Rust and Ember

I - something brewing

   The city was restless at night. Bustling with activity, even at a late hour. The sky was pitch black and the air felt like it was almost solid. A chorus of talking and coughing and general chatter hung in the air, creating a cacophony of noise. This was the way that Sunless City had been for the lives of all of it's citizens, it had never been anything but a dirty, busy city filled with people that were thrown away by upper society.

   Merchants lined the streets, trying to deal with people that were trying to haggle down the ridiculous prices of food that they were desperate for. Edith was used to going hungry. 

   That dull ache was something that children from the many orphanages down here were used to, so she just walked amongst the chaos, without being seen and went about her night. It was common for her to go around four large crowds a night and to just see what she could get from people’s pockets. 

   Tonight was good, because there had been protests going around lately and a bunch of enforcers had taken it upon themselves to start breaking it up. That meant rich officers from the over city, and Edith had enough money to pay the next month’s rent on her apartment and get a few night’s dinners after that as well. 

   There was nothing better than cashing in her finds to her boss and getting a full meal afterwards. Edith went back to her apartment and gorged herself on food that night. It was probably the normal amount of food to people of the upper city, but to her it was almost a feast. 
She fell asleep without a second thought after she was done, not knowing the horrors that were about to come. 

*

   Pyry had a job to do. He was tasked to make different types of medicines. That’s what he had done his entire manufactured life and that was what he was going to keep doing for the rest of his life. Things were methodical. Easy.

   He was the most efficient in his assembly line. The most upgraded robot, able to do things with a proficiency that others could not. 

   This was how he liked his life. He ran his code and processes. All day. Every day. Every hour of the day. 

   Life never deviated from that. 
  
   He didn’t want it to deviate. 

   He didn’t see any reason for it to. Of course, he wouldn’t though. He was a robot. He was built to be logical.
It turned out that the humans had other plans for him.

   Pyry had gone through three hundred work orders in the past hour and a half. He logged it mentally and kept working, but there was something bothering him that he wasn’t able to diagnose at the moment. This was starting to make him pause and slow down a little, which was something that never happened to him. Steam rose up from the floor and he noticed that the temperature was starting to rise. Something that shouldn’t happen until about two hours later. He glanced at the air conditioning unit and logged that he needed to request a new one. This usually didn’t happen, and it was imperative that the temperature stay safe for the chemicals that all of the robots were using to stay in a safe zone. 
   
   The temperature starting to rise before they started making their next batch of anticonvulsants was something that Pyry knew was not supposed to be happening yet. “Great,” He mumbled to himself. He was trying his best  to get his job done. Something that should not be a problem, but that nameless something was still bothering him. 

   What if something was about to go wrong and he couldn’t catch it? He would be demoted and probably sent back to manufacturing. They would wipe his memory and start again. That was something that he didn’t want happening. “I’m going to work on the A/C,” He told the bot next to him. The bot nodded and he turned, heading for the stairs. He needed to figure out what was going on. 

*

   Edith usually had three moods. 

   Grumpy, royally pissed off, and even more pissed off than that.
 
   Somehow, everyone seemed to be managing to drive her to the absolute edge of her sanity today. She had been going through the tables at the Two Bird Casino, and it seemed that people were intent on trying to get one over on her. She wondered when people were going to leave that she was a more capable con artist than most of the people in this one room combined, and she could spot sleight of hand a mile away. Especially when most of the people that played against her were drunk.
 
   This was her third fight today, and eventually the bouncer came to her. “Sorry Edie, boss says I have to kick you out now.” 

   She had been coming here for a long time, the boss of the Two Bird Casino had a love-hate relationship with her. On one hand, she always brought in a lot of business. On the other, she always stole from customers which meant less money for them. All of the bouncers tolerated her a little bit more though, so they would give her some extra time to do her thing before they had to kick her out. 

   This time she understood.
 
   She didn’t make a stink about it. She just rolled her eyes. “Alright, alright. I’m going.” She left the casino with a good seven hundred coin. She had been making a lot more than that lately, but she knew that she should count her blessings. Recently, the Sunless City had been starting to get restless. People were starting to get more violent. Something was going wrong, she could tell. 

   She didn’t want to find out what, though.