Post by Darkrai on Oct 27, 2009 19:19:16 GMT -5
The Rundown truly was the festering nest of all that was vile, uncouth, and just plain unpleasant. The rather endearing name given to the gigantic slums of the once-great Nada Citadel, Rundown did a wonderfully simple job of describing the barren wasteland of civilization where only the hardest, cruelest thugs could even hope to stay alive for more than three straight days. That was one way of looking at things. The more popular public notion was that the name did a far more fantastic and skillful job of falling miles short the mark than it did describing the absolutely squalid living conditions to be found in this loathsome rat hole.
The Rundown was, put succinctly, the closest thing to hell on earth that almost anyone would ever know. If you didn’t have a weapon of some sort, you were lucky to even stay alive. Muggings, rapes, and murders were the order of the day, and that was all before lunchtime. At night, gang wars and raiding parties light the night with torches and the explosions of firearms discharging. Normal civilians generally wouldn’t set foot in the area even with a gun to their backs. However, if you were a criminal with a taste for blood you’d find the perfect place to escape the law, because cops didn’t exist in this place, quite frankly. All the law enforcement officials were either dead or too terrified to go within 100 miles of the place. It was, in short, a civilization that had long ago committed suicide.
The remaining architecture of the ruined city blocks had deteriorated appropriately to match the broken and corrupted nature of the people who called this place home, or something like it. It would have been just as easy to call the place the Warzone as the Rundown, because the name was equally if not more fitting. Most of the buildings had long ago crumbled into piles of broken rubble. The burned out ones that remained standing stood at awkward angles, as though they were slowly sinking into the ground on one side. Walls were missing in many places, exposing rooms that had been looted years before. Waste and filth were strewn with reckless abandon across a street that could no longer be rightfully called a street. The asphalt was badly shattered, and grass grew wild in the cracks only to die because of the ridiculously high pollution levels. Other forms of vegetation had attempted to reclaim the shattered buildings, but what the residents hadn’t deliberately killed had soon withered away on its own. The entire setting was a pure and true wasteland, a rotting sore that the earth simply could not heal all because of mankind’s own foolishness, violence, and selfishness.
Surprisingly, most people in the Rundown knew each other, at least on sight. In this place, if you weren’t strong you died quickly. One didn’t see many faces more than once, so the ones that did keep reappearing tended to get remembered fairly quickly. As such, it was nigh impossible to wander into the Rundown and go unnoticed if you were new in town. More than likely you were bound to attract attention to yourself, and attention was the last thing you wanted around here.
However, the young adolescent wandering down the main road of the Rundown didn’t seem aware of this very important fact. He swaggered down the broken remains of the street with a cocky smirk on his face as though he owned the slum he was walking through. The boy appeared to be about 16 or 17, about average height, with skin the color of chocolate. A white muscle shirt underneath a tattered black leather vest covered a chest with clearly defined pectorals and showed off a pair of arms covered with whipcord muscles. Complementing the black vest was a pair of similarly colored jeans with torn hems that just touched the ground around a pair of black combat boots. A silver oval-link chain hung from the belt loops of the boy’s waist, and strapped to his right thigh was the sheath of a knife. The knife itself was being casually twirled through the fingers of a biker glove-clad hand in a casual, yet undeniably skillful manner. Someone with knowledge of weapons might recognize it as a sniper-issue double-sided tactical knife, but most people simply regarded it as something they’d rather not have sticking out of their throats, which was how the boy liked it.
The adolescent’s face was thin and vaguely gaunt with hollow cheeks a rounded chin. His mouth consisted of a thin line that was curled in a self-assured smirk, with high set almond-shaped eyes of piercing ice blue set to match the expression. His head was adorned with a messy mop of hair so purely white it must be dyed, and while most of it was carefully trimmed if a bit askew he had allowed part of it to grow long enough that he might fashion it into a ponytail, which he had.
The boy marched straight down the high street of the Rundown as though this were the old country road of his safe little hometown. He didn’t even seem to comprehend the idea that boasting your existence to the entire slum was an invitation to get very badly hurt. The suspicious leers he received from various wary vagrants were returned with either a jaunty wave or a winning smile and a wink. His confidence, aside from being incredibly annoying, outright baffled the people he passed as he went on his little stroll. He had no Pokémon out to protect him, and he didn’t seem to carry any Pokéballs either. In fact, it seemed that his only method of protecting himself was his knife, and in the face of an angry Salamence or even a simple handgun that little blade would surely do him no good at all. Of course, no one had any idea just how well protected the individual they were watching actually was. It was hard to imagine that what looked to be a jumped up little punk was in fact possibly the most dangerous thing these people would ever see in their lives. Again, the child liked it this way.
Continuing on his merry way for some time, the child ambled down the main road until he suddenly stopped in place on what remained of the corner of a street intersection. With a mildly puzzled expression the child looked about, tapping the point of the knife softly against his chin as he examined the crossways about him. He seemed to be comparing the street to something in his memory, for he would occasionally adopt perhaps a slightly exaggerated pensive expression. After a moment, the child seemed to make the connection he desired. The smirk returned to his face, and now it was tinged with just the slightest hint of anticipation as he began to saunter casually down the road to the left of the path he had been walking before. It wasn’t hard to guess that the boy was looking for something.
As the boy went along, his eyes wandered over the burned out remains of the city he was passing, and although the self assured gleam never left his eyes, a new look of mild contempt had wormed its way into his gaze. It was, quite frankly, disgusting. Here was a monument to the things that humanity was either willing to do or let happen to itself, and millions were suffering because of it. And this was only part of it, though admittedly perhaps the worst part. The child had seen the state of greater Remoor on his way to the Rundown, and sometimes he could only shake his head in amazement at the sheer level of destruction.
“Honestly,” he muttered to himself with a roll of the eyes. “It’s as if they like destroying themselves. Sometimes I just don’t understand people.”
The Rundown was, put succinctly, the closest thing to hell on earth that almost anyone would ever know. If you didn’t have a weapon of some sort, you were lucky to even stay alive. Muggings, rapes, and murders were the order of the day, and that was all before lunchtime. At night, gang wars and raiding parties light the night with torches and the explosions of firearms discharging. Normal civilians generally wouldn’t set foot in the area even with a gun to their backs. However, if you were a criminal with a taste for blood you’d find the perfect place to escape the law, because cops didn’t exist in this place, quite frankly. All the law enforcement officials were either dead or too terrified to go within 100 miles of the place. It was, in short, a civilization that had long ago committed suicide.
The remaining architecture of the ruined city blocks had deteriorated appropriately to match the broken and corrupted nature of the people who called this place home, or something like it. It would have been just as easy to call the place the Warzone as the Rundown, because the name was equally if not more fitting. Most of the buildings had long ago crumbled into piles of broken rubble. The burned out ones that remained standing stood at awkward angles, as though they were slowly sinking into the ground on one side. Walls were missing in many places, exposing rooms that had been looted years before. Waste and filth were strewn with reckless abandon across a street that could no longer be rightfully called a street. The asphalt was badly shattered, and grass grew wild in the cracks only to die because of the ridiculously high pollution levels. Other forms of vegetation had attempted to reclaim the shattered buildings, but what the residents hadn’t deliberately killed had soon withered away on its own. The entire setting was a pure and true wasteland, a rotting sore that the earth simply could not heal all because of mankind’s own foolishness, violence, and selfishness.
Surprisingly, most people in the Rundown knew each other, at least on sight. In this place, if you weren’t strong you died quickly. One didn’t see many faces more than once, so the ones that did keep reappearing tended to get remembered fairly quickly. As such, it was nigh impossible to wander into the Rundown and go unnoticed if you were new in town. More than likely you were bound to attract attention to yourself, and attention was the last thing you wanted around here.
However, the young adolescent wandering down the main road of the Rundown didn’t seem aware of this very important fact. He swaggered down the broken remains of the street with a cocky smirk on his face as though he owned the slum he was walking through. The boy appeared to be about 16 or 17, about average height, with skin the color of chocolate. A white muscle shirt underneath a tattered black leather vest covered a chest with clearly defined pectorals and showed off a pair of arms covered with whipcord muscles. Complementing the black vest was a pair of similarly colored jeans with torn hems that just touched the ground around a pair of black combat boots. A silver oval-link chain hung from the belt loops of the boy’s waist, and strapped to his right thigh was the sheath of a knife. The knife itself was being casually twirled through the fingers of a biker glove-clad hand in a casual, yet undeniably skillful manner. Someone with knowledge of weapons might recognize it as a sniper-issue double-sided tactical knife, but most people simply regarded it as something they’d rather not have sticking out of their throats, which was how the boy liked it.
The adolescent’s face was thin and vaguely gaunt with hollow cheeks a rounded chin. His mouth consisted of a thin line that was curled in a self-assured smirk, with high set almond-shaped eyes of piercing ice blue set to match the expression. His head was adorned with a messy mop of hair so purely white it must be dyed, and while most of it was carefully trimmed if a bit askew he had allowed part of it to grow long enough that he might fashion it into a ponytail, which he had.
The boy marched straight down the high street of the Rundown as though this were the old country road of his safe little hometown. He didn’t even seem to comprehend the idea that boasting your existence to the entire slum was an invitation to get very badly hurt. The suspicious leers he received from various wary vagrants were returned with either a jaunty wave or a winning smile and a wink. His confidence, aside from being incredibly annoying, outright baffled the people he passed as he went on his little stroll. He had no Pokémon out to protect him, and he didn’t seem to carry any Pokéballs either. In fact, it seemed that his only method of protecting himself was his knife, and in the face of an angry Salamence or even a simple handgun that little blade would surely do him no good at all. Of course, no one had any idea just how well protected the individual they were watching actually was. It was hard to imagine that what looked to be a jumped up little punk was in fact possibly the most dangerous thing these people would ever see in their lives. Again, the child liked it this way.
Continuing on his merry way for some time, the child ambled down the main road until he suddenly stopped in place on what remained of the corner of a street intersection. With a mildly puzzled expression the child looked about, tapping the point of the knife softly against his chin as he examined the crossways about him. He seemed to be comparing the street to something in his memory, for he would occasionally adopt perhaps a slightly exaggerated pensive expression. After a moment, the child seemed to make the connection he desired. The smirk returned to his face, and now it was tinged with just the slightest hint of anticipation as he began to saunter casually down the road to the left of the path he had been walking before. It wasn’t hard to guess that the boy was looking for something.
As the boy went along, his eyes wandered over the burned out remains of the city he was passing, and although the self assured gleam never left his eyes, a new look of mild contempt had wormed its way into his gaze. It was, quite frankly, disgusting. Here was a monument to the things that humanity was either willing to do or let happen to itself, and millions were suffering because of it. And this was only part of it, though admittedly perhaps the worst part. The child had seen the state of greater Remoor on his way to the Rundown, and sometimes he could only shake his head in amazement at the sheer level of destruction.
“Honestly,” he muttered to himself with a roll of the eyes. “It’s as if they like destroying themselves. Sometimes I just don’t understand people.”
