[*Author's note: This is not finished, or even close, so nyah! More coming later.]

    It's a gray season. A dead season, like all the others. There is no flora in this part of town. There is no fauna, save the people hurrying from home to work and back in their cage of aluminum and slabs of manufactured stone. This cage is black-ceilinged, gray-walled, a paradise of industrial fortitude gone wrong. The city looks war-torn, at first glance. One might even say post-apocalyptic. But when you inspect the buildings, you can see that they were never built quite right in the first place. It's as if a hundred mechanical creatures threw up an entire city as fast and as haphazardly as they could, and the scenery is the same in nearly every direction.
    There are only two things that might grab a wandering tourist's attention: for one, the sky which is black across the rest of the city, warring clouds that cast lightening on each other in an eternal elemental feud, is bright blue to the north. A little bit of heaven shining through to give relief to hell. The other attraction is a huge mountain that lies to the east. At least, it looks like a mountain. The material, though, is the same as that of its valley, glass and stone and metal. It's impossible to tell just what the great heap rising above the horizon is unless you go there, and hardly anyone in downtown Uunder ever does.
    Here, there are no tourists. No one from the other continents knows what's happened to this place. No one but the former inhabitants and children of The U know that that tall center of breeding, learning, and experiment is nothing more now than a tall building which has been demolished and dead on the ground, raided weekly by CoRe, the Children of Rebellion, for supplies. The day it crashed, the Sen'tal died, the Reinforcers fled. CoRe was left with rubble and the labor of saving the people they could scrape out of said rubble.
    This city is made from rubble and the half million people, bruised and deflated, whose home had been blown to the ground. Of this half million, only a fraction is concerned with making anything better. The rest still wish the rebellion had never happened in the first place.
    One of the original members of CoRe is a woman named Laseloni. She's sitting on the sidewalk, knees bent up to her chest, well-muscled arms folded around them. Her several blonde braids fall about her face, obscuring it from view. In this position, chest covered up, pale face hidden, it's impossible to tell that she's a woman. A tan canvas bag, full of both sharp and lumpy shapes, sits next to her. The seams are splitting open, gnashing teeth of thread that have been worked and reworked in a vain attempt to reconnect the canvas into something usable, but the bag has given up its fight for life. Metal shines from within it, and the bright yellow light cast by overhead lamps is recasting as a jagged sliver of faceted gem-cuts on Laseloni's red-clothed leg.
    Laseloni is a one-woman manufacturing company. It was she who designed and built the machines that contributed to the ressurection of Uunder. She drilled into walls of the U, pulling out stockpiles of metal and scraps of circuitry, forming them together into giant robotic golems. She, and a team of her associates in the Electronics and Engineering department, yanked out wires with which to run electricity through their new city. This team dug through the broken building, toppled over like a slain titan, to find the huge generator and start it up again. That team is, for the most part, working away in some lab to design a new system, a better one that will enable them to run wiring under the ground instead of the way it is now, haphazardly pasted to buildings, painted over with a gluey substance that cannot be broken without a special solvent provided by the Chemistry department. Each building gets one wire-end to light their homes and their outdoor lamps until a new generator is built. Power is carefully rationed. Food is cooked on U-salvaged black boxes by lighting chemical fires within them.
    Laseloni is one of the few number of CoRe members who refuse to contribute to the city as a whole. She does not wish to be put down in the history books as one of the patrons of Uunder. As it is, her name is undoubtedly being printed by the Historians and Literaturians as one of the most active members of CoRe when the U was still standing. She does not want to be known. Her actions have disgraced her far more than she will ever care to remember.
    Behind her, an alarm blares tinny and annoying. Laseloni sighs picks her head up to catch sight of a black-coated man with a scratched-up brown satchel trying to enter the door of her building. "What do you want?" she asks. Her voice is deep, suitable to her muscular build.
    "I need you to fix something for me." The man's shoes make a tok-tok-tok sound as he steps over the sidewalk towards her, into the yellow light. Laseloni takes stock of him. Thin frame, but tall, with big hands and feet. Thick lips, short black hair. His right eye is brown. Over the left, he wears a patch. Classy. "Laseloni, right? My mother knew you."
    "Your mother?" Laseloni reaches into main flap of the canvas bag, pulls out a small black plastic-coated device with a pale yellow display screen, and points it at the bag. After a tiny beep of approval from the device, she replaces it, stands up, takes the satchel, and hunts through it.
    "My mother's name was Stuart."
    Laseloni almost drops the satchel and everything in it. Bent over where she was when she caught it, she looks up at the man with wide eyes and parted lips. "You mean... To tell me..."
    The man winces, and as his face catches the light, Laseloni can see just how young he is. At the moment, however, she isn't paying attention to his face. Only his words. "Yes. I'm the son of a Reinforcer."
    "That bland white-haired idiot actually had sex?" With that, Laseloni promptly drops the satchel onto the ground and falls over, laughing her blonde-braided head off.