Maji Nobuna
When Maji awoke an hour before dawn, she found that the city had woken with her. Maybe it had never slept at all.
Grabbing her belongings, she took stock of the tiny metal box that she had rented to sleep the night inside. "Tube hotels are a travelling saleswoman's pride," she'd bragged to her colleagues on multiple occasions. Certainly, she stayed in them very often, and was proud of the fact.
Maji slithered out of her box like toothpaste, glancing around the hotel. It was a sterile, white room, with dim fluorescent lights in the ceiling. The room-boxes were stacked on top of one another, with little lights indicating whether or not a person was inside. At this hour of the morning, there was a crypt-like quiet inside the hotel.
Maji tiptoed out to the row of lockers and grabbed her suitcase. Next to the lockers, an automatic clerk machine stood, a box with little fake arms forming a salute. Down the front was a faded list of rates for board and storage. Maji had gotten a ticket on the way in, and she now slotted this ticket back into the machine, along with her money. There was a slight beep from the simple circuit inside, and Maji was free once more for another bright, early, sales-filled day.
As she stepped outside into the throng of the morning rush, she noticed a spark in the sky, to the east of the city. The grid of lightcrystals that formed the city's day and night cycle appeared to be malfunctioning. The patch of crystals in the ceiling were changing color rapidly, flickering from a loose circuit somewhere. Not to mention, the mist in the early morning, spewing from the moisture vents which dredged up water and evaporated it from underground lakes far below. High above them, the moisture sparked with the lightcrystals, etching links of lightning into the stone sky.
Maji looked around. She really wanted to talk to someone about all this.
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