Terrible Poetry

Not terrible poetry but writing stuff nonetheless:

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Spoiler Upon closer inspection, the old man proved not to be very old at all - Rachel squinted - he could hardly be past middle age. The impression owed itself to the cumulative effect of bent back, bloodshot eyes, hacking cough, and more wrinkles than a nine-year-old's bedsheets. He looked as if you could run an iron over him and he would come out fifteen years younger. He looked as if he'd been dried over a smoky fire, or had the water sucked out of him at some point and reintroduced one drop at a time, or even left out in the sun too long, except of course there wasn't any sun.

He also muttered like hell, in the sacred tradition of the sidewalk nutjob.

"New in town, are ye? Gods forsake ye, it hurts me but some to see ye come here thinkin' it's a bloody paradise or summat. Comin' through the gates in droves, and ye can't leave until ye pay off the debts they give ye for the privilege of breathin' the bloody patricians' air. Not that they'd breathe the same air we do, they's too bloody stuck up for that." He stopped there to hack wetly into a blackened rag, by way of punctuation.

"What...happened here?" Rachel hazarded, gesturing at a random spot in the smoggy air. High above them, the palatial marble complex began to chime what might have been a joyous carillon, in the minor key of A Million Fucking Other Things That Don't Fucking Give A Shit What Fucking Time It Is Because You Fucking Blocked Out The Sun, You Fucks. She raised her voice over the strangled notes. She could swear the people around her were actively trying to make her surroundings as loud and stressful as possible. "What, what IS that?" She tried not to think of the obvious answer: 'Exactly what it looks like: a sprawling ceiling made entirely of another city, suspended a kilometer on top of us, presumably held up by the gigantic pylons dotting this wasteland of an underworld, and designed to... what? Stop everyone down here from getting skin cancer?' The old man snickered in a phlegmy sort of way, and she realized she'd said that out loud.

The not-so-old man waited a good long moment for the carillon to fade away, spending the time hacking up a particularly stubborn loogie from wherever his lungs were probably located, or at the very least their mailing address. He spat into the gutter as the last notes were choked to death in the exhaust pipe of a landing freight ship, and watched with interest as it slowly began to crawl away. Rachel looked up again into the mass above them, mostly to avoid having to see the evolution of some horrifying mucus lifeform, and it struck her yet again the sheer scale of the project. It was blocking out the sun. The whole concept was - was just... terrifying. The little star inside her dimmed a little in fear, flared a little in anger - but above all she thought that if it could, it would salute: a salute for its lost brethren, in the skies obscured above.

"Skin cancer," - she realized the old man was speaking again - "ye think we might get skin cancer! Skin cancer!" He punctuated this gem of wisdom with the wettest, phlegmiest rattling sound she had ever heard a human throat create, and with a start she realized he was laughing. "Hah-h-h-h-hah hah hah-h-h-hah hah! Skin cancer!" With a mighty lurch, he heaved and projectile-spat another brown glob of mucus into the gutter, where it met the other one and fell in love and started a new and glorious civilization of Spittlonians. Up above in the human world, however, the old man was slapping Rachel on the metallic exoskeletal back, still chortling. "I haven't had a good chuckle like that for bloody ages. Tell ye what, sport, for that I'll take ye to some mates o' mine. Ye look like a technical boy, they can give ye some work needs doin'. It's a better deal than ye going to be gettin' just lookin' around for a job, and a man's gotta eat." He held out a foully-stained hand. "Name's Roj. Ye tell 'em I sent ye, with my favor, an' that I say they're not to kill ye on the first day. We could all use some of that brand-name humor ye got there around here."