Mini-Grand 5801 [Round 1: Gridlock]

Digger hefted his shovel and looked around him curiously. He had never visited Vegas, although he had heard it was a very bright and dangerous place and was located on Earth, so he had no idea where he was. To make matters worse, he was also clueless as to what the large, rusting, metal contraptions littered around him were; the closest parallel he could draw was with the colony's monorail car. He tapped the top of one experimentally, hurriedly withdrawing his finger with a pained noise when this revealed how hot metal can get from nonstop sun exposure for such a long period of time.

Digger glanced down at the sand piled up on the sides of the metal structures. He knew what sand was because once he had come across a merchant selling little prickly pieces of vegetation planted in small boxes. The merchant told him that the yellow-brown substance at the bottom of the box was sand; when he had started to ask what the plant was and it became clear he wasn't going to be buying it, the merchant told him to buzz off, so he never found that out. But he knew what sand was.

Digger's reverie was interrupted by a very soft version of the sound of starship's engines made when they started up. He looked around curiously, his head easily a foot above the tops of most of the contraptions. It didn't take him long to locate the source of the noise - one of the large metal contraptions was plowing through a lot of smaller ones, pushing them to the side and off the road. Digger picked his way between the contraptions to get closer to the path the thing was traveling in, although he made sure he had a way out if it didn't feel like stopping; he didn't want to end up crushed between these metal monsters.