To the onlookers of the city Ar’Kane Bluffs, it was blatantly obvious that the inhabitants had all but abandoned the place in a hurry. A peculiar air of uncertainty gripped eyes that settled themselves on the landscape; a feeling of constantly being watched with malicious intensity, a feeling of overbearing ominous-ness that seeped its way into bones and managed to hit the switch for one’s fight or flight instincts. Perhaps the emotions were brought about by the rather depressing quality of the buildings; once, all of them surely were in top condition, windows glittering in the sunlight, marble walls shining regally. Now, the piles of crumbling bricks and rotting wood could only be described as depreciated and dilapidated – kings and queens thrown from their seats of power to languish pitifully in the shadows of their own excellence. Perhaps it was because of the cliff for which the city was named; the way the roads and grass collapsed hopelessly into the void below, the abscess snaking its sickness of cracks farther and farther into the maze of structures. Maybe the visitors, like the inhabitants before them, were caught off-guard by the strange name for the supermarket that occupied the foremost position at the corner of the streets: Red Herring’s. The thought that, feasibly, they might be being played and, as equally feasibly, they had missed something fairly critical probably wiggled its way into their minds. Whatever the case might have been, it was as clear as a summer’s sky that something was horribly amiss.

As an onlooker wound his way deeper into the labyrinth that was Ar’Kane Bluffs, he might have noticed the WANTED posters that had managed (or were in the process of) to peel themselves from their original homes and float lazily on a breeze that wasn’t there, slow enough – and maybe deliberately enough – to pretentiously display the distinct hole in the page where the mugshot would have been pictured. The fact that every one of these many posters had a gap in the same spot would have definitely added to the emotional broil cooking in the pit of this visitor’s stomach.

One of these onlookers might have payed close attention to the names of the buildings – duly noting Red Herring’s like the rest of the group, but also filing away the stainless steel construction of Cryptonomicon, the craggled concrete of the loading bay 2E, and the mystical colored Facies Hominum painted with mossy green swirls on a velvety purple background. This onlooker could have spoken a trifle of Latin, and translated the name of the violet abode into Make A Human.  

No trees dominated the skyline – actually nothing permeated the horizon; it was like where ever it lead just feel off the edge of the world. The contrast of the buildings – the ones nearest the cliff appeared to be more low-cut and stout, made of varying brick and metal and concrete while the ones that crouched in the distance were Roman-esque, held up by towering marble pillars that punched through massive marble roofs next to stone curved in elegant marble arches etched with blocky marble letters that looked to be Roman Numerals but upon closer inspection, proved to be of no meaning – would also have caught the eyes of the onlookers.

The one thing they all would have missed (or maybe things is more appropriate) were the small scuttles of movement and flashes of tiny black heads that crept silently through the crunchy grass that seemed like every blade was competing to see who could become most like a tree. That, most likely, was the source of their uneasiness and wary tread, just like it was the cause for the frantic abandon of the city of Ar’Kane Bluffs.