"LEVEL 11" — The City of Overgrowth
The year 2222. Summer.
The City of Overgrowth seemed to be evolving.
Miriam Bloom Sepal had left the comfy, yet awkwardly compact space of Half-Sunk City to explore out into the wild expanse, hearing from the tail end of the grapevine that the land beyond safety was finally healing to the point that it was safe to travel through without need for the bulky suits. It still baffled her that those suits could be so cumbersome and awkward to wear but fold up neatly enough to fit in one's pocket. That was probably the intention of them, though it wasn't like the original inventors of them were around to ask. Anyone who made anything technological like that had been dead for over a hundred years.
Miriam took a Geiger counter from her front pocket, as it was still recommended to carry one no matter where she went, and held it out to the main street ahead of her, looking down curiously at the readings it displayed. Hardly anything, thankfully. Just background radiation that existed almost everywhere. You couldn't even escape from background radiation in the rural lands of the Wild Plains. Finally stepping away from the hand-operated, pulley-aided main gate of her home city, she set off.
These much more open lanes were eerily silent compared to the streets she had lived on behind the safety of the walls. The wind blew through the open door and window holes, singing a soft tune that was accompanied by the rhythmic swaying of the leaves. It was peaceful, surprisingly so. Miriam had known nothing quite like it. No sounds of arguing from the married men upstairs, no whining babies from the grandmother downstairs, and no annoying sounds of loitering teenagers outside her window. No, here was calm. Miriam felt like the only person in the entire universe.
The buildings around her only seemed to get taller, starting out as simple constructs of brick and plastic that were a measly three or four stories tall and gradually getting both wider and taller. Looking above herself, the buildings jutted high enough to pierce the clouds and go deep into the sky. These megastructures, connected by decaying metal bridges, ached and groaned in sounds of inanimate agony, coupled with the actual groans and wails of the things that lived within. She had been warned about those, but she at least had her fire spray in the other pocket. For the sake of staying alive, though, Miriam didn't even go onto the edge parts of the city's pathways. She stuck to the middle, where the faded white lines were.
Leaving the ominous megastructures, which continued to emit sounds of metallic grumbling as if begging for Miriam's returned presence, she turned and headed right. She had been going in more or less a straight line since leaving, so if she went north, she would end up at the canal bank.
Well, look at that, she was right. Considering she's never actually been outside the Half-Sunk City, she found that pretty impressive.
Unfortunately, the canal was hardly like the fables and fiction of previous centuries and was instead exactly how her mother and father described it. The water was thick and sludgy, with a whole manner of metal, plastic, and glass junk resting on the liquid's surface. The raised bays on either side of the canal hardly fared any better, the stone they were made of cracking and crumbling, with the settled rubble from nearby buildings having bled into the water.
Towards her left, one of the less elaborate pathway buildings had collapsed from many centuries of disuse, chunks of its stone either limply hanging from either side of the canal or sticking up in the water. Those odd, doored metal capsules also hung in the water underneath the bridge. Miriam had been told that those husks used to be used for transport, but she had a hard time believing that. They didn't seem to have a way to connect an animal to their fronts.
However, something much more interesting was located towards her right. Though the ruins were unnoteworthy in isolation, and nothing would compare to the groaning megatowers she had just been at, there was still something unique about the decaying waterfront property. There was the faded outline of where a large, 3D emblem would have been on the side facing the canal, placed on the wall that the triangular roofs sat upon, though now she assumed that that sign was at the bottom of the canal. What intrigued her most, apart from the missing sign, was the litter that surrounded the structure.
Glass bottles, possibly numbering in the thousands, littered the stone area in front of the factory, scattered among additional dormant transportation machines. Giant piles of them sat out front of what she assumed was the factory entrance, as they were located next to large square gashes in the brick and were stacked almost as tall as the largest metal transportation husks. These piles were so great, in fact, that they had toppled into the canal, creating a secondary sea of glass bottles that connected to the other side of the canal to form a valley.
For a moment, Miriam considered making her way over to the factory to investigate the bottles, but the only bridge between here and there she knew was already destroyed. She looked across the junk that populated the river more than the fish did but decided it wouldn't be wise to go across it. Although the water appeared safe, the thought of the diseases and bacteria thriving below made her physically shudder.
She decided to keep walking elsewhere.
Just when Miriam was worried that the land outside of her home was starting to feel mundane, Miriam discovered something new. The city seemed to end. The stone trail she was following entered a world of deep forest, with the path she was following being broken up and thinning out as dirt and trees overtook rock. As she looked to either side, the buildings also thinned out. They became less frequent as they extended deeper into the woods, and conversely, each one was increasingly destroyed until only rubble remained. Miriam grinned, taking an eager step into the unknown.
As she walked through the forest, Miriam questioned whether she was still within the City of Overgrowth at all. The wild, rural nature of the place was such a stark shift for her that it felt as though she was in another world entirely. She knew that wasn't the case; she'd been told before that she would feel something more supernatural when experiencing a first noclip, but it still felt wild to go from the urban ruins to (mostly) raw nature. Only the occasional buried brick or hollow skeleton of a building or device interrupted her journey.
After ascending an incline, Miriam found herself on a hilltop that lacked trees, providing her with a view of the world for miles. In the direction she had just come from, she could see the skyline of ruined buildings, skyscrapers, and megastructures. The city she was in had clearly ended for miles on either side, as the perimeter buildings formed a mossy and generally overgrown wall that acted as a harsh divide between city and forest. Looking in the other direction, Miriam could see the faint outline of something similar, miles and miles away. Another city, she supposed. The name "The City of Overgrowth" hardly felt accurate considering there seemed to be more than one city, but perhaps she was the first to discover that.
Miriam spotted an odd blot of red between the trees as she made her way down the hill, heading towards the second city even though she hadn't planned to go there. It was undoubtedly brick, but its face looked surprisingly pristine for a building this deep into the overgrowth. Miriam made her way towards it.
Sure enough, the building was made of brick, being an odd compound shape no more than a storey tall, and completely missing their roof tiles. Though the structure was as unnoteworthy as the ones from the city limits, she had to admit that this one being so complete intrigued her, and it wasn't like a place so brightly lit could contain threats. Unlike the buildings within the actual City of Overgrowth itself. Her Geiger counter read the interior as safe, so she made her way inside.
For an abandoned building, the interior wasn't nearly as awful as Miriam was expecting it to be.
She had half expected a gross, sludgy interior like what was floating atop the canal and half expected just about any perishable materials to ooze and stink of rot and miasma. To her surprise, though, there was nothing of the sort. Perhaps the building was so old that any wood and paint had already rotted to dust, and if that were the case, perhaps the structure was already abandoned before the Great Change had even occurred. Whatever the reason, Miriam was incredibly thankful for it as she toured the facility, passing through the open area she'd arrived in and entering the roofed hallways.
The hallways led to many different large rooms, each as unfurnished and bland as the last. Miriam assumed, from the stories she was told about the work her great-grandmother did, that these spaces once held massive machines or long racks of metal shelves to store what said machines had manufactured. She assumed that most of the usable metal had long been taken and worn away, considering how little of the stuff there was back home, leaving only piles of scrap and a useless area inside an already useless building.
Reaching the tail end of the hallway, Miriam poked her head into the final doorway. She'd skipped past looking into the others; she knew what to expect from them by now, but she figured she'd at least look into the last one. That turned out to be a good thing, considering that this room was fundamentally the opposite of all previous ones. It was smaller than the others, was clearly not used to produce or store products, and actually had furnishings within it. There were the rusted remains of a table frame without a middle and upturned frames of chairs that were devoid of cushioning. Marble countertops lined the perimeter of the room, and underneath them were the remains of lacquered wooden drawers, which still looked limp and rotting. There was also a large metal box with a hinged door on it, with a handful of metal racks spilling out from it.
Miriam glanced over her shoulder to the rest of the hallway, but entering this room seemed to be the only avenue to go down. Miriam didn't trust herself to go through the window without cutting herself on the glass. As Miriam stepped into the room, she felt relieved to see an open doorway leading to a stone clearing with only a single transportation pod lying on its side in the treeless area. That was a relief. She'd hate to have to backtrack through the entire place. This building didn't exactly amount to much after all, but then again, it's not like anything from the old world ever did.
On her way out through the door she had found, Miriam almost tripped, her foot landing directly on something cylindrical, which rolled backwards when she tried to walk over it. She stumbled forwards, almost losing balance completely, but was able to save herself with some rapid wafts of her arms and an instinctive wide step. Confused as to what just happened, Miriam looked over her shoulder to find the culprit, hearing the echoes of a glass bottle clink along the ground as it rolled and gently tapped one of the table legs, stopping once it did.
Miriam stared at the glass bottle, trying to determine where it was she had seen it before. Sure, she used glass bottles a lot at home, but this one felt different. Familiar. It was identical to the ones she had seen at the canal. Curious to see if she could determine what it was and then guess why there were so many of them, she approached the bottle and picked it up. It was old, of course. Glass of this fidelity had become a lost art a century ago. There was some moss growing on the inside, and the sticker on its front was faded and difficult to read. Despite that, though, this faded sticker was the best option to try and figure out just what it was.
Despite the sticker being big, considering it wrapped around the entire width of the bottle, the writing was small and hard to read even in places where it wasn't faded. Because of that, Miriam stuck to reading the largest part she could.
"Almond… Cola." She read aloud, saying each word slowly. The way the word had been written was strange, as the lines that made up each letter were oddly wavy and curly. Below it were more words, but they were significantly harder to read. "Est… Est? 'Est. 2040'."
Miriam didn't quite know what that meant, so she quickly moved on. Passing by a great wall of text filled with words that Miriam didn't even know, Miriam found legible script on the bottle's rear. It spoke of the bottle coming from a "Level 11" and being "lovingly crafted" in a factory, which sounded like an oxymoron. At the bottom of the label were more words and numbers in bigger writing, so naturally her eyes fixated upon them.
"Packaged… 04/04/2090. Best Before… 04/04/2101." Miriam continued to read. She understood one of those phrases at least. She assumed the numbers were a calendar system, much like the one used back home. Miriam considered it quite impressive that their calendar reached the two thousands. It was only the year 51 for her. Unfortunately, the rest of the text was either in words she didn't know or words she couldn't read, so she chose to put the bottle gently on the windowsill.
Mystery solved, she thought to herself. It's just a shame that the mystery was so uneventful. She stepped back into the woodland, continuing on with her exploration and giving the bottle no thought.