It is an urban forest, steel and glass rising up like indomitable and reflective trees. Streets snake out in every direction creating a labyrinthine maze complex enough to dishearten even the most enthusiastic of tourists. Rain pelts down in diagonal sheets, faintly orange thanks to the street lamps, and rushing down fast enough to drench any fool who thinks themselves brave enough to weather this mess without an umbrella. It’s extraordinarily late, or extraordinarily early depending on how you look at it, and very few people are out, only one or two lone pedestrians hurrying home from the graveyard shift. They have good reason to scurry; a city is terrifying enough during the day, but at night it becomes so much worse.

Here comes an honest looking young woman, with a glint in her eye that either screams alert or paranoid. She’s running down the street as if she expects some nightmarish apparition to pop out of the pavement at any minute and spirit her away to a world of eternal anguish. 

Not far behind her is an older gentleman who stops and looks over his shoulder every ten paces; the look on his face is rapturous when he finds nothing there. What was he expecting to see there? A mugger? A gangster? Nosferatu hoping to enlist him into his army of the undead? It’s nearly four in the morning, hardly anyone is out thanks to the time and the rain, and those that are, are easily distinguishable by the delightful squashing noises of a person walking in shoes brimming with water. But for some reason this doesn’t appear to matter at all; the very fact that he is in a city seems to erase his common sense and replace it with the mind numbing terror of bodily harm.

You should go into that metropolitan mess sometime; it’s a great place to watch the general populace slide into mild insanity.