The Underground City

As a guide who takes people to the underground city, I am a seasoned expect at things such as avoiding ghosts buried far under the earth, knowing which spots to dig and which to avoid because the earth will become too hard for you to dig your fingers into, knowing how to avoid the giant worms and such as the bugs who will burrow into your skin as you sink further down into the earth and begin to pick at your flesh with their microscopic teeth so that by the time you are a mile down you are half gone and too far below the surface to cry out for help or seek medical attention. Of course if you can make it to the city you can see it with your own eyes. Of course, why would anybody make such a journey just for the sake of seeing something new? Well the surface is burning up from the sun and now people are looking for anything that might be different from the blazing heat of the day and unfathomably cold pitches in temperature of the night which have rendered the earth a formidable force of hot-cold flashes no more able to sustain sane life than a person whose body is thrown into shock intermittently, say every 12 hours, so you see despite the ghosts and carnivorous worms and detrimental bugs and hard soils of the path to the underground city people still bother to try to make the journey, of course I cannot always save them because even though I am a guide I am not a god and the creatures and whims of the below-surface world are beyond even the grasp of the most seasoned experts such as myself. I have no desire to watch my fellow people crumple underground so when they express interest in going under I detail all of the dangers explicitly so that they may know what they are falling into, when they insist anyways, well then there is nothing I can do and I take them down. Many times they do not get possessed or eaten or trapped and they make it to the city.

If such a thing happens, that they do make it, I always try to prepare them for what life will be like down there. The temperature is stable so that is good and beautiful. The people eat clay from the below-earth deposits of the stuff, which is surprisingly high in nutritional value and not so disgusting in taste once you get used to it. I explain to them that when they are down there they will be joyfully received and taught how to forage for the correct types of clay and occasionally, underground moss deposits, which grow between the layers of thin mud and feed off of the heat lamps they use in the city at night. The people in the city will explain to you which moss is good to eat and which is riddled with deadly bacteria. They do not often eat the carnivorous worms despite the fact that they have the tools to catch them because the consistency of their flesh is uncomfortably like our own. There is vague speculation that the giant worms evolved not as an offshoot of earthworms or snakes, but as an offshoot of human beings, as evidenced by their eyes sunk deep into their heads (and long since covered by a layer of milky flesh) and their nubs attached to where their shoulder blades and hip bone would be, anatomical developments that are not seen in any of the surviving species of worms or snakes today. The bugs were probably once cockroaches, and they are eaten sometimes, but they are considered to be filthy much like the worms. Of course the ghosts are inedible, and I do not have to tell you where those came from, because it is very clear to you all that much has died again and again on the patch of land that the underground city resides below.

There are underground rivers, too, which the colonies of life depend on. I can barely explain how those work even as a seasoned guide. I am pretty sure they bleed in from the ocean and the salt is filtered out by the mud and clay, since most rivers and lakes have all but dried up in the unbearable surface sun, but such an explanation (however likely) does not account for the roaring currents, the unbelievably strong currents, that pull the rivers along and thread their precious water near and through hollowed out stone that the people and some distinct creatures reside in. I could not explain to you how the currents work or why they are pulled so sharply. I want to say it has something to do with the moon, as the moon drew along the tides of the old oceans, but as centuries pass and geography changes the moon has somewhat ceased to behave in its old ways- not to mention the underground rivers are much thinner streams of water than the oceans were. Maybe the moon has decided to behave its old way again. I really do not know.

One of the main things that have contributed to the underground city’s success is how rich the soil is. It is rich enough to grow some of the old plants and food that haven't been grown on the earth very much since the sun got too hot and the nights too cold. The reason for this richness is the vast amount of decaying corpses and dead animals and dead vegetation that have settled and mottled into the soil for centuries upon centuries- these also being the source of the ghosts. The ghosts sometimes bother the inhabitants of the city but for the most part they bug the people traveling to and fro. I say ‘bug’ but the annoyance is more severe than that. If they are particularly annoying they will posses a member of the party and attempt to murder the rest of them. This is the main reason I do not let anybody bring weapons to the city. A ghost will possess them and cause them to kill the others. This is also the reason we have to do the digging with our hands, a shovel is a plenty good enough weapon for murder, especially when weilded by fingertips of one of the underground city ghosts. Many people scoff at my guide abilities when I tell them they have to dig by hand. After all it would take much less time to reach the city if we just used tools, however I simply cannot allow them to do so, it is almost guaranteeing death by the ghosts. Although I sometimes wistfully think about how many less people we would lose to the worms if we could defend ourselves against them and how many less people we would lose to the bugs if we could move quicker, and how many less people would be trapped if they had the means to dig through the harder soil, but I must remind myself all that doesn’t matter, tools of almost any kind results in death by the ghosts, no matter what, trust me, trust me, again and again, people have died. Every once in a while a brash young man or woman tries to sneak them on their person before we go down, and all suffer the consequences. To get to the underground city we dig by hand.

But of course, sometimes the ghosts claim a kill anyways, by means of sheer force and brutal hand-to-hand combat, usually with the involvement of teeth or filthy tactics like hostages. I can usually stop them in a situation like that, though. It’s not as frequent.

So now you see how dangerous and strange the journey underground is. The consequences are severe if failure occurs, but the reward is high enough that people make the journey anyway. And I am the guide.