There is a valley, or more accurately a gorge, cutting through the City. It's not completely untraversable, but the roads in and out of the gorge are narrow and zigzag up the steep walls, so naturally there have been several bridges built over the City's long history. Suspension bridges, ziplines, cable cars, rope bridges... over time, the various crossings have intersected with and reinforced each other. There are knots now - places where you can move from one bridge to another, and at some points people have built small shops to take advantage of the traffic. The densest areas at the centre of the gorge are permanently inhabited, and the people there have developed a certain sense of insularity.
Of course, I end up in this neighbourhood, looking for someone or something. The guy I'm talking to is trying to make me uncomfortable, deliberately leading me across the flimsiest and least stable paths he can find. I grit my teeth and avoid looking down. I've got a nasty suspicion that someone's picked my pocket, but luckily most of my money and other essentials (including my knife if things get really hairy) are in my bag under my cloak. Which is, admittedly, flapping around rather a lot in the wind and is not doing anything for my balance as a result.
"So can you help me or not? I've got money and information, but not a hell of a lot of time, so how about you quit dicking me around and we negotiate like civilized people, arright?"
There follows a lengthy period of muttered conversations between my guide and various other, equally shady, characters in this weird bridge creole that I'm clearly not expected to understand. I don't, much, but I can decipher enough to know that someone was here earlier, poisoning the well. Explains a lot, really.
Of course, I end up in this neighbourhood, looking for someone or something. The guy I'm talking to is trying to make me uncomfortable, deliberately leading me across the flimsiest and least stable paths he can find. I grit my teeth and avoid looking down. I've got a nasty suspicion that someone's picked my pocket, but luckily most of my money and other essentials (including my knife if things get really hairy) are in my bag under my cloak. Which is, admittedly, flapping around rather a lot in the wind and is not doing anything for my balance as a result.
"So can you help me or not? I've got money and information, but not a hell of a lot of time, so how about you quit dicking me around and we negotiate like civilized people, arright?"
There follows a lengthy period of muttered conversations between my guide and various other, equally shady, characters in this weird bridge creole that I'm clearly not expected to understand. I don't, much, but I can decipher enough to know that someone was here earlier, poisoning the well. Explains a lot, really.
There's a tense standoff that feels like several minutes, then the guy nods and does the universal hand sign for money. I slowly reach for my bag and pull out my main bargaining chip, and the situation immediately turns into a complete Mongolian clusterfuck when the stock "twitchy little weasel-faced guy" mistakes a data crystal for a weapon and knocks it out of my hand, over the edge of the bridge. Yelling ensues. The interesting thing was the device itself. I was probably only holding it for about 30 seconds, tops, but dream-me knew that the crystal was some manner of data-storage device - optical, like a DVD or CD, but instead of the data being stored in a spiral, two-dimensional pattern, it was stored in short segments in a lattice structure within the crystal. Basically, the thing looked like a polished chunk of rutilated quartz, with the internal striations indicating data clusters.
