We Belong Below

Intro

What do you consider adventure? A bag full of provisions and a dragon to slay? Well those are very decorated dreams you have. My kind of adventure is getting out of the enormous city I call home. The city seems to go one forever and ever, mankind has taken over the earth. Well the earth above the old one that is, we built our new civilization over the last, making it bigger and more advanced than the last. We started over, a fresh new slate for humans to begin anew. We left all the animals in the Below. We don't need them anymore, we have robots for companionship that are less messy than real dogs. At least that's what I've been told. Nobody has even seen a real dog in about nine hundred and fifty years. I was told they were covered in fur and had claws and sharp teeth. Much of the animals were like that, cats, tigers, bears, they all had sharp teeth and claws. Humanity thought it best to leave them behind when we invented the new world. It's illegal to go in the below, there are too many dangerous animals and there's nothing for us there anyway.
So in a world where you can't go and see the ruins of the past, what do you do for adventure? Well for me I of course couldn't help myself from wondering how life was back a thousand years ago. And though there are buildings and houses and factories as far as the eye can see, I used to like to get out of town, and I would search for signs of the past. I didn't find a whole lot, there are barriers where the old ramps used to be. The ramps were our way of getting back down into town in the old days, or at least that's what I've been told. The history of how we got where we are is a little muddled and nobody really knows why we didn't just get rid of the old roads. My mom likes to tell me they needed a fresh clean slate to start with to advance technology and expand without walls to hold us back. She always told me I shouldn't go looking for the past, that all we need to look for is tomorrow.
And as the years went on, I thought tomorrow was more important than what we left behind, and I gave up on my childish dreams of going to the Below. That is, until I found myself at the gates of what seemed to be hell itself. And I had no idea the horror, adventure, and even beauty that lied beneath. But I was about to find out.