Colin's legs were aching from sitting on them for hours. His face and shirt were drenched with sweat and water from the broken toilet he'd been kneeling in front of. Whichever of the horribly overweight Morrisons had sat too casually on it, had thoroughly toppled the porcelain throne. Now who would run this mildewed ceramic kingdom? No one, that's who.
He wiped his face with his hand, and shook the sweat off his scraped knuckles, before attacking the dented pipes again with his wrench. His efforts to stop the bathroom from flooding, seemed to be in vain. Miss Rian was taking her sweet time shutting off the water. Towels piled up around Colin, and every time he turned the wrench, his slippery grip sent his hand colliding into the sharp corners of the pipes.
Colin spent another twenty minutes in a last-ditch effort to close the pipe, before the water stopped gushing. at least Miss Rian had made it to the water main. It seemed that was the only upside to all of this. Colin lifted his shirt to towel his face off; but that didn't stop the torrential downpour of sweat from returning. Who builds a city in the middle of the bleeding desert anyways? I mean, sure, the desert was basically all that was left after nuclear holocaust, but would it kill someone to put a working air conditioner in this craphole? Surely not all of human technology could have been lost to the Sweep, right?
"That's it, I'm calling Matt." Colin groaned, looking over the toilet damage that he was very underqualified to fix. He fished a drippy little hockey-puck-sized thing out of his pocket. The module made a pinging noise, and the holographic display winked up in front of Colin. His background was a tasteful shot of his DJ equipment, and it made him smile.
"Amelia, send message to Matthew Parker." he instructed. another pinging noise signaled that the message was recording.
"Hey, Matt. How's it going? Girlfriend still up in the North District for the weekend? Great, I need you to do me a favor. Some fat people broke a toilet, and I don't feel like spending another hour to break it even more. I'll uh,, I'll owe you lunch if you could swing by the dump and take a look at it."
Colin tapped the display and a whoosh told him that his message had been sent. He checked the digital clock in the corner of the screen and nearly hit his head on the wall at the time.
"Shit! I got an hour to get ready! Good god, Callie is gonna kill me." Colin ran his fingers through his hair, and scrambled to get up. He stumbled to his room down the hall, waiting for the feeling to return to his legs. Colin stripped out of his soggy work clothes and swapped them for a pair of black jeans and his Neon Conscience T-shirt. They were a group he stumbled upon after picking up the shirt in a discount store. As with most things, music especially, Colin grew to like it. He had some of their more EDM songs on a playlist he used for Dj-ing gigs.
When he thought about it, Colin couldn't have asked for a better last-surviving-human-civilization to be born in. Even though Los Ambience was the only city left on the planet. He liked it here, the streets were filled with music, and pop culture. It was funny to watch humanity struggle to make new trends, even after surviving a blast of radiation that wiped out almost all other life on the globe. He was home behind his turntables and under the blacklights of the club. NightStep was just as much home as this run-down apartment he scraped by in, fixing menial things for rent, and getting his extra cash from club gigs.
Speaking of NightStep, a message from its owner, Callie, pinged on his module. Colin let the audio message play by itself, as he pulled his thick boots up and laced them with scraped fingers.
"Hey, nerd." Callie's sweet, big-sisterly tone rang out through the tiny room. "You coming tonight?"
Colin told the module to reply to Callie's message and a ping began the message recording.
"Hey, Cal, yeah, I'll be there, got held up with some plumbing. ETA, twenty minutes." he glanced at his clock, crap, it was already after eight forty-five. "I've got some new Eternal 005 stuff I've been itching to mess around with."
His message sent, and Colin hurried to grab his module, along with his storage cell, which microscopically held all of his equipment for gigs. He shoved the modules in the pocket of his leather jacket, and slipped out of his room, locking the door behind him.
The first hints of nighttime chill wafted through the crowded streets of the West District. All around Colin, people walked, getting ready for a weekend of drinking and dancing. Cars raced down the torn up asphalts that resembled streets. Police sirens wailed not far off, and Colin breathed in deeply the smell of engines and neon and sand that skirted across the streets.
Creatures in coal-colored skin that glowed with patterns like bar sings littered the streets, singing to their hearts content. As Colin drank in the sounds they made, he couldn't help but feel a tingle in his chest, anticipating the music.