Overhead, the City groaned. It didn't groan in a direct sense that one would expect from an animal or a beast. The City, the all-pervading, omniscent creature of cement and iron in which all surviving things lived, did not have a mouth with which to growl, did not have organic flesh and blood that it did not utilize to create creatures separate from and subservient to it. It did, however, groan. The beasts in its thrall looked up past the City's gleaming, ethereally empty skyscrapers and bayed loudly into the air. The flocks of crows, shadowy darkspawn above, cawed in ominous tones that, were any of the people populated in the City alive before the creature ate the Earth, would have sounded off to anyone, not like any crow they ever heard. The street lamps flickered, the electric hum resonating louder than any true street lamp could have- but they are only lamps in the barest, aesthetical sense. The buildings, immense and majestic and almost all completely, totally empty, groaned as unseen and unfelt forces pushed them, moved them, sent them sliding along on some extradimensional plane. And, somewhere off in the distance, there were other sounds. Gunshots, roars of an unidentifiable creature, maybe an Afflicted, even the alarm of the rare, but still extant, automobiles that the City sometimes lines parts of its streets with. All these sounds combined, formed an audible din that was just barely there on the edge of peoples' hearing, compounding to their already tense, uneasy feeling.

The City was awake and attentive, looking inward at two Sectors and the branching, dead paths that connected the two. There were other Sectors, other paths, other quadrants, but the City's attention was almost wholly focused, and while it could not directly do anything, what it could do was increase the tension, the internal panic, the fear in the hearts of every man, woman, and child who weren't fearing a more immediate threat at the moment. The fear was palpable, clear on everyone's faces, and while there was no panic, no frightened attempts to do something stupid, no outright rebellions or attempts to escape, the way people went about the hectic humdrum of what they could scarcely call their daily lives has changed. The way they interacted, looked around, even the way they walked. Trouble was brewing in the air, but nobody wanted to let out the feeling, as if letting it out would unleash the metaphorical Pandora's Box and start the very thing they were fearing.

The two Sectors were going to war. It was close, waiting around the corner. While the Sectors felt it the most, even the people wandering the active zones, lone wolves, nomads, traders and moving families or bands of people felt it as well. They all felt the coming conflict, and kept silent.

Both Sectors, Sector Nine doing its best to send out its Retrievers to go into caches and gather supplies and armaments for the impending battle, and Sector Three doing the same thing, but with forced conscription of hapless and unknowing people and beasts in an attempt to increase their numbers. And across both Sectors, both citizen and council member alike were tense, wound up to the breaking point. It would only take one chance encounter, one clash, and both Sectors would snap at the seams, and the best case scenario of both sides entering a truce while heavily battered was diminishing rapidly by the day. The story begins here, in the tense, agonized calm before the storm...

----

Councilman Bertram Connelly was watching the buildings move. He couldn't see the buildings actually move from the window in the refurbished high rise that Sector Nine called its Council Building. As the person in charge of the Retriever teams and the person overseeing their operations, he kept a number of radio transceivers mounted to a bulky, unmovable setup the table, an old battered thing that nevertheless did its job fairly well, and currently only a small number of those transceivers blared any sort of legible news. On occasion Bertram would turn and answer one of the signals on one of the transceivers and then turn back to the active City visible from his window. He could tell that buildings had changed- sometimes they changed completely, but other times only certain buildings shifted positions or grew or shrunk.

It was a game he played with himself to ease the tension that comes from overseeing teams of young, bushy-tailed recruits, or when he didn't hear word back from the more jaded but reliable team leaders. The Sectors on the brink of war was no news to Connelly; as one of the Councilmen of Sector Nine he knew the coming hostilities even before most of the other citizens. To lose any teams of Retrievers was bad, almost catastrophic. But, on the other hand, losing teams was almost unavoidable. Some of the best teams have stayed in business for almost eight years or more, while some groups had to get replaced within their first mission. He heard the passing of many people, and even though he couldn't see the carnage, the pieces of jumbled audio that sometimes came through transceivers when the Retrievers were lucky enough to radio in but unlucky enough to avoid catastrophe sent chills up Connelly's spine. The screams, the inhuman roars, sometimes the faint, meaty sound of flesh being torn and other, equally unpleasant sounds. As a former mercenary and Retriever himself, he knew the sources of some of those sounds and the reasons for some of the teams' demises, bringing him back into hairy, tense situations where nobody's survival was guaranteed. How he managed to get all but a very small few of his former teammates alive throughout all those near-catastrophic missions was an anomaly to him. That brought him back to thinking about the coming war.

[i]'How many of the people I tried to save are going to be in there? In the other Sector's army.'[/i] He shook his head, deciding to dismiss it. He looked back to the skyline outside his window. Surprisingly enough, he could count the changes on one hand. Two buildings had shifted position when he wasn't looking. He sat back at his desk and waited for something to break the tension.