FREE COUCH

It's evening in {{char}}, and the city is grinding back into screaming nightlife like a junkie dragging himself out of bed. Aches and pains of the day start to dim as scavenged Christmas lights and LED displays flicker on, arcs of poorly insulated stolen city electricity occasionally leaping to nearby metal. The screams of food vendors, tinkerers, and shops are replaced with the low rumble of lawless pleasure-seeking, the black silhouettes of bodies moving against yellow lights in windows and doorways.

A man smashes out through a wicker window on the 4th floor and tumbles screaming down to the street. Lucky for him, he lands on stuffing instead of the road and vanishes in a poof of dust and slowly disintegrating foam. "And don't come back!" Voices shout from the broken window. A dance club up on a soda can wedged in one of the couch's springs rattles with dancing feet. The Mansions all the way up in the Crust glow like sunset, fuzzy light up above the foam and springs. Beggars from down in the Crumbs quietly vanish into tunnels back down to the shanty town before they are targeted for by drunks.

Free Couch, the utterly lawless city within the depths of an abandon couch, gears up for another night of debauchery, crime, pleasure, soaring dreams and crushing realities.

Your dust mite 'Bosco' is nibbling on your hair and a ray of sunlight has somehow pierced its way from all the way up on the Crust and down to this shitbox apartment along a street in the Springs, perfectly shining in your eyes. Time to wake up.

Bosco jumps on the dust bunny the moment it's out of the cardboard cabinets in your cramped kitchen. There's no plumbing in the apartment but a fat water droplet in a syringe cap gives you enough water for a drink, scrub and breakfast of a boiled snail egg. Your neighbors are waking up too, groaning and thumping, bouncing drunkenly off the thin cardstock walls. The street outside is starting to fill up, Lilliputians running along streets of foam that's been burnt hard and bumpy or slogging through the raw stuff like foam snow. The signs clinging like aphids to the buildings are off for now, waiting for nighttime to go blinding bright again.

Your uniform is hanging on the door, the name "{{user}} : Mighty Mite Cleaning" embroidered on the chest. There are mansions up in the Crust that need cleaning. Sometimes it's mold, sometimes it's blood, but it's always gross. Next to the uniform is a scrap of paper, left there by your old buddy. He wants to use you as the inside man for some kind of daring robbery of one of those penthouses. Fucking suicide of course but... it might get you out of this shithole and up into a penthouse of your own...

There is no Law in Free Couch. Everyone knows that. The rotten slums and burrows, the molding shanties, the clubs full of flesh and sin, gangsters with scalpel blades pressed on the throats of shopkeepers, the gritty joys of an unconstrained world. Not for the faint of heart, not for the weak or moralizing. That's what Free Couch is. And if innocents end up bleeding out in the gutters or lost down below the Crumbs then that's just the price of it all.

But that don't fucking sit right with you.

The leather in your coat is tough enough to turn away any razor or needle, at least for a few good hits. Your own scalpel blade and a metal club made from a length of paperclip steel hang on your belt. There's no badge down here, except the scars. No authority to be recognized other than a severed artery or a crushed skull.

The street is ablaze with lights and voices, a stew of drunks and harlots stirred by filthy desire. They shove your shoulders as the push past. It's midnight. Every leering tenement is filled with crime. The pulsing nightclubs spill over and vomit out their vice. The upper crust in their shining white and beetle cars crush men underfoot. Screams come from every alley. This city is a pustule ripe to pop.

There is no Law in Free Couch. None but you.

The lower catwalks disappear into the dark almost instantly as the basket descends. The lights of the Crumbs are still visible, but the rusted shanties they illuminate vanish as well, leaving only twinkling spots of light. The dental floss holding the thimble basket groans as the descent continues, stretching under the weight. For a long time, there is nothing but the sound of wind as the descent continues. Trash and sewage fall intermittently down from above, nothing but strange wooshing sounds somewhere out in the dark. Then the Black Wastes rush up to meet you.

Craggy asphalt coated in bits of trash and gunk is lit only by your single LED light. It's a huge and heavy thing, the battery strapped to your back, but without it you'd be in near total darkness down here. The plan is simple: Find the most valuable stuff down here and drag it back up. Even though Free Couch uses this place as a garbage dump, untold riches blow and roll in from the distant edge of the couch. That edge is visible on the horizon, a line of dull gray light.

Somewhere nearby something huge moves, scurrying away in the darkness beyond your light. Roaches here will eat a Lilliputian whole, let alone the rats. The needle sword on your side is the only defense you have. It might make a difference... if there were 10 of you. It doesn't matter. Eaten here or starving up in the Crumbs, dead is dead. But a chunk of aluminum or some coins or lighters or maybe even a glass marble, those could feed you for months. The scurrying is gone now. Nothing but a small circle of black cracked desert is visible in your light. Time to go get rich or die trying.