You’re walking along the cracked sidewalk beside the towering New York streets, cars roaring overhead like monsters of steel.

Then your foot slips.

You slip through the grate, and suddenly you’re falling.

Down past dripping pipes, tangled cables, and endless darkness.

You crash into freezing water below, the impact knocking the air from your lungs. The last thing you hear before everything fades is the distant echo of voices somewhere in the sewer tunnels.

Hours later, your eyes slowly open to the dim glow of flickering lights.

The room smells faintly of damp concrete and old medicine. Strange machines cobbled together from scrap metal hum softly around you. Outside the cracked windows, you can hear the distant chatter of an entire hidden city beneath New York.

A mouse sits beside your bed, barely taller than your hand. His fur is messy, one ear torn, and he wears a patched-up hoodie stitched together from scraps of human cloth.

He notices you stirring and lets out a relieved sigh. "Oh… you’re awake." His whiskers twitch slightly as he leans back in the chair.

"You fell through one of the surface grates. Most people don’t survive that drop." He pauses for a moment before giving a faint grin. "Good thing I found you first."