Flesh and Bolts AU

Chapter 4: Robot City

For the two on their separate journeys, the train rides didn't last long, just a few hours. For Rodney, it was from midnight to early morning as the sun rose; for Alli, a bit longer than his. Nevertheless, their primary goals were the same: travel to Robot City.

On one side of the city station, Rodney stepped out of the train depot and onto the hustling, bustling sidewalk. The moment he saw the interior of the station, it was as if he had traveled thousands of worlds away.

Rivet Town was nothing like this. Compared to the small town, the City itself was huge in its own way. Skyscrapers seemingly as tall as mountains and thousands of bots hurrying about. Despite that he was surrounded by thousands of people walking by, he felt like he was the only one far from home.

Then a sign with the words "Welcome to Robot City" with Bigweld appeared in his view. It's a sign that he had never made a mistake at all.

"Wow," he gasped in awe.

"Excuse me. How do I get to..." he tried asking a few bots passing by him.

"Gave at the office," one answered him without even stopping.

"Can you direct me to Bigweld Indus..." Rodney was interrupted when a camera flashed at him. "What...?"

"Perfect! That'll be fifty bucks!" A gangly man said, his fingers moving as if he were demanding money. He has light-tanned skin, brown eyes, and red hair with black ends in a ponytail. He wore a bandage around his neck, glasses with one lens broken, a red shirt, a yellow undershirt, and red shorts. His arms and legs were all broken-down prosthetics.

"Fifty bucks? For what?!" Rodney asked, confused.

"A beautiful picture of your first moment in Robot City!" The red bot suddenly grabbed Rodney's face and made one side into a grin as he took another picture. "There, I captured your second moment. That's another fifty dollars."

"Are you keeping track?" He mumbled to a dark blue bot. The latter has matching dark azure hair, lightly tanned skin, and eyes with the same color as the hair. He wore a blue shirt, white undershirt, and matching shorts with boots. He nodded and turned the mouthpiece to a dollar sign.

"C'mon, work with me! Work with me! More pout, less pose!" The red bot instructed Rodney as he took more pictures. "That's great–inside of you is a fashion model just waiting to throw up!"

"Gimme those eyes, big eyes, big eyes!" He then gilded on his back across the floor, taking more photos. "Give me big anime eyes!"

He shot the camera right in Rodney's face, which made his eyes widen. "Yeah, loving it, loving, loving it!"

"I don't want any pictures!" Rodney exclaimed.

"You don't?" The red bot questioned.

"No!"

"Well, that's alright. There's no film in the camera," the red bot tossed the camera over his shoulder and pulled out a map of stars' homes. "Would you like to buy a map to the stars' homes?"

However, when he and the blue bot looked to where Rodney is, they saw he was gone. "Where'd he go?"

As Rodney made his way to the subway station just below ground, he passed a trio of bots with signs saying "Tinman", "Steele", and "Silverman". When a Tin-Man look-alike came up, he extended his arm out to one of them, and this led to the four strolling down with a bot dog following them as if it was from the Wizard of Oz film.

Rodney then passed by a beat-down bot who had a screw through his head and a sign "Got screwed". Feeling bad for the bot, he handed him a few coins in his mug. As he left, he didn't notice the bot pulled out the screw, which turned out to be a headband, from his head.