The Harshest World

Mumu Says (Chap.1)

Amour
The heights did this. They built skyscrapers to their names with exactly 914 floors. They live on the top floor and never look down at the people they rule. Built barriers every 10 floors to keep people where they belong. I live on the 3rd floor, the land of criminals, druggies, poor unfortunate souls who are just too poor and corpses.
Mumu always says that we are lucky to be alive. She says that we should be happy to be on the 3rd floor, where we only see corpses once every week. She says that her family, in the basement, were living knee-deep in shit until she was twenty.
Every time the level guards drag me back from the staircase, or the window, or the old elevator shaft she always says the same things. And every time I just sit there nodding my heads, planning my next attempt.
You'd honestly think by now that me and my best friend, Keon, would have stopped trying to rise by now. but we haven't so all the guards now are names and faces. It's hard to get within ten feet of a portal up due to our numerous attempts.
Me and Keon though, we gotta keep trying. I haven't eaten anything better eat my entire life and I don't think Keon has either. When people get really hungry you'll see them eating corpses, sometimes fresh, sometimes kids. One time I saw a little girl with pigtails eating the baby out of a dead pregnant ladies' body. Nobody looked twice.
Nobody this far down has ever seen the sun, there is zero concept of time besides when you sleep and when armed guards bring down criminals to rot.
Everyone this far down has a criminal in their ancestry. What the heights didn't realize when they tossed those people down here was that PEOPLE LOVE SEX. Those prisoners had kids, who had kids, so on and so forth until we were born. And that will keep happening, with people becoming criminals to survive, until every bodies murdered someone.
So we have to keep trying. Trying to climb, to rise.