After chowing down on strange but tasty food, Max had scanned up and down the atrium levels in a vain attempt to figure out where to go next. Once he and Bandit caught their second wind, they simply started walking around at random, wherever their feet happened to take them.

Along the way, he tried asking more questions, but quickly realized that people here just got confused, afraid, or irritated— just generally upset in some way he couldn’t quite piece together— so he finally decided to drop it for the time being. Especially how no one seemed to believe places called “Tranz-D” or “the Triangle State” were real, and inevitably demanded Where the hell is Centralict? whenever he asked about the library. That, and it was hard to stay focused in such an exotic place, there were so many things to see.

Over the next few hours, they traversed entire corridors. Sampling a variety of foreign food and drink. Examining objects, clothing and devices, many of which Max had never heard of. Including the discovery that he could get water for free by pushing a panel on some peculiar boxes built into the walls. Sights and sounds and wonders greeted them from all angles, and Max took it all in with a goofy grin that made him look only half his age.

Not that he minded. Bandit seemed to soak up the attention and admiration as if he was making up for all the years that people weren’t fawning over him, and Max was glad. His companion seemed to be rolling with it more easily than he himself was. Which was a good thing, because he noticed that other people appeared to be afraid of Bandit, and he didn’t want to cause any trouble.

Still he worried about Justin, and wished he could find someone here as knowledgeable as the librarian. That, and that people would stop pressuring him to buy things. He guesstimated that he had spent at least half of his “normal” money on food, and no one seemed to want the “foreign” stuff. Though charmed for a while by this place’s diversions, his sense of optimism from earlier had gradually waned behind his back, and now he worried about how he was going to find a way back to Centralict, let alone Tranz-D.

He was on his way over to a block of benches, wondering why his feet hurt so much, when he was turned hither by the sound of music.

Around the corner, Max found the source, a place with a sign that read Bankshot, whose entrance hardly seemed large enough an escape valve for all of the decibels bottle-necked there. The entrance was lined with more neon than almost any other front he had seen. There were a few fliers tacked up, and a placard read Mosh Hour.

Max shrugged and went inside, Bandit following less enthusiastically than elsewhere.

As he stepped into the darkness, the wall of sound beyond the doors nearly pushed him back out. The flashing multi-colored lights and strobes almost made him dizzy at first, but much to his surprise, it only took him a few moments to adjust. The music itself, whoever was playing it, with its rapid pulsing of drums and bass, was otherwise accompanied by the sounds of instruments the like of which he had never heard before. And a voice, almost shouting more than singing, as if to make itself heard over all this, in an accent too thick for him to decipher.

A brief look around showed a neon-lined bar, a few tables, a dance floor that took up most of the place… and an empty stage. Which led to the one thing that confused him so far: Where are all the instruments? After walking underneath one, he realized that the sound was coming from black boxes mounted near the ceiling. Seeing these objects (speakers, the Outlanders called them), he remembered an Outlander who had passed through the Islands when he was only five or six years old. A young man, about the same age he was now, who really liked music. He carried a device he called a “boom-box” or something, and his music was somehow kept on little plastic tapes. Now that he remembered, that guy mostly carried loud music that sounded similar to what he was listening to now, only this stuff here had more… attitude.

Most of the Islanders didn’t like this passing stranger’s taste in music, and a few even tried to shame Max and his friends for trying to dance to it. And then there was Dad, nodding his head and tapping to the beat. Staring off into space as if the music had carried him off to some long-forgotten time and place…

A moment later he decided that perhaps the singer’s accent wasn’t as impenetrable as he had previously thought, for he was sure he could make out him chanting something about no return from somewhere, whatever that was all about. It was cryptic, but in light of the happy memory of the Islands it implanted, he was beginning to decide that he liked it.

Among the crowd, Max’s attention was drawn to a young man in the midst of the dancers. Aside from the question of how he could stand to be dancing out there in a heavy-looking denim jacket, it was the reflection off the kind of dark glasses he had seen others in this place wearing in such a dimly-lit place, and it piqued his curiosity. He noted that this one’s moves were not quite in step with the music (not that that seemed to faze him), but what really held his attention was that his moves looked almost more like martial arts than any dance he had ever seen.

Before he could make his way into the crowd, though, the song came to an abrupt and crashing halt, and the young man vanished into the swirling tide of people as a new, similarly loud song started playing. Max was about to go looking for him when it began to dawn on him that Bandit was getting more agitated by the minute in here. Realizing his friend’s heroic effort to put up with this place, Max decided to give both of their feet a rest after a day of so much walking and running around.

Little did Max realize that this young man had a tale of his own to tell.