The Tin City of Mount Sn

                “Crumbling stone and dissolving powder.” Blared a theatrical recorded voice. “Decaying wood and rotting straw. The ancient city builders put their faith in the materials that nature saw fit to leave upon the surface of the Earth. They used scraps of trees, spurs of rocks, and broken rubble as shelter for their rulers, their greatest minds, their families, and themselves, putting their trust in what they’d wrought to stand for generations to come.” The tin gramophone speaker curling from high up in the corner of the ceiling gave the words a harsh edge. It had been crafted with love, but time had tarnished the metal and a number of faint dents were apparent along its horned profile.
                Slowly the metal carriage rose up its tracks on the mountainside, climbing the steep slope with a regular clanking and juddering. Scrubby mountainside grass grew in between patches of loose stone, and thin hardy trees clung to rocky outcrops with a determination to live on the inhospitable slopes visible through the carriage window. Deliberately, it seemed, the carriages had been designed in such a way as to make seeing along the tracks ahead, and the final destination, impossible; coupled with the slow ascent, the anticipation of arriving at the summit was intended to be stoked to flashpoint by the end of the journey. Whilst that was at least partially true, it also made Kevin wish he’d brought a book with him.
                “Learning from the mistakes of those before me, I, Gerrard Synotite, was brave enough to question conventional wisdom. Why continue to use flawed wooden beams which would rot and splinter? Why subject ourselves to dragging stone around, only for it to erode and shatter?” the voice continued, gaining ferocity with every word. Either the message was fundamentally believed deep within the being of the narrator, or it was the most dramatic case of over-acting that Kevin had ever experienced in a vocal-only part. “Of course, as with all revolutionary visionaries, I was laughed at when I presented my new truth. Gatekeepers of the old order, the sheep of the foolish flock and conspirators of stone, tried to discredit me. My plans were mocked and my investors made to endure intimidation by false promises of bankruptcy. But I held strong despite all these attempts at sabotage. The ivory tower will always be brought down by the sweat of the people when united under the banner of progress, and I held that banner aloft without fear of retribution.”
                It was a rare thing, in Kevin’s experience, for great revolutionary leaders to espouse their triumphs almost exclusively by pre-recorded messages in funicular railway carriages. Whilst the messages were not without merit they did still lack a certain gravitas afforded by more conventional and widespread media. Propaganda which is heard only when the listener is within the grip of the speaker is somewhat wasted after all.
                “And so after many years of toil and dedication, personally leading the efforts to make my dreams and my visions into a reality, my great gift to the world was created. You too are about to bear witness to the ember of enlightenment; a flame of progress which shall burn the world down and rebirth a greater civilisation from the ashes.”
                Clanking to a gentler gradient and fading gradually into shadow, the carriage seemed to enter a station of some kind. Dull metallic walls overtook the mountainside scenery, each one inlaid with hard-to-discern messages or images of some kind. The same tarnishing which had taken the speaker was also working its magic upon whatever engravings had been made, and closer inspection would therefore be needed before Kevin could interpret what the artist, or perhaps vandal, had been trying to convey. Several metres of such engravings were ponderously presented to Kevin through the window of the carriage as it moved through the station, until gradual braking brought it to a halt. Windowless doors faced directly towards the centre of the mountain.
                “Welcome to what the blinded fools called impossible. Welcome, my newest. Welcome to your utopia, your future, and your forever home. Welcome to my city of tin!” Bellowed the speaker with bombastic grandeur as the doors opened, unveiling to Kevin what he had come all this way to see.
                Visible through a broad, open doorway leading out of the station was a vista of rooftops, towers, buildings, walls, monuments, and fountains, each one rendered in the matte colours of tin. For miles it stretched away, minarets and spires piercing the skyline at irregular intervals and reflecting sunlight to various degrees, until the city ran out against the stony rear wall of the crater into which it had been built.
                Kevin looked down at the partially crumpled leaflet in his hand. Sitting between his fingers it had picked up an array of creases and curves which were not a part of the original design, and white paper was starting to peek through the glossy laminated finish at each fold. In and among the various distortions Kevin had made the large silver lettering was still legible.
                ‘The Amazing Tin City! Vision of the Future Atop the Mount Sn Crater!’
                Against all the odds, and against everything Kevin thought he knew about reality, the advert on the pamphlet spoke the truth; there really was a tin city filling the crater of Mount Sn. It had never happened before, and would possibly never happen again, but there he stood in perfect agreement with the wording of promotional materials. Gerrard Synotite would probably have been livid that the wonder of his city was outshined by a small piece of paper made to describe it, but Kevin didn’t much care.
                Stepping out of the metal carriage onto a platform of tin, Kevin looked around at the station and saw that, as was to be expected, it was of the same uniform metallic colour as the rest of the city. Peering at it up close for the first time, Kevin compared the metal of the station to the colour on the leaflet and saw that the ravages of oxidation had not been kind. Up in the damp mountain air the tin had been tarnished in exactly the same way as the speaker inside the carriage, revealing a simple way that perhaps Mr Synotite’s vision had not been flawless.
                Hanging over the open doorway was a sign indicating that it was the exit. Although obvious enough even without a sign, Kevin was grateful that Gerrard Synotite hadn’t decided on a revolutionary new method of leaving train stations that defied convention after finding ‘success’ with his tin constructions.
                Having been built into the rim of the crater, the station was high above the majority of the tin city and allowed any disembarking passenger to loom over it like a child peering into a display case of sweets. Or possibly a display case of tin, if Gerrard Synotite was a role model here. As he stepped through the exit and onto the balcony, Kevin was surprised at how still the air was, given how high the city had been built. The crater was making an impressive shelter for the whole settlement, acting as equal testaments to Gerrard Synotite’s vision for planning and his presumable disdain for windmills of any sort. Standing at his vantage point and examining the streets, squares, rooftops, and buildings, Kevin was almost tin-blind with the uniform dull greys. He could make out the basic shapes and outlines against the sky and the rocks, but distinguishing where one building stopped and another began was a struggle. As if stepping into a dark room he squinted at the cityscape as his eyes tried to adjust, focusing on where the edge of a crooked, angular building should logically be in an effort to distinguish one wall from another.
                “A whole city built for artificial snow-blindness.” Kevin muttered to himself as he stared intently. After a full minute spent not quite managing to work out the boundary of what would later transpire to be a tin bakery, he suddenly realised how peculiar he must have looked, peering intently at such a specific and uninteresting point. Kevin scratched his chin and stood up straight again, giving the impression that he’d successfully managed to achieve something perfectly normal and acceptable, and felt pretty assured that he’d styled it out. Surreptitiously he flicked his eyes from one side to the other and checked for any potential witnesses, but discovered no observers. In fact, there was no-one else in or around the station at all.
                Realising his isolation at this supposedly wondrous tourist location for the first time, Kevin’s brow furrowed. Even if it hadn’t been an interesting attraction, it was still supposed to be a somewhat functioning city. Granted it was an unpopular one, and one from which the population had moved out as rapidly as they’d moved in if everyone he’d asked about it spoke true, but it was still claimed that the city had residents. Around Kevin, however, there was no-one and nothing; no sign of motion or life.
                With the stillness of the air and the lack of any life it felt like time was standing still in the tin city. Kevin checked his watch and, with significant relief, found that not to be the case. Comforted by the continuing passage of time, he glanced across the vista once more and set off down the metallic stairwell leading away from the funicular station.
                Extending from the rock wall in a series of gantries, the staircase switched back and forth as it descended. Thick tin girders were bolted into the sheer face of the crater, and they gave Kevin some small degree of confidence in the integrity of his path. Unfortunately that confidence was largely offset by the disconcerting bow that each stair had adopted in the questionable amount of use they'd seen. When that bowing was combined with the various exciting bends and dents in the already too-small handrail, and the walk down was an adrenaline rush of unreliable infrastructure.
                A hollow clang echoed out every time Kevin’s foot landed on a stair. It lacked the solid reverberating note of steel stairs, and instead sounded somehow dulled or muffled but also distractingly loud. By the regular footfall chimes there was no mistaking that somebody was descending. If anything the volume felt deliberate, as if the city had tried to reduce its bell costs by employing someone to walk down a set number of steps every hour.
                Kevin gripped the battered handrail tightly whilst making his slow way down the stairs. An unsettling lack of rigidity met his feet every time he set one down; the stairs didn’t move as such, but there was a feeling like stepping on very slightly dampened clay. The surface moved and imprinted to a degree which would be almost imperceptible under normal circumstances, but when that surface was the only thing between Kevin and a multi-storey drop he gained a much-heightened awareness of it. His fingers curled farther and harder around the rail until he received a revolutionary form of tin-induced cramp that outperformed anything he’d felt back in the old world.
                A small and flat square platform marked the first turning point of the staircase. Whilst the platform was square in shape, the handrail didn’t see any need to follow suit, instead bending outwards in the lumpy, irregular curve borne of many exhausted climbers leaning their weight upon it. Electing not to trust it himself, Kevin turned through the switchback and carried on with the walk.
                Over the next few minutes Kevin gradually crept lower, watching the tin buildings grow ever larger until they eventually overtook his own height. He became accustomed to the random fluctuations in the battered handrail and the soft sensation of malleable tin underneath his feet, and even the clanging of his footsteps faded into the background of his mind. By the time he finally reached the last flight of steps it could just have been any other staircase in the world, except for the monochromatic surroundings.
                "The streets are paved with solid tin!" The leaflet had said. It wasn't wrong, although the definition of solid may have been stretched for advertising purposes. The familiar tarnished colour was stained and patterned by dirt, dust, mud, and everything else that gets smeared onto a road by heavy traffic. Even through the covering of filth, however, there was no denying that the entire road and pavement were both made from pure tin that faded into one another disconcertingly. At night it would have been nearly impossible to tell where one stopped and the other started, and easy distinction was something that Kevin valued in his pedestrian and vehicle passageways.
                Adjacent to kerbs and corners were lampposts and signs that rose smoothly from the paving, the former starting to sag under the weight of their overhanging light fixtures and the latter standing proud with embossed instructions. Without any kind of paint, the message of the sign was shrouded in mystery.
                "That doesn't seem very safe or convenient." Kevin muttered, struggling to determine what the sign was asking or warning or perhaps informing him.
                "It's not." Someone agreed from behind.
                Kevin leapt a foot the air.
                "Sorry newcomer! Didn't mean to startle you." The voice hurriedly apologised.
                Turning around, Kevin saw a woman standing underneath the staircase, which was a strange place to be standing for someone who claimed not to want to startle newcomers. She was neatly tucked into place with the underside of one stair just barely brushing the top of her head. It was as though both the stairs and the woman had been made for one another, fitting perfectly together. If she'd chosen to wear her hair in a perm rather than a tight bun that morning then she'd have had to settle for standing under the next stair up.
                "No, no that's fine. I didn't realise anyone was there." Kevin said, letting her off the hook for the ambush.
                "You thought there was no-one around to talk to, so you made conversation with yourself instead. I can understand that." The woman accepted.
                "That's about the fill of it, yes." Kevin confirmed
                "At least the outside world is giving you those kinds of survival skills I suppose. Is this your first time in the Tin City?" She asked.
                "Yeah. Pretty obvious I guess?"
                The woman chuckled.
                "Could say that. You've still got the tin wonder; even road signs are fascinating to you, I can tell. But you're quick on the uptake; you can see the flaws with Old Synotite's dream."
                Kevin remained silent and held the woman's gaze for a moment. He felt like she was trying to sell him something with her compliment, but for the life of him he didn’t know what anyone might try to sell him up here except tin.
                “What’s your name, stranger?” the woman asked.
                “Kevin. Nice to meet you.”
                “Hello Kevin. I’m Anne, proud resident of the tin city.” She said, giving a vague wave of her hand to indicate that the tin city to which she was referring was indeed the one around them. “What brings you here, Kevin? Come to see the tinniest wonder of the world?”
                "Er, yes. I found this leaflet and thought it sounded interesting." Kevin answered somewhat redundantly. He consoled himself by acknowledging that the woman knew nothing about him and might, therefore, have assumed he visited only those places which sounded boring, but he knew it was a long shot.
                "Not one of those boredom seekers then? Good on you." Anne congratulated. "Well do you know where you're going and what you want to see?"
                "Um..." Kevin stalled. "... I saw a few places in this leaflet that I thought would be good starters. The tin town hall, the great forge, the smelting district..." He said, flicking through the various folds and panels of his information.
                "Ah yeah. All the tourist traps. They’re grand and all, but if you want to see the real tin city, what it's become and what it really is, then you'll need something better than them."
                “And I suppose you’re about to offer me that something?” Kevin asked sceptically.
                “It’s pretty hard to offer you a whole part of the city. I’m not a baroness.” Anne chuckled. “But I can be your tour-guide. I’ll show you around and make sure you get to see everything you need to.”
                “Er… that’s a kind offer.” Kevin said, trying to find a way of letting her down gently. Accepting the company of strangers, especially strangers who lurked underneath staircases and chuckled a lot, was something from which he instinctively shied away. “But, I don’t have, er, any local currency to pay you or tip you or anything. I’ll be fine on my own with the map in my leaflet, thanks.”
                “Oh, I’m not expecting anything from you! I just want you to see what the tin city has to offer.” Anne persisted, her slightly crooked smile pulling the leathery skin of her face into thick concertinas.
                “Thank you, really, but I should be alright.” Kevin repeated, unfolding his leaflet and turning to the map of the city. He was aware of Anne’s smirking face watching him as he tried to locate the funicular station on the brightly coloured and questionably scaled map in his hands. A minute passed, and then two more, until the furrows in Kevin’s brow were of equal magnitude to those in Anne’s cheeks.
                “Do you need some help?” She finally asked.
                “Please. I just need to work out where I am and then I’ll be able to pick my way towards the town hall.” Kevin insisted, unwilling to condemn his navigational abilities on the basis of a single map reading incident.
                “OK. We’re here at the moment.” Anne said, hovering a finger half way between the edge of the map and Kevin’s midriff. For a second Kevin wondered if she knew she’d missed with her pointing, and then considered whether she was pointing to the literal position of his feet on the tin paving.
                “Uh…” he started, but Anne continued.
                “Your map doesn’t reach this far out.” She explained.
                “Right. Great.” Kevin assessed. “Thank you, though.” He added.
                “I’ll tell you what; let me show you to the town hall and give you a little tour on the way, and if you really think you’re fine afterwards I’ll leave you to it. How does that sound?” Anne compromised, looking at him with one eyebrow raised.
                Kevin looked up and down the desolate street, seeing no-one else to ask for directions or any kind of clear signposting. Even if he tried to piece his way there, there was no way he’d be able to read the road names without climbing up the walls and pressing his face into them anyway. With one last look down at his incomplete map, he accepted that there was no other reasonable choice.
                “OK then. Thank you.”
                “My pleasure.” Anne replied. Kevin was worried about how true that statement was. “This way then. The town hall’s about twenty, maybe thirty minutes’ walk from here but we can see much better things on the way there, I promise. And feel free to ask anything you want to know about the city.”
                Switching into her tour-guide mode instantaneously, Anne strode out from under the stairs and along a broad street leading towards the centre of the crater. Rustling the difficult to believe and frankly unfeasible number of skirts she was wearing, Anne’s short legs moved with purpose and energy sufficient to make Kevin hurry like a toddler behind her. After a few strides Kevin noticed that while he was still beating a tin drum with every footfall, Anne was strangely muffled; not quite silent, but far lighter than him. He supposed that custom soles were something that had to be worn when you lived here to keep the noise at an acceptable level.
                “This is Cassiterite Street, the oldest roadway in all of the tin city. The original intention was for it to lead all the way to the city centre, but during the first winter of construction it was realised that creating a long, open strip like that formed a kind of wind tunnel. Whenever high pressure wind events occurred the air got driven down here and channelled up to tremendous speeds. In one particularly bad storm it picked up all sorts of stones and debris from the rest of the crater, as could have been expected, and then sent them along the road like a sandblaster. There were a few injuries that day, and if you look at places like this” Anne said, resting a hand on the edge of a building “you can see the damage and abrasion it caused.”
                Kevin leaned in and saw hundreds of long, deep grooves along the tin wall, running as far as he could see in either direction.
                “Wow. That must have been horrifying.”
                “So the construction crews said.”
                “But… hang on. I don’t know a lot about building an entire city from scratch, but starting with a road that’s perfectly enclosed by tall buildings doesn’t sound practical. Surely you’d start with a few scattered amenities and necessitates and then fill in the gaps from there?” Kevin speculated.
                Anne chuckled and shrugged.
                “Old Synotite didn’t know much about building an entire city from scratch either. That might explain it.” She said, making no secret of her amused disdain. “If you look over there in the road you’ll be able to see the wheel tracks from when the roads where in use. Because this is the oldest street it’s got the most tarnishing, except for those strips where the wheels used to erode the tarnish away.”
                Kevin turned his attention from the scarred buildings to the road, and saw that there were indeed two paler tracks running in parallel lines up the tin road. They were still fairly well oxidised, but undeniably clearer than the rest.
                “How long has it been since this was in proper use?”
                “It’s hard to put an exact time to. A few years now I’d say. The tin dream buckled.” She said, not turning around or slowing down.
                “And since that time everyone has just deserted the city completely? You’re the only other person I’ve seen.”
                “Well, of course I am. I met you just outside the station and I know it’s not manned.”
                Kevin maintained silence.
                “But no, not quite. There are a few people left up here. Most of them left when the money dried up and the city couldn’t run itself, but some of us didn’t depend on the city like that, so we were able to stay.” Anne answered.
                “Yeah, I was wondering about that too, actually. Building a whole city out of just tin is... well, even if he already had access to the raw materials it would be horrifically expensive to construct everything like that. All the casting and moulding and specialist labour required would be atrocious.”
                "Oh, yes. It was prohibitively expensive for any single person, including Gerrard Synotite. He just stole a lot of money and wrote cheques he couldn't honour, basically. Complete fraudster. Unfortunately for him, and for the people who moved here, it turned out to be pretty hard to hide a whole city built into a mountain, so the debts got settled eventually at the tax payers expense."
                “Right… It sounds like that was probably inevitable.”
                Anne shrugged again.
                “So, that took a toll on the city funds and where the taxes went, as you can imagine. Old Synotite tried to hide it of course so that it wouldn’t undermine confidence in the leadership.”
                “Makes sense.” Kevin shrugged. Around him there were no signs of looting or rioting, so he could imagine that Synotite’s cover-up of the financial situation was good enough for a long time. Either that or no-one else in the city saw any appreciable value in tin when they were fleeing. He supposed that lugging vast weights of tin down the funicular would have been unappealing to everyone during their exodus.
                “Now this” Anne said, pointing towards the edge of the pavement “is interesting. What strikes you about it?”
                Kevin stood at Anne’s side and followed the line of her finger, settling his gaze on a splash of shining colour in the ocean of grey.
                “That’s not tin.” He said. It was strange for the statement to carry any emotional weight or grandeur, rather than stating the obvious as it usually did. But here, starkly contrasted against the monochrome street, the non-tin acted like a sudden reminder of the existence of other colours.
                “Correct. It’s a bronze marker. A sign.”
                “Of what? Someone not transporting their molten copper safely?”
                “Of someone having molten copper at all, and wanting others to know about it.” Anne explained.
                “What do you mean?”
                Anne started walking along the street again.
                “The tin city was sold as a new utopia. You must have heard the voiceover in the funicular going on about the permanence of new tin versus the foolishness of the old world, or some such nonsense. Well, that was how it got sold to anyone and everyone willing to listen to Old Synotite when he made his rounds. Door-to-door he went, trying to sell his idea like a double-glazing salesman, although he obviously would never approve of traditional windows here in his pet project.” Anne recounted. Kevin wasn’t sure what she meant by the window disapproval remark but nodded politely anyway. “There were public announcements in squares and parks to win support, posters slapped up wherever he could find free space, billboards all over the approach to Mount Sn, and somehow he even got his hands on tin city themed coasters to leave all over pubs and bars. It was saturation in daily life and eventually people started to believe him. Or maybe believe in him. We all thought that he had a point about tin being more reliable than wood for building a house, and it making more sense to have a single sheet of tin for a roof than hundreds of small tiles that could shift and leak. No-one ever bought the window line no matter how hard he pushed it, but everything else managed to outweigh it and he still gained support. Or, investors I guess was more important. Early buyers and commitments to move in.”
                Kevin still wasn’t sure about the window thing. As he stared up at the buildings towering above him to look for some clue, he became distracted by the perfect tin facsimiles of mismatched architectural styles, apparently constructed together in an effort to replicate a genuine, organically evolved cityscape. A terrace of narrow Georgian townhouses with brickwork patterns pressed into the tin gave way to a three storey Victorian home with authentically wonky window frames and fasciae. Slamming into the side of it like a runaway chest of drawers was a stark, brutalist block of flats offering nothing but rigid straight lines and perfect functional rectangles, making the almost satirically gothic cathedral next door look even more like a hedgehog’s fever dream of spires, sharp points, and protrusions.
                Most alarming to the eye, though, was how every one of the buildings looked like it had been made from a single piece of tin, either moulded into the shape of a building or painstakingly carved from a cyclopean lump of solid metal. Maybe Gerrard Synotite had thought everything would look cleaner that way, or that it would be somehow more pleasing to have a single continuous piece of housing rather than chunks and plates, but whatever the intention had been Kevin decided that they’d missed the mark. With no seams or edges it gave the impression that the city had risen up from some kind of primordial tin sludge and formed spontaneously into a parody of human architecture. It was deeply unsettling.
                “So, there were a lot of people to begin with then?” Kevin asked, conscious that Anne had been silent for a few moments.
                “Oh yes. The marketing campaign was a success and the people flocked up to Mount Sn as soon as the first wave of houses were ready. A great parade of luggage lined the road to the bottom of the funicular, and a constant stream came off it at the top. Carrying cases and bags down those stairs was a pig, I can tell you. But people were grateful for the ‘no outside furniture’ rule by then, because climbing down that lot with a wardrobe balanced between you was a no-go.” Anne told him as she turned left off Cassiterite Street. Kevin didn’t struggle to believe that manoeuvring a vast piece of wooden furniture down the steep steps would have been less than enjoyable.
                “Seems like a heavy-handed way to stop people being stupid though. Why not just insist on dismantled furniture or provide a lift or something?” Kevin asked. He saw another splash of bronze on the pavement as he went by.
                “I think you misunderstand, outsider. The ‘no outside furniture’ rule wasn’t about safeguarding the people or stopping them from dropping a bedframe over the handrail. It was because the only thing that Old Synotite would tolerate in his wonder city was tin. It was the new magic material, and to bring in wooden furniture would be to imply that tin couldn’t do a better job.”
                “That’s… wow. I mean, did people not mind? Tin doesn’t sound like the best thing to use for literally all of the house.” Kevin observed, as all carpet makers in the past had observed before him.
                “Synotite’d had his smiths make up all manner of furniture for the first wave so no, not really. They didn’t have to lug their mantelpiece up a mountain, and they got a free tin one waiting for them in their new home. I think we all actually liked it to begin with.”
                “So the tin city dream worked out for a while then?”
                “I wouldn’t go that far. Despite Synotite’s best efforts the people started trying to use other materials so the dream began to sour, and that only took a day or two. Tin might well have been the wonder material for a lot of things, availability or price to Synotite mostly I’d suspect, but it just couldn't function as everything all of the time. Who wants to live in a house with tin windows? It's bloody dark!” She accurately pointed out, as they passed another bronze marker. “And it's all well and good having tin sinks with tin taps but the threads bend and bind as soon as you tighten them, then you’ve either got a permanently dry bathroom or a perpetual waterfall. It just didn’t work, so people tried to get the obviously broken stuff changed. They started off with small enough requests, like having glass windows for a start, but old Synotite was infuriated that the people had supposedly turned on his vision so quickly. They didn't give it enough of a chance, he said, because they were too hung up on the values and ways of the old world. Called 'em brainwashed.” Anne gesticulated broadly as she recounted Gerrard Synotite’s tyranny, making her dense jungle of skirts rustle like undergrowth. “We all knew he was just a crackpot though, because it just isn't possible to make a streetlight without using at least one insulator to stop the whole post, and the whole street, going live from the mains connection. And tin tin-openers! Do you know how many we got through! Blunt in an evening!” Anne remembered with mounting frustration in her voice. Recounting the details and the memories was waking up a latent irritation which had apparently been sitting just below the surface. It would have made Kevin feel awkward if the situation surrounding it hadn’t been so perplexing.
                “Wait, so literally everything had to be made from tin? Not just the city and the furnishings and stuff which could logically at least provide a function? Things that didn’t work in tin just weren’t allowed at all?”
                “Exactly. The mains supply is all on tin wires, and they come in from underground and rise through the house at the centre of a cavity, because they can’t run tin wires across tin telegraph poles without electrocuting everyone. Tin plumbing serves the water. Tin gas lines with tin solder joints to hopefully keep them sealed. Cutlery? Tin. Cookware? Tin. Anything made in or for the tin city had to be made from tin.” Anne practically spat the word tin by this stage, as if the word itself tasted dirty. She stopped outside an Edwardian style building with a simple tin front door.
                “No. That can’t possibly be true.” Kevin denied.
                “It took a hell of a time and more failed attempts than I care to mention before Synotite would accept that the funicular couldn't be made entirely from tin. He eventually compromised on having steel tracks because they were technically outside of the city limits. You can still find the shavings where the carriage trimmed down the original tin rails on its maiden voyage, though. Made for a hell of a glittery wind.” Anne added, driving her point home.
                “I just don’t believe that a city could have functioned like that for any amount of time, even a few days. Nor that anyone would ever think that it was a good idea.”
                “You don’t have to believe it; it’s true either way. Some say that Synotite was a con artist and never believed in the idea himself. I don’t though, I reckon he was just an honest madman.” Anne said as she inserted a tin key into the tin door. Wracked with worry that it might bend or snap, Kevin keenly watched her turn it and held his breath. After a couple of tense seconds it clunked reassuringly around and he let his gaze fall in relief. It landed on a small strip of bronze hidden behind a short tin lip on the doorstep.
                “There’s a bronze mark outside this door. What does it mean?” he asked, with self-preservation creeping in alongside the tourist curiosity.
                “It’s nothing to worry about. It just means that you’ll find the truth inside, rather than what Synotite wants the world to believe about his city.” Anne said, cryptically. It didn’t bring Kevin a lot of comfort though, because ‘it’s nothing to worry about’ is exactly what someone would say if there was very much something to worry about. On the other hand, though, she had been an excellent tour guide for the previous few minutes, and that, for some reason, felt like it counted for something.
                “Is it a museum or something?” Kevin asked, his face contorted with concern and uncertainty.
                “More like a private collection, really. More educational than any other tin city museum though, so you’ll get a good grip on the real history of this place.”
                Kevin looked up and down the street, not entirely knowing what he was looking for but feeling like he should make a good go of the search nonetheless. No sign of whether it was safe or not came to him. There were no hastily covered up blood trails to indicate that this was a serial killer’s den, and no clawed finger marks in the doorway though, so that was a positive. Plus, he was fairly sure that he could take down a tin-addled woman twice his age and half his size if he got the drop on her. He settled on following her, but made a mental note to surreptitiously grab the first makeshift weapon he saw.
                Anne pushed forwards and the door opened with a squeak that turned quickly into a screech. Wincing at the sound, Kevin followed her into the building and stepped into a dark hallway, facing a staircase that he could just about see thanks to the light from outside. He was almost immediately robbed of that illumination by Anne as she closed the door amid another cacophonous metallic wailing behind him.
                "This way." Anne said, brushing past him and walking into the pitch blackness.
                "Which way is that? I can't see."
                "Straight ahead but not up the stairs. Step carefully and you’ll be fine without light.” Anne replied.
                Doing as he was told Kevin took ginger steps in the darkness, wary of anything which might roll underfoot and find itself pressed permanently into the tin flooring. Even when taken with care his paces were heralded by the familiar thunk sound of boots on metal. Without any light at all by which to navigate Kevin barely trusted himself to walk in a straight line, and he extended his arms to locate himself by the narrow hallway walls. Almost immediately he snapped them back himself, having felt how cold bare metal walls could get at the top of a mountain and finding the resultant chilling pain to be unpleasant. Regardless of how cold it made his fingers, however, he still had to be able to navigate without kicking the stairs, so he compromised with holding out just one hand to a wall and keeping the other warm.
                Another few short steps echoed with the typical thunk and then, suddenly, there was a clunk from beneath his foot instead. Instinctively Kevin paused, and he felt around with his sole for any sign that he was stepping into a trap or somebody’s dinner. When nothing suggested either of those things, and he found nothing else amiss with his probing foot, he took another step and heard another clunk without significant incident. Desperately aware that he didn’t want to lose track of Anne or give her time to set up an ambush, Kevin pressed on to the new clunking soundtrack.
                As he progressed, Kevin noticed that not only had the acoustics changed but the terrain underfoot seemed to have become rough. It undulated like the rocky bed of an ancient river. He didn't know much about the tin city, as he was coming to learn from Anne’s nuggets of wisdom, but he was sure that there had been no rivers running through the town’s buildings at any stage. At the same time as the floor’s metamorphosis the smooth metal walls also transformed to more irregular and natural feeling shapes, followed by a sharp change to what felt like a door frame. Shortly afterwards his hand fell straight through a gap where a door would normally be presumed to stand, confirming the door frame hypothesis fairly conclusively.
                "Yep, in here." Anne confirmed, hearing Kevin's startled grunt. "Step just through the door and hold it there."
                Stopping as close to the doorway as possible lest he stub a toe on a tin end-table or something, Kevin came to a halt and awaited whatever it was that Anne was intending to show him.
                "Will there be lights at some stage?"
                "Getting to it. You can see what I mean about living without windows, can't you?"
                "I can't see anything at all. But figuratively yes, I suppose so." He answered. Feeling this helpless and blind in a foreign city whilst under the care of a woman of questionable morals and intent was starting to bug him. “No-one would want this.”
                “Except old Synotite. This was part of his vision of the city, apparently. Houses in permanent darkness unless the lights were switched on with the power cables that could electrocute everyone in the home in a strong breeze.” Anne said, making a concerted effort to press that particular point home. “But not everyone was willing to settle for that. We’d come to the tin city for a better life, not a life ruled by a tin-crazed megalomaniac. Maybe he wanted to pretend that nothing but tin existed, and maybe the majority of his captive citizens would have gone along with it, but not everyone. Some of us held our ground. We stood against the tyranny of tin in the name of something greater.”
                Without warning a burst of light erupted into the room, dazzling Kevin as his eyes attempted to absorb whatever loose light the room had been keeping secreted away. Squinting in the brightness he saw light assailing him from every angle. It came down from the ceiling and bounced off every surface, seemingly determined to focus itself straight into his eyeballs and blind him. Gradually it faded from indistinct glare to discernible shapes, and Kevin appreciated what Anne had shown him.
                Where the city had been dominated by dulled tinny greys everywhere else, this room was awash with glowing, shining bronze. From floor to walls to ceiling, the undulations that Kevin had felt revealed themselves to be solidified tide marks and frozen waves of bronze, their fluid forms held static like a cooled magma flow. A bronze three-piece suit was arranged as if it were nothing out-of-the-ordinary around the room, facing towards a bronze coffee table covered in bronze cutlery and mugs. Against the far wall was a display cabinet full of various unknown shapes and trinkets.
                “And there was colour our lives again.” Anne announced, standing by another doorway and looking pleased with herself.
                “You... turned the tin to bronze?” Kevin said, his voice lacking the impressed edge for which Anne had been hoping.
                “We circumvented Synotite’s oppression and turned his tin into something superior.” Anne corrected. “His obsession with a single metal threatened to destroy lives and make the people of the city miserable, so we banded together to oppose him. We showed him that the power of one falls flat in the face of unity. In secret smelting societies we took our copper and added it to the tin that incarcerated us, turning it into a bronze so strong that Synotite could do nothing to stop us!”
                Taking another look, Kevin examined the undulations of the bronze surfaces in the room where splashes of previously molten metal had been allowed to cool without moulds. Letting his gaze run around the room again his mouth dropped open. The sheer volume of molten copper which must have been flung around was staggering, as was the danger associated with doing so and allowing it to pool and bunch wherever it fell.
                “You... er… you sure showed him who’s boss.”
                “Don’t I know it? Old Synotite was lording it over us all from his tin tower but we were turning tin to bronze down here, right under his nose. He had his vision and the power, but we had our moxie and each other. We unified the segregated metals into a bonded unit that stood head and shoulders above its constituent parts. We refuse to bow to the tin monster. We are the Alloyance!” Anne announced proudly, resting balled fists on her hips and puffing her chest out like a superhero. Kevin presumed he was supposed to be impressed, but unnerved was closer to the mark. “Here, let me show you some treasures.”
                Anne dropped her pose and walked over to the display cabinets, indicating with enthusiastic hand gestures that Kevin should do the same. Wondering what he was getting himself into but intrigued all the same, he followed along diligently until he stood next to the glass-fronted bronze cabinet. The thought immediately struck him that the Alloyance, their ridiculous name be damned, must have allowed not only alloys but materials which were entirely non-metallic within their philosophy; a radical step forward for the tin city which must have threatened to return it to the old world’s insistence on using the correct materials for the job.
                "This beauty is a piece of history. The news plate from early in the days of the Alloyance, when Synotite was still trying to deny that we would stick around." Anne told him, pointing towards a rectangular tin plate roughly the size of a broadsheet newspaper.
                “News plate?”
                “Oh yes. There were no newspapers up here because paper can’t be made from tin. Instead Synotite insisted on these plates being manufactured daily, one per city block, and having them displayed at the news stands.”
                Kevin leaned in, peering intently at the metal, and saw that the surface was covered in deeply stamped lettering.
                "Alloyance is a mere annoyance." The headline declared, stamped into the tin news plate. Kevin struggled to understand how everyone on the block would have crowded around the plate together to read the whole story; he had to practically hold his face against the display cabinet window to make out the faint text as it was. Ink and paper definitely had the competitive edge here.
                "The plates were printed every morning by a team of master engravers. That drove up the cost of a subscription ticket, and of course crippled the uptake."
                "And Gerrard Synotite wouldn't have allowed them to use a printing system instead? I mean, even printing directly on tin would have been better than this."
                "Gosh, no. That was worse than failure to him. Printing on tin would have meant using ink, and ink isn’t made of tin, you see?"
                “Yes, I think I see.” Kevin confirmed.
                “Now this was one of the Alloyance’s best tools for smuggling copper in.” Anne continued, pointing towards a thin, crinkled sheet of tin.
                “You were smugglers?” Kevin asked. “I mean, obviously you must have been. I have no idea why I asked that.” He added immediately.
                “See, I said you catch on quick. We had to smuggle in all the copper we wanted to use because old Synotite wouldn’t allow that in his city. Using this thin sheet of tin, we were able to wrap and cover any copper we wished to bring in, such that anyone checking our luggage would be fooled. Can you imagine it? Synotite was right about tin being a miracle material in that regard at least; a foil of tin foiled his tin dreams.” Anne chuckled, wearing a victorious and slightly venomous smirk.
                Desperate to curl Anne’s attentions away from illicit metal movements Kevin pointed towards a vague bronze shape in the cabinet.
                “What’s this one?” he asked.
                “Ha! That’s one of our bronze markers, like the ones we passed in the street. See, when the Alloyance got some weight behind it we needed ways to mark safe houses and leave instructions for each other without the authorities knowing.”
                “Authorities? You had your own police force up here?”
                “More like a secret police, but yes. They didn’t recognise the sovereignty of bronze over pitiful tin, and tried to hunt us. We had to communicate in secret, so we would embed coded messages in the walls or the ground. Using one of these…” Anne explained, pointing towards a bronze contraption shaped like an icing bag “… we wrote with molten copper, fusing bronze print into the tin permanently.”
                Kevin squinted with one eye and gawped disbelievingly at Anne.
                “You want me to believe that you were able to carry melted metal around with you, and then somehow smelt it into the walls calligraphically using a handheld funnel?” Kevin accused.
                “Look for yourself when we’re back outside.” Anne challenged, with defiance and the spirit of revolution in her bones. “These tools served us well and helped us topple tin oppression in the name of glorious bronze! Believe it or not they were the most practical means of secret communication at our disposal. We made other attempts before the advent of our masterstroke, of course, mostly around a coded verbal language, including a dialect based on the periodic table. It emphasised our connection to all the base elements and our commitment to unifying them into something greater. Snow would be pronounced TinOxygenTungsten or similar, you know? It didn't catch on though, because even short sentences took far too long and protracted, obviously coded conversations were too obvious for the secret police to ignore.”
                “Right.”
                “So, as I was saying, the markers were the best choice and this is one of them. The secret police tried to erase them from the streets but they were powerless to separate copper from tin once bonded. They were fused in matrimony and unity, and nothing the oppressor tried would ever be able to pull them apart. Sometimes they got desperate enough to pull the markers out completely, much like this one. We were able to steal some of them back for prosperity though and turn them from a message of safe harbour to a declaration of victory, all for bronze!”
                The longer Anne spoke, the more fervent she seemed to become. Hands which were previously relaxed and open had grown tense, holding their fingers out like claws with tendons popping proud of the surface. Her eyes glowed with zeal, and she seemed to be reliving some kind of glorious conflict in her head as she explained the relics to Kevin.
                “That’s… er… yes.” Kevin assessed, looking more at Anne than the display items in case she tried to smelt him into a bronze tourist.
                “And finally, this was the pride of Gerrard Synotite's wardrobe: a solid tin set of breeches.” Anne sneered, holding one hand towards a pair of vast, smooth-beaten, bulbous breeches. “He walked as wide as three men with these on, and he just loved to parade his pomp. But no trousers are wide enough to withstand the Alloyance and we managed to wrest them from him in one of our final conflicts before the exodus. That's what broke the back of the tin men's hold on the city. Without his stately breeches their figurehead had fallen, and the Alloyance had won.”
                “Wait, a conflict? I thought you were just making tools and things so that people could live their lives?”
                “Who could possibly live their lives forever under the yoke of tin, dear Kevin? Yes, we provided means for the people to light their homes and open their tinned goods, but that was only the first step, and there was far greater work to be done. We had to free everyone from the tin boots that fell upon them. They had to be released from the tin shackles of Synotite’s madness. We rose up against the authority whenever it sought to quell the inevitable tide of change.”
                “It sounds like a civil war.”
                “Oh, there wasn’t a war! Gosh no; it was a revolution, but not a war. Synotite’s police couldn’t dream of standing up to our superior bronze equipment with their pathetic tin offerings, and any battle was lost before they started. They tried to defeat a glorious whole with but one of its components; the only thing they could ever do was fail. Anything that doesn’t adhere to the evident eminence of bronze is a failure and a blasphemy, and this tin city is just waiting for a wave of copper great enough to bring salvation.”
                “Yeah, sure. Definitely. You’re right…. well, I think I’d best get back to the streets now and keep exploring the city.” Kevin said, slowly backing his way out of the room.
                “But there’s more to see in here! More of the history of the Alloyance!”
                “It’s all interesting, honestly, but I’d like to see what I came here for first, and then maybe I’ll get to know more of what the Alloyance and all this bronze business is about, yeah?” Kevin called back from the corridor. He turned on his heels and dashed towards the door, pulling it open towards himself to the familiar screeching of struggling tin hinges.
                “Wait for me, I’ll show you the way.” Anne shouted after him, dashing along the hallway but still not making a sound.
                “Really, thanks for showing me all this already, but I think I'll just wander about for a bit by myself and then head back down." Kevin told her. He was out of the door now and walking backwards along the street with his hands held up.
                “You will? But you haven't seen the best bits yet! You’ll have to come with me to get the greatest sights." Anne persisted, advancing upon him interminably.
                "But surely I’ve already seen them. Gerrard’s captured breeches?" He questioned, eyes widening and darting around for any avenue of escape.
                "Goodness no! The alloy underground! Streets of bronze and brass. A whole steel door. The old copper stashes." Anne declared.
                "I really don’t want you to take me underground."
                "Of course you do! The city might have slowed down but we still need to resist Synotite's will, and we still need new blood to keep us strong. You’ve heard enough now to know that you belong on the path of bronze, not wandering around being taken in by Synotite’s madness." Anne said through gritted teeth, her eyes focused on Kevin with a feral hunger.
                "I mean... it feels like you’ve all resisted it enough without me for this long, and judging by how deserted the city is you’ve pretty well broken whatever madness was holding people here. I really want to be on my way now." Kevin asserted.
                "Pah! You know nothing still! But I’ll show you the truth.” Anne spat, lunging forwards and grabbing Kevin by the upper arm. Her grip was alarmingly strong, like a bronze vice around soft tin. Her preaching had got into Kevin’s head.
                "Unhand him, filthy metal-mixer!" Boomed a sudden voice, filling the streets with a righteous echo straight out of a 1950’s recruitment broadcast.
                Anne's face contorted into a mask of horror and her grip tightened, which was the exact opposite of what she'd been asked to do. Kevin felt sure that the embarrassment would kill the poor woman when she realised her mistake, unless of course the metal spear which slammed into the wall beside them did it first.
                "He's here! Run!" Anne shouted with sudden-onset camaraderie, trying to drag Kevin back along the street to her safe house.
                Under normal circumstances Kevin wouldn’t have been averse to that advice. Away is the general direction in which he anticipated he would want to go when confronted by sudden spear strikes at other times of life. In that moment, however, faced with the prospect of being dragged into an underground society of amateur metallurgists, he wondered if it would be better to take his chances on the surface and run back to the funicular.
                Looking around himself for the best route of escape, Kevin came face-to-face with the ‘he’ who had spooked Anne so much. Standing over six feet tall on the narrow street, with one foot propped up on a fallen bin, was a man grasping another dull metallic spear in his hands. From head to foot he was dressed in a suspiciously crinkly material of the same colour as his weapon, sharp angles taking the place of soft creases, with folds and panels held in unusual formations.
                “I shall keep you safe, my newest!” he declared with regal authority, twirling the spear in his hands and striking out forwards towards Kevin’s would-be captor. Anne dropped her grasp and made off in a mad sprint, her feet finally making a slight sound as they thudded against the tin street, before disappearing into an alleyway between two barely distinguishable metal buildings.
                “Slink off like the tailings you are!” the stranger bellowed in triumph, once again adopting a power-stance with one elevated leg. There wasn’t a convenient foothold around to support such a stance so he’d been forced to make do with resting his boot against a nearby wall. It didn’t look comfortable, especially with legs clad in alarmingly well-fitted tin cargo trousers, but if it caused him any discomfort he hid it well. The trousers lipped over the tops of thick tin combat boots which must have been difficult to lift that high. “Are you alright, dear fellow?” he asked, looking down into Kevin’s unnerved face with a theatrical kindness.
                “Um… yes, thank you. Was she trying to kidnap me?” Kevin asked, still not entirely sure that he understood what had just been happening.
                “Ha! She had such intentions but lacked the salts. None shall have to fear the dregs of society for as long as I still roam and lead this great city.” The stranger answered.
                “That’s, erm, good to know. I feel much safer.” Kevin responded in an effort to appease the stranger. Truth be told he just felt in a different kind of danger, but at least the new stranger appeared to have good intentions thus far.
                “You’ll always be safe with me around…” the tin man said, giving Kevin a cumbersomely knowing look. Involuntarily the man was gesturing with his hand that Kevin should take the hint.
                “Oh! And who are you?”
                “Gerrard Synotite!” the stranger bellowed, barely letting Kevin finish asking the question. “I am the founder and architect of the great tin city and I shall safeguard all who enter here with hearts as pure as tin.” Gerrard lifted his head upwards so that his gaze was settled somewhere between the second and third floor of a nearby building, and puffed out his chest grandly. Kevin looked his self-proclaimed protector over, marvelling at the tin shirt with torn-off sleeves that exposed muscular, if not thick, arms. Gerrard’s face, framed with greyed mutton-chops and somewhat ruffled hair, sported a set of tin-framed glasses atop a thick, ruler-straight nose and well-bred thick jaw. He looked quite capable of mining and refining ore with his mouth alone, filtering out the scree with his moustache as he went.
                “Wow. It’s an honour and surprise to meet you, Mr Synotite.” Kevin said earnestly. He’d assumed that the tin city had been abandoned and that Gerrard Synotite would have been long dead, or at least exiled for fraud and insanity, by now.
                “Please! Call me Gerrard, or His Tinship if you prefer.” Gerrard declared with magnanimous grace. “And my city is open to you with all the wonders that tin can provide.”
                Kevin saw that Gerrard’s broad, toothy grin was punctuated here and there with metallic grey. A small part of him wondered if he’d have been safer as a hostage of the Alloyance after all.
                “Thanks, Gerrard.”
                “Now, what brings you here? Looking to buy a home and settle in to the marvellous city of tin? There are still some vacancies and we welcome anyone who can share our vision of tin!”
                “Um… no, not right now. I was just looking around. I found a leaflet and thought the city sounded interesting to visit for a bit. Unusual and entertaining. I didn’t know there would be secret societies and criminal underbellies.” Kevin explained.
                “Interesting is an understatement, lad! This city is a marvel of engineering vision and pioneering spirit. You mark my words; in ten years’ time every city on this Earth will be moving to pure tin.” Gerrard bellowed, ignoring the critical element of Kevin’s statement and clapping a hand against his tin shirt. It rang out like a finely crafted church bell full of a man’s torso. “But if it’s sights you want to see then there’s nothing finer than the tin town hall! A chaperoned tour is the least I can do, after your narrow escape with the metal-mixer. Preying by the staircase was she?”
                “Uh, yeah, actually. How did you know?”
                “Common tactic for the old witch. It’s dishonourable, like shooting fish in a barrel or trying to match any other material against God’s own glorious tin. I dread to think how many she’d have co-opted into her bronze cult without me standing as a sentinel against her.” As he spoke Gerrard snapped himself to attention, standing bolt upright and holding his spear at the ready. “As the sovereign of this city it is my duty to keep my citizens and visitors alike safe from whatever foul element has bred in the sewers.”
                “That’s very much appreciated, thank you.”
                “Now, shall we keep moving? I’d hate to make things too easy for the mixer to come back with reinforcements.”
                Alarm bells continued to sound inside Kevin's head, drowning every other thought with their shrill ringing. Both of the people he'd met were demonstrated lunatics and alleged nutjobs, and both of them had tried to coerce him to travel with them and enter a shrine to some kind of metal or other. The city of tin certainly had its defined demographic. At the very least Gerrard Synotite seemed to be a lot more straightforward than Anne with his intentions and passions. And he was only asking to act as an escort to where Kevin already wanted to go, which was a boon. Whether or not he really trusted the man, he was going to have to move away from the Alloyance’s safe house. If that motion was in the company of a spear-toting mayor then so much the better.
                “Yeah, sounds like a good idea.” Kevin said, summarising his thoughts for Gerrard.
                “Top drawer! This way my newest!” Gerrard declared, beaming smile and booming voice acting in perfect harmony. Taking long, eager strides and using his spear like a walking stick, Gerrard Synotite led Kevin away from the bronze marked door and through the tinny streets of the city. For a man clad in what was, effectively, thin and ineffectual plate armour, Synotite moved with impressive speed and Kevin had to hurry to keep pace. It seemed to be a theme with tin city tour guides.
                “What do they call you in the world below, friend?” he asked as they accelerated through grey avenues of monolithic tin.
                “Kevin.” Said Kevin. He didn’t think that his name was different at any altitude.
                “Marvellous! How many tonnes of tin do you think went into building this city, Kevin?”
                “Uh…” Kevin stammered. He had no idea how large the city was nor any idea of how dense tin was. “… a vast amount, I suppose. A few tens of thousands?”
                “A few tens of thousands? No specific number as a guess?” Synotite pushed.
                “I have no idea.” Kevin confirmed. “How much is it?”
                “Drat. Not to worry. I’ve no idea either but I was hoping that you’d be some kind of strapping old world mass estimator or whatever they have down there. One day someone will be able to tell me, and then I can update the marketing information.” Gerrard ruminated. It either showed a lot of trust or very little integrity that he was willing to take a stranger’s guesstimate as a source of information for marketing. “What would you say is the most striking aspect of the city so far?”
                Arguably the most striking thing had been the attempted kidnap and subsequent assault with a homemade spear, but Kevin got the impression that Synotite didn’t consider those things part of the city, per se.
                “Erm, how uniform the colours are?” he guessed.
                “Yes, the colour! Everything looks like it belongs to one community and one team! Even the mixture of bold architectural styles makes perfect sense in the uniform of glorious tin. I love it, Kevin. That’s definitely going as a quote in the new leaflets.” Gerrard spouted, recklessly putting words in Kevin’s mouth and looking upwards into middle distance, whilst constructing the advert in his mind.
                “Are there not more important priorities than tourism leaflets at the moment? The city seems…” he stopped himself before calling it deserted. “… like the population is on the low side and could do with immigration more than tourism.”
                “Well… yes it does have a lot of room for the tin family to expand,” he began, looking down at the ground briefly “but that’s exactly why these materials are being made. If I can sell the city enough for someone to visit, then just being here will be enough to convince them to stay.”
                “Yeah, maybe. I mean, some people would have things that stopped them moving here no matter how much they liked it, but I’m sure your plan will work out.” Kevin appeased, making a point of laying the groundwork for why he, himself, wouldn’t be hanging around any longer than he had to.
                “Mark my words, Kevin. By the time you’ve seen everything the city has to offer you’ll be scrambling to move your existing tin goods up here and choose a new home. Please, drink in the sights and keep an eye out for anything that you think you’d like to live in. I’ll see what I can arrange for you.”
                “Sure. Thanks.” Kevin nodded for the sake of avoiding an argument. Offers of previously abandoned, but still very much owned, homes were legally questionable, but maybe the mayor had those kinds of powers up here.
                For several minutes Kevin marched along behind Synotite, taking in the sights and surroundings of the tin city. The continuous mismatched terraces of the outer city gradually gave way to smaller detached buildings which were still densely packed but allowed space for thin, winding alleyways. As Anne had alluded to, the wheel marks on the streets farther into the city were less pronounced, having seen less traffic and less use. Some of them, in fact, seemed like they’d seen no wheels across their surface at all. Many of the blocks they walked through were pristine to the point that Kevin suspected they were not long removed from their packaging.
                “Was the city full at its peak?” Kevin asked. “Its previous peak, I mean.” He added hastily, lest the spear-wielding fanatic get offended.
                “Sadly it did always fall slightly short of complete occupancy. But I maintain that it’s important to always be able to accept new people in. If all the homes were filled then it would place an unfair delay on some poor souls who were trying to make their lives better with a world of tin.” He replied politically. Kevin took all he needed from it.
                “So this is all still owned by the state, as it were?”
                “That’s right. The sovereignty of Synotite has always been committed to being able to provide affordable housing to any new residents, keeping it out of the hands of greedy corporate interests. And we never taxed our citizens into poverty from it either.”
                Kevin believed him. They didn’t wait around long enough to be driven into poverty; they just left straight away by the looks of it.
                “Sounds like a laudable model.” He said.
                Ahead of them Kevin could see that the roadway opened up to a square or public space of some sort; the structures on the right hand side of the road abruptly stopped a few hundred metres away. As they closed in on it the details were very gradually resolvable by Kevin’s eyes, in as much as details were ever discernible in the grey blend of tin. It looked as though there were regularly arranged rectangular blocks of some strange texture to the ground of the square, still rendered in the unmistakable colours of tin in various stages of tarnishing, but moving away from the flat, planar surfaces of the rest of the city.
                “Coming into view now is our destination, so get yourself ready to be amazed and prepare your mind to be blown. The town hall, jewel in the crown that is the tin city atop Mount Sn, is the seat of all administration and governance within the tin city. So important is the smooth running of the city to me that I, Gerrard Synotite, have made the town hall my own home so that I need never be away when the people need me.” Gerrard recited in the perfect salesman’s lilt.
                Kevin raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
                Strides as bold and powerful as ever carried Synotite towards the square of the town hall, and Kevin continued to chase behind him, waiting for the moment of the great reveal. Even as they approached he was no closer to working out what the odd textured sections were, but his attention repeatedly drifted to the idea of Gerrard Synotite walking down the stairs of the town hall, clad in tin pyjamas, and settling straight down for a planning meeting with the local parish council. That, or perhaps the sounds of the sovereign showering during a discussion on bin collections, would have been enough to send most people back down the mountain to the old world.
                “Behold! The seat of power!” Gerrard bellow, throwing his arms out and nearly delivering a spear-clutching fist into Kevin’s sternum. Kevin looked up, thankfully snapped free of thoughts about Gerrard showering before he could dive too deep into the rabbit hole, and saw the town hall.
                Where the other buildings had been packed together closely, the town hall stood isolated and free. Rising from the centre of the public square and surrounded by many of the textured rectangles that were outfoxing Kevin’s perceptions, the hall itself was as much of a chimera as the rest of the city. Where the competing architectural styles of the other structures had been allowed to butt against one another without merging, the town hall comprised an unholy fusion that defied logic, taste, and practicality. Walls transitioned seemingly at random from flat plain surfaces, to faux-timber panels, to intricate spires and ornate gables, leaving arbitrarily angled connecting planes patching up potential gaps. The western end of the building was one and a half storeys lower than the eastern wing, which extended farther forward and farther back than the centre of the hall to give it the look of a hammer viewed through a fish eye lens. The great tin double doors at the front of the building were each constructed in a different style, and they were flanked on one side by spiralling columns and the other by comically disproportioned gargoyles. Rooves sloped defiantly into one other, walls curved in and out before meeting at sharp angles, and as with every other construction that Kevin had seen, windows were an absolutely prohibited feature. Rendered in the uniform tarnished tin of the rest of the city, the town hall looked like every governmental structure Kevin had ever seen, combined by a child’s faulty kaleidoscope during a fever dream.
                “Oh my goodness me.” Kevin said simply.
                “A wonder, isn’t it?”
                “It definitely stands out…”
                “Like the beacon of hope and authority it needs to be.” Gerrard clarified. Kevin chose not to dignify that particular claim with a direct response.
                “Who… er, who was the architect?”
                “I was! Hard to believe that I could be an entrepreneur, a visionary, and a revolutionary architect, isn’t it? But it’s true. This is my masterpiece within a masterpiece, Kevin.” Synotite humbly admitted.
                “It’s an interesting fusion of styles.”
                “Ah! Picked up on that, did you? Yes, it’s a statement, an artwork if you will. It says that all are welcome here. It says that no matter our differences in style or substance we are all welcomed and valuable under the glorious raiment of tin! That is what this city is all about; the wonder material, and unity.”
                Kevin stared at Gerrard’s sparkling eyes, as the man himself looked in awe at his own creation and home. He was struggling to decide whether Synotite was the megalomaniac that Anne painted him as, or the messiah that he called himself. Certainly the words he said spoke of honourable intentions, even if those intentions were so heavily blinkered by a tin obsession that they rendered him entirely blind.
                “Come! If you’re impressed by the exterior, as well you should be, you should see the interior. That’s where the magic happens.” Synotite guided, striding off again.
                Following along behind the sovereign, Kevin took the opportunity for a close look at the strange textured rectangles. Within their regular, straight borders there appeared to be hundreds, thousands even, of flat leaf-like structures that all pointed upwards at a slight angle.
                “What on Earth are these?” he finally asked, drawing a blank.
                “Those are the town hall lawns!” Gerrard explained as if it should have been obvious. “Tin can even be made into grass, it’s just that versatile.”
                Kevin looked again with horror at the lawns. In such thin, tapered leaves the tin blades of grass were literally that; a lawn of knives pointing upwards from the floor.
                “That’s incredibly dangerous. What if someone were to slip onto it when the perfectly flat metal ground gets rained on and becomes slick.” Kevin asked, nervously shifting his gait to carefully placed steps.
                “Ha! It teaches people to watch where they’re going and be careful. And it saves money on ‘Keep Off The Grass’ signs too. A double-win for tin!” Gerrard celebrated, yet again failing to see the point which had been explicitly explained to him.
                Kevin stepped carefully to the centre of the pathways and kept as much space as possible between himself and the decorative knife patches.
                Entirely unfazed by the razor sharp tin death surrounding the pathway, Gerrard continued his march up the steps fronting the town hall. Placing one hand on each of the double front doors he leaned in, braced his legs, and shoved them open with a single forceful push.
                Much like the door to Anne’s Alloyance safe house, the hinges of the town hall’s double doors were not enjoying their vocation. In discordant wails they screeched out protests at having to grind open once more, and across the floor were great circular sweeping gouges where the doors themselves were gripping the floor in resistance. Kevin seriously hoped that Synotite swept up the inevitable tin-shavings every day, otherwise they’d both be breathing in a significant quantity of metallic dust once inside.
                “Welcome to the town hall!” Gerrard boomed, his voice echoing around the cavernous main foyer. Twin tin staircases curved down from the mezzanine and formed a bowl-like auditorium shape around the enormous open space, amplifying Synotite’s voice until it could probably have been heard several streets away. Hanging from the vaulted ceiling several storeys above was a tin chandelier the size of a small car, beaming bright yellow light out in all directions. “Please, Kevin, come in.”
                “Thank you.” Kevin muttered quietly as he stepped inside, acutely self-conscious about not having his voice broadcast to the city at large, whether or not there was anyone else left to hear it. A tin pith helmet hung on a tin hat stand by the door, presumably for formal occasions or emergency colonialism, and a collection of tin umbrellas of questionable functionality sat in small cubbies its feet. Gerrard rested his spear alongside one such brolly.
                “This great hall is where all public declarations are made, with the doors thrown open to welcome all of the community. To your right is the council chamber where debates are hosted for making important decisions about the city, and to your left are the administration desks for local people to resolve their personal dealings with the city, such as licenses, bills, fines, and the like.” Gerrard directed.
                “And upstairs is where you live, presumably?”
                “Quite correct. A man’s home is his castle, so I’m sure you’ll forgive me for not inviting you up just now.” Gerrard explained, making an ambitious but accurate assumption regarding Kevin’s forgiveness.
                “Yes. That’s more than fine.” Kevin agreed. Whatever a used tin toilet looked like, Kevin was ok without seeing it.
                “Jolly good show. Now, I’d like to draw your attention to the floor. You’ll see that it has been carefully engraved with the full story of the tin city’s founding.” Gerrard informed Kevin, making a wide, sweeping gesture with one hand towards the floor. Looking down at it, Kevin saw that there dozens of square sections, each one the size of a paving slab, covered in stamped text. Between every three or four slabs were embossed pictures, presumably representing tableaux of some important city event or other.
                “Up here we have the tale of my life in the old world; a shepherd with no flock who, nonetheless, knew that he was destined to change lives. It details my various enterprises in the old system which were ruined by the old world’s prejudices and conspiracies despite their brilliance. But it goes on to tell of my epiphany on the true nature of divinity, and its physical manifestation in the wonder material tin. This image here shows me in my workshop, basking in the glow of enlightenment as my first tin creation, a fully functional tin coaster, rests on the table in front of me.” He proudly recounted, ready to receive Kevin’s boundless adulation.
                Kevin peered down at the floor fresco and verified that there was indeed a picture of Gerrard Synotite looking at a disc on a bench of some kind. Without any kind of colour variation the details included were difficult to discern.
                “A coaster, you say?”
                “A coaster! And believe me when I say it worked a treat. Fluid from the bottom of my mug was left on the coaster and the table beneath was protected. Of course, later tables were made from hardy tin and therefore were just as resilient as the coaster itself, but that doesn’t diminish the efficacy or importance of that first product. It showed me that tin can do anything! It offers itself to us as a metallic miracle and I had a duty to bring that miracle to the rest of the world.”
                “That’s why this whole city exists?” Kevin blurted. “Because you made a circle of tin and decided that it was perfect for literally everything else?”
                “Exactly!” Gerrard beamed, misinterpreting Kevin’s amazement. “A perfect, gleaming city of tin!”
                “But surely in practice you can see that it hasn’t worked out perfectly. Everyone has left because they don’t like living in the dark. And the city doesn’t gleam because it’s tarnished.” Kevin pleaded with unintentional metaphor.
                "Pah! Everyone complains so much about the ruddy tarnishing, but no-one sees sense up here! Tarnishing is a blessing for a city like this! None of you fools ever seem to work it out though, blinded as you are by the fog of the old world order." Gerrard denied.
                Kevin looked at Gerrard with quiet puzzlement, but didn't dare voice his lack of understanding after being branded a blinded fool.
                "I mean it's patently obvious that a booming polish industry could emerge to take advantage of the oxidation 'problem', creating all sorts of jobs from tin-polish-makers to tin-polish salesmen to tin polishers. The possibilities are limitless, and that's leaving out the secondary benefits to the polishing-rag industry." Synotite continued, rescuing Kevin from the pitfalls of both experiencing ignorance and having to voice that ignorance. "That was my plan all along, of course. I know that tin tarnishes, I’m not an idiot. But, sadly, it seems that the world just wasn't ready to accept that kind of vision."
                Although industrial quantities of metal cleaner would probably have been ecologically devastating, Kevin couldn't help but feel a little bad for Gerrard. Sure the old fruitcake was committing heavily to something that didn't work and that no-one wanted, but it really seemed that he believed every word he said. Even down to the lack of natural lighting inside a home.
                “I did everything I could to make this a real community! We had our news plates to bring people together with information, allowing them to discuss and debate it all at once rather than stewing in their own opinions alone at home. I ensured secure houses without fragile glass panes that advertise the owner’s goods to any criminal element. I funded a security force to root out the subversive Alloyance who sought to undermine everything the good people were working towards and their reckless splashing of molten copper. This tin city wasn’t just a crackpot idea to remake a typical old world town under my control, it was a chance to create a whole new, better culture for the world.” Synotite ranted, before the tension left his chest and he seemed to sag. “But you’re right, nearly everyone has left because they can’t see it. All that I have right now is a perpetual war with that bloody Alloyance.”
                “How many of them are there?” Kevin asked.
                “I don’t know for sure. Maybe just Anne, maybe Anne and one other. Certainly no more than two though because I don’t leave enough sandwiches out for more than two people.” Gerrard mumbled.
                “Sandwiches…”
                “They’re living in the underground, Kevin. There’s no way they’re getting decent food to themselves in an empty city like this whilst also trying to subvert my all-powerful state, so I leave them food to make sure they’re alright.” He explained, as if it were as matter-of-fact as putting out the bins.
                “It sounds like you’re funding a coup against yourself.”
                “Maybe they’re trying to create a cult around filthy bronze, and maybe they’re actively corrupting glorious tin, but they’re still humans and I’m not a monster. They need to eat, and as much as anything else they’re the only one, or ones, who haven’t abandoned the city. While I still have one citizen I have a duty to keep them safe no matter who they or what they do. And while I keep them safe, there’s proof that the city is liveable and that others could move up here.” Gerrard maintained. Some of his tinny resolve had returned, the fire of smelted tin burning in his eyes once more.
                “I can’t say I was expecting any of that.” Kevin admitted.
                “And I can’t say that you sound sold on living here yourself.” Gerrard said softly, deflating into his tin shirt again. It didn’t deform with him, so he took on the look of a man leaning over the edge of a boat.
                “Maybe not no. I’m still a bit reliant on things made from stuff that’s not a soft metal. But I can see that you’re a man who’s trying to make a better civilisation Gerrard. I could be an emissary in the old world if you’d like?” Kevin offered. “Until you get your new leaflets out, I mean.”
                Synotite narrowed his eyes.
                “I’m afraid my administration isn’t hiring new officials at the moment. The budget won’t allow it.”
                “I’m willing to volunteer on behalf of the state. Anyone I see wishing for a better life with more tin and less anything-but-tin will be sent your way.” Kevin assured him.
                “Honestly? Bear in mind that you’re discussing with a diplomat from a foreign nation so you can’t lie.” Synotite questioned. Kevin was fairly sure he’d just made that up, but accepted it regardless.
                “Honestly. I’ll send everyone I can up here to learn from your example and… well, so that they won’t think I’m insane when I relay what I’ve seen. The tin city certainly is a wonder.”
                Gerrard unfurled back up to his full height, and presumably puffed his chest out beneath the rigid tin shirt.
                “Then that is tremendous news! The tin city has an official ambassador from the old world and proves itself to be a player on the national stage!” His moustache twitched with gratitude and happiness. Without warning his face dropped into anxiety as a realisation crept across it.
                “As an ambassador and friend of the state… I have a request for information from you.” He said. Kevin held eye contact and Gerrard swallowed. “Did I hear you mention breeches outside of the Alloyance woman’s house of horrors?”
                “Yes! They have your tin breeches in a display cabinet in there. It’s weird. How did they steal your trousers?”
                “You saw them?! They’re beautiful aren’t they? Broad as three men I was, in those.” Gerrard reminisced.
                “They’re certainly something. But, really, how did they get them? Anne made it sound like a battle or a riot or something.”
                “Well… it wasn’t quite like that.” Synotite said, somewhat sheepishly. “They just asked nicely.”
                Kevin’s mouth dropped open.
                “I look after my people, Kevin. When all they need from their mayor to be happy is a pair of divine tin breeches, then divine tin breeches they have. It was a cold but proud walk home.” He said defiantly, daring Kevin to challenge his claim. “But now, I think, the time has come to take them back, and as a diplomat you are honour-bound to help me.”
                Kevin pondered for a moment.
                “Is that what diplomats are supposed to do?”
                “It is for the moment. Come on, I didn’t see the metal-mixer lock the door. We can be in and out before she knows a thing.” He encouraged.
                Kevin hadn’t known what to expect from the tin city. Kidnapping, revolution, and state sponsored burglary were odd surprises none-the-less. But it was definitely a better day out than the leaflet had promised.
                “Of course, your Tinship.” Kevin said.
                With a broad, proud grin Gerrard Synotite swept up his spear once more and led the way back out, ready to continue espousing the virtues of a tinful life.​