LoT: Meanwhile

The old man's nephew looked out the giant observation window into the city. His workers and helpers spewed statistics at him every so often about the amount of steam being released and the last earthquake location. They barely even stopped talking anymore.

He sighed, which only deepened when his uncle burst in and ran to look out through the window at the city. The nephew watched him, disinterested, then said "Uncle, really, you have your own observation deck, what are you-"

"Shhhh. Hear that?" The old man waved his nephew impatiently into silence, and went back to his staring, pressing his large nose to the window to see better.

The nephew looked out at the city, then back at the old man. "Hear what?" Agitated, the old man looks at him for a moment before seeming to make up his mind and rushing over to him, dragging him to his eye level by the collar.

"Listen," he hissed. He looked back out the window, and the nephew unenthusiastically follows his gaze.

"I still don't hear anything," the man pointed out. The sound of earthquakes and releasing steam was pretty constant by now, surely his uncle can't mean that.

"No, no, no, you're not listening! That sound. It's growing."

A roll of the eyes. "The steam released? Yeah, of course it is."

The old man looked back at his nephew. "Don't you know what this means?" When no answer came, he swept a hand over the window's view of Taitle. "My city...it's alive again!"

"Really, uncle, there's been people here all this time, of course it's alive, that's what people do." The old man just gave him an annoyed look.

"Just listen. Or better yet, just look. It's alive. It's all coming back, just like I had hoped. And it's doing it on its own." He clapped his nephew on the shoulder and laughed as he steered the young man to fully face the window. "Just look, my boy. Look at how glorious this city used to be!"

Skeptically entertaining the old man, the nephew looked out the window, still with that same uninterested look. Steam hissed out of the street lines that led to nowhere. Buildings crumbled every now and then because of the earthquakes. The fighters themselves weren't close enough to hear, and the observation dome's chatter was too loud where they were to separate the two. The nephew shook his head and went to point all of this out but his uncle simply grasped his shoulder firmly and pointed out the window himself. Following his gaze, the nephew found a good reason to be interested.

There was another earthquake, louder because it was closer to them, but it wasn't the earthquake or the subsequently ruined buildings that caught his attention. It was the collection of street that had suddenly dislodged itself from the rest, curling upward and taking a fair bit of that city's neighborhood with it, as well as some of the pipes that ran underground. The pipes themselves almost looked like-

"F-fingers?" The nephew's wild eyes followed the hand that was emerging, blinking rapidly and turning back to his uncle as if praying him to deny what he was seeing. But the uncle merely beamed at the curled street and pipes as the pipes themselves began to move harshly like fingers.

"Alive, again," he repeated, turning the nephew's head North to see a small hemisphere of street and a garden, the pipes and tree roots still connected to the ground, but only barely. It had two steam vents on the same horizontal level, releasing the same amount of steam at the same time.

"Like eyes. Eyes and hands," the young man whispered. "Is this going to continue?" he asked his uncle in a hushed tone.

"One can only hope so, my boy!" the old man responded. "This...this is how Taitle should be."

Shakily, the nephew's eyes found the hand once more. Slowly and carefully, accompanied with a lot of earthquakes, the hand was raising an arm to go along with it. Even more steam was being released from that particular sector, and the accompanying earthquakes were throwing a good deal of the buildings there into rubble. After several minutes of being transfixed by this sight, he uttered, "we should reinforce the Viewer's Dome." A set of robots whirled out about their business, and the old man patted his nephew sympathetically on the shoulder before leaving the deck as well, going back to his workspace and the wishing machine, which had been whirring more and more in anticipation of its new and final master.