In a nearby nook, an old apartment door opens--the wrong way. A boy peeks his head around the doorway, bright-eyed, and then pads out of an apartment he'd never been in.

A kid wearing thick gloves digging through trash of a more mechanical variety. Scraps of furniture, some kind of machinery, glass and broken plastic.

He glances over to the door and stands suddenly. Minding his own business, yep.

"Hullo," Tav says, stepping into the alley, and there's a sharp ow when he steps on glass with bare feet.

"...Hi? You, uh. Wanna buy some shoes?"

Tav makes a face. "I don't like shoes." 

"Then I guess you're gonna get hurt by broken glass. Bad news, that. Could get infected. Could lose your feet!"

"Psh, that's not going to happen to me!" Tav shakes his foot until most of the glass is gone, and then looks up. "What're you doing?"

"Bacteria care not for your opinion. I'm salvaging. Pretty much nobody cares about this alley anymore so I won't get yelled at probably. You can find good stuff in the junk sometimes."

"Who's going to yell at you?" Glass: gone. Tav hops over closer to where the other boy is standing, and this time not a single shard of glass gets into his feet. "What sort of stuff are you looking for?" He pokes idly at the trash.

Nick quickly stuffs a key picked up from the mess into a pocket. "Never mind that, what did you just do? You did something."

"Do?" Tav frowns. "I didn't do anything."

"You stepped on glass again and didn't get poked. What'd you do to your feet, huh?"

"I think your eyes are wonky." Tav lifts a foot up and pokes at it. "My feet are my feet. I just avoided all the glass, that's all."

...This is a person he wants to be friends with. Mysterious power of some kind.

"If you say so, I guess. I'm keeping all the stuff I find by the way. Useful, some of it. Sellable, the rest."

"What kind of useful? Can I see? Do they do explosions?"

Tav's lack of regard for personal space makes itself very apparent right about now.

In that case Tav gets pushed roughly away. "No explosions. Never any explosions. Topside would just cut us loose and let us fall into the deeps if us shantytowners started fires and explosions."

He picks up a - toy of some kind? Plastic spinny-top thing. "See, this looks electronic. I bet it used to light up or something. I can take it apart and use the lights and wires in something else I bet."

Tav is not bothered in the least when he's pushed, and instead clambers onto one of the piles of trash. "Aw, but explosions are fun! Who's Topside? Is it a big fall? Can I try?"

He doesn't seem too impressed by the spinny-top thing.

"Topside is where the good stuff is. Rich people. But I'm just a shanty urchin, I don't get any of the nice toys, what do I know?"

"Rich is when you have lots of money, right? I don't get it. Why do people always want useless pieces of paper?"

"Not paper, here. Coins. Good solid metal. And money's not something you want for itself really, it's just that everyone knows you can use money to get stuff."

Still digging through the piles. A curved lump covered in grime that might have been part of a refridgerator, once. "Eh, it's metal, at least."

"But that's a really boring way to get stuff. Metal's better when it's used to make cool things, like explosions, or I guess not explosions if you don't think explosions are fun."

Poking around his pile yields nothing interesting on the surface. Tav plops back down, bored already, and decides to try to make the spinny-top thing light up in his hands.

The battery is long dead.

"Well, explosions break stuff. And mostly we don't have a whole lot of stuff to go breaking it willy nilly. There's animals that explode, though. They do it to scare off things that wanna eat them. I think."

Tav fortunately does not know how electronics work. The toy lights up anyway, a stuttering glow coming from all the wrong places, which is gone almost as quickly when he hears about the exploding animals.

"Where can I find those?"

Oooh. Mysterious powers, indeed. "They're called fireflowers! We'd need an airship to go find them. People kill 'em if they get near cities, they don't want explosions around here and all."

"Airship?"