Afternoon fades into evening. Tikki watches and waits. The street before her is a side street and it’s almost suffocating, crammed on both sides by jammed-together three-story brownstones, sidewalks glutted with people, curb lanes packed with parked and abandoned cars. Everything is stone and metal and plastic and pushing, jostling meat. Tikki wonders how she could ever have seen anything appealing in this choking crush of metahumanity. The smells, the sights, and the sounds all speak of the two-leg infatuation with things, machines, ornaments, trinkets. Nothing that really means anything. Nothing of significance.