The Rat-Catcher Princess

[Harmonious_Echos]

Floe lifted a hand in front of her face.
In the darkness she pictured her hand, lifted like a dancer's, soft and white and slender, gracefully tilted at the wrist; tried to picture it moving, wriggling her fingers in front of her face to see if she could see them.
Then something thick and sticky plopped from the ceiling onto her hand and slid off, leaving a greasy, smelly trail. She retched and shuddered, attempting frantically to wipe it off on her clothes. That made it worse, of course; the rags she wore smelled horrid too, and she felt a faint sensation of crawling on her skin which she was desperately trying to ignore.
The darkness was like a heavy blanket, weighty and black over her eyes, making it impossible to use them at all. She'd have relied on hearing, but all around her she heard soft squeaks and scurrying, the occasional plip-plops of dampness dripping from above, and the rumbles and whooshes of sewage systems above, carrying waste downward into the tunnels. Alone, one of those sounds might have been easy to pinpoint; but together they made an almost overwhelming din of sound, a low roar, not loud, but continuous, blurring each of the echoes into more echos, again, and again, and again. It never stopped. Floe remembered how she had been thinking it would be very quiet in the sewer system, compared to the city above. How wrong she'd been! There was no silence here. This was no calm, hidden place. This darkness was ALIVE. 


 

[Snypiuer]

It gives me the feeling of someone who ran away, fled even, from some situation or unwanted existence and is searching for some sort of safety or stability or imagined fantasy life or maybe an addict or mentally ill person.

[Harmonious_Echos]

Well, yeah.
Floe is 14, escaping assassins and an arranged marriage by fleeing through city sewers... in a post-apocalyptic world where 90% of the earth's human population is contained in a densely-populated, roofed, & climate-controlled city, approximately the size of the state of Alaska. People inside the city are governed by the Officers, a police style Oligarchy/Monarchy controlled by a few ruling families, the leader of which is called the Supreme High Officer. Floe is the Supreme High Officer's daughter, and his bloodline's only heir ...in spite of having several concubines. This is due to a cocktail of war-related toxins in the 'outside' environment, which have faded over time... World War 5 had combined all nations into one, and the total human population was significantly reduced by war; almost all the earth's landmass was uninhabitable, and so with what specialized medicine and technology they had, the survivors of that great war produced the domed city, built its system of government and made it self-sufficient, and attempts were made to increase fertility rates. While increasing fertility didn't work, they did discover and develop a DNA-coating elixer, that greatly lengthened the lifespan of the current population, in order to allow humanity to produce more children over time. With this came a great drive to produce children, and women came to be married as soon as they 'came fertile' due to social pressures to increase population and squash the low birth rates. It has been 27,500 years, and the population of the City has finally begun to bounce back. However, so many of the original settlers have passed on that no one remains who knows how the city came to be built, and things like science, technology, and medicine have become very limited. (Think "roman empire" type levels of civilization and technology). No one still living has the capability of telling who will be fertile and who won't be; so due to the social pressure to be fertile and produce heirs, women are socially forced to immediately marry and become mothers as soon as they are physically able. Men, too, are expected to be fertile, so if a man cannot produce children, they lose much of their social standing. If they are wealthy, they can take on concubines and attempt to produce an heir this way; some adopt a lower class family's child as their own. If the person, male or female, is lower class and infertile, however, they run the risk of being proclaimed Nameless, or 'a Non-Fertile'. These are people who are city citizens, but are legally permitted only a first name, and who are sold into slavery or made indentured servants of the ruling classes, since they are considered near-worthless for anything but manual labor.  
Floe's never thought much about those things, though. She's had loads of formal training to be a ruler, since she would be expected to be the next supreme officer (it is an ungendered role). However, as a female, she would also be expected to take on a high-society concubine and bear heirs herself, for her family's name and bloodline to be passed on...basically forcing herself to be repeatedly impregnanted by as many men as will bed her, to raise her chances of having a child. Yet, in many ways, she's still a child herself. 
Now she's running from the assassins sent by the next-highest ruling family, who have already murdered her mother, her father, and kidnapped several of the other concubines, with plans to remove her bloodline all together, and elect someone from their family as Supreme High Officer. She's dressed in dirty castoff rags, and she's just been shoved down an ancient tube-style drain in the side of a building, meant for food waste and large piles of street filth. She's the princess of her realm, and she's now in the nation of rats...and the rat-catching Orphans, a race of strange, mutated humans who somehow survived and thrived outside the city, who came into the city sewers through the gated doors outside the sewers; who live in what is now becoming once again, a beautiful, natural world--remade by war, reborn as a new Eden. A world Floe, and all of her generation, have never seen, heard of, or ever dreamt of.... 

(Feel free to use this idea if you like. I will be using it too, though, so be forewarned...)      

[Snypiuer]

Precisely what I hoped The Nursery would be for! I like to see what different directions an idea can go in depending on the writers' viewpoint.