#yes I know I'm overly romanticizing big cities shut up shut up shut upppppp

[generic-sonic-fan]

Rouge strikes me as the kind of person to know the history of the culture around her. She's a city girl. She knows the streets and the people who've made their home there. She knows where to get the best tamales and dim sum and hot dogs in the various neighborhoods. Where to shop, where to steal, where to visit and where to see. How it got that way. "A riot happened here," she explains to Shadow as they run down a specific road, "back in the day. And it changed things."

Shadow, then, is the equivalent of a small-town boy. And he's hit with just how much history and culture can be baked into a ten-mile radius. More foods than he could ever name, more foreign languages on shop signs than he could ever recognize, more histories and heritages than he ever knew were possible. He realizes that someone could spend a lifetime here and still not have experienced it all.

(And that gives him the only thing he looks forward to about the long future ahead of him. Instead of just one lifetime, he'll have several.)

(Maybe he could experience it all.)