Heavy rain, pouring down across the neon signboards, each drop catching the city's colors in miniature.
The sky was fully dark, but Nightless Street ignored that entirely.
Its signs blazed through the downpour around the clock, pulsing to the rhythm of music that spilled out of every doorway, the entire concept of time dissolved into a perpetual purple-red glow.
The covered walkways kept the rain off, and the crowds hadn't thinned at all, tourists stopping for photographs, locals who got more alive after midnight, video bloggers moving from venue to venue with cameras raised.
Two in the morning and it felt like a busy afternoon market.
Raphael walked through it and asked a passerby for directions. It didn't take long to find the Hiyori Nightclub.
It was large, with an unusual shape, a massive sphere, the exterior plating composed of interlocking hexagons in non-transparent metal, a surface unlike anything else on the street.
