Day 674

The building was tethered much in the way all the others were - thick fleshy vines.
Each individual vine could take over a generation to complete.
It was skin you see, flayed, preserved, wrapped all tightly and at the very core were steel chains.
Whenever someone died their skin was near immediately removed and added.

Wealthy families generally had the weakest tethers - they died at a much slower rate than everyone else.
As a result most of the upper class had long since blown away or crashed into the lower classes.
Nowadays it was rare to find a "respectable" family building but despite the mingling some clung to their titles.
They kept themselves to single tethers, clinging to the past like the ropes clung to the cliffs below.

It was the safest way to live ever since that last meteorite hit and damn near destroyed the world.
The amount of helium it tossed into the air had thrown everything into chaos for well over a century.
Whole countries were uninhabitable as pockets of super light gravity travelled about in the winds.
The tethers had originally begun as a means to combat this, avoid being sucked up into the sky.

They called it "The Dropsy Days", a cutesy term for watching your loved ones suffocate and splat to the floor.
Some of the oldest around would reminisce that sickeningly wet thud as they met concrete.
Even to this day it can be heard from time to time as some poor creature walks into a null spot.
We use adapted fishing rods to scoop up their remains - food is food after all.

Nobody's quite sure when we started using the skins of our dead to make the tethers stronger.
Somewhere along the line we began to use every last part of the deceased form in order to minimise waste.
For me the worst part of it is the faces, the ones that smiled and laughed with me all dried and warped.
I know its for our protection, to keep us from drifting off and away but they could at least remove the faces.