The World Beneath Us

Xavier

My name is Xavier. I am twelve years old today. That's right. Today's my birthday. My birthday has never been celebrated. Why would it be? Who would want special things at their birthday? Even if someone did, what would we give? Maybe an extra scoop of dry sawdust? I, personally, would not want extra sawdust. It is the only substance I put in my body, and I gotta say, it gets old. Life in the Tunnels in general gets boring. Just on the off chance that you are some future thing that is reading this, the Tunnels, capital T, is the network of winding corridors and rooms, where we live. Everything in the Tunnels is the same. No personality. All of the bedrooms are the same. You could buy something to decorate with, but space is so expensive that nobody can, except for King Arthur. If you don't pay your rent, King Arthur's guards send you up into the great unknown above the tunnels. No one has ever come back.
Oh, how I wish I could leave the tunnels. When I say everything is the same, I mean everything. Everyone looks exactly the same. We were all born from the same tub of Nixion Acid. We are not humans, the savages that live in the world above, we are nixions. Nixions all have two eyes, purple, one nose, two arms, two legs, and anything else a human would have. What sets us apart is our hair, or lack there of. How humans put up with hair all over everything is something I may never know. Since we all look the same, we all wear gray pantsuits with a number on them. I am number 4,563,184. That means that since the beginning of the Tunnels, 4,563,183 nixions came before me. So far, about 1,000,000,000,000,000 nixions have been born in the twelve years I have existed. You may be wondering how so many things survive in one place. First of all, we don't get dirty, so we don't have germs, which means we can live anywhere. Second, we don't need air to stay alive. Third, the tunnels are everywhere. Humans have discovered a few of them, such as the segment in Paris, I believe called the Catacombs, and all the ones in Egypt. It is so funny that they think King Arthur's chamber is a tomb!
Uh oh. It's time to go back to work. I work a very dangerous job, building new tunnels, and get paid next to nothing. We nixions are forced to do this, as the king's reward for "keeping us alive," if you could call this living. But if you are late, bad things happen, so I better go.