Alive At Crepusculum ✓ [TPL Book One]

III

Morning shone on the towering bank buildings and multidallen toy stores, printing companies, and textile factories. Streets made of sett or dirt making for easy clip-clop-clobber of horse-pulled hansom cabs or slow-trod stagecoaches made their winding way through twist-and-turn paths that masked as roads. 

The rest of the west was already enjoying the new inventions of some miraculous horseless carriages that ran on steam. United Arcan, in this day and age, dismissed the idea as 'absurd and stupid' and kept on shoveling horse dung off the streets.

How stubborn.

U.A. was a farming country that many outsiders would say smelled like cow and horse dung all day long, with not even a single steam train speeding across the bleak barren lands. Trains that even the poor, crumbled country of gloomy Lwendolen had in abundance and convenience. Trains that connected north and south across vast swaths of land. Trains that carried passengers far and wide.

The hard-headed, our-way-or-no-way Arcans still hadn't caught on that the 'long metal snakes' were useful. They just slaved away all day as slaves and as workers. "Every day, the same thing" should've been a country slogan.

Many countries in the west—except for sorry Lwendolen, of course—had people that did more in life than just slaving away. They had inventors, craftsmen, scientists, and doctors using real medicine instead of some hocus-pocus bogus! Many western nations were already turning their pages to a new era, but U.A. was being left behind in the history books.

Speaking of "behind in history", U.A. was the only country in the west still allowing people to keep slaves. Rich mongrels were holding onto "human tools" letting the dallen talk in court if they ever agitated the law too many times. The mongrels weren't shunned though. In fact, some pro-slave people admired them.

The bastards! The tyrannies! They were on the top of the pyramid of society with trimmed 'staches, pot-bellies, and admittedly unpleasant and conniving. They often had chubby-cheeked bratty children and cynical, often religious wives.

Those "tyranny-sauruses" with their little hands, big feet, and big plantation nests could be found in much of rural Tupper. Rural Tupper was, for lack of better word, a hidey-hole of abuse and injustice where slavery thrived whether it wanted to or not among those vast swaths of fields.

And who lived here? Who was the biggest king of them all? Who Richard called, 'Gluttony Brews', Geoffrey Brews. The bulgiest bulge of all bulges, he was the epitome of wealth gone rotten and moldy.

On this day, sunny and bright, he was fuming because a Roktion slave had 'fled the nest'. It had been a punishing long night for fleshy, calling up slave snatchers for quick hire. Geoffrey had not slept a wink and was looking forward to divulge everything to Charles Reuben Rushford who was always kindly to him despite their different views. 

The difference didn't matter because Fleshy Brews thought he could conform Charles one day. Give him a plantation, surely, he'll want a slave or two then. Besides, Geoffrey was in debt, believe it or not, as Charles once saved Geoffrey's youngest from choking on chalk when she was two.

Richard sat behind the counter, being Charles, waiting for noon to come around to close shop early today to visit 'tonight's meatloaf'. He could never understand why Charles hadn't tried to save the slaves from the tyrant. He turned a blind eye like all the rest of the stinkers, sometimes even mocked the hard-working paper-white Roktions who often suffered from heatstroke unable to adjust from their cold climate back home to the warmer climate of U.A.

His thoughts wandered to freeing the slaves by starting a revolt. Geoffrey, he knew, would have a word or two or two thousand to say about it. Anastasia detailed some of the things he did to her because he thought it was "my right" as he put it.