The Gaming Outpost

Third person omniscient, sad to hopeful…

The City slept coiled by the River, like it was a security blanket around which the sleeper flung his body on the mattress of the great flat delta.  No one built anymore further down the delta, after insurance and government firmly said they would not bail out the next idiot to build his mansion on a sandbar.  Someone did, of course, J. Patricks Verckerize the III built five thousand square feet two feet above the ocean into which the River flowed.

And when his house got ripped off its foundations, and carried upstream twenty miles, he pled ignorance and need (despite his billions) and tried to get the governor to have the poor folk pay him for a new house.  And thus ‘verckerize’ entered the vocabulary like ‘moonbat’ for Monbiot, and others.  ‘To verck’ was to try to get your ex-husband to pay for the honeymoon for your second marriage (and yes, in the City, five women tried that the preceding year.)

The City is corrupt.  And its not just that the rich help themselves to the contracts they like, and then deliver shoddy product.  Its that the cop on the street is expected to take bribes.  After all, he gets paid so little that unless he lives in an illegal flat without a toilet or shower, and eats day old bread and peanut butter for most lunches, that he (never mind his family) would quite literally starve.

Oh, the prices do not seem too outrageous, but then you have to tack on a quarter to a half more dependng on product to be paid to the various Men of Influence.

The good thing is, the City will not let you starve, but it also won’t let you get ahead, or even get a little put aside.  It takes your dreams, demands your allegiance, and gives you back enough crumbs of whatever you need to keep you going.

And that was how the City was in the Year of the White King 19, and how it always would be the dead bodies who floated in the River seemed to whisper.  But then something changed.

A tiny rivulet of exotic non-matter trickled into the reality, and then became a huge flow that threatened it seemed to overwhelm the world of matter and energy with something not-energy, but yellow.  In the space of a microsecond, all this happened, and the City caught its breath.

And then the scriff, an interdimensional fluid, a not-energy not-matter something resolved to is pattern, and the molecules of matter each scriff ‘particle?’ held rejoined, and the spirit was again with the flesh.

The man twitched a bit, as his brain restarted and expressions of wonder and fear chased themselves across his lean face.  And the City, oh it must have wondered who this stranger was, and how he had come to the local reality.

And then the man opened his eyes, and stood.  After a careful looking about, he bowed and began to pray.  After consecrating his arrival spot, as an anchor, he began to walk, and pray, and occasionally he would talk to someone.  And the City shuddered in fear as it felt an almost forgotten Presence sweep out over it, through its dark alleys, and its darker hearts.  Touching those who had made easy deals with the devil (‘just five percent of your soul. No need for blood, a red magic marker will do.’), and wakening them to their chains, it passed on, and it looked with harsh judgment on the Courts where evil was enthroned, and on the Newspapers who always cried for more of the same hair of the dog that bit them when they spoke of corruption.  And in the great houses, that Presence considered, and weighed their souls.

Brought here, the City knew, by an honest man who spoke the Words of Life, and the City knew fear as it realized its comfortable corrupt slumber had ended, and deeds of honor or of horror might soon be done.  And the City hated and feared and would have reached out its hand to smite the man, but the Presence knew this and so the City spoke not, nor moved not, but quailed in terror.

And it was thus that Hope came to the City even though it did not desire it.