12 - Coming full circle

[lolitics_meme]

Dearest Anons,

In five days (on May 8, 2011) this meme will have existed for a whole year.

It is an extraordinary achievement, your extraordinary achievement, to have kept this going well and alive for so long. With thousands of fics and comments, this meme is one of (if not the) most amazing thing I've ever come across. Not only the amount of fic

Comments

Fill: Hattie and the Pirates of Dodrago Cove, part 6a

[anonymous]

While men in garish suits and women in feather headdresses flitted about in the heights of the wealthy citadel, so little warmth and sunlight penetrated the depths of the lower city that the streetlamps were ever alight, glowing orange globes lining the pavements. The air was murky with smog and cooling water from the monstrous factories trickled over cobblestones. The gutters were lithe with rats and runaway clockroaches.

Children who were clever enough to earn scholarships may escape to the dreaming spires and towers of the upper city, but most were not so lucky. There were no less than three dozen workhouses in the lower city where young children were paid for their labour in matchsticks, dried peas and titbits of cured meat. As they grew into adulthood, those who didn’t turn to the seedy underground for dirty money could find long-term employment in the factories that dominated the lower cities. Wheels turned within towering walls and chimneys coughed steam, which formed a hazy, hanging cloud, gradually dispersing up into the upper city.

Philippe Pennyway was born in the country, and first became part of Sky City when he moved into the Academy to study the population explosion of the ‘sooty lace’ silkworm in urban areas. He found that children from the lower city were cheap to employ, and did an efficient job of categorising silkworms sixteen hours a day for his study. He realised that this labour was being put to waste in the disorderly lower city where people strayed from job to job each day, on Monday a chimney sweep, on Tuesday a shoe-shiner.

He invested a fortune from his inheritance in building a factory, and soon enough, the lower city cretins flocked for secure employment. Within a year, he had become a successful textiles merchant and never looked back at the Academy.

Years later Pennyway was found dead, (a giant toothed silkworm having climbed through his ear canal into his brain and devoured it), but his factory still stands. Towers belted out steam and smoke, crates of embroided silk flocked from the gates to the market and the Pennyway workers all wore rough cotton overalls.

The Central Clock Tower had been derelict since clockwork replaced the ancient bell-ringer and his hour glass. Cogs and gears turned, and it struck midnight.

“Bargh.”

John Prescott stood a short distance from the wrought iron gates of the Pennyway factory, his back turned defiantly to employment. John was a large man. His head melted right into his massive neck, his mouth was a lipless gash and his nose a brick-tough lump. His eyes were wide-set and bags wobbled beneath them when he was angry, which was far too often to be good for his weak heart.

However large a jacket he wore, it always stretched over his shoulders. His belly hung far over his thick leather belt. He was slightly bow-legged and his feet were always a shoulder width apart, aggressive and ready.

He had abandoned his old work wrapping bars of soap in brown paper for Reddican’s Delights long ago, and had been stumbling blindly through a series of jobs ever since. Having been thrown out in disgrace from his last occupation for stealing half-baked raisin bread from the oven, he had decided to follow an old childhood dream. Memories of a happy afternoon on the coast; the colour and the excitement of a Punch and Judy show seen as a boy of five had never left him.

The puppets and painted theatre cost him his last hundred sequins; he couldn’t afford to hire himself a bottler or a wagon unless he miraculously found more business, and he was far too proud to admit that he made a terrible Punch and Judy professor. Hearing the eleventh strike, he grunted again.

“Bargh.”

There couldn’t have been more than about thirty sequins tossed into his soaking cap over the day. Perhaps it wasn’t enough for a night in a warm bed, but it would pay for a hearty breakfast the next morning. He wrenched his jacket from the nail hammered into the back of the puppet theatre, tearing the threadbare lining, and shrugged it on.