blueberry yoghurt with butterscotch and a cherry
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Valetta City
Rating: G
Challenge: Blueberry Yoghurt #23: building
Toppings/Extras: cherry (description only), butterscotch
Wordcount: 319
Summary: The humble beginnings of the Moon’s capital city.
Notes: So this is where Robyn Walshe and Victor Blackledge end up living and solving crime and getting into general trouble. Maybe I'll do one of these for Britannia City too...
It was perfect virgin soil for the colonies that first arrived upon the silvery surface of the Moon, a place that spoke entirely of the future. In the place of the feminine curves, the buxom hills and valleys and mounds of Earth, there was undeniable masculinity; it was hard, craggy, pocked and pitted and scarred, whitish silver, glowing like starlight.
The first buildings made there were for the miners, to fetch up the various precious rocks they had found under the surface of the dead rock of the Moon. The mines were deep and craggy tunnels that glowed in the frissons of light from their hardy lamps: homes were built beneath the surface of the rock.
When they discovered moonquartz-a relatively useless but incredibly hard and beautiful type of diamond crushed beneath the moon’s surface rocks-the economy suddenly boomed for these mining companies living in the dirt. It became a fashion statement-jewellery from the Moon, people!-and spread like wildfire over the high-society types back on the ravaged Earth. Suddenly money was pouring into the mine, and people were banging on the doors for jobs.
The underground society moved overground as a massive scientific project was started: to build a dome, and in this dome, to build a city. Valetta City, capital of the moon. It took decades, and in the meantime everyone lived under the ground, sealed off from the intense cold of the dark side of the moon, without too many accidents and incidents.
When the city was built-the diamond city, they called it sometimes-it had its flourishing economy in mind. The mining took a back seat to tourism, and immigrants began to find other jobs that needed doing in a fully-functioning city. Doctors. Lawyers and a justice system. A police department. Shops of every kind.
The city rose from the dead moonrock and shone in its glimmering bubble, growing every day.