Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
Despite being in a fantasy humor novel the “boots theory” is legitimately the actual reason poor people stay poor. Just apply it to literally everything else; food supply, car maintenance, clothes, teeth, toiletries, everything.
with a wave of his finger and flick of his wrist, he cracked his neck and grinned like a bitch – Anon Guest
[AN: Ugh, the prompts that make me think about my new D&D character who didn’t exist when this was submitted… Not doing that noise. Keep it professional…]
There’s two ways to go when the forces of fate conspire to brand you for the sins of your father. One, of course, is to sink even deeper into sin, since people expect you to be like that anyway. The other was to be more pure than the driven snow. Some try both, because neither work. Some, like Fastophel, deliver cold justice with devastating accuracy.
The god’s brand on his left cheek reads wrath in the Divine Script, but Fastophel is not wrathful in the slightest. He takes care to weigh everything in the balance like a logician at zero kelvin. He is a Justicer. Those who pay for his services get Justice whether they aimed for it or not.
So when the High Lord Blystur brought forth fifty starving peasants on a claim of conspiracy to commit Grand Theft, Fastophel sent the Lord out of his court to hear each and every one of the peasants in turn. He heard about taxes, he heard about Prima Nocte, he heard, too, about how slow their Lord was in paying his debts to the people. He heard each and every one of them complain that they couldn’t even glean the fields for stray grains to make their daily bread, since their Lord insisted their toil last from dawn to dusk. Even the smallest of children were forced to work.
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When the wealthy can afford room-sized vaults to protect themselves and their treasures, those who can’t do so are bound to revolt. This is a fundamental truth. Civilisations end when the gap between the wealthiest and the rest are too large to be withstood.
When the wealthy live in secret, secure bunkers, separated from the real world by armies of their own guards and throngs of their own servants, you know the world is about to turn into shit. When the hordes of the starving pull down the walls with their bare hands, there’s suddenly no wage large enough to protect the one who’s been arguing towards paying you less.
This has already happened. With the bodies of the rich swaying from a convenient tree branch, and the bulk of the gore swept away, those who are left are picking through the remains. Paintings that haven’t been seen by the common throng for decades are used as kindling to cook foodstuffs that have also not been seen by the common throng for decades. For a day or five, everyone here gets to eat like a king. A few even managed to walk away with inherently valuable objects, though the solid gold statue of the original homeowner had been melted down and turned into coins.
Migno the Malevolent pouted on his throne-like chair. “I am trying,” he said, “to be the ultimate evil, here. The worst living thing on this earth. I need a volcano secret base, some kind of intimidating laser-assisted animal life, and at least one overly-complicated death trap. Because when a nicely-dressed superspy gets up in my grille, I actually have to be prepared for that.”
The accountant took all this down. “And… why are you doing this?”
“To take over the world, of course. Once the global system is under a unified rule, things will be way more efficient. No more starving people in weird little countries. It’ll all be one country. No borders to secure - no borders at all! Universal medicine, guaranteed food supplies, no more trade tarriffs. A sudden lack of tax shelters… the whole nine yards.”
You once wrote an Instant about a Company owning 99.99% of the World. What they wouldn’t realise is “If you own it, you have to fix it. Lousy Hospital, Education, Roads, transport. It’s Your responsibility. enjoy!” government retires. – @knitnan
When you’ve just bought the world, you never expect it to be a fixer-upper. The previous administration neglected to mention things like noisy and annoying tennants. Rising damp. The fact that the heating needed to be fixed. And they had the luxury of being able to shove the metaphorical buck.
Now, there were no excuses.
There was just one person in charge. One person who ruled the world. Because he had just bought it like a pig in a poke. Because he believed that owning everything meant winning. But the prize that Jeri Maximilian had won was -well- the booby prize.
“I wish time would skip ahead. I got here too early.” – @witterprompts
Paul checked her watch. “You’re right on time.”
“No. I mean… the whole future thing. It’s like… most of my time has been spent waiting for stuff that should have been here, already. Like… I dunno. Tablets should have always been there since my childhood, you know.”
“And flying cars?” teased Paul.
“No. Dur. You can’t have flying cars until after self-driving cars have taken over. Because, look at existing traffic. We’re not going to get much better in three dimensions,” Karen was in full rant mode by now. “We should have telepresence tablets by now. Something like Google Glass only way more flexible for people who need glasses. Shit, we should be making glasses _extinct_ by now. And not by lasic. It’s like technology has slowed the heck down and nobody knows why.”
