Microstory 2280: Peaks and Valleys

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I’m back home, and feeling much better. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in a lot of pain, and it’s difficult to move around, but this is a far superior environment. Man, I feel like I’m so out of touch these days, bragging about my large house, and private medical team. I never wanted to become this, but you have to admit, healthcare is better without all those other sick people. Jesus, what the hell! Why did I just say that? And why am I not deleting, and starting over with a more relatable tone? It would be really nice if this were how everyone lived. Or would it? How would that even work? Everyone’s rich, so they can hire a private home staff, but then who are these home staffers? This sounds like a caste system. So maybe there’s a happy medium between traditional healthcare, and private. I suppose things could get better and more comfortable for more people by improving the ratio. Fewer patients per medical professional would make it easier for each one to focus, and not be spread so thin. Maybe they could work shorter shifts, and have a better work-life balance too. Is that what I should do? Should I be concentrating all my money on healthcare reform? I’ve always thought that I should be distributing it across a number of causes, relatively evenly, but I’ve heard that it’s more productive in the long run if everyone chooses one or two causes to be passionate about. I dunno, I’ll need to see some numbers. In the meantime, despite my circumstances, things are looking up today. Watch, now people will start taking bets when the next bad thing will happen to me, and maybe what it will be. That’s how it always seems to go. Peaks and valleys. Peaks and valleys. Anyway, I’m going to put all that out of my mind, and just try to live in the moment. Nobody’s rethinking their charitable contributions today. Best not to make any big decisions while you’re on drugs, right?

Microstory 1433: Peak Valley

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Before there was even a spark of an idea to build the eighth town of Astau, construction began on a new town called Peak Valley. It may seem like an oxymoron, but there really was a smallish mountain to the south of Springfield and Splitsville, on top of which was a sort of bowl that looked like any other valley. Experts believed it once housed a glacier, but they couldn’t explain what would have happened to all the water on the surface. In fact, it was a question they never answered about the whole world. There were signs of water erosion all over the place, but no liquid or solid water anywhere. The planet must have ventured close enough to its star to evaporate it all away before that star expelled it from its system, but there really wasn’t any proof of that either. Regardless, the real magic of the Peak Valley was that there was an extra seed portal from Earth there. For the most part, seeds only showed up on Durus in a certain region, and any plants that grew beyond it did so due to the normal spread of vegetation. They appeared from small flashes of light, like fireflies. It wasn’t particularly safe, because of the monsters, but teenagers liked to go there on quick romantic getaways, and watch the seeds appear. The Peak Valley was the only other place where this happened. It would have been a nice place to live all along. While monsters definitely had the ability to climb up the side of the mountain, or simply fly, it was still a well-fortified area. It was easy to see them coming from pretty much anywhere in the valley, which would give mages enough time to prepare for an attack. As always, the main reason they never settled there before was because of resources. It was difficult to pump water up from Watershed, but as time went on, both technology and time powers promoted progress. By the 2070s, it was a sufficiently viable option. The filter portaler would remain in Distante Remoto, where she belonged—even though they could have used her—because there were other ways of getting what they needed, which they didn’t always have. Laying pipe in the ground was a fairly easy endeavor when dirt could be teleported out of a hole, the pipe could be teleported into the hole, and then the dirt could be teleported back on top of it. The new town was initially planned for a 2075 completion date, but in 2072, a new member of Mad Dog’s Army was sourced who could make quantum replications of objects. A single pipe could be manufactured once, and then copied thousands of times. This process was not instantaneous, but it started moving a lot quicker once the quantum replicator joined the project. Peak Valley was finished in 2073, and prospered for seventeen years.

Microstory 1430: Hidden Depths

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If Fort Frontline was designed to protect the Durune humans from the monsters by standing before them, Hidden Depths was designed to hide themselves away. Watershed was a fairly difficult place to navigate. It was the only place with fresh water, but getting to it required climbing over rocks, and negotiating other impediments. While Parade was built as close to it as a surface town could be, while still on dry land, it wasn’t technically the closest place, full stop. Watershed was located at the bottom of a foothill that was up against a small mountain range. On the other side of the hill was a valley. This valley received none of the water from Watershed, and none of the seeds that were still being randomly transported there from Earth. So it was a lifeless place, rocky and dirty, and unfit for settlement. Unless that was exactly what you wanted. With a little bit of tunneling, water could be sent to this location. People had just never thought to do it before, because there was little point, but when the sixth town was first being conceived, they decided it was time to change that. They figured that the time monsters would not be able to find them there, precisely because it was so remote. Just because it didn’t look like a logical place to find humans to attack, didn’t mean they couldn’t be there. The workers dug that tunnel from Watershed to pipe water directly to them, and they built more tunnels for living spaces. They used their water source to irrigate hydroponic gardens, and slept in their underground bunkers. They were like a true group of survivalists. Other people thought they were weird for wanting to do this, but it made perfect sense to them. Doomsday preppers on Earth were all waiting for the world to end, and the residents of Hidden Depths determined that this was exactly what had happened. They were trapped on a mostly dead planet, faced relentless attackers daily, and technological advancement had all but been halted. If that wasn’t an apocalypse, they didn’t know what everyone else was waiting for.

Travel to and from was restricted. They had no reason to believe monsters were capable of surveilling them, but if the people living there wanted to stay hidden, it seemed a little weird to make that more difficult. Visitors weren’t illegal, just limited. If someone did want to see what Hidden Depths looked like, they had to go there with a very specific mage, who was capable of camouflaging a small area with his time powers. Basically, what she did was show any outside observer what a given spot looked like when she and her group weren’t standing there. That made them effectively invisible, so if a monster ever did try to find the location of the sixth town, they wouldn’t be able to follow anyone there. Hidden Depths was completely self-sustainable, and did not interact much with the other towns. They didn’t hate the others, and the others didn’t hate them, but their values were too misaligned to justify taking part in a lot of trade, or the same celebratory events. Mages protected this new town, but there were fewer of them, and since the word border had to be replaced with the term above ground in their case, they didn’t really patrol. They just kept themselves available, in case anything went wrong. They were more successful than anyone else in their mission. In the three decades they were around before the Monster War finally ended, they were not attacked even once. And when the Mage Protectorate fell immediately afterwards, they were the only ones truly prepared to thrive during the Interstitial Chaos that followed.

Microstory 1275: The Camel and the Party

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And so the animals gathered for a lively party in the valley. The hummingbirds and the elk sang the music, while the elephant handled trumpets, and the woodpecker kept the beat. The lynx was there, and so was the antelope. The sea otter family swam up while the flamingo flew down. The chimpanzee swung in to much fanfare, and the camel walked up slowly. The lion showed up late, thinking he was cool, but the others just thought it was rude. Still, he was the most ferocious of them all, and though he and the animals had called a temporary truce, no one wanted to set him off. It wasn’t worth the risk. One by one, the animals came before him and showed them their dances. The otters shook their shoulders, and rolled their stomachs. The lion was impressed, for he could not do that himself. The antelope hopped gracefully back and forth, and though the lion could hop as well, it was almost as if the antelope’s hooves never touched the ground, so the lion was also impressed with her. The lynx spun around, and performed flips, which the lion was too large to do himself. The flamingo soared through the air, which of course, was impossible for the lion. The chimpanzee was the most impressive, however. He could shimmy like the otters, and leap like the antelope, and flip like the lynx, and when he swung on the trees, it was almost like he was flying like the flamingo. Then it came time for the camel. He was slow and bulky, and quite frankly, graceless. He tried each of the others’ moves, but always failed, and tried to cover it up by switching to something else. By all accounts, the camel was a terrible dancer, but he was having fun. The lion scoffed and mocked him, and the other animals followed suit, for they still did not want to anger the lion. But the camel never stopped. He kept trying, and he kept having fun, and eventually the animals began to dance again, but this time together. Even the lion tapped his foot and bobbed his head. The party was a hit.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Monkey and the Camel.