A Day In The Life [AMW]

[Chrinthanium]

A Day In The Life is a thread for members of the A Modern World (AMW) role play group to post short stories regarding the people who live in their nation and snip-its of everyday life. This thread is only open to members of the AMW role-play group. If you're interested in becoming a member of A Modern World, please read our application's thread. Have a question about our group? Feel free to visit our discussion thread. Thanks for reading our thread! We hope you enjoy it!

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Table of Contents

[Chrinthanium]

REDACTED due to claim shift.

[Chemaki]

Crump. The low thud in the distance and the accompanying shake woke Eskandar Khorshid up from his dream, his eyes prising slowly apart as he shields his face from the glare of the Iranian sun. The day was cloudless, save for a small trail of white smoke which arched through the sky, bisecting it in two. As he groaned and stumbled across his hotel room, littered with papers and scripts for the day ahead, he paused over a packet of hashishis left open on his desk, cheap and dirty Arabic joints which were the favourite of yokels across the Ummah. Strange then that in this godforsaken place, with nothing better to do, that these were so difficult to come by, he pondered as he walked out to the balcony and lit one. As he stared down at the street below at the crowds, their nature - the men sporting long, heavily decorated beards and many of the women almost entirely covered by their Hijabs, many of them with face veils, he remembered why. He cursed his boss for sending him on a business trip to Kurdistan, where backwardness and Shiite Fundementalism mixed in a way unsavoury to the liberal, progressive majority in the rest of the Ummah. As he began to relax, feeling less cranky as his hashish cigarette shortened, his mobile went off. Swearing, he dropped the hashishi from the balcony and rummaged through the paperwork to find it, running his hand through his hair as he realized who was calling him.

''So, Khorshid, you all ready for the pitch today? I know you're going to amaze the General; just keep up the good work for a little longer.''

Eskandar frowned as he replied tactfully ''General? I thought I was meeting with one of the Islamic Vanguard's civilian represenatatives? That's what I based the pitch around...''.

''Well, for reasons quite obvious the Islamic Vanguard doesn't see it fit to have a civilian administration over here. So, the land is technically leased to this General instead; don't worry! If anything it means he cares less about plots of dirt, as long as you tell him how drilling here is going to revolutionize this backwater.''

''Right, so we have the community feedback plan, where we invest into schools, colleges, infrastructure... build a new shopping center in nearby Ilam to get domestic and foreign brands in, donate ten million rial to war victim charities... But I don't see how this is going to impress a General!''

''All he cares about is making sure his soldiers don't get shot at by Shiavash Golzar and his fucking Wahhabis, spin some shit about how if we get kids educated they'd be less likely to become terrorists and if he has our financial backing he can clear North Kurdistan by New Year's. If he gets really antsy I can deal with it and throw in a few million for some Humvees or something.''

Eskandar paused and lowered his phone from his ear; someone on the street below was shouting up at him in Gorani, the local language. He peered down and saw a heavily robed man, pointing down at the half-lit hashishi that was still smouldering on the ground, the smell of cannabis wafting through the narrow streets. He seemed to be attracting a bit of attention with his rant, and a few others took the chance to express their disdain for the ''Rich Tourist'' who was staying here. The man then changed his dilect to broken Persian, the universal language of the Ummah, his voice as sharp as ever

''How do you call yourself a true Muslim when you're turning your mind to dirt with this stuff? And leaving it in the streets for women and childen to pass by, and be tainted by this? Go back to Saif Al Maya and your fancy penthouse, you Greek-loving heathen! God willing you'll catch the next bullet, and we'll see no more of you!''

Eskandar turned and walked back inside, closing the door to the balcony as he focused on his boss' voice on the phone ''Eskandar, can you hear me? You're not smoking again are you? We need your head in the game for this!''

''Huh, no, no. I'm fine, just tired, that's all. Got a bit of a nasty wakeup this morning.''

''I'd imagine!'' He heard a chuckle from the other end of the line ''Live news reports are just coming in on a Scud launch at a Wahabbi outpost a few miles North; apparantly it's some softening up before your General leads the charge across the ceasefire line in a few days. I was worried those terrorists might try and fire something back... you've heard how bad they are with shelling towns near the border of their little 'Caliphate'... and just wanted to phone in to see if you're okay.''

''Yeah, I'm fine. I'll prepare for the pitch now, Boss.''. Eskandar switched off the phone and swore, staring outside at the dissipating vapour trail. After a few minutes, it was replaced by a series of smaller ones, presumably more missiles headed across the ceasefire line into Wahhabi-controlled territory. He sighed and pulled out another hashishi and swore, looking down at the street again. Life returned to normal again, though with nobody willing to touch his discarded joint, an upturned bin now sat in the center of the street instead, covering its tainting influence. Nobody even seemed bothered with the rockets filling up the air as they sped North; even these conservative Shiites thought the Wahhabis were animals, and the most dangerous place in the Ummah wasn't here, but North of the ceasefire line where ragtag militants and their self-proclaimed Caliph ran a state of two million unfortunate souls. Even with that small relief, Eskandar was unfazed ''Buying oilfields from a General in the middle of a Kurdish warzone. This fucking trip...''

[Nova Gaul]

Crowds and chimes.

Yoshi Makaro’s life revolved around crowds and chimes.

On a morning much like every other the accountant for Jeiseito Financial Services Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of the faceless Mitsubishi zaibatsu, jostled with the teeming mass of commuters at Tokyo’s cyclopean Shibuya Station. Cheek to jowl he shuffled along in a precise line while never-ending chimes announced the arrival and departures of various trains. The Empire of Japan had the world’s busiest rail network, and Shibuya Station was the second busiest in the country. As if to mock the similarly business-suited drones the sound of birds tweeting and water rushing was piped into the labyrinth catacomb, intermittently audible after chimes and bombastic scheduling announcements. On every side merchants hawked their wares: readymade bento lunches, sweets, coffee, clothes, watches, anything one might wish. All the sellers belted out with dead-eyed enthusiasm "Irasshaimase!".

After slogging through the morning travel, pressed so close to other commuters he could read their magazines (in this morning’s case, the elderly salaryman opposite him flipped through pages displaying a little girl fleeing -unsuccessfully- from a sexually aggressive squid) he arrived at precisely 7:00 a.m. at the company offices. No sooner had he entered his cubicle than another series of chimes rang out followed by the dictatorial voice of Yoshi’s boss: “Attention workers of Jeiseito Financial Services, report to roof level for calisthenics!” That was that then…before even a sip of Congolese coffee Yoshi trudged with his fellow workers up the stairs, twenty flights.

Roofs in Tokyo were often the only place one could find greenery, and the office building Yoshi worked at was no exception, it was like a little park forty floors above street level. The company’s president stood on a modest podium, in the same military style tunic he always wore, and led the employees through half-an hour of stretches, jumping-jacks, and slowly paced martial arts. There followed a five minute harangue (while the company’s hundred or so workers stood at attention, for all intents and purposes) about the importance of their work: balancing the books for the conglomerate that traded with the Socialist Federation of the Congo was apparently a ‘righteous blow’ against the pig-dog European imperialists and pond-turtle-scum Californians. More chimes at 7:35 a.m., then it was back to the cubical to do the day’s work.

Lunch was taken at midday, but Yoshi didn’t eat in peace by himself. He went to the building’s café with his department (‘Fractals and Irreconcilables’) and the ten men ate their rice, sea bream, miso soup and pickled vegetables together. They even took their cigarette break in the smoking lounge together. Not that Yoshi disliked his coworkers, mind you, they were what we might call his friends, and he often visited the red-light district with them (actually, the first and third Friday of every month) to leer (and more) at the pretty young things mimicking schoolgirls and nurses on display, for sale, there. But lately he wondered, albeit briefly, what it would be like to have more individual time and activity, though this concept was more a basic human yearning and was totally abstract. Even his family’s vacations, to the Mitsubishi Corporate Recreation Center in Aomori, were taken with the families of his department.

Chimes rang in the smoking lounge, and it was back to work. He spent the day tallying numbers related to the Mitsubishi zaibatsu’s materials expenses in the Congo’s Katanga region. It sounded awfully exotic, Katanga, and Yoshi, for a tiny instant, let his mind stray from the decimals and equations of heartless profit to a lush jungle wilderness. Then it was back to work. At 6:00 p.m. the intercom on his desk activated, “Makaro-san, congratulations! You have been chosen to work overtime!”

It was 9:30 p.m. when he arrived at his flat in Chichibu (after more chimes and crowds), an outlying district of the megalopolis Tokyo. There, amid gleaming modern appliances and accoutrements he was too busy to ever enjoy, his pretty wife, dressed in kimono, bowed as one to him alongside his son, 15, and daughter, 11. A healthy dinner of crab sushi and sake (for Yoshi) followed and ended promptly at ten. Then the children (who had only just gotten home from cram school before Yoshi) went to their rooms. His son would spend the next two hours studying calculus and chemistry with an online tutor while his daughter would practice the piano.

Yoshi and Yume, his wife, sat in the living room together to watch the news (little more than polychromatic propaganda that carefully explained why Japan was superior to every other nation on earth interspersed with bizarre stories featuring, for example, a polar bear that wore a bow tie and a monkey that fancied cigars) and their favorite game show in which a sumo wrestler dressed as Mickey Mouse dunked via a rope pulley failed contestants into a transparent tub of scalding hot water. The successful contestant that evening won a shiny new Lexus sports car, which elicited an “Ooooh, wow” from Yume. Yohsi smoked all the while.

At midnight the residential tower in which he lived, as per new Prime Minister’s orders, played the Imperial anthem, Kimigayo. That family stood shoulder to shoulder in the living room while it played. Following it they bowed to a shrine-like portrait of the Emperor, clapped their hands in unison, and prayed to their divine ancestors. Whereupon they wished one another good night in unison and went to bed.

In his sleep Yoshi dreamed of the morning’s group calisthenics.

[The Crooked Beat]

Near Sortavala, Karelia
July, 1969

Lindfors the elder was latest in a line of dairy farmers which stretched back at least three centuries, descendants of settlers shipped-in from the German-speaking world’s poorer and more dismal regions to populate a vast expanse of deep, dark fir forest and bog-land, viscerally beautiful yet, as ancestors had quickly discovered, distinctly ungenerous to its tillers and cultivators. A handful of modern appliances and industrial-age clothing styles excepted, his family could well have been transported back, suddenly, to 1750 and not have attracted much more than casual bemusement. Progeny, at least, gave patriarch Lindfors a tenuous source of self-worth, and for a man whose decades of backbreaking labor had brought precious little gain, it was truly one of few available. He could, if nothing else, take pride in having not lost that which his forebears had built, and in keeping fed and clothed a haggard household of ten, though what love he may, at certain moments, have felt for them, shone through to his charges seldom if ever. Unending struggle had wound together with a scarring experience as an infantryman on Great War battlefields to harden a heart that, in some dimly-remembered past, had harbored the same dreams and passions held by every human being, had broken a man and turned him into something, almost, less. Cold, overbearing, domineering when sober, he could be brutal when drunk, and constant abuse had aged his wife, once a gorgeous young bride, far beyond her years.

Beyond the homestead’s stockade fences, beyond the fir forests and swamps, the summertime mosquito-shrouded woods, a great cultural movement was however shaking the Gandvian nation’s comfortable certainties, such as they were, and in its own way the Lindfors household was about to be transformed by the age as well, rocked by a wave of youthful self-assertion. Lindfors’ eldest, Leonard, had nearly come of age, and the implications of the son’s adolescence, his tremendous growth in mind and body, were not altogether lost on the father, himself feeling ever frailer, suffering more sharply than in years the effects of an imperfectly-treated shrapnel wound. All, and harried Maria Lindfors perhaps most of all, could sense that a reckoning was at hand, that lifetimes of incendiary material might burst into flame at the slightest provocation, and in that unseasonably warm and muggy summer of 1969, Riga stepped in obligingly to provide just such a pretext.

Chancellor-General Alfons Riipalu’s round of administrative reshuffling, undertaken in response to the previous year’s unsettling events, had as one of their relatively unintended byproducts brought about the replacement of a district captain deemed friendly to local smallholders with a shamelessly avaricious young man , too well-connected for outright dismissal yet considered wholly unsuitable for work in a higher-priority constituency, transferred out to remote and sparsely-settled Karelia where, it was believed, he could do the least amount of damage. Nonetheless, he had promptly set about alienating and extorting the local farmers, and matters had, within little more than a year, reached a point where the district captain felt the need to recruit a bodyguard of sorts, a band of toughs and hard-cases swept up from Ingermanburg’s seedier layers, for his personal safety. Even this did not wholly prevent certain acts of subversion, often extremely crude, and an exceedingly bitter Lindfors was a leading culprit. That summer, as, in a move calculated to court populist backing, Riipalu’s government slashed food prices, the local leading heads-of-household felt they could take no more, and resolved, at one late-night council, to take drastic action.

It was not a course, however, supported by Leonard Lindfors, by then a hale seventeen-year-old, and for once he was prepared to make his opinions known. A violent argument followed in which father and son beat one another bloody, immune to desperate pleas for calm offered by Maria and her younger children. In a height of foolish passion, a tearful young Frans Lindfors, feeling at age eleven the first stirrings of adulthood, and beginning to feel that his father’s behavior was not in fact a natural consequence of family life, attempted to separate them, forcing his small, bony frame in between blows, only to catch a wild and powerful right hook from his infuriated father.

As a dazed Frans fell backwards into the arms of his mother, near hysterics herself, his father, as if splashed with a bucket of cold water, seemed to to regain his senses, and beneath a torrent of abuse from his eldest quickly gathered his coat and hat, and walked off into the night. Leonard found him several days later, prostrate in a pig-sty near town, victim it appeared of a run-in with a crew of the district captain’s heavy-hitters, though the official explanation, alcohol poisoning, did not seem implausible. Frans, however, was by that time already hundreds of miles away, having hopped aboard a passing freight train bound somewhere south, though not before he paid a visit to the district captain’s headquarters, and, in what he intended as an act of just revenge for the terror inflicted upon him, his mother, and his siblings by his tyrannical father, divulged everything which he had seen and overheard, sparing only those details which he calculated would incriminate his brother.

Perched on the edge of a well-laden freight car, the train winding its leisurely way through the dark, Frans imagined magical, northern forests, the act of his flight now, to his own mind, irreversible, Frans Lindfors wept abjectly as thoughts of his brothers and sisters, never, he reasoned, to be seen again, cycled through his adolescent consciousness. There could, he thought to himself, be no going back now. He would have to grow up fast, learn to make it on his own in the adult world, no choice but to do it, no little kid any longer. Of course, it did not hurt at all that the district captain, genuinely appreciative of the young Frans and his information, had written down on a small slip of paper an address and a telephone number, reputedly that of a ‘well-placed associate’ in the big city, a ‘public servant,’ who could help Frans settle into his new surroundings. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders,” added the district captain as a final, not entirely sincere word of encouragement, “and where you’re bound, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble at all.”

[Europe - Prussia]

Lind Eissel truly hated her family sometimes.

As any Valendian, she understood the concept of duty and that sometimes one had to make sacrifices when it was required. What she couldn't accept under any circumstances however were the sacrifices made in the name of the ambitions of others, moreso if these were personal ambitions.

Like what her father, told her yesterday.

"Next year, you will go to Valhalla Academy. It's your turn to advance the good fortunes and influence of this family by becoming a Valkyrie. Don't bother in voicing you opinion, because everything has already been arranged"

The discussion that came after those words lasted one hour, and was heard through the entire house. Lind tried to say to her father in every way possible that she wouldn't go to Valhalla, that she wanted to study medicine, only to be rebuked with the "duty to your family" and "the honor and prestige a Valkyrie brings to herself and her family" arguments. She knew better though; he was doing all of this in order to advance his own business, family and honor be damned as long he could gain more Marks. Her father, as far as she remembered, has always been an ambitious and greedy man, traits that became more prominent when her uncle Sigurd took all the inheritance left by her Grandpa (100.000 Marks in golden coins!) and lost it in the Monte Carlo Casino.

In the end though, her father ended the discussion with an ultimatum: she could ignore his orders, but in doing so she would lose all of his support in pursuing future endeavors, which means that not only he wouldn't give her even one Mark to study in College, but also he would use every one of his resources to make sure she couldn't enter into any University.

Driven to a wall, Lind angrily left her father's study and went directly to her room to rant and rave about the unfairness of everything. She couldn't go to her friends with this problem because they would get angry at her for wasting such "opportunity". The less said about her mother the better; she had the spine of a toothpick, and most likely already knows about her father's orders.

And so she spent the rest of that day stewing in her anger, until the moon replaced the sun in the skies. However, when morning came and she awoke because the sun became too unbearable to continue sleeping and her stomach began to growl because she missed dinner, Lind had a sudden epiphany:

So she had no other option than join Valhalla? fine. But until the autumn term started (in September of 2015) she would live her life in the way she desired, starting as far away from Nordentor, Belka and Valendia altogether.

Shaking her head to get rid of any left-over sleep and ignoring the growling of her stomach, Lind reached for her smartphone resting on her nightstand, selected the maps app and began to look for a destination.

Five minutes later, she stopped at a certain point, a point that made a smile to grow on her face.

She had found her destination.

"Rio here I come!"