Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to be used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
Some of them want to be used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams*
"Those malignant smackthumpers from out west! Why can't them just smosh them upsides with a new fralenta and overdo with?" In Newion, perhaps one of the most grandiose and almost certainly the most unnecessarily crammed of all the capital cities you could possibly dare to name, six hundred thousand poor souls now find themselves squalid in a good thirty square kilometres of land. Of all the places that the beating heart of Gladom Newion could have been located in, who had the sheer cheek to drop it slap bang in the middle of the five percent of the mainland so-called most vulnerable to overspill from the River Lydia?
It was never even called that in the first place - a hundred years ago or so, the nation was a few tribes minding their own business, occasionally gunning and vying for control of the estuary of the river whose name nobody could agree upon; if you controlled that, you controlled the nation. Was all fine and dandy? Was it fuck. The arrival of "Tinhamptonian Civilisation" in 1921 and subsequent declaration of control as New Lydia was mostly welcomed with plaudits, if not in that dank corner of Atlantian Oceania then in Tinhampton itself. Why New Lydia? Because the nation was allegedly seen as a haven for "grand materials that shall raise us to the echelons of the multiverse," which it was anything but.
For half a decade it remained like this; for the last 15 years of that era, like so many of those who contrived not to live in Douglas, Hazanta meKonta worked as a farmer on his father's ranch in the inland south, not far from the "city" of Old Haven. It was there, approximately five-thousand-odd shoved into a more bearable area - that many of the old members of the Valu tribe has dwelled and spent their days; and with them he decided to lead a 30-mile slog northeast into the capital city. It was there that they discovered, to their disgust, that Christmas Day was not a holiday for every Douglasman.
MeKonta survived on the grounds that he had slipped into a local boozer for the night. With their demands presented peacefully two months later, the Tinhamptonians could do no better than announce their withdrawal, carried through in 1977. Then, and only then, did meKonta begin the first year of what had so far been forty-one at the very top of the tree.
‽ ‽ ‽ ‽ ‽
Eve Jenkins was certainly not out to commend the art of the malign smackthump, although you are surely aware that most of what was then Douglas and now Newion had seemingly been built on this principle, it being five times more cramped and half as large as the Tin City. The pub in which the President had escaped, once the Bulldog, was now named in his honour, strung together along with the rest of the odd-numbered premises on String Street, the kind of place that would surely fall apart en masse if you extracted a single brick from a single one of the buildings.
For whatever Godforsaken reason, located two doors down from there was a standard issue crate of dingyness which called itself "EROTAS HAIRDRESS," but which neither housed anybody called Erota nor possessed any barbers' or hair stylists' in its wake. Instead, there was one of many government buildings hosted as a result of requisitioning business from disloyal citizens... or, as they liked to call them, "demissions." She wasn't entirely sure as to whether the floor or her shoes were supposed to be making the creaking in the first place, although she had been warned by her old headmaster that "if you insist on remaining in Newion, you will almost certainly slip at some point."
The whole place was a good six metres either side, and "only" four stories to boot. The first floor offered all the governmental bureaucracy and inherent health-and-safety posters that anybody could want in the first place, and - as is true to form - a few stairs constructed so haphazardly that they began a good thirty inches upwards and could almost pass for being part of the military obstacle course. Getting there was the easy bit; actually getting up there was even worse.
The second floor was one of three dedicated to minions operating on behalf of the foreign affairs wing of meKonta's Advisory Council, and it was here that Jenkins had the misfortune to overhear some piece of Newion slang that she would otherwise have no need to know. "Otherwise?" She was the vice-captain of the national cricket team (and, by extension, the football team, owing to a "lack of resources" that could never possibly explain the President's snazzy new car); it was absolutely necessary if they wanted to confuse the opposition.
Even more perplexing was the room in which she almost surrepticiously fell into, only two-and-a-half metres by three and mostly occupied with the desk of a high-ranking slave to the system. Wait, wasn't he famili---"Ah, Eve... I believe you're here for the cricket or the soccerball?"
"Absolutely not! This is a matter of urgency I read about in The Newion Express, the one about New Cardiff! Sounds like the kind of place you'd organise those kind of games in, except they're doing a few war games instead."
"Let me introduce you, my friend," interjected Councillor Yaan emKventa himself, "to the world of the Gladom Newion press, although you are familiar surely with it. When we call exercises like this war games, we do not mean little silly games. We mean full-on threats, invasions of other nations... it's never, ever, ever a war until the foreign useless whatever pain train rolls into our beloved Newion."
Jenkins had no need to concur, and was quick to note that "They claim to be locating themselves in 'a rugged deep dark foggy giant swamp land.' Let's see... Newion as a settlement has survived for two hundred years, my feet are ironically placed below sea level right now, the curfew's supposed to begin at eleven o'clock every night... OK, so it's only a bit of fresh sea breeze outside and we can't call ourselves the largest of places. If anything, I think I'll just tell the powers that be to make a war on New Cardiff and then---"
"I call the shots, not you, Miss Entitled Malignant Smackthump from out west! I'll tell them about this, very thanksly, and show them what those swampy bastards be constructioned!" If Jenkins needed proof that Newion was the real tin city, this was it. That most Gladom Newion were also around five foot six and barely had a healthy BMI appeared to help as she departed the indefinitely-makeshift so-called hairdressers' building to hundreds of beeps and millions of nitrogen oxide particles; just a pity, she thought, that most of them were blokes.
*OOC: If you guys are using real-world weapons in this RP, then...