Despite all my efforts, I could see things beginning to unravel already.
Work was proceeding apace – as well it should have with an extra few hundred quartets of hooves. Only six days in, and sleeping outdoors was now a thing of the past, though indoors was still uncomfortably cramped. The last canopy had been taken down and scrapped the last day, replaced by the foundations of our thirty-eighth house, already halfway ready. The crop field, too, was now joined by a second, enormously larger plot, farther out into the meadow away from the forest, courtesy of the farming brigade.
The whole place was now much more fit to be called an actual settlement. The new houses hugged the edge of the forest, sprawling outwards from my cabin. The two warehouses were joined by a third large building, acting as a dining hall for the residents – numbering just under seven hundred now, thanks to new arrivals. I thought it was a little bit unnecessary, in all honesty, but I wasn’t the expert on town planning. It would probably end up being converted to a cafe or something later on.
The forest itself was thinning out near the sawmill. We weren’t chopping down every single one, of course; some trees just aren’t lumber material, being too thin or soft, or just saplings, not to mention it’d be a real bummer to see another beautiful wood lost to the ravages of industry. Instead, we were pretty selective, cutting only a few down in one spot, though over a much wider area. And, of course, we did our best to replant whatever we cut down too. It wasn’t the most efficient way of doing things, but I figured it would be more sustainable over the long term.
Good news overall, one would think… if one wished to be profoundly incorrect.
We were hungry. Rationing was intense, just barely enough to keep the worst of the pangs away. Construct and her original lot were doing alright, since their necessities came from Equestria, and they were kind enough to give whatever was left over to us. Everyone else… it was rough. It was really, really difficult to be responsible for that kind of thing. Especially when I was the one to look them in the eyes and give them so little to eat personally. My own howling abyss in my stomach made it difficult to resist stuffing my own face, too.
With hunger came unhappiness. Bread and circuses… and I had neither. Ponies weren’t openly calling for my blood, if nothing else, but there were a lot of empty stares in the Free State. Lots of slumped shoulders, dragging hooves, muttering under their breaths. It disappeared pretty quickly when they were working, though, I assumed because they knew they were working to fix their miserable situation there and then, with their own four hooves slash two wings slash horn, delete where applicable. The second they clocked out, though, back it was to those same empty stares. Not everyone was so dour, thankfully, there were a few more sanguine folk with us, but still…
I was very lucky no pony had seen fit to leave yet. I didn’t for a second delude myself into thinking that it’d stay that way, of course. A week or two more of this would have broken someone, guaranteed, and once the food ran out for real that’d be it, the end, fin, that’s all folks. Equestria might not be perfect, but I’d never heard of any pony starving to death in it.
I sighed into my coffee. Least I still have that going for me, I thought. Some decent caffeine. Ponies, apparently not the biggest fans.
I had woken up alone. It was pretty late in the morning, Lyra and the two kids had already left by the time I’d stumbled out of my bedroom. My breakfast consisted of one and a half slices of bread, washed down with the coffee I was still drinking. It wasn’t nearly enough to sate, but there was nothing I could do about it.
I wasn’t looking forward to another endless day of manual labour, as good a cause as it was for. It was either gonna be another few tens of square metres of ploughing soil, or carrying another few huge trunks of wood to and fro. Both were back-breaking in their own ways, though a little less literal for the former. I was most likely going to opt for a day on the field, this time. It was getting more difficult to carry wood like that, anyway.
First things first, though. The now-empty mug of coffee I set down on the counter. First Minister duties, if any.
I stepped outside, onto the beginning wisps of what could charitably be called a street. On the opposite side sat the front of a house, a line of dirt packed down from thousands of hoof-falls separating the two of us. Main Street, I thought, with some small, strained amusement. Some ponies were already starting to give names to some of the most commonly used paths here. Main Street (or rather Mane Street – fuckin’ ponies, man) was the first to be named, by virtue of being the busiest through-way in general, since it lead to my house, the sawmill and the dining hall, all of which seemed to have begun serving as landmarks to the ponies. Right now, though, it stood empty.
I ambled my way to the sawmill, now the de-facto meeting point for new arrivals, courtesy of Ambassador Blueblood. Only a few ponies crossed my path, who gave me quick waves or nods before continuing with their duties, whatever they may have been. I returned their greetings tepidly, with simple glances. It was all I could bring myself to do.
The sawmill was usually a quieter area in the settlement, despite my earlier expectations. Everyone had a roof under their heads at night at the moment, so more construction was shunted down the priority list in favour of tilling up as massive a farm as possible. The only ponies still working here were a few of Construct’s crew – the original lads that first arrived here with her. The remainder, camped just at the foot of the stairs leading up to the platform, were the new guys, along with Blueblood himself taking quietly to them.
He was the first to turn my way, prompting the rest to also follow along. “First Minister,” he called out, as I quickly stepped up to the group. “Good morning.”
“Yeah.” I was not in the mood for pleasantries. My ‘cynical arsehole’ mode was on full blast at the moment. “What have you got for me?”
“Three ponies,” he said, “from Equestria.” Blueblood’s capacity for mathematics remained boundless; four ponies stood in front of me, indeed.
“I see that,” I said flatly. “You get their details?”
“Of course.” A scrap of paper floated over to me, which I quickly plucked from the air.
“…Mmm. Two earth, one peg… all adults… hold on, pegasus metallurgist?” I quirked my eyebrows up. “That’s not something you see every day. What are you doing coming to me?”
The new pony looked rather uncomfortable under my sudden scrutiny. “…Business went bust, sir,” came the smooth contralto voice of the pegasus. “I had nothing else to rely on. Figured I’d throw my lot in with you. If you’ll have me, that is.”
“Hmm.” I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was causing my unwarranted suspicions towards her. Probably just my poor mood. Still, I couldn’t shake it off. “Odd talent for someone with wings. Then again,” I dismissed, “we’ve had weirder. Welcome to the Free State.”
I gave them my usual spiel, the one most new arrivals got, a more compressed version of my first speech from the day after I got back. The three were impassive, but I thought I got my message across nicely. The earth ponies were suitably cowed when I, ah… established the ground rules, but the pegasus chick only stared at me as usual.
The new ponies quickly scarpered away to their new duties as I turned to Blueblood. I waited until they were out of earshot before I spoke. “They seem odd to you at all, Ambassador?”
“Not to my knowledge, no,” he replied. “They’re not wanted or anything, First Minister, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Hmm.” I remained unconvinced, though in the end I figured it didn’t really matter. Besides, it probably was nothing anyway. Just my sunny disposition handing me another few scraps of itself. “Well, thanks for your help in any case, Ambassador. Was that everything?”
“Actually, there is one more thing,” he confessed. “Miss Construct wishes to see you. She says it is urgent.”
“Urgent, huh?” Something finally comes up that needs my attention. Gosh, it’s almost like I’m important, or something. “Not important enough to go find me immediately?”
“I was only asked to pass the message along,” said Blueblood.
“Alright, alright,” I relented. “If I see her, I’ll ask her. Thanks for your help, Ambassador.”
We parted ways. Blueblood trotted off to… somewhere. I still had no idea exactly what his duties entailed, when I wasn’t the one handing them out to him. I hoped for his sake he at least took some interesting books with him when he got here. Regardless, it was time to get started on my own work.
The second, great big fuck-off field of food.
Half the population of the Free State was here, working their flanks off to try to scrape out a living from this land. It was… almost gratuitous, how rabid we were in regards to it, though the reasons for it were self-evident. Many, many ponies were busy tilling rows of dirt, followed soon by those who planted seeds, or seedlings, or what have you. A few were talking one-on-one with those who were struggling, or couldn’t quite figure out technique. One was overseeing the whole operation.
The original milestone, three-hundred-sixty ponies’ worth of crops, was now out of the question. I couldn’t afford to take any chances with nourishment, any longer – certainly not with how meteoric our population growth turned out to be, this past week. This field, when I was done with it, would be fit to feed multiple thousands. At least two, preferably three. Overflow… well. There was no question where that was going to end up. I’d learned my lesson decisively, indeed. The still, from now on, was going to be fed from personal reserves, if I ever got around to it – the field was for the good of the whole population.
I shook my head, even as I took my place among the workers, and began digging ditches myself. The sight of this work, from a distance at least, rankled me something fierce, and no mistake. While I was doing it personally, it was okay. The gnawing hunger I was slowly getting used to; wasn’t starving just yet, after all. The work itself helped distract me from thinking more generally, something I was very glad for. I always was the kind of person to get swallowed up in the utterly tedious – the kind of person who genuinely enjoys doing data entry, watching numbers increment in real time, and so on.
At a distance, though, merely watching the work unfold in front of me, ponies struggling their way through laying the foundations of their lives here… it made me feel off. What really threw me off, though, was the first comparison my brain dredged up to what was happening here… an antebellum plantation. The similarities, to me, were depressingly striking. Work the field, or else. Even if the ‘else’ was technically thrust on me by them thanks to circumstances, rather than the other way around… blech.
The simple motions of digging trenches in the soil, a pony following behind me to fill them back up, cast the doubts in my mind away. This was work I knew how to do, and well. I’d been doing it for a few years, both here and back home, and essentially non-stop for the last four days too, out of the six I’d actually been First Minister, as it were. Somewhere at the back of my mind I was aware that doing the work along with the unwashed masses would earn me huge cred among them, which would build genuine, grass-roots legitimacy for my position. (Strange thoughts usually cropped up when I was in the middle of tedium like that.) Mostly, though, I was just happy I was making a difference.
Time flew. The sun flew along with it, slithering across the sky. Morning to noon, to something approaching evening. I felt… not great. Lunch was a short affair, just barely enough. Once again, I needed to oversee it personally, for all just-under-seven-hundred residents. (Hooves and his, and Lyra, I trusted enough to let them take themselves.) Nobody was happy about it, but what could they have done besides what they already were?
Morale was going down the shitter, and fast. No fancy speech of mine was going to stop that. I needed to give them something tangible to hold on to – the only thing that came to mind was a feast, which was less than wise. It’d certainly solve the problem we all were having. If only for another few, all-too-short days.
I hadn’t even been back on the field for ten minutes before the consequences of my decisions finally reared up to smack me across the face.
“Why are you doing this?”
An angry stallion was right in front of me, fuming at me. I suspected only my natural height advantage prevented him from getting his face all up in mine, but the glare he was throwing at me about made up for it. “You’re forcing us to work ourselves to the bone,” he accused. Slowly, but steadily, others around us were dropping their own duties, gearing up for a spectacle. “You’re starving us to our graves!”
“Yes. I am.” I didn’t bother denying the honest truth. “I don’t have any other choice. This is what I have to do, if I want any of you to live to the next harvest.”
His hoof stamp made clear what he thought of my clarifications. “Horseapples, ‘no other choice!’ You’re killing us! And you expect us to spend entire days breaking our backs out here?”
I cared little for his insinuations. My own hunger, fatigue, general sunny disposition and now his accusations were making fertile ground indeed for some good old fashioned burning rage. “Yes, I do,” I replied, trying to keep my temper even. “I’m expecting it of myself. And I’m doing it. That’s more than I can say for a few of you. If I don’t ration as carefully as I possibly can, none of us – none of us at all – will live to even September, let alone when these crops will actually mature. I am doing my best.”
The stallion’s opinion didn’t change. He began pawing at the ground, language I immediately recognised as fighting words. “Then you can get bucked! Your best isn’t good enough! Your ‘Free State’ is no different than the Crystal Empire! Filthy tyrant!”
Miraculously, he refrained from taking a swing at me. Just as well; if he’d tried, I couldn’t guarantee him walking away unscathed. His words had touched a nerve. I paid no heed to the still-growing crowd. “Tyrant?” I asked, incredulous. “You call me a tyrant for trying to save your lives? For trying to get you all under a roof at night? For trying to make sure you actually get what I’ve tried to give you? Tyrant?”
It was no use. He charged, yelling and howling, telegraphing his intent with all the subtlety of a traffic sign to one’s face.
A few things, first. One: I was very, very good at bottling things up. It was a trick I learned pretty early in, while I was abroad back on Earth, when I realised how crap life actually was. My friends used to give me crap for it, even, how I could seemingly turn my emotions off at the flick of a switch, something about a ‘serial killer vibe’ – and, even though to them it was just me going back to my resting face faster than most, they were partly right. Reduced affect display, they call it, most likely symptomatic of depression – I suspected, every so often, that I had a mild one, but I never went to the bother of a full-on diagnosis. It wasn’t much of a problem, in my day-to-day, so I left it be.
Two: there was a very nasty streak in me, somewhere deep down. Not to say that I was a complete monster, of course; doing good felt good, doing evil felt bad, etc. but, at the end of the day, I knew that I could do some deeply unpleasant things if I set my mind to it, and I would lose little sleep over them. That was where number one came in handy, actually, locking that shit down like El Presidente’s jail cell. Not to mention, y’know, going to prison myself would be a major bummer, as well as not being very physically menacing either way, good reasons to not actually go around being an arsehole.
Three: if number one fails, number two suddenly becomes a big fucking problem. I was, after all, only human, and was therefore not immune to throes of passion, positive or not – mental illness or not. If I got pissed off enough, and circumstances were poor enough, well. Suddenly, there was a better-than-poor chance the kiddie gloves might come off.
This idiot in front of me… oh dear.
He was an earth pony, a slightly-dirty yellow one with a surprisingly boring brown mane, and a cutie mark of two knots tied into each other, whatever that was supposed to represent. I couldn’t recall his name, and didn’t care. He was running full-charge at me, head held low, level with my stomach, probably intending to knock the wind out of me, down to the floor.
I only had to sidestep and kick my foot out to catch him out. He went spiralling to the ground, digging his muzzle into the freshly-dug soil. I stalked over and, before he could recover, plucked him into the air, holding him by the scruff of his neck like the world’s fattest, dumbest cat. I twirled him around to face me. He was still sputtering the dirt out of his mouth, but froze up when his eyes met mine.
“You think me a tyrant.” My voice was low and cold. A part of me marvelled at it; my anger was usually much less restrained. Perhaps that was the budding man of state in me, trying to work this to my advantage further as a decisive, collected leader. Whatever. “Because I ask you to work for your future, and because I work to see you through to that future. You believe that you should be able to sit in your little home, eating your little meals, and living your little life. Is that correct?” I didn’t bother to wait for a reply, and wouldn’t have listened to one even if he did work past his terror to give me one. “You think me a tyrant,” I repeated. “Let me show you what tyranny is, little pony.”
I spun on my heel towards the direction of the dining hall. The crowd parted before me at once. Practically the entire field was here around us. I glared down as many individual ponies as I could. “You lot.” Everyone cringed from that. “Take the next twenty minutes off. First Minister’s orders.” The sighs of relief and grateful smiles threatened a smirk out of me, but I held back. “Knob here needs a little lesson.”
The knob du-jour, himself, didn’t even try to resist, even as I frog-marched him over to the dining hall in front of practically the whole town, holding him up like a trophy kill the whole time. Not even a peep. Must have been that herd instinct I’d read about. Or maybe he just didn’t want to try his chances against me. To be honest, I was just glad he wasn’t flailing his hooves about like a twat. Earth pony magic might not be hot cakes against me, but a kick from a small horse was gonna hurt, and no mistake.
I kicked the door to the hall open (gently, of course, no reason to test its integrity), earning a whimper from the idiot. A brown pegasus was inside, almost leaping out of their skin from my dramatic entry. It was Construct.
“Fir…” She only got as far as the first syllable, mouth left open as she stared at the pony in my hand. I shot her a look that I hoped said ‘in a minute,’ and moved past her to the iceboxes at the back of the building. Construct, bless her heart, followed me.
“Here you go, little pony,” I said, unceremoniously dumping him to the floor in front of our food storage. He landed on his arse, and narrowly escaped faceplanting with quick applications of hooves on the ground. “Here’s your lesson.”
I threw open each icebox, one by one. I already knew what was inside them – that is to say, not much. Not much at all. There was still about a week’s food left, for all about-seven-hundred of us.
“Congratulations,” I told him. “You got me. Say the word, and I’ll step down right now.” He only stared at me, uncomprehending. Construct stifled a gasp, turning it instead into a little shaky inhale. I threw my hands in the air in mock defeat, taking a flippant tone of speech. “Actually, fuck it! I’m tired of this crap. Well done on your doubtlessly richly deserved promotion to First Minister.” Now, I cast a hand out to the boxes of food in front of him. “First things first, this food needs to get us through to our next harvest. We just had one a few weeks ago, so the next one should come out to about mid-October. Possibly early November. This here food’s enough for another week. Your job is now to make that stretch out to fourteen. Seventeen, if you’re unlucky.”
I shot him a profoundly unpleasant look, one he began trembling under. “Oh, and hey. We’ve got twenty-five foals with us too. Sure would be a shame if they all starved to death, eh? Thank fuck we’ve got all our houses ready, right? Four ponies each? Sounds about right.” I glanced at Construct, who had schooled her face into her usual impassiveness, except for a crease in her brow that I couldn’t exactly decipher the meaning of. “Which reminds me, we’re still attracting migrants to us, which we can’t feed and can barely house. Good luck!
“Oh, and also! Construct here’s got some news for you! Go ahead,” I nodded at her, then to the pillock.
A considerable pause came and went before she went ahead. “Our crops are failing.”
I sucked in air through my teeth. Pillock’s eyes had shrunk to pinpricks. He looked to be on the verge of passing out. I didn’t relent for a second. “Hear that, chum? Sounds like you won’t even be able to feed us all come harvest time! Sure sucks to be you, don’t it? Well, since you’ve got things well in, er, hoof here, I think I’ll let you talk business with your second-in-command.”
Nothing but silence. Pillock just fucking stared at me, wide-eyed. I returned it evenly – about as evenly as I could, at any rate. “No?” I asked him. “Doesn’t sound so good after all?” Finally, some gears turned in that brain of his, just enough for him to shake his head no. “Oh dear, and here I was thinking you could have sorted this business all out without extreme measures!” Finally, I dropped my faux-friendliness to growl directly into his ear. “Now listen to me, little pony. Call me a tyrant now, I fucking dare you. I dare you, you dirty little fucker.”
I abruptly stepped back, folding my arms behind my back. “Besides,” I said. “If I really was a dictator, I’d have sliced you up like a side of beef right there on the field. Consider yourself lucky.” I stuck a thumb out to the door. “Go on, then. Piss off.”
He pissed off.
I shook my head, walking up to shut the iceboxes again. “Fucking useless,” I muttered. I… probably could have handled that better. Faster, too. Nothing for it now, though, I figured, but at least I might have struck some of the fear of God into the idiot parade.
That display probably wasn’t going to inspire my loyal subjects with hope for the future, I reckoned. Better to be feared than loved, perhaps, but during hardship, fear becomes a lot easier to turn to hate… the downfall of every leader. Still, if that didn’t end up coming true, at least I’d have defeated my first public challenge to my leadership – no small feat by any margin. My first trembling step to making my position my own.
“First Minister?” Construct’s voice broke me out of my musings.
“Hmm? Oh, yes, right, apologies.” I waved a hand in the air in a circular, ‘et cetera’ manner, still facing the boxes. “Just needed to impress my authority on an idiot. Hopefully he won’t be a problem again. Not for a while, at least,” I grumbled under my breath.
“That’s not what this is about,” she said, walking up into my field of view. Now, a scowl had made its way to her face. “I meant what I said.”
“Huh?” What she said…?
…oh.
Oh. Oh shit.
“…You’re kidding.” I shook my head. “No, you’re kidding. You’re fucking kidding. This has to be a fuckin’ joke.”
“I’m afraid not, First Minister.” She inhaled, ready to continue, but I cut her off by spinning on my heel and all but running out of the dining hall backroom. Construct had to canter to match my pace. “The original field is at about a forty percent failure rate. The new, larger field is too young for accurate measurements, but I estimate at least sixty-five percent. Most likely more than that.”
I barged through the door, slamming my shoulder through the passage, not checking back to see if I’d let the door hit Construct on the rebound. I didn’t give a fuck. Bigger things were running through my mind. “This can’t be fucking happening. I don’t believe this shit, how can it be so fuckin’ bad? The worst I ever got was individual crops! Some bad seeds, maybe, dodgy potatoes from earlier on! Half the fuckin’ field…? Now?”
I kept mumbling to myself, barely even noticing the ground under my feet change to bare soil. I stopped, though, knowing I’d gotten to my destination, when I almost tripped over a budding head of cabbage. I turned my gaze out of myself and to the field itself.
Construct was right. Almost a full half of the tilled land was still bare. The crops that were growing, seemed to have been distributed at random, patches of leafy green jutting out wherever, interspersed with small chunks of empty earth. It looked like a field worked on by the blind.
“Whuh… bu…” I was lost for words. Syllables were the best I could do. This could not possibly be what was happening. What in the fuck was this? What was I supposed to do about this?
“We still haven’t figured out what’s causing it,” said Construct, finally catching up to me properly, coming to rest at my left. “Some of the crops still seem to be able to grow despite the inert field, but some are actually affected by it. It’s baffling.”
I wasn’t listening. I was too busy screaming internally. Well, it was more like anguished sobbing mixed with truly staggering quantities of exotic profanity, but it all added up to the same thing. Please try again later.
“It isn’t even limited to any specific crop, either,” continued Construct, taking a few tentative steps forward, before bending down to nose at a stalk of green. “It’s like some just refuse to grow. I’ve never seen anything like it. No pattern, no cause… the potatoes are all still fine, but the radishes, carrots, all the wheat is just gone. Everything else… might as well be a toss-up.”
“Heh…” I was this close – this close – to breakdown, fully expecting to snap in half and start cackling like a moron at the sheer fucking hilarity of it all… but I caught that last little snippet just in time. And my brain ran with it.
Potatoes?
Wheat?
Something came up to me, dredged up in the depths of my mind. A connection. A faint one, practically grasping at straws, but a connection nonetheless.
I wasn’t the one to plant the wheat on the smaller field this go around. I’d been laid out by heatstroke before I could even finish harvesting it, after all, and Lyra had put her hoof down, doing it herself, with Hooves’ help. By the time I was fit to go outside again, it’d all been finished already.
The potatoes, on the other hand… they’d been done with seed potatoes, the old-fashioned way. I’d been the one to pick the ones to go back into the ground myself, and had planted them with Deft’s help.
I inhaled. Breakthrough. “It’s gotta be sabotage,” I concluded. Construct whipped her head around to me, poorly-masked shock running through her. “I oversaw those potatoes myself, I had nothing to do with the wheat. This time, anyway. All the potatoes are fine, all the wheat is fucked. Make up your own mind.”
“…Sabotage?” Construct was less than impressed.
“It fits the evidence, sunshine,” I replied. “The simplest, dumbest explanation is usually correct. And this is certainly simple, and definitely fucking retarded enough.”
“Why would anypony sabotage their own food supply?” asked Construct.
Erk. “…An excellent question,” I conceded. “Guess we oughta ask around for the answer.”
“Assuming your assumption is correct,” she said. “If it isn’t sabotage, what else could it be?”
What else could it be? My mind spun tracks in mud at the question. It was still better than the alternative. “…It could be something with the ponies themselves?” I tried. “Hell, I grew food here just fine. Somehow, you ponies don’t have as much luck.” I snorted. “Inert fields… ponies just can’t do anything right without magic, huh?”
“I resent that remark,” said Construct, more playfully than I’d ever expected her to.
“That why you decided to work hooves-on for a living?”
…
Wait.
I plant crops in inert fields just fine. Ponies don’t.
I just about slapped myself in the face. Of course. My bloody un-magic touch. I pondered it for a few seconds, then decided to slap myself after all. Yeah. That sodding icebox debacle turns out to be the fuckin’ linchpin, eh…?
“First Minister?” asked Construct, alarmed at the impact of my palm on my face.
“That’s exactly it, Construct,” I said.
“What? Slapping yourself?”
“No, you dolt,” I exclaimed, exasperated. “I grow food here just fine! You don’t! You use magic, and I don’t! Fuck, I break the magic in those enchanted gems if I touch them! That’s gotta be it! If they don’t have any magic in them in the first place, they don’t need any more of it to grow!”
Construct was silent for a spell, mulling it over. “…That could explain it,” she finally said. “I’d need to consult with Thaum-agro to be sure, but your theory could fit. There was speculation about inert seedlings a while back, but…” She trailed off, frowning to herself.
“Get to it,” I said, breaking her out of her spell. “Do what you have to do to puzzle this shit out. If it’s plausible, we’ll… uh, figure something out,” I finished lamely.
Construct nodded, and took off at a steady trot. I watched her go for a while, before turning back to the field.
This… was not gonna go over well. Turns out a big chunk of our work was for nothing, and was probably going to need to be done again. I’d consider myself lucky if I kept my head on my shoulders after breaking that piece of good news to my lads. Then, realising that I was gonna have to do that work all over again too – and if I was right, literally all of that work – I couldn’t restrain a groan from escaping me.
Fuck this shit, I thought, turning around and trudging my way home, exhausted beyond belief. I need a break. Twenty minutes, sure… I don’t get paid nearly enough for this bullshit.