2. The King's Guard: Underused Facilities?

Well it seems the bloodthirsty generals got their way in the end. The rebels, those blacksmiths and tanners and fletchers and organisers of fancy balloons made of animal intestines, tried a peaceful protest, and in some ways succeeded. Sadly the onlookers were distracted, as always, by the extremists, who were obviously of the world view of ‘Well, we pay for all these guards to police us, don’t we? It’s our right to get smacked on the head with a truncheon when we’re being out of order.’ There were plenty of signs reading ‘Down with this sort of thing’ and ‘Stop punishing us for learning.’ There were no warning signs, that suggested things might ‘Roll like a drunken cow’ – that is, to go udders up.

The cynical believe there is no such thing as a peaceful protest; after all, a protest is born out of anger, and only intense anger at that. No one who would describe themselves as ‘a tad miffed’ would ever be moved to go down to the shed with the paints and cardboard and make themselves a sign. Let’s say that a throng of these angry people turn up to protest outside the palace, as happened recently. It is only logical that some of them will show their anger not by chanting ‘We Will Not Be Moved’, but by moving very violently towards the nearest person who looks like they might disagree.

But even aside from present events, or the idea that protests are naturally destined to boil over, the history of Mephoria can stand testament to the fact that sometimes people just like an excuse for a good old fight. The bar room brawl is a good example of this. Every local tavern has been the site of many a battle, whereby one person with a general grievance with another smashes a bottle on their head, and then the couple in the corner of the bar, twenty feet away, stop playing scrabble and inexplicably lay into each other. The woman who just popped in to use the privy gets tackled over the bar, and of course someone is slid down the length of the counter. When the local guards turn up to enforce the law and deflate the situation, they never fail to be completely baffled by the following exchange, which they will have with every participant.

Guards: ‘What on the shiny bonnet of Cheo happened here?’
Random Brawler: ‘We won. We showed ‘em good and proper. That’s the last time they do something like that to us.’
Guards: ‘Why, what did they do to you?’
Randon Brawler: ‘Er… dunno, but it must have been bad. Look how many people lost a tooth.’

These random acts of violence, whilst appearing everywhere, serve only to taint such protests. As is the way when honest people come together to protest in a nice manner – a sign is not too harmful, after all, until the sharp end is jabbed in one’s eye – their collective message is overshadowed by the minute quantity of people who stopped throwing insults before they’d even seen someone who was a member of the opposing side to them. Several of the King’s windows got smashed, and there is now a lot of cowering amongst the populace of Skyth, and even more vocalising of the fact that everyone is very lucky that King Pherron is nothing like his father, King Overly-Keen-With-The-Axe, as he was fondly referred to (mostly by people in the axe sharpening trade, it has to be said).

It is a problem in Mephoria, a land that has suffered many a mass book burning over the simple power of words, that a lot of the time people with an honest message go unheard because someone happens to be standing next to them with a large pike and an intense look in their eyes. These volunteer-mercenaries, as they might well be deemed by the Scholars of the Treetop Libraries, are like water looking for a gorge. They do not care what shape it is, or in which direction it is trying to go, as long as it provides them with a vague way of getting from A to Bloody Well Take This, You Opressive Pig-Type Person.

They would argue that the situation is roughly similar to this: a man chops off your leg and he’s fine, but if you throw your shoe at him (a shoe, they rush to point out, which is now unneeded) that makes you some kind of anarchist. Yes, they say, so perhaps he claimed he was doing it under the guise of necessity. But I’ve never heard of gangrene before, and anyone can go around calling themselves a doctor.

So the generals that so thirsted for a fight got one, and although out of tens of thousands of protestors, only nineteen women, seventeen men and one small pig (whose defiant act of public urination could have simply been a coincidence) were involved in violent acts, the full might of the King’s guard was unleashed, and one thousand heavily armed soldiers careened into the protestors and forced them to abandon their cause. And so it is in Mephoria, in Skyth the Capitol City of the Pherron Realms, that repressed people voicing an innocent protest have been swept aside, and their protests will go unnoticed, not because they did nothing, but because a few of them did too much.

Epilogue

It is not all doom and gloom in Mephoria, however. It was a particularly prosperous day for melons, as the fruit was considered the best, and cheapest, impromptu missile. It was not such a good day for windows, however, as they were mainly what the melons went through.