The Imperial City Underground was not a good place to live. It was, like sewers throughout all the known worlds, dirty, smelly, filled with unpleasant sights and smells. It wasn't bad enough that the Underground was the clandestine battlefield between Loyalist and Resistance forces, but it was also home and hunting ground to the cannibalistic scientific rejects known as Ghouls.
The Imperial City Underground was not a good place to live, but it was a excellent place to die.
Magdalena Delgado knew the hazards of the tunnels well. For the past year, she'd been forced to make them her home. She knew the cardinal rule to survival was to keep moving. Change your hiding places every few days, never carry anything you don't absolutely need, sleep light, avoid the deep tunnels, be ready to kill; these were the things that kept you alive. Forget any of them and you could be eaten alive by a Ghoul or, worse yet, become a 'volunteer' in one of the Tyrant's research programs. Given the choice between lunch of lobotomy, I'll choose lunch. At least the Ghouls won't try to convice you that it's for the greater good.
Magdalena had very good reasons for staying out of the hands of the authorities. Since she had been caught in the crossfire of a police assault that involved live fire in a public park, she'd been an active member of the Praetorian resistance.
The incident that the nightly news had called 'a scheduled police training operation' had cost fifteen innocent civilians their lives and wounded twenty others. Magdalena was one of the lucky ones that day. The bullet that grazed her head missed killing her by a fraction of an inch but it destroyed her right eye. The damage would have been easy to fix if she had been willing to go to the hospital but that would have brought her to the attention of the wrong people.
Magdalena was a Talent. In Praetoria, having super human abilities meant that you either joined the Powers division and became one Tyrant's attack dogs, or you kept them hidden and prayed you'd never be found out. In Magdalena's case, the situation was infinitely worse. Magdalena was a Telepath and that meant that you were automatically given over to the loving care of Precentor Tillman. Otherwise known as Mother Mayhem.
In Mother's care, her psychic abilites would have been measured, and encouraged, and trained for the good of Praetoria. She would have been put to work monitoring the thoughts of the public looking for any sign of disharmony. All in the name of the public good, of course. Finally, after she'd outlived her usefulness, and before she could regain any ideas of her own, the benevolent Precentor Tillman would burn Magdalena's mind to a cinder to keep herself young and beautiful.
The Resistance offered a way out, but not without a cost of it's own. Despite what the government claimed, the Resistance was far from a unified movement. The membership ranged from social reformers, who were looking for a peaceful transition of power to dedicated hardcore revolutionaries and anarchists who would love to see the Tyrant burn and Praetoria along with him. Joining the resistance meant walking a fine line between all of the factions; trying to be useful to all of them without becoming a threat to any of the others at the same time.
If she had any choice, Magadalena would be anywhere but here. For now though, the resistance was all she had.
The Imperial City Underground was not a good place to live. It was, like sewers throughout all the known worlds, dirty, smelly, filled with unpleasant sights and smells. It wasn't bad enough that the Underground was the clandestine battlefield between Loyalist and Resistance forces, but it was also home and hunting ground to the cannibalistic scientific rejects known as Ghouls.
The Imperial City Underground was not a good place to live, but it was a excellent place to die.
Magdalena Delgado knew the hazards of the tunnels well. For the past year, she'd been forced to make them her home. She knew the cardinal rule to survival was to keep moving. Change your hiding places every few days, never carry anything you don't absolutely need, sleep light, avoid the deep tunnels, be ready to kill; these were the things that kept you alive. Forget any of them and you could be eaten alive by a Ghoul or, worse yet, become a 'volunteer' in one of the Tyrant's research programs.
Given the choice between lunch of lobotomy, I'll choose lunch. At least the Ghouls won't try to convice you that it's for the greater good.
Magdalena had very good reasons for staying out of the hands of the authorities. Since she had been caught in the crossfire of a police assault that involved live fire in a public park, she'd been an active member of the Praetorian resistance.
The incident that the nightly news had called 'a scheduled police training operation' had cost fifteen innocent civilians their lives and wounded twenty others. Magdalena was one of the lucky ones that day. The bullet that grazed her head missed killing her by a fraction of an inch but it destroyed her right eye. The damage would have been easy to fix if she had been willing to go to the hospital but that would have brought her to the attention of the wrong people.
Magdalena was a Talent. In Praetoria, having super human abilities meant that you either joined the Powers division and became one Tyrant's attack dogs, or you kept them hidden and prayed you'd never be found out. In Magdalena's case, the situation was infinitely worse. Magdalena was a Telepath and that meant that you were automatically given over to the loving care of Precentor Tillman. Otherwise known as Mother Mayhem.
In Mother's care, her psychic abilites would have been measured, and encouraged, and trained for the good of Praetoria. She would have been put to work monitoring the thoughts of the public looking for any sign of disharmony. All in the name of the public good, of course. Finally, after she'd outlived her usefulness, and before she could regain any ideas of her own, the benevolent Precentor Tillman would burn Magdalena's mind to a cinder to keep herself young and beautiful.
The Resistance offered a way out, but not without a cost of it's own. Despite what the government claimed, the Resistance was far from a unified movement. The membership ranged from social reformers, who were looking for a peaceful transition of power to dedicated hardcore revolutionaries and anarchists who would love to see the Tyrant burn and Praetoria along with him. Joining the resistance meant walking a fine line between all of the factions; trying to be useful to all of them without becoming a threat to any of the others at the same time.
If she had any choice, Magadalena would be anywhere but here. For now though, the resistance was all she had.
Writer of In-Game fiction: Just Completed: My Summer Vacation. My older things are now being archived at Fanfiction.net http://www.fanfiction.net/~jwbullfrog until I come up with a better solution.