The Minotaur
"Lead two sheep to the butcher's, two oxen to the slaughterhouse, and make one of them understand that his companion will not die; the sheep will bleat for pleasure, the ox will bellow with joy. But man, . . . what is his first cry when he hears his fellow-man is saved? A blasphemy."
—Alexander Dumas
Chapter 1:
In the Kingdom of Atlas picturesque mountains are scattered about the landscape. One particular mountain is of sublime dimension and, at a time, it was the stop for many travelers. Yet the superficial grandeur of the mountain could not compare to the value of its innards. At its side is a tunnel, a decline into a mining operation within its belly. Going downward into the mineshaft one will pass the lamp fixtures, and other such accessories which accommodate the hollowing of a monolith, markings scattered at various levels to denote completed prospection; and upon reaching the inhabited the sector of the mine, where the laborers are found, there is a strange situation to witness: the laborers have no automated machinery and are instead mining the ore with simple tools like some extreme homage to olden practice. (Anyone who is aware of contemporary mining procedure will know that the practice has done away with sole use of pickaxes and shovels.) But the ore they mined was too odd to be handled by inaccurate mechanisms. The minerals possessed extraordinary properties, commodified for commercial and military use. To supervise the laborers are armed sentinels outfitted with helmets, armor, and rifles. The sentinels bark orders like wardens and herd the laborers like sheep. The laborers, the tattered and broken collective, work tirelessly until their allotted time is over and can never leave the mines. They lived in that suffocating place, working until they were either too old or too ill.
It is by this situation we find ourselves; a singular matter in the horrendous motion of life; this is the life for a faunus laborer, as the sentinels called them, but there is a far more appropriate description—slaves.
We can not talk of the enslavement of the faunus without discussing the faunus themselves. These strange humanoid creatures whose physical characteristics adopt qualities from various species in the animal kingdom. These bestial qualities were once only relegated to mammalian, but further intelligence finds their countenance extending to the insectoid, arachnid, reptilian, amphibian, and aquatic realms. (The aquatic faunus, by their nature, develop a marine disability on dry land.) Because of these differences in their countenance humans have feared the faunas, warred with them, subjugated them, occupied faunas territory and used their unique physiology in laborious activity.
Once a barbaric and bloody escapade has in the modern era become streamlined and bureaucratic, the process of trafficking slaves was to all parties but the faunas a matter of unassuming elegance. Throughout the realm, where orphans are created as frequently as any natural phenomena, it is commonplace for children as little as a year or reaching seventeen to be adopted by a sympathetic couple. The Schnee Dust Company owns a majority of these orphanages, and the children are given good homes. But rare in the adoption process are the faunus children. These unwanted youth are studied by the caretakers of the facility and if they are deemed able bodied and competent enough, the child, through a series of legal loopholes, nepotism, and loyalism, find themselves adopted by an inconspicuous couple. This child, feeling the hope and freedom of such wanting, is then whisked away in a carriage driven by their new parents. The fresh fantasy of a happy life with their new family pervades, expressed differently by each child's imagination. But rather than a new house filled with toys and home-cooked meals, they are taken to a local mining operation. On record they are living remotely in some province yet in reality they are to serve as the replacement or extra hand in the laborious machine, grow old and die.
Such is the case of the young faunus boy, who had just been brought to the once famed mountain. Per the standard procedure of the matter, the lad had arrived to the entrance via the family automobile. It was night and the supposed parents walked the child to the entryway where they exchanged words with the two stationed sentinels; there is a laugh between them—casual chit-chat, and after some evaluations of the child, who's confusion contorted to unease. After formalities have elapsed the sentinels cuff the fresh slave and drag him away as he kicks and screams and cries into the abyss. And the remorseless couple watch on while sharing a cigarette, and when the last tuff of ash has fallen, they head into their vehicle, their roles fulfilled.
In the cave boy was jostled by the sentinels, being dragged level by level to the bowels of hell as the air's density made his breath short and dry. Therein the boy resigned from his struggle. He could see the dull light of the mining lamps, the shine of a gem, and the vastness of the cavern. Eventually he was led to the current inhabited sector of the operation. Here the brighter bulbs assaulted his eyes, which had adjusted to the darkness. But in this light he could fully look upon his taskmasters: their sleek, colorless military-grade armor and their reinforced helmets which covered the entirety of their skull, save the exposed area of the mandible. He took a hard look at the sentinel's weaponry, the white rifles were fueled by the strange ore which was excavated. Instead of bullets it delivered beams of energy from the barrel. Each rifle had a dial with a spectrum of settings, if set to the far left the gun delivers a beam equivalent to a small taser-like shock; set to the far right, a terminal almost explosive blast expels from the barrel. The former setting is used to discipline the faunus and keep them in line if their pace should falter. The latter is a precaution to deal with the deadly creatures known to inhabit the depths of the mountain. Although there are some crueler sentinels who leave the dial turned to the right when disciplining the slaves, killing that faunus instantly. Upon these incidents the sentinel is blameless, and excuse the freshly charred corpse with their own forgetfulness to which setting had been toggled.
As the boy observed them one of the sentinels tugged the boy to his front.
"Look," said the sentinel; "this is your new home."
The boy shook in denial of the situation. Then he was dragged further into a more industrialized section. The sentinels presented the boy to a gentleman with a white suit who supervised the slaves who were toiling away at the higher levels above him. The suited man turned to the sentinels who approached, then looked down at the limp child before him.
"New one?" inquired the man in the white suit, his silver eyebrow raised.
"Yes, sir, a bull," replied a sentinel.
"Then he must be strong. . . "
The conversation became too technical for the boy to follow and, upon his frustration, he began to whimper, trying to appeal to the good nature of the suited gentleman. The white suited man paid no attention to the tears, and remained stoic and professional, and simply crouched to observe the boy properly, grasping the boy's cheeks with a pinch of his pale hands. There was a coldness to his grasp, like dead snow, yet his hands were of a softer sort, a sign, one can assume, of the pains of luxury. The man himself was pale, and if not for the look of health in his blue eyes one would assume him sickly. He must be an immaculate man of his own right as the dirt of the mines hadn't tarnished the quality of his cloth or dulled the silver sheen of his hair.
"He seems healthy enough," said the man in the white suit.
And upon rising he ordered the sentinels to take the boy away, and he continued to supervise the enterprise.
Having lost all will to resist the boy went limp as once again he was dragged into another area of the mine. It was a small and condensed community of nooks in the mine's unstable architecture where the slaves were stashed. Some faunus were chained together, others were chained to the sides of walls while they rested in the makeshift residential area. Without raising his head the boy glanced around, trying to avoid eye contact with his kin. They looked at him with a pity and understanding, some called out to him but received no notice. The sentinels then stopped short of an unoccupied hallow, just small enough to house a single soul, a chain hung from the stone wall, and with a show of teamwork the two sentinels threw the boy into the opening, and applied the chain to his cuff.
With their task reaching its finale, they gave the boy a number to which he would now be referred. One of the sentinels from some sick sense of decency wrote the number on a piece of paper he had in his pocket and gave it to the boy, as slaves who didn't respond to their number were beaten until their number could be written with the blood on the dirt. And after they completed the intake they left the boy to wallow in his fear and isolation. Here he wasn't a boy; he was a beast of burden, but a bull.