A year ago, a plague had stricken this quiet village, consuming its and its people slowly but surely. The first one to fall ill with the hallucinations and high fever associated with the disease had done so half a year before he finally died, a look of pure anguish carved into his features to greet the gods with. Bodies, everywhere.
A priest came to the town two weeks ago, and said they should be burned, not buried, because of the pure mass of them.
Bodies, everywhere.
And among them were the parents two small children, a boy, named Alexander and his sister, a girl named Elizabeth.
9 years later.
A sunny day greeted Alex as he turned over in bed, the sun spilling in his eyes and awakening him forcefully.
"Damned sun!" he growled, reaching to close the drapes. "I knew I'd forgotten something when I went to sleep"
After sitting in bed for a while, constantly trying to get comfortable, Alex gave up, yawning, and got out of bed. He looked around, but his sister was nowhere to be found.
Peeking out the windows, he saw that the sun was almost at its peak. His sister had gone to her job already. No doubt she had left the drapes open. Oh, well.
After a quick breakfast, he went outside and walked over to his hangout out behind the farmhouse on the other side of town.
Aeril was quiet these days; the epidemic of 9 years ago was still a thorn in the side of its inhabitants, who were greeted slowly on roads. The stigma of being an Aerilan was almost too bad to bear. Not only had the town fathered a sickness that killed too many to be counted, but it had grown worse and worse since the sickness, with wandering gangs patrolling even in broad daylight. Even if they weren't the worst of their kind, they certainly added a little too much spice to the quiet life of the town for most residents' stomachs.
Alex and his friends were one of them.
Alex rounded a corner on the main road, which wasn't much more than two ruts scarring the face of the earth where the carts and carriages passed daily, and passed into an alleyway between two buildings.
The foul stench of fecal matter wafted around him, but he kept to the side and ignored it. The sun hit him again as he walked out of the shadows behind the building.
Damn, he thought, the boys'll kill me if I don't get there soon.
A slight tinge of rosemary hit his nostrils. Oh, crap, he thought. He upped the tempo his pace to that of a slight jog, still keeping the façade of a walk.
"Harrumph!" an indignant female coughed behind him.
Seemingly startled, he whirled around to face his current girl, serving girl from the tavern.
"Hannah!" he blurted. "Imagine seeing you here!"
Damn you! I need to get somewhere. He looked around for a place to escape to, but finding none, he turned his full attention to her.
"Yes, yes. Imagine that I wouldn't catch onto your little trysts with other girls and wait for you on your normal route to 'the Boys.' Hah!" Hannah said, her voice strong and resolute, quavering only a little. "I thought we had something together, you and I! When the girls told me 'Alex's a bastard! He doesn't give a rat's ass about anyone.' I told 'em that you said it'd be different…" Her resolve seemed to be breaking. "Between… us two…" She put her head down into her hands.
Taking this chance, he pushed past her and ran into another alley. After a few minutes, he glanced back, but she wasn't there. She didn't even seem to have followed him. Damn, that was close.
He looked around at his surroundings, realizing that he wasn't too far from his hangout. He dashed to it.
At the hangout, three boys sat. One on a rotten crate that looked as if it would cave in, another on a bale of hay, staring off at the meadows, and finally the last lying in the grass, throwing a rock up into the air, and catching it as I came down. These boys constituted "the Boys" and together they had caused mischief and mayhem throughout the city for going on 3 months.
Obviously they didn't have seniority as far as being around the longest as a group, but they did have the unmistakable advantage of having all of their members come from the top spots of other gangs.
The gangs of Aeril weren't too rough. They mostly kept to themselves, excepting the minor squabble between groups and a more than a few cases of theft, both major and minor, which made people scared to unlock their doors at night.
Seeing Alex, the members sat up, slowly, annoyed with their self-chosen leader.
Alex stood his ground and addressed them:
"Last night, I was with a girl, and I didn't get to sleep 'til late so leave me alone, alright? More than once, you guys've come in late or not at all and I haven't made a peep"
"Yeah," said one. "But we boys aren't our leader"
"That may be so, Frankie, but even a leader is human," retorted Alex. "Any questions before we start our proceedings for the day"
"Yeah, we do," said the other two, in chorus. Each was a facsimile of the other, right down to the brown bowl cuts they wore proudly on their heads. "Why are you leader"
"Because I'm the smartest bastard in this lot, Castor," replied Alex nodding to the one on the hay, then saying: "Pollux," and nodding to the one on the grass.
"You're the only bastard in this lot," they prodded. "We all have fathers, right?"
"Let Alex speak," said Frankie, rising to his full height of seven feet. Frankie was by far the most intimidating of the Boys, muscular and towering. He had made it up to the top of another gang, the Muds, by doing muscle work, and when they refused to make him leader, citing that his intelligence was sub par, the locals had found them strung in a bunch, each by his ankle, to a high clothesline and crying, looking like a bunch of bruised-flesh colored bananas.
"Yea, whatever," they replied softly, shrinking far below their own already small statures as they could. The trick with Castor and Pollux was that, as twins, they went from town to town, pulling cons where they had an alibi because one was in the bar the whole night before when the other looted everything from the shops. The only problem with this type of gig was that they could only do it for a while before someone caught on. That's when their mouselike sizes and their sharp wits got them out of town, post haste.
"Yes, yes. But you Dioscuri," he said, the twins wincing as he said their self-titled subgang's name. "Can hold an election to vote me down, if you want. I don't mind, really. Being leader and coming up with plans is hurting my head."
Alex, though, was the mind in the gang, even with the twins' parallel processing at work, and that was where his expertise at planning large-scale cons and heists came in, and thus, his leadership qualities.
"No, we didn't mean that," they said quickly. "We just want to know when we can sleep in too is all"
"A thirst for knowledge, now, have we?" chuckled Alex. "Well, you can't always get what you want, but from now on, unless there are plans, we each get a day that we can have off, as long as we notify the others in the group, ok? But for that day we forfeit our right to object to the decisions of the group"
Alex thought for a second, then continued: "On my day, everyone will get the way off. We wouldn't want some half-baked ideas coming out of a tribunal of the three of you," he said, adding: "No offense, Frankie"
"None taken"
"Wish we could say the same," said Castor, sighing.
"Ok, then are we in agreement?"
"Yea, two days off is always fine with us," said the twins.
"Wait…. two?" said Frankie, a look of enlightenment coming to his face. "Oh! Okay, yeah that sounds fine"
"Well, now," said Alex. "What've we got on the ol' agenda today…. Twins"
"Nothing. We decided we want to take the next week off to visit family"
"Wait… what? The great twins, the Dioscuri, have a family to go to?" said Alex in mock incredulity. "Yeah, well, is that ok with you, Frankie"
"Yea, Al, I'm still sore from the job two days ago, a week off sounds good"
"Then it's settled," Alex said with authority. "Meetings adjourned…. For the week"
Well, that was worthless, as always, thought Alex, as he walked away into town. I guess I have to break up with Hannah officially now… damn… won't this be fun? And she was actually decent.
He walked into the tavern and ordered some bread and meat, with which he intended to make a rather large sandwich and eat while he waited for Hannah to start her shift, which, he glanced at the clock in corner of the tavern, was in 3 hours. Oh, well. I guess I'll play some cards, he thought distractedly to himself as he yelled to the owner for his meal and sat down at a dark table tucked away in the back.