Chapter 1: A New Leaf
Clink, clink, clink.
Counting the Mayor's money had become a chore. For years, this would-be "leader" — in reality a lowly villager like herself, blessed by circumstance, but still a hypnotized pawn in the capitalist hellscape they existed in — swept in and out of the office, day in and day out. The ever-present smile never breaking, the glossy-eyes never cracking to reveal the pressure, which must've been intense, bearing down on him every day.
Every day, wearing another one of those stupid hats. Did those things cost money? Isabelle wondered if perhaps the Mayor's money would be better spent on repaying that damn raccoon than perfecting his style. Certainly, the townspeople had grown to idolize her boss; they'd lived every day for the past several years in a sort of… makeshift harmony, never realizing just how tortured their leader was, never realizing that the new leaf he'd promised they'd turned over had cost blood.
Or, well… not blood, literally. But certainly the leash was growing tight.
There were times when the shih tzu felt for her employer. Since the beginning, she'd been content to serve as his secretary, making a measly amount of bells for just how many logistics she had to juggle and numbers she had to crunch. They were in mountains of debt, debt that truly never seemed to cease but only grew bigger as the shadowy lender's pockets grew deeper. Their malevolent benefactor's store continued to grow larger, and the island's amenities more extravagant, but at what cost? She could see it wearing on the Mayor's psyche each day. Perhaps no one else could, but… she knew him better than most. She could see when he was breaking down.
It was Monday morning, and he was late. The Mayor was never late, especially not recently — a pretty nasty bug had started spreading through town, leaving him with more to do and less distractions to encounter on his way to the office from his home. Granted, since everything had started stirring up the shih tzu noticed all too often the Mayor had been neglecting his duties for his decor hobby.
She'd caught him on the computer designing new wallpaper patterns weekly. You'd think that was his job or something, but no: taking care of his citizens was his fucking job.
The jingle-jangle of the front door opening shook her out of her thoughts, and she looked up from her paperwork — reports on the prices of turnips at Nook's Emporium this week, unsatisfying as usual — to see him standing there, that dumb stare on his face. In a brand new fucking t-shirt, that he'd no doubt sewn himself over the weekend.
The door slammed shut behind him and his face was shrouded in shadow, as the small-framed golden dog hadn't bothered to turn on any lights besides her desk lamp. After all, if he wasn't going to save any money, she'd at least do her part by saving on the goddamn electric bill.
"Good morning, Isabelle," he waved at her. He reached up and flipped on the lights. Isabelle blinked as the brightness attacked her pupils.
"Morning, Mr. Mayor," she sighed, her annoyance evident. She'd become less peppy and cheery about the state of affairs when they were in private recently, saving her energy for pretending everything was well and good in the public's eye.
For a moment, the Mayor just stood, and Isabelle could almost see his dimple muscles squirm to keep the smile on his face. This motherfucker was in over his head.
How had they ended up with such a crackpot for Mayor? No — how had she been fooled into believing this idiot, with his lack of governmental experience and unusually eclectic passion for the equally-unusual hobby combo of interior design, bug-catching, and fishing, was actually someone that could forge a successful new community? Had she been so blinded by optimism that she'd just fallen under his spell, just as he'd been duped by Tom Nook, that dumpster-diving bastard?
She shuddered at the mere thought of the racket-running raccoon's name.
As long as they lived under that capitalist shill's regime, they would never be free. She could see that now, but she worried the Mayor would never awaken from Nook's hypnosis.
"…those the turnip prices?" he asked, pointing at the papers splayed about on her desk.
"Yes, sir," she bit her tongue, sliding them towards him.
"What's the damage?" he asked, but with a sense of dread lying beneath his tone that betrayed his pessimism.
"I think you know it's not good, sir," the dog-girl frowned, leaning back in her rolling chair and sliding toward the back wall of the office, inexplicably plastered with wallpaper that resembled a shoddily-drawn, pixelated version of a fluffy creature from some film the Mayor had called My Neighbor Totoro. Isabelle hadn't heard of it, hadn't been able to find any traces of it in the museum or the library, and had triple-checked: none of her neighbors had ever gone by the name 'Totoro.'
The Mayor's face went pale as he looked at the returns.
"87 bells today," Isabelle droned. "Tom Nook is robbing us like the goddamn pansy-asses we are, sir, excuse the French."
"Tom Nook is an entrepreneur," the Mayor bit back, glancing over his shoulder as if he was worried the raccoon might hear them, as if the bastard had eyes and ears all over the island. Isabelle wasn't totally sure the paranoia was unfounded; that raccoon was fucking sneaky. "He's just — going with the market. Market's just bad today."
"For goodness's sakes, Mr. Mayor," Isabelle shouted, slamming her fists on the desks and standing up, a veritable explosion in a tiny golden dog's body, "Tom Nook makes the fucking market."
"Please, Isabelle," her employer waved her off, "it changes with the wind."
"No, sir," she growled through gritted teeth, "it changes with his whims."
"Isabelle," the Mayor snapped, his glance darting from the returns to her face, "you will tone down this insolence when you're speaking about Tom Nook. We owe the existence of this town to him!"
"Aaargh!"
Isabelle's golden paw wrapped around the handle of her candy umbrella, leant precariously against the desk, and swiped it up toward her boss's face. It smacked against his cheek with a loud thwap, and he toppled sideways, slamming onto the ugly-patterned carpet, the turnip returns launching into the air and floating unceremoniously to the ground around him.
Isabelle gulped, her grip tight on the candy umbrella's hilt. What the fuck had she just done? She dropped the blunt object, racing to the Mayor's side and kneeling next to him. The side of his skull already looked to be bruising. Somehow that irritating hat hadn't been knocked off his too-round cranium.
She could feel her breath speeding up. She edged closer and closer to hyperventilation as the thought of all the different punishments she'd face for being mean to another member of the town. What would the Mayor do when he finally regained his senses? Would he fire her? Would he banish her from the island? Even worse, an incident like this was basically social suicide. She'd never be welcome at the annual Bunny Day celebration ever again.
"Euuughhhh," the Mayor rolled onto his side, taking a hand and placing it against his cheek. "Isabelle… what are you doing?"
Isabelle didn't have a good answer. One second she'd been looking at him as her boss, the person in charge of her — incompetent but still deserving of her respect, well above his real pay grade but also certainly above hers — and then suddenly in the blink of an eye, he'd turned into a worm right before her very eyes, the one thing standing between their island and the evil tyrant who kept them pressed under his thumb, forever working tirelessly to pay off a debt they'd never escape. A go-between that really only worked for Tom Nook's greed, never climbing high enough out of the pit of capitalist despair their small community had been forged in to enact true, everlasting change.
And in that blink of an eye… she'd done something about it. She'd become a girl of action. She'd become a dog in the fight. Without thinking about it for even another moment, her golden paw grasped the letter opener off of her desk and jammed it into her boss's nonexistent neck.
He let out a helpless yelp, a pathetic whine, before the gloss over his eyes became permanent and he became forever reset. Isabelle knelt next to him, blood spurting onto her fur, her quickened breathing finally beginning to regulate again as she confronted the reality before her. There was only one way out of this capitalist catastrophe: kill Tom Nook and take back their town.
Until this moment, she hadn't even realized they could bleed.
To be continued.