CHAPTER 4: THE ONE TRUE HAT, or ON THE QUEST FOR GENTILITY, THERE ARE MANY FALSE TURNS
Louise woke with a start, as opposed to an end. An end would have been preferable.
That dream she had so had had portended something. Unfortunately, it didn't seem true now. She had dreamt of frozen hands, grasping the emptiness of the air, standing out from the snow drifts, through great gales, reaching as for life. They were buried in the whiteness, a whiteness that smothered. It seemed heads on pikes weren't enough. This was an empire's retaliatory measure, rarely in employ to keep its effect. Never seen by herself, except here. It was to come for her. For her mother's destructiveness had to be creative; creatively destructive, innovative to the death. Karin. A heavy wind blew in through the open window, slashing at Louise's watery eyes.
She felt her face encrusted. She felt it in her still-there hands. She felt it covered in tears, blood, and spit.
Yet none of this concerned her. It was secondary. Her concern was to first be with herself, over her actions. They had convinced she herself was the issue, and to police herself with honor, that fool's pretense of gentility.
"What have I done?" she thought oh so tritely. She pulled herself up, appealing to a sense of fatalism to keep herself going. "I did what I did. It is done."
Her eyes swept through the room. It would never be clean again, even if she did lower herself to sweep it thoroughly and truly.
"After all I have done... what can I do?" she asked aloud. "Who can accept me now? Who will ever? What can I do? Please, Brimir, forgive me."
Louise was never one given to religion, but now she fell to her knees. If one were to do so out of despair anyway, it would be best to turn it toward a possibly pretending to be productive purpose then.
There was always the chance divinity and fate twinned together, intertwined, could answer her calls- and, in an unwanted way, they did.
"Louise, what is done is done. Do not be ashamed. It is by no fault of your own that the wheels of destiny turn."
"They... died... from me. By my hand."
Hat moved in closer to Louise and placed his hand-pipe upon her low facing shoulder.
"That is not true. I do not have hands, and I was the one who killed them."
"But the master is responsible for the familiar, which makes-"
Louise was interrupted by Hat licking her eye, seeking to whet his appetite for the coming delicacy of tears.
"WHAT WHY DID YOU HOW THE IN THE WHY?!"
She turned her head in shock and slammed face first into Hat. Hat retreated.
Cold fury, refreshingly icy, filled her to the brim once more. "Why did you do that, Hat?"
Hat sighed. "Do you know of subtext, Louise? Honestly, your appraisal as a non-noble is beginning to seem more and more proper."
"Answer me."
"Fine then, yes. I suppose I am here to cheer you on so, not to give rise to more self doubt."
Louise drew her wand and pointed it to Hat. Hat, unfazed, hopped upon the nearest, and one and only table.
"Louise, you certainly did not wish for me to lick you in the eye. Yet I did. Therefore, you are not responsible for my actions."
"What? Don't be silly. If that were so, then I would not have a familiar. Then I would not be a mage. Or I would not be able to control my familiar. And I would not be a real mage then, either."
"Ah, but our case is special, Louise. The majority of familiars have no thoughts. I am quite given to thought. I am of thought, so much so. You should expect a difference."
Louise drew her wand down, then snapped it back up.
"Honeyed devil's words. I don't believe you. You seek not only to defy me, but subvert and control me now. I will never abandon what honor I have."
"What honor you have left?" Hat chuckled darkly as some fine, expensive, aged chocolate that would pair well with some fine, expensive, aged wine would. "You have two choices before you now, Louise. You can stay the current course with I, the gracious Hat familiar of your dreams. Or, you can face their 'justice' at the hands of the Church, the nobility, and the country. All for nothing doing- doing naught but what was natural. The familiar reflects the master, as you would say."
Louise lowered her wand, but remained snappily angry for the red alert of a show that most given to the weak gods of rationality abandon ships for. "I shall need some time to consider this matter further. For now, I shall retire to my quarters."
So she moved to her wardrobe, realizing that she was already within her quarters and had nowhere to go based off what she might have said.
Through the high quality wooden barrier between the two, Hat spoke up. "Louise, understand that everything I do is for your own good, your own sake. For our good. Someday, someday soon enough, you'll understand."
He made a sweeping, hat-bodily motion, like a wild, motile trunk scrambling in a humid morass-filled jungle of green, across the room. She tried the wardrobe's door.
"Blood may be spilled across the length of this room. It may be splattered on your face, body, and self. But do you feel on your hands? No? Then I have succeeded." From certain perspectives, technically and morally, Hat's words might be even viewed as the truth.
Louise broke through the door and slammed it shut. It was a tight squeeze, jamming herself in that wardrobe, no matter how fine it was (although it did, admittedly, make the experience a little more palatable... and lamentable, but sometimes, one so wishes to revel, or at least find solace or sympathy, in the destruction of something beautiful), but she managed to fit. Now then, it was time to sulk.
"That someday better be very soon to be soon enough. The stains and blood from the duel were hardly even washed off by the time these new ones came."
Her indignation held true. It is difficult and unbecoming of a noble to deign to engage in the cleansing of their clothes, no matter if it did rhyme and thus would be coupled with the enjoyable activity of flensing and commonly was required after such. For this one occurrence of such belongs to the domain of the uncouth servants' ways. It is a sign of true gentility, all would know, to lack these basic life skills. There are lowers for that.
Hats, the signs of the highest of gentility, know this more than all others might feign to. They are not washed, but preserve and persevere on their own, serving as stoics forever marching forwards do. Only the unworthy might wash or be washed; those that hold a candle subserviently to nobility but do not know of gentility, like of straw hatkind. To say otherwise is to operate on a different distinction of nobility; that is to say, one that is not at all.
And it is widely known that...
"I am right," as Louise whispered to herself. Wherever the future took Louise, she would travel. And master, or make, the road. No one had ever told her the road to gentility would be easy, and it would have been apt to assume it would be hard, as objects without much definition often have a pesky predisposition toward being difficult to obtain. But she was so resolved now. And she had even found a way to continue the course without conceding the argument, if what had transpired could even be called such from views separate from her own. Regardless of whether the events existed or not, those views that do not matter, actually. That was her genius for justification showing; her greatness in this was her greatest part of the whole. Louise does not argue- she finds out whom is misinformed, and informs them. At that flat planet at the center of the Universe where all by the total name, given and surnamed, and with other names between those two together, of Louise Francoise le Blanc de la Valliere do exist as the stars about always rotate about them and rules of capitalization, amongst many other rules, bereft so as to be unknown, one pink wonder stood and shined.
She could justify well. Well enough to lead.
凸
Louise stood alone in the Academy's courtyard, Hat astride her head, but not truly worn. Nor was he truly asleep. Merely resting to regain his strength, as one often does following a hefty meal. A befitting repose for the repository of digestion within is necessitated at times.
In the distance, a gray shape approached, delineated, and came into full detail. Wardes. Her fiance. Her hero. The one who had groomed her in her childhood, and in every possible way that term might be so applied.
Louise, for all her stupidity in effect, was not stupid in the metaphorical heart, heart signifying not the pumping of blood, or even feelings, but one's mind. She knew that if she was still standing here, and Wardes was coming, she had to accept it. And she had better be beaming about it. It would be for the better in that manner.
After all she had done, she was alive. The Princess had spared her one last time, leaving her to house arrest in the Academy, her final fate up to her family, and her family had it in mind to spare her, just barely. No punishment of death was forthcoming, but she could never expect her family to ever show any shred of sympathy or what little love they had collectively before ever again. Even Cattleya had to be disgusted by the news. This was the best she could expect: sent off to be married to Wardes, a man so generous as to still accept her, and, for her, to serve the family so politically. To serve as a pawn-piece in penitence.
Yes, Wardes came on behalf of the noble le Blanc family. As Captain of the Griffon Guard, he would have come anyway to accompany Henrietta's official coming visit to the Academy, but he had left his normal duty for this. It warmed Louise's heart a bit to know that that man who had held her, stood by her side in her youth, and said words of comfort and sweet nothings of content and contentedness had loved her wholly. Even now, he came for her. Hot tears slipped down the length of her cheeks, and Hat did not lap them up. No. He was resting.
Wardes' magnificent figure sauntered over to her, his visage fantastical to Louise's disbelieving eyes. He said nothing. There was nothing to be said. Nothing needed to be said. He came in closer, moving to pull Louise into a hug. Louise collapsed into his arms, her crying accelerating into sobbing, then bawling. He was set to smile in a sinister way, as if a plan long in the making had come to fruition sooner than expected. He was set to pat her on the head, set to compliment her for defending her honor, to tell her to not listen to the others, and to reassure her that all was well, and that all manner of all matters would be well.
Louise made as if to say something. "Shhhh," Wardes whispered. "You're in my hands now, little Louise. Whatever they say you've done, I'll be here for you."
Louise lost herself in his arms. There was no longer a her and him. It was only the two of them, together. It was an eternity of union, an eternal union meant to be. They were to be bound in holy matrimony- but that was only an acknowledgement of the bond in their souls, of what was meant to be. The two of them would become one; they would stay one, as they were now. This moment was for all time.
Wardes was a man of wealth and taste, and Louise was-
"Sweet imperious Brimir," Louise said when she tilted her head up and caught sight of something beyond her best nightmares.
Hat awakened with an implacable bellow, shouting a battle cry long forgotten and lost to the ages. "THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!"
He swung to Wardes, claymore materializing by him, and forcibly detached the man's head. His head was locked in an expression of utter incomprehensibility, neither understanding nor capable of being understood. The execution complete, the head rolled away, and green energy leaked from, then came in a torrent from, Wardes' body. It went into the air, through Hat's sword, and into Hat himself, his monocle swelling with fresh power.
Hat pointed his levitating weapon, longer than his own body, to Wardes' body, as if it were still defiant in any challenge. "There can be only one... I." Hat whispered. "You who would wear the brimmed hat... you have been tested and found wanting."
A pause. Then, Hat raised his bloodied blade to the Heavens. "I! AM! THE ONE! AND ONLY!" The blood came off in a singeing flash of white, and the green energy disposed of itself.
Bow before the truth, for it is blinding.
Louise's eyes had been closed during the bulk of the killing, but had managed to catch the last parts of it; the killing blow, all important in and of itself, sufficiently finely. Now, Louise's eyes gazed over to the new body made and proceeded to glaze over, becoming an empty shell in color and form. "Hat... what did you do?"
Another pause. Hat lowered his sword and faced to Louise.
"What was proper," he said. "I did... what was proper."
"Proper?" Rage surged through Louise, the stages of grieving advancing rapidly once more, and resurrecting her once more. "Cutting off heads is proper?!"
"That is correct. Oh, technically, a fair point though, thank you for reminding me, so let us learn and be learned together of this apprising: it is not proper, for it is right and also proper. Though, truthfully, it is a matter of perspective. If you must take issue with this, which I suggest you do not, you should very well take issue on the quibbling form that is how some cultures have an alternate, alternative, alternating viewpoint, much as that 'alteration' of a word itself acts out. You see, some cultures view the cutting off of heads not as right and also proper, or the set phrase of right and proper, but proper, which may or may not be the case in this local land's culture, though, by your reaction, I do not think it to be. Simply keep in mind to not be close minded and broaden your worldview; for us to be effective intercultural communicators and engage in a productive dialogue, I would suggest that you realize that, in some cultures, it is perfectly normal, entirely appropriate in some contexts, or even commendable behavior to decapitate one's apparent appointed lover. In summary, who are we to judge what is proper? Who are you to, you should particularly ask. Keep the bias of your privilege in mind and realize another being's rational reasonings for their positions."
Louise breathed in deeply, preparing to unleash a volley of unbridled, hastily worded rage.
"And remember that you have no right to the condescending, impetuous, excessively judgmental, jerk of the knee, appropriating ethno- and class-centric opinion you are surely about to express freely," Hat gave in addendum.
Louise was already inured to the worst effects of Hat in excess. Rather than to go catatonic as before, this time she sat down on the soothing, unstained grass and stared downward before opening (with insulting) dialogue again. "You're worse than... nothing compares."
"That wasn't my 'appointed lover,' Hat," Louise said. "I have known Wardes since childhood. Along with the Princess, he always stood alongside me. In fact, he was more of a guiding light than her- after all you did, he was coming to help me. As for before, it was the same: he was always there to comfort me in times of trouble. He was my hero; the epitome of nobility to me, selflessly working toward a better world. I was a little girl without magic, a noble lost in a world all about that which I did not have, and he took it upon himself to watch over me. He was going to marry me, the one no one else would ever take, to keep watching over me forever. And now, one swing from you, and you've undone the weight of our shared history, betrayed everything we built. You've... I've betrayed all that."
Hat had a close call of a near smirk. "Louise... do you honestly believe that tripe, that ocean drainage of a mound of collated, concentrated tripe refined, about that man? Please, he could not be trusted. He was only going to exploit you."
Louise said nothing.
"You must have seen his face. His head. Look past your school girl's frenzied first love and you'd see it- his hat. It was wide brimmed."
"So...?! You are a hat! Oh yes! That's right! You, the hat, you fool fabric, can't be trusted! I see! Thank you for showing me the way... I see... fool... f-fool."
"Exploit me?" Louise continued on, as if demanding explanation for some servant's excusing for a rudeness. "As if... he could..."
Taking Louise's screaming silence as a sign to continue, Hat did. "Yes, that man had a wide brimmed hat about him. The hat of ambition. And never forget that a hat is the truest sign of one's character. Hats suffice and show where emotion and words cannot. A normal hat was not enough, and so he had to have the greatest expanse possible. This was a sign of his ambitions, Louise. He would have used you. Exploited you. He could not have been trusted. Even wanting to use him, if it had ever occurred wholly to you, or so how your family of fellow nobility but no gentility, might have thought, would have turned out poorly. He would have stood in the way any way you cut it, by my assertions. Estimations, let us say. Thank me later. Or don't. This is a thankless job, anyway."
The sword withdrawn, and Wardes' body left desecrated, whether out of respect or disgust, Louise and her familiar sat in the courtyard as a cool spring breeze blew over them.
Hat sighed. "You are quite sympathetic, Louise. Perhaps too much so. Knowing that, let me place my argument in terms receivable by you, then."
And so an earnest, if mostly one sided, discussion but not dialogue was had, not held.
"You'll see everything by your own view," Hat said. "By you and your perceived compatriots' views. Yet you always fail to consider mine, mine own. Consider that... I... could not abide the Hat Man's existence. This may sound selfish, but I assure you, I have had many an experience, and my experience tells me that he could not be trusted. I will not say I am sorry. I will not apologize. However, I will explain to you that his hat was an unforgivable affront to myself. This I will explicate why."
Louise shifted up in apparently attempted-to-be-disguised-but-clearly-not-done-so-very-well interest.
"We of hatkind are highly territorial creatures. All my combat skills, you see, are trained to perfection by constant use, tempered in the fires of war without end. On my world, my race, the top hats, ruled a country known as Top Gat spanning the north of a peninsula next to an island known as Rising Boushi. That island was once ruled by us, but we were driven out by the maniacal missive of a wide brimmed hat. I barely escaped death myself, having resided there in its better days. A land that was once in harmony- plunged into endless war by those wide brims. You can say that they were not to blame, but they wholeheartedly accepted the wide brim, the one who was first called Yari, but then, by proclamation, by the name of Grimm Hatte, who led them. The one named Grimm Hatte, who led them to the ceaseless strife, and saw to it they embraced it. Grimm Hatte, who perpetrated the genocide of top hatkind in Rising Boushi, and led the invasion of the Three Mountains of Ryuukyuu, then followed with the invasion of Top Gat. The one who made the deaths of many policy, not only stamping out hatkind in Rising Boushi, but exporting it to Ryuukyuu, engaging in the trade of killing there in the Deathly Hanagasa Ondo, and following with the murder of as many of top hats as he could have his despicable ambition wrapped around in the campaign in Top Gat. Grimm Hatte did not even give his own land time to recover from the ravages of revolution before more war came; such was his lust for war, blood, and conquest."
Hat's monocle and likewise features shone in melancholy.
"During this time, I had fled to the west, to my ancestors' homeland of Top Gat, where the rest of the top hatkind welcomed the refugees from Rising Boushi, either out of sediment* or for the hatpower for the inevitable coming war that clouded over the land. There, I abandoned everything I had on the road to redemption. The loss of peace was my fault, I felt. I had not been prepared for the original rising. I had been a playful dilettante pretending to nobility. So I had to make everything right again by the reclamation of the island. I took my current name, Boushi W. Nisekoto, and erased my past. I extinguished my name, the essence of my soul,a lesser but still grand sign of self, like Grimm Hatte did to Yari. I swallowed all my sadness, and prepared for a bitter life of harsh campaigns, every day studying tactics, gathering support, and training myself physically for the final day we, my new comrades and I, would restore rightful rule to Rising Boushi. I even took the fields when Grimm Hatte's armies landed in Flat Crown, a region at the bottom end of Top Gat, and drove him from my new home at no small cost. This was the brutal war that we had awaited, feared, and anticipated; it had come. It was the Homeland Liberation War**, and we were actually traveling the road to victory. On that final day, that glorious day when we were finally ready for the final battle, the boats set and stocked, the soldiers prepared with steeled hearts and swords, and a good wind blowing to clear seas, everything ready to avenge the fallen, you took me away."
Hat hung his head, or rather, his entire body, down.
"In truth, as you hear today, I was never the noble like I had said, nor was I ever genteel, Louise. I lost all my titles to Grimm Hatte's revolution, and the urge for vengeance became my only purpose in life. Style mattered little in face of such feelings. The waning days of my life there were engrossed by the war, and it was all that mattered to me anymore. I say again that I am not sorry for what I did, but I hope you have context now. On some other part, I am sorry, however much that means, for deceiving you. For lying to you, by omission. Even if you never asked properly and let me speak about it."
Louise and Hat looked to each other. Hat turned away, climatically. It was dramatic. The drama was climbing.
"I know that this is confusing for you, but you do not have to know. Not now. Not yet. Just understand how I am, where I come, my background. If it is of some help, you may think of my story as a mere parable, a tale. An allegory."
"Then... if all that was true, why were you fine with the Princess? Her crown... would be a more than a wide brim, wouldn't it?"
"You are being stupid. Cease this at once, or I'll bash your head in and eat the soft parts," Hat wanted to say. Instead, he responded, patient as a mountain rumbling, that crowns were distinct from hats. It was obvious. And Louise's lacking, shriveled intuition in the art of dealing with the obvious was overwhelmingly, overpoweringly heady, like the scent of bitter oranges on the wind on a midsummer morn, carried through the atmosphere alongside the smell of earth after the May rain: it made for a too-long of an imbroglio of a wonder to behold.
Louise shook her head, eyes squinting in a mix of self hatred, hatred, and confusion, infuriation building in herself for dropping to her familiar's level.
"Crowns and hats are of a very different make, that is true. It is akin to how helmets are most definitely not hats. The hardness and the softness of the two marks a different branding, a different maker, it makes for. I am clear? If not, let me place it this way: to take a hat's power, one kills and skins them, or lets it flow in naturally for a lesser gain. To take a crown's power, one must take their very essence. One either, if mercifully inclined, beats into submission and enslaves the crown for a continuous drip feed of power, or seizes upon them at once and consumes them, taking them as bread. The taking of anything else as bread is mere enjoyment, but a necessity for absorption of coronal power. Such is the way, and such is how it must be."
"What... what do you know? You're just a hat," Louise said.
"One would think being a hat qualifies one well for speaking about hats," Hat responded. "But apparently not by your exacting with no particular standards rules. No, belay this and that. The onus must be mine for you never allowing me the time of the day to explain myself earlier, and then expecting you would accept explication now. It's true. It is. You've never cared to become familiar with me before, why should I think it might happen at this here and now? Why, you've called me naught save Hat all this time. I'm a tool, a device to your body, you busybody. Let there be exposition, and let it be summarily given, 'little Louise': in the world of fine headgear, it is not only the nobility that must compete, and not only in gentility. It is a constant struggle, and none may be complacent, for only one hat may reign supreme. In my day, that hat was very nearly- was me. It was."
"So... I believe I caught this important part in there: you admit that this, whatever that may be, is your fault?"
"...Sure. Let's operate off of that assumption from this moment forwards, even if you'd reached that conclusion much earlier. Presumably. Off presumptions."
"And if my understanding of the later parts I skimmed over aurally are correct, which they must be, for they are my assumptions, then you delivered death unto Wardes over his hat?"
"...Yes."
"That's actually why you killed Wardes? Because of his hat? Actually because his hat..."
"...failed to show proper respect to me, yes. That is actually why. Know this, Louise: as I unclearly iterated in favor of saccharine appeals, I see myself, and saw to that I would be on the path to be, the Supreme Hat, El Supremo. No other hat may challenge or even question my fashion abilities. They must show reverence in my presence, or be judged and face my wrath, for a lack of humility to El Supremo is a request to duel or ignorance in need of enlightenment, both of which honor demands the same response of death, preferably in the forms of rolling cranial objects. Objections of the sort."
"Be more in depth a bit then. What, specifically, do these rules have to do with Wardes? That that hat was upon his head?"
"That is that," Hat said, his mountain eroding under the geological undertaking of Louise's nature. "His hat was him. It was upon his head. It was imperceptibly linked to him; linked to him so thoroughly in ways that you cannot be understand and I therefore conveniently will not detail. That hat was his sinister plot, his conspiracy. It was him exploiting you, in time. His failure to show respect to me was his character encompassed fully."
"I... know I will regret this, if I still have the agency and coherency to do so in the future... but what would respect entail?"
"His hat would have been taken off or tipped to acknowledge my presence. It is contextual: in some locations and to some variants of hat, to tip is a most scandalous proposition of the sexual sort, often accompanied by the set phrase 'm'llinery.'"
"Oh... kay. If you don't mind, and I don't care if you do, Hat's name, I shall now be despondent for the next..." Louise drew a mental dart and saw it let fly true, "72 hours."
"Take your time, Louise. Take it slowly."
The two rejects, master and familiar, failures and pretenders each, nodded solemnly to each other, a tacit understanding formed, ready to be shattered.
"But don't take too long," Hat threw a smashing rock spear with. "Any time exceeding 72 hours incapacitated, one way or the other, in any way, demands the blood of an equivalent number of virgins as a sacrifice to right the grave wrong such dithering wreaks upon the schedules of others' nefarious schemes. It is especially troublesome in that the sacrifice has a vacillating exchange rate to be equivalent to, too****."
"Was that supposed to mean any- ah, being despondent," Louise though-...
Being despondent was truly beyond the true pale though, truly. It meant Louise had been met with a situation beyond even the point of catatonia, what little distinction there was between the two. It meant that Louise was standing on the precipice of great change, or sitting at the here and now, inert. Inert when she could have been broadcasting her fury, unleashing her signature incandescent, raving, thousand exploding Suns level rage. Yes- so many Sunhoods, and not at all in the sense of bright clothing (although it is best not to play it up too much, as Louise certainly does not reach to the top of the scale; that would imply she is the best at something that does not involve being the worst***).
Louise fell to the floor of earth, violently and sadly, as per usual expectations.
Hat stood vigil and sighed his last. He gave a lie over a lie for Louise when the sentiment failed. But it was all lies anyway, so, regardless... soon, Louise would be grateful. That impossibility, that impossible dream, would be accomplished.
"Oh please. You'll be thankful soon enough, as should be," Hat whispered then thought. "And as you should have been. He was only trying to exploit you, Louise. He would use you, that Wardes, but he does not deserve. He does not DESERVE! Didn't you see his head before I so efficiently and speedily removed it? Answer that how you will not."
"That was my fiance. He loved me. Could I trust him? I thought so," Louise thought. She sighed a deep sigh, even her despondency. It was one of indistinct, instinctive nothingness, void of anything. But it was a deep sigh, one like a regal one inhaling a cocktail of mentally fine finishes encased within a luxurious bainewood finish hookah smoking implement (though to Louise, it didn't really seem as if she had that at the moment, no matter how so she subconsciously imagined such an image).
The two fools sat and sighed, absorbed in their own world.
The importance was in this impossibility: for Louise's, as of Louise, it was a regal sigh. One of one tried and tired, having had fools around them prance to the point of having taken too much, and ready to unleash their (self-) righteous wrath upon the world.
So the scrivener "notes" so non-laconically:
Greetings and salutations to me, you subordinate audience (do it! yes! proceed!):
*It has been deduced that this statement may be "inaccurate": a sic, the ill dictators of what they would call forth as "proper" writing call it. But that may not be so. As might be said before in different contexts, it is all a matter of perspective. Perhaps, when they uttered that it was for want of sediment, they were desiring to have the flesh available and blood run freely to fertilize their fields, to let the ichor run like pus from a sea of such, though it is a large question of an if on whether hats are capable of, or even see an need to, practice advanced, sedentary agriculture past the hunting-gathering, or resource managing, non-field depleting stage. A manageable, sustainable stage, that being.
With this all in mind, one should also keep in mind that a third option consisting of this and the previous option of their being an error combined is possible, however unlikely. The gentry of Top Gat might have so desired the war to make them rich, or to make the worst of that earth shattering rebellion in Rising Boushi, with war being profitable to those not touched by its ravages, and had not only sought the fertilization of the land, but wished for the additional hatpower of the refugees to serve in the coming conflict. The better part of it, if someone might so deem a conspiracy for conflict good at all, might be that they did in fact wish the best for those under them, and sought those refugees' hatpower in order to absorb casualties, serving as a permanently displaced mercenary army. If the casualties would be on the refugees, one might actually see benefit from the peasantry too, from better crop yields after the war that saw little casualties taken. Why, the few who died would allow for even greater harvests; there is a certain point, a certain margin where there would be little famine from sufficient workers, and still the lack of those workers would allow for greater portions for those that remain. Food for ten for one year could conceivably serve as food for one for ten years, after all storage measures are undertaken well. And there is the untidy but possible consideration of nutrients to be derived from the fallen's remaining body trunks, unpleasant as that may be. But they are but peasants, like animals. They may consume their kin, and they may enjoy it! Do not act as if you would serve better in such circumstances. There is a beast chained within yourself, within all our selves.
That is all.
**This war that had come to be known as the Homeland Liberation War in Top Gat is known by many other names in other regions of Pileus, the world of the hats. The most common name outside of the participant regions, an exonym, which you will, is the neutral name employed by both amateurs and dedicated historians of the Wide Brimmed-Top Hat Class(y) War of 1945, sometimes appended with Part the Second, which has its own optional corollary or even replacement of "Electric Bugalu" due to the instruments oft-deployed to coordinate army formations in the time which technology had advanced to a sufficient base to allow electronics but communications and ideas had not yet innovated and been put into practice to the point of deploying dedicated channels of contact such as radio. Other commonly held names include Yari's Revenge over the Revenge of Yari*****, the War of the Three Yari (or Yaris), or the Yari Yari Yari (Yari Yari Yari the Yari Yari Yari).
As an aside, this war would later merge into a greater regional and then worldwide war known as the First Nomenclature Conflict, itself a portion of a greater conflict, which saw Pileus, or Hat's World (depending on the faction), plunged into a three hundred century long conflict known as Civilization, which began with bludgeons; cudgels; stones; swords; muskets; primitive rockets; some magic of some kind; and crude gunpowder bombs, cannons, and contraptions, and ended in bloody trenches; hat wave attacks to clear landmines; the innocence [of a generation] lost; mobile warfare employing combined arms, integrated engineering and recon, and close air support; chemical warfare; electronics and communications warfare and countermeasures; convoy raiding tactics; and the first deployment of a nuclear weapon by a purpose built kamikaze missile flyer. The First Nomenclature Conflict, as the name so clearly implies, unless you wish to take issue to this, would end in a disastrously unbalanced treaty known as the "Armistice for Twenty Years" that would see the Second Nomenclature Conflict follow and conclude with the deaths of nearly every single hat on the planet, with the remaining hats enslaved into a projected to permanent underclass existing only for the crowns' pleasure.
Hat was as of yet unaware of any of these events, or the events to follow. There is no indication to suggest toward the otherwise.
As a further aside, the First Nomenclature War, as one might logically expect to be intrinsically befitting of a war rooted in such a cause, is also known as the Second Nomenclature War ("we don't mention the first one") between the Foreign Import Pluralists, and the Not the Pluralists, known also as the Non-Pluralists, the Loan Word Integrationists, or, alternatively, the Damnable Cultural Appropriating Sea Thieves of Grammar Lacking Scum of the Pileus of the Three Oceans' Expanse against the Honorable Ones of Extreme Virility But Still Possessing Prepossessing Modesty Who Would Seek Justice, Peace, and Eternal Harmony If Not For the Savage, Unforgivable Acts and Very Nature of Their Enemies by their enemies, and sometimes themselves, if one may count the separatist subfaction of the Term Reclamationists/the Reclamators as amongst them still.
Let this suffice however, and be brief: for this is here without even mention of the possibly third or fourth or innumerable faction of Those Who Would See Us Devolved Into Warring Tribal States of Savagely Barbaric Users Of Redundantly Capital Title Case.
*****This is also yet another matter of intense debate, as Yari's wars are sometimes viewed not as a revenge, but more a "first strike," and so a "venge," if the backformation of a term is even still extant or ever so was. Those that push the revanchist agenda aruge that some injustice must have been heaped upon or otherwise reverse lopped to Yari in his peasant days when the gentry consisted of foreign in origin top hatkind, and so that they oppressed him, forcing his hand, and that it is a matter of perspective or something or the other.
Those were the notes of this one time, and, if we are to be nothing but a dot in the cosmos, let us be an annoying, pest-like dot that shall accord some notice from those that hang above like a terrible, unknown Sword of Damocles
As they say in Araby, "that's all she wrote"
Except no:
A note within a note from the scrivener, thoughts building upon thoughts, stairs spiraling on spiraling sets within a recursive set of set sets:
A note within a note from the scrivener, thoughts building upon thoughts, stairs spiraling on spiraling sets of a confused sort of nature:
Uninformed as always viewers,
***A scale measuring the numbers of exploding suns from 1 to 10 wherein 4.789432 is the highest. It has been criticized for being confusing and infuriating, but that is where its most-verily-tensile strength lies: such is the way it may convey the frustration one feels to another (though use of the scale has been known to commonly overtop that goal and cause many a user to proceed slightly past a thousand suns' rage toward symptoms which may cause extreme danger to both the afflicted and those nearby, warranting immediate and hopefully medical intervention, including and limited to, and so really plainly just consisting of: bleeding from the ears at irregular intervals; incoherent screaming and frothing from the mouth and rarely other regions; clawing out one's own eyes; biting off one's toenails rather than fingernails, including the non-cuticle regions that are certainly definitely not meant to be bitten, to "boot"; using multiple adverbs consecutively and commonly; smashing one's head repeatedly against wardrobes; and being of the belief that food from Albion is not only physically edible, but palatable to the point of desiring its consumption, even once given alternatives, starting from cannibalism and beyond- unthinkable as that may be.)
With despairing regards toward to your lot's education (a-a...although not caring too much or wanting for i-improvement... of the lot or a-anything; it is only despairing... not disparaging your circumstances or a want for more),
That rare informed breed of those suffering crawling upon this piece of spoiled soil adrift in the dark night of eternity illuminated only by overly etcetera worthy etc... It is only I
Elsewhere:
****This system employs a similar scale to the non-standardized weight of a thousand "exploding" Sunhoods, known as the Typical Hood Derivative Sacrifical Exchange Rate System