Our Undoing
In a city of acid rain and broken dreams, a scarred survivor plots revenge against a criminal syndicate while yearning to escape to paradise.
It rains acid here. It isn’t bad, but it’s like my eyes are burning out of their sockets. Like most lonely inhabitants of this desolate city, I stay inside. The city is filled with people who don’t mind the rain. The Acidic Commune go out to ‘cleanse’ themselves, as if the acid removes their scars. It only makes it worse.
I stare out the window at the infinite stretch of haphazard houses atop one another, like a dangerous stacking game. We live in a constant state of everything collapsing around us.
The rain blurs my reflection, but anyone seeing it would shiver at the scars from that fateful night. I lived in a small, isolated village. I loved to sit in the fresh air, watching the moonlight glinting off of the grass and trees. Until the heavens opened and rained down bullets and a shower of fireworks.
I was only entering my second decade when they unloaded their weapons. I remember dropping to my knees and staring at the sky in confusion. The villagers were confused, too. We’d been a peaceful tribe for thousands of years.
The outsiders didn’t leave until everyone in my village was dead and the storehouses were stripped bare. They vanished; leaving only corpses. My mother was the last one to die. She held onto life long enough to see me stand.
Days passed in a whirlwind of melancholy until the soldiers who had the nerve to call themselves ‘saviors of the innocent’ arrived. Why weren’t they here to protect us before this had happened? Because I had no identification, I ended up a nameless person in temporary housing in the galaxy’s most miserable place.
A crime syndicate has taken over worlds valuable to them for the last few decades. What have our supposed noble leaders done to stop them? Those officials have been bribed into submission. They don’t want the syndicate to expand further, but they aren’t doing anything about it. This pointless battle rages on.
It’s my dream to receive passage to a new planet far from this one. The lush forests of Pinona, to assist with conservation. Or New Remoria, the home of luxury resorts fueled by the resource-rich ocean planet of Baslisco.
It’s as easy as plucking each hair from one’s head. While our forms are processed, we’re trapped here. How unfair is that? It breaks my heart and twists my mind into knots. I’ll teach these fools a lesson. Or bring people their freedom. Whatever comes first.
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Statistics → Word Count: 451 | Reading Time: 1:38 mins