For the fun of it, the children of the rich and bored used to throw down dead animals deep down into the vertical shafts of the cities; some of these shafts turned horizontally into people’s houses and apartments where parts of the animals washed into toilets and sinks. The city’s water supply became polluted, and the fresh waters that came down from high mountains were blocked. What did this have to do with rich young people in the mythical world? In that fictional world, wealth was defined as land and knowledge. Mainly wealth was genuinely measured by the number of people who had lived under an elite individual; there was the reputation of the family, the number of family members who had been in the council, there was the number of animals, how many ancestors were chiefs or kings, families that owned large and small machines, and everything else. The young people of those families had humans, devices, and artificial servants. Their minds were indulged, and with thoughts, they brought things to reality as they lighted candles without touching, as the flames appeared on them. Perhaps nothing was beyond what they wanted. Was that why they flooded the streets and people’s homes with things from the cesspool as malicious activity?

These children seemed to have had the power of magic techniques they learned from exceptional tutors, wizards, or scholars of transformation; education paid for by their families. There was a problem in that no one could stop them. The decided solution was to kill them with projectile weapons that were developed and improvised weapons that were put together with anything found in the city. That solution didn’t always work as these troublesome children read the thoughts of people who intended them harm. There were family oracles that spoke about the future, so they knew what might happen before the appointed time. The wizards and scholars were the ones that opposed them; they started teaching the familiar people magic, but most wizards were attracted by money, and they continued to work for the families as tutors.

Children were slang; the troublemakers were young adults who thought of themselves as significant because of family connections and power. These young adults from these prominent families used magic and ability to elude the courts. But there was something about the magic because it used up their life force. Some died of disease and premature aging; they had been warned about that by the scholar-wizards, but they didn’t listen.

Families were clans that guarded their power against usurpers who sought to take them down. These usurpers were not bad people, they didn’t like what was happening in their world, and they believed that those clans had to be taken down because their young people had caused too many problems.

Robert J. Matsunaga