polymorphikos
Scrofulous Fig-Merchant
I wrote this a moment ago as the introduction to a story about a woman inadvertantly fleeing into an extremely unpleasant neighbourhood (hopefully not as corny as it sounds) and would appreciate an opinion as to whether it sounds convincing and horrendous. Thank you in advance, and sorry if it's really dull or aweful.
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It would be unfair to call Sangott a decrepit, rancid hell-hole rife with vice and poverty and the ever-present stench of all of the less admirable of human attributes. To say that the water in its gutters was little short of toxic waste, and cleanliness was a bi-word for wealthy would not be the honourable thing to do. If one described the police department as a horde of poorly-paid enforcers whose ideas of lawfulness stretched as far as the barrel of a gun, then the insult would be unbearably unjust. Sangott was far worse than that. In fact, the police department didn’t even pretend anymore; they only wore the uniforms because the Sirius Department of Civil Order gave them to them for free.
The streets were buried beneath great, rolling drifts of refuse that it took a less-than-diligent bulldozer to cut through, and atop these piles were ranged the half-insane former residents of the crumbling, once grand buildings that rose up around in ashen, grime-encrusted escarpments. Graffiti was omnipresent, but temporary as the rain and the burst water-mains swept the walls and washed off the outer layers of a filth so thick that in many places it took the place of plaster. In the puddles children played, dressed in hand-me-down rags scavenged from the rubbish depot that had gradually consumed several blocks of the neighbourhood. It wasn’t uncommon to hear a scream emerging from amidst the foetid roadways as some child refused to cede their ancient rubber boots and received a shard of glass in return.
The sun rarely shone on street-level, thousands of rickety wooden causeways linking the upper floors of the apartment buildings that had been absorbed by the Gairkeizers and their armies of drug-fuelled lugarus. Gunfire and roaring explosions would often echo down through the buildings to the ears of squatters in the lightless rooms below, and the people would idly wonder what the werewolves were fighting over this time, and praying that a sneak attack through the lower levels or a mining of the foundations wouldn’t occur.
Down the streets rolled armoured cars laden with stim and deep-blue synth, destined for the border lock where the gendarmerie would take its cut and then load the bottles and bricks and tablets into inconspicuous ground cars bound for twenty-first birthday parties and movie premiers with the middle and upper classes who either didn’t know how many faceless, soulless, fleshless men and women and children had laboured under the watchful eye of a bead-gun, or didn’t care.
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Cheery, eh?
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It would be unfair to call Sangott a decrepit, rancid hell-hole rife with vice and poverty and the ever-present stench of all of the less admirable of human attributes. To say that the water in its gutters was little short of toxic waste, and cleanliness was a bi-word for wealthy would not be the honourable thing to do. If one described the police department as a horde of poorly-paid enforcers whose ideas of lawfulness stretched as far as the barrel of a gun, then the insult would be unbearably unjust. Sangott was far worse than that. In fact, the police department didn’t even pretend anymore; they only wore the uniforms because the Sirius Department of Civil Order gave them to them for free.
The streets were buried beneath great, rolling drifts of refuse that it took a less-than-diligent bulldozer to cut through, and atop these piles were ranged the half-insane former residents of the crumbling, once grand buildings that rose up around in ashen, grime-encrusted escarpments. Graffiti was omnipresent, but temporary as the rain and the burst water-mains swept the walls and washed off the outer layers of a filth so thick that in many places it took the place of plaster. In the puddles children played, dressed in hand-me-down rags scavenged from the rubbish depot that had gradually consumed several blocks of the neighbourhood. It wasn’t uncommon to hear a scream emerging from amidst the foetid roadways as some child refused to cede their ancient rubber boots and received a shard of glass in return.
The sun rarely shone on street-level, thousands of rickety wooden causeways linking the upper floors of the apartment buildings that had been absorbed by the Gairkeizers and their armies of drug-fuelled lugarus. Gunfire and roaring explosions would often echo down through the buildings to the ears of squatters in the lightless rooms below, and the people would idly wonder what the werewolves were fighting over this time, and praying that a sneak attack through the lower levels or a mining of the foundations wouldn’t occur.
Down the streets rolled armoured cars laden with stim and deep-blue synth, destined for the border lock where the gendarmerie would take its cut and then load the bottles and bricks and tablets into inconspicuous ground cars bound for twenty-first birthday parties and movie premiers with the middle and upper classes who either didn’t know how many faceless, soulless, fleshless men and women and children had laboured under the watchful eye of a bead-gun, or didn’t care.
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Cheery, eh?
