Needy's Destiny II: The Legend of Fox Cipher

Chapter 3: Ain’t No Place For Boy Whores

I may have been young but I was not a fool. I knew full well that Sharpe, like the rest of Tamsborough, was a dangerous place for people like me. It was a town of scoundrels and inbreeds, of criminals and traitors. I was a clean-cut companion, an atheist unlike my parents, but moral and law-abiding all the same. Dealing with white hat-wearing loyalists was first on the list of any morning’s agenda to the townsfolk. They didn’t like people like me coming to their town, and why should they? It’s because of people like me that they were there in the first place, thrown into this hellhole like rats. Even then, they should count themselves lucky; some would just stamp the rats outright.

“How dare the rats walk where we walk, polluting the air with their foul talk, spreading diseases like vermin, threaten the lives of our offspring…”

Edward Stellar might not have been a stellar poet, but he certainly was an accomplished mass murderer. Little wonder then that these people hated us, especially when racist leaders like the aspiring poet took the lead in banishing these abominations from respected society. Of course, he was more in favour of the “drowning them like the rats that they are” defence.

Even so, I’d say that, contrary to popular opinion, the townsfolk weren’t the vicious murderers some officials would have you believe. They wouldn’t have won any “Nicest Person in the Verse” award, just as the majority wouldn’t win any beauty pageant, but they were far from the two-dimensional bad guys often seen in fictional stories. Life rarely is as simple as a story. Sometimes I wish it was.

Sharpe was a town of people, unlucky, sick people maybe, but individuals nonetheless. Even so, taking a train to Tamsborough was not exactly in my best interests, but I got on it all the same.

You see, I knew that even if you did manage to avoid the wrath of the locals, you were still prone to catching the sort of di