Hippodromes for hypocrites Part 1

It was another fast night at the Government block. The Government block, contrary to expectations, is where everyone thinks work moves the fastest. Pen screeches on paper, keyboards are scorched owing to friction, clerks face early retirement due to burn outs and kents, well, lets leave the Supermen for later eh? I moved in slo-mo. At every blink, people were moving over 50 metres. Aliasing. Blink fast enough and everything slows down. I start moving faster. The world comes back to normal. The Government block. Nothing moves.

No matter. Nothing happens anyway. When you are a knight, people keep thinking that you're life is exciting, that you actually do some work, that you have a million peasants under you whom you can allocate work yo, whom you can bully, boss over, push off cliffs, feed to the lions and what not. Not true. Little do people know that half the time, you are begging them to give you a fair share of the crops they have sown. Dammit, half the time the crops aren't even sown... and the damn harvest season is coming up soon. Three weeks from now.

So I left the Government Office and decided to ride up to the Clerk's Building. This is where they do all sorts of wizardry with math. Accounting, finances, complex numbers, imaginary profits, you name it, they do it. This is also where they like to store marks you may (or may not) have earned in courses that you do. I had been doing a course on Basic Wizardry at the Apocryphal Academy and wanted to know how I was faring. Don't we all. Alone as I am in my office looking at the clock tower at the other end of town, by leaning out my window as far as I can, tying a string to the back of my belt and the other end to the door knob, I sometimes wonder that if I become a wizard I might not be able to tell the time in an easier fashion. I also fear that someone would open the door someday while I am at my amusing pass time and send me, arms flailing and all, to my doom. There is this garbage can below my window, and out my door and in the room two doors away. There is garbage everywhere here. I wonder....

I digress. My memoirs get worse and worse. This isn't to say that it was bad in the first place. I was in the Clerk's Building trying to juggle a few grades around and, in general, make it appear that I was better at the dark arts of necromancy than I was (I did say that I was a dark and stormy knight if you remember) when my wandering eye happened to notice a D grade on the list. I daren't look up at the face of the gnome at the desk. She was sure to be all aglow, a nice little mocking smile on her face. "Changing the course because of interest, are you? A genuine student, eh? What was that again about not worrying about doing badly in courses? Not worried now either eh? Looks like you have a different definition of bad entirely. What were you fearing? An S?" Hmmm....

Cut to a day later when I went to see this wizard with my pal, another novice at wizardry, though he is far more committed to it than I am. He wasn't in his room, these wizards almost never are. They appear to work all day, and yet, when you need to see them, they vanish. It almost seems as if they know we're lurking around. Perhaps, they do know, perhaps they make it their business to know, perhaps they do that the whole day. That's why they're so busy. The bastards.

He finally came walking to his room. A walk of arrogance, swaying this way and that. Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a wonderful day; I killed a novice, I murdered a fay. So he swaggers in, wonders aloud if we wanted to see little ol' him, and plops his mammoth backside onto this swiveling chair. It doesn't make a sound. It, too, has learnt to shut its trap in front, or behind, a wizard. When he learns what we're there for, he checks his notes, remarks that perhaps we deserve more for our knowledge but not so for our naivete. What with us telling him that we did our work together, when we should have been colluding with each other and trying to outwit him? Children, to have been honest when we should have been lying through our teeth. No wonder we deserved a D. Sheesh.

So what do we learn at the end, eh? Do we come out with any wizardry at all? Of course we do, but how many stay the course? Was the whole thing worth it, I ask myself sitting in the vapours of my office, with the wargs looking down on me as before, with the bloodsuckers getting their sweet nectar without paying their tax. "Why?" I shout, "What happens to the system?" I see a wizard sashaying down a green corridor. He scratches his itching chin, then the sole of his foot and his chin again. I'm better than you, son. I got a griffin service. Got a dozen merchants working my train. I'm sitting watching you at the Colosseum, son, and I like what I see. We want you to work for us kid, prevent you from going anywhere and we have ready labour. Can’t be beat.I went to San Fransisco, brother, and you can't. Why? Coz Hippodromes are for Hypocrites.