In the crowded slums of the metropolitan city was a young girl dressed in rags of all black. Her eyes were golden like that of the morning dew with her hair being a brilliant silver. Her body was obscured completely in rags of black as she meandered her way through the crowded streets.
Bumping into people both male and female. Acquiring loot through the two step process of bumping into them. Something that would result in the turning of their shoulders towards the former position of the young girl who had vanished as if she was never there.
But in that very confusion which would result in their turned shoulder, she would reach for their pockets or very purse and snatch. The crowd was large so naturally bumping into others would be expected and even if spotted, the crowd would provide the perfect means to flee.
These conditions were enough to guarantee the young girl a flawless victory...
Leaving the mainstream, she squatted in a section of the alleyway where no one saw her. Looking into the wallets of the people that she snatched from, her golden eyes lit up with a red tinge on her once monotonous face.
‘With this money I should be capable of affording at least several weeks of food…’
She thought to herself before running off to her rundown house on the other side of the lower district. It was the slums of the slums, where the poorest of people had lived and rarely if ever they worked. But if these terrible cretins of the world were to work it would be as criminals.
After all, why would someone wish to employ someone of such a lower socioeconomic status. Someone completely unvetted by the world and its systems? Someone with no effort at inculturation or education or degree of employment? Someone who would naturally be a liability to the corpus of society.
The slummish girl turned to the side and entered her shabby house once more. It was dark, dirty and decrepit and hard to traverse even for her small body but this is the life that she couldn’t help but live. She turned to the side and stared at a rat. Her eyes glistened with the same red expression from earlier before reaching out for it and crushing it with a single motion.
‘Rat soup should be good…’
She thought to herself as she threw the rat onto an iron pan and reached out for a cup of muddied water as she turned on the gas stove and began to cook. At first it was slow before a fire enveloped the stove and even the young girl. But even through the flames the young girl smiled.
There really wasn’t anything more that she could have lost… After all, after such a long day of tailing her targets around town and stealing from them, she really didn’t have much to invest or to lose. So to risk it all for a day of deliciousness, that was enough.
The flames simmered out as she turned the gas stove back to off and she stared over her meal. It was completely burnt but her eyes lit up once again. Instead not with a red flare but instead a green light.
She bit into the charred mess before slowly grunting to herself.
“It’s sooo good~!”
She said before reaching out to the burning rat’s body with both of her hands. Even though it had been hot she was more so interested in the taste of it. it was just perfection to her. Perfection to a little frog who had not popped out of its very egg in a well of ants.
“It’s so delicious!”
She said before looking at another rat who stayed at her. Just like the rat from before it had entered into her house through a gap in the lower wall. The rat’s vision scoured around before its eyes landed upon the dead skeleton body of another rat.
With nothing but a heart of rage the rat sought to take it’s ven-
And the rat was squished against the rough hands of the little girl. She brought the rat up to her face before chuckling madly like a madman suffering from the plague. And with the itty bitty fingers of her childfish body she would move it up to its neck to strangle it out of life and oxygen.
Slowly letting it die…
Another rat was dead and she turned to her stove and placed it there. With her still dirtied hands, she walked into her bedroom. A bloody mess of various cans, plastic bags and various trinkets that would certainly prove of little use to the young girl. With her head right on the bed, she looked right over a broken diamond ornate portrait across from her on the counter top.
It was the portrait of an older woman with silver hair like her, and the figure of a brown-haired man with a ripped out face with a young white-haired child right in a cradled basket right before the two figures.
She smiled to herself as she came to remember all that she loved in this world.
‘Mom, I’ll find dad for you…’
She muttered under her husky breath as whimpery tears struggled down her cheek and with that she blurred out of consciousness.
#
The rats chirped and with that her unconscious eyes shook into motion hearing them chatter with every step. Gathering around on the counter-top, a group of more than two dozen rats had assembled. Honoring their fallen comrades, a skeletal husk and a strangled rat, the dozen rats gathered in prayer for the funeral rites of their companions.
Right in front of the ceremony of rats sitting right on the stove heat controls had been a particularly fat rat with a golden crown on his head. He spoke to his subjects with a mighty fervor.
“Our comrades! We gather here today to honor the dead of Squeak Squeak and a forgotten rat ally of ours! We wish the very best for our comrades as we wish for nothing more than these people to go onto Rat Heaven! We will reclaim the Sewers and make that our home!”
“SQUEAK!”
“Make The Rodents Great Again!”
“SQUEAK!”
“TOTAL HUMAN DEATH!”
A reluctant sigh left her opened mouth as she towered over the stove. A crimson spark enveloped her eyes once more as she gripped her hands tightly. The rats could only shiver and cower as they could not even look over to see the impending fate that awaited them…
“Shut up. You are all too noisy.”
With quick powerful jabs all the rats were dead and the young girl sighed before looking back to the spot in the wall that allowed the rats to come in through. She sighed to herself before looking back to the pile of dead rats. She reached out for her pan and drank the residue juices of the “rat soup” from last night before shoving the rest of the rats onto the pan.
A look of fortune befell her as a greedy smile and a green spark enveloped her eyes. She came out of the house while skipping and humming to herself.
“Is that girl carrying a frying pan of dead rats?”
“It seems like it… But man, look at how many rats that is! That’s like an entire family of them!”
“She must really hate rats or something…”
“Yeah… Rats are pretty annoying and they are pretty gross so it’s probably for the best that someone like her decided to take them out.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Hey now that I am thinking about it, didn't the Rogue’s Association offer up a quest about rats?”
“They did?”
The NPCs on the side began to talk amongst themselves as they watched the jolly girl skipping her way over to the Rogue’s Association. Once known as the Thieves’ Guild, the institution had reformed its public image as a caretaker for the poor and unwelcomed of society and instead of being some random thieves stealing for no reason, the Rogue’s Association was a group devoted to empathy of the disadvantaged.
Walking into the Rogue’s Association, the young girl’s eyes wandered across the room before befalling upon a familiar face. The rugged face of a brown middle-aged man. She approached the man with a mostly blank look that had a slight tint of green.
“I’ve got rats.”
She said monotonously while the man stared at her with an awkward look on his face. She placed the frying pan full of dead rats on the counter of his desk as he looked into the swarm of the dead rats. Counting them as he did so.
“Well that I could see…”
He said.
“It’s 27 dead rats. 28 including one’s dead skeleton….”
The brown man glared towards the young girl with a look of pure disappointment knowing what it had meant seeing the skeleton of the dead rat.
“Raelia, You shouldn’t eat such things… You know you won’t be happy if you eat such dirty things?”
“I’m already happy though. It’s that happiness comes from within. That’s what you’ve said, Mister Earle.”
“Well I did have a point but here’s three silver tokens. It’s for your duty in slaying those rats. Those guys have been a pretty major issue eating local produce so that’s your payment for dealing with them.”
The young girl nodded after hearing the statement of the tan man.
“Ugh…”
A man grunted off on the side of the Rogue’s Association's office.
“Why do we have to carry something so heavy? Can’t we just get a truck or something to help us carry it?”
“A truck? You must be kidding. Automobiles don’t exist in these parts and if they did, they would instantly be taken and destroyed by the petty thieves of the street.”
The young girl turned over to the side as she watched some workers at the Rogue’s Associations moving a large black machine. Something that caused her eyes to tinkle with a golden curiosity.
“And that is?”
“It’s a gaming machine. It’s not something that is often seen in our parts but it’s getting thrown away because no one can use it.”
“That’s a waste…”
Earle nodded in agreement to the statement of the young girl before she disappeared right before him. Instantly reappearing right next to the movers.
“Hey can I take it since you are throwing it out?”
“Uh sure.”
The moving men said as they let out a sigh of relief and the young girl gripped the giant black machine from edge to edge before running out of the guild with it. A feat that left everyone in the Rogue’s Association surprised after all, something like that should have weighed around 150 Kilograms (400ish LBs).
‘She really has some monstrous strength…’
#
“That was pretty heavy.”
Raelia sighed as she placed the black VR machine right outside of her house. Despite the fact that she was leaving something outside, she was confident in putting it out there. After all no one would be capable of stealing or much less be wishing to steal something that looked that heavy…
Well that was unless they were a psychopath like her… But that would be a different scenario.
She stared at the black VR machine before walking up to it and pressing a whole number of various buttons on its side to try and get it to do something. But nothing worked. Even after pressing everything like a baby with no idea of what she was doing, it netted no results.
“How do I work this thing…?”
#
A girl with short shoulder length black-hair sighed as she came back to her dark room. Dressed in a black suit and tie, she turned to her sword on the side before letting out a faint smile.
‘Thank you, Mister Sword.’
She smiled before turning to her desk and turning on her laptop where she went onto a messaging app.
The black-haired lady sighed.
‘I wish I didn’t have to rely on someone so unreliable like you… Couldn’t you just be more reliable like Meela or Michael?’
Various notifications blared from her computer as her DMs were being flooded with the desperate pleading of a hopeless loser. A loser that she wished she could not have in her life... Neither do we want to have someone like this in our life.
‘Even Michael is trying to shoot his shot…’
I glanced over to the side to look over my desperate DMs of this bitch who had been barking towards me as if she was deserving of my forgiveness. It was just getting annoying to talk to Michael with how much she was raving over me.
The rest of the messages were a continuation of that same pathetic display. Something that wasn't worth her attention in the slightest. It was a disgusting sight that no one should have to see. Even terrorists should not be shown these pictures for this was beyond a war crime but a crime against all of reality. All 147 pleading messages were things we were left better without seeing.
End of the chapter.
