Inner city apartments were an extremely rare commodity, and because of that they were nearly works of art. The apartment Kaspar lived in was the top of a smaller tower on the south side of the Verdigris Tower, that looked to the south of the city. Verdigris wasn’t a particularly expensive city. It was heavily populated, sure, but its footprint was relatively small. The outer suburbs were starting to sputter out further and further, but the height at which Kaspar’s apartment rose allowed him and his brother to see the expanse of dull green fields that were the southern plains. They were vast, and there was nothing populating them aside from the occasional farm and the river that cut through all of them, heading out to sea down south. Suburbia barely made a dent into the rolling green fields.
The Veridian sky was rarely anything else but gray with clouds and rain, but Kaspar always thought that made the greens of the southern plains that much more beautiful. That dull gray Kaspar always thought looked more appealing than the vibrant, in-your-face green that showed up in cloudless days. He thought it almost blinded him whenever he looked out his large living room window to see the southern plains fully illuminated by the sun and the vibrant blue sky.
Seth, as far as Kaspar knew, didn’t care. His brother was always more of the practical type. Where Kaspar enjoyed the idiosyncrasies of language and the uniquely human influence on the words they spoke every day, Seth was always one for machines and math and the black and white. At times, Kaspar even thought that his younger brother only saw in black and white. He was a very objective person.
Today was another cloudy day. Kaspar ate breakfast in the living room, as he did every morning, and looked out on the very dimly lit landscape. He could hear the faint echoes of the first morning announcements from the streets below. He wasn’t sure who it was this morning. He probably wouldn’t be able to figure it out until he got to work later and heard late morning repeats of the same announcements. Probably something about the Yellow forces on the southern plains. He couldn’t see any large militaristic movement out of his window, so he figured that they couldn’t be a threat. They’ll probably retreat at some point when they push too far north and meet the bulk of Green’s forces. Although he could have sworn he heard the word “Purple” somewhere in that announcement. Purple couldn’t have joined the campaign north, could they?
A door behind Kaspar opened, and Seth stumbled out, still half awake. He made his way to the kitchen to make breakfast, his eyes barely open all the while, actively protesting to the lights that Kaspar had already turned on. Kaspar didn’t say anything to him. Seth was always cranky in the mornings. He had learned to let Seth speak the first words in the morning. It was a wonder he was still a student, Kaspar always thought, with the early mornings and all.
Finally, as the landscape outside the window lit up enough for Kaspar to see the definition in the rolling hills, Seth sat down in the living room with his breakfast, and started eating. Kaspar was done, but he still sat and looked out the window like he did every morning.
“So,” Seth started, his voice still croaking with sleep, “any fun things going on at the Institute today?”
“Not really, honestly. I think we have a seminar later today on new slang that has appeared in the past few years that we somehow missed.”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Thought you had one like that last week?”
“We did. We’re finding more and more stuff like this coming out of the streets. We’re barely able to keep up at this point. Dialect is hard enough to keep out of the city, but the fact that the Institute wants us to work on weeding out slang, too, is quite the task.”
“Sounds riveting,” Seth said with obvious boredom in his voice. He took another bite of his meal. Kaspar stood up, put away his dish, and went to his room to go get ready for work.
Kaspar worked as a linguist at the Institute for Modern Standard Verdanka, the group that enforced the standardized language that was supposed to be spoken within the walls of Verdigris. It was a cold, analytic language, but standardization helped with unity, and with how big of a continent Viridia was, Verdanka tended to drift in the more remote parts of the continent. Up north, near Helicor, it was nearly a different language, becoming something similar to Old Red instead of Verdanka. The variety in the language they all spoke made communicating hard, so the Conclave commissioned a bunch of linguists to standardize their language. They had effectively been doing so for a long time now.
“I’m heading to work,” Kaspar said as he fumbled with his jacket, “It’ll probably be a later day today from me. Good luck at school, see you when I get home.”
“Sounds good,” Seth said from across the apartment. Kaspar opened the door and walked out into the lavish hall of their apartment building.
The building in which Kaspar worked was not a far walk from his apartment building, totalling around 20 minutes of partially circumnavigating the outside of Verdigris tower to find his workplace. The building from the outside looked rigid and cold, with sharp angles and reflective glass that didn’t give you a good look inside, which made sense because the inside was quite inviting and warm. It didn’t rise high into the sky, but it sprawled out, and its lack of height was made up for in its sheer footprint. Kaspar always thought it fitting that the Institute operated out of a building that laid low but took so much real estate away from other buildings.
When Kaspar walked inside, he saw a small group of his coworkers watching the broadcast screen in the lobby, which showed the morning announcements for the day. On the screen was 201, and while his coworkers were huddled around the screen, they didn’t seem to be paying any sort of attention to it. It seemed as if they were waiting for something specific. They had to be, because 201 was just spouting some obituaries. Kaspar watched from a distance as 201 wrapped up the final obituary, and turned to another sheet of paper.
“Reports from the field suggest that the Yellow forces have grown a significant amount. Current reports suggest that Purple forces landed on the east coast and navigated to meet up with Yellow’s march. We have confirmed that this is officially a Royal attack on Green.”
201 continued to spout out specifics about the advance north, but the people in the lobby stopped paying attention. The focused silence broke down, and now people were arguing wildly about if Verdigris was going to be attacked or if the Green Military was going to be able to fend off this massive attack. “We have the greatest generals in the world right now,” “We have the strongest forces,” “Yeah but can we stave off Royal? The two next powerful nations in the world?”
Kaspar didn’t partake in the arguments. He just calmly walked away to his office, and started reading whatever he was assigned to read and annotate. Something from an eastern dialect, but he couldn’t pay attention to what it was specifically. His hands were shaking, and his heart was racing. He put on a calm demeanor, but deep down, Kaspar was scared.