RATKING
Dank. Dark. Shit. Humankind has made itself familiar with all of the sort. Either by force of nature or at the hands of their fellow man. They were spawned in the gutter then pulled from the muck and cleaned by the rain. Many have come quite far, living lives akin to Gods rather than men. The hominids roaming the savannah and discovering fire would find it quite difficult to recognize the aristocrat, draped in velvet and dripping in jewels, as one of his own. Though not all manner of men are privy to this level of debauchery, in fact, many were left in the gutter, never to climb from the muck. Never to taste the rain. Men like Joffrey Middleton. Men such as he had never known anything but the gutter. Nothing but the muck. Joffrey Middleton had, quite literally, never left the gutter and existed in the muck. The man was a tosher. Like his father before him, and his before that. He was a mudlark, a dirt grubber. A tosher, for those unfamiliar with the profession, is the undignified trade of descending into subterranean sewage tunnels and searching for all that God deemed unfit to be found. Armed with a burlap sack and a tool not unlike a rake, a tosher would overturn foul refuse in search of coins, silverware, or anything of remote value. Those who make it into the rain find themselves with an abundance, so much so that it often finds itself mingled in with the rubbish that they toss out. Joffrey subsisted on what the wealthy deemed fit to let swim amongst the shit, rotting food, and the rats.
Joffrey had been doing this for almost his entire life. Wading through detritus and hacking on toxic clouds of noxious gas. But these were not even amongst the worst factors that he had to engage with on a daily basis. There were four things that Joffrey had to constantly stay aware of if he were to stay alive in this underworld of piss, The Halls of Dis. If he let even one of them leave the forefront of his focus then all would be lost, never seen again. The first is the dark. There is no shadow on earth that shades the soul like the ones you find underneath London. In the belly of Satan himself there is likely more light to see. It is so dark that if you couldn’t feel the hammering of your heart in your chest, you might’ve assumed you already died. If you lose your lamp and are engulfed by the dark, you are helpless to fall prey to the other factors. The second is the tunnels themselves. To compare the vast entanglement of sewer tunnels to a maze would be an understatement. It was unlike any maze known to man. More akin to Daedalus’ labyrinth. It felt as if the walls moved, shifting with every turn Joffrey made. The deeper you venture, the worse this feeling got. As if the tunnels were a beast itself, trying to snare Joffrey, trapping him forever in the dank, dark, shit. Or until his body decomposes and becomes another one of the desiccated skeletons he often stumbled upon. They were the bodies of toshers like himself. Those were the only men foolish enough to be found down there. It was hell, no man but those already damned would allow themselves to delve so deep. Most toshers had partners, someone to hoist them up a wall and out of the rare manhole cover or to help them keep their way should they get lost. At the very least they could hoist your carcass back into the overworld should you be wounded or worse. But Joffrey kept no mates. He had a wife and he thanked his God every day for her, but he was a hard bastard and was not fast to friendship. So he went at it alone. Alone to face what many often deemed the most heinous factor. The rats.
There are mice and then there are rats. Then there are city rats and then there are the rats that reside in the sewers of the London underground. These creatures were less like rats and more like large cats. The only thing that would clue a tosher to the difference was their great horking yellow teeth hanging out of their gaping maw. That and their bald, shit-caked tale slapping against the mushy sewer floor. These creatures were enormous, fattened by an endless supply of disregarded food. Their bodies were fat and their gluttony was endless, the beasts were ravenous. A single bite from their diseased mouth could kill a man thrice Joffrey’s size. The filth from everything that was crushed by its jagged teeth would soon find its way into your blood, leaving you sick in a few hours and dead in a few more. Joffrey had heard countless tales of men being cornered by dozens of the beasts. In their numbers, they could pin a man against a wall and spill his belly onto the cold garbage. They could clean a man’s bones in minutes. This is why it was common to find a man’s skeleton but never his corpse. The only thing that kept Joffrey from becoming one of these skeletons was his lamp. Fueled by oil and clipped to the front of Joffrey’s overalls, his lamp was truly his lifeline. The unnatural light blinded the creatures, it was the only thing that drove fear into their hearts. What would be done if it went out? And who would do it to him?
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