Okay, thanks to Lord of Change for helping me with character names at 3:30 in the morning to finish the rough draft of this! I encourage negative comments , since some aspects of the story may be hard to wrap your head around at times. I need to know what exactly these elements are, so Virbot can laser them. *pets Virbot*
Max loved his job, and his job loved Max, too.
He sat down in his uniform and stared out the window at the passers-by. Most of the citizens never bothered to look through the large front window at Max, and he felt that was just as well, for those who did usually sneered at him.
His hometown had changed a great deal after his six months stationed in the Western Sector. Ever since the invasion, nothing seemed to stay the same anywhere for very long. The new school building had become the most prominent structure in town, nearly as tall as the old church. In front of the school, the paved road that replaced the dirt one still looked like it was laid yesterday, even though it had been laid three years ago. And across from the school, Max sat at his desk in the new recruitment office for the Imperial Army, since the old one was burned down in a fire two years ago.
He opened up a newspaper and spread it across the entire desk. On the front page was an article about a fire and how deftly it was handled by the local fire department. Only one building had burned down, and no one was injured. Max turned to the Imperial language section of the newspaper, and smirked at how similar it looked to English. Both languages used the exact same character set, so it was very easy to learn, not at all what one would think of a language of another species.
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In the rear of the office, the two other workers sat on the floor and looked at a number of posters up on the wall. Sulica twitched her ears as she looked over the works. She walked on four paws over to one poster and gave it a nudge with her nose.
“Be careful, Leevin. You need to organize this better,” Sulica told him.
“What’s wrong with it?” Leevin asked.
“Look at the central soldier.”
Leevin looked perplexidly at his work. It looked like a simple poster design. There was a human soldier standing at the right, with a vanishing point in the bottom left of the work. In the middle was a wolf soldier, and on the left was a fox soldier. The human soldier was obviously the central character, while the wolf soldier was much taller than the fox soldier.
“The wolf soldier looks fine to me,” he pulled his ears back and pretended to be distracted.
“No,” Sulica rapped the wall to regain his attention, “He’s not the right size. Neither is the fox soldier, for that matter.”
Leevin now looked more baffled than ever, “But they are,” he stood up on four paws and pointed his ears at Sulica, “I have the scale correct!”
“Exactly,” Sulica extended her claws and used her right paw to scrape a line through the paint, “See this? All the characters should be on the vanishing line. Not above, like the wolf soldier, not below, like the fox soldier. On this line.”
Leevin tensed up, “If I do that, the soldiers won’t be their real size anymore. Wolves are slightly taller than humans, and foxes are far shorter than them.”
“Why do they need to be their real size?”
“To be correct.”
“What is correct?”
Leevin sat back down and relaxed, “I think I get what you’re saying,” he looked over the paint, with the conspicuous line drawn through it, “What if I just put the human soldier in the middle? It would be more real that way.”
Sulica shook her head, walked back over to Leevin, and gave him a nudge.
“Leevin.”
A short pause.
“Okay, I’ll redo it.”
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Max read through the Imperial-language section of the local paper as the front door opened. He was startled at first, but then calmly folded his paper, walked over to the youngster and gave him a hearty handshake.
“Good morning! My name is Max Averson, are you interested in enlisting?”
He looked young, not even into his twenties. However, he did look well-kept up, and not a disparaged youth in any sense. More likely, he was a youth who had just developed a good deal of sense.
“Yes,” he replied, a bit tentatively.
“Good, why don’t you have a seat?” They both sat down on their respective sides of the desk and the candidate looked around at the walls of the room. They were mostly bare, aside from a few posters, calendars, and other trinkets.
“What’s your name?” Max asked.
“Zachary Meson,” he replied.
“Now then,” Max leaned back in his chair, “What made you come here today?”
He shifted about uncomfortably. “Well…” Max watched as he tried to come up with an enthralling reason, but could not.
“Do you know any Imperial?”
“A little. Only what I picked up from school. Should I?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Max smiled, “I didn’t even know what Imperial language looked like before I joined. Besides, most foxes speak English, anyways.”
“Really?”
“Oh, of course! In all my time I’ve only served under one wolf who only knew Imperial. Did you know that wolves and foxes both speak separate languages? The ‘Imperial’ that we reference is really the foxes’ language.”
Max watched as Zachary’s eyes opened wide. “Even though you can choose to stay in the Eastern Sector, where you will see…you know…humans…most of the time, I highly recommend you sign up to serve a few months in the Western Sector. It really opened up my eyes to a whole new world I hardly knew existed.”
Zachary finally started to smile.
“Here,” Max plucked a set of papers from the stack, “I’ll help you fill these out.”
“Thank you.” Max handed him a pen, then Zachary wrote his full name on the top line of the first page.
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Leevin sealed a large envelope with a completed design inside. Sulica wrote out an address on it as he chewed on a slice of jerky.
“Think we’ll make quota?” he asked, swallowing it down.
She paused in her writing, to check the address again, “Do you even need to ask that anymore? With Max at the front desk, we get far more recruits in a week than we used to get all year.”
Leevin stuffed another poster design in an envelope and looked at Sulice curiously.
She looked back at him, “You weren’t here for the bad old days. I remember hearing horror stories about ears being sliced off, and recruiters quite literally being shot to pieces. I was shot through both my hind legs during the push to control the Eastern Sector, so I wasn’t allowed to join the England invasion, and they threw me in recuiting instead. I was lucky to be stationed in a Central Sector recuiting office when the war ended. Even when I got here two years later, it was still an absolute mess. Having actual humans around here to help with recruitment helps a lot. I think that these people are finally learning to live with the Empire instead of against it.”
Leevin looked down at the poster he was about to put into an envelope.
“I don’t know about this one, Sulica.”
She paused, then walked over to Leevin, and sat down on the floor beside him. She tilted her head and twitched her ears while she evaluated it.
“It just doesn’t feel right,” he added.
“Try to explain it to me.”
He took a deep breath. “This poster shows a military tactical map with command terms in Fox, in bold at the top. The command terms all describe the various actions represented in the diagram. The tagline of the poster is, ‘Don’t understand what this means? Find out. Join the Imperial Army.’ This shows the inadequacy of the person viewing it, and proposes the solution to that inadequacy: joining the army.”
“Good, so the purpose of the poster is to show inadequacy. How does it do that?”
“The command terms at top are all in Fox, so they use English letters, but in a distorted way. This distorts an idea that they believed that they knew, reading. They are suddenly unable to read, in a symbol representation that is in actuality highly familiar to them. Therefore, they have been blind in their faith in their own abilities, and the army has the solution to this blindness of ability.”
“Explain how the diagram relates to this.”
“The diagram uses its own complexity to confuse the viewer and cause them to question their own view of location. While the map has arrows and symbols, familiar elements to map reading, the viewer remains unable to interpret these symbols. Therefore, although they believe that they can read a map to find their location, upon viewing this map they realize how they know nothing about their actual location. Therefore, joining the army will help them find themselves, and where they exist in the world.”
Sulica pulled the design closer and looked at Leevin’s work. “I just don’t know,” Leevin said, “Something just doesn’t feel quite right about it.”
She looked at the diagram and said, “I think this is your problem,” as she placed her paw in the center of the map. “This diagram is far too cluttered. I mean, even I have problems understanding this. It’s so complex, that it suffocates the strangeness, which is what you are trying to emphasize. Instead, try to build the diagram around one central idea. Therefore, the viewer can focus on this one element, and realize how he cannot interpret the map.”
He nodded his head, and placed it back in his inbox, “I’ll come back to it later.” He turned to face Sulica, “Let’s just finish mailing these out. Command will murder both us and the printers if these aren’t out by next month.”
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Max looked out the window as dusk came around. As winter neared, the nights became longer. Sulica always said that all recruiting used to be done at night, so winter was their best season.
He pulled out a book from inside his desk, as if he refused to let himself become bored. However, he was constantly distracted by any sort of movement outside, and the rustling of the Imperial flag above the town’s school.
A few people walked by, and Max set down his book to look closer at one of them. At first, they ignored what was inside the glass, but once one of them looked back at Max, he bade the other two look inward also. Max turned his gaze towards his book, but looked back at them as they entered the office.
“Oh!” Max sat up in his desk and placed his book down on the desk, “I haven’t seen you in ages, Greg.”
Greg sat down in the main chair while the other two leaned up against the side walls. “I haven’t seen you either…” he quickly looked around, then leaned over the desk and asked Max in a low voice, “What are you doing here?”
Max leaned back in his chair to ease away from Greg, “I just got back from my deployment in the Western Sector.”
“No,” Greg leaned closer, constantly observing the surroundings, “What are you doing, here? Working for them?”
Max tilted his head, “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you have any pride in yourself? You’re working for a bunch of…” he looked for a better word, “…animals!”
Max turned from a smile to a sneer, “They are NOT animals! At least not any more than we are. I thought someone as smart as you would be able to see that.”
“Max. They attacked us. They took us over. What part of ‘foreign occupation’ do you not understand?”
“Well, we did attack them first, and this land was theirs to begin with.”
“But they’re foxes and wolves! We’re people! That’s a big difference!”
“We’re all part of the Empire, when you put this petty difference aside. We’re not a collection of European colonies anymore; we’re the Eastern sector of the Empire. When will you get that?”
“They’ve really brainwashed you, haven’t they!”
Max sighed, stood up from his chair, and walked over to a poster on the wall, next to the taller of Greg’s friends. “Come look at this,” he beckoned. Greg obeyed, and as he stood in front of the poster he shifted his weight onto his left foot. “When you look at this poster, what do you see?”
The poster had two human soldiers, one lending a hand to help another climb up out of waist-high water. It said in English at the bottom: “The Imperial Army, guaranteed to get you out of the muck.”
“It looks stupid,” Greg analyzed, “One traitor helping another. How is this meaningful?”
Max looked at the poster again. “I see it as my meaning for joining the army. What are you doing with your life?”
“Working?”
“For what?”
“Pay.”
“Is that good enough for you?”
“Yes.”
“Not for me. You see the army as a tool for occupation by our ‘enemies’, but I see the army as OUR army. If we don’t stand up and defend ourselves, who will?”
“You treat the Empire like it’s something we should protect,” Greg inched closer to Max.
“And we should! We are all one joined group of minds, though we may look–”
“Listen to yourself!” he slammed Max up against the wall, “You sound like the articles in the newspaper after the invasion!”
“I believe that good can come out of this!” Greg kept pushing Max up against the wall, “What’s wrong with that?”
Greg pulled out a knife and held it up to Max’s neck, “Because I’m not going to sit back and watch while you grow a tail. That’s why!”
Finally, Max screamed out at Greg at the top of his lungs, “Well, I think that you’re absolutely…”
Sulica and Leevin both looked at each other, then silently put on their hind-paw pads in order to rise and stand on two feet.
“…really, entirely, completely…”
Sulica grabbed a key from below her inbox and used it to open up her desk’s very large drawer.
“…undeniably, sincerely, extremely…”
The two foxes both stood up at the door, and Sulica placed a paw on the handle.
Max took a deep breath, and Greg eased up the knife from his neck, “…absolutely ridiculous!”
The door flew open, then Sulica and Leevin came out with both their rifles pointed at Greg.
“Step back!” Sulica yelled surprisingly loud for a fox just under five feet tall. Greg stood dumbfounded for a moment, then dropped his knife and put his hands in the air.
“I said step back! To the window!” She waved the muzzle of her rifle at the three of them, with Leevin on her right side. The other two were already standing at the window, with their minds crossed whether to stay put or make a break for it. Greg looked with wide eyes over at Max.
“Are you here because you want to enlist?” She yelled in her high-picted fox accent.
The three of them slowly, silently shook their heads.
“Then go!” She yelled! “Before I force you to leave dead!” Max only returned Greg’s gaze with an icy stare. “Go!” She pulled her finger closer to the trigger. The other two had long disappeared out of sight before Greg left the office.
“You okay?” Sulica asked Max.
“Fine,” he dusted himself off, “Just a little ruffled, that’s all. I don’t think they’ll be back.”
Sulica lowered her gun, and Leevin claimed the knife that rested on the floor. “Okay then. Don’t feel that you have to linger here much longer; we can take over if you want to take a rest.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” Max sat back down at his desk.
“Just knock if you need anything,” the pair disappeared behind the door in the rear of the office.
Max looked outside as the wind began blowing in fierce gusts. He could see the entire Imperial flag as it swayed back and forth above the school. The emblem was a dark green paw on a brown backdrop. He then looked down at his shoulder, where he saw the same symbol, merely in a smaller form.
After he took a deep breath, Max still loved his job, and his job still loved Max, too.
One question for you to answer if you're up for it: "Who's right?" I can predict 3 different answers to this. Surprise me.
