>>5943628There are always the small and scuttling things, moving in organized rows: ants and termites, marching empty-mouthed into the city along its ditches and culverts, beneath notice, beneath contempt. Here, though, you see their return trips, with jaws clamped about chunks of dead foliage, or rotted wood, or bits of filth best not examined or considered too closely. You pass the solemn, undecorated, half-buried buildings where bodies are taken, on the rare occasion of an elven death—taken to be prepared, and cleaned, and recycled back into the wilderness from which all Sylvan folk are born. You smell the sickening sweetness of the fertilizer facilities where waste is processed into more palatable material for the advanced forms of silviculture which allow low-intensity elf-style food production to support an appreciable population without depleting the forest proper.
You see, as Zith-Zi would put it, ‘how the sausage gets made’.
“It’s quite artful in its own way,” Izzy says of the march of tiny reaper-assistants, processing death into life. "Extremely efficient."
You…
>Agree—this is the sort of natural process which was missing on the moon, and which has its own earthly beauty>Disagree—it’s gross, and nasty, and you kind of hate bugs and would rather not have them around>Must cede to the wisdom of your people—it is, at best, a ‘necessary evil’>Write-in 