The Announcement

*Posted by : Nim on Mar 14, 2018, 4:59am*

- Spink's Manor, Highholm. August 18th, Evening -

Emily was broken from her reverie when a loud voice said, "My fair lady, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am Tate Montclaire. I wasn't expecting to meet someone this exquisite."

She shook her head and chuckled at him.

"I know who you are, Tate. I'm pretty certain all of Dusk knows who you are." Which was true. Most everyone knew Tate's father, Benjamin Montclaire, one of the wealthiest people in Dusk, and as such they knew of his boisterous heir. A lot of the younger girls among the aristocracy were infatuated with him as well.

"As they should," he nodded while maintaining intense eye contact with her.

"Right... I am Emily. Emily Roezell." She barely suppressed an eyeroll as she extended her hand.

Tate put his hand firmly into hers and roughly shook her hand. She winced and pulled her hand back.

"Emily, have some champagne with me. Screw the speech. Let's make this a real party!" He exclaimed.

Emily cringed a bit. Everything about him was just so loud. She hadn't really come here to party, and she had probably consumed about as much alcohol as was advisable. If she drank anything more, she would risk getting buzzed, or worse, drunk.
Still, she needed to get away from him. It was time for the oldest trick in the book.

"Okay, okay.. just one glass, though. Is that alright?"

He smiled back at her, "Fair enough... I think you'll want more once you get to know me."

Emily faked a laugh as best she could. "Yep, I'm sure that's it."

A servant suddenly appeared with two glasses of champagne. *Oh jeez, he planned this*, she thought as she took a glass from Tate. She noted Tate's hostile look toward the servant as he took a glass for himself. What was going on there?

Tate clinked his glass into hers and winked at her. "Cheers, Emily. Here's to the night.. may it be forever young."

"Cheers," she replied, knowing this was her chance to escape. As Tate tilted his head back to take a gulp of his beverage, Emily furtively glanced over her shoulder to see if there was anyone nearby, and then she "accidentally" stepped backward into another partygoer as she sipped her own champagne, promptly spilling it on her dress.

"Oh my goodness! I can't believe this!" Emily acted incredulous. She glared at the man behind her, but he just shrugged. Now all she had to do was excuse herself to clean the champagne off, and...

Tate rolled with uncontrollable laughter. "A bit clumsy, are we?"

"Ha ha, very funny," she responded. Just as she was about to excuse herself, Tate suddenly did something she had not been expecting.

"Ladies and gentlemen, dogs and cats, may I have your attention please? I said, MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? AHEM!" Tate yelled out to all the guests.

She froze. What was going on?

"This fine young lady here with the hazel eyes. Emily. Emily Roezell. Now she knows how to party. Here I thought I'd be bored to tears with dull conversation and political drama, but Emily has shown me that there is hope after all for Highholm parties."

The room started to buzz with hushed questions as Emily stood still awkwardly, her face flushed with embarrasment. This quite a bit more attention then she wanted, and not at all the good kind of attention.

"Pipe down, people!" Tate shouted.

"As I was saying... let's take Emily's lead. Everyone grab a drink and splash it on yourself or someone else. LET'S GET CRAZY!!!" Tate shrieked as he grabbed a couple more drinks and splashed them on himself.

Emily couldn't help but giggle at the young man's antics, but now was the time to get away. She winked at Tate, then retreated toward the bathroom where she could hopefully get some water and a towel or something to try to clean off her dress...

###### ==============

Emily returned to the gathering area about ten minutes later, having wiped off as much of the champagne off her dress as she could with the resources at hand. She would have to soak the dress later and more thoroughly clean it once she got home, but for now the slapdash solution would have to do.

Most everyone was starting to head toward the vestibule in preparation for Councilman Spink's announcement. Emily was about to mingle into the crowd herself when...

"Emily, what in the Maelstrom was that!"

Emily whirled around to see Rachel Hemsworth coming toward her. "Oh, hi Rachel..."

Rachel was one of Emily's closest friends among the aristocracy, and although she could be rather air-headed at times, she was a wizard at navigating social circles and picking up on the latest gossip. Emily had helped Rachel out of a couple of binds she had gotten herself into in the past, and they had been fast friends since. Rachel was one of the few non-government-affiliated people to know where Emily lived after one such incident in which Rachel had drunk way too much at a bar in the Centrum and Emily had taken Rachel to her apartment.

"I didn't know you were into Tate Montclaire." Rachel exclaimed.

"I didn't know that either," Emily retorted.

"You didn't..." Rachel looked at Emily with confused expression on her face. "So you're not into Tate?"

"No, no I'm not."

"I was gonna say, you probably have quite a few years on him."

"I'm not old!" Emily protested.

Rachel swiled wryly. "Maybe so, but you're not in your teens anymore. So why did you talk to Tate anyway?"

"He approached me..."

"Well yeah, the guys always appoach us, but don't you usually strategically position yourself to get their attention like the rest of us?" Rachel asked.

"Of course, but Tate legitimately ambushed me," Emily explained.

"I see..." Rachel frowned. After a brief moment, she asked, "Did I see you with Louis Desaut earlier?"

"That is entirely possible, yes," Emily replied.

"Did he also ambush you?"

"No, that conversation happened intentionally."

Rachel's frown deepened. "You have terrible taste when it comes to men. No wonder you aren't married yet. How many relationships have you been through at this point?"

Emily paused. "That's kind of a low blow..."

"A lot, right? Like, at least a dozen..."

"Closer to two dozen," Emily mumbled. This was actually intentional. Emily dated a lot of men in order to get close to them and pry secrets from them. Once she got the information she wanted, she found a way to annoy her boyfriends enough to either get them to dump her, or provoke them into doing some egregious offense that she could use to justify breaking things off with them.

"Exactly," Rachel continued, oblivious to the fact that Emily sabotaged her own relationships. "I always thought you knew what you were doing, but now that you are spilling champagne on yourself and dropping hints to losers like Louis, I'm starting to think you need some help."

"I know what I'm doing. Besides, Louis isn't that bad."

Rachel put her hands on her hips and glared at Emily. "Really girl? Louis is an arrogant and condescending prick that isn't half as smart as he thinks he is."

Emily frowned. That was pretty much the vibe she'd gotten from him as well. "Aren't all of the rich guys like that, though?"

Rachel chuckled, "Yeah, pretty much, but at least they tend to flatter you until they get that ring onto you..."

Just then a booming voice exclaimed, "Ladies and Gentleman, thank you for gathering here tonight."

Emily looked up at the souce of the voice, Councilman Jeremiah Spink, who was standing on a balcony overlooking the rest of the room. She rolled her eyes. *Typical.*

"I'm still going to stage an intervention," Rachel whispered, provoking another eyeroll from Emily.

"As the servants doubtlessly informed you, I have a big announcement to make about the future of the city," Spink continued. "I believe most of you have heard that there were plans to build additional bridges between the Sprawl and the rest of the city..."

The crowd of guests had quieted at this point. Emily had naturally heard that the bridge plan had been shot down in the council, which did not surprise her much, but she was still rather irritated by this. All of the currently existing bridges were seeing an incredible amount of traffic, particularly the one into the Steamworks. The biggest reason the issue had even come to the attention of callous City Council and gotten as fas as it had was because the Department of City Infrustructure had learned that the Williamson-Lowe Bridge (the one between the Steamworks and the Sprawl) was likely on the verge of collapsing. If such an event occured, most of the factories would see a significant rise in employee tardiness. In order to effectively repair the bridge, the City would have to shut down the bridge, but the workers would need another route across the Styx, ideally one that wasn't too much of a haul to get too.

Also, Emily had to go to the Sprawl fairly frequently due to the Rising Star holding their meetings there. The other two bridges weren't in much better condition than the Williamson-Lowe, and she would have liked to have had more options to use to get in and out of the Sprawl. Emily made a point of varying up the route she took, but she was still becoming uncomfortably familiar to some of the guards that watched over the bridges. Of course she dressed like a peasant whenever she made the crossing in order to avoid standing out, but if one of those guards recognized her in another setting, she could quickly find herself in a lot of trouble.

"Instead we, the Council, have decided upon another, much more productive way to use the resources we saved for that project, which I shall share with you now. Ladies and gentleman, I present..."

Spink gestured toward a servant that had been standing nearby to come foreward. The servant brought a massive roll of paper. The servant unfurled the roll of paper over the balcony so the guests standing below could see the drawing on it.

Emily frowned as she examined the contents of the illustration. The paper showed the outline of the City of Dusk, but toward the top right corner of the outline, there was a dotted line that extended from the wall near the East Twins, Northern Steamworks area. Did this mean...

"...The Expansion Plan! The Council has agreed that in order to promote growth in the business sector and make room for our burgeoning population, we must add space to the Steamworks and East Twins Districts. In order to do this, we have to knock down the wall in that area, but never fear, we will make sure there is a new, extended wall built before we do that."

*Benjamin Montclaire is about to become an even more absurdly wealthy man,* Emily thought.

Spink took a breath and continued. "We have realized that we must expand our military in order to be able to protect the workers that will have to venture out into the dangerous Darklands and build the new wall there. This will unfortunately require us to raise additional funds to afford these additional units. We will likely add a slight, flat rate hike to all income taxes, but we believe that the boost to our economy will more than offset the minor tax increase."

Dredworth would likely see a spike in demand because of this. Emily would have to get to work on Louis and see what she could do to figure out what was going on in there. If things got too hectic in the factory, perhaps a few missing weapons would be more likely to go unnoticed...

"More details will be explained later at the next Townhall Meeting, but for now, I will say that we plan to expand our military force by fifty percent, expand our wall by..."

Spink droned on about the distance the wall would be expanded by, the amount of workers they would hire for the job, the amount of money they needed to raise, the proposed adjustment to the existing tax structure, and other things, but Emily found herself stuck on the thought of a fifty percent increase in military personel. That was an extremely sizable boost in the military's strength, much more than would be needed for something like defending workers from the likely imagined "dangers" of the Darklands.

No, the more Emily thought about it, the more she realized that there was something else going on here. Was the Council worried about another uprising? If another riot broke out in the Sprawl, the bridges would likely get damaged, which could explain the Council's hesitation toward repairing them. She also noted that Spink had failed to mention any kind of an actual timeline for this project. Perhaps the purpose of this whole announcement was to justify a tax hike so that they could increase their military size and preparedness in preparation for a possible rebellion?

"... Thank you for your time and attention ladies and gentleman. You may now continue as you were. The servants have prepared another course for us while we were occupied, so with that, let the festivites begin anew!"

Jeremiah Spink bowed lightly and started to make his way down the stairs while most of the guests applauded politely. The crowd then began to break apart.

Wanting to think a bit more on what she had learned, Emily retreated from Rachel before she could blabber on about staging some kind of an intervention. Emily knew she would have to inform her Rising Star colleagues of this development and her suspicions as soon as possible. This could change some things...