Looking Down at the Tangled Streets
to protest the city’s substandard sanitation- uphill would be difficult
- the engine of the pumping plant
- — it cannot be — no, for he is dead
- made him look exactly like a Japanese pug dog
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Looking down at the tangled streets and overcrowded market squares of the capital city, I recalled some of the Contrarian history I’d studied for my wedding. It wasn’t so much the sights as the smells that brought my lessons flooding back.
Funkistan takes its name from Ploot Funk, who martyred himself with fire to protest the city’s substandard sanitation. This despite it being among the first major population centers with a sewage system. In grand Contrarian fashion, the planners had placed the main treatment plant on a mountainside several miles away. Knowing that conveying so much waste uphill would be difficult, they designed the engine of the pumping plant to be extra powerful. They did not, however, connect the pumping plant to the treatment plant in any discernible way. The sewers are perpetually backed up. Implying anything ironic or humorous about the country’s capital being literally full of shit is punishable by death.
I glanced to my left where someone had joined me at the railing. It was Ploot Funk, unmistakably — it cannot be — no, for he is dead two centuries. He smiled, reading my recognition and puzzlement, and the resemblance grew even more uncanny. All the history texts say that when Ploot Funk smiled, it made him look exactly like a Japanese pug dog.
bonus points for using them in order