I was born one hundred twenty years ago in the sweres of Lolipop City.
My mother, a cute and not too intelligent trolless and my father, a belicose dwarf exile from Grumpsland, got drunk one day during a local celebration, a carnival in honor of Jigolanthas, one of the three main founders of our city, an ancient gnome with incredible magical powers.
Now, ordinarily, dwarves and trolls dont have sex. Much less babies. But the potent drink made from opium popies, strawberries, cannabis and coca leaves and a bit of griffons milk, known in our city as "kokodril", has the ability of dissolving any and all boundries, barriers, borders and blocks to free love. Drink it and you are guaranteed to have sex with something. It is one of the worlds best afrodisiacs, and a powerful narcotic to boot. Kokodril flows freely during Jigolanthas´ birthday carnival. The gnome is credited as the inventor of kokodril. And both my mother and my father were, at the time, notoriously addicted to kokodril. So the fact that I exist is not that surprizing. Blame it on kokodril and on the carnival.
My name is Pug, and I am neither a dwarf nor a troll, but a creature of two worlds, always split down the middle. You could say I am a child of "kokodril", and my home is the sewer.
The Lolipop City Drainage System or LCDS is a gigantic laberynth of drainage canals, most of them around 10 feet wide, which empty into the Serpent Sea. The canals are larger than the city itself and they count with a variety of additional underground structures such as homes, schools, stores and even hospitals. There are tens of thousands of underground dwellers under Lolipop City, all of them of a wide variety of underground-dwelling species, such as trolls and kobolds. The Drain System is what connects us all. The blackwater canals are reasonably clean, collecting mostly rainwater. Although to some, the smell is very unatractive. Since I grew up here, to me the smell of the smell of home, and always a welcomed thing.
My father left a few hours after conceiving me, kind of like a hit and run accident. We never heard form him again.
My mother lived all her life in the drains, as I do. She was an orphan left to fend for herself at a young age when her parents died in a fatal air baloon crash. She was given shelter and work by a huge community of trolls living and working in the gigantic underbelly of Lolipop City, the place known as troll district, about four hundred multiple ocupant dwellings somewhere under the university district in the surface.
I wsa born there myself, in my mother´s room, with the tender care of troll nursemaids. When they saw my bearded face, so untypical of troll babies, they knew right away that my father must be a dwarf. Two of the four nursemaids left the room right there and then, not really worried about my mother´s pleas for mercy.
Trolls dont much care for dwarves, and troll-dwarves like myself are certainly not considered real trolls by other trolls. The antagonism between trolls and dwarves is historic. In our planet´s prehistory, trolls and dwarves fought more than one war of genocide agaist each other, trying to exterminate one another. That was long before Lolipop City was built.
Fortunately for me, we now live in a perfectly civilized place, so the integration of races who might oppose each other, such as trolls and dwarves or elves and goblins, is absolutely demanded of all citizens. Mixed-race persons such as myself are celebrated as embassadors between the races. Lolipop City is an oasis of tolerance, having all manner of races living in harmony next to each other. The dominant and most numerous species, lizardmen, are quite cold blooded and have no enimity against any other race. But they are quite intolerant of intolerance and racialy motivated crimes are punished particularly viciously.
So tolerance might be the law of the land, but in practice, trolls still hate dwarves and a troll-dwarf like myself really doesnt have a place in the world. This is perhaps the principal reason that I had no troll friends as a young child. In fact, my mother and I lived as outcasts in our own district, always the butt of jokes about horny dwarves and trollesses without scruples.
This overt racism within our own comunity made my mother a spiritual giant in my eyes. Here was a female who defended her bastard child from the ignorace of her own people at the cost of her own reputation. My mother has always been my biggest hero. My father, the source of all my hatred and irratoinal sadness.
Mother put me to work in the sewers as soon as she could. Young trolls in Lolipop City are supposed to work to help their parents, since our district does not count with child-labor-prohibitions, as do the districts of the prizzy elves and humans. Young trolls work like trolls of any age. They are proud to be able to help their folks.
Mother and I worked as scavangers. Scavanging in the sewers is an extremely profitable job... If you are lucky. Folks loose all manner of valuable things in the drains all the time. Rings. Watches. Coins. Scavangers look for these treasures under the dark waters of the sewages using special equipment to be able to sumerge themselves under the water. Children, especially troll children, like myself, make excellent scavangers because of their small size and ability to get into very tiny spaces.
The thousands of kilometers of drains under the city are not evenly created structures, but really more like underground rivers with nooks and crannies in every corner. In these nooks and crannies is where you find most of the good stuff. In oder to get it, you have to push and shove a lot of gunk around, but ocasionally, you do find a gem, or a gold coin.
Sadly, the gods never favoured our scavanging, so we never found anything more valuable than a ruby-necklace. We lived two years quite well from that necklance. But for the fifty-odd years of my childhood, mostly we never found anything that valuable.
.... to be continued...
