The Aristocrats. (extract taken from Understanding the past, a school textbook by Prof. Mufudazi Flowers) "Chapter 4. By The Year of Extolling Leaves, (477) Gum Gooloo Gum Jublet was a well-established inward-looking little town, self-sufficient and proud of its achivements but afraid of the outside world. The farmers who lived on tracts of land outside the city's immediate boundaries were regarded as very brave people. Their former masters, the sinister, legendary 'They' were still on everybody's mind. What if They found them? How would They find them? By accidentally discovering an adventuring traveller, of course; and so the Goolooians stayed snugly at home. Sebastian Opal Fighammer was different. Sebastian Opal Fighammer was bored. Sebastian Opal Fighammer, aged twenty-five, decided that he was no longer interested in being the son of a skilled papier mache craftswoman, or happy with his intended future as an apprentice papier mache craftsman, so he left the city one sunny morning and travelled north into what is today the southern part of the Flatlands. To us, this is not a daunting trip. A rider on a fast beastie could get there in two days without expecting to meet any serious obstacles and no-one would think twice about it. In those days it was different. Sebastian ventured out beyond the boundaries of the most outward-lying farms, and he was regarded as dead by every Gooloooian except his mother, who went after him. She returned in five days with a note which she gave to the town's leaders. The note had been written by Sebastian and it read: "I, Sebastian Opal Fighammer, declare myself to be the rightful ruler of the aristocratic state of Fighammer. I am a Duke and will be addressed henceforth as 'sir' or 'your lordship.' Tell Dominique that he will have to get someone else to make the rest of the papier mache dolls for his son. I include the first doll (the only one I have made) with this note." The note was wrapped around a small model of a naked man with a wide smile and gorgeous black hair which shone as if it had been laquered (it had). The town leader held the note in one hand and the doll in the other, turning it absently over and over while he told Remedios Fighammer that her son was mad. He couldn't possibly be a Duke, the town leader said. They had never had a Duke or heard of a Duke. There were no such things as Dukes. "Sebastian has made one then," said his mother, and she was so impressed by her son's ingenuity that she abandoned her papier mache business and rode away to join him. She became the first Duchess of Fighammer. Later, after the state had aquired a number of other runaway Goolooians as inhabitants, she produced seven children who went on to populate the Fighammer bloodline. Gum Gooloo sent them a steady stream of notes insisting that they did not, could not exist. Sebastian responded every time with the same letter, politely asking why the Goolooians were bothering to send messages to something nonexistant? The town leader wished aloud for a group of armed people who could dismantle the Fighammer state by force. The Goolooians around him stared. They had never contemplated anything like that. During the following decades, other Goolooians began to copy the Fighammer experiment. We will see more of them in the next chapter." Go ahead to the next chapter, The Aristocratic Families or back to the Timeline.