The moment I turned my back, the spell broke.
Blue eyes.
Not the pale washed-out kind you saw sometimes along the coast after generations of intermixing.
A clean, sharp blue.
They didn't belong this far south.
Geortarian.
I clicked my clock shut hard and let the market noise swallow the lingering warmth in my chest.
Onyet.
Modern Geortza. Not even dressed up or archaic enough to pretend otherwise.
On-, the genitive marker for living nouns.
Nyet, heart.
Belonging heart.
Anyone half-literate enough in Geortza would immediately recognize it.
If you didn't you were either young, stupid or sheltered.
And Onyet hadn't looked stupid.
He was either careless or confident enough that I was another one of the stupid, uneducated commoners.
Neither sat well with me.
Geortarians didn't move into Undebian markets by accidents. They didn't sell vegetables out of the kindness of their hearts, and they sure as hell didn't hand out message numbers to locals without a reason.
Agents, observers, operatives, call it what you want.
Psyops didn't always come dressed in uniforms.
Sometimes they smiled and asked how your day was.
I adjusted the strap of my bag and kept walking.
A shame.
Such a pretty face wasted with Geortarian brainwashing.
The kind that snuck up on you before you remember you weren't supposed to stare.
Warm voice, soft hands.
That was probably the point.
Geortaria had always been good at that. At making you forget, for just a single second.
Those wards that slammed the burglar were another example.
To the uncritical mind they would see it as an act of heroism from the Geortarian government.
'Wow, such an efficient police force!' is what they'd think.
But behind the scenes, those wards would've let that burglar run away with the produce.
They only care about the kingdom's resources.
But they can't afford a revolution from the Protectorate, so they sometimes act like the good guys they make themselves out to be.
Disgusting.
I told myself I wouldn't message him.
I told myself I was smarter than that.
Geortaria didn't rule us because it wanted to civilize, or save us.
That was only the lie they gave out to the other nations to stay on good terms.
The version they fed to the public feeds, the schools, the infographics.
We were never the lawless desert they make us out to be.
Our civilization thrived before they arrived.
They ruled us for our use.
Cheap labor coming from a smaller population who didn't demand basic working rights.
Disposable soldiers from a race they saw as inferior. Down to the color of our eyes.
The Geortarians don't have the yellow or red eyes we do.
They act as if they were superior to us for the stupidest of reasons.
A convenient place to siphon minerals and water.
The northern Yatara range is the section that belongs to Geortaria.
They have stripped it down of its resources to the point it was unrecognizable.
It didn't look like tectonic plates had moved over thousands of years to form the range.
But like the gray craters you could see on the moon.
Most of the war was fought just for control over the southern Yatara mountain range.
The K'onoma throne never had to dirty its hands. Policies were written in clean halls far beyond the Yatara, stamped with seals and signatures, then enforced by people who could afford to pretend they were just following procedure.
And the average Undebian ate it up.
They argued over which ward was kinder, which ration officed skimmed less, which official smiled more.
As if oppression became tolerable if it wore a friendly mask.
As if the boot that was stepping on us mattered less because it was clean and polished.
When my mind snapped back to reality the street was blocked off by a massive crowd of people. So dense you could barely even make out the gaps between them.
Despite the crowd, the noise you'd expect wasn't present, they were all quiet and standing still, looking ahead of them at something.
Following their eyeline I spotted what they were all paying attention to.
On a small podium was a human.
His hair was curly and long, reaching to his jaw, he wore a beige shirt and pants, with a brown tunic around their shoulders.
It took me a moment to notice, but the shadows gave it away.
That person wasn't really there, but it was a hologram.
Despite technology being so common and used, generic commercial holograms were still in a pretty rough state.
They were either blue or green, and you could make out the scanlines, and on lower-end devices the image would wobble every few seconds.
But this one was one of the nicer, more expensive holograms.
Realistic colors, they even bothered with ambient occlusion on the feed.
However, no hologram could cast shadows, not yet.
Also, if you looked around the legs, you could notice the faint scanlines, being small enough that if you were to unfocus your vision, the image would look as if the person was right there, on the podium.
I turned back from the man and tried to push my way through the crowd of people, my stomach was almost aching with hunger, so the faster I got home the faster I'd get to eat my mother's soup.
The high density of people made it almost impossible to walk through.
With every person I shoved away from my path, two more appeared in front of me.
When I least expected, I was already a part of this crowd.
I gave a last few shoves before realizing it was impossible to go through anymore.
With a sigh, I decided to listen to whatever the man on the podium was spewing out, just to entertain myself with something as I waited for the crowd to disperse.
"I, no. We, the people. Will not be letting the crown steal from the Yatara mountains anymore! I speak for the freedom of us, the Undebians..."
Someone speaking out in public about the exploitation of the Undebian resources?
Something seemed off.
Was it the way he talked? The words he used? Is it because he's a human? Am I speciest?
I was now actually paying attention to the man, his words captured me, not in the intended way, my curiosity was piqued.
"Our rations, our land, our freedom. We are not the lawless society the crown thinks we are. We are...?"
The man put his hand behind his ear as if awaiting a response from the public, which was almost sudden.
"Undebians!"
"And we Undebians are...?"
"Free!"
"And we want our freedom!?"
"Now!"
The public spoke out in unison. I seemed to be the only one who didn't.
"Great! So I, Toheki Ho-ti', have taken upon the task of representing the Undebians. On this term's elections for Public Representative."
A 'Public Representative' was a position made by the crown to convince the Protectorate they cared about our opinion.
The job of a Public Representative is to lounge in the K'onoma castle and discuss matters of the town, hopefully creating change for the better of the Undebians.
His name... Toheki Ho-ti'...
It doesn't sound like any language I've heard.
I rolled the name around in my head.
It didn't fit any linguistic pattern I knew.
Could it be creole? A child of multiple cultures?
A minority in a minority? That's simply way too convenient.
Humans were a minority in the country, rare enough to stand out, although they were common everywhere else in the continent that wasn't the south or east.
So rare enough to stand out, but common enough to not feel alien.
His clothes were neutral too.
No regional embroidery, no religious marks.
Nothing tied him to any one group.
You could drop him into any country and he'd look like he belonged.
I scanned the crowd and they were eating it up.
Heads of the people around me were nodding, and I could make out drowned out murmurs of agreement.
His points too.
Our land, our rations, our freedom.
Its all vague isn't it?
Despite mentioning the Yatara, he didn't mention any other region.
The capital? The provinces? The outer villages with no name?
Nothing.
Rations could barely even be addressed in that way, since everyone had different needs, no one had the same rations.
And freedom is just a simple, big word, it could fit any political speech.
He spoke well. Clear pauses and rhythm.
But, that only raised more questions.
His dialect was as neutral as it could get.
Even the most formal people in the world have a certain accent to them.
Maybe they pronounce some letters differently, or their rhythm is much more like swing.
But his voice was as fake as the hologram he was projected onto.
No numbers were mentioned, no mechanisms. He never even alluded to how or from whom the resources would be reclaimed.
My eyes drifted back to the hologram.
High-grade projection with a stable output, the model was probably a portable one seeing as how this podium wasn't around yesterday.
Something military-adjacent.
A piece of tech like that could cost you upwards of thousands of Skirlias.
And here it was, in the middle of the sidewalk.
However, it was probably just my suspicions.
Maybe whatever party he was affiliated with decided to invest into not having to drag around a corpse if things went south.
"And with that. I'm hoping to see you around on elections day! Remember, vote Toheki, for your safety."
The holographic image disappeared in a fraction of a second, and with a round of applause the crowd finally dispersed.
I stared at the now empty podium for a second trying to catch up with everything that had just happened.
People drifted away in clumps, still talking about the public speech.
I waited until the street loosened enough to move again, then slipped through the gaps without taking a look back.
Walking on, the market now long gone and back to the usual buildings. I could still hear the murmurs of people discussing.
Saying how they would vote for Toheki, how he was so hot, how he would bring us freedom.
I didn't bother checking my clock. I simply walked on.
Soup would be ready soon.