The Farm Boy Himself

There is the boy who lives outside the city, in the Urbe Externus. He lives with his father, who is a businessman of sorts. Their land is on the brink of the inner city, and on the far parts of their property his father has constructed trading booths complete with locked warehouses for traders to use. Their house is on the other side of the property, acres away. The boy's father is away most of the day, and the boy is more or less free to roam with his friend. His friend smokes from a pipe, but the boy thinks it's a stupid hobby. The boy's mother is gone; in fact, the boy has no memory of his mother. She is in foreign servitude as a punishment for some crime. The boy doesn't know the crime. His father won't tell him, and the boy is suspicious. He's afraid to ask anything, of course. It's a touchy subject. His father is detached and mostly absent from the boy's life.

The boy spends a lot of time at his friend's house. His friend's father is a farmer of smoking spices (ah, so that's the boy's endless supply.) He's a funny guy. An daydreamer, but a father figure to the boy. The boy's friend doesn't appreciate his father as much as he should. The boy's mother means well, but she's not too bright. Mostly, she cares for the house. She's certainly a nice person, though.

There is a machinist near the boy's house. His father doesn't know that he sees the machinist. He wouldn't approve. The boy sneaks off to learn from him, as he has no other way of being educated. The machinist teaches him things like sacred mathematics, natural science, machinery, and astronomy. But what interests the boy most is his lessons in history. He tells him of the ancient cultures, and the lost arts. He shows the boy writings, supposedly from the people who inhabited Armour before the Latines. According to the machinist, they had secret brotherhoods. The brotherhoods would cooperate to protect the towns from tribal attack, but they would never share their secrets. The brotherhoods each had their own wereteknike (War-Technique.) The boy often tries to find out how the machinist finds these scriptures, but he says he swore to never tell. He will tell the boy, though, that he has no affiliation with any such brotherhood, and in fact believes most of their methods to be out of date, anyway. Especially considering the Latines seemed to have conquered them...

Regardless, the boy enjoys his lessons with the machinist more than anything else. He excels in his studies of sacred mathematics and the natural magics, but he's curious more than anything about the old brotherhoods. Of course, the boy's world is fairly limited. He has his friend, his farm, and the machinist. Despite the wealth of information available to him, he's never actually been to the inner city. His father has been promising to take him for many years, but the boy is growing old enough to realize that half of his father's business in the city takes place in brothels.

And this is the situation of the farm boy.