After the meeting, Tepic carefully collected all the Babbage Urchin Militia armbands that had been discarded by his compatriots on hearing there would be no more pay. He would store them away, for you never knew when the urchins would be called upon to heroically defend their City again, and it was best to be prepared.
All in all, it hadn’t been a bad time, they had all got their advance, and been fed, if not well, for the past four days, a real plus during what looked to be a long and hard winter. Also, there had been no more gruesome murders during their watch, at least no more than could be explained by normal New Babbage living….. Though there had even been less of the usual fights, it seemed having a visible audience of youngsters had a sobering effect on all but the most brutal of men, and those were pacified by being enthusiastically taken to a nearby watering hole where they could be Micky Finned into quintessence.
The tips had been good too, much being spent in any hostelry amenable to serving any urchin with coin in their pocket. The small strong box in the Sneaky Vole had filled up by donations from flush urchins, and would form a buffer for the leaner times.
Of course, it would have been nice to get their pay, the contract ending when Mr Tenk returned during the meeting, but it was no surprise that Mr Underby had stiffed them, claiming it was all a dream of some sort. That Mr Mornington had been in on duping the urchins had come as a bit of
a shock, he, at least, had always been a real gent. Still, one lived and learned.
No point looking back, they had done alright out of it all, and now Mr Tenk was back, everything would be set to rights again….
Arnold could have believed that he could have been hallucinating, he had listened to the meeting quietly at first unsure and feeling at his head occassionally.
But the arm bands and those dinners the urchins had gone to were real. City Hall wouldn’t have been feeding urchins before nor paid them an advance. There was the smell of previous meals still lingering in the building. Later he would find out that some of them had been smart enough to steal bites for later and still had left overs.
It also helped that the clockworks had been striking over the curfew. After the town hall he had gone to the telegram office with Avariel and the clockworks appeared to be amused by the whole story, Avariel saying, “Marsh gas! That was the best they could come up with!?”
At that point he could have stopped looking, but it was the curiosity of a cat that made him look for the newspaper clippings containing the evidence of the last week along with all the photographs that had been taken. He wasn’t that surprised to find they had become a bit harder to find, in fact he was starting to think it was funny. But when the Snitch had hired some of the urchins earlier in the week someone had reminded everyone that an urchin who couldn’t read could still wear the papers as a great insulator from the cold.
It hadn’t seemed to occur to Underby or Victor to have the urchins remove the armbands before the mayor arrived. It seemed they had also overlooked just as much that urchins and bums on the street often wore newspaper under their clothes. It didn’t take long to find children who were covered in the headlines, and not just the headlines. The picture of Morningtown was on one of the covers.
The cat just shook his head, smiling. His curiosity satisfied he curled up on the couch in the Gangplank with Momoe sitting beside him, the fire crackling in the background as he simply relaxed and rested.
Nathan placed his Babbage Urchins Militia armband and also the resistance badge into a trunk in the storage room in his TARDIS home, not being one to get rid of things if he didn’t need to. That, and…well, a TARDIS had an almost unlimited supply of space to accumulate stuff in, and anyway Nathan was a bit of a pack rat.
It had been all he could do to keep a straight face during the part of the town hall meeting when Mayor Tenk showed up and the cock-and-bull story Mr Underby had tried to concoct… started to fall apart. It was just such a doggoned pity then that Nathan really had to go to the bathroom, and that right about then it just wasn’t gonna wait any longer, because he really would have loved to hear the rest of it… but he had to get up right then and race out of the room looking for the nearest restroom before he pooped himself. Which…. actually… he DID do, because he couldn’t find the restroom in time.
By the point he’d gotten back to the meeting hall, cleaned up and in a change of clothes, all the song and dance was over and they’d gone on to more mundane things, like plans for coming months. Oh well…
He got some the details of the rest of the meltdown later, in dribbles and drabs, and it turned out he hadn’t really missed much.
Nathan now shrugged, closed the trunk and wandered off to find something else to do. Looked like things were going to settle down for awhile at least.