Rukae was known as a country full of crime and citizens living in constant fear. However, you wouldn't hold that opinion if you'd seen this city during the day. There was a pact between the crime lords of Rukae and the regular citizens (who aren't regular upstanding people by any of our standards); the pact states that the day is harmless – no conflict shall take place during the day unless necessary – and the night is for crime. Robberies, murders, rapes, anything can happen at night time. Unfortunately, this rule is so old that people have begun to forget it.
With the sun shining above, the citizens meandered the streets of the capital run by the five ruling gangs. Rukae's territories were static; the five gangs all had what they wanted, five equal portions of the city as territory. It took hundreds of years of bloodbaths after bloodbaths before the city was finally split like this.
In the territory that belonged to the former Liviedo gang, on top of a market street where dozens of people in groups were walking around, exchanging coin for food and clothes, an 11-year-old Teerom sat on the ledge on a rooftop, swinging his foot back and forth with his other knee supporting his head. He watched the people below carefully yet laxly.
He had short hair in contrast to today, but he still had a well-built body – quite unwashed and dirty - a result of his life as a thief. He spotted a couple walking down the street and scanned them carefully. The woman was about 5'8 and had well-tended brown hair – a rare sight in Rukae for a woman - that came down to her shoulders. Her man was definitely part of a gang; he was tall and looked tough with his slick back hair and scarred neck barely revealed by his long grey coat.
But Teerom wasn't afraid. He watched them walk up to a stand that sold fish, and the man took out his wallet that had a chain falling from a corner to pay 26 silver for a bag of shrimp (In Lusitra, the price would've been 5 silver, but everything in Rukae was overpriced, causing starvation to become a common experience. However, most of those who weren't willing to fight for their livelihood would've left by now).
Teerom dropped down to an uneven balcony five meters below and hopped into the one next to him as he dropped down further and further, following the couple as they made their way to the next stand.
Rukae was full of shoddy, run-down, wooden apartments. Most of them lacked a good foundation and were unbalanced, tilting to the sides slightly. The floors often separated from the ones below and above, giving the whole thing a badly stacked Jenga tower's shape. The entire city consisted of greyish brown planks with hints of blue and green paint along with extremely unsaturated cloud grey cobble and stone supporting the houses.
He landed a few houses behind them and slowly caught up to them, making sure not to look suspicious to the other people wandering the market streets. His pro strategy: whistling with his hands in his pockets. The couple slowed down as they looked for their next shop.
Teerom exhaled readily and sped up. He saw that the man kept his wallet in his right pocket, the one adjacent to his woman that walked beside him. It would've been troublesome, but they didn't seem so close that she'd be unintentionally guarding it with her hips.
Swiftly and smoothly, he reached with his nimble hand for the man's pocket and inserted his thin fingers into the opening. He felt the wallet's leather edge and grabbed onto it, pulling it gently but quickly. It came out without the man noticing, but he felt a sudden resistance from it.
He shifted his eyes from the man to the wallet and saw that it was chained to the interior of the man's pocket. Slowly, he looked back at the man - who was now glaring at him - with an expression of anxiety and hopefulness that he would take pity on the mere child before him.
"Spare some change, sir?" Teerom smiled fearfully. The man carefully put on a pair of gold knuckle dusters on each hand.
"First you try to pick my pockets. Then you crack a joke? Let me tell you something, kid. That was a bad idea." He lunged his metal knuckles towards Teerom's face, but the astute boy dodged; he had already concluded that the man probably didn't feel like sitting down for a nice friendly chat.
Quickly, Teerom swiped the wallet, still chained to the man's pocket's interior, and took out a bunch of silver coins. "Thanks for the coins!" Teerom laughed, put the silver in a zip pocket, and sprinted away.
"Not so fast!" The man shouted and threw his hand, palm open, forwards to cast a spell. "Lasso!" He produced a long and thin rope with the end knotted like a cowboy's lasso that snapped onto Teerom's wrist, tightening his sleeve on it.
"Crap."
"Get over here!" He tried to pull him back, but Teerom bent over with his arms out towards him to let the lasso only bring his shirt towards him.
He gave the man a half-cocky and half-innocent grin before running forward. But the man didn't give up. He chased Teerom down the street, despite his woman's suggestions to do otherwise, shouting aggressively.
Teerom threw down a fruit stand to slow him down and buy enough time to begin to climb one of the buildings. It took him a few seconds to get a good grip on a doorframe as support to lightly climb-jump up to a windowsill. The man had caught up to him though and was preparing to throw another attack at him.
"Whip!" He generated another rope, except this time instead of having a looped end it was straight and ready to injure. "Eek!" Teerom jumped to the left, grabbing onto another windowsill, away from where it hit the wall; it caught itself in the wall, cracking it and making it release a small cloud of dust. He couldn't help but wonder what would've happened if that hit him.
Quickly moving on, he punched the glass in of the window in front of him and pulled himself up to stand on the entirety of the windowsill. He now had enough support to make a high jump. "See ya!" He hopped upwards, using the Jenga-like shape the buildings had to his advantage, grabbing onto the unintentional ledges as he climbed toward the rooftop.
The man quickly looked around and saw a loose ladder resting against the building two left of the one that Teerom climbed. It was about thirty meters ahead and he ran to it and began climbing it to chase Teerom.
He reached the rooftops about five seconds after Teerom did and saw him running away, hopping over the gaps between buildings. However, Teerom soon reached a dead end. He suddenly hit the brakes when he saw that the building ahead was separated from him by a large street.
He glanced at the man, now having slowed down to prepare for the beating he would give Teerom, before scanning the street and finding a big fragile-looking lamp post on his right, right in the middle of the turn.
"Nowhere to run, eh?" The man chuckled.
"Fire Magic!" Teerom readied his hands as if he was going to use a spell, making the man tense up and take a defensive stance. He took a deep breath as you would before you shout something, getting exactly what he wanted from the man: a panicked reaction resulting in a free rope.
"Whip!" The man yelled and hurled a sharp rope which Teerom dodged and caught from the side – he used weak Protection Magic to prevent the rope from burning his palm. He'd pieced together that the man's ropes could snap around things to restrain them, but in that case, they could be used to hold a tight grip on something. The man realized he'd been played far too late as Teerom threw the rope and snapped it onto the lamp.
Thanks to his creativity and his athleticism at such a young age, Teerom jumped from the building and swing himself across to the other rooftop. He was light, but he'd still bent the lamp and unhinged it from its foundation slightly.
The man jumped after him, now blinded by anger, and tried to snap his rope onto the lamp, but as he reached the lowest point of the swing, the lamp's head snapped and he fell face-first onto the ground. He quickly got up just to be pinned back down by the lamp post that he had finished unhinging after Teerom. Expressing nothing short of extreme hatred, the man stared at Teerom on the rooftop above him.
"Hehe," Teerom giggled and walked out of view, throwing the coins up and catching them coolly as he hurried down the rooftops to a ledge that he could climb down from, far away if the man was to persist.
He found the end of the block after a few minutes and began climbing down the irregular apartments. Once on the ground, he dusted himself off and made his way home.
Near the North of Rukae's Liviedo territory, there was a large field of grass with small huts littered about. There was no transition from the tall 30-meter buildings, once you reached it, the field just started and the streets turned to encircle it.
By the time Teerom reached the road's end, it was nearing the end of the day. Where one would've expected to stand houses, there was nothing but the Northern Fields. There exists a rumour about the Northern Fields; a retired gang leader, notorious in his time for his brutality and hatred, stayed there. Hence why the sudden transition. People didn't want to risk building on that man's territory.
Teerom yawned and stepped from the road into the ankle-high grass, making his way across the houses towards Rukae's wall (the majority of cities have a big wall surrounding them to protect them from monsters).
Tiny twinkling cyan flames rose from the ground as the night began. Even though crime was a normal occurrence in Rukae, it was still advanced enough to have things like Street Flames – tiny flames that light up the roads at night; green and blue flames are used to light up fields.
Teerom continued past dozens of huts, walking for about twenty minutes before he reached his home: a larger shack, two storeys, than all the others, but still run down with coarse wood and some parts of the frame showing.
He jogged up three steps at the doorway and knocked to be answered by a huge, lean Hijian man who was blocking out the warm light of a fireplace. He had bright brown eyes and an short sides supporting fluffy, messy, texturized hair.
"Hey, Jiggan." Teerom innocently grinned.