[b]Hall of the Peninsula, Traverse County[/b]

The building was by no means a fortress. It was by no means a mansion. Far excluded far outside of the city of Traverse proper, it was a marvel the building was anything of use. Let alone anything of importance. But wrapped by drifting dunes of snow that piled up to window's height outside of its warm walls, the lone metal-sided building stood a test against time and elements. Defying the nature of abandonment or misuse.

Three faces to the front stood out against the road and the barren parking lot. The middle most face holding panels of old glass that had become covered with dry maroon sheets as curtains. An outbuilding just to the side. This building purpose too had been lost. By the evolution of time and society the long boarded white-building had been turned to a new use in this time. Broken up on one face, it was a stable. The warm amber glow of soft fires inside provided warmth and light within as heavily coated guards stood by with long pikes of metal pipe and wood.

As the wind kicked their coats fluttered in the cold revealing armor made of mismatching sets of metal. Ancient road signs and car-door siding made patchwork armor, like a quilt of aluminum of steel. Dents and scars in the metal provided the evidence needed to point out their use. Clearly marked dents suggested their pummeling by vicious native clubs or more makeshift weapons the old world over.

The guards men leaned casually and bitter against the wall. Keeping carefully to stay outside to fulfill their duty, but so much inside they caught the warm embrace of the fires inside. The smell of horse and hay lapped out into the breeze and tore off on the winds as a heavily coated man tore out from inside.

The guards didn't need to stop to see who was under the hood as they stood at attention as he tore by in the cold. Arms wrapped around to hug the coat tightly across his torso as he ran through the drifted snow for the building across the old torn drive. Heavily booted feet tore across the icy path beaten and shoveled from the icy drifts of snow. He ran on to the middle face, and into its glass maw without an acknowledgment for the men that stood at watch outside.

***

The door closed with a howl as the Councilor stepped in. Wind pushed against the aging hydraulic piston at its top, threatening to freeze an already arthritic mechanism. It took an effort against the wind and the stiffened joint above to close the glass door with a satisfying puff of cold air. But not without blowing deeper into the skin, and whisking in a few more white flakes of snow after the man. But as it shut, the air again grew silent.

The hall wasn't magnificent, and was little more than a small room in an already smaller building. Carpeting that had not aged well had become as hard as stone, and as brittle as dry grass. Decay and improper maintenance had just as well eaten at the fiber's, turning what could have been blue – or even green – a dark, putrid gray. Like an old tombstone, complete with its own moss as clumps of miscellaneous trash had come to pile up in the corners.

Turning about inside, the newcomer stepped to the side, to one of several burning barrels that provided heat and lighting in the old chambers. A rough cage sat over top, trapping the fires inside and holding rogue embers at bay as the man stood and warmed himself. Rubbing his hands together he muttered under his breath, complaining about the cold. His hands were beaten white from the ride, and even despite having worn gloves his knuckles throbbed a dark red, as did the tips of his long-nailed fingers.

Looking over the room, it would be hard for anyone in the new world to figure what the Old had used it for. Like many still-standing structures that had lost its purpose the years were beginning to peel into it. The ceiling – not maybe nine feet over head – sagged and dropped oddly at the corners. Panels had dropped cleanly through in time showing off the empty space that lay beyond. Some holes had been patched with sheets of wood. But for the entire frame-work, there were more open spaces that patched, and more water-stained panels than not. The only certainty about its previous life was that it was not a home, the man could not recount an old world home that had such ceilings or even such lifeless décor as here. But it worked for the purpose the Council inherited it as: a room to argue and debate outside the city itself. A quiet place to scheme as a whole.

And the voices of such scheming were already echoing out in the halls. Distant ghosts shouting out names and bellowing over one another catcalled, threatened, and boomed with laughter. Poetic – or often unpoetic – remarks concerning one's mother drifted down through the halls as the man pulled back his hood, removing his heavy winter coat.

From the side room a tiny spit of a man hobbled out from a darkened closet, reaching out with eager silent hands for the coat the man shed. The coated visitor stood at an imposing height, nearly tall enough to have to crouch under the sagging frames of the doors. His face a strong nordic tone and his head crowned by a muddied brass head of hair. And though he was merely forty, he looked like a man fifteen years his senior with an impressive nest of wrinkles on his face already.

The man who came to his assistance was nearly less than half his height. An imp by all rules and definitions and far less clean, and far more his age. A filthy mop of long silver hair fell from his bulbous light-bulb shaped head . Turkey beards of skin flapped at his chin. A long crooked nose looked like something from a fairy tail, or long enough to hang the coat he cradled in his long skinny arms.

He did his chores and duty in dutiful silence. Like a monk collecting the materials and rushing them inside the darkened room he sat in. The giant of a man could not blame the impish old creature for being silent, the means for him to speak had been cut from his mouth with a hot knife. He had seen it happen from afar when he was purchased off the caravans as a slave. They said he had come from the poisoned lands on the south shore of the lake, and had not been born with the rocks and tree of a proper man for being unfortunate enough to be born there. The slaver said he had come self-nutered.

The imp came bolting out from the side room with a new coat in his spindly hands. Stopping at the feat of his master he held up the bolt of off-white cloth to him. “Thank you.” he said in a low booming voice, taking the sheets from his hands.

The slave responded with a silent bow, stepping back on quiet feet to his dark quarters as the giant threw the sheets over his shoulder. Tying it over his shoulder and around his waist like a toga. Tightening the ends and tucking them into the belt that wrapped around his shirt of mismatched animal skins he pursued the voices. Called to them as a moth would be summoned to a flame.

“If every meeting means we're going to have to put up with your feud's bullshit, Graham,” shouted a angry voice as the giant bent down into the room council room, “then we would get nothing done!”

“Get things done? Is this now how the world went anyways!?” yelled another man from the corner of the table. The council chamber was a large empty room, made only bigger by the clear signs of old walls having been knocked out to house the large spacious table that took it up, clearly built and assembled in the room given its enormous size and weight in the red-stained wood. Small metal cans lay scattered over the wood, capped in metal plates struck with wicks. The tongues of flame that burned off of them helped illuminate the room in a dim glow as the winter sun weakly crept in through the windows, snow drifting up at the lower fringes.

“And look where it got that world!” cackled another man. There were six present in all. All generally old, perhaps having been sired into the world shortly after it went dark, or even just before. None though, no matter how long the beard could claim wisdom to the days that weren't. There was no gray that could validate memories, though these men existed for sure, they were just few and far between.

And each man wore some toga. Some manner of off-colored sheets that they wrapped around their bodies in homage to the Man That Was. Many were torn, many had been used a thousand times only. And many were patterned or single colored in such a way that suggested they were different in another era. The flowers, birds, fish, boats, and what not that covered them did not exist to depict house. But rather that long ago they were bedsheets. Now they had been torn from the mattresses and clothed the backs of old men as they sat in a cold room yelling at one another. Though it being winter did not provide the means to wear them as they would traditionally be worn, now more often over top light coats each wore to stay warm.

“It doesn't matter much anymore,” said another councilman, “The boy's here.”

“Erwin Solnburg, nice of you to arrive. How is your father?” asked one of the seated six. He was a large person. His chins blurring the definitive feature between head and body. His hair had thinned considerably to only a few rare strands. He wore glasses as well, though not nearly effective by how hard he squinted. But he was a man who would have been a more terrifying person in his youth.

“Father has been as he was,” Erwin bowed as he took his seat, “we fear the worse at this point. The physicians say his health fails all the more. And they can't come to a single diagnoses. We fear a cancer.”

“Then the last choice may be a show of strength.” patrician Pierce said in a half-comforting tone of voice. He rose a hand from the table. He was missing a finger, “Or as some might say, one of faith.”

“If we're here to discuss one of our own's timing, let it be to comfort him off in his last moments.” energetically growled a thin figure opposite of the lord Pierce. A thin trailing beard fell from his up-side down pear head. “But if we're here, we must speak.” he said rapping on the tables with boney white knuckles.

“Concurred.” said a third. A larger man, not in girth but in muscle. Lord Councilor Marcus of the house Rythmann . He was an imposing figure, even to Erwin who stood above him. Age had chose not to draw back his physique. At the age of fifty-eight he still wore the body of a figure half his age and toned to the fields. His hair was still a vibrant amber, his eyes a sharp crystalline green. “And I won't tolerate the continuing bickering at my table past this point. If we're to chew at each other I expect to see it between your idiot sons on the streets. Not in any of our chambers.

“But as we agreed to in our last session we'll move aside from our port taxes to foreign vessels. Mr. Solnburg, I believe you raised a point that's of immediate concern. I'll grant you your time.” Marcus leaned forward out of his adorned chair – something of a jealousy of others, permitted by his position - resting his muscled physique on his elbows as he waited.

The chair seemed to wait as well, mounted with a fanning array of antlers, and crowned with a deer skull. Erwin nodded, standing from the seat he had just claimed moment previous, “I am unsure if any of us have noticed the rising issues related to our food stocks, and the refugee squalor building up on the south-side of Grand Traverse. But the growing population of trapped caravans and displaced communities who sought out Grand Traverse as being an opportunity for personal safety is of course sapping city reserves from autumn crops.

“Grapes being a private asset in our community, there is little concern I'm sure. But referring to the Committee of Provisions for the Traverse Area has informed me that our stocks may not hardly run a year for those unable to use resources to acquisition food from land or lake caravans.”

“People our hungry, that is a fact of the world master Erwin, and I see little need to change this.” the wispy wraith of a man argued, “It is unfortunate that it must happen, I know. But for all over the world there is simply too many mouths and too little farming that can be done. Even in fishing and hunting, we must travel too far to ever expect sustained returns. The caravans are simply the best hope for the people, if they can not subsist on their own means then there's no room for them.

“So let them die.”

“This might be true lord Hollaender, but there's more that concerns me than suffering.” Erwin countered rather harshly, “I fear that we let this problem persist we may be looking at discontent from desperation. The squatter ghettos are unsustainable in the long-term and is becoming swiftly a growing den of murder against themselves and our own citizens.

“Now, we can do several things to fix this. We may purge the ghetto clean from our landscape and cauterize it in the short term. But lord Hollaender, there are many people in the world and they'll return. And I am afraid of what they might do when your son inherits your seat.”

“Are you implying I am old!?” the spindly man said, raising from his seat. He leaned over the table, arching his back like a rabid gargoyle, “Because I will remind you that I have more venom than any snake that slithers!”

“Marshal Hollaender you will sit and desist!” the Lord Counciler shouted.

The old skeleton spat and sputtered as he lowered himself down to his chair. Erwin bowed thankfully to Marcus, who impatiently dismissed the point. The giant continued: “We may attempt some number of long-term solutions to the matter. One might be to see out merely subsidizing the cost of basic necessities to allow many families to eat more than once every two days. The alternative, and what I feel would be the best option on the table would be to cease additional land by force, and cultivate it as we would here to furnish our people's tables.”

“And where might we go? Kalkaska?” Pierce asked.

“It would be a valid place to march.” Erwin nodded, “As any other would be. I do not feel that we would be eager on lowering the foreign docking fees any time soon, unless we have better options.”