A Location in Clositland: The Mill

[Grave Boy 13]

Hi all, this is a location in Clositland that I had created for my campaign and I figured that I would post the write up for it here just in case anyone wants to use it in their game or what not.  Enjoy...

The Mill
In the early 19th century, a new had age dawned on the world.  It was a time of great of progress and production, of insight and innovation; it was the birth of the Industrial Revolution.  New inventions were flooding the markets of the Western World and new innovations in labor swept the globe.  New methods of production were realized, the assembly line being the greatest of them, and great labor saving machines were made that would increase production in the factories ten fold.   The sky seemed the limit to those who had vision and motivation, but as is all too common, greed is often mistaken for vision.

As consumers cried for more luxuries at a cheaper price, the merchant barons of the world soon realized that he who offers the greatest amount of goods at the lowest cost would make the greatest profits.  So, as the prices for goods dropped, the factory owners began looking for cheaper means of manufacturing.  Women from the rapidly growing number of impoverished and displaced farm families who had come to the cities looking for a better life were soon employed to work in the textile mills for a fraction of the cost of a man.  Still, this was not enough.  The factory owners, ever eager to see a larger profit margin soon turned to child labor, and the poor families, hardly able to buy a loaf of bread, eagerly sold their children over to them.

Children rapidly became the choice workers in many textile mills, mines, and assembly lines.  Just ten cents a day would pay for twelve to sixteen hours of work from a child and their tinny hands were perfect for fitting in-between the turning gears and gnashing parts of the machines.  This insured that even if there was a snag or a jam in any of them, the line never had to be shut down.  If any of the children were ever injured or killed, no one would truly miss them, and the profit loss would be minimal.  

As industrialization spread, fanning the flames of greed, the horizons of Clositland expanded.  The Bogeyman reached out with his clawed hand seizing the psyches of the foremen, factory owners, and the merchant barons, and from the new fertile soil that they had helped uncover in Clositland, a new horror was constructed.  It was a horror capable of the most efficient means of shredding innocents and processing souls for the Bogeyman.  It was a horror known as The Mill.

The Mill has been doing its job quite effectively for the past two centuries.  While its heyday, where it had expanded by leaps and bounds, has passed, it still grows at a steady rate.  Children all around the world are still fed to it, though not quite at the rate they were in earlier years.  In the third world nations, child labor is still heavily relied upon.  As the consumers of the world clamor for cheaper luxury goods, the producers are forced by the distributors to seek cheaper and cheaper goods.  This leads the factories to seek cheaper ways of producing...  So unfortunate children in the poorer countries are still sacrificed to the grinding gears of The Mill, insuring its growth.  

However, even in the rich nations, children are still being fed to The Mill.  Child slavery rings still operate out of the Western World, steeling children away to parts unknown.  They sell them in foreign lands for a quick buck as expendable workers for the factories and mills.  Other times, the children never even leave their own land, being taken away in the night by carnivals or transient work camps to be used as cheep expendable labor.  In orphanages and state institutions, The Mill is strong, receiving its bounty from greedy tyrants that see the children as a reserve of virtual slaves.  It even manages to get its tendrils in foster-homes where children are used as a free check and slave labor.  

Lamashtu has been fairly hostile towards the Bogeyman, fighting bitterly on several occasions over many of these kinds of households.  Claiming the children from homes where they are used as nothing more then slave labor has always been the dominion of Kabaelza.  However, in the foster-homes, where money had entered the thought process, so did the Bogeyman.  Quickly, he stole many children's souls out from under the Idiot King, drawing the attention of Lamashtu.  A bitter fight broke out between the two of them, with the Bogeyman attempting to spread his dominion and increase the power of The Mill and Lamashtu defending her son.  Lamashtu figured it would be simple, destroy The Mill and the Bogeymans threat to Kabaelzas dominion would be removed.  However, even with the Demagogues blessing on Lamashtu, the fight has been going on for nearly a hundred years now, with no signs of it ever letting up.

A Walking Tour of The Mill
Under the Bogeymans dominion, never far from Black Bird Castle, sits the bleak, massive, brooding form of The Mill. It is a massive construct of suit-stained stone, cinderblock, and steel with large, stark smokestacks stretching high into the blighted black and acid green skies.  Dotting its stark blackened walls, high up off the ground are large sections of cloudy, smudged, and corroded security windows which would barely let in any light, if there was any from the outside world to be let in.

Inside, The Mill is a confusing series of long warehouse-sized rooms lit by rows of flickering yellowed bulbs hanging in poorly wired fixtures.  Steel grated catwalks and walkways, many of them coated in sticky, half solid fluids, criss-cross the interior of the buildings.  Hanging from many tracks that span the width and breadth of each warehouse like room are numerous massive, viscously sharp hooks on long chains attached to motorized and wheeled pulleys.  Odd massive bundles of bare copper cables crackling with energy stretch across the high ceilings along side massive pipe and duct work which leak foul fluids and release painfully lethal bursts of steam, sometimes onto the workers themselves.  

Dominating the spaces are row upon row of humming, clicking, and gnashing equipment, looking something like terribly outdated nightmarish industrial sewing machines, looms, or presses.  Chained to the machines and manning them are children of various ages and in various stages of abuse.  Walking up and down the isles between the workstations and whipping the workers for incentive are the monsters known as the Task Masters.  These hideous parodies of men whip and prod the children shouting and hissing the only two phrases they are capable of saying, "work harder, work faster!" and "lazy, worthless parasite!"  The latter of those two phrases is usually reserved for those children who don't really fallow the mandates of the first phrase and is the precursor to a rather harsh beating.

Besides being slaves of the Bogeyman, all of the children have another important thing in common with one another.  They all have a silver thread that stretches from navel to the machine that they are working at.  The thread is hooked to a bobbin, or a spool of some kind.  As the machine clanks, roars, and whirs, it pulls the thread out, and works it into a part for a toy of some verity.  All the children on one line make one kind of toy, each one in charge of making one part of the toy.  As more and more of the silver thread gets used out of a child, he or she becomes more and more docile and slow to react.  Their eyes slowly glaze over, losing their luster... and the Darkening sets in.  This continues until the child finally just falls over, an empty shell.  Once the child ceases to work, one of two things usually happen to him or her, either the child falls forwards getting caught up in the machine, ground up, and added to the toys being made, or the Task masters collect the child and drag him or her deeper into the labyrinth that is The Mill.

They take the soulless child deep down, close to the heart of The Mill, where the broken body is unceremoniously tossed onto a large conveyer belt.  From here, it is transported down into the Central Chamber where the massive mechanical behemoth known as The Master of The Mill waits.  The conveyer belt brings the body right up to the industrial monsters gapping bladed mouth where it drops the body in, feeding the beast.  It is sliced and ground inside the Master, the resulting material used to either build more onto the ever growing beast, feed the workers, and to spawn more Task Masters.

Connecting the massive assembly rooms together in a maddening maze are countless winding and twisting concrete corridors separated by massive riveted corroded copper and steel doors.  More pipes zigzag through the corridors, dripping their foul fluids down into thick, sticky puddles of mire on the dusty concrete floor, already heavily littered with broken and forgotten toys, bits and pieces of children's cloths, and small human bones.  Through even more doors off of the corridors are large rusted freight elevators that spark and vibrate dangerously every time they are used.  They connect to even more massive assembly rooms and corridors on what would appear to be an infinite number of levels.  Some say that there are just a few levels to The Mill, that the elevators just go in loops where the lowest level is also the top level.  It is also said that certain paths, if you walked them right, would take you from The Mill and into Black Bird Castle, though its impossible to map the rout for such a journey for the corridors and elevators form an ever changing maze that is nearly impossible to navigate.  A child could set out from one assembly room and after going down only one corridor, never find their way back to the assembly room that they had originaly left.

Through the windows that appear in some of the corridors, if a child looks really hard, he or she could make out the bleak concrete courtyards that lie between the corridors, some even accessible by large corroded copper and steel doors.  The ground in the courtyards are just as littered with refuse as the corridors and offer very little to look at.  Just the smoke stained cinderblock walls all around, possibly another door or some windows, and an acid green and black churning sky above.

At various places around the massive structure are large docks where the finished toys end up.  Here, they are loaded onto waiting trucks and train cars by more children, the ones who have proven to be too able bodied to be used on the machines just yet.  From the docks the toys are shipped out into the real world where they find their way into the hands of children, becoming highly coveted and sought after toys.  Once a child lays their eyes upon one of these toys, they suddenly realize that they must have it, at all costs.  It becomes a toy to die for or to kill for, and some kids actually do.

[Bob McNamee]

reminds me of Pink Floyd's tthe Wall....

Bob McNamee

[Grave Boy 13]

Heh, that was actually one of the few things I didn't think about when I was coming up with The Mill.  My thoughts ran around from everything from Steven Kings "The Mangler" to Hellraiser... but not The Wall.  Though, now that you have mentioned it, I can definitely see it.

[Comte]

Hey when I first saw the length of this post I decided to set it aside for a rainy day to read.  That would be tonight, massive migrain and no sleep in sight.  Still your thingy on the mill was extreamly impressive and I was blow away by it.  Your use the sweat shops as a historic land mark is something I would of never of thought of and it brings a whole new dimention into the way I look and think about closet land.  In shot well done you made this insomniac happy to be alive.

[Grave Boy 13]

Well, I'm glad I made someone happy... :)  And thank you very much for your complements and all, Comte.  The Mill came about due to my American Nations course a couple of semester's back and since then I had been fairly interested in the impacts of industrialization and all of the hell that it caused.  Recently, I had found a lot of old photos of child laborers on the web... though I am sorry, but I lost the address since.  I had downloaded piles of them to be used in some of my paintings and as I was going through them recently it just all seemed like it needed to be put into my Little Fears game.  To those people out there who say that our socially is going down the crapper in recent years, that we are not doing a good or right job in the raising of our children, I would say have a good deep look into our past... I still have a hard time believing it used to be socially acceptable and common place to do such things to children... or hell, any worker for that matter.  If a prison today were to work their prisoners on death row in the same way as the child laborers were worked a hundred years ago and in the same condition, human rights activists would go absolutely nuts...

Anyway, since it was well liked, I will try to post some more write-ups from my game as I get the time...

[Jason L Blair]

Wow. Well done, man. I'm very impressed.

Makes me wish I was in your game. ;)