Here’s where I think everything went wrong:
You’ve got this tiny group of hunters and gatherers. They’ve always been hunters and gatherers, like their parents and grandparents before them. But one day they’re out in the sweltering summer heat trying to pin down a couple of antelope for dinner or whatever, and one of them gets what is possibly the best idea for mankind since fire and the wheel.
Motherfucking Agriculture.
So they catch some animals and start breeding them (perverts) and instead of gathering what’s around they find some stuff they can grow reliably and after a few generations they’ve got a nice thing going on. No one has to go out of town to find the meat they want, they have stores of grain and food to last them through the winter, and existence has become pretty damn chill.
This becomes the problem.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but some humans are reliably Not Chill. They wake up in the morning and they have to do something. They have to be productive. They have to accomplish accomplishments. And they have to do it before mid-morning or they start feeling all sweaty and antsy and gross. It’s a fucking compulsion. It’s a nice day, the weather is cool, it’s sort of cloudy, and everyone is looking forward to doing maybe an hour or two of weeding and watering the crops and feeding and water the animals and then lounging. Play some music, kick the ball around, talk shit. You know. The usual.
Everyone, that is, except Wallace.
See, Wallace is one of these chronically Not Chill people. Wallace needs to be doing something. And not just anything. Playing music or games is not enough for Wallace, oh no. He needs to be improving shit. He needs to see results. While everyone else finishes up what they need to do to continue survival around ten in the morning and settle into enjoying life, Wallace is hard at work.
“We need to fix these tents,” Wallace says.
Sebastian hears him and looks up from whatever he was whittling, and then turns to look at Wallace’s tent.
“What happened? Did yours rip or something?”
“No,” Wallace said, “But we’re living in tents!”
“And?”
“And…and we’re better than that!”
At this point Sebastian stares at Wallace. Wallace is a known pill, and Sebastian knows if he engages anymore than Wallace is going to somehow become even more unpleasant.
Piper doesn’t notice and says, “But we’ve always lived in tents! It’s worked so far.”
As Sebastian closes his eyes, Wallace claps his hands together.
“Yes, that’s the point. We’ve always lived in tents! Come on, people, we can do better than that!”
“Well,” Piper asks even as Sebastian is screaming at her with his mind to shut up. “What do you think we should live in?”
“Stone houses.”
“Stone?”
“What’s a house?”
“It’s what we’re going to be living in, once we finish the work! The stone will insulate us better than the canvas. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and there will be more privacy. You can’t hear dick through stone!”
Now, it’s not that Sebastian doesn’t believe Wallace on how much better stone housing would be. It’s more than he doesn’t care enough to do the work to make it happen. He likes his tent. It keeps him warm and dry and he decorated it up really nice and it’s easy to move. It keeps him alive. Why would he want to do anything else?
He passes on building the stone houses, but Wallace manages to get a few other Go-Get-Em types to come with him. A year or so passes, and now the town is made up of stone and wood buildings. They are better than the tents and everyone is a little more comfortable. They go back to getting what needs to be done by ten and then enjoying existence for the rest of the day.
Everyone except Wallace.
Wallace, of course, never stops finding things he thinks he can improve on. While the others spend their days in the water or laughing with each other he’s out there, building better fences and windows and all sorts of shit that’s, like, nice, but not really necessary. Everyone just leaves Wallace alone to work, though. Live and let live, right?
Except, Wallace is starting to get a little weird about it. He wakes up, he stretches and eats breakfast, and then he gets to work. And all these other people? Why, they’re just sitting around! Talking to each other! Not accomplishing a God Damned Thing while Wallace is busting his hump from sun up to sun down! And he’s getting mighty sick of it.
“You people need to help me!” he screams at them one morning.
“Oh, no thank you,” says Sebastian.
“I wasn’t offering! This is ridiculous! I’m the only one working in this town!”
“Yeah, but, like, you don’t have to be. We don’t need these things to survive. We took care of all that before ten. Now we’re enjoying ourselves.”
Wallace sputters a bunch, getting redder in the face, because he can’t think of a good reason why everyone should be working as hard as he is all the time. But they totally should! So unfair.
See, Wallace has decided that because he always has this drive to be doing something than that makes him better than the others. He’s more dedicated to the cause or some bullshit. They’re all just lazy assholes profiting off all of his hard work. He sees people sitting down and enjoying their time on earth and laughing while he’s slaving away (at some completely not necessary task) and thinks that something is wrong with them. How dare they be happy with what they have? Don’t they know they’re constantly supposed to want better? More?
Wallace isn’t only the sort who has to be constantly doing something.
Wallace is also an asshole.
Wallace starts scheming. He is going to find a way to get those lazy bums off their butts and doing the work that he has decided needs to be done.
Anyway, from here you can picture any sort of scenario you want, because they all happened at some point.
Wallace decided he was in charge and started ordering everyone else around.
Wallace gathered a few flunkies and made an army and started ordering everyone else around.
Wallace told everyone there was a man in the sky who would give them paradise but only if they worked all day and also followed all of Wallace’s orders.
Wallace invaded a neighboring town and made those people work.
Wherever there are people enjoying their existence, there is a Wallace.
And Wallace is an asshole.
Fuck Wallace.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 