Chapter Text
June 7th, 1800
...
I work at the Summit Station 12 hours a day, from Monday to Friday.
Someone else takes my place during weekends. It's always a different person, so I don't bother to know their names.
Salary isn't great, but it's enough to live on, I suppose. Hell, it's better than fixing those cable car engines, and there's not enough money in the world that can compensate for that ordeal.
As a conductor, I've met a lot of people from around the continent. Different people wearing different clothing and talking in different languages. They go to the station and then somewhere else. No one stays, they're always moving around, left to right, Lindblum to Alexandria, Dali to Alexandria, Alexandria to Treno, and recently, I've seen that some folks just go nowhere. No clear destination, it's something vague as grasslands, or forest or the lands below, I heard that one very often. The lands below... There are no towns, no cities, no villages, no farms, no kingdoms, nothing there.
It was a rare occurrence, but ever since the Mist's disappearance, there's been an increase in these kinds of people around the station, most of them peasants and a few nobles in between. And lots of money involved, too. You see, there are large portions of unclaimed land below us and no one owns them, not even the state has control over them. I mean, they lie within each nation's territory, but no one has lived in those lands for centuries. They belonged to our ancestors before the fear of the Mist forced them to leave to higher places.
Only a few mad lads dared to cross the Mist in the past, the rest were too afraid of what they'd find in there. All kinds of monsters, some of them not even documented in bestiaries. I can't tell if it's true or not, I have only heard rumors so far, but the world we live in is too big. Our continent, as well as the others, remains largely unexplored, and because our world revealed itself to be more empty than we thought, suddenly everyone wants to claim a piece of land as their own. "I'll build my own town!", a farmer from Dali said. Last thing I heard about him is that he went to Lachenta Wetlands and I don't know anything else, I heard no news of him or his town.
There are people who've lost everything in war and are throwing themselves in the wild, hoping they'll get a second chance. Refugees of Burmecia looking for anything but ruins, people of Lindblum and Alexandria who have witnessed the eidolons destroy their homes, the rich from Treno who were funding both sides of the conflict with their resources... Everyone is in. Except me, I'm still here.
I think those continents should be renamed. Forgotten, Lost, Outer... Even the one we're in. It's been months and I still hear people call this place "Mist Continent", despite there being no sight of anything that resembles fog or haze for a while. It's like those people are craving for its comeback, or because no one wants to rename an entire continent, it's not as important as discussing what to do with the rise of land disputes.
The rulers of each nation are currently discussing the land reform, and so far, there has been no agreement and nothing else has been done. They sit, they talk while people just die for no reason, but I suppose it's more complicated than that.