The red sun hangs over the midnight sky in the city.

The city was mostly empty and the only people that were around mainly hung around the train station. The train station was populated by passengers from the next city over. The snack bar was in disarray, without anyone being in attendance to clean up the place. It would normally by mostly clean, tended by at least one employee who would offer at least candy bar from the glass shelf.

The passengers on the train read these comic magazines that would be sold on the news stand, being sold in newsprint that featured the different seasons in publications. These would come at around four hundred pages per book, and would be read on the subway. A new series would constantly be cycling in and out of the volumes of pages. There would not really be anything in them that your average person would recommend, except that no better books were available for perusal. None of the series would quite catch on, despite the efforts of the editorial team. In other magazines, this would be considered a sign that perhaps they should discontinue publication. I would say cancel, but language creep started setting in that made using that word no longer meaningful. For some reason this magazine would always keep being put on the magazine shelf, despite there be dwindling sales. In the past, people would say this would be do to political ideaologies creeping in, however the medium by its nature has had the tendency to let their right-wing sentiments influence the works in question do to editorial intrusions.

In such a train station with disconnected priorities, influenced by long sense dated civil wars between sharp left-wing and right-wing sentiments, what was left was a husk of a station whose ticket sales gradually became fewer do to those of a centrist persuasion, whether that be liberal or conservative, being tired of being stuck in the middle between what seemed practically like rival gangs in social discourse. You could sneak in a semi-automatic gun, simply do to the sheer lack of security, ever sense groups like Antifa gradually expanded the meaning of police to also include security guards at subways. Despite the fact that the purpose wasn’t just to prevent those who did not buy tickets from access. You would almost never even see anyone with a taser or can of pepper spray despite this lack of security.

Here, Jeruan steps outside of the train, and ascends the escelator into the city above, dimly lit by the glow of hanging star of rid in the midnight colored sky. She had just returned home from high school, having to travel several miles for school. It was here that she remembered a specific class period.

In many classes it wasn’t uncommon to have a special day during the school year, where they were have a potluck where students would bring lunch. Such classes would generally be in the afternoon, and would be especially nice for students who could not otherwise afford a lunch. It was a school where they had to cut certain programs, like free lunch, in order to pay other expenses like maintaining the parking lot. The teacher would have the class watch a movie related to the lesson, generally that of Julius Ceasar or McBeth. Yet curiously none of the many adaptation of Magical Realism novels that had been out for decades.

Jeruan would enjoy eating the barbequed weiners cooked inside of a crocpot, while one of her classmates wearing a baseball cap and a pair of birkenstocks would watch her eat while drawing pictures of roses. Eating inside of the cafeteria was always a lonely experience, and never anything like what tended to be depicted on television, with the sole exception being “silent lunch” periods, a form of collective punishment for the offense of one student. But here she would not be unique in the ability to talk during class. Generally this potlocks would be close to Summer vacation.

Do to a change in culture during 2056 A.D., teachers starting approaching discipline in a different way, where students would generally be suspended for a week, to about a year. But the changing times brought back school spanking, and there was a special term for teachers that would bend students over the desk. Merusa Sifana. So it was a mixed bag as to whether they would be hit by the teacher, or allowed to eat during the classroom. But the original theory behind this was to prevent the student from missing important classes.

One class room stood as the odd exception, that permitted Jeruan to eat in class all the time. In fact, instead of doing biology assignment, this particular Sifano would have the class eat a salad with bacon. This salad would be laced with some variant of cannabis and LSD. The her head and flower barret would seem to grow a million times larger, and her neck would wiggle about while she spoke in chanting verses. Despite the fact that the high school was years behind other districts, and being one of the few schools to still hit their students, this teacher would be the one class that she would always look forward to. Even Birkenstock wearing girls who were perpetually late like one of her classmates, who would be smoking pot inside of the bathroom stalls.

Most classrooms would keep a dark green colored chalk board, while other school moved onto using dry erase. Students here would not even be allowed to used digital drawing and writing styluses, while Sifanas preferring them to still not even use the cheapest of mechanical pencils. Even in districts that still had Amish people, the ones that remained after the massacre of thousands during the Leftist Revolution of the 2020s, would still have to use modern writing and drawing convienences.

This was the school Jeruan had to go to day in and day out.

Jeruan returned home from the station.

Jeruan would talk to the friends she knew in the district of 2170 A.D., or at least it felt like it compared to this school, who gradually stopped returning her calls. Eventually she went completely cold Turkey with cell phone usage, and the only replacement was an old flip phone, that had old “Rectangle Pukus” games. Rectangle Pukus was a genre of games characterized by being parodies of mainstream JRPG titles, with more more blood and gore. It wasn’t uncommon for these games to have the entire floor tiles covered in blood.

There was Berudo team, which would sometimes split into different factions. However eventually a physical fued broke off between them, causing them to abandon the games altogether.

She wondered why her parents would never ask her friends. But she also did not want to tell them she was considering breaking away from the team, that her friends had initially started as a union that would work against some of the abuses in nerd culture in other parts of society. Instead she was alone again.

She became Ros Wierudo Eguno: A widow gun.

And this was how she went to the station the next day, with a Wierudo Eguno in tow.

The next morning, another dead body was bloodied at the station: it was Jeruan.

Just another sack of meat.