A Day in a Life in After World: SoGlog

haven't made engines for more than a couple of thousand years. There is no possible way we could give you an engine let alone a large one. It is hard enough to manufacture replacement parts. Engines are just too precise to build."

  "You are wrong though."

  "In what way?" The Johnson demanded.

  "There are engines being built." The captain replied. "We are building them."

  "Then why do you need one of ours?!" The guards outside the door opened the door to ensure everything was alright because of the shouting the Chugger was doing.

  "Because we have only succeeded in making small working engines. They are not powerful enough to operate the heavier equipment we want to build. But each time we build a bigger engine, we are able to build more powerful manufacturing equipment to build a bigger engine. We will have the engine we need soon, but if we had yours, we could be there sooner. We could even return yours before very long."

  "And why do you think that we would want to loan you an engine? What is in it for us?"

  The boat captain reached into a pack next to his chair. The guards stepped forward in case he tried something untoward. He pulled out a glass jar and set it in the middle of the table.

  Inside the jar looked like water with a slight yellow tinge in it.

  Albert went quiet and narrowed his eyes at it. "And just what is that supposed to be?"

  "Wait until you are done eating, and open it."

  The Johnson looked down at his plate and he was three-quarters done. He pushed his plate aside and reached for the jar. He looked up at the boat captain.

  SoGlog nodded, smiled, and gestured for him to open the lid.

  Carefully and slowly the Johnson turned the lid. Immediately there was a chemical smell that permeated the room.

  The Chugger took a smell at the jar and scrunched up his face in disgust. "Is that..?"

  "How much of your food supply is being wasted by making vegetable oil fuel for your engines?"

  "But how could you..?"

  "If you had diesel fuel, REAL diesel fuel running in those engines, how much better would they run?"

  The Johnson took another sniff and then sealed the lid. He handed the jar off to one of the guards behind him and it promptly vanished.

  "I don't know what you are trying to pull here," Albert Johnson's voice sounded suspicious, "But if this is legit, and that stuff tests out, then we might have a deal."

  "It will test out."

  "You understand we will want fuel before we can turn over an engine?"

  SoGlog leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. "Of course! There is already a steamer pushing a barge this way. It is about two weeks out."

  "Really though," Albert asked with awe, "How are you getting this?"

  "With what we have learned out of Texas, we have pieced together a platform that has a rig and refining ability on it. We can fill up a five thousand gallon barge with diesel in just a week. How long would five thousand gallons of pure diesel go for you?"

  The Johnson scratched his chin thinking about it.

  "And how much food would one barge save you?" SoGlog continued.

  Albert stood up from the table and extended his hand, "That would save over half our yearly crop with one load.

  "You will not need to worry about that for a while." The Boatman explained while shaking the old man's hand. "Your biggest problem is going to be to try and figure out how to move 5000 gallons of diesel over land.

  With that, Albert Johnson and his entourage of guards left.

  SoGlog waited a few minutes to give him time to clear the building and then headed out himself. Once he got back out into the sunlight he turned and walked quickly towards the trader house. On his way there he came across a gruesome site of a giant splayed out in the street and being hacked apart by what appeared to be a group of trade guild workers.

  "What's going on here?" He asked the closest worker.

  "Trader business." The worker replied and continued to dismember the corpse.

  SoGlog cleared his throat and then said, "Excuse me."

  When the worker looked back up at him, SoGlog made a point of displaying his collar pin. The worker seemed to suddenly change his attitude.

  "Sir," he started, "sorry I did not know. The giant stole a trader's coin bag."

  "Really?" It did not make sense to SoGlog. "That is not like a giant."

  The worker shrugged his shoulders.

  "Fingers are a bit fat for picking pockets."

  "Well, Mr. Farsid found his coin purse missing, we set out to locate it and found him with it." The trader stated then returned to complete his work.

  SoGlog continued his way to the traders' building.

  As he walked in he could see all of his melons in crates against the wall. He tapped the foreman on the shoulder and the foreman turned abruptly.

  "What do you-" the foreman started to castigate but immediately changed his attitude when he recognized the collar pin. "Ah, A Southfield! A pleasure sir. I am Protus, the House Master."

  SoGlog nodded and returned the invitation, "I am SoGlog Southfield, Pleasure to meet you Master Protus."

  SoGlog then pointed at his product lining the wall. "My melons."

  Protus nodded. "Melons normally get a good price but this season they have been a bit low. Fortunately for you I just got some open food orders from a Johnson in town."

  "Old one, tenacious?" SoGlog asked.

  Protus replied, "Yes, Albert Johnson. You know him?"

  SoGlog nodded. "Met him today. Hope he makes good use of those melons. How much did I pull in on those?"

  The House Master checked through some papers he was carrying. "You got three house credits per crate. It came out to 435 credits.

  "Four hundred and thirty-five?" The captain asked.

  "Something wrong?"

  "A little matter of a porter with some grubby hands." SoGlog cursed his luck. If only he had not been so rushed. He had been forced to trust that scum of a porter. "I will take it up with the harbor master."

  "You to take it up it under Trader Law?"

  SoGlog shook his head. "One dead today to Trader Law is enough."

  "Two," the House Master stated, "but only barely. Had to exterminate a mouse this morning, scarcely worth the effort."

  The captain nodded. "Then I will definitely take care of this myself."

  "So what will be loading your flat with?"

  "Fill my flat with steel ingots. As much as it will hold."

  "Making weapons?"

  "No," SoGlog answered, "but you know better than to ask."

  The House master nodded and put away his curiosity. It is actually against trade house policy to ask about the purpose of a trade, but one does get curious about an order of that much steel.

  "How long till my steam flat is loaded?"

  "Give us an hour and a half." The trader assured him.

  "If that porter tries to intercept the shipment and will not let it board, then it can fall under Trader's Law."

  Protus nodded seriously and passed over a board for the captain to sign.

  "Please see that all the port taxes are paid on these shipments." SoGlog requested.

  "Of course." With signatures in place, the house master returned to work.

  SoGlog had an hour and a half to burn. He was not all that hungry yet, but decided he could use some dessert. His nose guided him to a bake shop a couple of blocks away. After a bit of deliberation he finally decided on an elderberry scone topped with fresh whipped cream. He carried this to the market place and from a vender there purchased some strawberry fizz to wash down his scone. Finding a comfortable bench, he sat and slowly started eating his pastry.

  When out on the water, people were few and far between. If you ever encountered anyone, they would not leave you alone. They wanted to know what was going on where you were from, who you might have seen in your travels and then they want to tell you
everything that has happened to them. They would just go on and on no matter how many times you had politely told them you had to be continuing. In the cities it was not like that. People appeared to ignore each other and so SoGlog relished his time in the cities because everyone left him alone. He could get all the human interaction he needed just from people watching.

  Around the corner he spotted a group of traders emerge. One of them was the well-dressed gentleman Mr. Farsid. He was very well known in the trading house and had his hands in nearly every deal. The steel SoGlog was purchasing would likely be coming from his stock. They seemed to be talking frantically about something and it was obvious that the gentleman was very upset. A couple of times he picked up his purse and rattled it at one of the main traders and then released it to hang again on his belt. They argued a bit more and then Mr. Farsid stormed, in a very dignified way as befitting a gentleman, out of the marketplace with the other traders in tow.

  A couple of minutes later he saw a couple of kids? no, they were mice, emerge from an alley. The girl mouse was extremely well dressed in some kind of formal wear. A moment later they were joined by some normal human. Then he spotted it. The mouse was holding something that immediately caught his attention. The coin purse from the gentleman was in the hands of the male mouse. He stood up and started walking briskly over but the small human took off running back down the alley. He kept shouting "Sugar, come on!"

  Knowing mice as well as he did SoGlog knew it would be useless to follow him. When he arrived, he took a firm hold of the girl's arm. She whipped around in alarm as did the person holding her other arm, albeit in a much more polite fashion than the boat captain did.

  "Who was the other mouse?" He