fandomhigh | Urban Survival - The Uglier Side of City Living, Thursday, Period 2

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Urban Survival - The Uglier Side of City Living, Thursday, Period 2

"So," Sparkle, who had come in to class today with a flower crown made of yellow and orange roses because why the hell not? smiled as he leaned back against his desk. His desk, which was covered in water bottles of various sizes. "I've got another hands-on assignment for you guys, this week. Here on my desk, I've got a bunch of water bottles. As fate would have it, they're all, you know, empty. I also have a bunch of vouchers for free pizza, because I'm not above resorting to bribery in order to make things more interesting in my classroom."

He grinned.

"Last time I taught this lesson, I gave each student one water bottle, told them to fill it up somewhere that wasn't the school or the dorms, and then got them to bring it back and talk about where they got that water. The catch was that it had to be clean, potable water. The sort of stuff that you weren't going to get, you know, cholera from. None of that idiot white person raw water fad bullshit that is literally going to give you some sort of horrible parasitic infestation if you're lucky. I'm going to mix that one up just a little this time around."

He jerked a thumb to the bottles of water on the desk.

"There are three sizes of water bottle there. There's your basic Gatorade bottle, the kind that you might see a jogger clinging to as they trample people down on the sidewalk. There's your in-between bottle, basically a four-litre milk jug. Don't ask me what the hell that is in gallons. I'm Canadian and I'm going into fashion. So long as it fits in my fridge I literally have no reason to care. And then the big one, the mother lode, the office cooler bottle."

He pointed to each bottle in succession as he listed them off.

"Each one is worth pizza vouchers, today. Filling a sports drink bottle will get you one coupon for a personal-sized cheese pizza from Pizza Planet. Filling the middlest bottle and getting it back here is going to get you a medium pizza with up to two toppings. And filling the big one and getting it back here, before the end of the class period, is going to get you not one, but two extra large party size pizzas with whatever toppings your heart desires. And, I mean, knowing Pizza Planet, you'd probably end up with like a dozen on an order like that, so that's kind of the teenage dream, right there."

And now he was holding up a finger.

"You each get one of each bottle," he continued. "No more than that. You can get them filled in whatever way you possibly can, so long as you're filling them up with clean freshwater, or you can convince me that you have a reliable way to make that water clean and safe to drink without losing like half the contents of the bottle. You can't fill them up in the dorms building, in the school building, or anywhere you might actually be employed in town, and yes, I am bribing the squirrels with rum to narc on you guys if you think you're going to cheat. For each bottle you fill up and bring back here - it has to be back here by the end of class, it's up to you to figure out how to get one of those cooler bottles back to the school over all those stairs without breaking your back or something - you get the corresponding pizza tickets to go with it.

"So you have a few things to consider, here. Where are you going to get that water? If you have to resort to seawater or one of the streams in the preserve, how are you going to make that water safe to drink? If you're stealing water from a garden hose or something, and good luck with that since most people turn off their outside water this time of year so the pipes don't freeze, how much can you get away with before you get chased off the property? A sports bottle might be easy, but someone's probably going to give you problems if you walk into their yard hauling that big cooler number. And then you still have to get it back here. You're probably going to want to make multiple trips. Water bottles are heavy."

He smirked a little.

"Did you get all that? Grab a bottle or three and get outta my face, then, and don't come back before the end of class unless you have some water to show for it and can tell me where it came from."

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"You have to freeze them if you can't turn it off," Breq agreed. "That's a problem, of course. As is getting the right tools. You have to be sure it's a long term solution for it to be worth it."

"Frozen water expands, and water pipes break if they freeze," Sparkle noted, "so that could be pretty disastrous, too. You'd have to luck out, I think, and wait for a situation where the water is already shut off for some reason. Those are few and far between, in a city. That said... shit, if you ever get the opportunity, take it."

"No," Breq said. "You freeze the liquid inside a pipe in order to repair it if you can't turn it off ~~if Radchaai plumbing works the same way~~. It's very efficient if you can't reach the main valve for some reason. Of course, you should install more valves if it happens regularly."

It happened sometimes.

"If you say so," Sparkle replied, holding up his hands and letting her have that one. "So. You're living on your own, presumably outside, and you don't have money, food, a steady water supply, or a steady income."

He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow.

"How the hell are you going to freeze a water pipeline? In a way that won't attract unwelcome attention, no less?"

It wasn't that he wanted to make these classes difficult for Breq, but out of the class, she was one of the ones that seemed most likely to have to live this reality. He didn't want her to think this was going to be easy, either.

Edited 2018-02-15 22:26 (UTC)

Breq was silent for a moment. "Perhaps things are different here. I was thinking I could steal a plumbing toolkit which would include a pipe freezing kit and then try and find a place which was mostly used for technical inspections."

After another pause she added:

"Are there never communal wells in cities here? Or public bathrooms?"

Pipe freezing kit. They... they were still talking about doing this with the city's water supply and not, like, dinky home repairs, right? And if it was mostly used for technical inspections... they'd probably notice a faucet had been installed. Wouldn't they? It was literally the place people went to look at the pipes.

But he was anxious to let the topic drop, just shrugging his shoulders in reply to her question, instead.

"There are both, depending on where you are," he allowed, "but anything with 'public' in the name isn't always as public as it sounds up-front. You might find some luck in a park, if the park is busy enough and the city is big enough that they've installed a bathroom with plumbing. But... at least in my experience... the word 'public' is still often limited to those members of the public who don't actually need these things in order to survive. Gotta keep up an image, and all."

Just wait until he got to the lesson on places to sleep.

Breq considered this. "Yes, and poisoning that water would be an easy way to get rid of the homeless."

Sparkle's eyes widened and his mouth fell open a little.

He just sort of stood there like that for a few seconds before scraping his brain up off the floor and going, "It'd be a good way to get rid of the people with homes who just want to enjoy a day in the park, too."

Just. Um. Just throwing that out there.

"Oh. Yes. I think my mind was on a place mostly frequented by the homeless and the poor," Breq said. "Although I've seen poisoning public wells in an enemy city done, but the aim was to cause unrest. That's off topic, though."

The Radchaai had considered those people terribly uncivilized.

Sparkle actually lifted his hands to scrub at his face for a few seconds. Okay. Okiedokey. Alrighty then.

Yup.

"Good god," he muttered, "I can't even say that isn't something governments don't do here. They're just a little less blatant about it."

But only a little. Just look at places like Flint. Why poison the water outright when you could just neglect to clean it properly in the first place?

Assholes.

"Oh, they blamed it on a minority group," Breq said. "In this instance an ethnic one, but I suppose it could happen to the homeless as a group too."

Perhaps she should change the subject? Sparkle looked a little uncomfortable.

Yeah, Sparkle was actually feeling faintly ill at that.

"They poisoned the water and then they blamed it on an ethnic minority?" He didn't want to ask he didn't want to ask he didn't want to ask. "Were they trying to incite genocide or something?"

He asked.

Edited 2018-02-16 14:52 (UTC)

"Yes. Although an annexation prevented that." Occasionally they could be of advantage to some people."

"Would you prefer to change the topic," Breq added, feeling a little concerned for Sparkle.

Annexation had prevented the massacre that the Rachaai had incited. Great. Wasn't that just...

Sparkle sighed and ran a hand through his hair, feeling ill.

"For now. Today's topic is water. We'll... we'll touch on treatment of minorities again another week, though, I think."

With a conversation like this happening basically once a week in his classroom, he kind of felt he had to.

Oh, the massacre was a local thing. The Radchaai did things on a different scale.

"I would start with trying to find people who would give me water, and use other sources to complement that. Finding a place to store things would help though. If the city is in a place that rains catching rainwater to wash could be useful too. Or if you manage to melt snow."

One of these days, Sparkle was going to just start screaming in the middle of class and nobody would be able to get him to stop.

"Melting snow is a good one," he offered, "as is catching rainwater, yeah. In the case of the snow situation, water gets a little tricky, though. Since... if you're stockpiling it outside, there's a chance that it'll turn to ice. Having a way to melt it again is important, if you can't find it in its liquid form."

"Having some kind of shelter must help with a lot of things," Breq said. "Including storing water."

She paused. "What other methods would you suggest?"

"Of storing water, or of getting it?"

Because a lot of this was going to boil down to where people lived, too.

"I was thinking of getting water, but I'm interested in both," Breq replied. And despite not being able to read the narrative, she added:

"I've been to a lot of places and what to do would be very different depending on where you were."

Sparkle smiled wryly at that, and nodded.

"It really would be," he admitted. "Especially because there are a lot of cities that are in areas that are prone to drought, so you can't necessarily rely on natural sources or public water supplies. There are going to be situations where you have to just acknowledge that getting clean isn't an option for a while, or you'll have to find some alternative to bathing. Drinking water is always, always going to be top priority, since it's hard to worry about doing dishes or bathing if you're dead."

"Yes," Breq agreed. "And in many dry places bathing isn't a priority for anyone."

Which others considered uncivilized, of course.

"Being able to boil the water might help a little."

Sparkle could probably guess at who those others were, and at just how wasteful they likely were when it came to resources that didn't belong to them in the first place.

"Boiling water does help, to some degree," Sparkle agreed. "You might lose some to evaporation, but there are ways to minimize that, too."

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Urban Survival - The Uglier Side of City Living, Thursday, Period 2

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