Challenge #04104-K086: One Life's Worth of Change

in #fictionlast month

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I was a pickpocket, a thief. I didn't want to be, but when you're starving, and alone, you do what you have to do to survive. Then I met this odd wizard, and hir friends, and my life completely changed.
I WAS a pickpocket, now I'm an adult, and the building they helped me found in this forsaken city has ensured there are very, very few in this city that are as I was, and I have many loved ones to care for.
https://peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-03714-j061-change-a-life-change-the-world -- Anon Guest

Adventurers are a weird lot. Most of them take up Adventuring through a lack of other options. The Rogue known initially as Scram was one such. They could not say he was down on his luck when he met Wraithvine. That would imply that he had any luck to begin with.

Meeting Wraithvine was the luckiest mistake that Scram made in his life to that day.

Two kind hands can change a life. Gifting food, cleanliness, new clothes, and a new name - Robbie. Gifting education. Guiding and shaping a better path for someone who previously had no choices. Such as finding an occupation that Robbie loved to do.

He became quite the gifted artificer. Robbie returned to his starting point, and bought a lot of slums and land in the Tumbledowns. What happened next was the unique change in that city.

He started building better residences there, and gifting them to the people who lived there. He set up a school, for free, for everyone who wanted to learn. He set up community kitchens. Community halls. Community sanitation. Community medicine.

Those above sneered at his efforts. Repeatedly insisted that he was throwing good gold at a bad cause.

It took decades for the change to be seen, but it was seen.

Epidemics no longer had their centres in the Tumbledowns, nor the "bad side" of town. Plagues ceased springing forth out of those areas. More heroes rose up from those pits of poverty, true, but they were better at the job.

They sent money back home. Lives improved. Health improved. Prosperity improved.

By then, those who sneered had been overtaken by those who were taking the credit. But those on the wrong side of town, those with long memories and an eagle eye for the truth, knew what was real.

They owed everything they had to "Uncle" Robbie.

[Photo by Den Harrson on Unsplash]

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