A Trip To Knollocus

"Alright fellas, get to your cells!" boomed the voice of the operations manager. Triton and his coworkers trudged their way through the smothering smog of the engine room, a black wave washing over them from the opening of the door. The dimly lit engine room was one of the hottest places he'd ever known. Its suffocating heat was only matched in intensity by the devilish stares of the watchers in their towers, hungry for a misstep, waiting for any reason to come down from their watch and make an example out of whichever poor soul happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Fear lingered in the eftlings' eyes, as it always did, but the air of the room had changed. An air of hope in the room was ever-present, all waiting for the moment. He saw it in the half-smile on the faces of his fellow eftlings, the way their conversations seemed cheerier as they made their way to another day's hard work. Even as they painstakingly pushed their heavy levers in circles, the expressions they wore were ones of quiet hope, no longer that exhausted frown of resignation that had been ever-present since the day Triton was old enough to work at the factory.

Since eftlings age faster than humans, they're required to work from the age of three, which in eftling years is equivalent to around ten. From the age of three, until the eftling reaches his natural conclusion at around twenty-five, they're to work their entire lives in the factory. Six days a week, twelve hours a day, thousands of eftlings did the jobs that no humans wanted to. There was no getting away from it. Though they had the bodies of small humans, their lizard-like facial features ultimately made them inferior in the eyes of humans and ripe for subjugation.

Eftlings had rather large black eyes with no notable irises or pupils, as well as a flattened orange face and a wide mouth. Their tongues were thicker and a translucent white, and, though not used for this purpose anymore, could easily catch flying insects that wandered too close. The current scientific consensus is that eftlings had evolved from the same ancestor as newts and thereby had many of the same features. Eftlings, however, evolved closely alongside humans, so they developed a lot of the same features. But, that same closeness ultimately led to the subjugation of the eftling species that's lasted hundreds of years.

Now, eftlings are tasked with working all the jobs that humans won't touch, living at the factories they work in since the general population doesn't want to be anywhere near them, watchers make sure no one left the living quarters. The only exception was on the weekends when the watchers would let the eftlings go into town to do their shopping for the week.

"Fourth of July is this week fellas, so we're gonna need all the energy we can put out! Your pace is expected to be 20 RPM!" barked the manager, a heavyset middle-aged man, out toward the middle of the room. A unisonal sigh reverberated throughout the room, a sign of a much harder day of work than usual ahead. The eftlings started their day anyway, pushing the endless amount of levers round and round, generating the bulk of the electricity for the city of Boston. Triton pushed and pushed until the small meter got up to 20, but by then he realized how fast and how difficult keeping up a pace like this for ten hours was going to be.

Triton was now nine, or around thirty in eftling years. Six years spent in that factory in Boston hadn't been pleasant, but the choice wasn't his to make. His wife, Beth, worked in another building designated for making fabrics, but she was allowed to stay with him here. His son, who was now two years and four months, would soon join him in the factory, should they fail, of course.

In the shadows, Hopper, a fifteen-year-old eftling had been gathering support, coalitions from different factories in South Boston, in hopes of being able to make an escape. There had already been plenty of escape attempts on the east coast, much to the dismay of the local governments in the area that required eftlings for their electricity. The discovery of Knullocus had been a blessing to North American and Western European eftlings and a tragedy to every human. An entire lost continent of eftlings, in the far south Atlantic. No humans lived there.