BOMBS ARE BREAD

by D. J. Shriek

This past weekend, a disturbing new fact has come to light regarding the weapons being used by House Lewden: they can be eaten. In certain parts of the Merchant Quarter, which has sustained heavy bombing damage in recent weeks, citizens have been hunting through the rubble not for other survivors or the bodies of loved ones, but for the bombs themselves.

Dr. Alan Self, a physician employed by a House Hoegbotton militia, confirms this information. “I don’t know how it started, but because of the food shortage in parts of the city, starving people have begun to eat the remains of House Lewden’s infernal fungal bombs,” he said.

The core of these bombs does not explode, but serves as the delivery system for the bomb—ballast, of a sort. The ballast is high in protein and appears to have no harmful side effects, as of yet.

Some kinds of fungal bullets appear to share these properties.

“They have a short half-life,” according to Sarah Mindle, one of many Hoegbotton employees recruited to fight in the increasingly confused civil war. “After about five hours, most of them become inert, harmless.”

High in nutritional content, these bullets are also being harvested by the poor and those cut off from food by the barricades and militias of the various warring factions. Of course, finding the bullets can be hazardous. Knowing when they have become harmless requires yet another set of skills.

“I wait until [the bullets] lose their purple tinge,” Charles Jarkens said. Jarkens is a homeless man whose wife died in a bombardment at the beginning of the war. “I wait for that, and I wait until they get a little orange around the base of the bullet. That’s when I know they’re good to eat.”

In an unverified and extreme case, a family whose son was killed by a barrage of such bullets resorted to removing them from the body and eating them.

What no one can as yet explain is exactly how House Lewden procured such weapons, nor why Hoegbotton & Sons have not yet deployed captured weapons against F&L. Some speculate that the blockade of Ambergris by F&L ships has led to such a reduction in food stores for Hoegbotton’s various militias that the Lewden weapons are, in fact, being deliberately detonated for use as food.

As might be expected, such incendiary stories led to Lacond’s offices being bombed so many times that he eventually moved his printing presses, under cover of night, to a secret location in the forests outside of Ambergris.

“Let them stop me now!” he would say, face flushed with defiance. “Those pompous, homicidal swine can blow me up as much as they like—the presses will keep churning out the pages!” (The war, I must say, revitalized Lacond for a time.)