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It isn’t so hard to find food in the outer city, as long as you know how. There’s food to scavenge, the occasional bubble folk who you can usually count on to toss a copper or two, and if you're looking, there’s always jobs for the kids who would go unnoticed if they disappeared. And of course, there’s always the Lightkeepers.
Sol doesn’t really like to work for the Lightkeepers. They come around to the water park every now and then to give long, boring lectures about Thiala and The Cataclysm, and they always get really mad if you fidget even a little bit. Even worse is when the kids Sol has hung out with for weeks now suddenly won’t stop talking about “the Light”. And then they usually don't want to play Hide and Seek and Punch anymore.
But, if you follow their orders, you can pretty much guarantee food for the day. It's a reliable last resort when one of the older kids raids Sol’s backup stash again. The missions aren’t usually all that hard either. All Sol had to do this time was break the window of the abandoned shop where the Juicy Rats gang was hiding out, and make a break for it when he got spotted. Sol is small and slippery, so the Lightkeepers love recruiting him for these kinds of missions. He’s fast enough not to get caught, but slow enough that the rats won’t lose track of him. The main thing is to keep his cloak on and his hood up. There’s many orphans outside the bubble, but only a few frog-folk. Sol ducks and weaves through the alley, keeping the rats distracted for long enough that they don’t figure out what the Lightkeepers are up to. Once he hears the distant sounds of battle, he makes a last dash, and disappears, unseen, into the city.
Sol doesn’t ask what the distraction was for when he finally sneaks back into the Lightkeepers’ territory. Sister Lilith is there waiting for him. She’s one of the newer Lightkeeper recruits, a sweet half-elven woman who’ll sometimes give the water park kids an extra piece of bread if they don’t bring up anything too heretical. She smiles when she sees him, tells Sol what a good job he did, that Thiala’s light shines down on him. She places a hand on his head, grimaces, wipes off the frog slime on her tunic and shifts her hand to Sol’s shoulder. “Remember that you are always welcome here, little frog. We are all children of the light.”
Sol feels the warmth of her hand through his sweater. The feeling stays for the rest of the day, until Sol returns to his hideaway in the water park with milk and three entire loaves of bread. Her words wrap and twist themselves around Sol’s mind, burrowing deep into his body until he can feel it at the end of his clammy fingertips. For all the food they give him, taking missions from the Lightkeepers always leaves him cold and hungry. He thinks about being a child of something, bigger than the water park, bigger than the bubble, bigger than the whole of Ezry. When he dreams, it is filled with memories of a moonlit swamp he has never seen before in his life.
Sol avoids the Lightkeeper recruiters as much as he can. After all, there’s many other ways to find food in the outer city.
It’s hard to make real friends in the water park. The kids with a family to go home to leave abruptly, and won’t come back for days, or even weeks. The other orphans like Sol get recruited by the Lightkeepers, or taken in by Mob Goblin, or grow up and leave Ezry behind entirely. And sometimes… kids go missing outside the bubble all the time.
So people don’t really make friends in the water park. But it is important to have allies. And the best way to get allies is to get noticed. If people can remember your face, you have a better chance of being asked to join a game, or a mission, or a con.
Sol remembers when he first came to the water park, and everyone wanted to know who he was. He was new, he could out-jump all the other kids, and at that point, he was the only frog-person they had ever seen. For the first few weeks, Sol had kids to play with, to dare him to climb to the top of the water tower, and to share food with him when he hadn’t figured out how to find it himself. That all changed when Lula showed up. By then, Sol had been there for two months, and his new-kid intrigue had long since worn off. Lula was bigger, stronger and older. She could hold her breath underwater for way longer than anyone else in the park. She was also the first other frog-folk that Sol had ever met.
Overnight, Sol’s popularity had faded, and he was demoted to “that other frog”. But he couldn't hold it against Lula -She was the coolest person he had ever met. It because of this, and for absolutely no other reason, that Sol decided he had to spend every possible moment in her company. He spent his days following her and asking her every possible question that came into his mind. Where did she come from? What’s her family like? Did she know her parents? She did? What were they like? How many frogs do you know can you jump as high as I can why do you have different colour spots do you know if you can grow hair-
Lula mainly yelled at Sol to quit annoying her. And if she was with the other older kids of the water park, she would sock Sol in the arm and tell him to buzz off. But Sol remained undeterred. He was sure if he could just say the right words, he could make her talk to him, and laugh at his jokes, and compete to see who could run the fastest. He didn’t understand why, but he felt deep down to his bones that everything would be alright if only Lula would look at him.
The last time that Sol saw Lula was the few weeks before winter. He was in the middle of a long, rambling thought-train about how tired he always gets when the weather turns cold, when he's cut off by a snort. “Well obviously, idiot . It’s Winter, we hibernate during Winter,” she drew out the syllables like she was talking to a child and not a fully grown ten year old. “Don’t you know anything, Bufo?”
Sol flushed, stuck his tongue out at her, and hopped away before she could give him a dead arm. He didn’t know he was supposed to hibernate. Nobody told him. Do all frog-folk do that?
Lula disappeared sometime in the middle of Winter, and didn't come back again. Sol had only known her for a month, and would probably never see her again. It wasn’t a surprise, that kind of stuff happens all the time at the water park. But sometimes, when he’s curled up in the bottom of an empty pool, and the walls can’t stop the biting night air from creeping in, Sol wonders about Lula. He wonders if she’s somewhere warm. Or maybe, reaching out to the ends of his imagination, she's huddled together with a whole family of bullywugs, softly sleeping through the cold.
For the first decade of his life, Sol’s entire world was the water park. He knew he couldn’t stay forever, but he had no idea what he was supposed to do when he finally stopped being a kid and had to leave. He didn’t know what happened to those older kids who packed their bags one day and never came back. And there was so much to do in the meantime, it was easy not to think too much about the future. The day that changed was the day that Mothership came.
Sol was first alerted to their presence by the crowd of kids slowly forming at the entrance of the water park. Ducking through legs, he managed to crawl his way through to the front. There were two adults in pristine Mothership uniform, holding a clipboard in one hand and pamphlets in the other. Their hands were calloused but clean, not even a speck of dirt behind the fingernails. This was not the grimy look of the outer city’s gangs, or even the oily veneer of the Lightkeepers. The Mothership agents shined . They stood with a radiant glow that only ever touched the people from inside the bubble. The water park rumbled with a hushed whisper. People like that didn’t come here.
One of the agents stepped forward. They had come to talk to all of them about Launchpad Academy, has anyone here heard of it? It’s a school for the sharpest, strongest and bravest children in Ezry, to mould them into proud future heroes of Bahumia. And thanks to the kind sponsorship of the Mothership corporation, the entrance exam was freely open to any child, no matter their… background. This first speech did not get too much of a reaction, until the other agent added that, of course, any student who passed the entrance exam would be granted free food and a free place to stay. It was hard to reach the Mothership agents after the ensuing explosion of noise.
Narrowly avoiding getting trampled, Sol made his way back to the front. He shouted out a question that was immediately drowned out by the shouts of a dozen other kids, all hungry for the attention of these mysterious Mothership agents. One of them glimpses down at Sol and smiles. She takes an educated stab in the dark and tells him, “You know, there’s lots of other Bullywugs at the academy!”
When they’ve finished handing out pamphlets, the two Mothership agents quickly make their escape. Sol barely remembers what the question he had been trying to ask was, but holds on to the answer he’d been given. The kids at the water park only ever call him “Frog”. Nobody’s ever called him a Bullywug before. Was that what he is? And there were more of him at Launchpad? Sol was too young for the entrance exams that year, but he held onto the pamphlets for months afterwards, until he had it memorised word for word. And slowly his dreams of a warm bed and a full meal were replaced by the image of a frog, a bullywug , standing tall and dressed in shining Mothership blue.