CHAPTER 4: ROXANNE “These people gonna stop drinking and go to bed already?”Trip sat on a table-top at the periphery of Shunk’s town square, watching the drunken, boisterous crowd with a mixture of abject disdain and predatory alertness. His feet on a chair, his elbow was propped up on his knee. He held his head in his hand, fingers drumming impatiently against his cheek.The crowd wasn’t getting thinner as the night dragged on. Instead, it seemed to have been slowly growing until the entire population of the city-state was sitting at the tables that had been brought in for the night’s festivities and arranged around the beer stalls and junk-sculpture fountain, now lit up with dirty brown water sputtering out of its top. Pre-teen kids pushed rickety wheeled carts piled high with mugs and gallon milk jugs of beer on a regular circuit through the tight aisles between tables, people grabbing whatever they wanted as the carts passed. The crowd was getting drunker and more song-happy every minute — at that moment there were at least three different but equally out of tune drinking songs going on above the din of conversation and laughter.
