Steam Town (Part 1)

Once upon a time, a community got together and built a town in the middle of a railway junction. They called it... Steam Town. The town was an experiment of sorts. This community wanted to see if they could create a place where everyone worked together to create something greater than themselves.

However, the town needed investors to get off the ground. The leaders allowed anyone to invest in the future of the community. Anyone who wanted to own a piece of this investment simply had to give their currency to the town coffers in exchange for stake of the town's exports.

That's when Djinn came along. Djinn was a massive giant with a lot of money. He wouldn't hurt a fly, but he was greedy. His alignment was lawful evil, much like a banker or a lawyer. He wouldn't break the law, but he did not have the best interests in mind for the town. He wanted to exploit their gullible system. He gave the town a boulder sized gold "nugget" in exchange for a very high percentage of the town exports. At first, the town was very thankful to Djinn. He really helped support this important movement.

Steam Town was a farming town. Being located at a railway junction made it very easy to distribute goods all over the land. Community members with stake were allowed to take some of the crops for themselves, but there was an honor system involved.

Give what you can, take what you need.

If everyone in the community followed this simple rule Steam Town would surely flourish and everyone would benefit. Therefore, the town leaders asked stake holders to do the honorable thing: sacrifice short-term gains for long-term success. It seemed like a no-brainer to most of the community.

However, Djinn had no honor. It wasn't against the law to take the maximum amount of crops "owed" to him so that's exactly what he did. Djinn was like an entitled child whose parents had lost control of the situation. Over and over, day after day, Djinn would collect as much product as was legally allowable. The longer this went on, the more community members he angered.

They would say things like:

"Hey Djinn! Would you mind sharing your crops with these new community members? They are starving and we want them to have an incentive to stay and make Steam Town great."

"LOL. No. What's mine is mine. It's your fault for agreeing to these rules in the first place. Suckers."

He would reply.

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"But if you invest more in the honorable nature of our town then the value of your stake will skyrocket. You can make more money in the long run if you give away crops today."

"I have to give away money to make money? You people are fools. Not interested. I'm done investing in this town. It's time to reap what I have sown."

Djinn's blatant disregard for the town's wellbeing enraged many prominent members of the community. The town charter wasn't completely naive to the fact that stake holders would abuse the system. The bylaws stated that anyone could use their stake to cancel out someone else's, so that's exactly what people started doing. By sacrificing some of their own crop ownership, the townsfolk chipped away at what Djinn was allowed to take.

Obviously, this infuriated Djinn. If he couldn't crush them physically he would crush them economically. He used his booming voice to make claims that the people attacking him where the evil ones. He abused the system to silence his rivals and even the supporters of his rivals. He utilized his gold-boulder stake as an investment, not to help the town, but instill fear in the community. He attempted to control the town using the very same tactics of the old paradigm; the paradigm that Steam Town's charter was trying to avoid in the first place. Unfortunately, it worked. Very few citizens were brave enough to challenge his underhanded tactics.

Djinn wasn't super smart or articulate, he just kept repeating the same tired arguments over and over again. However, this turned out to be much more effective than it should have been because his voice was so loud. Many people in the town had no idea what was really going on. They only heard what he had to say about the situation.

This went on for quite some time. The entire debacle turned into somewhat of a stalemate. In the end, both sides formed a truce.

All this fighting in Steam Town was blatantly transparent for all to see. It looked bad for the entire government as a whole. Who would want to invest in a community that had all this nonsense going on? It was agreed that both sides would leave each other alone for mutual benefit.

It was officially declared a truce, but Djinn had obviously won. He went back to exploiting the system with less resistance than ever before. Again, this went on for quite some time. Like a boiling pot, the pressure of the situation kept building and building.

Eventually, the "truce" was broken. Djinn once again went on his booming rampage of repeating himself over and over and over and over and over again.

"They broke the truce! This is their fault! Everything I'm doing is justified!"

Obviously, he refused to acknowledge that his greed was the foundation of the entire conflict. Doing so would have been contrary to his entire world view.

The town could have easily rallied together to stop Djinn, but rampant fear and misinformation stopped proper consensus from being formed. How would the town ever purge Djinn's corrupt behavior from constantly undermining the government?

To be continued...