Travelling-Turtle not named Tyler (Part 1)

1st of July arrived rather fast. Too fast in my opinion. I'll start a petition for turtle scientists to stop digging holes and to start tackling this time problem. My appeal for paid leave over the next three days had been granted, no surprises there. All I had left to do before departing with one of the many stagecoaches rented specifically to transport turtles from their homes to Turtle Village, was to finish breakfast and packing my lunch.

The packing lunch part would be the act of rounding up my breakfast leftovers and placing them in a bowl. As an environmentally conscious turtle, all the bowls in my house were made of wood, lest I lose them in an accident. Accidents such as 'having the need for a ranged attack, but running out of ammo' or 'there's an annoying singing beetle and I can't find the mechanism to turn it off'.

After leaving my house and dropping the neighbours a note to remind them of the three different instances in which they told me that they'd take care of my plants while I'm gone (I got their testimonies written down and signed so that I can hold them liable in case they forget again, like the two years before that), I made my way over to one of the meeting spots.

I decided to wear my brand new 'Lightning Carapace' that got delivered two days ago, reason being that I wanted to participate in the race. I'm not into turtle wrestling competition, I hadn't polished my close combat skills in quite a while, which meant that wearing my tank shell would only slow me down. In addition to that, my speed shell only had one scratch (that I got while trying to test out its performance, whoops) and hadn't lost its lustre yet. I wanted to brag a little…

There were some other competitions that I wanted to participate in, but more about that when the time is right.

Our "transport" was one big trailer pulled by two horses. I'm not too sure about the facts when it comes to organizing this event, but if I had to guess, then I'd say that the horses would get ample monetary compensation for their service. I guess that they are war horses, trained in at least three different close combat techniques with minimum 10 years of field experience and botanical knowledge that could put our city's most prominent pharmacist to shame.

In other words, our matriarch made sure that we reach Turtle Village in the same state that we left Faculty City in.

All the turtles in the trailer (with one exception) were female, which would make the ride fairly boring. This is probably intentional, I'd bet money that I'm one of maybe 5 male turtles that were allowed to leave turtle city. I can't fault them either. The first thing I'd do if I had a partner in crime would be to talk about the injustice of turtle-tax. I can't stage an uprising all on my own, dammit.

I need accomplices.

Fellow activists.

Those who profit from the system can NOT serve as substitutes, neither can non-turtles.

I decided to save my indignation for another day.

Due to the fact that all my coach-companions were female, all of them were on the "earning" side in gatherings. This meant that all of them had nice and expensive shells. This meant that none of them displayed any form of envy when it came to my shell. This made me very sad.

I took a look at their shells instead. There was one cool turtle that rocked the same shell as mine. Nice taste in shells there, miss! Many wore their casual shells.

I just realized that I never elaborated this: The casual shell is the one you get born with. It usually is decorated in accordance to the individuals wishes. Most of them had singular colourful lines. My shell has golden lines and red accentuations for example. A few had small paintings of various other animals or objects. One even had the chess piece 'turtle' (resembles rook) displayed. I don't know about that one.

There were some exotic shells too.

Mostly luxury related shells, probably having over 50 different gadgets to improve your life in one way or another.

There were two standouts though: One lady, who appeared to be about 10x my age, had something that I'll probably never be able to afford:

An atlas shell. I was wondering that we departed with only 8 turtles in the trailer. She was half the reason. Those things are heavy infantry shells. I once joked about turtles being immovable and if you wear this thing, while it doesn't quite weigh 100 tons, you probably are as resolute as a mountain. There are some assisting servo motors integrated (judging how she looked, she probably didn't even need them) and some slots on the outside where you can deploy a wide array of weapons. This shell is like an armoured house. It has seen its fair share of combat too, judging by the amount of scratches on the surface. I wish I had one…

Note: I was grateful that I decided to skip out on the combat tournament.

The other shell I mentioned is comparable. Not as heavy, but probably twice as expensive: A cataphract type shell. While you take atlas turtles and put them somewhere, you take cataphract turtles and shove them in a general direction. Boosters, servos and even a spinning engine coupled with spikes or sawblade-thingies, that shell is the definition of 'overwhelming'. I didn't even want to think about getting one of these, fearing that I'd go bankrupt just by looking at the price tag. The shell was fully polished, I'd imagine that the owner was very high up the turtle ladder. Might even be someone in charge of turtle-ops in 'Faculty.

I decided to not talk to any of them. Probably safer to stay silent. I prayed that they would be unable to read my mind and witness my dissident thoughts.

I spent most of the trip enjoying the scenery, nothing too outstanding but it was alright. None of my trailer-teammates were engaging in any meaningful conversation. Some looked as if they wanted to speculate how much turtle-tax they'd receive, but I employed intense stares to successfully shut those conversations down for good.

What surprised me was that I was the only turtle to pack lunch. I originally intended to be the recipient of envy due to my magnificent shell (failed spectacularly, I'm very glad I didn't tell anyone), but my food managed to save the day.