The ancient peldaks never developed a calendar, time was just a vague concept between rhythmic volcanic explosions that occur every three years. After an eruption, the local area is warm. Just before an eruption, the air is cold. This lasted until the year zero, when an alien race known as the sayran uplifted the peldaks and brought them into space. The world of Sayar does orbit a star, and had created a calendar millennia prior, so the peldaks adopted theirs.
360 days in a year, 24 hours in a day.
The peldaks then added that there are 5 days in a week, 3 weeks in a month, and 24 months in a year. This was because the King of the Peldaks, King Arus, had a strange affinity to the number 15, and there were 24 Saints who were instrumental in founding the city of Pelda.
In terms of working, each peldak day is split into two 12-hour shifts, with half the population working each half. Though it should be noted that there’s a long break in the middle of the shifts, meaning the shifts feature 10 hours of work.
For the first week of every month, every peldak will work 4 days, and have 1 day off. This day off is unique for each peldak, so 1/5th of the population will be off on any given day.
The second week follows the same schedule.
The third week is special. Every peldak has one day off, like every other week, but the last two days of the month are universal break days, with nobody working, save for a few exceptions, meaning peldaks only work two days on the last week of the month. This gives friends and family the opportunity to hang out if their schedules otherwise conflict, and lets industries restock their inventory, repair machinery, or catch up on backlogged work.
Therefore, in a two-month period, there will be 20 days of working, and 10 days of rest. Festivals and most holidays are typically held during the last two days of the months. With the exception of New Years, most holidays are held once every three years, in line with the regular eruption of volcanoes across the planet.
Convicts follow this schedule. Soldiers are expected to work every day for the entirety of their term of service, though days not fighting are spent exercising, or practicing, so no true peldak could call that ‘work’. Some vital industries, like train conductors or bureaucratic/infrastructure jobs, do have staff specifically set aside to work these off days. Nobody’s happy about it, but the Protectorate is such a large machine that it can’t afford to stop functioning for the last two days of every month. Couriers still need to deliver the mail, warehouse workers need to ship ammunition off to the soldiers, and those who coordinate such things still need to coordinate it. Therefore, the staff will be broken so somebody comes in even during the end of the month.
The Protectorate Bureau of Critical Infrastructure is, despite the name, not one of those critical industries, and therefore it has no extra staff who need to come in at the end of the month.
Yet despite that, Cyryl, exhausted and hung-over from a night of excessive drinking, walks through the front door on day 14 of the month. He has the tray of coffee cups in his hands, shivers from the frigid winter air, and yawns. The year is early 588; it’s been about four years since he was assigned to the bureaucracy, and Heaven’s Reach is in the dead of winter, only a few more months until the local volcanoes erupt and the heat puts them right into summer. His ears are so bundled that he can’t hear well, and he’s been too tired to interact with anyone beyond a nod or a grunt.
He walks over to the empty reception desk, sets the tray down, then looks at the chair for about three seconds.
“Laura?” He calls out. “Huh. Must be in the bathroom.” He takes one cup and places it on her desk, then heads upstairs.
Another heavy yawn accompanies his entrance to the gym, but it takes a dozen second of blankly looking at the empty chair to realize Eliza is missing too.
“Uh…” He looks to the gym, but all his tired eyes see are empty, blurry pieces of equipment. “How much did I drink last night? Did the military have a draft or something?” He sets the tray of coffee on the desk and rubs his chin, “I… didn’t go to my apartment last night, so maybe I didn’t get my recruitment letter? No, wait, we’re all convicts so they wouldn’t have recruited us. So where is everyone?”
Cyryl’s ears perk as he hears the distinctive clang of a weighted metal bar tapping against the metal pegs, then a sharp exhale. He rubs his blurry eyes, then squints as he looks to the bench press area. There’s movement, though that’s all he can tell.
“It’s gonna be hard to read the manifests later…” he mutters to himself as he walks over. “Hey.”
Cyryl’s deep voice catches the man off guard, resulting in him slipping, the bar landing on his chest as he struggles to get it off. “Ack!” He cries as the weights knock the wind out of him.
“Ah!” Cyryl yells as he springs into action. He runs behind the man’s head, wraps his hands tight around the bar, then lifts with all his might!
But rather than the weights adding up to some 800 pounds as Cyryl expected, the total weight is significantly less. Cyryl yanks with such force that the bar flings up and slips out of his hands, launching backwards, and landing with a series of ear-piercing clangs and crashes as it lands and bounces against other scattered bits of metal.
“The hell?” Cyryl looks at his weathered hands for a moment, but then shakes his head and helps the man sit up. “You okay? Everything fine?”
The man, who Cyryl now realizes is Tymon, lets out a series of weak coughs as he struggles to fill his lungs with air. He tries to wave off Cyryl’s concern, but it comes off as a pathetic attempt to save face.
Cyryl silently recoils when looking at his boss. He’s so small. Short, of course, but since he’s currently wearing gym shorts and a tank top, Cyryl understands the full depth of how tiny he is. Hardly any muscle lines his body, there’s so little definition to his limbs. His wrists are thin, his veins aren’t bulging out of his skin despite the seeming intensity of his work out, and his neck is so thin; Cyryl could no doubt choke him out with one hand. To make matters worse, Cyryl looks back at the bar and quickly does the math in his head, counting up the weights on both sides, plus the weight of the metal bar. He slipped when only lifting 210 pounds? That’s basically nothing! Tymon can’t even lift his body weight?
“Shut…” Tymon’s words are separated with a few seconds of heavy gasping, “up…”
“I-I didn’t say anything!”
Tymon’s head is turned away, but his large ears are red, and his clenched fists are trembling.
“Uhh, I brought a lot of coffee. Want some? It’ll help… uh, your muscles, or something, I think. It tastes good.”
“Why are you here?” Tymon says, looking away, his voice finally steady.
“I always come in this early.”
“It’s the 14th, you’re supposed to be at home. Or out in the town. Or I don’t care, just not here.”
“14th…” Cyryl scans his brain, his ears twitching, “oh yeah, yesterday was the 13th, wasn’t it? Eugh, I drank way too much, haha.”
“Yeah, so… go home.”
Cyryl scoots over to the bench and rests his arm against one of the metal pegs, “then why are you here?”
“I’m always here.”
“But it’s the end of the month. Don’t you have some friends or family to spend the…” Cyryl’s voice trails off, and Tymon doesn’t respond. Quickly switching gears, “there’s no work to be done at the months end.”
“There is, not that you care.”
Cyryl sighs. He glances at Tymon’s frail arms, then looks to the discarded bar which thankfully didn’t dent the reinforced floor after being thrown. He walks over, wraps the fingers of his right hand around the center of the bar, then lifts it with one hand. Walking it back to the bench is simple, and he effortlessly places it back on the pegs.
“You, uh, want a spotter?”
“No. I can lift it just fine on my own.”
Cyryl shakes his head and walks off. Tymon sighs, thankful that that momentary bit of embarrassment has finally passed, only for his relief to be interrupted by Cyryl returning, sitting on the bench across from him. He has a cup of coffee in both hands, and extends one to Tymon.
Tymon looks down at it for a moment.
“Just drink it.”
Tymon grumbles, but grabs the cup regardless. He puts the opening on the lid to his lips, then slowly tilts his head back. The piping hot liquid burns his lips, and he can only take a sip before putting the cup down.
Even though every instinct in Cyryl’s body tells him to mock Tymon for being such a baby, he lets it go. “I thought our department doesn’t have to work during the month’s end.”
“It doesn’t officially.” Thanks to the angle, Tymon can’t easily hide his blushing cheeks and ears, but steering the conversation away from his workout lets the embarrassment slowly pass. “But some trains coming in today, and tomorrow, will have some of our resources on them. Only a few tons here and there, usually, but the train station workers will still bring the cargo to the warehouse.” Tymon pops the paper top off his cup, letting the steaming liquid cool faster. “When the warehouse workers come back on the first, I want them to already have the destinations of those resources.”
“Why?” Cyryl asks with an eyebrow raised.
“If not me, nobody else is gonna do it.”
“Okay, but why does anyone have to do it? It’s non-essential work. If the Protectorate wants someone to do it, they should declare it essential work and assign some people to work the month’s end like any other industry. It doesn’t have to be you.”
Tymon blows into his coffee, disbursing the small cloud of steam as he thinks up an answer. “I’d just have to check their math anyway. It makes more sense if I do the work myself. Besides,” Tymon grumbles, “it’s not like I have anything else to do. Might as well make myself useful.” He shakes his head, but doesn’t look up “so why are you here? You drank too much?”
Cyryl rolls his eyes and leans back. The memory of what happened forces his jaw to clench and his brow to narrow, he takes a large, angry gulp of coffee as he finds the words. “I was tricked.”
“Oh dear,” Tymon says, dryly.
“I’m spending the next 30-something years here, so I thought about finally getting a girlfriend.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And so, for the last few years, I’ve been going to all these bars and restaurants and parties and events.”
“Yeah.”
“Women are the most chatty, talkative, annoying creatures I’ve ever met.”
“Sure.”
“I’d honestly rather talk to an alien, literally any species, but whatever. So a couple days ago I went to a bar and met a guy. Great guy, fun to be around, one of those pretty boy types who, you know, was a little short but he had a great face. A Forestlander from… Dubawin, I think he said. Well, he was a scout stationed on Basugio during the last war, so we were exchanging stories, right?”
“Yep,” Tymon nods as he takes a small sip of his coffee.
“So as we were talking, he tells me he’s got a wife. As to be expected, most men do.”
“Except you and me,” Tymon says.
“Yeah, thank God. But he’s telling me that his wife’s sister is actually single, a leftover woman.”
Child peldaks, as they grow up and progress through schooling, typically stay withing the same class of peers until age 75, then they spend 20 years of compulsory service in the military. The vast majority of peldaks pair up with their peers, and will then get married upon finishing their compulsory service. Women who don’t get married by age 100 are considered leftover women; they were left over from their class of peers, and are typically desperate to find a spouse. Tymon and Cyryl are not considered leftover men because society doesn’t place the same expectations on males, though it is seen as childish.
“So, the guy tries to set me up with his wife’s sister and I’m, you know, not really sure about it. I’m humming and hawing, but he’s pushing me into it. Eventually, he brings up the idea of a double date. He brings his wife, I’ll be with the sister, it’ll be nice and casual, not some act of desperation where the girl is basically begging me to marry her.”
“Makes sense.”
“So… so yesterday, after I finish work, I head out to the town. Some spot deep in an alien district; I didn’t know why. I’m the first one there, basically the only peldak, and then, low and behold… three women show up.”
“Oh no.”
“Come to find out, the boy was actually a girl. Forestlanders just look like that, and I’m an idiot, so I didn’t realize she was crossdressing. It was all just a plot to bring me out into the alien district where there’d be no peldaks around to save me. So, I’m sitting at a table, and all three of these women are just crowding around me, yapping in my ears, talking over each other for my attention.”
“Wow.”
“So I start drinking.”
“As you would.”
“Yeah. But… we were at an alien place. They all had horns, I don’t remember what species they are, but they had some strong booze. I don’t know if you know this, but peldaks can’t drink as much as those horn aliens can, I dunno why.”
“Sure.”
“So… I drank as if it was peldak booze, just chugging it back, and then I woke up on the couch of one of their apartments. The crossdresser’s place.”
“And you have no idea what they did to you when you were blacked out.”
Cyryl raises an eyebrow, “huh?”
“You were wasted,” Tymon says. “You have no memory of that night. They could have done anything to you, and you’d have no way of knowing.”
Cyryl’s lips press into two thin lines, trying to decipher his meaning. “No, no, Tymon. The girls were peldaks. I was only at an alien restaurant.”
Tymon raises an eyebrow and cocks his head.
“You don’t know a lot about women, do you?”
He rolls his eyes and sighs, “I guess not. But whatever, it seems your problem is that you want a girl who’ll just shut up and listen.”
Cyryl narrows his brow and takes a long sip of his coffee. “What?”
“You’re talking about how you hate women, right?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“And you hate them because they’re too chatty and won’t shut up.”
Cyryl takes a second to think, “yeah, that’s about right.”
“But you’re talking to me just fine, and I always see you around the office chatting up other people.”
“Yeah.”
“So,” Tymon gestures his hands together, like fitting two pieces of a puzzle. “You want to talk, and you want a girl to listen. If the girl dominates the conversation, then you get bored and start drinking.”
“…Huh.”
“Next time you go to a bar, just keep talking and don’t let her interrupt. Or let her talk only a little, maybe.”
Cyryl leans forward, his elbow on his knee and his head propped up on his fist. “Hm. I should just keep talking.”
“I feel like you should have figured that out already, but whatever.” Tymon’s coffee is finally cooled off enough that he can drink it normally. Though it’s bitter, black coffee, and Tymon can only stand a few gulps.
“Well enough about me then, what about you?” Cyryl gestures to the press bar, “that’s the most you can lift?” Cyryl realizes his error and pulls back a little. “As… thanks for making me realize my problem, how about I help you put on some actual muscle, is what I mean to say.”
In the spirit of building bridges, Tymon tries hard not to roll his eyes. “I’m almost 600 years old, I’ve tried several times to get experts and trainers to help.” He nods his head to the bar, “that’s the most I can lift.”
Cyryl’s face tightens in surprise and confusion. He sets the coffee down, walks behind the bench, then lifts the bar and all the weight with one arm. “Really? How? I know you’re short, no offense, so you can’t lift as much as me, but this is way too little.”
Tymon takes a long drink of his coffee, ignoring the bitter taste long enough to keep himself from blurting out an insult. By the time he finally speaks, he has enough sense to keep his voice calm. “Because my mother was pregnant in the first few years we had space travel,” he says with only a faint layer of civility in his tone. “Of the 3 years she was pregnant with me, she spent about a third of the time in space, and the zero-gravity messed up my bones.” His hand clenches around the paper cup, though he has enough restrained to not crush it in his hand and spill coffee everywhere. “My mom, dad, brothers, sisters, cousins, everyone in my family is a normal height. My muscles are fine too, it’s my bones that are too thin, and the joints aren’t that developed either.” He reaches over and taps the circular weight, “this is the most I can lift without breaking something, I’ve tested. And no, unlike you, my bones don’t heal stronger.”
“O-oh.”
Tymon takes another sip, his hearts thumping and his ears gently flapping in discomfort, “and hey, you’re welcome. Because of my generation, and hundreds of peldaks who had it even worse than me, now there’re laws that prevented your mom from traveling in space when she was pregnant with you.”
“I… didn’t know that was a law.”
“Nor would you have a reason to know it. But if you ever did get married, that’s something you’d be made aware of.”
Now it’s Cyryl’s turn to be red in the face and ears, but thankfully Tymon’s head is turned away. “H-hey, how tall is the rest of your family?”
“Taller than you.”
Cyryl sets the bar down on the pegs, but can’t bring himself to say anything else on the topic. “Well, uh, since I’m already here, and don’t have plans, I guess I can help you out today.”
Tymon lays down on the bench and rolls his shoulders, “do what you want.”