MapleSAP Special: Justice Arrow
Part 9: It’s a Hard Knock Life

It’s Homecoming, and hundreds of Bow Masters and super high level bowmen and bow-women from the Justice Arrow have returned home. The people of Henesys are ecstatic over the arrival of the troops and everyone is celebrating.
Families greet their fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters who came back home for the short time.
The day after the troops came home from Roika, Chief Jalonska holds a ceremony and religious service. He praises his best troops on their efforts abroad, and Father Lykon leads the prayers, gospel singing and all that.
Every evening for the next few days people dance and play games. While everyone is in the best of moods, things are very different for the slaves and prisoners here. As for my team, Henesys has become an extremely dangerous place.

Prior to Homecoming and Thanksgiving, the slaves and prisoners were constantly overworked several hours a day to prepare for the troops’ arrival, whether it was cooking, cleaning, reparing things, or menial labor. The young servants were also not spared the burden. These kids worked themselves to the bone, and now that the Bow Masters are here, things don’t get any easier. They must work even harder to impress the Bow Masters and to make their families look good. For Hank, Rannbo, and Maria, and myself, special treatment for visitors is absolutely out of the question.
Punishment for lacking in work effort is all the more severe in the presents of the Justice Arrow’s elite. Every day we see kids and people dragged away for making mistakes or embarassing themselves such as tripping and falling.

At this time, in the metal shop, Jake and I are joined by over 20 other servants and metal workers as the metal shop takes orders to make, repair, or upgrade the elite’s weapons and armour. The supervisor in the shop carefully inspects every thing we work on. The boy next to me failed to notice a small dent in the metal of an arzuna set and was beaten viciously with club. The man shouted at the boy, saying that the Bow Mistress would have killed him instantly upon discovering the dent. He forces the kid to pray and beg for forgiveness.

For the time being, Hank and Rannbo are assigned to Bow Masters to carry their items or meet their requests.
Maria ends up in the bakery, preparing foods for the weekend feast as well as other things for the winter. Her family, the Nilsons, who she is serving have two sons and two daugters, all Bow Masters visiting. Amy, the red haired girl keeps Maria close to her at all times. Maria told me she was probably protecting her from her brothers and sisters, who would surely kill Maria at the very slightest hint of wrongdoing. She told me that many in this town are hostile towards those who moved in from out of town.

During the day, as field work is impossible in the snow-covered frozen ground, my team and I found more free time on our hands, so after spending well over five weeks here, we finally get to the work we planned to. The Justice Arrow has given us our memory crystals back, believing we proved our loyalty to them, the people and their religion.
On a routine morning check of the storage buildings out in the feilds, I spotted a cargo truck following us.
After we stopped at the barns in Field C10, north of town, the truck pulled in as well but drove to a building behind the cattle barn.
Inspection of the cows in the barn is quick, and there is no hurry to leave, so Hank and I went to check out the truck behind the barn.
The sunlight reflecting off the snow makes it nearly impossible to see, and we had to squint as we dashed to the other barn.
“Hey! You guys, come here! give us a hand, eh?” a man shouts from open gate of the barn.
We rush over. “What’s happening?” I asked.
“Gotta get these magicians off the truck and into the cells in there!” the white bearded man said, handing us special leather gloves. “No need to get magic burns on your hands!” he said, unlatching the doors of the truck and flinging them open.
I was shocked. the truck was completely packed with work out magicians, all slouched against eachother. There were so many of them no one could even sit. From the ceiling hung an electro-magic pulse emitter. EMP emitters radiate pulses of magic-magnetic energy that completely unstabilizes the magic energy in one’s body, and saps their energy.
A crew of men joined us and they started hauling out young guys and girls carelessly by arms, legs or necks and drag them inside. Hank and I had to help too to keep from breaking our cover. I carried a magician girl from the truck outside into the building.
Wooden cells that looked like horse stables lined the sides of the barn, but the gates rose to the top, and magicians were simply thrown in without the slightest bit of human decency. I opened one gate and gently laid the girl down on the old hay. Hank did the same.
The whole task took 20 minutes as the men worked hard and furiously. Servant kids fill food bows with mana-fuel saturated food that looks expired. Aftr all that was finished, the big gate was shut and locked tight.
The man in charge said the magicians would normally be at Haktzku, but new deals were being arraged to ship them to Zhong-guo via Lith Harbor.

During Homecoming, we secretly recorded various things on our memory crystals; slaves being abused, kids being punished for almost nothing, and two executions. A man was killed for cursing the religion, and another young woman we burned for denying an arranged marriage with a Bow Master.
During this time, we are all scared shytless