Thomas is coming home to Carolivia from studying abroad. He was supposed to study business and politics, which would mean having to continue the slave trade in Coralivia and other places. That's because for any business to be even slightly viable it needed to have slaves because of the massive profit margins slaves generated. And only wealthy people could vote so to get into politics you had to be pro slavery. Now slavery those days, in those lands, wasn't really about race at all, it was more about getting crazy rich off the suffering and poverty of your slaves.
Coralivia was a beautiful place with amazing, breath-taking nature with sandy beaches, tall evergreen forests, bright deserts, peaty loam, jagged cliffs, and the river that ran through everything. But the citizens' minded were unnatural due to their greed and exploitativeness and all manner of other vices, and partly due to the presence of the Roaring King who made sure nothing would ever change.
Now Thomas was a pretty intelligent guy. He was a young man from a very rich slaveowning family with a bit of power and a huge mansion. Huge, ornate, architecture and made from stone. It caught your eye. It was very far removed from the nature around the manor. Thomas always had the shine of the idea that slavery was wrong somewhere in his mind but didn't understand how to follow it and mostly just went along with what his parents wanted in his life, growing up.
Going to college, those views quickly began to change. He had to live humbly, as a student, in small, quite small, simple tents, by nature, with simple food, with his only form of entertainment being talking to his fellow students, all young people, in their early twenties, really young. He had no slaves. He realized he liked this lifestyle. He didn't need all that extravagent stuff, he was okay having just what he needed. Also, it was so peaceful for the soul, spirit, and conscience to not have slaves. It was so great to not have slaves, to not be waited on by slaves, to not have the source of your lifestyle be someone else's suffering. It was also good to not have a lot of stuff, becasue that meant people were being cheated out of their fair share, suffering, so you could get that much stuff.
But he wasn't perfectly good yet. He still didn't know how to live without his parents' blessing. He didn't know how to or think he should live without his parents accepting him and being okay with him so he consigned himself, reluctantly, to going back to his life of being a slaveowner. He also, while he was okay with being lower middle class, he wasn't okay with being poor and not having the stuff he needed to live and be healthy. He knew that without his parents no-one would give him money and you needed a bit of money to get started on a career. So even though he didn't like having slaves he didn't want to not have slaves enough to fight against it.
During the whole time he spent in school and changing he also really got into theatre and playwriting. He loved making stories and acting them out and potentially changing peoples' thoughts, though at this point his stores weren't too original because he wasn't too original. Plays could be very elaborate and extravagant with flashy costumes, sets, and props if sponsored by a rich patron. They could also be very simple, with just a bunch of people in you tent and you and your friends acting it out. Thomas liked the latter type much more. Writing plays was very hard word but he and his friends liked it. Thomas liked it a whole lot. The feeling he got was incomparable. A constant push foreward met by a constant buzzing sense of harmony. Playwrites never made more than a little money so he could tell his parents wouldn't want such a career for him. But playwrites never had to use slaves so that was a huge plus. His friend Alexander, who was from a different, better countrym encouraged him to go professional in his passion. He eventually decided he wanted to, but he still wasn't okay with potentially not having enough to live. So he decided to ask for more money from his parents under the guise of it being for something else, and use it to sneakily start his playwriting career.
But he didn't ask soon enough and soon it was time for him to go home. His stint at college may have been ended prematurely by his parents catching whiff of his plans. He could've tried to say longer but he didn't since he was so against being abandoned and poor.
Anyways, dark things were at work, always had been at work, (for a while) in his home state of Coralivia.
A spiritual weapon that would help him on his future journey of redemption was that he had talked sincerely (respectfully, listeningly) to a few slaves and therefore the thought that people experiancing slavery had their own thoughts and emotions was more strongly within him.
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