11

When you arrive back home, the sky is nearly dark. As you kick off your shoes and walk through into the kitchen, Arctus comes to greet you, trotting along beside you as you go to start making something for dinner. Once you sit down to eat, you open your laptop again, and turn your concentration to a page you've had open for a couple of days and have been meaning to look through: the Clarence Industries website.

After scrolling past a wall of positive endorsements from customers and pictures of smiling employees, you find a page titled "Success Stories", which details all of the various projects Clarence Industries have done in the past, and what they're planning to do next. It seems that in the past ten years or so they have completed developments in around half a dozen towns, usually focusing on smaller neighborhoods rather than big cities. It goes on to explain how the company are now pursuing possible developments in four towns concurrently, and that they have several ambitious plans to build everything from new apartment complexes to enormous fitness centers with swimming pools and climbing walls. There's also a report that claims the company has doubled its profits over the past five years alone, and that their presence has helped to boost the economies of over half a dozen towns in the last decade.

There's nothing in any of it about mining, or any kind of work being done underground.

You exit the site, and after a couple of searches you come across a thread on a forum that seems to be designed for residents of a particular town—whose name you recognize as one of the places Clarence Industries worked on a few years back. The thread is simply titled "Too Expensive", and after clicking on the link you find yourself faced with a chain of comments all complaining that they can't afford the prices in the new stores that have appeared in their town. A few others chime in that the cost of rent has been increasing too, and that it's been that way ever since the new developments were finished.

All they seem to care about is getting rich people to visit, one commenter writes. What's the point of more people visiting if I can't even live here anymore?

Tourism drives the economy, another replies. It's good for the town.

Well then, when do I get my check? the first commenter asks. Tourism's fine as long as that's not all there is. Why do they assume everyone here is a rich tourist and not just a normal person trying to get by?

$$$ is the only response.

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