The Only Chapter: A Train In a Wasteland
War. War never changes.
Sure, the people fighting it do, as well as what they're fighting with, for, how, on a Tuesday or not, and why they're fighting in the first place. In fact, I'm pretty sure war is constantly changing. But I think that cliche was a good touch.
I digress. Back to starting our narrative today.
War had broken out on the small island of Sodor. Unknown to everypony except its inhabitants, and left completely to its own devices since its creation, evolution had taken a surprising path here. Its dominant species was a race of large, talking trains. The most popular of which was the sky-blue tank engine, Thomas.
Thomas was a jovial fellow, quick to smile and laugh, and always there for his friends, and along with the island's single human, the apparently immortal Mayor Topham Hatts, he lived on the island in peace with the fellow residents.
Until a faction of trainlings, for that is what I shall call the residents of Sodor, decided using coal was no longer an economically viable nor environmentally responsible mode of energy. They proposed using cleaner, healthier fuels as an alternative fuel type.
They were all burned at the stake for being heretics.
I think now's a good time to mention that these trainlings revered coal, vehemently. Any word against coal, true or otherwise, was equated to High Treason, Murder One, Sadistic Homonecropedobestiality, Heresy, and littering rolled up into one charge.
Naturally, some bleeding-heart do-gooder trainlings thought “Killing others is wrong!" The small group quickly grew in size, calling out to address the 1984-esque fucked up government they were all subjected to. Soon, to prove their numerous points, they started killing the coal miners, naïvely thinking that would do anything.
This didn't end well for them. Obviously. Tensions heated up, brother turned against brother, family was rent asunder, and the 93rd Sodorian Civil War began.
It quickly degenerated from both parties murdering each other, to everyone murdering everyone. It is recorded that in the first 12 hours of open conflict, out of the approximately 1 million trainlings on the island, 927 percent of them had died. Mayor Topham Hatts, himself, made up 483,000 of the 9,270,000 casualties.
Enough back story, now to the good stuff:
