Boys of Summer
By Alex Hamilton
Prologue

“Farewell to pens and prison holes,
Where fiends themselves broke through,
And tortured noble captive souls
That they could not subdue,
But in the fullness of the day
Heaven’s justice did we do.
Disaster, famine, ruin, may
Make fearful answer true.

Goodbye to muster and parade,
Goodbye to grand review,
The dusty line, the dashing aid,
Goodbye our general too.
Goodbye to war, but halt! I say,
Good sire a word with you,
Pay up old scores or we again,
May don the army hues.”

Whalen smiled at the sight of it; the sight of thousand of young boys singing remembrance of a war they were born a century after, the sight of boys so eager to die in horrible ways they could never imagine. These boys who sung of famine but never knew hunger; who warned of disaster but never knew war. These boys who were so willing to give up parade when it was all they had ever known, who spoke of the end of muster when it was all they had ever done.

Whalen looked to his left; the Emperor was smiling, his catlike face having its ears up with his confident, closemouthed grin. The singing mobs of green boys, Emperor Mewtwo must have known, were all ready to die for him. Whalen could see a twitch in his majestic purple tail, though the excessive amounts of purple amethysts that shone like the purple of the Emperor’s eyes kept it from moving. For the first time, in the century and a half that Whalen had served the Emperor, he saw some sort of excitement in him.

Yet in a moment it was gone. Mewtwo calmed himself down. Whalen tightened his grasp on his pendulum as he prepared to move his ancient body. His short yellow legs had grown tired of standing. Even for a hypno, one hundred and forty three years was exceptionally old. His position as chief inquisitor of the Emperor had been an effortless one for the past half century. He was so far past his prime that his once thick beard was thinning out into a wispy shadow of what it once was, and his ears were so deaf that they seldom perked up in any kind of attention.

And still he served the Emperor. It was all he had ever known, and all he ever would. Before he left, he looked once more on the feverish crowd: the young boys who would never know of the true pleasures of life because of a couple of old kings’ war. He looked at the fatal eagerness within them to prove, their need to prove themselves; he looked one last time on the boys of summer.