Org

I remember spending my afternoons atop the neighborhood church, watching as people scurried through the tight alleyways of Sableclutch. I couldn't afford school and didn't yet have the build to work, and staying home reminded Dad about all the mouths he had to feed. Staying out of the way was easier, perched above it all.

From my vantage point, Hallia's twisting corridors were veins. Clogged, broken, and in desperate need of repair. I watched as carts jammed against each other in streets too narrow for their purpose, as people shuffled in long lines outside bakeries where the bread ran out before noon, as the city wheezed and sputtered under the weight of too many bodies and too little thought.

It was obvious to me, even then: this wasn’t how a city was meant to function.

I used to imagine pulling Hallia apart, like an old machine, stripping it down to its gears, laying it flat on the ground and building it properly -- without the superstition, without the inefficiencies, without the dead hands of kings choking it from above.

I spent those afternoons sketching in the dust atop the church roof. At first, they were just idle lines -- loops, connections, imaginary streets where no one got stuck, where no one wasted their life standing in line for scraps. The lines became roads. The roads became districts. The districts became a city.

I watched as people wasted hours waiting for a tram that was never on time because the city’s schedules were based on tradition, not necessity. I watched as merchants haggled in a market with no space to grow while entire empty courtyards sat behind locked gates, held by nobles who hadn’t set foot in them for generations. I watched as men bled in the streets, not because they were violent, but because they had no work, no way forward, no road out of their misery.

That was the first time I asked myself a question that followed me for the rest of my life. What if I could fix this?

Forster Cain

Founder of Prime Meridian

Architect of the Org