The War of NIMH Series

A Continuing Saga to 'The Rats of NIMH' Trilogy

Book 1

Thorn Valley's Fear

Draft 1

Chapter 1

"Davis, hurry up, your chief advisor’s at the door, you were supposed to be at the Chamber of Progress 5 minutes ago! ...the house of order doesn’t like a late leader.", squeaked Lois worriedly from behind him. Lois was Davis’ wife, a pretty brown-eyed blondeish female rat, also the first lady of the Thorn Valley United Republic of Intelligent Rodents.

Davis Arthur was fidgeting with his blue presidential collar, (the only clothing he wore on his whole body) in front of a mirror in the luxuriant executive bedroom chamber.

"Don’t like late leaders? Ha! Half of the house of order ever shows up to these hearings at all! They’d better not whine to me for being late, those bickering bunch of--", Davis uttered,

"CHIEF DAVIS, WOULD YOU PLEASE REPORT TO THE LOBBY, YOUR PARTY IS WAITING..." hummed a loud, kazoo-like voice emanating from a vibrating piece of metal in the corner ceiling of the room. Both Davis and his wife Lois jumped.

"...Darn intercoms! Why did they install these confounded humdingers all over the place! These are the grand Executive chambers, for God’s sakes, can’t I enjoy some damn tranquility! Those hacks in the House of Advancement have alot of explaining to do!"

"You heard them, Davis, we’ve got to go!

"Okay, okay! It’s this darn collar, I--"

"Oh, here..." Lois said impatiently, shoving his fidgeting paws out of the way, straightening the lopsided collar out around his neck and fastening the collar’s clasp with her inscisors.

"Okay, now Let’s go!"

"but I havn’t combed my whiskers--"

"--NO TIME!", she said panickingly, wrapping her long, wormlike tail around him and pulling him away from the mirror to follow her.

Lois scampered frantically down the main hallway of their palatial quarters on all fours, but Davis Arthur lagged behind, trying to walk along as fast as he could on two legs.

"COME ON! STOP PLODDING ALONG! YOUR’E NOT A BIPED!!!", yelled Lois, stopping to call back from far ahead of him.

"Lois, please, stop, you’re embarrassing me! You’re not a beast, get back up on two legs!!!"

"Oh, come on, Davis, don’t give me that crap, stop trying to be something you’re not! Why do you insist on mocking humans so much, they’re just naked apes!"

"This isn’t about being like humans, Lois, it’s about having dignity! You are the first lady, Lois, act like it! You have to look poised and presentable in public."

"I’m really more worried about getting to the public at all in the first place, so HURRY UP!!!"

At the end of the hallway, a door opened into the main entrance lobby of the executive quarters, and when they got there, two huge bodyguards, who would have made the legendary guard rat Brutus proud, stood in the room waiting for them. Both bore belts with swort hilts in them, mostly for intimidation, thankfully so far they had never been used. Davis’ chief advisor, Philaeus Gregory, stood dwarfed in front of them. "Hello, Chief Executive and First Lady Aurthur, good day to both of you... Come on, let’s go, we’ve got to hurry.", Peter said, escorting them both out into the grand corridor, the two beefy bodyguards following close behind. A personal buggy was waiting in the corridor for them to quickly transport them to their destination. They all got in and a chauffer rat yanked the ignition lever to an incredibly sophisticated vegetable oil-powered engine that the vehicle ran on. The miniature motor sputterd, revved and jutted forward, instantly filling the hallways with the overpowering smell of a deep fryer. The engine’s revving echoed through the halls, and as soon as the vehicle started a draft began to blow through the hallway from a powerful ventilation fan somewhere in the distance. it too, strangely, was powered by vegetable oil.

"This is madness...", uttered Lois irritably, holding her sensitive ears flat against her head with her paws because of the loud engine noise. Though pretty well quieted from its full engine noise by its rat-engineered muffler, it still filled the enclosed tunnels with a rather loud racket.

"Well, woud you rather walk a quarter of a mile down these corridors?", Davis asked.
"Well, I guess not, but couldn’t we just ‘borrow’ some electric motors to make clean-running electric trams?"

"How could you talk like that, Lois? You know we can’t do that. It’s in our constitution, layed down by the great founding fathers of this Republic, the very ones that suffered under the tortures and agony human curiosity that made us who we are today. We cannot be technological saprobes to humans."

"Why can’t we design our own?"

"We can’t attain or create the powerful magnets required to make such devices ourselves yet."

"Oh yeah, I forgot.", Lois said dissapointingly.

"...And besides that, to store the energy to power the motors for ‘clean-running trams’ as you call them would require batteries, which are extremely inefficient, and require huge amounts of electricity to charge them, which even in the human civilizaton comes mostly from gas or oil power plants that pollute the air in the first place! ...batteries also contain a deadly acid and base cocktail, which is extremely dangerous to handle, and I don’t want rats getting severely injured or killed trying to produce them."

"Are you serious? ...Humans are so nuts!"

"Yeah, I know, they’re just so lost in the complexities of their so-called "civilization" they can no longer see the whole process or cause-and effect of anything anymore. They’re too lazy to care. They want the fastest, simplest solution possible to their own problems, and never realize what countless new problems it might create for others in other places further down the line. ...I sure as hell hope our civilization never become like that.", Davis uttered, looking out the window as their car rode through the endless underground streets.

As they rode down through the more developed parts of the underground city, their vehicle drew alot of attention, recieving annoyed looks and unpleasant, ear-holding reactions to the engine’s racket from every rat they drove past. Hundreds of rats bustled along the sidewalks next to the street, walking alongside rows and rows of entrances to apartments, businesses, storefronts and offices, the fast-growing sprawl of free enterprise and capitalism in Thorn Valley, a civilization that was only 20 years before a tiny stone-age tenant farmer-based autocracy.

...After driving a quarter of a mile down through the endless underground tunnel streets, the buggy finally pulled to a stop at a pair of massive doors leading into the largest single open space in their entire civilization. Other vehicles, buses, multiple-car trams, even subway trains on tracks stopped and delivered flocks of busy rats (most of whom were government workers) rushing to and from this underground parking and boarding station. On both sides of the entrance doors waited more heavily-built body guards, for this caverous room was the Chamber of Progress, the central heart of all Rodentdom. The inside of this cathedral-like enclosure was 35 feet from wall to wall and 15 feet from floor to ceiling, an astronomically vast space to any rat. The ceiling had an intricate arrangement of vaulted windows, which shafts of blinding light shone down through into the room. The windows were specially shaped parabolically to intake as much light as possible, giving very sufficient lighting, and on the outside the entire ceiling was disguised as nothing more than a murky, leaf-choked pond.

Inside this chamber was a colossal, split amphitheater of elevated seating arrangements for the two bodies of Legislature, the House of Order and the House of Advancement. The house of Order consisted of 75 elected members in total; 50 representatives of the populous of the central nation at Thorn Valley, as well as 5 representatives for each of Thorn Valley’s 5 daughter colonies in distant regions: Nicodem, Vineglades, Frisbia, Justinburg, and Timothion. The House of Advancement was an appointed board of 250 scientists, engineers, philosophers and educators that coordinated and frameworked Thorn Valley’s explosive technological and civil advancements, and also equally represented the interests of the whole population for future developments to their civilization.

The huge pine doors into the Chamber of Progress swung open, and the president of Thorn valley, his wife and the chief advisor made a hurried, less-than-grand entrance into the room. The usual cacophany of squeaks, churrs, and squeals of chattering congressional members died down instantly as they entered, and were replaced instead by an ominous white noise of ill-sounding murmers and whispers as over 100 rats lifted their heads to look down unapprovingly upon them, and raised their whiskers in the air, sniffing the air as if disgusted by the strong fried-food smell that lingered on the chief executive and his wife from the private buggy’s exhaust. The murmers and whispers echoing throughout the chamber from members of the House of Order were silenced as the speaker of the House, a greyish-black rat named James Crassus, stood up from a near bench at the bottom seating of the amphitheater to introduce them in his usual cordial way:

"You’re late.", he said casually.

...TO BE CONTINUED...