Interlude – Heavy is the head who wears the crown.

Clang clang clang! “Wake up tots!”

Tater, the former slave of Jacob Smith the maid café owner, found himself waking up to the sound of banging pots, as had been usual for… a long while. He had sort of lost count of the progression of time since his emancipation. He stood up and straightened himself on his bed, which had a newly quilted sheet. He scratched his arms and legs which had been scratching like hell all night. Still, the boy preferred a badly made quilt to the piles of straw on the ground that he used to sleep on.

Clang, clang! “It’s time for breakfast! Come on now, the food is going to get cold if you don’t hurry your bums up.”

Immediately Tater got up. The “kitchen” was across a few beds similar to his, inhabited by folk similar to his age. It was a cramped room indeed. Tater got to the kitchen, also a dining room and a bedroom considering all were in the same room, and sat on another quilt on the ground meant as seating. The food was set on a low “table” made out of several disjointed planks of wood laid on the floor covered by a large tablecloth. Contrary to the ascetic status of the dining arrangement, the food on the table was one worthy of emperors… or at least that’s what Tater thought as he dug into slime gruel flavored with mint. Having never seen luxury, Tater had no clue as to what an emperor would eat. “Hey.” he asked to his fellow tots on the table “Any of you ever wonder what the breakfast of the emperor would be like?” He heard a few chuckles from the table and a few angry glares clearly telling him to not talk while eating.

Unable to solve this great mystery of emperor-worthy food, Tater went back to dipping some unleavened bread into the slime gruel. Maybe the emperor got to have a really big pot of slime all to himself? Gold? Were there slimes made of gold? Then that’s definitely what the emperor would have: golden slime. Gold slime soup for breakfast, gold slime pie for lunch, gold slime soap for a shower and gold slime candy to have with tea before sleep. Gold slime… that’d taste heavenly I bet, thought Tater. He’d love to have some of whatever that was. It’d surely be better than his now-emptied bowl.

“Hmm…” Tater heard an older boy across from him hum loudly in thought. He was Ejike, the former butler of Sir Algernon. Right next to him was his older sister Ekene. “Tater, I don’t think emperors have breakfast.”

“What? How?” Tater leaned forward in curiosity. “How can someone not have breakfast?”

“It’s a simple thing.” continued Ekene, taking over from her brother “The late Algernon was quite busy, and he only requested that we get him a drink for breakfast. I imagine that a big man bigger than him, like the emperor, would be way too busy of a guy to have breakfast.”

“Not even some morning tea like all the other big men have?” said Tater in horror.

“Probably not.”

“Woah…” Young Tater looked at his empty bowl. “Does an emperor even get to eat? Poor guy.”

“I mean, it’d explain why all the big guys are such big gits. They all just need to take a break and enjoy some good food.” Ejike sipped some tea out of a clay mug and let out a content sigh. “They’re all just jealous of us, I think. Can’t make their lives better so they gotta ruin ours.”

“…if I find a crown in the gutter, I won’t wear it then.” concluded Tater.

Thus, the kids of Hakim Orphanage in Libertycave learned an important lesson just in case they were somehow handed a crown by a stranger looking to trap them in no-breakfast hell.