The Gnome Resistance Revolutionaries

The Gnome Resistance Revolutionaries

They call themselves GRR.   If you're gnome and you live below the Furnace District of Clockworks City, you've heard that name whispered. If you're anyone else, you likely haven't, which is precisely how they operate.   The official position: GRR is a terrorist organization bent on destabilizing the Clockworks Government Faction and the Church of TGII.   The useful position: GRR is a network of gnomes funded (largely in secret, though Bellows Manufacturing doesn't hide it that hard) to restore "original gnome laws and freedoms" by any method that doesn't involve getting caught.   Let me be specific, since specificity matters.   GRR's methods include blackmail.   They find Government Faction officials with compromising histories and they catalogue those histories. A magistrate who falsified records. A church administrator who embezzled relief funds meant for widows.   They don't go public immediately.   They negotiate. Quietly.   They plant propaganda.   Know The News, the street bulletin service, sometimes publishes stories that nobody at Know The News remembers commissioning. Convenient omissions about Government corruption. Convenient amplifications about church excess. It's not sophisticated. It doesn't need to be.   They sabotage through proxies and cash.   A factory contract that Bellows Manufacturing quietly funds doesn't happen. A water line to lower districts gets "delayed" while someone forgets to maintain it. Nothing traceable. Nothing that leaves blood on anyone's hands.   The children who starve because of missed relief funds?   The families displaced because their neighborhood's infrastructure mysteriously failed?   That's the cost of loving your people better than you love being clean about it.   I say that without judgment, which might surprise you. I grew up below the Furnace too. I know exactly what it costs to live in a place that doesn't think you deserve to live in it at all.   The Iskari Council is comfortable.   The Government Faction is comfortable.   The Church is comfortable.   Comfort is expensive when you're poor, and someone has to pay for it. GRR decided it would be the comfortable people, by whatever means available.   Motherboard runs the operation with the kind of precision you'd expect from someone who learned logistics in a city that survives on them. Nat does the field work. Deloris handles the paper trails.   They don't act out of anger, though anger would be justified.   They act out of love.   That's the part nobody ever mentions. They do ugly things because they love their people, and they've decided that letting them starve quietly is uglier.   Whether they're right about that is a question I'll never answer in these Field Guides.   But I know exactly why they asked.