Hopperton Itself

Hopperton is an interesting city on the coast of a small nation. It is both big and small. It is big in terms of how spread out and developed it appears to be. For example, there is a trolley system, a large and prestigious university, a large downtown centered on an ornate city hall, several public parks with trails, fountains, and lake-like ponds, as well as many buildings with old facades, the oldest only going back two hundred years at most. Currently, there isn't much construction of new buildings, only the occasional repair of the old ones, where the workmen begin late the morning and quit early afternoon. In terms of both size of area and number of people, Hopperton is factually the second largest city in the nation.

However, Hopperton is small in terms of the people and how they interact with each other. Crowds are usually infrequent and light, and the feeling among its residents is generally warm, and a shade naive. It location on the warmer, more relaxed West gives it a Bohemian air. The largest city in the nation, Proudfoot, which happens to also be the nation's capital, is seen as cold, packed with uncaring residents who treat each other a bit harshly, or at least indifferently, and who always appear to be under stress. Life in Hopperton, by contrast, is slow and easy going, where simple needs and wants are often easily met.

The largest newspaper of Hopperton, the Hopperton Times, is a thick paper with multiple sections, publishing two editions every day. The morning paper is the main edition, containing national news, analysis of business, and an amusing entertainment section which often has reader submitted poems, stories, and illustrations. The local arts scene of plays, theaters, musical performances, and galleries is richly reported on, and even noted by papers in other cities. The evening edition is the paper of updates to the morning reports, with a sizable section on the weather, which many ocean related workers find useful for planning their dawn excursions to the sea.

As of now, the most interesting story in the Hopperton Times is also the most worrying. Rumors of an international war are brewing in far away nations, with minor outbreaks of violence and protest. It is a potential war which threatens to one day upset the rather comfortable nation in which Hopperton resides. Currently, the distance of such distress has insulated most of Hopperton's residents from the actual ache of daily upset. Indeed, over half of them have no idea it is even occurring. Rafferty, and most well read, intellectual people like him, follow the news of it closely. He is sophisticated to know that such things have a way of encroaching on the lives of careless nations who stumble along foolish paths of selfish interests until a preventable tragedy bursts forth in an outage of fear and terror. It worries him, but he generally puts off thinking about it as if it were a bad dream forgotten a half hour after waking.

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