Warm-up picture

Surrounding the isolated valley of Shangri-La are the Kunlun Mountains. Although Shangri-La itself has become quite well-known, its less famous neighbor to the west, within the vast mountain range is a utopia carved into the rock of the Kunlun Caves; this is the Kingdom of Pittsburgh. There is great unrest in Pittsburgh, for the income inequality willfully produced by a corrupt, profit-driven economic system has divided the city's inhabitants into two disparate class systems: the wealthy lotus-eaters of the light, and the cave diving proles of the darkness, or the disenfranchised. The dehumanized proles must wear wetsuits, for they spend all day working the lowest depths of the caves while the lotus-eaters lounge in the artificial light of the metropolitan city center. The proles are organizing a militia in order to overthrow the unstable aristocracy of lotus-eaters who have engorged themselves on their own opulence, their own greed. With their backs turned, some literally, the lotus-eaters will never see the proles approaching with their plans of a complex coordinated attack from all levels of the city at dawn. "What was that?" asked a female lotus-eater, looking into the outer reaches of the light. "Nothing," replied her partner, a male. "I say, it's probably those prole-servants, fetching us some more wine. We ran out not long ago. Since then the mood has dimmed considerably," spoke another male nearby. "I do hope they hurry then. My, how those proles lay about. We give them so much and they can't even keep the wine flowing," said the female, sending herself into a mild tizzy.