Dukelanders 1896,
Located in the western surbub of New Orleans and renowned for their heavy coal mines,was the small province of Dukelanders where there lived a very strong man named Diego Laputa,a man well known for his martial art and battle skills.So important was he to the dukelanders that the Duke of Dukelanders offered him a royal apartment in his castle,but still Diego turned down the offer to live with an old woman at the river side who had lost her husband,a former town sheriff,some 12years ago.
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Until 15 years ago there was no presence of Diego Laputa who later migrated into Dukelanders in the summer of 1881 when there was a civil war outbreak between the Mexicans and Venezuelans,to which Diego had lost his family to as a little boy of 13.
He had joined a group of Latinos on a scorching escapade walk through the hot borders of Mexico who were escaping into the United States to evade the war.He was one of the few travelling refugees who made it into the States in the autumn of 1879 after so much hiding(the heavy-armed USA immigrant officers were brutal and would shoot at any man,woman or child trying to break through the borders due to the ongiong high toll of drug smuggling from Brazil going on at the country borders)and living in the creeks of Paricutin within the borders of Mexico.It was during this 2 years interval where Diego would turn into a master of martial-arts at the hands and tutorage of a Chinese maestro named Yung-chi who dwellled in Mexico before the war and had to evade the country during the civil war alongside Diego.Yung-chi was as a father figure to Diego but in 1881 he would die in the woods after he suffered a wolf attack while alone,weakened by the fact that he caught a sickening flu in the creeks.Diego was enraged by the loss of the only father and friend figure he had,but after months of mourning Yung he thought of moving on for greener pastures.There was only death lurking at these borders.
ARRIVAL TO DUKELANDERS
On getting to Dukelanders in 1893,Diego was welcomed by the story of women who dissapeared with their left breast missen and their throat slit open when their bodies were recovered in the woods.Now,the women of dukelanders had always gone into the woods in search of rabbits and firewood to feed their families and burn their ovens especially before winter when the thickness of the snow would cover and wet the woods.
The mask behind these killings was a mystery to the Dukelanders and all their efforts of sending
armed vigilantes' into the woods to hunt this killer proved abortive.More throats were slit open,more left breasts got mutilated,corpses of women in the woods became a weekly tradition and atimes monthly routine in Dukelanders...yet there was no single man in Dukelanders with a solution to this eyesore.
A couple of Months later after he settled in Dukelanders,Diego turned out to be loved by the residents,both men and women due to his witty sense of humor,being a strong and intelligent man who always entertained the public atimes with his martial art skills,jumping of roofs in acrobatic manners and engaging in entertaining show-battles with the strongest men of the town,defeating them even while the Duke watched to a big applause.The Duke was a big admirer of Diegos skills and hired him to be his own personal body-guard. But Diego was never at rest due to the ongoing human massacre happening in the little province of
Dukelanders.He decided to take on the adventure to find out who this woman-raider was and promised himself to bring back the head of this notorious hill-billy to the king on a plater.After the king had heard his request to help,he gave him a royal permission to carry on.It was not going to be an easy task to Diego but he was determined to deliver the people of Dukelanders from the nightmare sitting before them.
One early morning he went to the Morgue of the town,and there he requested the body of five women who had suffered death as victims of the circumstance(Diego was an intelligent man despite his lack of formal education).On laying them on separate tables he started to study the wounds inflicted on each victim.They all had their left breasts cut off and he asked himself "why always the left breast?,this must be a psycological event" he thought.He could find no ground-breaking answers after deliberating and observing the bodies for seven hours.He asked morgue men to leave those bodies in a separate room for his studies as he left.
He washed himself in a nearby river and was carried away in his thoughts while going back to report to the Duke but was struck in his brain by a fact that he seemed to have overlooked during his study on the victims.He ran back to the morgue as fast as he could and on getting there there was only one worker who was almost locking up the morgue for the day(the dukelanders believed the morgue was sacred at night hours and ghosts would haunt night-workers who stayed at night).He got the key from the man despite the fear of being in the whole morgue alone and headed into the victims room.On getting there he got his torch out of his pocket and pointed straight at the victims neck where they were slit open,he made a very shocking discovery...the whole victims had their necks slit open from right to left...Alas!the long-anticipated raider is LEFT-HANDED!!
Diego would have loved to air his discovery to the Duke but he decided to keep quiet since he was shocked that someone he knows very well in the town was also left-handed.He had an idea but it was too late at night to return into the woods to study the spots where these victim bodies are mostly discovered.In the dusk of the day when most of the residents of Dukelanders were still sleeping away their fears on bed,Diego picked up his sword and walked silently into the woods to the spots where these killings have occured mostly,he found out unsuprisingly that there were some bushy hideouts nearby to where these victims are killed.He made up his mind that he was going into a death-life combat with this raider when he comes in contact with him or her.That afternoon,on getting to the Dukes palace,it was quiet from the inside-out but while approaching the Dukes room he heard someone screamings,he decided to stand at the front of the door until later when a little girl broke out of the room with her eyes covered in tears and looking terrified,she also had blood dripping from her legs. "The Duke must have raped the little girl" he whispered to himself.Now he was so enraged but he held his nerves for some two minutes before knocking on the Dukes door just to make the Duke feel he never witnessed what had just happened.On entering the room he informed the Duke on the surface,that he felt the raider was a very skilled man and that he never thinks he alone could architect the capture of the raider though he was working on it.From that moment,Diego had developed a mistrust for the Duke.
A week had passed by without any news of the famous killings in Dukelanders so Diego had a strong feeling that the clock was ticking close to another visit of the raider.Every evening from thence he would disguise as a pretty woman while entering the woods to fetch firewood,spending hours in the woods till night on purpose.For four days he continued the trend to no avail and then on the fifth day,as he was about going home from the woods after another wasted day he heard footstep approaching from a distance and instead of hiding he acted like a woman still picking woods on the floor,still on his disguised attire.He saw a
male figure approaching from a distance with a long garden fork,a sword and wearing a dark mask but he steadied his stand despite a little chill running down his spine at his distaste for the fear of the unknown.He reached into his hidden sheath under his gown and brought out his sword and with the mask-man(who was left-handed as he had pressumed)running towards him he made a fast dodge to his left as the foe swung his long fork at him suprisingly,and on dodging he hit the mask-man with the tip of his sword on his groin.The mask-man on realising the skills of this assumed-woman,upped his fight,rose from the ground with a chinese-get-up and made a swerve with his sword which dealt Diego a cut to the left side of his chest.He wondered how many women the mask man must have killed for him to be perfect and not to miss a cut to his left chest unsuprisingly,he was already in a little pool of blood as he wondered but he gathered himself together to the suprise of the mask-man who felt he has cut off another breast,made a quick dash at the maskman,stabbed him by the side of his ribs with his blood-wet sword then headbutted him in the face to uncover the mask which the man wore.Unbelievable!What was he doing here!It was the Duke!!What have he done!!Who would believe his story!!
Immidiately he made a sprint towards the town-square but just before he could get there he saw the morgue man walking home but he stopped him and took him to the spot where the Duke lay in a pool of blood but still breathing.Diego made him stay while he ran back to the townsquare and made a public call to the residents who all had to run into the woods in a crowd.Luckily for Diego the Duke was still breathing when the crowd arrived the spot.He told them how it had been the king who was mutilating women in the woods for years.The Duke,knowing his incumbent power ordered the arrest of Diego at the spot,claiming he came with him to the woods before Diego turned against him and launched an attack on him.The Dukelanders were almost agreeing despite the Duke being left-handed until Diego was telling them about the little girl who the Duke just raped a week ago and as it was being said,the mother of the little girl appeared crying with her little girl who was raped.Her child had reported to her but she could not raise a voice about it because it was the Duke who was the subject here,but seeeing this opportunity she hurried down to the spot to tell the residents what had happened to her little daughter of 14.Before the people of Dukelander could think of what to do to their once respected Duke who lay helpless on the forest floor,he was already coughing out blood and gave up the ghost.
It was latter learnt that the Duke had suffered sexual abuse at the hand of an Irish woman who dwelled in the province,as a boy of 9 for almost 4years while growing up.He would be forced by the Irish woman who was his late fathers concubine too,to please her urges while she threatened to kill his mother.The Irish woman would later flee Dukelanders to her native homeland of Ireland in 1875 after being caught with four missen children under her detention for almost a year. At the end of that day the town of Dukelanders were never to hear of missen women with mutilated body parts till today.
Diego lived the remaining of his lifetime in Dukelanders and went on to marry the second daughter of the old woman he lived with when he arrived Dukelanders.He went on to be crowned the Duke of Dukelanders at the age of 32 and ruled the town for almost six decades before passing out at the age of 91,being full of age and wealth.
He became the most influencial man in the history of Dukelanders until today.He returned to Mexico at the age of 41 but only for a visit,(his family was long gone during the war)but he built an orphanage in memory of his dead siblings and his parents who he rarely saw with matured eyes.Dukelanders was his home,his family,his life and everything about his story was engulfed within there since his arrival day.He always wondered before his death what his life would have been had there been no wars,no death of his real family,no fleeing of Mexico,no meeting of Yung-chi.But that was the tray life have served him with,and he lived it.
Thank you,
Dear Reader