Dirk's POV
Tonight's night street festival near Anselm's home in Mainz was pretty fun, and by 10 p.m., I had a train ride (using Germany's restored famous high-speed trains) back in Aachen. At 12 midnight, I stepped out of Aachen's train station (clad in Gothic and modernist, non-brutalist architecture). The Aachen evening winds blew coolness against my red hair. The city was in its night festival mode, and I walked back to my tenement home, which had the same architectural style as the historical medieval scriptorium I spent half of my days hunching over with a quill pen or a ballpoint pen, and caught some Zzz's for tonight, or rather, this dark morning.
5 a.m.
I spent 10 minutes for a prayer on my wooden bed. After that, I went to the kitchen to prepare a simple breakfast for myself. Breakfast for this morning: 2 fried Bratwursts, 3 toasts, and a side of black coffee. After that, by 5:39 a.m., I changed my outing clothes for that of a bus driver and clocked in for my bus driver duty, ferrying passengers across Aachen and its surrounding areas. The morning rush hour was manageable, and the traffic was as smooth as the quill pen ink on a parchment.
1 p.m.
After a brief lunchtime at a McDonald restaurant, I returned the bus to the bus terminal in the city and logged out for my scriptorium work. After a brief, but relaxing streetcar ride to the museum-like scriptorium near the Aachen Cathedral, I changed my bus driver's attire for my Fahrenheit 451 fireman suit and entered one of the Copying Halls, where the medieval scribe's furniture were occupied by my fellow firemen copying texts by hand. Some copied German ones in different German dialects, while others prioritized ones in Latin, French, and Danish.
For me, I sat down and started putting my quill pen ink on a freshly made parchment (for those who wanted authentic, pre-paper ones) made by a few fellow death creatures who had been Equilibrium Grammaton Clerics from their main headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and now dedicated most of their waking hours to the tedious, yet satisfying work of making traditional parchment from cow hides and raising cattle livestock on Aachen's rural outskirts.
The book I will copying by hand is a copy of the book by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. I had some things that I admired about Epicurus, like a balanced life between pleasure indulgence and Diogenes-style of living. I had some criticism of Diogenes, mostly due to the fact that he lived in a barrel in the streets of Athens and didn't have some level of decency like a decent home and food to eat, or even clothes to wear. But I did credit him with non-attachment to material things.
The copying session lasted until 3:28 p.m., where we had a snack break at the communal hall. After that, we had a Phoenix Self-Immolation method at the courtyard between the scriptorium and the Aachen Cathedral. 3 minutes later, 8 hardbound books of Socrates, Rene Decartes, and, my personal favorite, Fyodor's Crime and Punishment novels. Some of us put 5 of them on our personal bookshelves while the other 3 were shipped off to booksellers in a book fair in the city.
3:39 p.m.
A staged fire was set in a school on the southern district, and we responded to it in minutes. Using both water from fire hydrants and the Ultra-Blue Cold Flame Ceo and the other Spanish firemen brethren of ours had pioneered to snuff out the orange flames. It was therapy for us as we feel the cool breeze that comes after the orange, mocking fire had been thoroughly snuff out.
After that, as we cleaned up the mess, I looked at the view of the city from the classroom on the third floor, seeing the spirits of the dead Aachen residents giving their approvals to us, as always been whenever we snuff out cleansing orange fires that restored the sanctity of the fireman profession.