My father said he’d met one once, in some hovel near Ullsberg. A piteous thing, it spent the whole night trying to convince papa of the glories of Vermin "civilisation". It said that every citizen got a vote, choosing their leaders and their laws. That they elected a ‘senate’ and ‘consuls’ after the fashion of the Avrasi Empire. The rat even had the nerve to call us uncivilised for lacking the same rights!
Now, father listens for a while – how he manages not to laugh, I’ll never know – but eventually he asks what, if the glories of the sewer so outshine our humble kingdom, it is doing here. It transpires that the creature’s mate fell out of favour, and was assassinated, and it, a female, had to flee the kingdom. The best part is, its mate was killed by a ‘dusk senator’.
This glorious civilisation puts assassins on the legislature. And I thought politics here was cut-throat.