Hellsborough Exposed

smeln are what the chaos of the murk produces when it crosses a human with a boggart/hob and then loses interest: knuckle-dragging, hairy-backed, no capacity to reason, heads containing nothing but junk thoughts, work avoidance and get-rich-quick schemes. Which is why smeln is also the foulest swear word in The Dark Peak, deployed as "you filthy smeln!" and carrying rather more freight than that suggests. There is exactly one translation for it in the off-world and I am not going to write it down.

Seven of them follow me about, and I have taken to numbering them: number one works at the Rivelin school and passes me on the road most days without acknowledgement, though a smile will get a smile back, and in all that time our eyes have never once actually met. Number six is stilted and accented, which had me down as a fellow off-worlder until I found her at the muscle-fibre charging station staring at me with something very close to desperation. Number two has not been seen in weeks, and I suspect the replacement is the chatty new fellow who has lately been everywhere I am; I can be extraordinarily slow.