In the grand city of Hintopia, where everything was communicated by vague hints and sighs, and deviation was met with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for tax inspectors, there existed amongst the population a distinguished group of people known as the Veritans.

The Veritans, were a mystery to the good citizens of Hintopia. Not because they were hard to understand—on the contrary, they said exactly what they meant, followed the rules when given, and noticed details so obvious that the rest of society had politely agreed to ignore them. But this, of course, was the problem.

You see, in Hintopia, communication was a delicate dance of saying one thing, meaning another, and assuming everyone else understood the bit in between. The Veritans, however, did not dance. They walked in straight lines, pointed out the inconsistencies in the music, and suggested that perhaps the dance itself would be more effective if people simply said what they meant in the first place.

This, naturally, was deeply unsettling to the citizens of Hintopia.

“Why do you always have to make things so complicated?” they cried.

“You don’t understand how things are done!” they insisted, waving vaguely toward a rulebook of rules yet to be written. And they conveniently ignored the fact that the Veritans had noticed exactly how things were done and were simply questioning why on earth anyone was still doing them that way.

And that, really, was the true problem.

The Veritans asked questions. Not the placid kind Hintopia preferred, such as:
– How are you? (which was never to be answered honestly)
– What do you do? (which was not about what you did, but how well you could summarise it in a way that made you sound important)

No, the Veritans asked the practical kind of questions:
– Why must I look you in the eye to prove I’m listening?
– Why do we work eight hours when the job only takes four?
– Why does this rule exist if no one follows it?
– Why did you say ‘We should catch up soon’ if you didn’t mean it?
– Why do we still use this system when it clearly doesn’t work?

This sort of behavior was deeply distressing to the good people of Hintopia.

So, the Veritans were shuffled politely to the edges of the city, where they could be safely ignored—though, rather unfortunately for the citizens of Hintopia, this also meant that the only people paying attention to how things actually worked were now the ones standing outside it.

And Then Came the Great Unravelling.

One day, without warning, the delicate balance of all the systems that never worked, the rules never written, the hints merely hinted, and the sighs sighed reached its inevitable conclusion as the intricate tapestry that was Hintopia, began to unravel— most spectacularly.

The clocks ran backward. The trains arrived before they had left. The city’s entire treasury had somehow been misplaced—though officials assured everyone it was “only a minor clerical issue” and nothing to be concerned about.

The citizens of Hintopia were terribly confused. The world had never failed them before.

And yet, to the Veritans, the problem was painfully obvious.

They had seen the signs years ago—in the faulty calculations, in the ignored warnings, in the systems that had been patched together with good intentions and bad math. They had tried to tell the Hintopians, of course, but had been waved off with vague statements about “not overcomplicating things.”

And so, while the citizens of Hintopia descended into frantic discussions about how to communicate urgency without causing alarm, the Veritans, simply rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

They recalibrated the clocks. They traced the faulty data back to its source. They rewrote the policies that had never made sense in the first place. They restored order—not because they were particularly invested in saving Hintopia, but because they simply could not bear to watch something so inefficient any longer.

At last, the city of Hintopia was saved.

Afterwards, the Hintopians asked the Veritans how they had known the disaster was coming, why they had seen what no one else had, and what else might need fixing. And as the Veritans answered—plainly, honestly, with no winking or vague insinuations—the Hintopians felt something very strange indeed: relief.

For the first time in Hintopian history, people who noticed problems before they became disasters weren’t dismissed—they were valued. The question-askers, the pattern-finders, and the ones who could not be still, weren’t seen as troublemakers—they were recognised as essential. The Veritans, it turned out, weren’t a problem to be solved.

They were the solution.