Rule of The Crimson Rose 🌹 Chapter 5

The house of Tinker was a mansion—an extravagant gift from the Crimson Rose King after their former relationship. He had broken up with her because he did not see any benefit in being with her and because he noticed that she was quite manipulative. Still, the mansion remained hers.

The walls were crimson red, lined with roses. The home was lined with roses on the furniture—white roses, pink roses, blue roses, yellow roses, red roses, and even black and purple roses. Rose thorns and leaves were pretty much on decorative art but not on couches, and any rose that was anywhere on the couch was usually without the thorn, though the leaves were allowed there. There were also real rose plants throughout the home in flower pots that were always tended to.

This house was a gift from the Crimson Rose to Tinker, an African-American immigrant to the Rosen Kingdom with rainbow hair in an afro, each afro bump and puff a different color.

Rompo was not excited about the fact that Tinker was dating Ahmed. The whole purpose of the situation was actually to highlight that men and women in different cultures are treated very differently. It seemed like the characters were a little bit racist, but not exactly without reason. They did not hate these races, but at the same time they were very skeptical of them. So when she brought back someone from Pakistan, Rompo started bringing things up like:

"You could end up with a man who respects most women—his wife, his mother, his sister, even the woman across the street—but not his own daughter.

In some cultures, a daughter was seen as an expense, someone to invest in and eventually give away, while a son was viewed as a return on investment. The difference wasn’t affection; it was perceived benefit.

Children were valued for what they could provide. Even a son’s worth was tied to usefulness.

A daughter, by contrast, was often treated as a loss—someone who would leave, require dowry, or offer no economic advantage.

Layer onto that religious and cultural beliefs in India that frame women as lesser or even cursed because of their periods, and the preference for sons becomes even more entrenched. In that mindset, it wasn’t about love. It was about utility."

Rompo was not excited and was actually very vehemently against the idea of her marrying someone who was Pakistani because of the Muslim religion and because of how sexist the culture was.

Tinker responded, saying:

"He is a part of the Rosen religion, and he is simply not like that.

There is no way that this man will betray me or our future children because our culture teaches that both genders are equal, because women are extremely valuable.

They are the bearers; they are the birthers. They are the people that bring life into the world. If all men died, then we could take cloning, we could take sperm donorship, we could adopt previous embryos; in fact, we are the only hope those embryos have of actually living a life outside of being frozen inside of a lab.

And so, essentially speaking, as Master Oyoda has taught us, for the Crimson Rose doesn't really speak on feminist topics, as they do not interest him outside of encouraging birthing, Master Oyoda has taught us that women are extremely important and valuable, especially in today's society where you could just erase all men and women could revive the race.

Back then, women equally as much as men—like today, women and men are equal—but back then the world would not survive without both genders.

Both genders were necessary; men were necessary to provide the sperm to plant in the woman's soil, whereas the woman's body was necessary to carry that child.

Now they are trying to get, you know, embryonic, now basically artificial wombs, but we don't have technology to carry them from embryonic, so if a mother were going to die from childbirth, like let's say a woman got raped and she had heart problems that make birth dangerous, she's in her first trimester, they fought technology that can transfer a child from one woman's womb to another when they are an embryo.

With this technology, we would require two women; we take it from the victim's womb and we implant it into the surrogate mother's womb, and this way the victim is not at risk of death.

The surrogate mother is much safer and more likely to survive, and thus she is the saving grace of that child.

The woman was the saving grace of the unborn child, not just the rose, a female, but the sun, a son, that the victim was carrying.

So there is simply no sin in having a girlfriend; we are the bearers of life. A seed with no soil cannot grow.

Well, technically, a seed with no water cannot grow; you can take a seed, put it in water, and it will grow. But we are the water. The sperm is the seed."

And so Rompo replied:

"There are cases of incest in Pakistan, and some individuals may struggle with undiagnosed mental illnesses.

While most people do not engage in that behavior, I believe those harmful patterns can reflect a failure to recognize the value and importance of women. I don’t approve."

Now Ahmed was actually a good person. This was not really that surprising, but it was understandable why Rompo was surprised, because all her exes had followed their cultures and had done terrible things as a result of the cultures she had dated into.

Because of that, he was always so skeptical. He did not want her to date outside of her particular culture, and he really did not want her to date into cultures that were dangerous or toxic.

He knew many cultures were pretty much anti-woman, and he believed it was because of systemic issues.

People back then did not want girls because they believed girls were not as beneficial as boys.

Children were morally seen as something transactional, so if you were born the wrong gender in their eyes, you would not be given the same care, love, and acceptance that you would be given if you were a boy.

He said:

"In some cultures, if the genders were reversed, boys would have faced the same mistreatment. The issue wasn’t simple hatred of women—it was a transactional view of children. A child’s worth was tied to perceived benefit.

Historically in Japan, for example, very young children were sometimes seen as less fully human, and that mindset intensified discrimination. Sons were valued for what they could provide; daughters were often seen as offering little return.

At its core, this reflected a weaker cultural emphasis on the inherent value of a child and the responsibilities of parenthood. Compared to today, children were often regarded less as individuals to love and more as assets to manage."

Basically, he believed that back then people did not care as much about their children; they cared more about what the children could benefit them.

To Tinker, this felt like a case of abusive parents throughout history, because an abusive parent is the type of person who would kill their child if there were no benefit.

It felt like narcissism was what they were dealing with back then—like society had all the same mental illnesses, but evil governments allowed a more dystopic rule.

Rompo continued with vitriolic skepticism against Ahmed:

"I personally believe that a lot of people valued girls and loved their daughters because of how many girls and women were present back in those days and today.

However, the thing is that they did not care all the time; not all of them cared. And the issue is that they genuinely didn't care long-term. They knew, 'oh, if there are no girls, who will my son marry?'

But the problem was that for you to do that, for you to let your child be born so that other people can marry those girls, that would quite literally mean you would have to think non-selfishly.

Someone who kills their daughter for these purposes is inherently selfish, especially when all you would have to do is think, 'well, technically, if I had a daughter, I could just raise her not to get married so that she wouldn't get the dowry, or I could raise her to take care of me in old age,' you know, stuff like that.

You could raise her to be just as much of a benefit. You wouldn't just abandon her; you would give her to someone and say, I cannot take care of this baby, would you please take care of my child?

Or you would leave her on the doorstep to make sure that she was okay.

These were short-sighted people. Of course, they didn't care about what other people did—sounds familiar.

They only cared about who their own son would marry and just assumed others would keep their girls.

Not only that, but they did not care about their own daughters; they only cared about how it would affect them, not others..."

Tinker said "You sound so racist! I know you're right, but most aren't like that!"

Tinker stormed out of the living room into her bedroom where Ahmed waited for her.

Rompo felt... Scared. His country didn't have background checks in place for immigrants.

You see, while his experience when touring America was that the immigrants were always nice to him, he feared it was because in America, if you want to become a legal citizen, you had to go through background checks and they even had to test your moral character to see if you were of good moral character. 

In his home country, The Rosen Kingdom, they didn't have those kind of tests. Normally, you would just be put into a chariot and taken over to the Rosen Kingdom.

Basically, Rompo wasn’t necessarily racist—he was afraid. Rompo feared that people from certain cultures might bring harmful or regressive beliefs with them, especially ideas that devalue women.

For example, Rompo pointed to traditions in parts of India where menstruation has been treated as a curse—rooted in religious myths—and where women on their periods were restricted from entering markets, temples, or certain areas because their presence was believed to spoil food or harm plants.

To Rompo, it was disturbing to see women blamed or shamed for something that is simply a normal biological process. Watching someone be treated as sinful or impure for menstruating felt irrational and unjust.

Rompo believed those beliefs stemmed from deeper social dysfunction—cycles of stigma, rigid tradition, and untreated issues that warp reasoning over time. His fear wasn’t about race itself; it was about harmful ideas being imported and normalized in his own world.

What complicated things further was that Rompo didn’t just see those beliefs as cultural—he saw them as pathological. He associated cousin marriage and repeated generational inbreeding with potential psychological disorders, and in his mind, that explained what he viewed as irrational traditions.

Rompo would think: "if a woman menstruates every month, how could she sincerely believe that her period spoils food or kills plants?" Especially when some of the Indian women themselves upheld those ideas. To Rompo, that contradiction didn’t make sense. Rompo didn’t believe most Indian people believed it, because he considered it illogical—but for those who did, he concluded something must be cognitively wrong.

In his reasoning, regular lived experience should disprove the superstition. Unless someone had irregular cycles or other medical complications, Rompo felt it was unreasonable to interpret menstruation as a curse. So instead of seeing it as inherited tradition or social conditioning, he framed it as evidence of mental dysfunction.

Rompo carried his fear the way some men carry old war wounds—quietly, but always aching when the weather changed.

Ahmed hadn’t been vetted. That was the first splinter under the skin. No government file stamped and sealed. No official reassurance that this man stepping across Tinker’s rose-lined threshold wasn’t bringing something darker with him. To Rompo, borders weren’t just lines on maps; they were thin membranes, and membranes could tear.

He had read enough, heard enough. Stories about women silenced, bruised, dismissed simply for being born female. In some places, being a woman was already a strike against you. And fear has a way of turning headlines into inevitabilities.

So when he looked at Ahmed, he didn’t just see a man. He saw the possibility of old laws carried in the blood, old permissions whispered from father to son. He imagined Tinker—bright, stubborn, radiant Tinker—shrinking under a hand that believed it had the right to rise.

It wasn’t hatred that tightened his chest.

It was dread.

Rompo could hear the two laughing and giggling about the mansion. He was happy to hear them happy, but the dread wouldn't settle down.

Looking at his watch, golden with red linen for the straps and patterned with roses woven into it, he saw that it was time for him to head to work as a Jester.

More dread filled his chest. He immediately stood up, yelling "Tinker, I'll be heading off to work, now!" And she cried out "Be back soon!" As they were good friends, actually.

To be continued...