Santa Claus (p. 2)

Where Nikklos' reindeer ranch was floundering, he had some success with the new toy factory. Before the buy-out, Elftoy had grown from from a small workshop into a large factory in order to keep Santos supplied. By the time Elftoy changed hands and began doing business as Santas Workshop, the Parker brothers had already resorted to hiring most of their relatives in order to meet production quotas. Virtually the only source of employment for the elvish people in the region, Santas Workshop became the main economic driver for northern Nunavut.

Santos' first business success was, literally, a doll. Children up until this time had had to be content with dolls made of rags, fur, leather, tomato skin, or other naturally-occurring materials. Santos, on the other hand, embraced the then-new plastics technology and modelled a small figurine after his beautiful wife, naming it the "Debbie Doll". The concept of removeable clothing was a relevant innovation that he hit on during a long night studying the doll in the factory. The elves disapproved of a disrobing doll, but Santos insisted and mass production was begun. The Debbie Dolls were a huge hit, but Santos was astonished to find that little girls enjoyed dressing them in different costumes far more than little boys cared about undressing them.

For the boys, the elves had been crafting wooden trains, but found it cheaper to mass-produce tiny cast-metal cars. The cars were popular; by this time in history, populous areas of the world had embraced the automobile for personal transportation. Children could relate more to a car like the one in their driveway than to a train. Since the cars were made in the Arctic Circle, Santos called them "Chillie Wheelies".

Word of Santos' toys reached the civilized world, and one day Matthew Elliot, founder of Mattell toys, journeyed to the North Pole. Closed-door negotiations were begun, and a few days later, Santos had his first paying contract. Mattell worked closely with Santas Workshop from then on, and for many years all Debbie dolls and Chillie Wheelies were built by elves.

Unfortunately, it was a mixed blessing; the huge orders pouring in to the factory from Mattell caused an immediate backlog. The increased workload, various pressures of business, and poor ventilation in the plastics room caused Santos to become more irrational and hostile. His Christmas Giveaway vow to give toys to all the children worldwide was amended. This year, he would only give toys to those boys and girls he deemed "good". He spent very little time with his reindeer and even less with his wife. He once again began binge-drinking ouzo amidst nightly bouts of gluttony. More often than not, he would end his nights passed out on the floor of the factory.

Over the next few years, things grew increasingly worse at the North Pole. Demand for Debbie dolls and Chillie Wheelies exploded worldwide, and the Mattell contracts grew proportionally. Santos' factory had been overwhelmed from the beginning; that entire operation needed to grow, too. Then Santos remembered a certain piece of land he had seen on his visits to Siberia, one that already had a much larger facility in place. He hastily acquired it, and the company was relocated to Vorkuta.

The Vorkuta plant was established in 1932 as one of the most notorious Soviet-era forced labor camps of the Gulag. It was the largest of the Gulag camps in European Russia. A decade after it was built, it was connected to the rest of the world by a prisoner-built railroad. The camp was closed in 1962, so the prison itself stood readily available. A small airport nearby was deemed serviceable for Santos' shipping needs, and in short order the prison was renamed Santas Workshop.

The original elf brothers Milton and Bradley, as well as most of their relatives, escaped Santos' employ. While the toy factory and its workers were packed into a number of transports, the elves refused to relocate, and fled to their homes in Nanuvut. Santos, unfazed, began arranging deals with officials at elven prisons, effectively exchanging free product for free prison labor. The wardens were easily swayed, seeing the idea as a twofold blessing. Here was a way of getting rid of hardcore inmates and their attendant problems — feeding and boarding these criminals became Santos' responsibility — and in addition, the officials would receive free toys.

Production at the North Pole had already become so backed up that no one in elven society would ever receive their toys. Nevertheless, they were happy to he rid of their murderers and rapists. The criminals were immediately set to work, and the Santas Workshop facility began to regain its former ambiance of a Gulag camp.

The indentured laborers at Santas Workshop were naturally unskilled and disinclined to work, and product quality took a nosedive. What Santos had seen as a solution merely exascerbated his problems. Now he had the responsibilities germane to running a prison camp as well as an industrial facility, but he still wasn't able to supply enough saleable product to meet his contractual obligations and provide toys for his Christmas Giveaway program. To boost production, Santos needed still more elf labor.

However, elven society had been aware of conditions at Santos' toy factories for quite a while; no elves would work there of their own volition. Thus, Santos was forced to perform some legal trickery, but was eventually allowed to import elves that had been institutionalized for psychiatric reasons. Santos kept a tight rein on all the elves, criminals and psychotics alike, ruling them with the overly-cliché iron fist. He no longer had to let them stop work after sixteen hours, and often worked them to exhaustion. The elves' only rest came when Santos himself would pass out in a drunken stupor. His actual means of executing his tyrannical dictates involved a combination of shackles, drugs, and severe beatings. These were each given freely and with abandon to any elf who didn't obey his whim.

The toy factory quickly became a medieval dungeon, with elves chained to their workstations. The production lines were constantly interrupted by fighting. Catatonic elves, hiding in corners, would often he beaten to death. On more than one occasion, elves assigned to shipping and receiving were shot trying to escape through the loading bays. A huge security fence was erected around the North pole complex, and elves attempting to escape would often die from exposure within its frozen confines. Death became a frequent visitor to the toy factory. Santos quelled the suspicions and rumors of outsiders by showing faked photographs and forged letters, and blithely continued to enlist elven aid.

But as production increased marginally, costs were skyrocketing. The elves did require a modicum of care and feeding, and Santos was continually purchasing items to increase his already overabundant security measures. Most of the money from the Mattell contract was used for Santos' increasingly Bacchanalian tastes. He threw wild, perverted orgies for the elves on a nightly basis, rounding out the festivities by purchasing cases of ouzo from his former home village in Greece, although the transportation costs were also exhorbitant. Santos filled out his guest list with cheap prostitutes. As cheap as could be found, anyway; some raised their prices dramatically after attending one or two of these bizarre rituals but most simply left, refusing to return at any price. On occasion, one would disappear, never to be found.

Costs aside, the Mattell contract had ceased to be the boon it once was. Mattell was the beneficiary of a sort of reverse monopoly. They were the only major buyer doing business with the North Pole, and they found it relatively easy to dictate price points. Citing poor work quality and production delays, Mattell would threaten to back out of the deal, at which point Santos would feel forced to offer incentives and lower his prices. The percentage of money coming in to the North Pole slowly dwindled. Santos' operation, which had barely begun to break even, was again operating at a loss.

Meanwhile, the reindeer ranch in northern Canada was suffering from its own problems. Santos had relocated his loborer elves to his Workshop in Siberian Vorkuta, and spent most of his time there, turning his back on the farm. As he neglected the ranch, there was little that Debbie could do to save it. She kept working valiantly, though; grooming the deer one after the other for hours, keeping records of herd growth, doing whatever she could in hopes of making the farm prosper. But Santos refused to give her any aid, either in money or material. There were no buyers to keep the farm afloat financially; one or two pity sales just served to forestall the inevitable. Flying White reindeer don't breed swiftly, but the herd was growing out of control. The food and medicine supply was inadequate. The stables became overcrowded and fell into disrepair, and finally Debbie was forced to release the animals into the wild, there to fight against wolves and the sparsity of tundra grass for their survival. She kept only eight deer for Santos' annual Christmas Giveaway ride, including Donder and Blitzen, the herd's first pair.

Santos, who had completely disassociated himself from both the reindeer farm and his wife, saw the release of these magnificent animals as a betrayal, but cunningly devised yet another chance to make money. He had a small smokehouse built behind the toy factory and put out the word that for a small fee, hunters could find ample game flying about the tundra. But few hunters wanted to make the trip, preferring the availability of the more common species of earthbound deer closer to home. Santos had plans drawn up for a venison and jerky processing facility, but when he realized he would have to create a marketing campaign for it, he wisely gave up on the venture before it was even built.