“Are you from the wastes?”

Michael looked up from his book. It was a good book, a cautionary tale about hubris told through the lens of a child as her parents commit unspeakable acts in the pursuit of power. He deeply hoped the girl would end up killing her parents and hoped equally as much the urbanite bothering him would have a sudden coronary.

“Come again?” Michael heard him the first time, but he enjoyed making idiots repeat themselves.

“Are you from the wastes?” the idiot repeated, “I saw the patches on your jacket, the three hills mean you're from the northern dunes, right?”

Michel blinked. The idiot was right. Most urbanites knew nothing about the Wastelands beyond the omnipresence of sand. The idiot didn't look like anything special, a few inches taller than Michael with a black thatch of hair and a long black coat buttoned at its stiff collar, completely covering his neck, his mouth locked in a toothy grin.

“That's… right.” Michael could taste his own hesitation, it was a rare thing for him to be taken off guard.

The idiot beamed. “I thought so!” he ripped the chair opposite Michael out from under the table with a loud screech on the hardwood floor. “What's it like?”

Michael had come to the library to read in peace, but it seemed war was knocking at his door. He closed his book, set it down gently, and gave the idiot the same look he gave any challenger. Brow slightly furrowed with three sides of his eye showing white, looking upwards ever so slightly so shadow draped over them. The idiot didn't seem to even notice, but Michael forged on regardless. “Every day could be your last in the Wastelands. If you don't succumb to the boiling heat and drop dead of heat stroke, you call it a good day. If you aren't butchered for loot and meat by the bandits, you call it a good day. If you aren't torn apart by the sand crawlers and stripped to the bone, you call it a good day. Every day that ends so another can begin is a good day in the Wastelands.”

He was hoping the idiot would take the hint, but the idiot only grinned. “So I've heard! I've always wanted to see it for myself, dreamed of it as a kid! Me and my brother would play ‘Settlers and Sand Crawlers’ when we were kids. It was basically Tag, but whoever was the sand crawler had to grunt and snarl while they chased the settler!” The idiot laughed like… well, an idiot and wiped away a tear. “Good times.”

Could I hide this idiot's body in a dumpster, or would I have to find a place to bury it properly?

Before Michael had the chance to contemplate, the idiot resumed his prattling. “I'm from the Great Forest myself, nothing but trees for a thousand miles. I don't think I saw more than a dozen people by the time I was fifteen, my dad and brother included.” The idiot looked around the library at the twenty-or-so patrons who were enjoying their books in peace, all of whom Michael envied, “City life, all these people, it's an adjustment, to say the least.”

Michael grunted in a vaguely affirmative way and tried to return to his book. The idiot, as before, did not take the hint.

“My name’s Kahli,” the idiot extended his hand before Michael could even grab his book, “what's yours?”

If he was still in the wastes, he could have shot the idiot and went on, or bled him and left him for the buzzards. Every ounce of him wanted to grab the gun in his jacket and introduce this idiot to the barrel, but that just wasn’t the done thing in the city, and some naive, long-starved part of Michael thought humoring him might get him to leave.

“Michael,” he said, pointedly ignoring the offered hand, “Michael Lare.”

The idiot did not leave, and in fact, beamed at him. “Lare? Like the Lare clan? My dad used to tell me stories about Lucious Lare! About how he stood alone against Rhal Praton and his legion! And when he led the Lare clan to the aid of the governor of the Akouran nation and turned the tide of the Western war! Or when he killed that bugbear with his bare hands!”

Michael never liked it when strangers told stories about his grandfather, and he especially didn't like this idiot's version of them. He took in a breath and let it out slowly. “Yes. Like the Lare clan.” 

The idiot went back on about nothing, recanting bastardized versions of Michaels’ family history, singing triumphs that never occurred. It reminded him of the wastes, or more accurately, the ignorant morons that inhabited it. They believed everything they heard, just like this idiot.

Let’s see how he takes a dose of reality.

He put up his hand and interrupted the idiots’ river of gab. “The Lare clan is dead. The stories you’ve been fed are works of fiction. Lucious, my grandfather, killed Praton and the dozen men under his command in their sleep. The Akourans didn’t need us, they only brought us in to sweep out what little defenses the united settlers still had.” He picked up his book and opened it to near where he left off. “And bugbears don’t exist.” He ignored the idiot and went on reading. A blissful moment passed where Michael thought the idiot finally understood he wasn’t welcome. The moment ended.

“Yeah, I figured as much.” Michael looked up and saw the idiots’ grin was gone. He wore a somber sort of look. What’s that one supposed to be? Pain? Sorrow? Constipation? Emotions always eluded him, but whatever the idiot was feeling, it seemed genuine. “My dad used to tell those stories to get me to sleep, but he told me the truth to get me to think. I didn’t know the clan was gone though, I’m sorry about your family.” The idiot looked away, “My family’s gone too.”

Sympathy. That’s what it was. Or is it empathy? He could never keep the two straight. Both had to do with identifying with another person, that much Michael knew, but there was nothing in this idiot Michael identified with. They may have both spent their childhoods isolated from the larger world and may have both lost their families, but they were nothing alike. This idiot, this Kahli, was loud and obnoxious. The kind of person to go up to a complete stranger who wanted nothing more than to read just to interrogate him about his family. Utterly deranged. He snapped his book closed and glared at the idiot.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

“I appreciate your curiosity,” he said it in much the same tone he would have used if he were threatening to kill the idiot, “but I am trying to read. Leave. Me. Alone.”

Something finally seemed to penetrate the idiots thick head. He leaned back and looked at Michael differently, calculating in an idiotic way, puzzling over a single-digit sum. “I’m sorry,” the idiot said after a tense moment, “I’m not good with people. I just thought, since we’re both going into Axorian Academy, I might could get to know you. It’d suck to go in there with no friends.” The idiot got up to leave. “Sorry, I’ll leave you be.”

“Hold on.” The idiot spun around at Michaels’ words. “How did you know I was joining the academy?”

The idiot looked apprehensive for the first time since he started bothering Michael. “Well…” the idiot paused, Michael waved him on. “There isn’t really much else in Beacon for a wastelander. I mean, that’s why I’m here, and you don’t seem like any kind of pushover.” The idiot shrugged. “I’ll leave you be.”

The idiot… No, not an idiot. Not smart, but not an idiot at least. Kahli, then. Kahli started to leave, but Michael let out a sigh and stopped him. “Wait.” Kahli spun around for the second time in less than a minute with a look in his eyes like an eager puppy. Michael vaguely gestured to the seat opposite to him, which Kahli wasted no time returning to. “Why are you joining the academy?”

Kahlis’ eyebrows shot up. “Well, I want to see the world, see what there is to see, get to know all the different kinds of people. Being a hero always seemed like the best path to get there.”

Michael scoffed. “You want to be a hero to see the world?” The id- Kahli nodded. “You do understand you don’t need to do that, right? You can just go see the world. Not that there’s much to see.” He rolled his eyes and muttered the last part. Kahli just smiled and kept nodding.

“Yeah, I know that. But, like I said, I’ve never really been around people. You don’t jump into the deep waters when you're just learning to swim, right? Gotta acclimate, and I figure Axorian Academy is about as shallow as waters get.”

The metaphor was lacking, but Kahli had a point. Michael’s father had brought him to the city five years ago and had him go through four years of school. They had taught him useless things. Math, science, literary arts, history, all of it pointless. Nothing that would keep him alive, nothing that would kill his enemies, the kinds of things you worry about when everything else is expected. He had learned more from his classmates. They showed him how city dwellers were, how they thought and acted. How to deal with them.

“My father brought us through the Great Forest when we came to Beacon.” Micheal found he had said it out loud when he only meant to think it. Oh well, can’t un-open that can. “I don’t remember much about it. What’s it like?”

An eager fire burned in Kahlis’ eyes, and Michael regretted asking. “It’s great! The trees are taller than the buildings out here! The air is fresh and the water is clean! And everything is  out to kill you! Bears the size of buses! Centipedes the size of trains! A great eagle took me for a ride one time! But to be fair, I was trying to take her eggs.” That grin of his was back, and stretched a tooth wider. “Every single day is an adventure in the forest. I’ll admit, it's unforgiving, there’s a reason I’ve only ever met a handful of people.”

He was insane. There was no other possibility. He was talking about certain death as if it were an inconvenience. No, as if it were entertainment. Is he really an idiot? Is he playing me? People didn’t live in the Great Forest, they died there, everyone knew that. Half of Michaels’ excursion through had been spent running from megafauna. Wolves the size of the horses that drove their cart, a flock of some kind of bird with teeth that chased them on foot, and quite memorably one of those centipedes Kahli had mentioned. It was a death trap. Worse than the Wastes. The Wastes were inevitable, an ever encroaching tide every wastelander knows and respects, constantly struggling against. The Great Forest was in constant motion, an ever-shuffling deck of cards where every draw meant death. How could anyone live there? If he was telling the truth, Kahli had to be a force to be reckoned with. And completely insane.

Michael realized he had been staring at Kahli for a good fifteen seconds now. In that time, he decided he wanted nothing to do with Kahli. Without another word, he picked up his book and walked away. He checked out the book immediately after selecting it just in case someone trapped him in conversation and he had to make a fast exit, and felt a measure of security as the heavy door clicked behind him. He felt a measure of dread when he realized Kahli was lockstep beside him.

“Where are we heading?” Kahli asked it with a warm grin, as though Michael hadn’t just left in the rudest way he could think of. “I heard there’s a pizza shop nearby. No clue what pizza is, but I bet it’s tasty.” He was like a puppy. A puppy with a long coat and a guitar case slung around his shoulder. Guitar case? Michael hadn’t seen that in the library. Was it under the table? He didn’t take it with him when he tried to walk away. Damn it, he was playing me. Or trying to, at least. He called Kahli back out of curiosity, not guilt. But still, how had he not noticed the guitar case?

“Leave me alone.” Michael picked up his pace.

Kahli met the pace with little effort. “No can do.”

“Excuse me?” Michael stopped and glared at Kahli.

“We’re best friends now!” Kahli was ecstatic, disgustingly so. “I wouldn't be a good friend if I let you get pizza alone.”

“We’re not getting pizza,” Michael growled, “and we’re not friends.”

“Yes we are.” Kahli drew out the first word, almost singing it. It took every measure of self control Michael had not to shoot him then and there. He tried to divine some order of words that would break through Kahlis’ thick skull, but nothing had worked so far. Every one of his tried-and-true conversation assassins slid off Kahli like water off a duck. It was almost impressive.

Michael stopped In his tracks. He heard something. A rumbling, a distant crash. He couldn't be sure, all the buildings screwed with the way sound traveled, but he judged it was about a mile northwest, maybe a mile and a half. He faced that direction and heard a second crash, slightly closer this time.

“You hear it too?” Kahlis’ eyes were wide with giddy excitement. He was vibrating with glee. There was imminent danger, and Kahli couldn’t wait to get at it. He’s insane. Completely insane.

“Come on,” Michael started running and waved for Kahli to follow, “I’ll let you buy me some pizza after we deal with whatever that is.”

If it was possible, Kahli smiled even wider. He followed without another thought.

Maybe insane can be useful. And maybe he’ll get killed along the way. There were a lot of ways this could go, a lot of ways.