Insulator

2.1 Father and friend

Something my father always told me was that impact resistance was always going to be more important than resistance to fire.

Fire is a slow and painful thing. You can endure it and have time to find a solution. To not feel pain from fire is to lose your humanity, to no longer feel things like a normal human. An impact is something that happens in an instant, though. In the blink of an eye one can lose their consciousness or their life. If you can resist the sudden changes of an impact then there will always be hope for your survival.

It made a kind of sense, of course, and I follow it still, though it might have been coincidental. As someone so low on life and will-power, sometimes it's nice to feel the pain of the heat around me, to remind me that I still exist.

But my father was a stubborn man. He believed this too strongly, and did not approve of my best friend growing up, for seeing things very differently. If you were to think of myself as someone with a specialty for insulation, then you would think of my friend as someone with a specialty for fire. We grew up together putting our time into our impact and fire resistances, though my friend focused much more on the side of heat.

I decided to nickname him Sleeper. His dream was to one day be resistant enough to not just walk through the flames, but to become so at one with them that he could even sleep in them.

Your father has a point, he used to say. Impacts are much more instant of a result, but the difference is that fire is something with much more potential. It can grow and spread, and if you don't extinguish it early then it can become so powerful that no one would be able to stop it. An explosion of yours might eventually be strong enough to destroy a city, but a fire could destroy an entire nation.

He was truly the opposite to my father and I. It was why I was so drawn to him. Instead of simply wishing to survive, he had dreams of becoming something that could make an impact on the world. It was such an alien thing to me, to see someone with such ambitions, so I couldn't help but admire him for it, and hope to one day see what he would end up accomplishing.

I took out a special bottle from in my bag. It had a special flame, and wasn't insulated, as it wasn't a tool for destruction like the others I made. This was a present the fire man gave me when we were kids, when we both awakened our unique abilities and saw the potential we had. He called it 'the forever flame', and claimed that it would never burn out. It has been burning ever since, and was a special keepsake of mine to remember a special friend who was like a brother to me.

I liked to think that a piece of his soul was within it, like a part of him was still with me.

I would often think of him, and wonder what he would have been doing if he were me. I was just a wandering husk of a man, with no ambitions or directions. I felt like he was different, and that he wouldn't have given up on life like I had. I could never know, though, as I was alone on this journey.

The city I walked through was empty of life. While there were corpses all around me, it was the leftover flames that caught my attention. This wasn't a city that was attacked to capture, but rather was sought to destroy. Most of the buildings were burnt down, but the few that remained were enough for the fire to linger on around, however long it had been since the attackers had left.

While the corpses seemed to be killed by a variety of different methods, I noticed a few were burnt to a crisp, their life taken away from the very fire itself. I sometimes wondered if my old friend was out there somewhere, and that I occasionally came across his work, but that was impossible.

It was just the wishful thinking of a weary soul lacking in hope and meaning.