Vagabonding.1 [COMPLETE]

17. Nolan Started the Fire!

I hopped off the back of Rhys' scooter and looked around the barren landscape before quickly digging in my pocket to look for the drawing.

"Now, just how are we going to find this place?" I said curiously, my pitch much higher than I actually intended it to be. "I mean, it's a desert, this could be anywhere! I thought you told me that there was supposed to be a bar here."

Rhys lifted his hand and pointed dead ahead of him, "See that right there?"

"No," I replied dryly.

"That, there," He said as he ignored me as he continued to point at the air, "is the entrance to the citizen's village formally known as Section 11-14c. Not the smoothest off the tongue, mind you, so the government gave it a new name as of this year since people thought it was a bit too clinical. It's now known as Dragonfly Hills—ooh, how dainty, yeah? Makes you want to kill yourself slightly less than the prior name, but only by about a few points, mind you."

"Then if that's the entrance, why do we have to walk rather than drive?" I asked as I continued to see the location in the large distance of bare land.

"...Are you that lazy?" Rhys said, "No offense, it's just that it's not that far from here, you'll see. Besides, that would just attract attention at this point."

"Attract attention to what?" I said with a light exhale, "It's the desert, no one's around for miles."

Rhys took a few steps forward and melted before my vision as I looked around in a panic. I began to call out for him before his head appeared in midair. He quickly placed a finger over his mouth and shushed me.

"Keep it down, you're going to compromise everything," Rhys said in a low grumble before impatiently waving me towards his direction beyond the invisible, "Come on! Get on through to the other side, we haven't got all day!"

"Just... just walk right in?"

"Lad, are ya hard of hearing?" Rhys asked before his head disappeared again from sight.

So I did as I was told and walked forward into the very open desert until the trail began to shift and change. From the barren wastelands I waltzed into the heart of what appeared to be an olden village.

"I... but how... and the... what the f—"

"MIND THE LANGUAGE!" a plump woman shouted over my obscenity. She blotted her face with a napkin before pointing her nose high to the sky and walked away, "How rude!"

Rhys eventually came to get me since I was so captivated by the newly formed town around me.

This wasn't here before, why was there nothing here before, and now it's here, I said over and over to myself. A city that was just, like... POOF! Right in my vision! How is that possible? That's not possible. It can't be possible, and yet it was.

How many more cities are like this out in the world? Have they always been here but we just never looked close enough?

Sadly, all my answers were met the same way I addressed my own questions. 'I don't know', 'it just is', and 'you're asking too many questions', were the answers I mostly got back from Rhys. Together we walked along the very real cobblestone streets and made our way down the open streets filled with people unlike the other town that we had just come from.

In fact, they had gleaming and pristine cars that coursed through the city's veins, mothers with crying children who demanded another cone of ice cream, men who wore colognes that were far too strong and rich for their true demeanors and... well, the whole town felt fake.