I was lost in the Desert of Midden Men. The Dust Raiders had chased the rest of my troupe away and I had been left behind. The sun was setting and the other sun was rising, putting an end to the day and bringing to me yet another dim. I still don’t understand how The Architects made the mistake of building a second sun instead of a new moon. The news of the moon’s dissipation was etched into every news rock and was scrawled onto every single one of the few paper news prints around and I’m sure the commissioners were very clear with their instructions to The Architects. Still, there was confusion somewhere in the process and now we’ve got a dimly glowing artificial sun instead of a fresh moon and a day and a dim instead of a day and a night. After finding myself alone in the dim, I was very grateful for their mistake. I’ve imagined how terrifying it would have been to find myself wandering that desert under a dark night sky with the nocturnal creatures roaming the sands, taking peeks at my flesh and licking their cushy lips (none of those animals exist anymore, obviously, since there’s no night for them to exist in). I knew that I needed to head West, but I wasn’t sure which direction West was, so I chose a direction and stuck with it. After a week of walking in that direction, I found that I had been walking Northward and not Westward, as I had hoped. Instead of walking directly Southward back to where I had started, I cleverly figured that walking Southwestward would save me a lot of time, so that’s what I did. About two days into walking Southwestward, I noticed that I was being followed. At first, I was worried that it might be a Dust Raider, but I was able to put myself at ease after realizing that the character wasn’t dressed in Dust Raider rags and was clearly not as tanned and musculicious as a Dust Raider would be. Inspecting the figure further, staring harder, squinting with unmatched intensity, I was finally able to identify him as a Klein. Their bromidic drab and unnoteworthy disposition makes it difficult to distinguish them from the nameless bodies in the backgrounds of memories. The only Klein anybody would be able to recognize is Hungry, who writes a monthly column of The Northern Rockface News Rock and isn’t actually a Klein. Knowing my follower was only a Klein and couldn’t possibly do me any harm, I wasn’t worried. He stuck around for a couple days and then strayed from my path, finding his own way to his own destination. With his departure, there was an odd sensation of abandonment, despite not having cared for him in the slightest and not having any interaction with him at all. That Klein was my stalker and I lost him. I lost something that was mine. Then a few hours passed and I got over it. Out of habit, I tried to evoke the emotion back from its pits because I do enjoy pitying myself, but I wasn’t able to fish even one sliver of it out of my emotional intestines. I had already shat it out of my system. Eventually, I was able to catch up with my troupe, just as they were leaving Los Angeles. Just in time to join them for the trip back home.
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