An Interview...of sorts

When I was boy living in Transylvania, I was always the -ah- strange one. I always excelled in school. Always, I was a genius, a prodigy. I was also known by everyone. Well, By name anyway. I didn't have many friends. I was eccentric. I was more interested in human anatomy then was healthy, for a boy my age. I think I was eight? yes, that was.... second grade? Third? I don't remember, in any case I was a young lad and I was taking some sort of mathematical class it -ah- was extremely easy for me. I was always the last one picked, always, on the playground, I was also the skinniest. My parents were not rich or powerful. In fact, they were quite poor. They tried their best to the best for me that they could. I was never the best dressed, never had any of those fanciful video games, or a computer. All I had was my imagination, some pens and pencils and paper. Sometimes I had to miss school to work and get money to help my family. I could see the pain in my mothers eyes when she saw me working in the scrap yard. I guess that's where I first found my talent for engineering. I was ten, working in the scrapyard, one of the scrap-yard workers found me using a robot to help salvage parts from an old Warthog. He was impressed, told the overseer or who ever and he paid me 200 credits for it, it was a lot to a kid my age so I said yes, it would help my family. I didn't know that the man would later sell it for over 5000 credits to ONI, and later be used by there engineers as a base for some prototype they were working on. That same day, I returned home from the scrapyard, to find it empty, all the furniture was gone, the paintings, the windows, everything. I felt lost. I had no one to turn to. No place to go. No home, no family. They just disappeared.

Now, you may think this is strange, unbelievable or outright insane. That doesn't matter, what matters is that is what happened. This was my first time alone, truly alone. I was maybe five feet tall. I was young, scrawny, but brilliant. I was almost the stereotypical genius. Without the glasses. My eyesight was fine. I wandered New Rome for a while, lost, scared, but set on surviving. That's what I'm good at; surviving. I eventually found myself at the border between the city and the wilderness. The City was huge to begin with, I had lived somewhere in the middle of it all, but I had walked, ran, jogged, and otherwise wandered the city, it was a three day walk from one side to the other. I was now on the edge. The verge of civilization, so it felt. I had never been camping. never hiked. never left the city. but I read about it. I was about to find out how different it really was. Reading about as compared to doing.

My first day in the wilderness was interesting.