Small, windswept towns were a dime a dozen, and the people were always the same too. Despondent, laughing too loudly at jokes that were more morbid than actually amusing, their eyes bloodshot from the constant dirt whipping through the air, their mouths turned down in tired grimaces. They worked the land and said over and over "This year will be better" as their crops died and their children starved. Toren<em>loathed</em>them, because rather than shove away their pride and recognize hopelessness when it was staring them in the face, they continued to persevere, to move forward in their endless, tragic loops. Stupid, stupid humans with their clinging fragility and notion of 'home'. Home was wherever you wanted it to be, not somewhere predetermined. He couldn't help but be disgusted and annoyed. In fact, if one more of these dolts complained to him about their corn not making it in the edges of this desert, he was going to rip their heads off. Literally.<br/><br/>For the millionth time, Toren wondered why he'd traveled this way in the first place, chasing some bounty he knew he'd never catch. The guy he was after, a big town-skipping criminal who specialized in human trafficking, was nigh on impossible to get a hold of. Many had tried, and failed, just like Toren had. He'd managed to chase slave-trader half way across the desert before he'd lost the trail, and now he was on his way back to better lands, somewhere grass actually existed. You know, the green kind, not dried up brownish yellow stuff that usually died within days of sprouting. God, how Toren missed the color green. Toren was big on color, and lived for the sparkling blue depths of water, or the gem-like green of thick vegetation, or the multi-color fusion of rolling fields of flowers. In this god-forsaken desert land, all he had the was washed out blue of the sky, and different shades of brown. Hell, even the people here were shades of brown, their hair and eyes reflecting the dismal landscape.<br/><br/>Well, there had been that one girl in that one town, an extraordinary beauty with golden hair and violet eyes, but it was better to not think about her too hard. She'd been a feast; for the eyes<em>and</em>for his parched throat. Not only that, but she had begged him to take her with him after he'd finished with her, begged and pleaded and even cried (god, the crying!) but his bachelor will had prevailed, and he'd left alone, as he planned. It haunted him a bit, because Toren was terribly lonely, with no conceivable way to alleviate that loneliness. He couldn't make another vampire, something about his lineage prevented it, and keeping a human until they expired was just painful and terrible. For both him AND the human. He'd considered looking into other species, but had yet to find someone he could get along with for any period of time.<br/><br/>So, he wandered alone, and was now in - don't laugh - the town of Thursday.<br/><br/>That's right, Thursday. The official story was that the name came from the day the town was founded, but Toren was pretty sure that was bullshit, and that the founder had simply lacked creativity and run out of ideas for town names. Or maybe the vampire was just so bored out of his god-damned tits that he was pulling ideas out of his ass. Yeah, that was perfectly logical as well.<br/><br/>Since he was getting close to what he fondly called "The Mainland" (pretty much anywhere that<em>wasn't</em>this desert) he decided to check the bounty board and see if anything new was up for the area... or to be more accurate, the nearby area.<br/><br/>You know, that's what really killed him about this town. It was only<em>twenty miles </em>away from a perfectly habitable area. If they packed up their stuff, they would only have a days journey before they could drop everything once again and cultivate some food. Problem solved! No more starving children! No more hurricane force winds!<br/><br/>Toren shook himself out of that train of thought as he approached the township's center, his eyes drawn towards the board and the names posted there. Hm... nothing new, nothing new-<br/><br/>He froze. Something new, something entirely familiar. He ripped the bounty poster down without a second thought, and stared at the cute face he knew so well, despite having not seen it for years and years. "Shitfuck." He muttered under his breath.