Spoiler! :
Another scream started, which hurt her. More emotionally than anything else, he was everything to her and she’d be lying to herself if she said she enjoyed seeing him in pain. What hurt her even more was the knowledge that she couldn’t do anything except stay near and whisper soothing words.
Penelope had never quite understood the strange affliction which plagued the poor boy at random. She had asked him about it once, and He had tried to explain it.
“You know how things don’t quite make sense when you have a fever?” he had asked one day, and she had nodded silently. “Well, for me, things make TOO MUCH sense.” He could tell that she was confused, “What’s the smallest thing?” He had asked, in a further attempt to explain. Penelope had to think about this for a moment, neither of them had attended school, where would they go, Ignis? Regardless, she knew what the answer was, and she provided it after some time of strain.
“An atom?” she asked tentatively, the boy nodded. “I’ve understood smaller, I’ve BEEN smaller. I see, touch, smell, taste impossible things in my… err, ‘states’. I understand everything, yet nothing at the same time.” He chuckles sadly at this point, “Turns out that knowing everything is extremely painful”
They both fall into silence while Penelope tries desperately to wrap her own mind around Simon’s troubles. For being uneducated wanderers, the two were pretty smart, but this went beyond.
Penelope was shocked out of her memories by a light touch on her hand, which had been resting in her lap as she sat next to her companion. “Pen” the boy said weakly, “We need to go to Ignis.” She started to reply, but his eyes had closed, and his breathing had steadied into the carefully deep rhythm of sleep.
Penelope needed air; she stood up abruptly and headed for the tent’s opening. Busting out into the cold night air was both a shock and a relief, It was cooling down after the hot day, and the air seemed empty. Penny looked out from the hill top, to the vast fields of lifeless and abandoned buildings. A lot of people had left, or died. There wasn’t much point in staying after the accident.
In 2036, the government of the United States of America had a grim problem on their hands. Overpopulation, which had grown exponentially, People were living in crowded towns and villages and in hand crafted hovels. After long years of debate, the highest class of people, the ones who controlled things from the shadows and made decisions to problems that no one ever knew about had come to one of the greatest conclusions of all. They had to “trim” the population as they had put it. There were plenty of ways to do this, but they wanted to keep it under the radar. So they turned to their secret teams of soldiers who followed commands as if they were their own thoughts, and told them to poison the water supplies of the smaller towns which consisted of small amounts of people.
Unfortunately, there was a misprint, or a typo, or some sort of kink in the chain of command that led to the teams poisoning the water supplies of the LARGE cities.
Millions of people just died, from nothing more than a glass of water and a few secret chemicals. Suddenly, sprawling metropolises were ghost towns, while small towns housed the confused and scared. The “survivors” eventually ventured out of their little towns and migrated to the big cities, scavenging what they could. A man by the name of Stan eventually found the paper trail leading up to the poisoning.
Penelope and Simon were born wanderers, they weren’t siblings. At least, they didn’t think so. Their childhood was a muddled mess of running and fear. For 16 years they had roamed, scavenging to survive, and trading with other wanderers for whatever they couldn’t find themselves. They taught themselves to fight, and learned from books and magazines that they found in the abandoned houses. The only place they stayed away from was Ignis Urbem, a large New-World city where most of all the survivors flocked. There weren’t enough people to live in all of the big cities, so for some reason, with little communication, they picked Ignis.
So, it was there. On a lonely hilltop overlooking just another abandoned and whispering town, huddled up against a tree and rocked carefully by the wind and her own thoughts, Penelope drifted into unconsciousness for what seemed like the first time in her life.
The 'fever' resemblance made me really happy, because I get how that works- nothing makes sense when you have a fever.
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