It was a dark and stormy night. A tiny soaked dog rallied against its leash as the rain poured down on their cloaked head and they muttered obscenities muted by the rain and heavy traffic. A life size doll ran past them with a piece of toast—now soggy and limpid—hanging out of her mouth.

That’s right... It was that mysterious cloaked, shrouded, possibly evil figure from some time ago!

Now, rather than being in a slumbering sleeping city, they were in a rainy, sad city.

This mysterious figure, it turned out, had no name. They were Nameless. Null, even. This nameless figure began to divulge their backstory in quiet and scary ways...

Just kidding. We’d never get backstory from such a mysterious fellow, a dude of the most nameless variety. Instead, we followed their journeys as if they were a cheap, motorcycle-less rip-off of Kino from the hit anime Kino’s Journey, but only the 2003 one which is more open about the protagonist Kino’s nonbinary identity rather than the 2017 version which basically makes Kino more of a woman just to get those waifu bucks, not that this fiction is above compromising its values for money,; by the way, please donate money to the Quinlan Circle Patreon to ensure that more quality content like this story hit your digital front porches every week.

This person without an identity journeyed a long time, even if it was a pale imitation of Kino. They walked through the rain, then eventually got rid of that stupid dog from the first paragraph and never mentioned it again to anybody, even if they asked about it.

The nameless figure had seen destruction by the violence of nature and the violence of men, and felt themself in the grip of an All-wisdom that killed men or spared them as seemed for their good; but of death by sickness they knew nothing except that they believed they should never suffer it. They had been in Grape-vine Canon the year of storms that changed the whole front of the mountain. All day they had come down under the wing of the storm, hoping to win past it, but finding it traveling with him until night. It kept on after that, he supposed, a steady downpour, but could not with certainty say, being securely deep in sleep. But the weather instinct does not sleep. In the night the heavens behind the hill dissolved in rain, and the roar of the storm was borne in and mixed with his dreaming, so that it moved them, still asleep, to get up and out of the path of it. What finally woke him was the crash of pine logs as they went down before the unbridled flood, and the swirl of foam that lashed him where he clung in the tangle of scrub while the wall of water went by. It went on against the cabin of Bill Gerry and laid Bill stripped and broken on a sand bar at the mouth of the Grape-vine, seven miles away. There, when the sun was up and the wrath of the rain spent, the nameless figure found and buried him; but they never laid their own escape at any door but the unintelligible favor of the Powers.

The journeyings of the figure led them often into that mysterious country beyond Thot Creek where a hidden force works mischief, mole-like, under the crust of the Wuweizi. Whatever agency was at work in that neighborhood, and it is popularly supposed to be the devil, it changes means and direction without time or season. It crept up whole hillsides with insidious heat, unguessed until one noted the pine woods dying at the top, and having scorched out a good block of timber returned to steam and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It would break up sometimes blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek, or make a sucking, scalding quicksand at the ford. These outbreaks had the kind of morbid interest for the shrouded, dark being that a house of unsavory reputation has in a respectable neighborhood, but I always found the accounts they brought me more interesting than his explanations, which were compounded of vine ends of miner's talk and superstition. They were a perfect gossip of the woods, this extremely mysterious person, and when I could get them away from "leads" and "strikes" and "contacts," full of fascinating small talk about the ebb and flood of creeks, the pinon crop on Black Mountain, and the wolves of Mesquite Valley. I suppose they never knew how much they depended for the necessary sense of home and companionship on the beasts and trees, meeting and finding them in their wonted places,—the bear that used to come down Pine Creek in the spring, pawing out trout from the shelters of sod banks, the juniper at Lone Tree Spring, and the quail at Paddy Jack's.

Of course with so much seeking they came occasionally upon pockets of more or less value, otherwise they could not have kept up their way of life of being extremely inscrutable and also having some kind of vague dark vine magic; but they had as much luck in missing great ledges as in finding small ones. They had been all over the Chicken Coop country, and brought away float without happening upon anything that gave promise of what that district was to become in a few years. They claimed to have chipped bits off the very outcrop of the Chicken Coop Rand, without finding it worth while to bring away, but none of these things put them out of countenance.

It was no news to me, the narrator of this novel, then, two or three years after, to learn that they had taken ten thousand dollars from an abandoned assassination claim, just the sort of luck to have pleased them, and gone to London (a city in the country of Britannia) to spend it. The land seemed not to miss them any more than it had minded them, but I missed them and could not forget the trick of expecting him in least likely situations. Therefore it was with a pricking sense of the familiar that I followed a twilight trail of smoke, a year or two later, to the swale of a dripping spring, and came upon a mysterious, fully darkened figure by the fire with a coffee-pot and frying-pan. I was not surprised to find it was the figure in question. No human can be stronger than their destiny.

Now, they were entering past the showery downpours of one city and moving into a new place...

Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas for common use, the land dipped away to the river pastures and the tulares. It shrouded under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabouts were some strips of tillage and the headgates that dammed up the creek for the village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra. Wild vines that beggun among the willows lapped over to the orchard rows, took the trellis and roof-tree.

There was another town above Las Uvas that merits some attention, a town of arches and airy crofts, full of linnets, blackbirds, fruit birds, small sharp hawks, and mockingbirds that sing by night. They poured out piercing, unendurably sweet cavatinas above the fragrance of bloom and musky smell of fruit. Singing was in fact the business of the night at Las Uvas as sleeping is for midday. When the moon came over the mountain wall new-washed from the sea, and the shadows laid like lace on the stamped floors of the patios, from recess to recess of the vine tangle ran the thrum of guitars and the voice of singing.

Nobody came nowadays to the town of the grape vines except, as we say, "with the breath of crying," but of these enough. All the low sills ran over with small heads. Ah, ah! There was a kind of pride in that if you did but know it, to have your baby every year or so as the time sets, and keep a full breast. So great a blessing as marriage was easily come by. It is told of Vid Garcia that when he went for his marriage license he lacked a dollar of the clerk's fee, but borrowed it of the sheriff, who expected reelection and exhibited thereby a commendable thrift. Of what account is it to lack meal or meat when you may have it of any neighbor? Besides, there is sometimes a point of honor in these things.

But enough of that rambling talk of little relevance.

For, after passing through many towns and villages, brooding and contemplating, our mysterious new POV character happeend upon something important:

The battle between the Babylon Sisters and Xi Go Lo/Wifey!!!

The nameless person jumped into the battle!