ARKANUM - CHILDREN OF CHAOS

Chapter 10 - Human Reputation

As the days went by, Kaylan slowly found his groove. He was doing relatively well in his studies, En'Myar training was a blast and he was even getting better with a blade in his hand. But he did begin to sense that he wasn't very well-liked by some of the nonhuman pupils. No one ever came and said anything to him and they always answered his questions politely whenever he went to talk to them. But he realized no one ever took the initiative to speak to him. And in classes, he always sat with Zeeva and the twins, while all the others stayed away... except for Keeta, who seemed completely oblivious to it all.

Eventually, he went to Soren and asked, "Hey, dude, what's up with this place? Am I the only one who doesn't feel welcome here? I mean, the tutors are all great, but I feel like most of the other kids are avoiding me. It's subtle, but... I dunno... Am I paranoid?"

"Nope, you're not paranoid," he told him matter-of-factly, "We humans don't exactly have the best reputation."

He frowned at Soren, "Why? What did we do?"

"It's not what we did," he quickly explained, "it's what we have inside us. You know about our darkness, right?"

Kaylan tried to recall his readings, "Uh, yeah, I think I read somewhere that our ether is half light and half dark... but what does that even mean?"

"It means we're the single darkest race in the empyreum," Soren revealed, chuckling, "While most other races have small percentages of darkness within them, like, ten or twenty percent, we're half and half. They say the more darkness you have inside you, the more likely you are to do bad things... which, when you look back on what we've done throughout our history in the low plane, kinda makes sense, right? We've waged one war after another, we've committed genocides, and half the time we even end up destroying ourselves in some apocalypse."

"What?" he cut in, surprised, "We DESTROY ourselves???"

"Oh, yeah," Soren went on casually, "only a tiny percentage of our realms actually make it to the period I came from, colonizing other galaxies. You were lucky, your realm survived one of the first major apocalypses, the nuclear holocaust, but half of the others don't get past the advent of nuclear power. They literally blow themselves up! BOOSH!" He made a gesture as if to emulate a massive explosion, "And after that, there are devastating pandemics that wipe us out, widespread misinformation, climate collapse, AI revolts... and then there's the last one, the Dark Wars. None of us make it past that one... but I don't consider that one OUR fault, per se..."

 "What's the Dark Wars?" Kaylan wondered.

"You don't know about the Dark Wars?" Soren was mildly surprised, but still unphased by all the misery he was describing, "It's this war we all inevitably end up fighting against the darkness in our realm... those of us that make it that far anyway. You know how Humanor is really dark compared to other realms? Well, it turns out all that darkness eventually manifests in the form of this... it's a kind of entity that possesses us, like demons. Those who are strong-willed and don't give in to fear can resist it, but the ones who panic or freeze get taken over by the darkness. They become kinda like zombies... more or less... zombies with guns. Yeah, it gets ugly. Anyway, that's why you shouldn't take it so hard, the way the others treat us. If I were them, I'd be reluctant as well, to say the least. And they're not all bad, I even snagged one or two." He grinned slyly.

"Snagged?" Kaylan didn't understand.

"You know? Hooked up," Soren clarified, "had some fun, fooled around, shacked up..."

"Gotcha," he said awkwardly, trying to be cool about it.

"You were sixteen, right, when you ascended?" Soren asked him, "Have you been with a girl yet?"