About 7 Years Ago...

"I don't know where I am, but this hair is AWESOME!"

The name is Buddy. I'm just an average teenage boy, but I have a passion for self expression through my hair. I was born in 1962 in the country of Russia, and I am currently 16 years old. My dream is to travel the world with a food cart, but everyone says it's a ridiculous dream. I'm going to prove them wrong, without fail.

I had just gone to sleep and woken up in a dark forest. The forest didn't seem strange in itself, but the circumstances by which I ended up here certainly were. I didn't remember going camping or anything the day before, and it was certainly too warm to be anywhere near where I live. After taking a look at myself, I found that I was fully clothed, but not in my clothes. Well, I guess they're my clothes now! Upon further inspection though, I found to my greatest enjoyment that I had a full head of hair, and it was spiked in multiple places.

It's like I've been offered a second chance! I have no idea how, but I've been given a new life! Terror broke out. No! Did I die?! How could that have happened?! I took into consideration my current predicament. Oh, I get it, this must be the afterlife! Looks pretty nice to me.

At that moment, a brown snake with deep red eyes crossed within a few feet of me.

Ah, so there are animals here too!

The snake lifted its head up and pointed its face at me. For a second we just had a bit of a staring contest, and throughout the entire time it was aggressively licking the air. Eventually the licking got so intense that the snake was waving its head around as well, as if taking part in a wild ritualistic dance. It was too funny a sight, and I laughed out loud.

The snake face immediately focused right on me and without hesitation bore its fangs and lunged right at me. I instinctively turned around and ran, but the little snake was incredibly quick, and was catching up to me.

I'm going to die! I'm in the afterlife, and I'm going to die! What even happens if you die in the afterlife?!

The snake had caught up, and took a final jump at me. I fell on my back and covered my face with my arms, bracing for impact. I felt my hair stand on end as I lay there in terror.

I never felt the serpent's fangs boring into me however. After a few seconds of cowering on the ground I tried moving my arms away from my face to survey the situation. My arms wouldn't do this, though, and seemed to be connected somehow. I found that I could move them up and down, so I moved them closer to my chest.

I found that attached to my arms where what looked like hundreds of needles. On the ends of the needles was a perfectly skewered snake, which apparently ran face-first into this wall of thorns. After a little bit of maneuvering I was able to remove the now dead monster and took a closer look at my arms. These needles weren't needles, they were the hairs on my arms!

A little bit of experimentation later and I discovered that all the hairs on my body would stiffen and relax on queue. The world in which I had been dropped off in was quite strange indeed, but I was already loving it.

-----

After several weeks of travelling from town to town, safe haven to city, I had finally arrived at one of the famous meetup spots of the world. Here, I thought, I would find someone to travel with, to ease my loneliness and make the journey a little safer. Everyone was smiling and chatting up quite the storm. It was no surprise to me that it sounded like a continuous roar of thunder from nearby, as an expanse of people stretched off in each direction.

I walked around for hours trying to find someone to no avail. I stayed there, talking to everyone for days and nights on end (blightmares didn't dare attack such a large group of people), but just when I felt like giving up I met Berk.

I finished a conversation I was having and looked around the area for my next one. My eyes locked with a man a few hundred feet away. There was an instant connection: our hairstyles were both highly irregular. My current style was a spiked afro, and his was neck long hair that seemed to slowly cycle through a rainbow of colors, both of which stood out in the group around us. Our eyes did all the talking. This was the partner I was looking for.

-----

Things went very smoothly for the next few years. Our escapades ranged from small and big, but we enjoyed every single one.

There was a journey to a certain Library of Discovery, where we learned about the things that we were itching to learn about, but couldn't sit still long enough to learn anything else. To our great pleasure, we learned that we were not going insane and that our hair was indeed growing, despite not having to eat or sleep. Apparently those who wish their hair to grow will indeed have hair growth, which meant that we could change our styles periodically.

We played pranks on each other all the time. One time I blindfolded him and ran away. Still blindfolded, he tried to dye me a bright orange, but missed and instead dyed the air. It didn't take Berk very long to master this illusionary technique, and we soon gained experience in setting traps that utilize this ability.

We engaged in hunting blightmares as a form of entertainment. While hunting some sort of monstrosity, probably dreamt up by a kid, I had lost a small lock of hair as it tried biting me. I tried to spike up my hair into a sort of helmet that could be used to ram the beast, and to my surprise the lock inside the creature's mouth spiked up as well. After subduing the animal we had a heated discussion into the implementations of this power, and after a little bit of considering, used the hair on the sides of my head, which had gotten pretty long at this point, to fashion a sort of shirt that I could use as a weapon.

Eventually, we had amassed a lot of strength and experience, and actually became decently well known as the "Hair Pair" in the area. We always had the best of times together, until one day...

-----

3 Years Ago

Berk and I lay on the grass one night, a campfire between us. It was a nice night with a sky full of stars and a slight breeze. We were lying on a plain where we could easily see anything coming at us, but the chirps of some of the smaller fauna of blightmare kept us aware that we were not alone.

"Hey Buddy, what's your dream?"

"Well I guess you could say this world is my dream," I said in a sarcastic tone.

"Nice try, I mean what do you want to do? We've been here for several years now and for all we know we might not have much longer. We've held up pretty well so far, but we've had some close calls, and one day it might go beyond close, you know? I think we might want to give some consideration to a goal or two."

It was a very valid point, and as much as my pride didn't want me to admit it, we had had a handful of encounters too close for comfort. "I suppose you're right. What I want to do is travel to the world with a food cart! I'm not sure what kind of food I'd give out, but maybe something like pickles. I like pickles. I know it sounds crazy, but food makes people happy, and I want to see people from all over enjoy something that I gave them."

He smiled and nodded sideways. "That's not really that crazy. I want to climb all sorts of mountains so that I can see the world from a different perspective. My life on Earth would never allow me to drop what I'm doing and go off into the mountains, though."

"Yeah, I know what you mean."

There was a pause as we thought over what was just discussed. We both knew that our dreams conflicted and that it would be hard to fulfil them together, but difficulty didn't deter me.

Berk sat up and looked at me. "Hey, remember that little village that we saved from a swarm of insect blightmares?"

"How could I forget? Those little buggers were absolutely everywhere. It was a terrible pain to exterminate all of them."

"Well I want to go there again. Can we make that our next destination?"

"Of course!"

-----

We arrived at the village a few weeks later, and it was no surprise that there was a slight infestation again. Berk talked to a villager there and agreed to take care of it for them.

"You handle the ones on the east side and I'll take the west."

"Leave it to me!"

The infestation wasn't nearly as bad as last time, but some insectoid blightmares were definitely making work of some crop fields belonging to the villagers. It took several hours to take care of my assignment, but I nevertheless finished and headed back to meet up with Berk.

When I finally found him, he was standing next to something about as tall as me covered in a blanket.

"So while you were out in the fields, I had a villager here make this beauty for you."

He pulled off the blanket and revealed a food cart. I was so happy that I fell to the ground and cried.

"It's perfect! Exactly what I wanted! I didn't even know they had those in this world!"

"Well, they don't normally. There is a particularly skilled craftsman in this village, so I asked that he made you one, and since we've helped him out before he gladly helped! I'm amazed that he got it done so quickly though."

I collected myself and tried the cart out, rolling it around the village in glee for what might have been fifteen or twenty minutes. When I had finished, I returned to Berk, who was standing in the same place as before, apparently deep in thought until I got close enough.

"Oh, and there's one more thing I want to show you." He pressed a button on the cart and I heard a click, but nothing happened. "That button will lock or unlock some internal mechanisms so that you can... Actually why don't you just see for yourself! Try moving its parts around like you do with your hair power."

It was a strange request, but I tried anyways. Sure enough, I was able to move it, but only a few parts at a time. It was rather difficult to manipulate, but after a little bit of messing around I was getting it to take a new shape.

"A couch?"

"Not just any couch, move here... and here... oh, and here..."

I thought that my eyes were deceiving me, because the couch was not an ordinary couch: it was a rocket couch.

"You can thank me later, but first you want to try it out right?"

"It actually flies?!" I looked at my new toy with wonder.

"Yep, that pedal makes it go faster, that one makes it go slower, and that you can turn that stick to change direction."

It was just too cool. "What does it take for fuel?"

"Some strange powder. Apparently it can be found at Mt. Mound and is often mistaken for lava because of how slow and hot it burns. The guy I asked to do this says there should be a year's worth of fuel in there, but you can come back every once in awhile to get more, assuming you take care of any pest control problems of course."

"How fast can it fly?"

"With a full crew of three people probably at ten or twenty times walking speed."

"How can I manipulate it like that?"

I had obviously asked the question that I wasn't supposed to ask.

"Well... You see... I kind of had him put some of your hair in the internal workings... But it's ok, I made sure not to mess up your hairstyle when I took it."

I was heartbroken. "My hair? My hair?! When did you even have a chance to do that?! Why would you toy with the sacred temple of my head?! I thought you understood how much hair means to me! I thought you were like me!"

Furious and broken, I took off on my rocket coach without thinking things through.

"Idiot." Tears welled up in Berk's face. "I know, but there was no other way." He turned around and started walking in the opposite direction that I flew in. "I only hope that we can meet again, Buddy."

-----

By the time that I had realised what I had done, I was already too far away. Prepared with words of forgiveness for my closest friend, I returned to the scene, but Berk was nowhere in sight. I tried searching for him, but it was no use, and as much as I didn't want to admit it I knew that this was the case. If he really didn't want to be found, camouflage was a walk in the park for Berk, and I would never be able to search all of the surrounding land for him. Even so I tried, but in the end I failed.

-----

Truth be told, I was overjoyed to see my best friend at that fateful board in that fateful city, and he looked happy to see me too. We both knew that what had happened that day was for the best, and with our dreams at least attempted we could tell by the look in each other's eyes that we would be starting yet another great chapter in our adventures together.

Or so we thought, before our dreams were torn down right in front of us.