For the middle of the night, it's blinding out. There's a crystalline sky and a waxy moon. It is a redundant light, cause the sea of knee-high weeds it illuminates tells Wessel no direction.
It's startling how quick you can lose your way out here. Savannah and the city surround each other in splotches and swaths, but they remain distinct. You only ever know one side of Kettisburg, and you dare not leave it. Wessel loses his last clue as soon as he steps in a patch of grass, and the steenboks look no more assured when they bramble onto gravel. Less so when they are inevitably ground into chuck. Wessel can feel tonight's stew seep around his belly. The critter's version of rolling in its grave - perhaps.
No creature navigates both the wild and wilder halves of Kettisburg with grace, and only the hyenas do so without it. They are just as scary whilst snorting up a half-pack of Haribos from out back the Tesoco, as they are in the knee-high weeds.
Vezzo van Otten is a hyena. He, too, snorts Haribos, and does so with a glint in his eye, and not a care in the world. He barks and he bites with equal vigor. He leaves a wake. A rebel in the most cloyingly saturated way, and a self-proclaimed gangster. More like a brat in his pram. If it were up to his folks, he'd still have a pram. Overbearing, and not even Wessel, who makes a habit out of giving him a hard time over 'family', will stray from that.
He's one of those who tries and makes their life such a mess, that making it by is a great success. Jump in a well just so they can scale it, and look back on the feat as something affirming. Wessel would rather walk in a straight line. Revel in mediocrity and pointlessness, and get some sort meaning out of hating himself for it. Ahead is the tree he's meant to turn left at. Vezzo had called it 'the falling tree'. An unmistakable growth, jutting out at a seemingly impossible degree. Barren, for the tilt of it offers a delicacy scarcely afforded to the short and fat of the land; pigs and buffalo most likely.
Wessel has no clue why he follows him. They're good friends, yes. Best even. That's a question which similarly begs, but one he has spent far too many fruitless hours pondering, to further entertain. Still, there are hundreds of lines Wessel ought not cross between his front door and their predetermined post, and this friendship is not enough to erase them. But he walks still, boxing his shadow.
Vezzo van Otten is a force; deals only in ultimatums and cusses. You don't say no, not because you can't, but you don't want to. He has this pull. He is a force. He leaves a wake.
Ahead sits 'the only hill in the savanna', another landmark included in the directions. Wessel pulls the crumpled pamphlet from his hoodie. A warning about change in the the routes for the 315, but the back is a hand-drawn take on this wilderness. The dotted line is comparatively quite long between the tree and the hill, but he spanned that gap real quick. Is this little thing even a hill? Just as doubt forms, it is quelled. At the top, everything becomes obvious. Two beams of light appear in the middle of nowhere, decidedly skew.
Of course he would bring the Jeep. He loves it. Who cares what natural wonders he runs over? Who cares if it was bought by the parents he insists he doesn't need? Wessel can't complain too much since he is a permanent fixture in the passenger seat, but still. Really, he loves that thing just as dearly as Vezzo does. Gets him around, and gives him a reason to look think of his friend as a hypocrite. He sees him now, pacing around the toxic-yellow vehicle, waiting. Moonlight accentuates his paleness into something like light from the bulb. On the other hand, Wessel wonders if he, himself, can even be seen at all.
"Vez!" He shouts, letting his feet quicken down the slope towards the car. Vezzo lashes around, eyes all roly-poly like some sorta cartoon snake. He's on something, even though he said he wouldn't be. 'Gotta be sharp round them lions. Give em an inch- ah naw, Wes! I'm not talking like that. I'm talking like... well I'm saying that I gonna to be sharp tonight. Yeah? And it's all gonna go slick, yeah?' Something like that.
