The Demon's Travels. Sanctum.

I Get Hit Where It Hurts.

My name is Steven. 

Do I have a last name? Well I used to, but I don't use it anymore. My parents kind of disowned me for being too.. erm.. I'm not sure how to describe it. I think the simplest way to put it is that they were expecting having a kid to turn out one way, and it turned out another way, which according to every parenting guide on earth, they should have expected.

Okay that's just confusing. In any case, let's start over. 

Hi I'm Steven, and my family hates me! That good? Sounds great to me. 

I was 18 years old when I left behind everything I ever knew. I didn't know I would leave it, and it wasn't of my own free will either.  

I was walking home from Seven Eleven with a bag full of potato chips, microwavable food and gummy candy. I was treating myself. I'm not a huge fan of chocolate, but when it comes to sweets, Sour Patch kids and other sour gummy type candies are like my Kryptonite. 

As a person, I wasn't anything special. Average weight, average height, black hair, brown eyes. Any American looking at me would immediately think that I was the average John Doe of the States.  The interesting part was that I was half Japanese but I think my Italian side kind of screwed with that and as a result nobody ever suspected I was Asian at first glance. 

In other words, even the interesting parts of me weren't worth noticing.  I had no girlfriend, only a few select friends online, and virtually no physical social life.  Plus I lived in a One Room apartment in the part of New York which was literally the one place you didn't want a One Room Apartment. 

Forget inviting the friends I didn't have over. 

My day mostly consisted of going to the book store to see if the Japanese Light Novel translations had come in, going to the gym for an hour, and then spending the rest of my life in front of a screen with a game controller in my hand. 

Was I happy? No. Was I disappointed in my life? No. My life was pretty 'meh' as they say. But it wasn't bad. I was content with it. I prefer an absence of conflict above anything. Unless I have no choice, I will stay out of a fight.  

I have few enough friends as it is, no need to give people a reason to hate me right?

So you could say it was natural when I was walking home today with my bag of Seven Eleven, that I took a wide berth around what appeared to be two men harassing a young woman.

They were the typical neighborhood thugs of the neighborhood I lived in. In other words, white rich boys with parents so rich they could get out of any crime they wanted.

It's funny how you usually expect criminal thugs to be a certain race and or ethnicity, when in reality, the world of crime is a rainbow. It's ugly, but as much as society does the whole promoting of 'speak up' biz, the truth of life is that there's no such thing as speaking up solving everything. Because if speaking up is going to work, there has to be somebody willing to listen, and hardly  anybody is actually willing to listen. 

Today however, might have dissolved a bit of my reluctance to listen, and frankly I kind of regretted it later on. 

The woman in question being harassed was an odd one. Her hair was dark green in color. I kid you not, it was literally straight up leaf green. She looked around my age, or not. You ever see those girls who still look like they're straight up kids even though they're old enough to vote? She had that vibe to her. 

Her hair was unnerving to look at.  As a fan of anime I wasn't a stranger to the concept of people having unnatural hair colors, but I wasn't naive enough to believe it would exist outside of fiction.