As I lay in the warm sand of the Mojave, sheltering in the shadow of a rock outcropping, I heard someone call my name.

"Are you...Larry?" a woman's voice asked, hesitantly.

I didn't open my eyes. I hoped she'd go away.

My name's Polaris Moon, but everyone I don't hate calls me Larry. On paper, though, I'm just nobody, the son of two other nobodies who -- as you might have guessed from my name -- were basically attending Burning Man year round.

"I...was told you could help me." she pressed.

Sighing heavily, I opened one eye to regard my visitor. The young woman standing over me looked tired, sunburnt, and desperate. Desperate enough to hike up a steep desert trail to find me.

"Who told you about me?" I demanded.

She hesitated, and then licked her lips. "Star. She said you could help me. She said you're--"

"A druid?" I asked, grimacing.

Well, she wasn't wrong. I am a druid, though not by choice. I was born into it.

See, my mom and dad -- or, as they preferred I call them, Star and Banjo -- were performing a psychedelic-clouded ritual they learned while backpacking through Europe, on the night they banged me into existence. Unlike the mountain of other New Age bullshit they were into, that one turned out to be real. Lucky me.

As a result of their meddling with powers they were too stoned to comprehend, I was born with a connection to the forces of nature, and as I grew, I found I was able to draw power from the Earth, talk to animals and primal beings -- you know the drill.

My visitor nodded. "Yeah. I, uh, I'm--"

"I didn't ask." I cut off, then rolled to my feet briskly. "What is it you want from me?"

Brusque I know, but that's just how I am. You might expect that my mystical conception and innate druidhood would have made me turn out a lot like my parents: all hemp bracelets and organic everything, and fully in love of with the idea of a simple, nature-centered life that they never actually managed to fully articulate, much less live out in their day to day lives. But I didn't turn out like that.

Because, unlike them, I actually understand Nature.

"Well," she began, hesitantly, "I-it's my family's ranch, it's--"

"Dying, okay." I finished for her, rolling my wrist impatiently. "Megadrought, years of work, family legacy being slowly buried by dust and bad credit, sure -- I hear it all the time. You want me to fix it for you, right? Make your land lush, green, and profitable?"

"Well, I mean, you...you're in tune with Mother Nature, right, so..."

I rolled my eyes.

"Whoever came up with that 'Mother Nature' bullshit must have had one hell of a shitty childhood." I muttered, as I pulled out a cigarette and fumbled it alight with my battered old Zippo. "And that's coming from me."

"What?" she said, sounding truly taken aback.

I drew in a long drag, and then exhaled it with a sigh.

"Look, maybe you had a mom who kissed you on the cheek, tucked you in, and wished you sweet dreams at night. But Nature? She's not like your mom. She's not even like my mom. You know, the blissful burnout in the trailer park who told you where to find me?"

"Then...what is she?" the woman asked, hesitantly.

I paused for a moment, considering.

"She's usually more like a mother kangaroo. See, a mama 'roo will casually toss her own baby to a dingo to slow it down while she gets away. She can always make another baby, right? Or sometimes, Nature's like one of those mother rabbits, who'll quite frequently just up and eat their babies if they feel threatened. Or if they hear a loud noise. Or get too cold. Or too hot. Or just because." I explained. "When she's at her very best, Nature is sort of like a mother panda. Pandas usually take more or less decent care of one of their babies, while quite happily letting the other one starve because they just can't be bothered to multitask."

"What's your point?" she said, crossing her arms.

"My point," I said, thrusting my hands into the pockets of my jeans. "Is that you need to know what you're dealing with. The forces you're calling on aren't nice. They're savage, mindless, and heartless. And more importantly, their help isn't free."

"I...I brought money." she said, fishing a roll of bills from her purse. "All I have."

I looked at the wad of cash. It seemed like it would let me sleep inside for a while, if nothing else. I can sleep rough better than most anyone, but I don't like it. All the fresh air and open sky is too much like being at work. So, I held out my hand.

"You'll help?" she said, hopefully.

I glared, and she quickly dropped the money into my hand. I pocketed it, then held up a warning finger. "The money's good, but there's one more part of my price."

She bit her lip, and looked me up and down. After a moment, she nodded, took a deep breath, and raised her slender hands to the buttons of her top, parting the top one with a nimble flick of her fingers.

"Not that." I said, hastily raising a hand to halt her. "Shit. I'm not that kind of asshole." I jerked a thumb over my shoulder at the desert landscape. "You just have to watch me work."

She lowered her hands again, looking confused. "Why?"

I turned away from her, towards the desert landscape, and extended my hand. "So you'll know what my help really costs."

Then I reached out, seized the web of life in my hand, and pulled. I made some strands shorter, and some strands longer. Still others, I had to cut altogether. As I did so, the cacti and hardy desert brush withered and blackened across the sandy plains, as far as the eye could see. I had to take a lot from this place to give to my client's home, and the plant life here had little to spare. So I dug deeper.

The hard truth is that Nature isn't generous with her bounties. Everything that lives in her realm is living off something else's death and decay. It's been said before, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. The best you can do is make sure someone else is paying.

Desert creatures -- lizards, rabbits, and bugs of all kinds -- burst from their dens and burrows all around us, writhing in pain and screaming in a thousand tiny voices, as I ripped the life out of all of them. Using the young woman's connection to her home, I redirected that life into her dying patch of land miles away, and into the livestock her family raised there. Some might have called it horrific, or unnatural. Well, it might have been the former, but certainly not the latter. Something dies, and something else lives because of it. That's how Nature rolls.

When I finished, I was exhausted, and my client was gone. She'd evidently fled in the middle of my working, as my clients usually do. That was fine. I was pretty sure she got the point.

I started back down the trail myself after a few minutes, taking it at an easy pace -- I didn't want to run into the woman I'd just helped. No point in making things awkward.

I was looking forward to going into town, spending my money, and getting out of my head for a while. Most of all, I was looking forward to getting out of Nature.

Today, Cole had decided, he would scale The Chaplain. It was no small task, to ascend that uncanny spire, that towered over the masses below, as static and immovable as they were dynamic and amorphous. But then, it was also said that no small reward waited for those who made it to the Chaplain's upper reaches: answers.

This might seem no great treasure to most of the denizens of gray Nova Bali, writhing worm-like in the pale light of the Twisting Moon, their curiosity long since submerged by the endless sensory distractions afforded them by their ever-changing bodies.

But to Cole, it was all that mattered. Questions formed the very core of his being, and no matter how many times the Twisting Moon stretched and molded his flesh or cracked his bones into new shapes, no matter how his ephemeral body tried to distract him with new sensations ranging from overpowering bliss to lazy contentment, in the end, he always came back to his questions.

What am I? What was I? Today he was a sinuous thing, low to the ground, pulling himself forward with seven many-jointed arms. Tomorrow, he would be something else. He could not remember a time when that was not so, and yet he could not escape the thought that he had once been something both more and less permanent.

Today's body was, fortunately, ideal for ascending the Chaplain. With the benefit of seven circular hands that tightly gripped the tower's flesh, Cole moved up the skin of the great edifice with alacrity. That was another question: why did the tower alone have skin and sinew? The other fixed structures on Nova Bali were dead things of metal and stone, whose purpose was inscrutable to the Nova Balinese.

At last, Cole clambered up to the top of the tower, where a round bulb spread out at its summit. He had thought to climb up the outside of this, but to his surprise, the dark bumpy hollows in its surface, now that he was close to them, were revealed to be openings that led inside the Chaplain.

Within, he found himself in a hollow chamber, his surroundings barely visible even to Cole's large round eyes, which the Moon had made especially keen, today. His mind called out hesitantly. Part of him feared that the reply, if there was one, would be like that of the other denizens of Nova Bali: perfunctory, disinterested, or else nearly insensible with euphoria.

Instead his mind filled with an idea that was both foreign and strangely familiar to him.

"Welcome."

Welcome. It meant that, to the Chaplain, it was good that he was here. That this place was better for his presence. Why did that feel so...warm?

"It has been some time since I had a visitor."

Time. That was what it was called when the Twisted Moon rose and fell. But it could also be more than that, or less than that -- it implied so much, as a concept! There was so much that Cole wanted to know, so much that he felt he once had known.

"What am I? What are you?" Cole's mind wailed his questions, his hunger for the answer becoming nearly overwhelming, so close to his goal.

"In one sense, the answer to those questions is the same." The Chaplain thought to Cole, gently. "I am, and you are...a human being."

"What does it mean," Cole pressed, "To be...a human being?"

Another wave of strange warmth washed over him from the Chaplain. And to his surprise, he dimly remembered its name. Humor?

"That, my friend, will take a little longer."

"Salaam, effendi." Al said, bobbing his turbaned head in greeting, as I entered my family's convenience store for my early shift, about an hour before dawn. I glanced around, and saw that Al had, as always, faithfully done the cleaning the breakfast food prep, and our pristine 7-11 was ready for me to take over for the morning shift.

Al's a really good employee.

"Dawn approaches." Al reminded me, as I came around behind the counter and stashed my coat behind it.

I smiled. "Not a problem, go ahead and clock out." I had no worries about zeroing out his till, Al was never off by so much as a cent. Like I said, he's really good.

Al gave me a sober nod, and then, without saying another word or breaking eye contact, he glided away backwards, through the swinging "Employees Only" door into the back room. I gave an involuntary shudder.

Well, he's good at doing his job. When it comes to pretending to not be a vampire...he tries. To be fair, back when my grandpa opened the franchise in the 1970s, no one in our small town off the Interstate had ever met a Muslim. So, when Al claimed that his religion forbade him to go out in the daytime, it didn't occur to anyone to call him on it. Its symbol was a crescent moon, after all. Besides, as Al explained, it's much too hot to go out during the day, in his homeland of "South Arabia".

And, without Google to instantly confirm their suspicions, most people would probably have simply passed over the oddity of an ostensibly Muslim man wearing a Sikh-style turban, and being named "Al Abdul". (No, I don't mean his last name is "Al-Abdul" -- first name "Al", last name "Abdul".)

A few minutes later, the safe unlocked automatically, and I placed the money from Al's till inside, before counting out the appropriate amount of change for my own till and closing it again. After opening my till, I glanced at the donation box behind the counter. Another shudder ran down my spine, as I saw the set of neatly folded clothes and a pair of shoes in the box.

The clothes, assuming they weren't particularly distinctive, would go to Salvation Army, but we've never found out what Al does with the rest of his "leftovers". It's probably better that way. When I first found out about Al, my dad had assured me that everyone who "donated to charity" while Al was on shift was someone the world was better off without, and I had personally seen hand-me-downs from some people I knew to be particularly despicable end up in that old cardboard box. It was still unsettling, though.

For the first hour of my shift, I had only a few customers stop in for some coffee or doughnuts, as well as the usual steady stream of people paying at the pump for gas. The man who walked in to the store around 6 AM didn't look much different than most of my customers -- he was unshaven and a little bleary-eyed, but that was to be expected at this time of day.

So imagine my surprise, when he responded to my cheerful "Good Morning!" by shoving a gun in my face.

"Money!" he hissed. "Now!"

I was scared, obviously, but there was a procedure for this, that applied to every employee except Al, who by now, would be asleep inside his "prayer box" in the old storeroom in back.

I followed that procedure to the letter, holding one hand up and gingerly opening the register with the other. He was, predictably, unsatisfied with the handful of bills, and let me know with a string of profanity, and several sharp jabs of his gun in my direction. I shakily pointed to the customary sign on the wall that was designed to prevent just such an awkward situation:

NOTICE: LESS THAN $100 IN REGISTER AT ALL TIMES. EMPLOYEES CANNOT OPEN SAFE.

He expressed his opinion of the sign's veracity by striking me across the face with his gun, sending me staggering back into the shelves of cigarettes behind me, and then vaulting the counter and screaming at me to open the safe. I scrambled back away from the irate -- and, I noticed, clearly tweaking -- robber, while pleading my case vociferously.

Looming over me, he advanced forward, his threats becoming increasingly graphic as he came forward. He didn't fire, because I was just backing up, cowering -- I wasn't trying to run. That, too, was part of the "procedure" I mentioned.

Predictably, as I stopped before the door to the backroom, the angry thief shoved me through the swinging door, and followed me inside, warning me of the consequences of failing to produce any more than the paltry amount I'd given him.

And with that, I had successfully completed the standard emergency procedure that my dad and grandpa had drilled into me, in case of a robbery. We passed into the pale fluorescent light of the backroom, and the door swung shut behind my assailant, shutting out the sunlight.

My assailant stopped pointing his gun at me -- he had little choice, as his gun arm suddenly bent the wrong way. He screamed in pain and horror as a slender, too-tall shape that seemed to be made of pure darkness melted out of the shadows among the shelves, and hauled him off his feet and into the air.

"Al, don't--" I began, my eyes widening in shock, but I didn't finish the sentence before another snap echoed through the backroom. The robbers head lolled to the side, his neck stretched and bent at a sickening angle. I forced my breakfast back down into my stomach.

"I have apprehended the criminal, effendi." Al said, in a hollow, unnatural voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once. "I will...turn him over to the proper authorities."

Swallowing hard, I gave him a mute nod, and watched him melt back into the shadows. I suppose I'd always known that Al's thin human visage wasn't actually meant to fool us -- he didn't think we were stupid. It wasn't so much an actual disguise or deception, as it was a polite fiction. A lie mutually agreed to, that allows otherwise inimical beings to coexist in relative peace, protected by a thin veneer of not-so-plausible deniability.

Once I heard the lid of his box close again, I fled the room through the swinging door as fast as I could.