“Wait, why are you going to tell me a story you don’t think is important? Steve objected immediately because he felt like he should. His time was a precious thing! Sometimes.

“Well, I think it’s important, it’s just that most people wouldn’t.” Nuori clarified.

Steve hesitated. “Any other options?”

“It’s this, language lessons, or the governing questions.” Nuori smiled a predatory smile.

She waited, already knowing the answer.

Steve sat in silence, then--

“Well if you think it’s important…”

------

This is the story of Jeremy Calinski, he was born in the year twenty eleven, to parents who lived within a small town in the canadian prairies.

“Stop.”

“Why?”

“You’re patronizing me! Don’t.”

“I just started the story! Why do you think I’m patronizing you?”

“Canadian prairies? You just happened to be working on a story from the CANADIAN PRAIRIES?”

“Yes?”

“Nothing important comes from the prairies! I know this because I’m from the prairies! The only reason you’d tell me a story from there is because I’m from there. Ergo, you are patronizing me. Stop.”

“But this is literally what I was working on.

“Okay,I’ll choose to ‘believe’ you just happened to be working on a historical bibliography about a man from the prairies. Can you just not pull this stuff in the future please? I don’t like to be patronized.

“I’ll… try not to?”

Jeremy Calinski, had brown hair, blue eyes, and was never the most social child growing up. He had three siblings and lived with his parents in mild poverty. While his parents were able to provide their kids with the essentials in life, food, shelter, and water, most extracurriculars were beyond their economic reach.

The kids understood, it was a small town. Mild poverty was expected. Jeremy though, he couldn’t help but dream of exploration, of going to see parts of the world that were currently beyond his reach.

“Oh shit, a prairie person got into space!”

“No! Stop being stu- I mean… I’m telling a story! Stop interrupting.

So Jeremy wished to travel the world, but in the meantime he’d settle for anything. In came an opportunity. During the summer of his seventh grade year, the school organized a class trip. Better yet, underprivileged kids like him got in for free.

During the trip Jeremy got separated from the group, people thought he had gotten lost at the time but much later in his life he admitted that it was on purpose.

He wanted an adventure.

He did about as well as you could expect out of a seventh grader. He had a canoe, some camping supplies and a fishing rod. No food. He thought he could catch it himself.

After finding an island far from the set off point in otter lake, he established his ‘camp’. Jeremy didn’t have a tent, but he set up a tarp strung up between two trees with the bottom attached to a log in the ground, making a makeshift lean-to.

Next, Jeremy set off on solving his food situation.

Surprisingly, he managed to snag a fish on the first day. It wasn’t particularly large, but certainly enough food for a small kid like him. No, catching the fish was the easy part, cooking it ended up being the ordeal.

A storm hit that night. Not a bad one, but wind and rain were being depressingly uncooperative to Jeremy’s efforts. He moved his ‘fire pit’ underneath the lean-to and started to gather wood. He found plenty of deadwood, the northern forests were apparently lush with flammables, but most of it happened to be wet from the rain. The war of fire had begun.

Wet wood, wet moss, wet shirt, wet everything! The treasonous sky had even dampened his spirits! But Jeremy, he was an entrepreneurial child, he had solutions.

Or one solution with many attempts.

The matches were still dry! All he needed to do was keep on lighting until something catches.

With a fire going Jeremy grabbed his fish, ready to cook. Except he wasn't. He didn’t bring a knife! Generally considered a very helpful tool for actually filleting a fish. Descaled pickerel seemed to be just a pipedream.

Now, you might judge, but Jeremy was a child, inexperienced, naive, his list of outdoors essentials was understandably lacking. What he did not lack however was enthusiasm, he used his own determination to drown out his problems.

He would cook that fish!

He turned back to his fire, filled with survivalist cheer… and it had gone out, he left it a bit too long.

Many matches later, Jeremy was ready to begin his brilliant idea. He would position three alive and young sticks crossways over the fire, and… gently lay the fish upon them. Truly the height of cuisine.

But alas, his glorious friend and trusty companion, fire, had other plans. The young sticks could not handle the heat and so the fish was out of the stick grill and into the fire.

The result was to be expected.

But Jeremy was undeterred by the fish’s charred and ashy state. He decided to eat the fish whole. It was a time consuming consumption, the scales proving especially troublesome to both his taste buds and throat. In fact, most of the experience tested the child’s will, but his inner survivalist won through and Jeremy ate the entire thing.

Even the undercooked organs.

Predictably he got sick. When the searchers found him three days later he was still expelling the few fluids remaining within his body.

The experience certainly left a mark on him, not in the way you’d expect though. When he returned to his town of Tisdale-

“Tisdale? Are you kidding me! You’re doing a historical biography on someone from Tisdale?”

“Yes?”

“You’re fucking with me aren’t you. The only thing of note Tisdale had going for it was their old town slogan ‘The Land of Rape and Honey’, and they sadly got rid of it, leaving the city in even more of a sad state.

“I’m not even going to address the first part of that, but I have to say Tisdale was certainly not a city, that’s just rewriting the truth.

“Tisdale is a prairie city Nuori! Hell, by prairie standards it’s practically a burgeoning metropolis!”

...

“Steve?”

“Yes?”

“You keep using present tense, you know that these places were destroyed a long time ago, right?”

“...Ah.”

“I’m sorry… I hadn’t really thought about how it might affect you, but you’ll need to acknowledge you’re never going to see your time again.”

“Never…”

“‘I know… I’m sorry. I can’t even imagine…”

“All my family have been dead for years… So have my friends… My life I’ll never have back… My job I’ll never have to go to! Those tickets I don’t have to pay!

“You’re… being a bit uncaring about the news, Steve.”

“Look, I’m sad I won’t get to see them again, but my old life had problems. Lot of them. My friends and family got to live on with their lives back home, and I hope they were happy. So I assume they’d want me to be happy, right? So why should I spend time worrying about not seeing them when I have so many new opportunities here!”

“Steve…”

“Don’t look at me like that Nuori. I saw the look in your eyes, drinking away your troubles! My life was shit, and I deserved better. More. So much more. And here I can have that. Here I will have that. It needs to be better. Otherwise what's the point of living.

“...”

“Sorry, I got a bit serious there, can we just not talk about my family? Ever. Continue with your story Nuori.”

… Jeremy returned to Tisdale an inspired child. Despite his misadventures in the far north, or perhaps because of them, he wanted to travel to all corners of the world. Experience the unique trials and tribulations one comes across in the wild.

But Jeremy was young still, a child. His family couldn’t afford to let him see the world. So he dedicated himself to the next best thing. Drawing the places he imagined he’d visit.

He started out terrible, this I know as I’ve seen some of his pictures that are archived, but I also know that he persevered. His life became drawing. Before he did moderately well in other classes but after the trip he rarely did anything but draw.

This worried both his parents and teachers. They saw it as Jeremy destroying his future, his opportunities in life. A hobby was a good and healthy thing, but this? It was an obsession. While they never had particularly high hopes for him, this path he was on didn’t lead anywhere. That much was clear.

Succes? He would never achieve it.

Not a good enough artist. Not enough financial support to pursue his passion.

Jeremy knew that though. He knew he would never be a successful artist. But did he care?

No. Art wasn’t his passion, just the closest he could get to his dream in his childhood. A means to an end.

Drawing? What kind of life would that be? Why would he want to spend his life hunched over paper?

Jeremy wanted to explore!

But how?

That was the question on his mind as he neared his sixteenth birthday. He had no money, no skills, and he didn’t want to get tied down in a job. He thought that was a trap.

Any job he could get wouldn't pay enough for him to save money. He’d need to constantly upkeep his life, and travel costs are huge. It would take him years to get anywhere, and he’d end up back in the same place after every trip. Not for him.

Jeremy turned to the technique he pioneered as a young explorer. Just go off and see what happens. Sure, the last time ended up as a battle against the rivers of brown, but he had learned from his past! Probably.

Jeremy never had great long term planning but he made up for it in pure bravery.

He set off on his journey a week before turning seventeen, all the Jeremy essentials in tow. He had a backpack, water bottle, some of his pictures, paper to draw on and… no food.

He might not have learned all the necessary lessons.

Still, he hitchhiked and made his way to one of the local population hubs, Saskatoon. There he began enacting his ‘plan’.

The ‘plan’ was simple, he was going to draw pictures, then sell them to random people. Funding his journey to the east coast where he would purchase a sailboat…

“Steve?”

“...What?”

“You uhh… is something wrong?”

“I’m withholding judgement.”

“Okay…?”

A sailboat to explore the world. He sold pictures of cliffside lighthouses, seas at storm, and towering mountains, but the picture he always went back to, the thing he drew the most. What spoke to him as freedom.

The boat he wished to-

“NO!”

“What?”

"Don’t you fucking Sailor Dan me, Nuori! Don’t you fucking do this!

“...What?”

“SAILOR DAN! This is turning into some Sailor Dan shit right here!

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! And Sailor Dan isn’t a verb!”

“SAILOR FUCKING DAN NUORI! YOU’RE STORY IS SAILOR FUCKING DAN! THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.”

“I have no idea what you’re-”

“HOLY SHIT”

---------

Spark turned his ‘invisibility’ cloak off when he heard the shouting turn angry, worried about the safety of his mother. He couldn’t see what was happening around him under the cloak, Alliandra had failed to mention it blocked your ability to see. The first experiments with moving around had been painful.

He looked around relieved when he saw that both Steve and Nuori were sitting at their places. Spark had taken to listening in on Steve’s lessons, he had no idea what was being said but he told his mom he wanted espionage practice.

The truth? He didn’t trust Steve, not at all.

“Where the fuck did he come from?”

“He was always in the room! I thought I made that abundantly clear!”

Spark looked at each of them, read their faces. Their feelings were as clear as day to him.

Mom - Joking, exacerbated, good humoured. Indicates she thinks Steve is overacting for fun, similar to lessons with me.

Steve - Frightened, slightly angry, distaste, disappointment. He had been enjoying the story, the shouting. Likes to argue. Some validity to my mom’s analysis. Negative emotions: partially from surprise, mostly from a root cause of unhappiness. Me.

Spark took a picture of Steve’s reaction and filed it into his notes for Dyrian. He had to make a living somehow.

“What do you mean clear? You told me he definitely wasn’t here, that’s the opposite!

“I stared down at his seat and rolled my eyes! That’s an indication of sarcasm, how can you not get that.”

“You can’t blame this on me! Sarcasm failing is always the fault of the user.”

Spark didn’t understand the conversation but he understood the scenario. That gave him comfort. The dynamic had not changed.

Conversation

Steve - Accelerated heart rate, growing more comfortable, still attraction, purposely ignoring me.

Mom - Happy. She just loves to teach.

Spark smiled at that, how could he not.

“Think of something funny, Spark?” His mom grinned at him.

“Nothing much, I was thinking about heading out though, unless you need me here.” Spark looked pointedly at Steve.

“I’ll be fine Spark, don’t worry.” She rolled her eyes.

Honest.

But that was expected, she hadn’t lied to him purposely in a long time.

Steve though? Spark’s notes on Steve were far from flattering.

He got up to leave, and didn’t bother himself by thinking about Steve's look of relief. His mom never noticed Steve’s distaste. She liked to think the best of those she taught. It was a good trait, but also dangerous.

But that’s why Spark was there to watch her back.

He left the building as Nuori went back into the story, it was time for him to get back to work.

------

Jeremy always drew the boat he wished to one day sail. The embodiment of the freedom he wanted to have. Goal in mind, he made his way to the east coast, pushing forward a bit more every day.

It was a winding journey, never a straight path, but the world taught him many things.

In the alleys of Winnipeg he learned the joys of singing. Sea shanties echoed through cold winter nights, comforting his fellow damned. He learned to use anything at his disposal, so he might have shelter. He learned to steal, so he might not go hungry.

Oddly enough, he learned empathy in the prisons. Making new friends he would have never expected.

He also learned hatred. A hatred of being confined, a hatred of the guards. He found friends but also enemies. Always he moved forward though, documenting his experiences into his notes. He was almost a ghost, ever changing locations, never staying long. but he left a mark on a select few.

Greg Squirrel, a first nations man from The Pas talked of his long conversations with Jeremy about the northern wilderness, their shared passion.

Amy Lenshaw, a woman from Thunder Bay spoke of how he had helped her when her car broke down in the long desolate stretches of road outside the city.

And Jeremy travelled, having but the smallest effect on the world around him. Step by step he got closer to the coast, to his dream.

Ten years it took him to arrive at his destination. Saint John, New Brunswick. He had no money but he had made it. At the age of twenty six he had reached the ocean.

Then the hard work began. Having no money, no experience, and effectively being a ghost in society, Jeremy turned to what he knew. Drawing, painting, even singing. During his travels he had learned many strange tricks, he created a character for the people of the city. A legend.

Captain Calinski.

Jeremy traveled the streets singing sea shanties, selling his pictures. Oh he had so many from the years! He bought bristol board which he sold his signature works on. For five dollars at a time, at first no one wanted to buy them.

A strange thing happened though.

As Jeremy’s fame grew, more and more people sought him out for his pictures. It wasn’t that they were special, it was a novelty thing. People wanted one of Captain Calinski’s drawings.

Until one day he had enough to purchase his boat. Somehow he had enough. At the age of thirty Jeremy took to the sea, he had no training but he would learn. As he always did.

He rowed out to sea, a smile on his face.

The voyage had begun.

--------

Nuroi finished speaking with the same smile she imagined Jeremy having. She liked where he ended up, most of her history projects didn’t have the happiest of endings.

“Is that... the end?” Steve asked, confused.

“Of the story. Yes?” Nuori confirmed.

“But... it kinda just ended, I thought you said it was an important story.”

“I said it was important to me, and it is.” She shrugged. “Seeing the different lives people lived, the achievements of those forgotten by history. That’s what history is to me, the sum of all things, not just the parts we typically focus on. The big events of the times are easily accessible to all. I want to discover the unknown and give our people a chance to understand lives they would otherwise never see.”

“But this guy, it was entirely a Sailor Dan thing. Like fully. And Sailor Dan doesn’t deserve to be remembered.”

Nuoris shook her head. “Who are you to decide that Steve, all people deserve to be remembered in some way. At least in my view.”

Steve glared at her. “Not Sailor Dan, he’s an asshole!”

Nuori couldn’t get Steve’s attitude. “Why are you bringing up this man? You don’t even want to talk about your family but you get worked up about a homeless man being remembered.”

“I explained that!” Steve replied, exasperated. “And no, I just don’t get your fascination with this Jeremy. He was probably a jackass, just like Dan. Not worth being talked about.” Steve sighed.” What happened to him in the end, anyway?”

Nuori smiled sadly. “He died, most people do.”

“Doing what he loved?”

“No, brain aneurysm. A couple weeks later.” Nuori corrected.

Steve threw up his hands. “That makes the story even worse! He travelled all that way and just died, not even in the midst of sailing! Pointless!” Steve shook his head.

But Steve, she wanted to say, if you look at it that way, all life is pointless. The destination is always death, there is no escaping that. All great works will crumble, all Empires will eventually fade. One day our species will disappear into dust, and it will be as if we never existed. What is there but the journey? The fleeting moment of triumph.

But she didn’t think Steve was ready to hear that.

“Was it for nothing Steve, if his story is being talked about fifteen thousand years later?” By his logic she had him.

“Well okay,” He agreed. “But I still think you suck at history.”

“Suck at history?” Nuori was surprised to find that she was actually mildly offended.

“Yeah! Where’s the fun anecdotes! That’s what history’s meant for!” Steve responded.

“Ehhh…” She couldn’t help but be in extreme disagreement.

“Alright, we’ll go tit for tat, trade for trade. You give me a fun story and I’ll give you one in return. I’ll start.” Steve set the game. “There was this event called the Cadaver Synod, it was this crazy thing where a pope, you know what a pope is right?” Nuori had to nod. “ Well this pope, dug up the previous pope and put him on trial for being a heretic or blasphemous or something. I think it was some obscure religious term.” He waved a hand absently.

“And so they dressed this six month old corpse in the pope clothes, imagine that, what the fuck must’ve all the other folks been thinking. Popes are elected! They voted for him! Then he has them yell at a corpse!” Steve couldn’t stop laughing, Nuori joined in.

Yes. She thought. It's terrible history, but it certainly is fun. Sometimes fun is what you need. So she started up a story about Ky, any story would work really.

“Seriously? He had a mammoth genetically made, with no tissue samples? How much would that have cost?” Steve was flabbergasted.

“Don’t know, resources aren’t really a problem here.”

“Well, when there’s a will! I want to meet that guy. Uhh, let’s see… I got it! What do you think the first fascist government was on Earth?” He asked her excitedly.

“No clue Ste-.”

“You’ll never guess it!” He cut her off. “Oh wait, you weren’t trying to… Still most wouldn’t have guessed it! Paraguay! They had these crazy laws about ethnic purity involving Spainards marrying natives and were the original north korea, threatening to invade their larger neighbors. Only they actually ...”

Welp, Nuori sat back in her chair laughing a bit at his story.

There are certainly worse ways to spend the day.