Seemingly ordinary men

Reading a novel in a desolate and dry room, one made of sandstone and with a lack of ventilation, a curled up figure shook its head and laughed. Why is it that every novel has the protagonist as a scrupulous person? Why do we care if our protagonist is evil? Why do we care if our protagonist is good? Do we care if all we wish is to indulge in entertainment?

Playing with a sharpened knife as he spoke those words, Nathaniel gradually lost his manic and mocking smile and let the room slip into silence. Throwing a tattered book to the floor and jumping off of a metal frame bed onto a sandstone floor, Nathaniel's landing made a muffled thump as his cloth clad feet landed on the rough sandstone floor. With careful footsteps, Nathaniel's slender body moved with ease as he deftly opened a crude wooden door to the pitch black outside and a wall less than a foot away from the fully extended door, denoting this to be an alleyway.

With a bearing for what was directly outside of his home in the wall, Nathaniel wrung his hands before letting slip words of discontentment, "damn, what a fucked place. I wonder why I was brought here..."

With the moon acting as a lamp that outlined the entire district around Nathaniel, one filled with the ruins of a thriving community, a barely perceptible silhouette could be seen slinking out from what appeared to be a cryptic, abyss-like room in the wall of an alley of a long closed bakery, one with deep lacerations on the visible walls nearby, the only evidence of the chaotic and traumatic events that had befallen the bakery in past years. With all this in sight, a stocky, cloaked Nathaniel slipped out of the alley and stalked alongside a crumbling stone road, admiring and reminiscing on how the community looked bizarrely similar to his own, with the aspect of destruction and desolate streets exactly aligning with his own. Giggling to himself as he lightly trekked along his pleasant and meandering midnight walk, he gradually heard noises between two disgruntled men in a ruin ahead.

The deep and gravelly voice of a booze laden man pervaded the air as he asked, "do we have to kill her?"

"This ass," he said as a loud clap and distressed grunt rang out, "could get us booze for the next year if we sold it to the Coros gang."

To this question, a piercing sinister laugh could be heard ringing out in response before the same humored person spoke in a deadened, raspy voice to say, "and how would you propose that we keep our lives then?" Laughing, the man continued, "do you think they will pay us if we sell it to them? It'd be more likely that they slit our throats and rummage through our pockets before they pay us. We will simply **** her, kill her, and go about our business. Why are you having second thoughts now when we already came to this shithole?"

As if acquiescing with the man, the booze laden man spoke not a word in response and let the sound of silence simmer in its stead. Though as if fear could be smelled, an exuberant and unexpected danger had already set its vicious eyes on these two men.

On a cobblestone road's edge, walking one foot in front of the other as if walking on rope, Nathaniel lifted his head to the side, his nose barely protruding from the cloak, and smiled, showing off his sharp teeth and taut face to the silent audience of mice and crows before quickly retreating back into his frayed cloak.

As Nathaniel got closer to the sound of the two rowdy men, he became more and more like a rabid serpent in comparison to his already deranged and frigid demeanor. Still unable to see the men, he kept creeping closer until he heard the sound of clothes ripping. Nathaniel, pausing for a moment in his encroachment, heard a hollering noise of excitement before a violent slapping noise quickly made itself known. With this deafening noise in the perpetually eerie night, all other noises were drowned out. With this in mind, Nathaniel crept forward along the crushed cobblestone with a lightning pace, barely audible footsteps sounding out like the pitter patters of individual raindrops, before seeing the men next to a fire on the side of the broken cobblestone road. Immediately stopping, Nathaniel ducked behind a broken wall of a ruined workshop, its rotten wood floor creaking as Nathaniel glided across it. Luckily for Nathaniel, the hollering and exuberant struggle snuggle provided the perfect cover for Nathaniel's espionage. Peeking around a rotting wall, the silhouettes of the two men were perfectly displayed. One man, vigorous and full of strength as well as on a wooden board and shrouded in a blanket, was the actor in a violent sexual play with a pasty white woman beneath him, her muffled groans echoing out to even where Nathaniel stood tens of feet away. The other man was standing up and pacing, appearing to be a pallor faced man with a sharp nose, a curved back, and an intensely suspicious expression, as if he doubted the very ground he stood upon. His constant pacing and innately crooked body alluded both to that he was watching for possible danger and to that he was of a nefarious sort, perhaps even more so than his boorish friend . With these two in sight, a chilled breeze abruptly made Nathaniel give a muffled chuckle before looking up around him to assess the workshop. Above him, there was a hole in the rotten ceiling leading to the second floor, and to his right there was a cellar. Fearing the cellar, for there were mysterious things even he was wary of in this forgotten place, he stuck his icy fingers deep into the rotten wall in front of him and clambered up through the hole in the ceiling to reach the second floor. Looking for a window, he spotted one in an a room adjacent to the hallway he had clambered into. Sneaking over, he glanced over at the two men again. The crooked man was still as vigilant as ever, showing an uncharacteristic patience of someone who was waiting his turn to have sex, especially for someone who appeared to be of such a contorted nature. Lightly intrigued, Nathaniel pinned him as the one who had to go down first. As his gaze then spread out to the burly man rolling around on the ground, a slightly disdainful glint could be seen racing across his eyes. After watching for a few minutes, gnawing on the ambient rotting wood in anticipation, Nathaniel felt another chilling gust of wind blow at his back before grabbing onto the window sill and catapulting himself for tens of feet at lightning speed, aiming directly for the stooped and pacing man. Seemingly oblivious to the danger coming at lightning speed from above, the pacing man suddenly stopped before craning his head at the sky with an inhuman speed, his ink colored eyes staring directly at Nathaniel. As Nathaniel saw this, he felt an extreme sense of danger before disappearing. Back behind the window sill, Nathaniel's sleek figured could be seen with his hands on his head while writhing around on the floor. Quickly recovering, Nathaniel gave one last glance at the two men before creeping out of the room and out of a back window in the opposite direction of the men, scampering back to the bakery.

While all this happened, the two men could be seen in their original area with slight, jeering smiles as they continued about their business.