TO THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION

He hadn't made the most of his time in Hanoi. But something was telling him to start up the blog again, and so here it was. Once the book Terror in Australia was finished, he hadn't known what to do with himself, or quite why he was in Vietnam. Part of him had never expected to return; that he would fall promptly on his feet, find some job, a glorious house by the river; and never return.

But he was no networker, and so instead of making himself known, he had done everything he could to be invisible, contained within a single square block, abandoning even walks to the park; just going around and around, sleeping, despite his natural claustrophobia, in crowded dorms to avoid the marauding empaths, doing everything he could to suppress his natural abilities, to avoid detection. His kind had been hunted to the edge of extinction, not only on this planet, and he wasn't going to be found by anyone, no professional, military trained operatives, no one. He didn't care how mad such thoughts might make him appear.

"He would have been welcome," a voice said; and he promptly replied: "I didn't know who to trust."

The only image, the only shout out loud statement he had wanted to make at the time, was that before this species was even born, in a world of dinosaurs, they had survived as the tiniest of mammals; and that had required a high degree of avoidance.

They could laugh at him now. He didn't care.

And so instead of doing what was expected of him, what, perhaps, he should have done, he just became invisible. Glanced across rooftops; and could not take in what was happening inside the houses. It was the language for a start. Vietnamese bore little relationship to other languages that he either knew or had some familiarity with; and their way of thinking, at least in the North, was very different to what he was accustomed to.

And so he did what many people did in their own lives; found little snail tracks through a city, familiar pool tables, familiar situations. He didn't eat for several days; and the loss of his own place in the world, the loss of his home or what had passed for a home, despite the over-surveillance, meant that once again he was on the roam, disheveled, upset, angry at the fact that he had been so closely tail-gaited it amounted to bullying. Nothing was going to stop him. And nothing did. He did not respond well to bullying. He had not acquired the resistance he should have.

But there was no use crying about it not being fair, because it would never be fair. None of it mattered now. Everything was an evasion. There would be a new recourse, or no recourse, and that was simply that. Time passed all too quickly in such frail frames; and the next one was not yet ready.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/typhoon-koppu-makes-landfall-in-the-philippines/6863662

Typhoon Koppu has slammed into the main Philippines island of Luzon, killing at least one person and displacing more than 23,000 people, disaster agency officials say.

Key points

• Typhoon Koppu strikes the Philippines killing at least one person and displacing 23,000 people
• At least eight people have been reported missing as several villages are flooded
• Koppu is moving slowly and is expected to linger over the island for three days

The category-four typhoon made landfall around 1:00am (4:00am AEDT) on Sunday near the town of Casiguran in Aurora province, where it remained near-stationary for seven hours and whipped the area with gusts of up to 210 kilometres per hour.

A teenager was crushed to death as the powerful typhoon tore down trees and houses and unleashed landslides and floods across a wide area of the Philippines, injuring at least four others.

At least eight people have been reported missing and rescue operations are underway in the rice-farming province of Nueva Ecija where rivers burst their banks and flooded several villages, regional authorities said.