Dabi's Epic Odyssey

The days seem to be getting hotter these days.

Dabi did not understand why, but he felt that the summer is not just hot, it was also cruelly dry, leaving him feeling thirsty and exhausted. He could see nothing but sand around him, so he thought that he might as well head for the tallest sand dune he could see in the distance.

He always had a thing for climbing up high places, along with setting things on fire. That's why his supervillain name is Dabi - after the Japanese word "daburu" which means "two", or simply "double", because of his ability to create flames from his two hands. His parents were among the first Japanese immigrants to settle in this desert city, but Dabi himself never really understood why they had moved here in the first place.

The city was in ruins, there was no water other than what little rain that fell every few months, and yet there were still people here who would hide their faces beneath masks and try to pretend that they were still living in some sort of civilization. They would go out stealing water from other towns and cities, sometimes attacking people and looting whatever meager possessions they had collected over the years. Some of them would even attack travellers on the road.

Dabi didn't know why they did that, because there was clearly nothing worth stealing anymore. It seemed like everything had been left behind by some great flood, or perhaps a war that everyone had forgotten about. There weren't any cars left running anymore, no electricity or phones that worked - although there were still some radios that miraculously still seemed to work properly - and barely any food to eat anymore.

In the beginning, when he first learned his powers of pyrokinesis, he would set things ablaze wherever he went, and in those early days he could always hear his mother sobbing at night while she tried to get him back inside their house again. Nowadays though, he just kept on walking until he reached the top of whichever sand dune was around him at that moment.

It wasn't long until Dabi reached one of those giant sand dunes which were once shaped like small hills by windstorms but now looked more like large mounds of gold or something from a fantasy novel. The sun was shining brightly above him though and made it hard for him to see anything else apart from its reflection on top of the golden sand dunes surrounding him everywhere.

"Ahh," he said upon reaching the top of this enormous sand dune / mound / hill / whatever you wanted to call it. Dabi collapsed down on his stomach onto its surface and stared at his own reflection in front of him while wiping off some sweat from his forehead with a sleeve of his shirt before letting out a loud sigh: "I guess I'd better get used to this heat."