Things change so fast these days, Sebastian mused as he packed his knapsack with traveling clothing. He looked around at his small monastery room one last time to see if there was anything he had forgotten. Possessions were not especially important to him, and aside from his flute he didn’t carry anything other than clothing when he traveled.

He got halfway across the grounds of the monastery before realizing that there was still something important that he needed before leaving Siam. Passport. He returned to his room and dug the document out of the envelope in which it had arrived. Honestly, there never used to be such a hubbub about traveling. Stupid things expire every ten years. And I thought the Romans liked red tape.

As he walked along the road leading away from the monastery, he admired the beautiful scenery of rice patties and jungle. Sebastian mused that a person could spend a lifetime here and never grow sick of the scenery. Or several lifetimes, he joked to himself.

His current visit to Siam had been shorter than any of his previous visits, only about 11 years. It had been just long enough for his passport to expire. Again. He had been attempting to learn the art of Thai boxing, not because he wanted to fight anyone, but because the moves could be so beautiful and graceful when executed properly. Unfortunately he had only had time to get the basics learned. The grace that came with mastery had yet to be perfected. It irked Sebastian to leave such a thing unfinished, but he had more important things to take care of.

He had been following the news, as he always did, and read that the United States of America had passed a mutant registration law. It was a bed situation all around. Sebastian could remember other situations where minorities had to be registered. It never turned out well for the minorities. Two infamous names came to mind. Herod and Hitler. Sometimes it seemed that names that started with the an H sound had an affinity with the slaughter of innocents. Sebastian was not at all surprised when he heard only days later that the US had also built concentration camps to control mutants who were dangerous to society.

Sebastian had snorted, in a very horsey way, when he had read that. It meant the camp or camps, the paper hadn’t been clear on which, had already been built before the law had even been passed. Which meant someone had been very sure that the law would pass.

The United States was one of the world leaders, and if they decided to do something like this, it was probably only a matter of time before other countries followed in the wake. The government of Siam… Thailand, Sebastian reminded himself of the new name… had been considering something similar, until certain leaders had been assassinated unexpectedly and the idea lost support.

Unless a more peaceful resolution was found, it probably wouldn’t be long until someone tried something similar in the US. There was a certain individual, who had been making headlines for years, that was likely to be in the US currently and would be a prime suspect for that sort of thing. With all the recent mutant activity in that country, any one of the more violent ones could attempt assassination. No matter how strong the suspicions were, there was no need to go suspecting someone who might very well be innocent. Right. Innocent. Ha.

The trouble with traveling is that it takes a lot of time, especially when you don’t trust scraps of metal the hurl people across oceans at hundreds of miles per hour. And when you get seasick. That was the reason Sebastian had never been to the New World. He had been all over Europe, Asia, and everywhere in between, but no matter how curious he was to see the New World, he hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to go there. He kept telling himself that he hadn’t fully explored the two continents he had already seen, but in reality he disliked the feeling of not having solid ground beneath his feet.

Without flying, the trip would take considerably longer. His preferred method of travel would be to use his own four feet, but since things moved so quickly these days, Sebastian had figured he should probably find a slightly faster way of traveling. He ended up taking a combination of trains and buses up through the Middle Kingdom to the Yamchutka peninsula, spending a miserable amount of time on a boat across the Bering Strait, buying a car in Alaska and then finishing off the trip with a few days of driving through a country that doesn’t officially exist on MRO. Alaska and the non-existent country that separated it from the rest of the United States were beautiful. Cold, but beautiful. They were covered in glittering white snow that made the world look fresh and clean. White was a good color.

Luckily there weren’t any big highway closing snowstorms, but Sebastian wished the weather could have been a little warmer. He was used to the constant warmth of the jungle and hadn’t been this cold in years. The little car’s heater was blasting the whole way. For once he was glad to be in a car rather than making the trek on foot. His winter coat wasn’t warm enough for these kinds of climates. On the bright side, he’d never seen the aurora borealis look so clear before.

Continued in Unicorn in New York