As people stopped chatting and looked up at him, the silence grew profound. “Today I’ve been thinking a lot about us,” he said. “You and I are here in this place for a common purpose. We got here in different ways, on different paths, and this is by no means our final destination. We have spent a couple of years here learning about the world and our places in it. One day each of us will look around and say, ‘I’ve learned about all I can in this place,’ or maybe, ‘I’d like to stay and keep learning, but I can’t. I’m being called elsewhere.’ And we’ll know it’s time to move on, so we will.

“For this time, we’ve taken ourselves out of the chaotic, pointless, competitive, stupid society we were born into, mostly because it had become impure and corrupted by newcomers and inferiors and their helpers and apologists. We had enough of the fake political system and the rule of degenerates and hypocrites. So we kicked ourselves out. We became outcasts.

“In order to do that, we’ve had to learn to protect ourselves and each other. We learned to fight, to cut a throat, to shoot. We learned that when they expect you to give in is the time to dig in. We’ve also learned that sometimes the way to win is to make them think you’re retreating. We learned to disperse and disappear, to become indistinguishable from our surroundings, to live in the enormous forests of this continent or to be in plain sight in the most crowded cities, and then come together again when it’s safe.

“That brings us to now. Tonight, we have five guests.” He pointed at the five, who were sitting in a row at the back of the tent. “They came to see me, and they brought with them a problem. It’s my problem too, so the six of us are going off to solve it together.”

He looked around him at his audience. Most were on the folding chairs, and others stood around the walls of the tent, their arms folded in front of them. Many of them wore pistols in holsters. “I’ll thank you for not worrying, or saying that you hope what I’m doing isn’t dangerous. Whenever I go out in the world, whether it involves violence or not isn’t up to me. It’s up to them. I’m seldom looking for trouble these days. The time isn’t right yet. But I’m always ready for it.