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murmured, eyes huge with wonder, “I ain’t never seen a horse before.”
    “Me, neither,” assured Lance, to calm the boy. “Not before this one. Her name’s Llamrei. I’m Lance, and this is Arthur. What’s yer name, kid?”
    “Lavern,” the boy answered immediately, adding shyly, “Can I pet her?”
    “Of course,” replied Arthur. “Ye canst do more than pet her. Ye canst join our crusade.”
    Lavern turned his wide eyes from Arthur to Lance. “It’s cool,” Lance assured him. “Want to hear about it?”
    Lavern ceased petting Llamrei’s soft coat and nodded. So Lance told him. The boy soaked up every word and smiled broadly when Lance had finished.
    After leaving Lavern, Arthur and Lance rode on in this same fashion for several more hours before returning to Arthur’s “castle,” as Lance had dubbed it, to sleep.
    Lance chose not to go to school the next day so he could practice his swordplay and archery skills with Arthur. He enjoyed these times more than anything in his whole life. It wasn’t just the strength and power he was gaining with his growing expertise; it was Arthur, himself. Lance had never met anyone like him.
    Of course, if Arthur’s story about being from another time was true, there really hadn’t ever been anyone like him before. But it was more than that. He felt relaxed around Arthur, more than he’d ever felt around any grownup. Arthur was just… well… real.
    After resting that afternoon, he decided to show Arthur the pantheon of glitz, glamour, and sleaze in Los Angeles—Hollywood Boulevard. They set out that night in similar tunics and leather pants, and both sported a leather strap tied around the head to keep their hair in place. To the casual passerby, they likely appeared as father and son, despite Lance’s skin being of a browner shade than Arthur’s.
    Hollywood Boulevard, as always, teemed with nightlife, and it wasn’t even a weekend. Arthur walked alongside Lance, who rode his skateboard, and they navigated their way along the sidewalk against the press of bodies streaming in both directions, while the king’s eyes shifted rapidly from the endless sidewalk stars celebrating some celebrity, to the seething faces bobbing in and out of his field of vision from all sides.
    Whenever they came to a fire hydrant or other obstacle, Lance deftly ollied over it, much to Arthur’s enjoyment. He found much less enjoyment in the odd mix of people they passed on the street, from punkers and heavy metal rockers, to a large number of tattooed and facially pierced teens and younger kids hustling and bustling, likely homeless or runaways. But despite all these people slithering about, no one even glanced at their odd attire.
    “See,” Lance said, rolling up to Arthur and deftly flipping his board up and into his hand with ease, “I knew no one’d pay any attention to us here.”
    Arthur, nodded, appalled and fascinated at the same time. He gazed open-mouthed at the steady stream of honking cars, the eclectic variety of people, the flashing traffic lights, and blasting music from passing cars or open storefronts. He could never in his wildest nightmares have conjured such a world!
    The astounding progress of man on the one hand, and the astonishing degradation of human life on the other confounded him. How, he wondered, could humanity have come so far in its inventiveness, and yet place so little value on the human soul, on the human being in general? “Things” seemed in this world to be of much greater value than people.
    Suddenly, he stopped and pointed across the street. “What doth they be doing? It be similar to last night, and ye promised to explain.”
    Lance turned in the indicated direction. He saw a drug dealer selling a bag of something to a skinny blond boy with long, shaggy hair, who looked to be around fifteen, wearing dirty jeans and a wifebeater.
    “He’s a pusher, man, same as those guys we saw last night.”
    “A ‘pusher’?” Arthur repeated