“Don’t get too disappointed if my mind doesn’t change.” I said, “And how did you become a part of the Vigilantes, anyway?”

  “We’ve got lots of time, and so I suppose I may as well tell you,” Zay said, “See, I grew up in a pretty nice home, and I was an only child and my parents were very careful with me.

  Unfortunately, people being careful doesn’t always mean that evil people won’t f things up for them, and one day my parents and I were driving home from the movies when I was 19 years old, and several cars surrounded our car and forced our car to come to a halt.

  I was naturally terrified, and some masked figures opened the car doors and pointed guns at us and said that we’d all be shot dead if any of us resisted at all.

  Then the masked people dragged my parents out of the car and then they took them into their cars and then drove off, and that’s the last that I’ve ever seen of my parents.

  I don’t know exactly why those mysterious masked people kidnapped my parents, and I have no idea who the f they even were.

  I called the police about what had happened, and some officers met with me and talked with me, but the police didn’t really manage to come up with any good leads and I couldn’t really blame them for not knowing anything since I didn’t know anything either.

  At that point I went to a private investigator just to find out if she’d discover anything that the police had missed, and after a few days of her investigating she knocked on the door of my abode and I said that she could come inside and the two of us sat down and talked.

  Before she began telling me about her investigating though she noted that I looked like hell, and I nodded and said that I hadn’t been sleeping well and kept on having nightmares when I did sleep.

  She sympathized with me and mentioned that it might not be a terrible idea for me to purchase some melatonin to help me fall asleep, and she said that other sleeping aids might be more effective but that if melatonin could do the trick then it would be better to use that than the stronger stuff.

  I told her that I’d keep that in mind, but I also noted that I’d prefer not to even take melatonin if I could help it, and then she noted that even just some chamomile tea might be helpful but that what I did was up to me, and then she began to tell me about how her investigating had been going.

  “I wasn’t able to find anything about who might have kidnapped your parents,” she said, “but I may have discovered a potential motive.

  See, your parents used to be vigilantes, and they weren’t just the more casual vigilantes because they would actually kill people who murdered innocent people.”

  “Wait!” I said in disbelief, “Are you kidding me right now??? And how did you even discover this???”

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  “I can’t reveal all of my sources,” the investigator said, “but I can show you plenty of proof that your parents actually were killer vigilantes.

  BUT they decided to stop being killer vigilantes after they realized that your Mom was pregnant with you, and so they traveled far away from where they’d been operating and they settled down in this city to escape from their old life so that they could raise you in peace and safety; and that worked for about

  2 decades, but then those masked people captured them and it seems very very likely that those masked people captured them because of the vigilante killing that they used to do.”

  I was naturally shocked and in disbelief when I heard this! I mean, the thought of my parents killing anybody (even if they were only killing those who had murdered innocent people!) was inconceivable to me!

  The investigator then got out some proof that my parents had been vigilante killers though, and after she’d shown me enough of it I was finally convinced that my parents truly had been vigilante killers before I’d come along and caused them to put an end to their vigilante killing.

  At that point I asked if maybe it would be easy to figure out who the kidnappers had been based on who my parents had killed, but the investigator just shook her head and said that my parents had killed so many different people from so many different groups and walks of life that there didn’t seem to be much of a way to narrow down the list very much.

  My parents had killed people from lots of different gangs, they’d killed people who had been just murdering on there own, and they’d even killed people who’d been murderous police officers!

  This meant that the people who kidnapped them could’ve been rogue law enforcement agents, they could’ve been from one of the many gangs my parents had stoked the wrath of, and they could’ve been just folks who were associated with one of the people who’d been murdering on their own that my parents had killed!

  I thanked the investigator for the information and said that I’d be happy to pay her a lot more money if she could ever figure out who the most likely suspects might be, and then we parted ways and she’s never really given me any more new information after that day.”

  “Hmmm…” I said, since Zay was pausing a bit for a minute, “And so how exactly is knowing that your parents made a bunch of enemies and couldn’t flee far enough to escape from them supposed to convince me to become a vigilante killer like they were?

  I mean, the moral of this story seems to be that the last thing that I should ever want to do is to be a vigilante killer!

  Is there something I’m missing?

  Am I supposed to become convinced that the vigilante killing is so noble that it’s worth making enemies who are impossible to ever escape from?”

  “That was only the beginning of my road to becoming a vigilante killer,” Zay said, “and so maybe ya might wanna wait until I tell you about how things went after that before you begin talking about what the moral of the story is.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, “though I doubt that you telling me more about what happened is going to change much about the moral of the story from my perspective. I mean, you lost your parents and still haven’t found them again all because they’d been doing a bunch of vigilante killer stuff before they’d had you. The moral of their story seems pretty clear.”

  “You’re free to take whatever morals you want to take from what happened,” Zay said, “but I do think that what you’re focusing on now won’t be the headline in your mind anymore once I tell you more about what happened.”

  “We shall see…” I said, “And I’m all ears whenever you might want to tell me about what happened next…”