characteresque

character :: Kyle

A trip to Brazil was a vacation. A break from school, from family and from the expectations Kyle felt like he could never live up to, given how intelligent the rest of his family was. It was easy for them, he had always thought - a mathematical biology professor just outside of Mesa, a lab supervisor and, of course, Kyle's older sister, with the perfect GPA, a 4.0 genius. But that was alright with Kyle - he found ways to make school bearable like becoming the class clown and never pushing himself too hard, maybe even some soccer on the weekends. It showed with each grade he got but with his parent's focus on Vanessa, Kyle wasn't too worried.

As high school years faded fast and college was the next logical step, Kyle struggled to even find a school that would accept him, finally settling on the local community college as the urge of his parents. But even that became a struggle.

Kyle couldn't motivate himself, preferring to party his nights and sleep his days away until reality slapped him in the face with just a single letter: he was being kicked out of community college and would only be allowed to complete his current semester. Now the hard part: telling his parents.

But thankfully for Kyle, he never has to.

Right around the time that Kyle is preparing to tell his mom and dad that they raised a college dropout, Vanessa drops a bombshell of her own: she's been accepted to a program to study plants in Brazil - the perfect out for Kyle! He insists that it's not safe for her to go alone and that he had always wanted to travel to South America, convincing his parents that, should he get his paperwork in order in time, that he should go with her. And as luck would have it, that's exactly what happens. The two fly to Brazil and Kyle thinks he's leaving all of his worries behind...until he's not.

Within a couple of months in Brazil, Vanessa starts talking about the growth of the plants and how they're 'accelerant' or something that Kyle wasn't quite listening to. It only takes another few weeks for everyone to see how right Vanessa truly was. In what seems like the blink of an eye, Brazil's landscape is changing around Vanessa and Kyle, being overrun with deadly plants that infect their hosts with parasitic spores. It's these very spores that force Kyle to make the most difficult decision of his life: to save Vanessa's life following a severe infection, her legs and a few of her fingers would need to be amputated, a choice Kyle will never forget. It's at this time that Kyle realizes the severity of the situation they've found themselves in but what can Kyle do? He wasn't trained by the military, he isn't well read and smart like Vanessa - he can't even say more than a couple of words in Portuguese! But he can't just give up - so Kyle focuses on what Kyle does best: keeping morale alive through good humor. It's not much but someone's gotta do it, right?

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