The whites in South Africa had nearly been exterminated following the war. As he looked and sounded the part, he was able to pass himself off as Indian. He managed to eke out a living there for several years until he could get a job on a ship heading for Indonesia. The Indonesian archipelago had not been as severely damaged by the nuclear war as more important island groups but lacked the industrial infrastructure to maintain civilization.

Fortunately, there was little racial discrimination in Indonesia. He was able to find work on first one island until his lack of visible aging became a problem and then another. Andrew wasn’t sure how long he spent in Indonesia, but it was several centuries, apparently. He married at least three times and had several children who were still there, Andrew assumed.

Eventually, as civilization recovered, it became harder for him to hide his existence, and he moved on. He moved first to Tonga, which, while virtually untouched by the war, had suffered from the breakdown of modern civilization. This was followed by Caledonia and then Nuzeeland, at first on the North Island, and then later he moved to the South Island.

Finally, he was forced to move again and headed for Ostraya. Now he was truly starting to age. He settled in Ballina and met Isabel McHenry, whom he genuinely fell in love with as far as the accounts that were handed down seemed to think. Unfortunately, they only managed to have one child, Andrew’s mother, Cheryl. Andrew still had vague memories of his grandfather from when he was young, but they were only faint.

What it meant was that Andrew had full-blown tellies on both sides of his ancestry. Exactly what that meant for him, he wasn’t sure, but he was pretty certain he could set off fires in his near vicinity when he got angry. He’d managed to avoid losing his temper when being bullied on several occasions, but when he was alone in hiding down the back of the park, he had caused several fires to start simply from the anger he felt. Fortunately, he’d managed to put them all out before they became a serious threat or anyone noticed them, but it had scared the hell out of even the first time he’d done it.

With practice, he found he could cause a bunch of dry leaves to burst into flame with a bit of concentration. Next, he had worked on getting twigs to catch alight as well, and these days could make a big lump of firewood catch alight without too much effort. He found that by thinking hard and pushing out his arm in a stop motion, he could project a force in the direction his arm pointed. He’d discovered this by accident when a large dog had rushed at him three months ago. His action of self-preservation had pushed the dog back about three meters and scared it so much it had run away.