“Aleku!” said Bowlby with astonishment, his eyes shifting nervously between the billionaire and the woman on his right, “she’s speaking to you.”

Aleku sighed heavily. “I am, by all intense purposes, the most famous individual who is alive today,” said he, once again removing his cigar from his mouth and enveloping the space in front of him with enormous rings of smoke.

“You smoke so much,” jested Bowlby.

“I have zero smoking damage. Zero.”

“I don’t mean that,” explained Bowlby quickly, sniffing incessently. “I just meant-”

“Aleku,” the dark-skinned woman said again, “come on, talk to me. Answer my question. What is ‘good’?”

“I’m a fast learner. Some people don’t know that about me. I’m a fast learner. I’m gonna join the Warriors. I’m gonna be a Warrior. If you’re inside the Warriors or you’re a Cleric, you’re going to always know a lot more about life and stuff. So the basic premise is: I’m gonna become a Warrior,” said Bowlby, red in the face from his wine. If anyone’s gonna watch this, they not gonna know what I’m saying because they ain’t a Warrior yet.”

“Then how do you even know what you are saying since you yourself are not a Warrior yet?” the woman said with inquisitive eyes. She had, beyond all that makeup and all that lavish dress, which left not much to the imagination, an intelligence behind her eyes which was striving to come out and dominate that which had hitherto been suppressing her all her life, starting with her misogynistic father. The eyes of the foreign woman were gigantic and brown. There was something majestically exotic about her, as if her nature was not of the same that was shared across the men. She had her legs always crossed, one over the other, the length of her silvery dress ending at one of her thighs – formally called a Schenti, but commonly called, at least in these circles, a split skirt.

“So, we are gonna be doing these emergency meetings here or what?” shouted Aleku, waving his Desert Eagle around. Everyone suddenly stopped speaking and looked at him. “Don’t make me pop a bullet up in here. You missed the fuck out. I can’t tell you how much fun the Warriors had in Dubai. That’s the most important thing you need to know. Today isn’t a proper show; today is just me messing around, showing off the women and the diamonds and gold. So, Antonio,” he screamed at the top of his lungs in a joyful manner, pointing to a compact, dark-skinned man, squeezed into a green hunting cap, with bloodshot eyes which had a weariness and a shiftiness about them which made one uncomfortable, and who had, at his name being called, lifted his head up with such speed and force that it was a wonder how it had not come flying off its base and landed on the other side of the room, “is everything ready?”

“Yes, sir,” stammered the engineer, his forehead dripping with sweat.

“We’re going to take the world by storm: we’ve built up a huge army of loyal and devout warriors – you,” he said, pointing to the crowd around him, who were glued to his words, “you are my disciples, my Warriors, my weapon against the phenomenal world.”

“Oh, you used the word I told you,” said the woman next to him with the dismissive wave of her hand, an air of condescension betrayed in her voice as she picked up the wine glass in front of her. “I suppose you’ve been reading Kant...” she mused as she took a sip.

Aleku stopped speaking instantly and stared straight ahead, pausing for what seemed to be a few minutes, but in reality was only thirty seconds; however, it felt to all the participants in that room to be much longer than it actually was. He finally let out a long and drawn-out sigh, his fingers groping the desert eagle.

“What in the world are you whittering on about Sophia?” asked Bowlby with an ugly, perplexed face. “You are dumb,” he spat, his voice muffled by the thick cigar in his mouth. “Fuck,” he coughed, and coughed again but louder and more grossly. He took it out and blew chunks of grey smoke onto the table like a man spewing what he had drunk last night at the bar, which then dispersed across it like a miniature tsunami, and said, “I hate those who talk too damn much. They think they’re all just so clever.”

“You can’t be rooted in reality, Bowlby, without thinking such things,” Aleku said with an exaggerated sigh.

“What is ‘reality’?” chimed Sophia, her shoulder-length hair was black and permed.

“Fuck off,” said Bowlby. “Can’t you tell no ‘un wants to talk to you,” he added. “You wonder why no one’s listening to you prov don’t come in here chatting and lying pretending you got smarts innit, pretending you read books innit. We’ve got the true smarts, we took them all with us, you lot,” he spat, pointing derogatorily and accusingly around the table at the women on the table, “you, you, you and you: if we took one of you, just like my ex, how you look at me when your man ain’t looking...believe me bro you don’t even want to know what your girl been up to while you’re away, man.” He again took out his cigar and blew a cloister of smoke in the face of the woman sitting across from him, accompanied by a smile of self-satisfaction. “There is no way on God’s green earth it ain’t true. So, why you pretending to be anything different, why you giving me the cold shoulder all the time? Why, but other men get like “I miss you baby” and other texts like “I miss, miss you baby” and lots of heart emojis. Please, why, who are you lying to? You sent me three Canadian dollars. That’s from the free nation of Canada. That’s all you got, $3. She left you and now you’re like her and took her back. She don’t want you back. And if she did, and if she were to come back to me and say I want to hug you and kiss you again you stinky little Bowlby I’ll be asking myself like – do I even have a choice, bro? She left me. That’s my answer to should you ever take your ex-girlfriend back. It’s such an annoying question to me, like there’s no context,” exclaimed Bowlby passionately, shaking his head.

“Let’s just start the podcast and get this shit over with,” said Aleku.

“What podcast,” said Sophia, rolling her eyes, “your guest has the case of brain-rot.”

All the women on the table erupted into laughter, and all the men darted their eyes sheepishly to Aleku immediately like clockwork.

Suddenly Rod, who was still standing in the doorway, and who had not yet been noticed by the party, and who had by then drifted off in daydream of that woman once again, for one of the women in that room reminded him suddenly of that woman his heart was still so enflamed by, heard that which made his heart turn from a constant tearing of sticky residue from its base to one of turbulence and rioting and longing for physical safety. An instinct toward his self-preservation overcame him all of a sudden, which led him, for a few dizzying moments, into the room and not out of it for some strange reason he had not the mind at that precise moment to justify rationally, where the white wispy smoke from the barrel of Aleku’s desert eagle came flooding in his direction, obscuring the man who had caused the mayhem. The room, however, was not at all how Rod would have thought such a room, for it was silent and not screaming like he was, flailing his arms as though he was the one on fire and not the barrel. He stumbled into the room more erratically than the man who had left earlier under the influence.

At that moment, while the speaker began to blare again the thumping sound of grime music, the room and its host began to clear up of its obscuring smoke which had so obfuscated it entire that it almost looked like a remote, misty village, due in part to the several accompanying cigars contributing to the thickness of the smoke. As the room became clearer and clearer, Aleku was seen by all to be dancing hilariously atop his chair, no doubt ironically.

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“I don’t play fortnite by the way, I swear,” he said, “so don’t ask me how I know the Default Dance move.”

Sophia patted down her dress, holding onto her glass of wine. “What in the fuck was that for?” she said, coughing, checking around her body that no wine had spilled on it. “I don’t know why I’m even here-”

“Maybe warn us next time before you discharge-” said one of the men next to Antonio.

“Shut the fuck up,” screamed Aleku, a chain dangling from his thick and muscular neck. “You are wearing a primark t-shirt for a second time running. I’m not gonna sit here in a tailored suit designed by Ermenegildo Zegna next to your cheap t-shirt that probably cost pennies to make in some slave-labour factory half-way across the world. Do you even know how many children there are who have been deprived of their childhood because you need cheap t-shirts?”

“But you own most of the companies that operate those factories!” exclaimed Antonio.

“And you’re half-naked!” replied Sophia exasperatedly.

“Gangsters, Warriors, men, I’m, I’m no longer wearing damn suits until I need to because clearly, I’m not appreciated even in my own damn home. If you’re not going to even bother getting dressed in my house and walk in here in a suit then I’m coming in whatever I’m wearing at the time, which most of the time is nothing. I’ll have my Gucci necklace on as well. I’m not going to make any effort for you to sit here and make me look like an idiot,” said Aleku passionately. “No, you have to wear a suit. No, no, no excuses, please.”

“So you’re saying that the boss man, the top G, for the last two minutes, was a liar on his own podcast? You’re saying for the last two minutes, this man who has given you a new life in this country from your war-torn country, this man who has set you up for life, who has given you all these nice things, a nice life, is lying to your face, is a bad man? You a joke. No one likes you,” said Bowlby in a rapid, haughty manner, leaning forward and jutting his fuzzy-bearded chin toward her.

Sophia scowled. “You are wrong, you simpleton; it is not he who has given me a new life in this country, but I, myself, who has worked harder than all of you to establish myself in this way, and I ask that you not demean my own reputation by daring to put in your filthy mouth my name, or the name of my employer. You are only here because of what you offer, but I am here because of who I am.”

“I’m number 1 on all streaming platforms,” retorted Bowlby.

“Oh,” said Sophia, “you are stupider than I thought. In my country we do not have this kind of, er, noise on our radio.”

“Your country is a bag of shit,” said Bowlby, scowling, and then he laughed at what he had said and looked around the table, and he laughed harder and harder until most of the table was at least chucking alongside him. “And if your country was so great why you move here?”

“Because my government is hopelessly corrupt; at least in England there is hope. Besides, let us return to the subject of your reason for being here. You are a grime artist, Bowlby, and are scarcely a musician – even that designation is an insult to real musicians – and are merely something that generates views and clicks. You, and everyone of similar intelligence, may think that I am more of an object than you in this enterprise. But really, I am less of a product than you are. Hm? You look confused. You poor unfortunate soul. Like I said, you are merely a bundle of clicks and views to confiscate. if you had gone to university and read books you would have learned these things. You put your labour into these objects, and you cease to be a human being anymore. You are just a bundle of clicks and views. So really, as yourself, who is the product here? Mhm? You infuse your labour into these objects designed for mass consumption, becoming a slave to not only the object but to the masses at large.”

Sophie, feeling hot in the face, turned to face straight ahead to the people on the other side of the table with her arms folded tightly in anger. Suddenly, she felt warmer on one side of her cheek than the other as though a hole was being burned into it from the side; then a quiet growling could be heard, which only grew louder the longer she tried to ignore the hideous boy she had just spoke so frankly with. For a moment, even, she was doubting as to whether she should have spoken up at all, for what she had said she knew would be taken like a knife in the heart of an ambitious boy with a poor relationship with his mother. If she was honest with herself, she did feel a tinge of guilt swim in her gut after what she had said, though she was in denial, or rather, she wished she did not feel such guilt, for guilt, in her view, was placed into her by her mean father: she left him along with her mother and her siblings. But she will get them back one day...one day.

Antonio followed Bowlby and Sophia’s bickering with his eyes until the latter turned back around; then, he looked back at the young rapper and perceived that he was on the verge of one of his notorious temper tantrums. Bowlby had been with them for the past couple of weeks, and the group had grown accustomed to, or at least, the ability to tolerate, the behaviour of the eighteen-year-old; he was now turning pale, and had begun to tremble, and, falling to his chair, started to hyperventilate, while Sophia inserted herself into the conversation of those on the other side of her.

“Yeah, I saw his face,” interrupted the man next to him, “I saw his face. He, he looks like one of our old customers back from the old webcam days. So, I mean, he naturally doesn’t like. It’s obviously he wouldn’t like the Warriors-”

“What are you on about?” said Antonio with a perplexed face.

“No one, I repeat, no one wants to be him,” the man continued. “Of course he ain’t gonna like me; he ain’t gonna like you or anybody here, pfff, except the chicks,” he chuckled.

“Huh?”

“Time to start the podcast,” Aleku began. “Hey, you!” he shouted at Antonio, “Go get us some more coffee. It’s time we start the podcast.”

“What are we doing with the others?” Antonio asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Pff, there’s like a hundred of boys in there from your seminar.”

“They still here?” said Aleku, sucking his cigar. He sighed, “Tell ‘em to get fucked frankly.”

Antonio returned a few minutes later without the coffee.

“Hey, what the fuck?” said Aleku, looking at the smaller man exasperatedly. “Where the fuck is the coffee? Can’t you follow a simple order? I’m 35, I train at home, I smoke, I drink, I love junk food. Now people assume I can’t possibly be as ripped as I am,” said Aleku, and he flexed his pectoral muscles quickly, making them jump and leap and dance to in a harmonious ripple. “It’s literally amazing how God being God’s favourite utterly bewilders the normies. I’m sorry I don’t need any additional measures, give up donuts and adhere to miserable meal plans and protein shakes. I don’t, I simply don’t have to do that. I am literally the superior specimen. Absolutely bow down to your overlord, right now,” continued Aleku. He then tensed all his bicep muscles in both of his arms and squeezed hard until his ab muscles popped through the thin layer of skin that was left which sat swimmingly atop them. “Go on,” he said breathlessly, “look and marvel at your superior. You don’t know me. You don’t know about me. I’m not gonna lie, I do train; in fact, I train every day, every morning for that fact. I train with the boys every morning, but I exclusively train at home. I’m definitely not going to go use a public gym and just spend all that time bodybuilding like some gym bro – I'm not a freak who only trains and doesn’t train his mind,” and Aleku tapped his shaved head as he said this, “I’m definitely not. Nope. You know what I’m not doing, I’m not cutting up carrots and spinach and putting it little plastic boxes filled with BPA. I dump that stuff in the waters, not in my body. Start the podcast before I start shooting again ‘cause I’m bored.”

Bowlby started barking at Sophia, his teeth frothing and his eyes bloodshot with rage. Aleku turned to look at him, and then looked at the rest of the table, who were staring at him, and he stood up, holding the eagle and pointing it to the ceiling, and said, "This, ladies and gentlemen, is Acromegaly, right here, is Acromegaly: Too much growth hormones in a young boy produces this,” and he gestured toward Bowlby, who was snapping his drooling jaws like a feral, infected dog, “if anyone doubted that such a thing can occur,” and then he finally looked at Sophia and narrowed his eyes, “...medical students who think that they know what those outside the phenomenal world understand...” and then back to the feral boy, “look at this boy. I mean he’s no giant of course, but he’s still bigger than fucking Antonio,” and he laughed, tilting is head back so that his enlarged nostrils almost swallowed the whole room. “Ant maybe it’s worth getting your levels checked,” he laughed even louder, snorting heavily, “This little boy is more manly than you Ant. How can you let this be allowed? You know, the gladiator pits should come back. We should bring the gladiator colosseums back, right guys? Let’s build a motherfucking colosseum in Manchester. Just bulldoze a huge swath of those scummy apartment complexes, level it out, make it more green again. I could do it. I’ll make a call to the government tomorrow.”

Suddenly Bowlby erupted from his seat and leaped onto the table. He crouched over like a goblin and barked madly at Sophia, who began to look increasingly terrified. She looked for help from Aleku, and then to the rest of the men and women at the table, and finally to Antonio, who dared not even look at her, but instead at his own hands, smiling to himself pathetically.