Canberra, Australia, a university lecture hall.
For a small private audience, a movie scene was being played of two youngsters in love galloping on a horse through rustic farmland bordering the Australian outback circa early 1912. From the chirping of the extinct birds to the past sun's dimmer rays drawing sweat from the lovers' brows, the footage had an exact, true-to-life fidelity.
The university's chancellor had been proudly commentating. "Except for the actors, it's 100% procedurally-generated. Captured entirely within a virtual simulation, same technology used by Saanatek's videogame division, compiled from archival imagery, maps, and other materials corresponding to the era. Quick to produce, a fraction of the cost of conventional CGI. Best of all, the sensory immersion adds a whole new level of authenticity to the performances. You can confirm for yourself. This handsome farmboy - he's a second year in our theatre department, can't act at all, worst Hamlet you'd ever see. Here, flawless. The script was also written by our students, a winning submission composed by a team of grads from the history, film, and what, next year, will be your litera—everything alright?"
"Sorry!" A young man in the audience apologised as he apprehended a toddler broken loose and running through the aisle. "Little Larry, you rascal! Sorry!"
Henry, not wanting to draw further attention with a return journey, took the nearest seat.
As luck would have it, this decision happened to place him next to the patrician beauty who'd been located inconveniently on the opposite end of the row.
Tour I - Andante
He, beginning the redemption arc for his moral character, slipped Little Liu a juice-box bribe while whispering in fake exasperation to the patrician beauty. "Kids, am I right?"
The young woman stared fixedly at the screen, unwavering as a tight-rope walker. "Mm."
"You into this historical romance stuff?"
"Mm."
"Yeah, I prefer my love stories to be more modern."
The young woman pointed at the chancellor. "Talking."
"Right. The virtual production's pretty swanky, isn't it?"
"Mm."
"Very authentic. Still, they seem to have missed one critical detail. Here."
Henry made a small play.
Fresh Popcorn
The young woman, into the periphery of her vision locked firmly head, caught the encroachment of a rectangular box.
A popcorn box.
"Go on," Henry coaxed. "Take some."
Unbeknownst to him, this rather innocuous offering immediately stirred up suspicions on the other side.
The young woman's frowning head conjured several questions.
Where had he gotten popcorn from?
Why was the popcorn fresh? They were not in a movie theatre.
For what possible reason would this pretentious guy ever share popcorn?
Without any satisfactory answers, she found herself unable to convince any of her muscles to participate in accepting the offer. Every cell in her body, independently, had sensed whatever danger, test, trap, poison had been planted in the box. She decided to pretend not to have heard him or to have noticed the offered snack, which, through vigilance, she'd managed to avoid looking at directly.
Once he'd gotten the clue of her rejection, he should withdraw.
This, however, was a staggering overestimation of Henry's social IQ.
To the young woman's dismay, the popcorn box, moving once again, but not away, rose centimetre by centimetre towards the centre of her eyesight, each second of its climb heightening the absurdity of her pretending not to see it. Before she knew it, the natural timing window in which she could have simply refused outright without triggering alarms had expired, yet the popcorn, still, continued to climb. When it finally did stop its invasion, this was only due to it having pierced fully into the heart of her vision, obstructing the entire movie screen.
Then, as if to deliver a closing, humiliating execution, the box swivelled around, rotating to emphasise a side emblazoned with bold red letters.
'Popcorn'.
Oh, the young woman realised, her embarrassment draining into two emotional outlets, relief at this ordeal being over, anger that he'd te—
"It's 'popcorn'," Henry whispered in clarification, "a common snack to accompany the film-watching experience. Don't worry. It's free and non-poisonous."
The young woman frowned deeper.
Why did he just explain the concept of popcorn?
In-game, The Slums, The New Suchi Arena at night, a towering wall of light shining amongst the endless sprawl of unlit shacks.
The patrols of guards in ash-grey uniform along the site's perimeter had been quadrupled. This increased military presence, however, sparked little curiosity from the venue's trainees, whose sights were solely tracking the spearpoints and vitals of their 1v1 adversaries.
London Tremor, intern for Channel 5 News, was performing a ritual to revive his wolf companion slain in a duel.
Walking the perimeter of a circle, he gestured through a series of spell constellations. The completion of each caused a cloud of magical energy to be absorbed by his fingers. This energy, travelling along the highway of his arteries, passed through his heart into his moving feet, which ejected it into one glowing footprint after another. As he finished the full circle, a runic formation blazed into life around him like a city viewed from a distance at night.
In the centre of the formation stood a cup-sized effigy shaped like a wolf and carved from the bone of the same creature. Approaching this, London stooped towards the effigy, placed one hand on its chest, and his other over his own.
Awooo! A familiar howl echoed inside of him.
The soul-motes of his animal companion, stored inside of the chambers of his heart, slowly channelled from him to the effigy, which began to swell, reshape, and sprout a coat of greyish fur.
But London Tremor had performed the revival ritual hundreds of times now. Working through the motions, he'd been focused instead on the arenas around him, where Suchi's hopefuls were butchering each other.
A newcomer to this stadium would detect no peculiarities - beyond the venue's opulent size. But anyone like himself, who'd spent the past week totally immersed in this zone's strange duelling scene, would notice the anomalies, the signs, the tantalising changes.
In the expressions of the sweatiest trainees, a conviviality from their joint struggle to prepare for the recruitment tournament had been tainted by a strain of selfish, rivalrous animosity. They wrestled with extra aggression, they collected constellations faster, they thrust their daggers deeper. The banter between bouts had become clipped, replaced by sober exchanges of feedback and contemplative silences. And every now and then, a glance would be snuck in the direction of the private, hired arena of a certain mysterious teen.
A pinned notice from HF announced that his regular 'martial art invention' schedule had been disrupted. Why? Who could guess? But while he was logged off, the nine slots in his arena had been opened up in a king of the hill arrangement whereby control of a sub-map would be retained until the owner lost a best of 3.
Curiously, these spots, and those in the bordering arenas, were all being squatted over by the zone's highest-ranked players. Many of these squatters, curiously, were first-timers in these hours, situated as they'd been in conflicting timezones. However, London supposed, much as the world's oceans bulge towards whichever side of the globe faces the moon, these newcomers had been heaved here by the gravitational pull of a newly-forming celestial object.
Between today and yesterday, there'd been a quiet but monumental change.
Those gathered here, like himself, were the select few who'd noticed.
In their minds lingered the previous evening's tournament, The Pain on The Plains, the cat-and-mouse comedy routine between HF and Artemis in the monster maze. Those who hadn't attended the finale had since caught its recordings, and, right now, amongst the duellists queuing around him for their next round, some were still watching the match, studying, dissecting, remembering.
For the rest of The Slums, that duel had been unable to form a lasting memory. Much of its magic had been stripped away by the assumption of collusion between the finalists, Artemis being paid in the secrecy of that pit to take the final knee and refusing to exonerate herself. Then, Ramiro popped up at The Grand Hunt, Karnon awakened a Doomreaver, and a whirlwind battle between The Trickster God and Suchi's guardian obliterated Lake Hotferver. These subsequent events had caused most in The Slums to forget the duel, and what was forgotten by The Slums was forgotten by all.
All except those in the strange world of this stadium. This place had become an island apart, where false idols of saviours and Gods were swept aside for the sole religion of the arena. Here, amongst the anointed, the memory of that match, rather than fading, had been made bolder, more vibrant by the reinforcement of other memories of prior duels.
Between the bumblings of HF's flight, the trainees here remembered snippets of manoeuvres from the dozens of arts he'd demonstrated this past week. In Artemis's dogged pursuit of him, they remembered the unremembered: the personas that weren't the man-hating Grecian girl, the radically different martial arts that weren't the ferocious spear-bow swapping techniques she'd used to pierce their wretched hearts.
For the majority of this stadium's community remembering the evening's match, Artemis had been the dominant focus. She'd killed SaNguiNe of The Silent Three, the tournament favourite. Despite the loss to HF, she'd carried out the far more aggressive role in their match, being the predator to the yappy prey who, as he had in the prior rounds, zoomed away while trash-talking and letting the monsters do the damage until, once forced into a pit with her, he paid her to forfeit.
That was the story for those who remembered some but not all.
Then, for those trainees here at the very, very highest level, who'd had the opportunity to spar with the mysterious teen personally, they remembered in his comedic flight similar strange patterns that'd been used against themselves. These patterns hadn't previously drawn too much attention, their effectiveness seeming debatable as HF stagnated at the bottom of the top hundred players - great but not great. In last night's match, however, those same patterns had manifested with far more prominence, no longer constrained by the 50 by 50-metre standardised maps of this place, nor the teen's rigidity of training one style at a time.
These select few of the select few remembered the comedy itself. They remembered that his constant absurd claims to be inventing a myriad of martial arts sat upon a still astounding reality: he had, undeniably, learnt many, many styles. Might not, therefore, the 'lies' of last night's trash-talk have a similar quality, being only half untrue?
What if HF, 'The Oracle', had been peering into the future? What if he had been manipulating his foe through kung-fu? What if he had stomped Artemis down in that pit?
To the degree that one entertained these possibilities, the hilarious cat-and-mouse chase underwent a drastic metamorphosis. At the extreme end, if every exchange between them had been a purposeful action, concocted, plotted, and executed, then what the audience had witnessed had, in fact, been the greatest duel ever.
Ever.
Forget the bouts in this backwater zone, London Tremor had encountered nothing resembling this on any stage, amateur or pro. Duels weren't this spectacular. They began with either a slow, tedious exchange of cooldowns from afar or one party pursuing the other, and once the duellists entwined, the victor would usually be decided within seconds. Even the finales at The Company's grand tournaments weren't, after the removal of the pageantry and storylines of rivalries, much longer or prettier than street muggings. One disengagement was an uncommon occurrence, happening typically between contestants with similar talents when neither was willing to commit. Multiple disengagements and re-engagements, as had taken place in HF and Artemis's chase, spread out over several minutes, at diverse sub-zones each fielding a unique combination of tactics – Saana's 1v1s had none of this. There were no distinctive phases or developments. No one delicately wove three disparate styles together to distract and guide the opponent into a panther mauling. No one sling-shotted themselves with tornados to snatch up planks to bash the opponent to stun them into being bitten by a snake. No one aerialed off of mongooses while aiming earth golem spears to blow up defensive terrain structures to drop their opponent to their demise. Each of these multi-step plays, individually, would qualify for a highlight of the week or month in Saana League, the product of skill, daring, and a heap of luck. To have all been condensed, reliably, intentionally, into one duel, luck could no longer be a factor – there could only be skill, an immeasurable amount of skill.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The destruction of the pillar was especially confounding when interpreted as an act of volition. Its component steps, if planned, were dizzying in their difficulty. The timing to trigger the golem's
This, in a random Tier-0 tournament where the contestants were confined to the use of the default Basic Attack, had been the greatest duel ever.
By the greatest duellist ever.
If London was correct, they were witnessing the creation, or rather the showy unveiling, of a fundamentally new species of duellist. This mysterious teen, if they were a teen at all, had refined the 1v1 to an unparalleled extent, had graduated to a class of combatant that, so far, included no examples but himself - not even this other multi-stylist, 'Artemis', whom he'd toyed with as he'd toyed with the crowd.
A clamorous applause roared from HF's arena, hundreds of hands clapping in unison.
London checked if the teen had logged on, but the cheers were from a crowd observing a match.
In The Graveyard of The Gods sub-map, an Earthfriend, Cap Tim Slim, the zone's rank 30, had been duelling the Miracleworker SaNguiNe. The former, in Silverback form, was slumped against a god-statue, his beast body seizuring and his perforated eyeball spritzing red juice over the Miracleworker who'd an instant earlier poked a dagger through it into his brain.
SaNguiNe, true to his name, showed no signs of embarrassment at last night's humiliation. A hundred thousand had witnessed his raw romantic anguish at finding out Artemis was a dude, witnessed his pathetic misery while being gored by a rhino. However, like a monk who's purged their weaknesses through an episode of torturous self-flagellation, he'd arrived today with more determination than ever, his panther-black eyes steady and focused. Stepping aside for a medic, the Miracleworker signalled for his next challenger to ready up. In the meantime, SaNguiNe replenished his Stamina while another Earthfriend helped him review footage of the duel, the pair conversing wordlessly through private message.
This second Earthfriend was equally intriguing. A no-name with an abysmal 1v1-rating whose first appearance had been today, he'd nevertheless been shown a great deal of deference by the top trainees. London suspected from his familiarity with SaNguiNe that he was not a duellist at all. Lacking any martial talent himself, he was likely a 6v6 commander, a Japanese player, Yusuke Akihiro III or Y-A-III, whose team, which included the Miracleworker, had been the 4th best in the zone. Curiously, not only had this commander started a new character, he'd additionally swapped class from a Fighter to an Earthfriend, and he'd been practising an HF-esque style of combat with, although no multi-stylism, an emphasis on prolonged, strategical time-victories over one-combo wins. Was Y-A-III helping his teammate devise specific counters for the mysterious teen? Or was he, much more scandalously, a convert?
These were but two who'd been captured in HF's orbital field.
Today, London had failed repeatedly to interview the top players. He'd hoped to, if not pry their deeper combat insights into HF, to at least capture a snapshot of this odd moment. Alas, most had been tight-lipped, walling themselves off when previously they'd been happy to chat with the undercover journalist.
One could devise many reasons for this adopted silence, fear at being caught gossiping about one of The Company's members, reluctance to be proved wrong by projecting too much agency and logic onto the teen's almost mythical feats. London felt, however, that the main motive was nothing but selfishness. Like himself, these trainees wanted to keep the secret from spreading yet. They—as he had when he'd first re-focused his investigations onto the teen—had sensed that this 'HF', this 'Oracle', was the locus for a seismic shift to come. He and his ever-expanding catalogue of styles formed the epicentre from which 'Artemis' and this monstrosity of a stadium were both but mere emanations, mere foreshocks proceeding a continent-splitting cataclysm.
At no moment had any of this been clearer than when that stone spear had collided with the pillar. When that structure, so tall and seemingly robust, had been made to shatter and fall, all those paying true witness had caught a glimpse of the fragile edifice which the pillar'd been holding up. The final support was being removed; soon, there would be a monumental descent. In the new paradigm being ushered in by this teen, those quicker to follow, those who adapted first to the evolving landscape, these the chosen would have an opportunity to soar to never-dreamed-of heights of glory. The rest who missed it, who were too lazy, who were unfit, who like the arrogant Greek Goddess assumed falsely that their current position above was unassailable, these the unbelievers would be cast down to the arena floor.
London Tremor, when the revival ritual finished, spent a minute soothing his Grey Wolf Scotia, stroking the spook of its temporary death out of its fur. While comforting the beast, he received an irritating message.
-Oliver Spears: London lad, you're up. Get out of the sandpit, clean off your overalls, and migrate to The Duchy of Italy.
You have been invited to The Channel 5 Pighunting Enthusiasts Club.
The intern groaned. "This wanker again…"
Oliver had reappeared from wherever he'd been the past days and placed the whole Suchi branch on shifts patrolling the streets, steering them around as puppets in search of something. For what, he'd refused to divulge - London supposed a fat criminal from the group title or a corrupt cop.
London Tremor had begged for an exemption to cover the much more important news of HF. However, due to his unwillingness to share too much in case Oliver or the higher-ups stole the story from him, he'd been denied. Such was the plight of a lowly intern.
"LT, cuz, you up for round three?"
The intern glanced at a spear-wielding Arcanist in the adjacent arena who'd killed his Grey Wolf, the message to leave hovering over them.
London had half a mind to disregard the order. Really, Oliver would be in no position to complain, himself being an inveterate rule-breaker when chasing his stories. Look at his recent relocation to Suchi: everyone in Channel 5 knew it was a demotion for hijacking the interview with The Tyrant, a muzzle for the hound who'd barked too loud.
London actually admired that quality most of all in old Ollie. He didn't care for him as a human being, but he admired this crazed drive to hunt his enemies without consideration for anything else - not for public perception, journalistic ethics, the future of his own career. There'd been courage and nobility in the downfall of his new boss.
His new boss...
After a brief hesitation, the intern tsked his tongue in defeat. "No can do, mate. I'm off."
Invitation to The Channel 5 Pighunting Enthusiasts Club accepted.
-KyleLambert2020: …so I told her, 'No, madam, not even I if were reborn as a seagull and you a crisp.'
-d-double the s-shuffle: Dumb slag.
-Natalya's Vengeance: lol
-asdifuhsdo: Serves her right.
"Already?" said the Arcanist talking to London in person, asking as one does of a companion leaving a dope orgy before anyone's undressed.
"Duty calls," said the intern.
He was not Oliver Spears.
Giving a salute of farewell, he made his departure, his Grey Wolf trotting along in relief behind him.
At the stadium's exit gate, he stopped to survey the full vista of the thousands of ambitious young combatants honing their solitary craft, the private corner where the chosen, dedicated few converged and waited for the return of the most dedicated among them all.
London Tremor was not an Oliver Spears or an HF. He was not one of these headstrong types venturing confidently alone into the unknown, these avatars of the singular, undistracted will, bulldozering all obstacles between them and their goals, these takers of impossible long shots at the seemingly indestructible. He wasn't in this class.
His gaze flashed with balance-scale-shaped Peopleworker energy. His new boss Oliver, having infiltrated his POV, commandeered his eyeballs to inspect the world.
-Oliver Spears: What a monstrosity. Have you figured out the bankroller?
HF, thought London, obviously.
-London Tremor: Not yet.
He wasn't in their class yet, but he could try.
-Oliver Spears: Well, dig deeper, lad. I'm sure there's a decent article buried in this corner of the trash-heap, too.
-London Tremor: Was that permission to skip the shift?
-Oliver Spears: No.
Canberra, Australia, a university lecture hall.
Henry, an avatar of the singular, undistracted will, continued to hover his popcorn box in front of the patrician beauty, wondering why she didn't recognise it even after he displayed the label.
Was she a dimwit? Was she not really a patrician? Had he accidentally been seduced by a retard?
Wait, he had a sudden epiphany.
This...there happened to be one special circumstance under which such ignorance could realistically manifest in their class. For those who committed hard enough to the climb, it was possible to focus so much that you passed blindly by what others would presume part of the inventory of ordinary human experiences. Take himself, for example, fumbling blindly through this labyrinth of love. Again and again, he, who'd lacked the luxury to participate in ordinary teenage romantic whimsies, missed the most obvious turn-offs.
Ignorance could, on rare occasions, be an indication of profound genius.
To be ignorant of popcorn…this marked a terrifying level of discipline and devotion.
This theory would also explain the beauty's communication difficulties, conversational skills, too, being neglected on the slopes.
"It's 'popcorn'," he clarified to this potential uber-giga-hyper-patrician beauty, "a common snack to accompany the film-watching experience. Don't worry. It's free and non-poisonous."
He watched as the beauty frowned in perplexity, giving the concept of popcorn a prolonged cerebral palpitation.
"Pop," mumbled the young woman, figuring out his rationale, dying inside as she played along, "corn?"
At least she would now have a more robust excuse for struggling to talk than being starstruck after sampling 13 pages of his unreadable prose - preposterous.
"Popcorn," Henry nodded in amazement. "Take some."
Holding his breath, he encouraged the patrician beauty on as she, like a Homo erectus approaching its first encountered bonfire, nervously reached for the box.
The young woman seized a single flake, inspected it, bit half with caution, chewed, evaluated, and smiled in pleasant surprise. "Mm."
"Fun fact: you can eat popcorn in handfuls." Henry demonstrated the more efficient method of consumption.
The young woman, dying further, imitated the instruction. "Mm."
Henry, this being the slow-tempo opener of his redemption arc, backed away to not overdo things and savour the W.
Wow.
The popcorn play had simply been intended to sow the impressions of sociability via his willingness to share and hint at a mysterious resourcefulness via his procurement of the snack without any nearby concession stalls. In a remarkable twist of fortune, however, this minor move had been upgraded to the far superior impartation of a horizon-expanding experience: gifting the first taste of popcorn.
Lady luck seemed to be on his side.
On second thought, playing it slow might be the wrong choice. Maybe, with the universe having his back today, he could combo the momentum of this small win into an immediate finisher. Plus, he was never going to find anyone else this breathtakingly gorgeous in the next week.
It would be a long shot. But, in his illustrious careers, hadn't he pulled off many long shots?
Ambiguous Proposal Finisher
After reaching into a pocket, he pointed at the movie and laughed at a joke, this action darting his hand over the popcorn box between him and the patrician beauty.
"Don't hold back," he assured her. "Popcorn costs practically nothing per unit."
The young woman, continuing to die and die and die inside, repeated the taught popcorn eating motion. She reached in, only to frown when she scooped up something distinctly non-popcorny…something cold, dense, circular…bejewelled?
Opening her fingers, she stared down at a bed of popcorn and a sparkling object laying on top.
It was an engagement ring.
To her side, Henry, having taken the longest of shots, carefully studied the patrician beauty's reaction to deduce whether he'd successfully glitch-skipped to the love speedrun's final stages.
The young woman stared blankly at the ring.
Really? Did he just propose to her? To her? What the hell? That was rushing things a bit. It was kind of early for proposals...wasn't it? They were pretty young...
Henry The Cripple, after 2.3 seconds elapsed without a response, considered whether the patrician beauty had an impaired reaction speed like himself.
A quick mental survey of their interactions answered this inquiry with a resounding no. Although her replies to his questions had indeed been delayed, the speed of her involuntary reactions were faster than average, somewhere within the top 10% of people but not the top 0.1% - a higher-end pleb range, like Silver's, the alpha-pleb’s. This pattern was more in line with somebody deliberating on the unfamiliar than a genuine reflex cripple.
To the current proposal, then, the beauty could have chosen a response already, but she was either unable to select one or refusing to.
Therefore, she was: a) repulsed into silence by the offer, b) struggling with the ambiguity, c) weighing the pros and cons of marriage, d) indifferent, e) perplexed due to a second failure of common object recognition like with the popcorn, or f) other.
He lacked the requisite experience to assign probabilities.
Conclusion: inconclusive. For now, he should retreat.
Or.
Or, banking on explanation e), he could double down by informing the naive beauty of the symbolic significance of an engagement ring.
No. His gut, with slightly more interpersonal intelligence than his brain, was warning him to retreat. Fast. He'd failed abysmally.
The young woman, her brow wrinkling, her head tilting ever so—
Henry cut the beauty off before she doomed him. "WHAT THE!" He squinted at the ring as though he'd not planted it. "…is that…eww." In disgust, he pried the object out of the popcorn like a strand of loose hair from spaghetti, then he leapt to his feet in fury. "OI, YOU, WHAT'S THIS NONSENSE?! STAND UP!"
His abrupt shout brought the chancellor's presentation about the film production to a halt. At once, the heads of the out-of-the-loop academics snapped to Henry. Little Liu, sipping his juice and munching on a mouthful of popcorn, cringed at his moronic uncle, taking psychological solace in the fact that they weren't genetically related.
Everyone followed Henry's frustrated gaze to a back row of seats.
They were empty.
With no proper out for the horrendous proposal, had he sought refuge in blaming an invisible enemy?
Actually, no.
A head crested the seats like a guilty alligator emerging from a pond. It belonged to a young lady who'd been crawling towards the exit after covertly delivering the popcorn.
While no one here would recognise her, she happened to be the owner of a nearby restaurant, a prominent figure in the niche universe of Volefan cooking, a member of Flaming Sun, and the head chef on Tuesday morning shifts at a café attached to a certain in-game bookstore.
A puppet. Henry, The Tyrant, had an army of them in every major city in the world, digital or real.
He angrily waved the engagement ring, the light cast by the movie catching in its many-faceted gems. "Is this what passes for hygiene in Australia?" He gave a worried looked at the patrician beauty - blank expression - perfect. "What if someone had choked?"
The 'delivery-lady' didn't miss a beat. "Oh, my ring slipped off?"
Ambiguous Proposal Finisher: Who ever claimed it was his ring? He wasn't the only one to handle the popcorn. Statistically, who's the more likely culprit to have dropped in a woman's engagement ring? A female delivery-lady around engagement age? Or, him, a random 17-year-old boy? If this beauty'd assumed he was proposing, that's entirely on her. Maybe she's projecting her own feelings? Jeez. Stop imagining him in such a romantic light already. Kind of weird, sis. Kind of weird.
The young woman was not thinking any of this.
"Into my popcorn." Henry, believing himself super smooth, feigning shameless innocence, sighed at the ruined snack. "Don't bother with a refund. Catch! Sorry about the interruption!" Not wanting to linger on the half-missed finisher, he turned to apologise to the chancellor again and in the same motion back-lobbed the half-failed tool.
He then resumed his seat by the beauty, apologised for tainting her first popcorn experience, and joked that he'd make up for it in the future. The engagement ring, meanwhile, travelling a roughly 19.74-metre-long arc behind him, sailed with pinpoint accuracy into the delivery-lady's palm.