A brief history of Saana’s Second Gate.

The Second Gate…yes, dear comrades in the confidential, for a minute, that had also been His title. The Second Gate, who would become a sort of father-in-law to The Third Gate shrieking before us, that had been one of the aspects adopted by this multi-epitheted Being, [AN: removed a mind-numbing list of introductory epithets], just one of The All-Named’s multi-syllabic disguises.

The Second Gate – this Name amongst Names had first been spoken in the days of Saana II, around the era of Operation Phantom Limbs (blessed be its infinite lore). It’d been while he’d plotted that mighty campaign in the background through the character of His Highest Name (The Tyrant that is, his most famous) that he'd returned simultaneously as The Cripple…or what had been The Cripple, wisened and reformed after a protracted journey in the shadows…

The ‘Cripple’, re-emerging from a brief duelling hiatus, claimed to have obtained spiritual enlightenment.

Like many former samurai geniuses, after weathering enough storms for his tools to rust and his face to sag, he’d seen through the illusion and emptiness of The Duel. (For context, despite a hiatus of mere months (while studying war), The Cripple had aged his character’s appearance by decades. He was spouting all of this condescending jibberish while looking like an ancient kung-fu master.)

The Cripple, coming to the end of an exhausting reign of vagabondage, had finally recognised the youthful folly behind everyone's endless quest to prove their martial supremacy, that quest he’d himself finished decades ago after seizing his title Unrivalled Under The Heavens; Invincible Beneath The Sun. No longer did he possess the juvenile heart that ignored the price of seeking personal glory through violence, the copious litres of tears and blood that’d been shed by his loser opponents during their incredibly EZ shit-stomping in his smash-hit series, The Way of Fighting Alone. When one meditated upon the matter, what sin had any of his enemies committed to deserve his holy punishment? He could observe none, except perhaps The Original Sin of being born Worthless Under The Heavens; Plebtrash Beneath The Sun.

A changed and fairer man had returned our friend, The Cripple, a sage. From his bygone youth, he'd brought this matured, groundbreaking message of non-violent cooperation. To transform his philosophy into action, he’d also improved duelling, formulating an upgraded variant that elevated the art in a higher, more harmonious, more socially-conscious direction. The Name of this new duel? 'The 1vMany'. The 1vMany - this amazing concept was to be a duel designed for every class of man, bad or subarashii bad, in which one’s opponents would be given a fighting chance by duelling multiple of them at a time.

“But, Learner of Names Past, a duel against multiple adversaries,” you interject, my friends in mystification, “but isn’t that not technically a duel anymore? A duel, if classified by anything, exists in its fundamental characteristic as a one versus another one, in the conflict between a pair of opponents. Through The Cripple’s introduction of extra enemies to a duel, he’s transformed it into something radically and irresolvably different: a skirmish, a battle, a war.”

No, would contend the wisened Cripple, He Who’d Ventured Beyond The Illusion of The Two, who was much older than you now and therefore knew more about duelling. The spiritual core of the duel lay in the relative difficulty, in the capacity of its challenge to rival the immensity of oneself. The True duel was only that which matched your greatness, a duel being whichever enemy contained some chance of your defeat and whose conquest would therefore grow you.

In this regard, those critics who’d claimed The Cripple wasn’t history’s greatest duellist and who'd called him a virgin loser because he cheated every match, they were actually correct. He confessed: he was a duelling virgin. Never in his life had he fought a duel because all his opponents so far had been far, far, far too easy. Was it a duel when you stomped on a weevil? An ant? A termite? A worm? Indeed, his critics were 400% correct to assert he’d never duelled, not once in his existence ever.

However, with his latest, improved, transcendent version of the duel—the 1vMany—The Cripple might just manage to assemble enough bugs to create a single worthy opponent, like a duelling insect Voltron, and by beating up this hideous golem he could at last lose his duelling virginity.

“But, Teacher of Titles, what about the claim to non-violence?” you next ask, my clever comrades thrusting forward a second intelligent critique. “It looks like he’s still beating people up, and, if anything, by increasing the number of people, that increases the violence. That’s actually a situation of more violence. How do we reconcile this blatant contradiction?”

The answer to that mystery remains beyond our half-closed eyes, one of those secrets locked somewhere in the black gaps between the stars.

But The Invincible Cripple, to celebrate his spiritual enlightenment, discarded that once glorious nom de duel and proclaimed his Being into a humbler, more sage-like Name: The Second Gate. The Second Gate! He Who’d Travailed Beyond The Beyond! The Sage of The More Than First! The...[AN: further synonyms.]...Gate Opened Twice!

The lore behind The Second Gate title was an exquisite mind-horror of esotericism: ‘The First Gate’ referenced ‘The Bab’ or ‘The Gate’, an early 19th-century Persian mystic. This fellow had spam-written thousands of pages of heaven-sent messages foretelling the coming of Islam’s hidden 12th Imam. Then, in one of theology’s most delicious twists, this guy revealed that the prophesied figure was none other than Himself, an act of blasphemy that got him executed by firing squad at age 30. You see, The Cripple’s sage aesthetic was to be a comedic fusion of that holy martyr with the mature zen writings of Miyamoto Musashi and The Cripple’s own anime-inspired Heaven’s Gate duelling jargon.

The Second Gate, He Who Dueleth All, having discarded his selfish solitude for the all-truism of the 1vMany, next opened an island monastery to share his wisdom. There, he invited any disciples interested in The Way of Fighting Still Alone But Now Against Several. Most who went did so simply to try kill him. But, in the migration, there were a few sincere and chosen students, like Septic Rose and Mrtyu, converts enamoured by their glimpse of The Beyond. To these loyalists, The Second Gate bestowed his sagacity, offering lectures parodying various passivist religious movements while teaching the practically unmodified Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo, expanded only slightly with an extra module for multiple opponent duelling.

(Of course, His real motive behind these hijinks would be revealed years later, on the eve of his public demasking by the intern here and his boss, Gaming Journalist of The Year 2049, Oliver of The Reportage Spear. This strange duelling training camp? A total sham. The Tyrant, while merely masked in the syllables of The Cripple-turned-Second-Gate, had been travelling from his island to the various battlefronts of his campaign. His disciples meanwhile spread anti-Offworlder propaganda through his religious pamphlets while behaving, with their 1vMany ‘duels’, as pseudo-terrorists. Both of those were contributing factors in the global collapse engineered in Operation Phantom Limbs (blessed be its infinite lore).)

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Shortly after this whole episode, no sooner had he birthed it, Our Hydra of Multiplying Titles would discard the sage persona. With no further use for it, he carried on to the greater splendours of His Highest Yet-Known Name of ‘The Tyrant’. Those deeds require no elaboration, all of us here dwelling in the reverberations of His Grand Utterances. (But, if we’re being precise in our nomenclature, at this point he was called The Northern Tyrant, in contradistinction to The Eastern Tyrant a.k.a. Genocidelol a.k.a. Simon Xiao. (This differentiation…

[AN: A bewildering lore tangent into the connection between Henry and Rose’s brother.]

…of the lore faction that argues the defection was orchestrated!)))) Then, once The Tyrant Secundus In His First Ascension conquered Saana, he ditched that Name, too. Vanishing from the limelight, he moved on—as the public were now aware from the voluminous self-written fan-fic that He has most graciously blessed us with (praises to thee, Creator of All Lore)—to an even higher solo mission duelling interplanar hyper-demons and galactic space Gods. As for the specifics of his doings in those distant nether regions, We, through whose mouth The World declares, have yet to reach that part of the lore recaps. (But if you’ve swallowed the lorepill and like its poisonous flavour, do PM me for an update once I finish them.)

Yet, strangely, back on planet pleb, despite Him all but abandoning it, what'd been to himself but a side-story, that of his bizarre mock-passivist non-duelling cult, hadn't quite ended. The echoes in The Name of The Second Gate were continuing to ripple across the cosmic tapestry. Their forgotten propagations would go on to deform the universe and generate more sages, a Gate clone and a Gate child…

A brief history of Saana’s second Second Gate, as occurring within the brief history of Saana’s Second Gate.

Pray, imbibers of untold bounties, who would be The Second Gate's sage clone? Who… [AN: Tedious number of introductory rhetorical questions.]...inherits the Names Forgot?

At the start of Saana III, as The Cycle’s oscillations devoured and erased most that had preceded, some random dude managed to snipe The Tyrant/The Cripple’s username, Takezo33. (The name was a weeb reference, plus the year of his birth, if you’re in the camp of lore enthusiasts who accept Him as a human and not a manifestation of the divine Entropic Lore Principle.) This imposter Takezo33, using this stolen name, then began to roleplay as The Cripple during his last public sightings, i.e. The Cripple from The Second Gate era. Adopting the same sage aesthetic, this new guy rebuilt the monastery on that island base, now in modern Togavi. From there he'd continued to preach the old doctrine - right up until the present day.

What did this second sage gain from spoofing The Cripple? Why continue the legacy of The Second Gate?

One drunk on the recaps might draw the most obvious conclusion from The Tyrant’s identity-switching magic and his absurdist sense of humour. "Hey, Master of Monikers, isn't this new guy himself again? Isn't this just another reutterance of One of His Many Names Once Spoken and Forgot?"

Such would not be an unreasonable leap of logic. As has been confirmed by the lore explorers foraging in his more recent achievements, He To Whose Multitude We Allude By Saying ‘The Tyrant’ seems to have restarted this instalment in Togavi as well. The Trading Company’s very first public dealings began in that region. Back then, when the guild were actually a trading company and not a global military hegemony, their anonymous owner had pulled some tricks to swindle the local economy. The funds amassed from those scams would later seed the global conquest. What’s more, from before this, in Saana III’s opening months, we've collected some rare sightings of one of His in-game nom de plumes, ‘Henry Flower’, conducting minor Scholar work while presumably preparing for the re-ascension of His better-known titles. Some experts in The Tyrant lore sub-field of Karnon-v-Tyrant-Drama also point to his origination there as key in his eventual acquisition of Karnon’s mentorship during the latest Earthfriend Duel God arc, the blue trickster in fact being His Zone Guardian.

Despite these many clues, however, the assumption of a shared identity would be mistaken. More rational evidence points to the imposter being a distinct person.

Item one: the new Takezo33 speaks—before Saana’s automated translation—in a Dutch-accented Quranic Arabic. The Cripple, in contrast, had used an irreplicable blend of archaic 16th-century Samurai Japanese and intentionally excessive and misused gamer-mixed-anime terminology. (Before any young lore completionists sprint off to learn this ancient dialectic with ambitions of deciphering the deepest meanings lost in translation, I beseech you, step back! Avert, you arrogant child, from these dangers you comprehend not! Such is a cursed speech, a tongue that flirts between the planes of Heaven and Hell. In imitating its flickers and its salivations, one unwittingly dances close to uttering his True Name and rousing Him from His beneficent slumber. Step back, you fool! Step BACK!)

Item two: more obviously, the new guy couldn’t duel. His purpose in stealing the character seemed to be to play with the fun prophetic elements. The imposter had substituted out the 1vMany aspect of The Second Gate lore to focus on the mock passivism, augmented with what appeared to be the Dutch dude’s own studies in Sufi mysticism.

Item three: physically, their simultaneity seemed impossible because Second Gate #2 was currently preaching outside the stadium. If you walked just a few hundred metres out the door, you could listen to him yourself right now. He’d sailed to Suchi in indignation after issuing a fatwa on The ‘Cripple’ for daring to impersonate him by throwing this workshop, which, according to the fake, taught an earlier stage of 1v1ing that the real sage had already spiritually transcended. (Exploring the…

[AN: The hunchback covers exhaustively how the two existing in different physical locations concurrently could still be the same guy.]

…of course, those with the deepest grasp of the lore would never have eliminated the body-duplication Legendary hypothesis.))

Finally, item four: the consensus amongst veteran players had long been that this ‘Second Gate’ was a fake. Again, he could not duel, and The Cripple without duelling was like a sandwich without bread - inconceivable. In fact, examining the tiny cult the imposter'd built in Togavi, almost all of its members turned out to be hardcore Cripple anti-fans. This group enjoyed equating The Cripple and the fake out of raw spite, as a way to spit on their vanished enemy's legacy. Their professed belief in his teachings therefore, paradoxically, attested to their ultimate falsity. (And, if you’re following on, we really must sympathise with these poor jokers now, ignorant in their mockery of the darker Names of He Who Only Jests At Laughter From The Void…

[AN: The hunchback, most strangely, tells an entire parable on vengeance through the method of listing epithets. This vengeance parable also includes what appears to be a Socratic dialogue between Henry as ‘The Second Gate’ and his copycat. I think the purpose is to illustrate the process by which their doctrines have diverged and to also bring us up to date to the modern day.]

…and The Dog Whimpered This Lowly Aspect of The Sun of He Who Has Been Mocked in One Fragment of One Aspect in Their Infinitude.)))))) Hence, we really do have to lament the fate of those miserable anti-fans and the imposter, all of them almost certainly about to get jailed by The All-Remembering and The All-Watching.

Returning to the brief history of Saana’s Second Gate.

So, reasonably, this second story of the second Second Gate could have concluded here. It could have ended in a weird, esoteric joke for Old School Loreheads from Saana II and a series of payback incarcerations. But you, my damsels in the danger, can obviously see that The Circle of Lore has yet to be looped.

"Hoarder of Handles, Lover of Labels, we’ve received the promised sage clone, yes, but where’s the promised sage child?"

Very astute. Yes, this saga of the multiplying sages needs to extend one last layer, one third generation deeper…

A brief history of Saana’s Third Gate, as occurring within the brief history of Saana’s second Second Gate, as occurring within the brief history of Saana’s Second Gate.

You see, the second Second Gate would eventually spawn a much more famous...