Saana Online, the port city of Suchi, bordering the plains.
As always in this rainless land, the sun was out, offering a beaming greeting to the tournament's millions.
Opening ceremonies were already kicking off.
At home, on couches, the offline fans bunkered down with popcorn bowls while swapping through selected streams and news broadcasts. These transmitted the vicarious elations of the in-game crowds, the revellers competing over carny prizes, haggling at stalls, attending concerts planned to warm them up before showmatches from last season’s grand finalists. For the friends who cared for none of these, a banquet of other events—fashion shows, karaoke contests, magic-origami workshops, camel jousting—were being rolled out to satisfy every conceivable taste and every hedonistic pleasure.
Amidst the spreading circus, many visitors were wondering, was this Saana's most trash, most drought-plagued zone? This? Then how could one explain the generous torrents pouring through its streets? Endless seemed the flow of bodies, liquor, gold, and entertainment, each preceding that most anticipated deluge at the stadium’s thirsting sandpit.
In the background, isolated from the festival’s distractions, competitors were checking armour, warming limbs. Some, with plans to throw, were fixing bets. Others, seeking victory at any price, were performing quirky rituals of sacrifice to bring the gods’ divine blessings.
One hotbed of activity, where such a blessing was about to fall, was Suchi’s spawning grounds.
Raining upon a plaza by the slum’s edge, a meteor shower of light beams deposited fresh level zeros. A couple were genuinely new - spring lambs, who’d snagged their first VR units and chased the noise of the flock. Most were veterans from Saana’s foreign regions. After much hesitation, they'd deleted their original characters to teleport in last minute.
Such a rapid influx might have sown chaos and disorder. Thankfully, the newcomers were being corralled by the tournament organisers. Here, The Company had established a checkpoint with airport-esque efficiency. A forest of signposts pointed to the stadiums and other attractions. Guards, in disarmingly-cute bunny outfits, prodded any troublemakers with the carrot-decorated points of spears. Stooping NPC babushkas—hired from the slums as part of the community building—wore bright, officially-marked ribbons as they questioned the arrivals and ushered them to an appropriate queue. At staffed kiosks, vets could withdraw the gold to fund their weekend entertainment – at least those who’d trusted in The Company and stored their wealth in foreign trading posts. The slum neighbouring the plaza, its closest shacks repaired and painted, was separated by a cordon. Behind the rope, donkey-wagon drivers queued to taxi customers, and a small crowd of pre-established players flashed their usernames at arriving friends.
Amongst the spawning throng stood one middle-aged gentleman, super lost.
Where others landed with immediate purpose, this fellow held back in nervous observation. His gaze, on a restless search for meaning, possessed a bobbled-eyed and foggy character, like a sleeper rousing from a lengthy nap induced by a sledgehammer.
Kimura-san—a salaryman in his 40s from the Japanese prefecture of Aomori—was lost on many fronts.
Why so many people? he was thinking. Why the decorations and the costumed guards? Where were the muscled gangsters of old?
He was stupendously lost. However, unlike others, his bewilderment could be excused since he’d just awoken from a literal coma.
Kimura-san’s accident’d happened almost two weeks ago. At the time, he’d just received his VR-unit after many painful years of scrimping. Keen to jump right in, he’d made his character, he’d chosen this savannah territory, he’d spawned, he’d found his groundings. And then the system’d warned him of his need to urinate in real life.
It'd been during this trip to the restroom, perhaps due to rushing incautiously (his memory of this part remained fuzzy), that he’d apparently tumbled down the stairwell of his dormitory. At least, that’s what he’d been informed of when he’d awoken, one unlucky time skip later, hooked to tubes in a hospital bed.
Now, discharged and back, Kimura-san looked upon a scene inexplicably transformed by his fortnight absence.
His last memories had been of poverty and bedlam. Amidst a background of driftwood shacks, mobs of thugs had been strong-arming novices to join their gangs. A fighting crowd had even blocked the tutorial sign-up station, making progress without the thug’s assistance impossible. He recalled a kid in a monkey mask warning him to self-delete and switch to a less crazy realm.
Despite the logic, Kimura-san had been reluctant to follow that advice. After all, he’d picked Suchi for a specific reason. Like many Japanese salarymen, he’d been infatuated by a lifelong dream of safari-ing in Tanzania. Only, he could never fulfil this common fantasy due to a brutal, holiday-less work culture and a morbid fear—even if he’d had a break—of international travel and Africans. This game zone, with its vast open, hyena-stalked steppes, provided a virtual alternative, accessible from the convenience and safety of his bedroom.
Anyway, the scene of his return—with its orderly queues, taxi services, and lack of thugs—was difficult to reconcile with that former setting.
Kimura-san, considering the trauma to his head, wondered if this drastic change were genuine or symptomatic of his damaged noggin. Maybe there’d been no anarchy or gangsters? Maybe the accident had edited his memories?
If that were so, he felt a little disenchanted. The imaginary thugs, he realised, had sprinkled a dangerous spice upon this territory’s safari tourism.
While the salaryman was contemplating these mysteries of time, change, and faulty recollection, elsewhere on the plaza, a hobo NPC had been harassing players.
In a unique begging strategy, the scoundrel chased his victims with a lamp, blasting their eyeballs with its obnoxiously-bright glow and blinding them until they were inspired to charity. Similar scammer riff-raff had been carted off by the area’s security. However, something about this bum deterred them from his capture, the guards perhaps afraid to touch the nest of lice crawling through his azure beard.
This hobo, sighting another easy mark, approached the confused salaryman and thrust the lamp into his puzzled face.
“Ah!” Kimura-san cowered back. “Sir, what are you doing?! That burns! Please, politely, stop.”
“I’m searching for a crooked man!” The beggar shoved his lamp prop closer. “Or, failing that rare prize, a coin or five shall do.”
Kimura-san, retreating to no effect as the scammer and his lamp pursued, blinking through the burning glare, made out the dirt-smeared face of his assailant. He felt a hit of revulsion. Simultaneous, however, this one feeling was accompanied by a stronger relief, the adventure-seeking component of his soul rejoicing.
So, the salaryman thought, this zone had not completely forfeit its exotic charms…
Seeing no escape, a little interested, he stopped and bowed apologetically. “Alas, sir, I can spare you nothing, for you—I guarantee—are richer than my lowly self.”
Kimura-san intended this quite literally. He would’ve paid this bug-infested scamp his toll. However, he’d just spawned and had therefore yet to acquire a single coin of whatever currency the players used.
The hobo, a cockroach smirking in his blue beard, swung his lamp and smashed it at their feet. “What an audacious deceit! Me, a vermin-riddled drifter, wealthier than you? Who has shoes?” He gestured at his lack of footwear, his naked toes visible amidst the broken glass of his scam prop. “And yet you told that lie with such superb politeness. You, you are the crooked man for which my light has foraged! Tell me—without dissimulation—what is your name, adventurer?”
Kimura-san preferred not to share such private information with a bum. Putting on an obvious charade, he reached into a trouser pocket, searched, then frowned with mild shock.
“Hmm,” he grumbled. “How regrettable...my business cards did not survive the voyage…”
The hobo NPC nodded at this act with serious approval. “That was the correct scam! Yes, give nothing to the poor and even less of your personal details - lest you wish to be a victim of identity fraud. Through this display of keen street wisdom, you, my crooked man, have passed the second hidden trial!”
Parodying the salaryman, he shoved his hands deep into the crotch of his pants, and he began to rummage as if through a toolbox’s disordered miscellanea. His exploration soon produced a scroll.
The item, when unfurled, revealed three lazily-scribbled lines.
Quest Title: Legendary Secret Crooked Man Identification Challenge
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Step 1: Be crooked
Step 2: Dodge identity fraud
The hobo, licking his thumb, smudged the two items, their ink still wet; then, rolling up the scroll, he placed it into the empty pocket of Kimura-san, who’d frozen in place.
“Tell me, my crooked man,” continued the beggar, “what’s your favourite sport? I’ve taken a recent interest in the hobbies of you Offworlders.”
Kimura-san, regaining his animacy, replied with hesitation, off-put by this continued interaction and a sinister twang in this…quest NPC’s question. “Well, there are many sports of interest..." he blathered. "If one had to limit their selection to a single sport…you could not go wrong by picking one with a rich history and capacity to foster social connections. In my country, baseball is popular for such qualities.”
“Baseball!” The hobo loved this answer. “I have observed that game. This is a baseball bat, correct?”
The NPC twirled his fingers. A tangle of jungle vines—appearing in his grip from nowhere—straightened out into the slender figure of a golfclub.
While Kimura-san was contemplating whether to correct the bum about this confused instrument, the beggar whacked him with it.
“Ah!” he screamed, his limbs flailing as his body rocketed—with unusual speed—out of the plaza and straight into the sky.
The attack hurtled him a dozen then a hundred metres high, hurtled him towards a violent, horrific death.
“Ah…what a predicament…”
But his immediate sense of doom vanished at a sudden recollection of his whereabouts.
“Ah,” he said again, his fear deflating.
That’s right. The air whipping in his cheeks, the earth alarmingly retreating from his shoes – these sensations were not real. They were videogame simulations, harmless. The most horrific ‘injury’ would simply prompt his character’s revival.
Soothed by this invincible epiphany, Kimura-san ceased to worry and absorbed with stoic interest the scenery of his first game death by mysterious, club-swinging hobo.
His trajectory was aimed towards a clay-walled city rising from the slums and backed by the brown-painted flats of the savannah. Beneath him, meanwhile, his feet treaded over many scenes of celebration propagating through a shifting labyrinth of shanties.
Down one road, a parade marched by beating drums and wearing matching colours and waving banners as if for an international sports event. Down the next, a row of stall vendors were dishing out steaming snacks to families. A ring inside some compound passed by, where two teams of mages were exchanging spellfire, a thunderbolt exploding one struck fellow into mist. Next to them, party folk were chugging themselves blind from flowing casks of liquor.
“Hmm,” Kimura-san mused. “A festival, perhaps?”
As his increasing height multiplied and shrank them, the people of the crowd relinquished their individuality. Indistinguishable as a colony of ants, they became one bound organism of pure density and pattern. From this collective metamorphosis emerged the larger brain and pulse of this festival. A tide-like pull was sweeping through the streets, the cramped conglomeration tugged in one irresistible direction, towards one goal, one purpose.
"Stadiums..." said Kimura-san, still flying.
Clustered on the slum’s far edge were multiple stadiums. Dozens of these giant timber structures stood in rank, their banner-draped entranceways flung open like the arms of titanic parents encouraging their children to gather for a hug.
In a parade ground outside one of these huge venues, he found a crowd of unfathomable size gyrating to music. Before them on a stage, an orchestra accompanied a thumping moose-step jazz fusion number. A smoky haze of fireworks and flashing magic substituted for modern lightshow effects. Kimura-san recognised the song, a recent global chart-topper from India. The DJ, their image blown up by projectors, seemed to be on stage, too, pumping their fist from the shoulders of a prancing mammoth.
Most strikingly, supervising the show from behind the performing artists was a massive, looming wooden construct, a human statue taller than the Buddha of Ushiku, which he'd seen as a child before its destruction. The colossus struck Kimura-san as odd. Incongruent with the atmosphere, it watched the partying with an imposing silence, its lengthy black shadow extending through their celebration like a finger reaching to the distant ocean.
Before Kimura-san could resolve the source of this disconcerting impression, his attention was drawn by panicked shouts below.
His flightpath had traversed the clay city’s outer walls. Guardsmen stationed on the parapet were sounding the alarm. Several soldiers glowed, bright clouds of magic enveloping them. Bows twanged. A hail of arrows followed seconds later, like shotgun pellets aimed to clip a bird on wing.
But these projectiles couldn’t reach his altitude. He watched their sparkling tips rise and then descend, dropping back upon a metropolis of red adobe. In stark contrast to the poverty outside, the architecture here was of exquisite fabrication; it resembled the Sudano-Sahelian style of Djenne but—advanced, through greater prosperity and magic—into a taller, tidier, more opulent extreme, each building a wonder of mud.
Scanning ahead, he noticed that his flight had shot him dead centre at the city’s highest structure. A tower was approaching, rising out of some religious building. On its tip balanced a glass-walled domicile with an unbroken view of the whole region.
His momentum beginning to decrease, he didn’t think he’d clear this structure. It seemed his death was near. He would splatter against one of the tower's upper windows like a drunk pigeon.
“Hmm,” he nodded, accepting his videogame demise.
But this prediction proved wrong.
Narrowly skirting the domicile’s upper lip, Kimura-san spotted, with eyebrow-raising astonishment, that blue-haired hobo NPC who’d whacked him.
Somehow, the guy had outraced him to the tower’s apex. Squatting on a baseball diamond, he was waving a comically-large catcher’s mitten, into whose pocket the flying salaryman slid safely.
“That’s a bingo!” roared the hobo, mixing up his player games once more.
Kimura-san was placed down gently, blinking as he readjusted to the now static landscape.
Forgetting everything before, his eyes were immediately drawn to a picturesque marvel beyond the city and its circumscribing slum.
Far in the distance, the steppe’s sweeping vista called. Its grass expanse invited the cubicle-oppressed soul to join it in safari, to join its plunge into the infinite horizon. For the salaryman’s heart—habituated to the many claustrophobic pressures of his workplace, dormitory home, and crowded city wedged on the perimeter of Honshu's mountainous interior—the flat nothingness was hypnotising. With so much real estate untouched and unpossessed, a man, in what should never have become a luxury, could lie down anywhere and simply be.
By an open-air mine, Kimura-san caught the delightful first traces of the untamed beasts that dwelled upon this miracle. A smudge of golden-speckled dust had gathered, a cloud stirred up by a thousand-cattle herd of metallic-coloured wildebeest, muscular and free – free as he might one day himself become.
The salaryman, his spirit surging to a higher altitude yet, gasped with awe.
“’Who’s this handsome stud’?” the hobo asked, interrupting the brain-damaged salaryman’s mesmerisation with the moment’s obvious question. “Well, these days, I juggle many roles, but the one that most relates to you would be my function as a guardian angel type, a captain of the lost and devious. Anyone who’s looking crooked, I set them on a straighter path.”
“Ah,” replied Kimura-san. “A helper NPC...”
That explained the crooked name-calling. Saana, detecting his head maladies, must’ve sent a coach as part of its disability assistance.
“A helper!” the hobo, improvising off that cue, used a dirt-smeared finger to indicate a new article of clothing.
Draped around his beggar rags, a cloth ribbon had been equipped, imitating those worn by the grandmas at the zone’s entry point. A job title, stitched with officious letters, read, ‘Designated Helper’.
Kimura-san, observing this clothing swap, stroked his chin. As with the vine golfclub, this item had materialised between two blinks. His ‘helper’ NPC possessed some trick of instantaneous magic.
The hobo shook his head, some tricks best kept secret. “So, survey our confusing world! What puzzles come to mind? Ask, and I, the help, shall clarify your crooked riddles.”
Kimura-san followed this instruction. Reluctantly, he tore his eyes away from the savannah’s attractive glow and inspected the nearby urban drudgery.
From their elevated view atop this sky-scraper, this most prominent feature, beyond the festival, was this land’s crisp partition, as what from the ground appeared pure anarchy assumed a clear, intelligible form.
There were three divisions: this blood-red clay metropolis, the slum outside its walls, whose brown carpet of run-down hovels he recognised from two weeks earlier, and the rainbow extravaganza of the stadiums, representing the change that’d so bewildered him. As clearly as the ocean lapping against the shore, these three territories met but did not cross, separated by a snaking, multi-kilometre boundary, transitioning in colour, density, material, and destitution. The newest region—its buildings lighter, cleaner—was that of the stadiums. Between Kimura-san’s two visits, it seemed to have captured the spawning area. However, it had not infiltrated far beyond that point. Like a timid beachgoer, it’d dipped its legs into the tumultuous waters of the shacks but it dared not enter past the waist.
“They do not mix...” he said.
The helper hobo wondered if this customer really were brain-damaged. “That’s just sensible urban design. You, obviously, don’t want broke scum mingling with your law-abiding citizens, nor festival-spreading, ideal-spreading foreigners with either. But it’s not these political tangles that they’ve hired me to straighten out. Keep the questions to the tournament. What are your crooked queries on the games that bless these segregated shores?”
“Aha…” Kimura-san epiphanised, the missing logical connection forming between the sports references, the crowd’s attire, and the clustered mass of stadiums. “So…it is a tournament.”
To this response, the hobo frowned so deep that three lice spilt from his azure eyebrows, the poor creatures whisked off by the blustering tower breeze.
He’d not prepared for this degree of ignorance. Gesturing for the salaryman to wait, the beggar shoved his hands back into the inventory of his crotch. This excavation produced a file-stuffed manilla folder, whose contents he speed-read with increasing disturbance.
“Nerin’s stinky butt!” guffawed the hobo helper. “How’d you miss the tournament entirely?!”
Kimura-san shrugged. With some trust gained by the knowledge of this NPC’s official designation, he then gave a brief accounting of his time-skipping disaster.
“A slippery tale of swindled memories and miraculous revival,” the hobo nodded sympathetically. “Hard to believe. However, it’s not the first of its species. Similar miracles bounce around the streets below. It might be the very essence of this age – incapacitated heroes and hibernating bears that history has numbered dead are waking from their truant comas.” He flashed a wicked wink. “But you, my crooked man, can take some solace, for you have risen from your sleep neither late nor prematurely. This day, this hour, coincidences with a long-, long-awaited start. This busy hive beneath us, these drones with fists clawing for sweet nectar, have gathered for a tournament…for THE tournament!”
The hobo, pausing and signalling for Kimura-san to wait, stripped off his helper ribbon, replacing it with a second one that read, ‘Designated Tournament Promoter.’ Along with the outfit change, he reached back into his groin and pulled out a flimsy piece of paper covered in a mass-copied script. This, he proceeded to recite with all the lukewarm gusto of a part-timer juggling multiple jobs and enthusiastic about none of them.
“Yes,” the hobo yawned, “insert customer’s name, before us is THE tournament: The Winter Open Invitational! You and the world, in this intemperate season, are most warmly welcomed to an epic, multi-category arena hoedown, a series of heaven-shaking, soul-inflating showdowns between Saana’s best and Saana’s better. From blood-splashing duels to—"
“What’s that?” Kimura-san interrupted, pointing to a black dot flying at them with the deadly speed, stealth, and aim of a drone missile.