Right…the script...FuzzyGirl35's ever-evolving script...
Yes, certain elements of that original jousting-betrayal sketch, formulated before this bracket stage and before any certainty over whether she’d even pair against Justinian, had mutated as the match had upgraded to the semi-finals. The knight was elevated from a mere traitorous henchman of The Cripple to the penultimate mini-boss. Since her forbidden technique of humanshifting had already been debuted against SaNguiNe, her straight-man knight roleplay morphed into a parody of Justinian swinging around a wooden replica of his zweihander.
This knight parody, in the most drastic script change, would be portrayed not by herself but by a doppelganger Third Gate. (She had backups even of herself, an invaluable asset for miracle sketches.) The real her meanwhile would parody the pro Whitefrog eliminated by Justinian in the ‘surprise’ upset round before, recycling material workshopped for the showdown between her and him that'd never happened. (Whitefrog getting clapped was no surprise to her - the kid was an over-pampered fraud, too accustomed to the false formalities of arena combat. He'd never deserved his apprenticeship under The Cripple, herself being the latter's only true successor, even if her parent Gate would never admit it.)
The result would be a sensationally confusing orgy of doppelgangers. She, ‘The Whitegate’, would barge into the jousting tournament screaming petulantly for a re-match. The elimination by the knight would be blamed on her seventh coach, a.k.a. The Manager of Left Foot Suppleness and Relaxation, who’d thrown her off balance with the wrong left-foot-massaging technique. She would demand a recount, threatening lawsuits and the loss of multiple luxurious Indian brand sponsorships. These demands would be caved into by the jousting tournament within a tournament's host, a doppelganger of the corrupt Cripple, who would eject The Third Gate (her own doppelganger) and have her slyly fed to a pack of wolverines. She, as The Whitegate, would immediately lose her first match against Justinian, just like the real pro. That embarrassment would be followed by a switcheroo and a return to her original knight parody self, saved during the wolverine execution after their bites had granted her lycanthrope powers a la the earlier version of this script. Finally, she (the real her) would salvage the last two matches of the series against the knight (the real Justinian), who would be exposed by his defeat as yet another fraud apprentice of The Cripple, only marginally better than the fraud pro, both inferior to herself, The Third Apprentice and The Third Gate.
One could hopefully see in this conclusion how she would be playing around with The Gate lineage's core successorship and heresy themes.
(Justinian caught up to her again, locking her in another blurry skirmish. She pulsed rapidly in and out of monster form - gorilla punches alternated with desperate-quick stabs from her sword, the two blending like glass shards and bricks picked up by a tornado. Her technique was inappropriately chaotic and reckless, having been calibrated not for the knight but to counter The Cripple’s overly-schematic juggling.)
But speaking of The Cripple and schemes, for the semi-finals, there were also, unrelated to Justinian, several miscellaneous sketches for the wider False Gate apocalypse-obstruction storyline. The Cripple’s end-goal, still an enigma to most of her audience, had to be revealed more explicitly before the grand finale where she would stop him.
Somewhere in the doppelganger jousting-tournament orgy, he (a doppelganger) would monologue about an abstruse mechanistic connection between roleplaying and the apocalypse. According to this theory, the act of the individual stepping so far into foreign personalities to become them constituted an ultimate exercise of empathy, one that generated a universe-spanning force of friendship. This force, if enough was built, would one day expose the false duality between The Self and The Other that existed at the kernel of all the world’s oppressive institutions. After this exposure, and the subsequent apocalyptic dissolution, humankind, vampirekind, robotkind, etc, would at last be able to recognise their fundamental unity - in kindness. (All of this was a nod to her other mentor, Uncle Peaceloveharmony.)
The Cripple, bitter that he’d never himself had a friend, wished to suppress the movement. He’d been attacking friendship through a commercialism that’d stripped Saana of all personal and authentic meaning. Bartering under his regime had been replaced with goods at standard prices, adventure parties with tour groups, and roleplay—as exposed in earlier skirts—with no roleplay, the friendship-cultivating hobby now illegal.
Her Cripple doppelganger, to really goad the spectators, would boast about this tournament as another prime example of his anti-friendship strategy. Through it, he'd reduced the epic battles of old to a point-collecting sport. Gone was all the emotion, spontaneity, and hesitancy of a fight, its meditative buildup, its spiritual connection with the landscape, its consequences as feud storylines were settled and begun. What were they, the people, given in replacement? Sponsorships, a crowd, shorter waiting times between the fights – in sum, nothing of spiritual value. They had all been swindled EZ-ily, yet still they cheered, cheered for him, The False Gate, barring them from the higher stages of duelling and friendship Beyond. (The scam here was genuinely offensive coming from The Cripple, who’d been initiated into the more dramatically intriguing modes of combat during his adventures with Uncle PLH and who’d later pushed this mode to its very pinnacle during the global jihad orchestrated by his Second Gate persona. Although she’d not herself played back then, that crusade, according to her Dutch mentor, a Second Gate die-hard fan and reenactor, had been the best RP season of all time, making the purges of Reformation Two seem like a Wednesday evening community improv class.)
The Cripple, not content with these betrayals, a post-maximalist seeker of More $$$ Less Friends, would lastly reveal the expansion of his strategy to everywhere, beginning next with a renewed phase of militant anti-roleplay campaigning. In Saana—this tournament for himself being a mere ruse to brush up on old duelling techniques—he would be re-ascending to the Cosmos, hunting out their RP-brethren on whatever planets or dimensions they might reside. In real life, simultaneously, funds from his lucrative sponsorships had been poured into the construction of a spaceship fleet for tyrannising alien RP-friends intergalactically. These other beings, once conquered, would then be banned from roleplaying just like themselves watching and—just like themselves—sapped of any instinct to rebel through the opiate of commodification. And so authentic friendship, along with its sacred powers of societal transformation, would be extinguished universally.
Such a diabolical scheme—obvious to anyone decoding the lore (actually, she'd just made all of this up today)—needed to be stopped, but who would have the courage and the heaven-blessed might to intervene? Spoiler: herself, a.k.a. The Chosen One.
The doppelganger jousting tournament semi-final sketches against Justinian were a pretty decent setting for the delivery of these monologues. She would've preferred her original sketches against Whitefrog, which'd had much stronger commercialism and post-maximalist themes. However, a roleplayer worked uncomplainingly with whatever stage or cast members they were handed, and her recycling of that material for her one duel parodying the pro achieved a tastefully absurd middle ground.
(In the blur of attacks, FuzzyGirl35 suddenly snagged Justinian by his waist and upended him with a gorilla suplex, driving him face-first into the horn of a dead bull – or so she thought.
She’d upended nobody, one of her arms releasing him as he hacked it clean off at the shoulder.
The knight, wriggling free, pursued her as she dropped form and sprinted into a nearby greenzone. A pulse narrowly saved her as his sword impaled her through the back.
With a gasp of shock, like a drowning victim vomiting out water, she stumbled forward from the attack, and she gawked once again to the audience for commiseration, and, once again, she received nothing.
Throwing her useless sword and shield back at the demon and hurdle-jumping a dead lion, she cast her arms to the sky in mystical supplication. “O All-Seeing Twins, O All-Beneficent Twins, attend your Daughter in distress! Lend me, if not your Hand of Mercy, then your Hand of Scorn, and smite this heathen from existence!”
Another strike from Justinian fell true during this plea. It cleaved through her forearm and shredded some of her neck meat behind.
In the cooldown before his follow-up, she reversed her course, ducked past him,
Further script revisions had been ushered in by The Cripple’s death fiesta of a semis.
As she’d been sermonising in support of Snackman and his monster allies, she’d carefully highlighted the fuzzy friendship angle of her lore from Uncle PLH’s teachings. The audience had been reminded that she was, as much as a roleplayer, a daughter of the wilderness. Her character had a somewhat mysterious, feral aspect, much of the dirt in her dreadlocks picked up from un-aired solo adventures during which she’d learned martial arts and lost her sanity.
That character thread, now that it’d been hyped up, should take precedence she felt over any comedic parodies of Justinian or Whitefrog. Ditching those, she would enter the jousting tournament within a cage as her Third Gate self, captured by The Cripple’s henchmen cleaning up the battlegrounds after the slaughter of her monster friends and made to duel his protégé for their demented, anti-RP, anti-friendship entertainment. Her roleplay would be much more tragic in tone, borrowing from some animal-cruelty-themed material of a Beast Tamer contestant never faced. The duel, as well, would be free of her gag set-up techniques, Justinian losing through a clean, no-frills 2-1, one match thrown as always to boost her screen time.
Overall, it would be a much simpler script than the earlier versions. This was unfortunate but necessary, the downgrade allowing herself and her team to better focus on tying this mess of new sub-plots together for the grandfinale. The audience, she guessed, also wouldn't be in the proper headspace after watching The Cripple's complicated set-plays to appreciate the anti-comedic layering. That stuff only hit to the extent that a fight was dull and needed cerebral padding.
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(No matter how much she fled, Justinian remained close behind, his knightly strides gliding over the circuit of dead monsters she attempted to put between them.
Somehow, he was gaining on her - this was despite her lighter physical build and her class’s mobility advantages. Each jump of his over their corpses shaved down another wasted centimetre. Each turn in response to her own was a little faster, a little earlier.
An unsettling conviction was sneaking up behind her, like the quiet footsteps of an assassin on a moonless night. At this rate, her enemy would soon, somehow, be turning before she did.)
Then The Cripple—just randomly—duelled a God, the patron deity of his former Cutthroat class.
This may have posed a challenge for inferior script writers, the bizarre escalation impossible to reconcile with the limited scale of an amateur rookie tournament. For her, a master of the retcon, it was nothing but validation, confirming the made-up plot of The Cripple using this event as training before hunting roleplayers cosmically.
Yet, while her team was rushing to collect any lore about The Skinny Guy that might support a narrative of him as a pro-RP ally, her own thoughts had drifted elsewhere, neither with her people nor the ecstatic crowd.
At first, watching The Cripple go knife-to-knife with The Skinny Guy, she'd awakened—as a few select others must've—to the ludicrous triviality of all preceding events, which'd had only a fool's semblance of continuity. The cosmic tales were, in fact, not unreadable self-fan-fiction, and any apparent duelling equivalency between themselves and The Cripple was a consequence of him sandbagging for reasons inexplicable. Those reasons, likely never to be shared with any of them, dwelled somewhere in this highest, most unreachable stratum, where one had friendly playfights with divinities.
But then, her epiphanising had ventured higher still, skipping The Cripple's layer to touch something beyond even him, something laughably miraculous. This unbeatable monster, this slitter of cosmic jugulars, had just lost his whole silly tournament.
She was about to beat him - again.
How? That secret she wouldn’t be coughing up for free, one needing to be cautious in case a certain person had unlocked a mind-reading Legendary, but it was a fairly simple deduction for any student of The Cripple’s arts, for one attuned to the aggregate factors of skill mismatches, strategical limitations, rule pedantry, energy fluctuations, and so on. The audience should just have faith that she was correct, that there was only a superficial paradox in her opponent styling on a deity before losing to a dirt-eating hobo, and, if anything, such an ending was appropriately Cripple-esque, embodying his characteristic themes of bathos and elitist layering. As above was not as below.
(In another monster-packed healing zone, the roleplayer stood her ground, switched back into gorilla mode, and went full on the offensive.
Relying on the zone to cover her mistakes, she hurled fists at the knight as fast as possible, trying to clip him once – just once. At this point, she was barely thinking about the steps afterwards to chain a hit into a finisher. None of that longer scheme mattered if she couldn’t even land the first hit to initiate. One hit – that’s all she wanted, one snapped wrist bone, a single drop of blood on her knuckles, any basic proof that her opponent was still a thing made of flesh.
But the knight was, by now, evading everything. As in the pursuit, he’d been gaining comfort through each skirmish, the spacing of his dodges shrinking, the timing growing ever closer.
He was becoming too fluid, and it disturbed her. A proper duel had friction. This one was beginning to feel more like one of the coordinated theatre fights from her childhood.
Back then, before any of them could afford VR sets, she used to gather all the neighbourhood kids to recreate Uncle PLH’s battles. One of her first lessons in theatre had been the importance of always pulling punches - if you so much as scratched a kid, the show ended instantly in tears, and they would refuse to play with you again. She’d had to learn very fast how to fraud a convincing hit, not just delivering one but receiving it. That second part, the receiving end of the loser, had been its own essential acting lesson, a different type of pulling punches. Since the other kids considered her shows lame, the only way to keep them engaged had been to make them look much better than herself, to bring out from them abilities they didn’t know they had – and didn’t truly have. She’d never enjoyed this loser role – what kid does? But she’d taken pride in the humbleness of her efforts, volunteering for the unwanted villain roles, making bloodpacks with her dad out of syrup and dye, discovering what non-faked hits she could tolerate before breaking character.
The knight’s evasiveness reminded her of those fledgeling performances. Except, today, there was nothing intentional behind her missed attacks.)
Yeah, the Cripple was doomed to lose to her. Despite constant insinuations in her prophecies, she’d never anticipated this outcome. Her purpose in entering this competition had just been for a stage to RP, and she’d expected none of the tricks used to kill him once to work a second time, The Cripple thoroughly deconstructing them.
But, if a second win was being offered, she, a humble agent of destiny, wouldn’t turn it down, and she looked forward to the spoils. Beating The Cripple just in a sparring match had multiplied her fandom by over three hundred, boosting the attendance at her sermons and spawning several prophet imitators competing over a ‘Fourth Gate’ title - she’d naturally denounced all these heretics. So what then, would be the reward of an official victory, of towelling off this nerd when he was at his sweatiest?
She could hardly fathom it. With the influx of supporters, a prophetess might be able to kick off a genuine religious movement, might engineer that apocalypse she’d been rambling about. Whatever happened, the RP possibilities were endless – so many new arcs, so many new friends, so many new enemies, so many new powers, so many new titles.
Heaven was raining its abundance on its most faithful daughter.
(Between FuzzyGirl35's many missed attacks, Justinian rationed his own deliberatively, each striking accurately and to some lasting purpose.
A first cut disembowelled her in gorilla form. He retreated from this instantly, spoiling a grab-counter attempt, predicted as she burned a health-boosting ability in sync.
His next stab, another quick one to the human face during a de-transformation manoeuvre, popped her last spellshield.)
Although she and her team had no time to re-script around her surprise victory, roleplay-wise, the necessary pieces were already established.
This whole tournament had been threaded by a string of prophecies alluding to The Cripple’s doom, and, although she’d trumped up others for this task, others who’d all subsequently failed, the very essence of the Gate roleplay lineage was a circuitous foretelling of one’s own manifestation as a chosen messiah. That she, FuzzyGirl35, had never anticipated winning hardly mattered because, in a subtle point of nuance, her character, ‘The Third Gate’, had been fully convinced - The Gate lineage of RP was multi-layered, mystically insane at the sermonising base, calculatively narcissistic at an intermediate cryptographic layer, and then meta-fictionally self-aware at a higher anti-comedy layer in which the preceding two layers become Dadaist caricatures a la the late great Andy Kaufman.
Her team, within these layers, had already prepared a fake victory celebration skit, just in case she'd managed to steal a single match from The Cripple at any point.
They would pretend her single win had, somehow, built up enough magical force of friendship to trigger the apocalyptic merger of Saana and real life. A golden gate, stored in segments in the inventory of her troupe, would be hastily installed, and then she would dramatically teleport through it into real life. Several fake videos, forwarded to The Company for the TV streams, would show her invading different earth cities at the head of a roleplayer army. After a destruction montage, the ‘real-life’ Cripple would be dragged back by her through the portal into the stadium, trembling in his underpants and VR set, 20 centimetres shorter than his otherwise identical game avatar. Joining him as captives would be a cast of historical-figure roleplayers, like Genghis Khan and Cleopatra. All of them would submit to The Third Gate, praising her as the messianic queen of their merged universes, the uniter of all spaces, times, and kinds.
Alex Wong, while clearing this sketch with her team, had agreed enthusiastically to participate. He would add a fun bit in which he’d insist the ‘real-life’ Cripple doppelganger was genuine, verifying its reduced height, and he’d approve its submission as an official tournament forfeit, making her the winner.
Meta-fictionally, this celebration would’ve only corresponded with a single match win in a pointless amateur duelling tournament. The real-real Cripple would be standing there the whole time and waiting for the rest of the series to resume. Alex Wong had warned her that, having no sense of humour these days, his friend would likely override his ruling, eject her team, and perform some kind of character-breaking humiliation ritual on her for the remainder of their duels.
Naturally, applying the strategical mindset she'd learned from The Cripple, she'd planned to counter this counter in advance by ending the series early. The shorter ‘real’ Cripple would betray her and have her executed in a firing squad sketch parodying The First Gate’s real-life death of 1850. After reincarnating, she would then weep that the apocalypse had been stopped by The False Gate’s treachery, and, forfeiting the now-pointless tournament, she would wander off into the night in search of the next opportunity to destroy this wicked universe. (The arc would’ve ended for the mystic there. Her other layers, however, would have a goofy epilogue. She would—in the delusional narcissist layer of her character—claim forever after that she’d neither given up on the apocalypse nor forfeited, but that The Cripple, fearing a risk of defeat if the series had been allowed to continue, had reversed the doppelganger tricks back onto her by using a fake Third Gate to deliver this submission. This bullshit would then be corroborated at the meta-fictional anti-comedy layer by her having, in fact, forfeited through a doppelganger following a covert switcheroo at the respawn point. This fake Third Gate would expose the truth to the media two months from now after a period brooding on their sell-out guilt and realising that The Cripple’s lucre was not worth the cost of her soul. The real her—already preaching for whatever arc succeeded this one—would accept this confession while denouncing the double for heresy.)
But now that she would be winning the tournament, for real, her victorious apocalypse sketch could be shuffled back for the series closer. Scrap the anti-comedic epilogue, and it was excellent. It might just secure her a place in the hall of roleplay fame - right next to Joaquin Phoenix's avant-garde hip hop career, Patisserie Peterson's dramatic death by oven, and, of course, The Cripple's Second Gate era. EZ.
Of her script change, and of her victory in general, she’d chosen to delay informing her team until the very last minute, just in case The Cripple had installed a mole. The job had thus fallen solely to herself in the preceding series against this knight, to lay down the proper foreshadowing. She'd hammed up the Chosen One angle, sermonised extra about his betrayal of the roleplayer-cause and the need for another to replace him, woven in a couple Easter Eggs boasting of her victory, etc.
(Their skirmish veered out of the greenzone, away from the safety of its healing.
For Justinian's last attack, after exhausting her defensive cooldowns, he committed much harder, dropping his shield as he dodged past a gorilla swing into her blind spot and plunging his sword—with full two-handed force and body weight behind it—up through her monstrous abdomen, inflicting a mortal blow.)