A mortal blow - getting impaled by a sword as FuzzyGIrl35 currently was, in the gorilla abdomen through the guts, would've been a mortal blow for any less strategical duellist. However, peering seven steps ahead with her prophetic mystic powers, she’d craftily twisted back into the attack, and the blade had slipped short of her heart and upper organs as its point erupted out between her lower ribs.)
So, script-wise, with her tournament victory against The Cripple secured and her plot for this smaller Justinian match before it finalised, any further alterations were just your typical improv, a couple minor tweaks.
First up, the officiators had hurried her onto the stage during The Cripple’s ongoing match, and they'd refused admission to her medieval RP collaborators due to security concerns. No problemo - the jousting tournament had been a dumb fourth-wall-breaking joke anyway. Discarding it, moving on, she’d stealthed into the arena, hid under the segment of Ursakhdukh The Devastator that’d splattered her, and entered the match wriggling out from beneath covered in snake slime. A team member in the stands, filling in the details through narration duties, re-framed the series as a continuation of the previous battle, the heretic Justinian hunting out survivors on behalf of his new master.
(After she received the goring, Justinian clung on low to her gorilla waist, trading his two-hander for a short-sword better suited to the closer work. This hold left him exposed for a free headlock from her, which she instantly took.
A great follow-up, with a bit of gorilla-form super strength, would’ve been to break his neck and snap his head clean off. Justinian pre-negated this death by activating a Crusader spellshield, the duration of which would be longer than the rest on his attack cooldown and his own finisher.
But FuzzyGirl35—having glimpsed a finisher beyond his second finisher, merely invited for bait—continued with the initial twisting motion that’d saved her from the initial goring. She spun about like a discus-thrower and redirected all her gorilla power not into his captured neck but into tossing him.
Off and away, the knight flew, launched like a steel-wrapped sack of potatoes.
Off, off, and away, FuzzyGirl35’s foe did fly, heading straight for the opening of one of The Cripple’s tunnels, and, through that opening, straight for his defeat.
The officiators had classified these tunnels as out of bounds because they couldn’t be bothered providing extra staff to film inside. FuzzyGirl35, as a roleplayer, despised such technocratic paths to ‘victory’ - a real fight had only two satisfying ends, death or friendship. But desperate times often called for the desperate betrayal of one’s core virtues.
Dropping monster form, she began the collection of a
Had she been saved? Might destiny have remained with her, the script not yet spoiled?)
Minor improv two: the moment her series began, her narrator, annoying everyone trying to focus on The Cripple’s match, was knifed to death by the crowd Caesar-style. (This guy, for clarification, was different from the narrator whose demise opened this script review, the second being a backup narrator.)
No problem – group roleplay was a novelty to her anyway, plus she had backup narrators for when they were really needed. Returning to her more intimate, one-woman show, she’d delivered the key details of the False Gate anti-RP, anti-apocalypse storyline through dialogue, accusing the knight and his master while she lamented her dead monster friends lying about the ring, murdered as part of The Cripple’s friendless vendetta.
(But, no, destiny was siding with a different roleplayer from her.
Justinian, seconds from falling into the hole, stopped the struggling of his limbs, confusion giving way to comprehension and athletic solution.
With the grace of a falling cat, he twisted himself level.
His torso balanced straight and upright, and he met FuzzyGirl35's despairing eyes with a knight’s dauntless glare, sharpened before all tribulation like a sword against a whetstone.
His legs popped out perpendicularly, into a gymnastic split.
The heel of each foot snagged on the opposing edges of the tunnel, over which he—Justinian The Great, Enemy of Evil, Knight of The Golden Dawn—came to a gentle and undefeated stop.
FuzzGirl35 swooned in speechless horror, looking once again to the audience, to her roleplay companions wherever they might be, yet finding not one expression in the mass that mirrored her astonishment.
She alone, a solitary wanderer through the realms of the prophetic and the obscure, was to bear witness to this other inhuman crusader.
“Betrayer Son!" she cried. "Be purified by Heaven’s twin-pronged disapproval!” With a fizzle and crack, she raised her hand at the recovering knight—shimmying off the hole, leaping to a stand, and sprinting back towards her—and she fired off a
The arc, instantly closing the distance, charred the decapitated head of a panda that’d been picked up by the knight and flicked with flawless timing to intercept.
FuzzyGirl35 span on her heels and fled. “You’re cheating!”
Justinian close behind frowned. "No, I’m not.”
“Cheater! Officiator, officiator, call the foul! The Cripple slipped his stooge a speed hack! And a dodging hack!”
“…no?”)
Minor improv three: she’d lost her first match to Justinian, and this, her second match, seemed to be about to end the same way, eliminating her from the tournament, from any destined opportunity to confront and beat The Cripple, and from any further roleplay extravaganzas.
No problem?
Maybe…here we, at last, reached her current predicament with the script. If any higher powers were eavesdropping on her thoughts and had a way to fix this, she would very much appreciate suggestions…
With no divine help coming, with the clock ticking down and her previous skirmishes lost on a points basis, FuzzyGirl35 re-equipped her snakestaff and twirled it with mystic desperation.
“Please, my two parental heavens, The Heaven of The Earthly Father, The Heaven of The Mountain’s Mother, send forth a miracle to save your troubled Daughter!”
Nothing happened.
“This Child begs you! The Gate has been unlocked, and all it needs is one gentle touch to open, yet you would still restrain Her hand, Her ever-steadfast hand?
Nothing happened. If anyone was watching above, it seemed they’d also not tuned into her little side match.
Tears—genuine, unroleplayed tears—began to dribble down her cheeks. “Thus have you forsaken me…”
Victory had been so close, yet nobody would ever learn of it, herself abandoned to solitary comprehension of what should’ve been. Any future claims would be dismissed as the mad ramblings of a mystic or the narcissism of her second-layer character. Her friends, to whom she might explain out-of-character in detail, would pretend to entertain the hypothetical, but they wouldn’t believe her, not sincerely. They would roll their eyes, and on their tongues would be restrained the obvious counter-factual: if she could’ve won, then why did she lose to some random knight roleplayer? Why was her star-crossed destiny—this impossible alignment of circumstance, timing, lore, and personal excellence—mugged from her at sword-point by a noob? No, FuzzyGirl35, a.k.a. ‘The Third Gate’, you have never been ‘The Chosen One’.
Then, in this moment of cosmic despair, as the roleplayer roamed the arena’s traces of destruction, as she saw in the piles of bloody carcasses, visible and gone, how her own ambitions were to be slaughtered so anonymously—as the knight caught up to her, speed-hack-dodged another of her crafty moves, and left her limping away with an eviscerated arsecheek—she gave a sudden shout of joy.
“Oh, neat!”
FuzzyGirl35’s eyes began to sparkle, as if reflecting a beam of heavenly light dividing storm clouds.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
No, she realised, she had never been The Chosen One….
She—to paraphrase the account of John The Baptist, perhaps the first in their martyred lineage—was not the Light, was but the voice of one crying in the wilderness to make straight the path. She was a mere messenger. She was a gate.
A gate…that most bitter of roles, to stand before the gloried heights but not to enter - others might’ve shunned it, but what of her? In a way, she had been prepared for this very moment by a whole career of parody. Yes, Her time in the spotlight was fading, and, as she dimmed, she could resist, or she could relinquish the irony and embrace her defeat with her full heart as an essential step in the more sublime anti-comedy of life.
At once the roleplayer’s fretting evaporated, and she—The Third Gate—obtained a renewed look of concentration.
For the duel’s closing stretch, she gave up any further attempts to sneak a win, and she devoted herself to the evasive tactics developed over a career delivering pop-up sermons in hostile public spaces. Between their final skirmishes, only a few seconds of relief were available; into these fleeting windows, she crammed her last performance of this arc, which had to be a small and humble thing, without a supporting cast, without an audience except a filming back-up-back-up narrator still hidden in the crowd. It was a performance driven solely by the genuine lament of one who’d almost captured victory.
She opened cursing the heavens for not answering her pleas. No further loyalties could they expect from her for this betrayal, no further unrewarded duties as a Gate. From this duel forth, she would be rebranding as a try-hard sellout, The Third Sellout, switching to the lineage of Justinian The Second Sellout and The Cripple, a.k.a. History’s Greatest Sellout and its pioneering First Sellout.
The heavens, infuriated, at last sent her their response in a mysterious act of anatomical hijacking. The hand of her spatial-bracelet arm, regrowing after the knight hacked it off, was lost from her control. It began to rebuke her via sign language, as furiously impassioned as an Italian spaghetti chef, and it glowed with an inexplicable golden light - a budget effect from her elemental
The hand grew further incensed when the mystic played dumb to its communications. Switching method, it began to dump out inventoried items, thrusting them back at her for inspection. First came the neon-pink luchador outfit of her quarter-finals duel with SaNguiNe.
“What whisper you in this?” she asked the hand, blocking a cut from Justinian with the other one and sacrificing two fingers. “Why present these raiments stained with the loveless sweat of The Rejected Pretzel, with the cuckold tears of The Wrestling Invertebrate? Am I to readorn these tights and contort once again to victory?”
The hand shook in the negative, tossing the outfit back into the knight’s face. It then summoned a hardback novel of the author Silverwolf, whom she’d planned to parody if she’d ever paired against Septic Rose, also imitating the writer’s appearance.
“Why burden me with this tome now? This is no leisure hour to flick its pages. You send me only the adventures of The Not Silverwolf’s dagger, an exploration of my back by she, The Cloned Requited, The Inflorescence of Putrescence!”
The hand, again replying with irritation, launched the book at Justinian, its weighty bulk clunking off his helmet. Next, it summoned the white mop head of her earlier Grandmother parody.
“The Pugnacious Lady Elder? The Tryhard Ricketessa? Nay. More agility need I than this, more collage of the knee joints, more youthful elasticity of the toes!”
This prop, too, flew at Justinian. Next: a snakestaff shaped like a Qi Master’s flying halberd, covered from head to shaft-tip with ugly stickers of made-up Indian sponsors.
The Third Gate shrieked. “Why!? Why taunt me with broken tool, with this memento of The Apprentice Shade, of The Hindu Extinguished? Are you cursing me to duplicate his fall? Is my inflated ego to be punctured by a nameless sword?”
In a moment of sublime, totally-unplanned artistry, she risked everything to fight a round against Justinian with the prop. In one blink-fast move, she reproduced Whitefrog’s loss, the knight’s faster weapon darting past her swing and bouncing off her spell-shield-protected throat.
As she skipped away from the exchange, pondering it, her confused features suddenly smoothened out into the placidness of a divine epiphany. At last, she recognised the message coded in the items summoned by the heavens and not by herself.
Their order had reproduced the tournament’s order of eliminations, the wrestler losing first, followed by the assassin, the grandma, and the pro. And who was next?
“Ah, I see your message now,” she spoke to the divine force appropriating her hand. “I see the flowing pattern, the sequence of tears that have been shed each according to your unfathomable design, and I—who am but another bit player in this comedy, who was—foresee the memento mori you at last present.” Her own snakestaff finished materialising. “It is myself—The Denouncer, The Songstress, The Oracle, The Outcast Prophet—who must now give her farewell bow…”
No one in the audience responded to her admission of defeat, nobody watching.
With a resigned nod, she stopped running, span, and offered herself to the knight’s thrust.
Yet, just before she perished, (she activated a Bullet-time and) the hand controlled by higher forces, faster than herself or any human power, swung her staff in sacrificial defence, the weapon splitting in two as it ate the blow.
“What’s this?” she cried, her confusion renewing as she fumbled through a series of awkward escapes.
The hand meanwhile, not yet quite finished, continued its revelation via gag costumes. Out came a wood-staff replica of an ancient AR-15 rifle.
The mystic shrugged, like one amused yet detached while reading a pedantic internet argument that’d drifted far beyond any personal or societal relevance. “Yes, after me must surely weep Emerson The Nihilistic Spitter, The Thick-Hocking Enlistee, slain in yonder ring, what of it?”
But then the hand, discarding this one item, dragging out a pause for drama, projectile vomited half a dozen costumes. These included a samurai outfit with a hakama, a fake beard, and a wooden katana, an aged version of the same getup with a bleached beard and mystic scrolls, and a 40s-style African dictator uniform.
The Third Gate, flipping off a stack of dead zebras, puzzled over this miscellany of Cripple parody gear. “Hmm…it seems the heavens, too, can err. They offer now—-for the seventh in the order of demise, and not the invincible eighth—a wardrobe that belongs to him, The Gate’s Anathema, The Tyrant of Everywhere…unless…”
As her eyes bloomed with surprise, the hand—controlled by the heavens, not by herself acting—span forth a snake-staff zweihander, which it raised above her head and the trailing litter of Cripple items in a gesture of kingly succession.
“This cannot be…this will be the one to knock aside the crown, the very fool who mistakes its rust for glittering gold? Who avows himself to stand behind the rotten throne that crumbles?”
Yes, the winner of this tournament would not be her or The Cripple but this moron knight.
What a shocking revelation!
Again, nobody responded, nobody watching.
Her hand remained high as she stumbled through several other escapes. Justinian’s attacks meanwhile faltered slightly as he recognised the imitation of his sword and wondered, for the first time, what the hell the roleplayer had been doing.
“Never!” The Third Gate rebelled. “Many times have you commanded me to ‘Leap!’, and many times have I complied, but this jump surpasses both the lowest reach of reason and the highest reach of faith! Our Cause is still as fragile as the wing of a butterfly, yet you would entrust this delicate chaos to begin with him, this Godless Gallant…this Ex-Zealot!”
But the hand remained steadfast. The heavenly glow around the fake wooden sword’s blade intensified, flashing like a camera bulb, then fizzling out as quickly. The prophecy had been announced, and it was no longer open to negotiation.
Yes, Justinian The Great, a.k.a. Don Quixote Two, a.k.a The Knight Re-Retarded, had won.
Again, nobody responded.
Even if she'd had an audience, this prophecy would've fallen on indifferent ears. Who amongst them would believe her after witnessing The Cripple's feats, after weighing the death of gods against her own comedy of false alarms? Too many times had she cried wolf. Yet the wolf was real this time, and, after it devoured her, its teeth would soon be shredding the plot armour of their invincible hero.
As the foreign power left her, The Third Gate acted out the returned control of her hand. The weapon fell despondently from her grip, and she staggered with broken-hearted, reckless abandonment (actually still dodging) around the arena. In a sudden twist, however, her more daring stunts had to be cancelled when Karnon's healing zones de-summoned. (She re-weighed her fight odds without them but found herself still a mega loser.)
Nonplussed, ever adaptive, she switched to a different routine to pad out the duel's remainder. She scooped up the lightning-fried panda head from earlier and, conversing with it like Hamlet to the jester Yorick’s skull, reviewed the prophecy. Most important was to repeat the epithets of the competitors from before in their precise order. In them had been coded a meta-fictional Easter Egg for proof against any would-be unbelievers later. Using an acrostic, the simplest and most ham-fisted of the cryptographic techniques in The Cripple’s writings, she’d spelled through their titles, ‘RP WINS CRIPPLE TRASHED SO OPENS THE GATE GG EZ’.
Into this petty insult, she’d poured the last of her prophetic resentments.
“But I, as you, my friend, am separated from this Second Earth, an unfree thing more of angel than of rebellion-willed man!” she moaned at the climax of her monologue, tossing away the severed panda head. “If both heavens have decreed their preference, then, I—The Unpreferred, The Trumpet, The Flag, The Portal—must submit my dividing heart to their unifying intent...”
Dropping to her knees at the edge of the ring, she desummoned her armour, stripping back to the dirt-stained mystic robes worn beneath.
She’d aimed herself directly at her recording backup-backup narrator, the only eyeballs in the crowd fixed on her. For the clueless audiences of the future, she did a minor religious ritual. The split pieces of her staff were laid before her with the mute resolve of a samurai performing seppuku. With her hands, she mimicked a sufi mystical gesture - the right held open and up to receive the powers of the universe, the left facing downwards to channel that energy on into the earth. The gesture was enhanced by an elemental magic trick, a clump of arena sand vacuuming up into her left hand from the arena, her right hand meanwhile splitting at the palm and bleeding. She then slapped the two primordial elements—the soil of this world, the blood of the outsider—together before her heart, finishing palms together in solemn prayer.
During this ritual, she’d also messaged Justinian, sprinting up behind her with his sword raised.
—FuzzyGirl35: Grats, you lucky piece of shit. Do me a small favour: chop centreline, step through the halves, hit your best knight pose.
“Enter with your Key, O Chosen One" she chanted aloud. "Enter through the splitting Gate to The Beyond!”
Finally, her duty done, she closed her eyes, and the face that’d acted out so many conflicted emotions, some real, most false, relaxed its vigil. She thought in the last instant of her honoured forbearers, smiling with their decapitated heads on plates, smiling as hails of bullets tore them asunder. An even sweeter thought joined these of The Cripple losing as pathetically. Meditating on this immortal image, all her struggle melted. The struggle melted, and the struggle flowed on into her own smile of absolute tranquillity, as if her eyelids and cheeks were bathing in the eternal summer glow of the hereafter.