When the summons came, Nathan had been eating a sandwich and enjoying a drink—a gin and tonic, which is known to exist in all worlds across all universes.
There could, of course, be some question as to whether it was truly a sandwich that he was eating. A purist with regards to structure would object to its shape—it did not have two separate pieces of bread, but rather dwelt within the hollow of an opened cylinder. The freshly baked sourdough roll had been cut open and the soft innards pressed gently to make space for food that was strikingly familiar to Earth’s fare: minced fish, celery, mayonnaise, a small amount of quick-pickled red onion, a like portion of mustard which served only as an emulsifier, capers, whole slices of vine-ripened tomato, avocado, shredded lettuce, salt, pepper, and a topping of melted sharp cheddar.
Reader, to call this not a sandwich is ludicrous. Of course a tuna melt is a sandwich, whether it is pressed between two slices of bread or presented in a sub, hoagie, grinder, or hero. Even the open-faced tuna melt sandwich is arguably that—a sandwich, and it bears the name that suits it, borderline as its identity is. What comes next after the sub is severed from its rightful claim to its category? Does borscht no longer qualify as soup, or naan as bread? Will you rewrite the planets of your solar system, or demand that kale chips be banned from the table?
Well, that last might suit many. But we digress.
The sandwich had registered as a one-point-three on the scale of diversity-of-experience, just below the cumin-infused hummus whose regrettable grittiness would haunt Nathan for entire minutes of his life. And it had been good, if not to the level of the food he’d eaten at the golf course which he would never return to—and he was well aware that this was an unfair standard for a sandwich, since that golf course had private chefs who were paid commensurately with the astronomical wealth of the parasitoid criminals who frequented it.
Precisely on time, however, with the timing being completely unknown to him (since he had not inquired with regards to it with anyone, nor socialized with those who would have volunteered the information), he was teleported away into a new arena.
The food in his hands was gone with the teleport, as was the mouthful he had been chewing. The meal in his stomach remained, though it felt attenuated, as though some time had passed in which he had digested some portion of it, and he could tell that whatever alcohol had been in the gin and tonic was no longer affecting him. He was as sharp as he had ever been at his best, and as physically able as well.
This, he thought, would serve him well.
The arena was something… new. Pathways were thinly carved into stone, shimmering with an array of colors. Aside from those multivariously shaded trails, the great sideways monolith he stood on was unadorned and almost smooth—pebbled with just a touch of texture in order to allow feet an adequate grip, but otherwise possessed of a blankness that was eerie in its perfection.
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And to the sides was void.
It was not the Void, of course. The Void is and remains unique, something which cannot be precisely interacted with so much as interacted at, in much the same way that a typical automaton labeled “this machine does not recognize the difference between metal and flesh, nor does it care” can be interacted at—that is to say, one might place oneself within the ambit of interaction, and then be subject to it. The Void cannot be shaped and cannot be contained; it can, sometimes, be mitigated with regards to that about it which approximates voracity, but the mechanisms for doing so themselves deteriorate and become compromised! It dwells without the dimensions, in the infinities between the infinite expanses which separate each thing from another. It would be an utter absurdity to employ it as a framing mechanism for the match Nathan was to experience so briefly.
Such a thing is left for grand finals and exhibition matches.
No, rather than the Void, all there was to the sides—not that it would matter in the slightest—was mere void, an expanse of spacetime’s weave which contained neither energy nor any medium through which that energy might travel. Not precisely a vacuum, as one might travel through a vacuum and so transform it, temporarily, to something which contains; but what a vacuum might be, were it impossible to make it otherwise.
Reader: I am lying. The truth is more esoteric than your language and understanding of physics can grasp, particularly due to the mundane foundations of that understanding and language. But it will do, for an approximation of a metaphor.
Regardless, as Nathan stood and gawked at the ultrablack negacolor of the unwalls, he noticed that there was a slim figure standing at the other side of the platform. A girl of indeterminate youth, looking to be in perhaps her late teens, made no indication of noticing him. She neither swayed nor stood rigid, but seemed rather to exist as a distilled fact in the world, as though she had been written into a narrative as a fixed point which could not be assessed through diegetic means. He gawked at her, too, and then his mind blanked for a moment as a voice started speaking a language he did not recognize.
It took a few moments for the universal semiotic translator fish which he wasn’t aware had been slipped into his umbra, the metaphysical shadow of his soul—which of course is nonsense, but again: an approximation of a metaphor—which would persist from life to life, to begin to translate the language. And when it did succeed in doing so, he heard the following:
“—no contest, I should think. Well! It seems that the Firstie can hear us now. Ready on the field!”
“Behold your announcer! Behold your foe! FIGHT!”
Unceremoniously, Nathan died.