If you told me on my 18th birthday that I was going to become a world-famous Metafighter in just a few years, I'd just laugh and politely disagree, silently questioning your sanity. I knew exactly what I wanted to be at age 18. I had little interest in Metafighting, beyond how it shapes history and cultures of the world. I was in college, as an anthropology major. It was my roommate Amber who got me interested in the more intricate details of the sport. Before meeting me, her favorite hobbies were smoking weed, playing video games, and watching movies, anime, and Metafighting videos. Often, she would do multiple of these things at the same time at her dual-screen computer on late nights while I studied with my headphones in.
Then one day, a Friday night came in which I didn't have much to do, and that's when she picked up a new hobby.
“Yo, Tater–” That was the nickname she gave me. “¿Quieres?” She asked me as the hazy, skunky smoke slowly dispersed around her face. With droopy pink eyes and a smile stretching from ear to ear, she extended her arm to me, gripping her small heart-shaped bong in hand, which had murky water and some kind of black waxy substance all over the inside.
I gave a second to ponder the pros and cons of my impending decision. I was pretty sure you couldn't overdose on marijuana, and some kids even told me it wasn't even addictive. But some of those people also like to drink, and they have a tendency to…how do I say it? They have a strong tendency to lose their ability to walk and talk at certain points of the night.
“C’mo~n, Tater-kun, it's not gonna kill you. Just one rip. It doesn't even give you cancer like tobacco does.” Amber had a good point, if she was telling the truth. Plus, the way she said “c’mon” was her warning that she was gonna make fun of me till I did it. So I stood up from my bed and grabbed the bong from her.
When I spat out the enormous greyish-white cloud from my lungs, I was sure that Amber had to have been lying to me when she told me weed wouldn't kill me. Immediately, I was on the floor, coughing with no signs of stopping. She came down to rub and pat on my back, which really didn't do much.
After a few minutes, I found myself with my head in her lap, my fingers steepled, eyes squinted, and eyebrows stuck to my hairline. I was rambling on and on about my life, my heritage, and my deep-rooted disconnection from it. I told her more about myself than I think I'd ever told anyone at that point. I even told her about all the Midenite artifacts I needed to collect. And the whole time, she kept mostly quiet, reassuring me with only her touch, and an occasional “hmm,” “yeah…” or “awwwww” to break up my paragraphs of the barely-cohesive, non-chronological story of my life. She was breathing heavily, but steadily, and something about the sound of her breaths was soothing. She softly stroked my hair and face, and occasionally even put her hand on my chest to feel my heartbeat.
“Your heart's beating real fast,” she whispered to me when I got off topic for the umpteenth time, trailing off in the middle of the story about my sixth set of foster parents and how shitty they always treated me.
“Yeah…” I said. My throat was dry and my voice was fried. “Is that…like…a side effect?” With every word I spoke, my brain kept trying to take me someplace else in my life that I'd mentioned earlier in the conversation: In one split second, I was at the orphanage, playing with the other kids who had no concept of race beyond the kind you do with your feet to ensure you're not a rotten egg. In another, I was dodging a Hadorami bottle that one of my adopted parents threw at me in a fit of drunken rage for being too goddamn expensive. In another…I think it was the future. It was hazy, but I was up on a podium of some kind, in front of a crowd of a lot of people. At first I thought the masses were cheering, but quickly the shouts became more shrill, more piercing. They were screams of rage.
Amber’s little giggle brought me back to the present. “Hehe, yeah, it's a side effect. Happens to a lot of guys. Then you either get super anxious, or paranoid or…” She lowered her face closer to mine. “Horny,” she whispered with a grin.
“...Oh. That's interesting.” What the hell was that future I'd just seen??
“So…” She gingerly played with my bead necklace before slickly slipping her warm fingers under my shirt to feel my heartbeat. “How’re you feeling right now?”
I tried to shake off that blurry image. It had to just be a product of my THC-induced overactive imagination. Even if it wasn’t, there was nothing to do about it except to enjoy right now, today. “... I'm just…really…relaxed.” I told her, closing my eyes and drawing a sigh. I started to think about how great it was that I was finally out of the foster system, in college, and about to get my life together. Regardless of whether what I just pictured in my head was a vision of warning from the gods or my ancestors or whatever, I was sure I was on my way to doing what I always wanted to do as an adult. I was a cultural anthropology major, with a minor in archeology, here because of a full-ride scholarship awarded to me by one of those “non”-profit social justice organizations that love to find condescending ways to seem generous. I smiled, thinking about how within a few years, I was going to travel the world, collecting artifacts from the nation of Miden, the people indigenous to the land now largely occupied by Higashima in the east, and Liberty Moon in the west.
From that night onward, Amber's new hobby became trying to get me to smoke with her as much as possible. She seemed to really like hearing me talk. Eventually, I started to talk about more than just myself. I explained all the wonderful kinds of clothes the Midenites have, and about Midenite activists who are trying to make things better for the descendants of our fallen nation. I explained the psychology of Midenophobia, or the fear of Midenites and Miden’s culture, and how it goes back hundreds of years, to when the Higanese first arrived on this land, and were convinced the Midenites had to be devils because of our ability to use Metapneuma–a form of metamartial arts formerly known only to Midenites.
It seemed Amber just couldn’t get enough of these one-sided conversations. Eventually, though, I had. Talking about things you already know can only be so much fun, especially when the other person doesn’t have much to add. All Amber really talked about were…Stoner things, I guess. Different kinds of weed, different ways to get high, and the things she does while high, which, as mentioned earlier, consist primarily of watching movies and anime and playing video games. Sometimes she watched video essays, and sometimes they were about interesting topics like true crime or social justice. Other times, though, they were about things like celebrity drama, overnight-activist-type buzzwordy “think” pieces, and powerscaling. Honestly, I didn't understand that lack of hunger to understand the world around her. She just kind of found her bubble of topics to interest herself in. I figured that if I wanted to enjoy our remaining time together as roommates, I'd have to introduce some kind of new topic that we could both become interested in, and I could thereby show her that being interested in more than a few things can be fun.
After a few months, I finally got that opportunity. It was a night like many others. The electrifying strings of Terry Templeside’s awesome eleki rock instrumental Test Driver pushed the episode of Meta-banashi that Amber was watching into the background, but not enough to fully drown it out, because she really liked to blast the sound on her videos.
The episode had legendary Metaswordsman Soshintsu Taiga on as a guest, discussing the thing that always got him views: The supposed death of Metawordsmanship. While I did have most of my mind focused on this jade Midenite mask I was reading about in my archeology textbook, some of my focus did drift over to Amber’s side of the room, and not because she was in her spaghetti straps and panties, sucking down an ice pop.
The topic of Metaswordsmanship dying as an metamartial art form was actually kind of interesting to me. What I’d always wanted to talk to someone about was the comparison of the death of Metaswordsmanship to Metapneuma. To me, the notion of Metaswordsmanship “dying” was more superficial than the death of Metapneuma. Metaswordsmanship was only “dying”, apparently, because it was just becoming less and less viable against other, more complex techniques. Plus, judging from Amber’s heckling at the screen, Metaswordsmanship is just kind of boring. Metapneuma, on the other hand, was nearly dead because the people practicing it were hunted and killed, and books containing the information were burned. It never seemed like a fair comparison to me. I had always secretly wished that I knew someone who knew enough about metamartial arts to talk about this with. But everybody I knew who liked Metafighting was only interested in powerscaling, or the who’s-fighting/fucking-whom aspect.
“Okay, so what about Takako Hatoya?” Mashu Tekker, the host of Meta-banashi asked. Mashu had one of those friendly, boyish “white boy” faces that, coupled with a plain haircut, made him look like he could either be 12 or 32 years old.
Soshintsu Taiga-sensei roared out a bitter fake laugh. Tekker had just been listing off a bunch of today’s modern Metaswordsmen, and as the legend, Taiga was appraising each and every one. He had nothing nice to say about any of them. To Takako Hatoya, an up-and-coming female Metaswordsman (Metaswordswoman?), Taiga-sensei had the following to say: “When’s the last time that bitch did anything with her katana, other than to [BLEEP]ing block an attack? That thing on her hip is practically decoration!”
“...Okay…” I heard Tekker say as I kept my eyes on my studies. The jade mask was used for “ritual purposes”, which is a fancy way for archeologists to say, “I don’t fucking know, man.”
“But what about Freddy Fenghuang?” Tekker asked. The Midenite symbol for “life”, which looks kind of like a little sun, was engraved into the forehead of the mask.
Soshintsu sighed. “Welp…He was pretty good. But he’s dead, so-”
“WHAT?!” Tekker shouted.
“THE FUCK?!” Amber shouted right after Tekker.
“Yeah, last week actually.” Taiga said, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry. I thought this was all public by now. He came to my place to challenge me, ‘cuz he said he could ‘feel the changes’ in the world and shit. You know how he is, right?”
“Uhh…”
“Y’know, with his ‘prophecies’ and shit. I always thought it was some kinda act for his fans, but no, he really believes in all that superstitious shit. Like how every time he gets a new form, it brings ‘good fortune’ to all the people who see it happen, and that type of shit. I always thought it was some kind of–what’s that new term–clout-chasing! I thought it was a clout-chasing scheme.”
“So he came to you with some kind of final prophecy?!” The topic change from shitting on Metafighters to potentially talking about the real reason Metaswordsmanship is dying off got me to look up from my work and at the video on Amber’s screen.
“Not exactly. He didn’t get into the specifics. He said he’d explain as the fight got along, but things got…cut short.” Taiga explained, trying to hold back a chuckle.
“You…[BLEEP]ed him?” Tekker asked. His color started to drain from his face.
“Yes. Legally, though. I’ve got the Deathmatch Consent Form at my house.”
“D-don’t you feel bad about [BLEEP]ing a fellow Metaswordsman, especially since your kind is already dying off?”
Taiga shrugged his shoulders. “I told him not to challenge me.” This was followed by an eruption of laughter, then cheers as he looked to the camera with a grin, still shrugging.
“Holy shit,” I breathed. How common was it for Metafighters to get on TV and brag that they killed someone? It wasn’t talked about much in Amber’s videos. I don’t think, at least. But that could just be because you’re not allowed to talk about violent topics on AntaKan, which is where she watched all her Metafighting videos.
“Do you think his death is some kind of sign? Like his transformations?”
“I hope not. Cuz that’d probably mean I’m cursed or some shit!” He belted out in an unbridled laugh, leading the audience to do the same like a chorus. After a second, his smile disappeared, and he grabbed his sword, which was leaning against the side of his chair. He rested his hands on the hilt and planted it in the ground between his feet. He looked at the ground with a solemn intensity. “That makes all of you cursed, too, for laughing at him,” he told the audience.
“HA! Bozos,” Amber mocked.
“Hasn’t Freddy Fenghuang come back from the dead before?” Taiga asked. “He’s probably gonna do it again.”
“Well, they say he wasn’t technically ‘dead’, but his heart had stopped,” Tekker clarified. “He was fighting Sweet Lightning, and he accidentally restarted his heart after…Well, accidentally stopping it, so it’s not like…y’know…”
“Well, if he can’t come back to life, then this is what his death means: There are too many younger Metafighters who are hitting their peak, and then just dying. You all keep getting too bold and challenge the top-tiers too early. You younger Metafighters need to study the craft more. The Metafighters nowadays fight for different reasons than we did. And that’s gonna get you all [BLEEP]ed.”
“What do you think you should do about this issue?”
“What I’ve always done. I’ve always kept my home address public because I want people to come over and challenge me. I’ve gotten really good at holding back, so I’ll make sure to only [BLEEP] you if you sign a Deathmatch Consent Form. And when you lose, then you’ll see just how long it’ll take to get to my level.”
“There’s this sort of title that comes up on the boards and on Squawker. They say you're the gatekeeper of the S-tier. Would you agree?”
“No. But that’s probably how most kids see me, so maybe I am. Actually–hmm. Gatekeeper of the S-Tier. It’s not terrible.”
Amber’s video ended, and the countdown to automatically play some other video the algorithm recommended to her began.
“Well, that fucks my tierlist up bad,” Amber muttered. She closed the tab and opened up another one, where she had a tierlist of all the Metafighters she watched. At the top tier, labeled “S”, she had most of the people I recognized from being unable to avoid hearing about them. There were a few great retired fighters like Soshintsu Taiga and Sophus Doragon, historical figures like Star 17 and Asa Astra, and people I’ve seen on billboards and ads like XIX. She moved Freddy Fenghuang down from “S” to “A”, right below it. She also moved XIX and some other Metafighter I didn’t recognize down to A as well. Then she moved some more of her A-tier fighters to B-tier, and a large group of fighters on B-tier moved down to C-tier, where a majority of them already sat. She paused and sighed, then brought a few of the faces that were in C-tier down to D-tier.
My eyes went back up to Sophus Doragon. There was something I read back in middle or high school about him that I found really interesting.
“Wait,” I told Amber as she sat there for a second, contemplating her tierlist. I got up and walked over to her chair. “Didn’t that Sophus Doragon guy…Doesn’t he know how to use Metapneuma??”
“Yeah. He never used it in an official fight, though. Pretty shitty of him to just appropriate your culture like that, isn’t it?”
I squinted at the small tile with his face on it, sitting near the top of S-tier. He looked like he was in his mid-twenties in the picture, and had one of those stringy mustaches that hung all the way down below his chin. He sported a goofy smile, like a kindergartener showing off their magnificent macaroni art piece.
“What’s he up to now?” I asked.
“Bro’s been retired for, like, 40 years. Probably ‘cuz everybody knows he’s a cultural-appropriationist-ass motherfucker. He had this whole little phase where he was obsessed with Midenite culture, even though he’s a hundred percent White.” She said that word with disdain, as if the color of his skin made him evil. “He didn’t even know any Midenite fighters.”
“Do you know any Midenite fighters?”
“Honestly, no. I’m pretty sure it’s really hard to get in as a Midenite fighter these days, ‘cuz of the Babel Blast. And the shit with Ron.”
“But Ron wasn’t Midenite…”
“Yeah, but since his outfits were inspired by Midenite culture, a lot of networks don’t wanna show Midenite fighters, since a lot of Metafighting fans were affected by him.”
I looked down for a second, fidgeting with my hair and taking all that information in. “So the most notable Metafighter known to use Metapneuma is white, hasn't been seen in years, and on top of that, has never actually used Metapneuma in an official match?”
”Yep.”
“I think I wanna meet this Sophus Doragon guy.”
“Hell yeah. Give that motherfucker a piece of your mind. Tell him, ‘my culture is not your motherfucking Metafighting technique!!!’”
“I've got a lot to tell that man,” I told her as I grabbed my backpack off the floor and plopped it onto my bed. I unzipped it and pulled out my laptop.
“What’cha doin’?” Asked Amber. She got up from her gaming chair and came over to my bed. She put her ice pop in her mouth and crawled onto my mattress on all fours.
“No, finish that first,” I demanded.
Amber crawled off the bed and sat on the floor on her knees. She took the ice pop out of her mouth, pouted, and said, “fine.” She then started noisily slurping on her ice pop and obnoxiously licking her tongue up and down its length. A drop of melted artificial orange flavoring dribbled from her lips, down her chin, and fell onto one of her breasts, before sinking into the dark valley of cleavage between them. She locked eyes with me and refused to let go of my gaze. She always got upset at me for not letting her eat on my bed. When I watched the second drop seep from her mouth to her chest, she started pushing the ice pop all the way into her mouth, somehow able to fit the whole thing in without choking. Maybe I should've been impressed, but I knew a girl in the orphanage who could do the same with the Jumbo-sized ones.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Once she finally finished, she spit out the little wood stick and crawled back onto the bed. “What’cha doin’?” She asked again
“Do you know what social medias Sophus Doragon has?” I asked in response.
“No. He’s off the grid. Like, all the way off. He’s not even on the old people socials.”
“Oh.”
“Nobody really knows where he is, or what he’s been up to in the last 40 years. People have all kinds of crazy theories, though.”
“I think I’m gonna need some weed,” I muttered to myself as I typed “sophus doragon whereabouts” in Oku search.
“You got some weed money?” Amber sharply asked.
“Oh. Uhh…I guess not.” My eyebrows narrowed at the horde of results from trashy news sites, archives of anonymous message boards, and old blogs. “You don’t really have to…”
“I can take payments in other ways,” she assured me.
“I was joking,” I said, opening up the first 15 links in 15 different tabs. “I don't need any weed.”
She crawled up to me, pushing her face an inch away from mine. “Well, if you do want me to give you some, ask me. I'll tell you exactly how you can pay me back.”
“Okay.” I shuffled into a cross-legged position, propped my elbow on my leg, and rested my cheek on my wrist. I took a deep breath, bracing for a long night of wading through an endless slough of bullshit for tiny, sweet corn kernels of possible truth.
And so on that day, I gained a new hobby of sorts: finding out everything I could about Sophus Doragon with the hopes of finding him. Amber actually helped, too. She'd put on videos talking about all the various Sophus Doragon conspiracy theories, of which there are countless hours worth. These theories ranged from claims that he secretly had dealings with Ron, the Devilish God–the Metaterrorist who was killed by Star 17 four decades ago–to being a secret founder of the DOOMLAYERZ–a controversial organization known for its dissatisfaction with both the Librian and Higanese governments.
“Yeah, no fucking shot,” Amber said to the guy in the video that suggested Doragon to be the founder of the DOOMLAYERZ.
“What makes you so sure?” I asked as I typed “doomlayers history” into Oku search before deleting the “s” and replacing it with a “z”.
“An old white racist in the motherfucking DOOMLAYERZ?! Come the fuck on. Guys like him, who appropriate cultures, are pro-government. The motherfucking DOOMLAYERZ are anti-government. It's that fucking simple.”
“How's Sophus Doragon racist?”
“He fucking appropriated Midenite culture–a dying culture–your culture!” Something about hearing someone say “dying culture” out loud kind of hurts in a way that thinking about it doesn't.
“How's that racist?” I asked.
“Because Midenite Metafighters should be the ones who get to use Metapneuma. There are plenty of other Metafighting techniques for a white man to choose from!”
“I see.” Amber was really disdainful for white people, especially for a white woman.
After weeks of searching, the biggest lead we ever got on where Sophus Doragon was actually came by complete accident. I was reading Philosophy of the Devilish God by Robert Midoriya, and Amber was watching a video from XIX, a clout-chasing content creator who also does Metamarial arts. In my book, Robert Midoriya traces the life and death of Ron, the Devilish God. Midoriya tries to understand the mind of the deeply disturbed individual who tried to take over the world. Amber’s video was about XIX wandering through the infamous Gump Forest, known nationwide as a place where many people go to kill themselves. Surrounding the content creator was a multitude of corpses hanging from trees. The bodies were all pixelated, censored so the video could still be allowed on the “family-friendly” AntaKan.
Even without the blurry bodies, Gump Forest is a haunting place. Every tree was shaped like an emaciated arm, often with more fingers than usual, bending and twisting their way out of the ground. The biggest ones–the oldest ones–locked fingers with one another, locking away the warmth of the sun for the ones below–including XIX and this mysterious old man. Many of the smaller trees seemed underwatered or even to be withering.
“Oi!! Kaeruzo!” I heard an old man's voice echo from the video. I looked up from the paragraph about Ron finding out that there existed documents kept by the Higanese government that break down exactly how the Babel Blast was created.
“Holy shit guys, I think that’s a ghost,” XIX whispered. He pointed his camera over to a thick chunk of trees and blurry bodies and zoomed in. There was a silhouette of a body in the distance that was different from the rest. This one was on the ground, standing up, and didn’t have any pixels obscuring its outline.
“HEY!!” XIX called out to the silhouette, who was slowly striding toward him. “Are you a ghost? Omae yuurei no ka?”
“I said leave. Stop recording these poor souls,” commanded the silhouetted man.
“But I’m doing this for suicide awareness. I’m recording this forest to inform people.”
The man continued to approach XIX. He was wearing an old, tattered monks’ robe. “Nobody needs to see a dead body to know about suicide. Get out. You’re being disrespectful.”
“Literally how am I being disrespectful? I’m just making a video. I’m not hurting anyone. Everybody here’s already dead!” XIX laughed at his cruel, accidental joke.
The man sighed, squatted and touched a fist to the ground. I immediately identified the pose as a Metapneuma form I'd seen in a book. All the trees in the area started to bend toward him, as if bowing to their ruler. The hanging bodies also started to point to him, as if being tugged in his direction by an invisible rope tied to their feet. The man looked up into the camera, and for the first time, the camera got a good look at his face. The bottom half of his face was obscured by a tangled mess of white hair, but he had a distinctive stringy mustache that floated wispily off his clothes, wriggling around in midair as he charged his energy.
“You’re alive, aren’t you?” the old man asked XIX, flashing him The Look.
“Well, yeah,” the clout chaser said with a nervous laugh.
“Don’t you want to stay alive?” The man’s mustache started wiggling faster and more wildly.
“Pause that!” I told Amber.
“What’s wrong?” Amber asked.
I got up from my bed and tapped on the old man’s face on Amber’s screen. “That’s him!” I exclaimed.
“What? No way. I mean, he’s got the mustache, but a lot of old white guys probably have that. Plus, XIX’s videos are almost always staged.”
“He’s got the mustache! He’s got The Look! He’s using a freaking Metapneuma technique!! That’s him!!!”
“Well, even if it is…” Amber looked up at me. “What now? He clearly doesn’t wanna be fucked with.”
“Now, I’m going to Gump Forest.”
“What?! He’s gonna fucking kill you!”
“I’m not so sure he will.”
“Bro, he hates Midenite people! Why do you think he took one of their powers?!”
I started fidgeting with my hair, twisting a few of my curls in contemplation. I didn’t think that Sophus Doragon was really racist, but I didn’t have much evidence to prove it. There’s just a certain way that racist people talk and act that you eventually just kinda pick up on when you’re a minority.
“I’ll just say I know a technique he doesn't know,” I told Amber, smiling, trying to make it sound like my idea is a good one.
“Y’know..That could work. At least for long enough to hear you out. But what are you gonna do when he finds out you’re lying?”
“I only need to talk to him long enough for one good conversation. I just wanna learn who he learned Metapneuma from. Then, I’ll go to them, and continue my research.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll publish everything I learned in a book and pass it out to people living on Midenite reserves.”
“Wait, you don’t wanna learn how to use Metapneuma?”
“Oh, no, I do, but just for cultural reasons, y'know? I don’t wanna become a Metafighter.”
“Why not??”
“As a Metafighter, you’re basically putting your life on the line every time you fight. I’m not doing all that shit!” I told her with a laugh. “Plus, I don’t like being put in front of large crowds.”
“But think about how famous you’d be!”
“I have. I don’t need fame.”
“But what about money?!”
“There are a lot of ways to make money. Metamartial arts is a lifestyle. I’m not gonna adopt a whole lifestyle just for money.”
“...Fair enough…” There was a very slight rise in her inflection, like it was a question.
That next Saturday, we packed our bags and embarked on the trip to Gump Forest.
Gump Forest was a six-hour drive from our dorms. Amber insisted that she go with me, and that she take us in the pickup truck inherited from her father.
“This is a road trip truck!” She told me as she slapped the side of it like a used car salesman. “And look at this!” She then escorted me over to the truck bed, in which lay a queen-size mattress. “My dad gave me this truck, and the mattress when I was 16,” she explained. “He was like, ‘this mattress is for when you finally get a girlfriend!’ And I was just like, ‘…umm…how do I say this?’ And then that's when I came out to him.”
I breathed out a little chuckle. “Heh. Wow.”
Amber laughed. “I was just like, ‘ummm, actually, I am the girlfriend.’”
She also had another idea I wouldn't have thought of: To stock up on snacks. And she stocked heavily. She also brought her stash of marijuana and a pipe.
“Is it a good idea to smoke and drive?” I asked Amber as she gingerly pinched a large clump of freshly-ground weed off her rolling tray and stuffed it into the tiny bowl.
“I'll know when to stop,” Amber reassured me as she sprinkled the last few flecks of flower off her fingers.
“You'd better,” I said as I put on my seatbelt, sensing somehow that today I'll need it more than ever.
“Hey! I'll have you know I've never even been pulled over, even when I'm speeding! It's cuz I'm a good fucking driver.” Amber then reached over to me and placed the rolling tray and plastic baggie with the rest of her weed in my lap. “Now, I'll worry about the driving. You just focus on riding, and packing the bowl every time it goes Yabuki.”
“Yabuki?” I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow.
“Aaaawww.” Amber playfully pinched my cheek. “You're such an adorable casual. ‘Yabuki’ is a stoner term. Hand me the lighter.”
The plastic bag had her grinder and lighter in it, too. I handed her the latter.
Amber lit the pipe, took a drag, and blew a grey jet of smoke out the window. “It's when there's nothing in the bowl but that pure white ash,” she explained as she watched her cloud disperse with a newfound contemplativeness. “It's named after a Metafighter from, like, a hundred years ago: Joseph Yabuki.” She handed the pipe to me.
I took the pipe and took a puff, making a mental note to watch my high. “Who was Joseph Yabuki?”
“A Metafighter. From, like, a hundred years ago. He burned himself to death with his own Metaki.”
“You can do that?!”
“Apparently.” Amber reached into her pockets for her keys. She scraped her truck key against the plastic right next to the ignition three different times before finally jamming it into the right place and starting the car.
Over the next six hours, we took turns blasting music and sucking smoke from the pipe, talking about life. For the entire duration, the grey and yellow road stretched ahead of us endlessly as our surroundings gradually shifted from our college campus to featureless expanses of farmland to the dark, looming forest. The “entrance” to the resting place of hundreds of lost souls who couldn't bear the weight of the burden the world strapped to their backs took the form of a little clearing on the side of the road. When we'd arrived, the sun had just set, and on all sides, countless trees groped at the sky like twisted and malnourished black hands.
”Here we are,” Amber announced with a hint of cautiousness on her breath as she pulled off the road and right up to the clearing; an oblong mass of shadow tearing a small hole in the huge sheet of trees choking each other for a chance at fresh air in the sky.
I took my seatbelt off, hopped out of the truck, and walked over to the back to get my duffle bag from the trunk.
”What do you need your clothes for?” Amber asked as she walked up to me.
”I guess I wanna look like I'm here to do something other than kill myself,” I explained.
Stepping into the clearing immediately gave me chills that added to the efforts of the already nippy outdoors to make me want to turn back and talk about going to a hotel and returning at a warmer time of day. I took a deep breath in through my nose, then out through my mouth, and kept moving forward.
Amber trailed behind me, understandably afraid. “S-so…How exactly do you plan on finding that old man…who may or may not be a ghost…and if he's not a ghost, then he may or may not be Sophus Doragon..?”
I took my phone out and shook it, which turned the flashlight on. “He'll probably find us first,” I answered as I raised my phone above my head to help illuminate the place.
The beam of light provided by my phone landed on a human face of an inhumanly purplish-black color. Inky dried blood trailed from the nose and mouth, going down the chin and staining the plaid buttoned flannel shirt this poor soul had decided to wear on their last day on Earth. Contrasting with the gruesome state of this person’s face was their blank, bizarrely peaceful expression. I slapped my free hand onto my mouth, feeling like I was about to vomit, but simultaneously fascinated. Behind me, Amber shrieked and fell on her backside.
“This was a bad idea, Tater!” She said as I helped her up. “We shouldn’t have come here! We should go back to the dorm!”
“No, you shouldn’t have come,” I told her, holding my stomach. “I came here expecting to see a few…dead…dead bo-” With every attempt to finish that sentence, I could feel my stomach flipping and my mouth filling with that particular taste that comes right before chunks erupt from the throat.
“だれだ?!” (da re da?! Who is it?!) I heard a voice ask. It sounded more like a demand than a question.
I swept the flashlight’s beam in every direction, seeing nothing but more trees and more dead bodies hanging from them. In every angle I looked, I saw another young adult hanging by the neck from a branch of these hand-shaped trees making scraping, curled fingers, with some of them twisting around and interlocking with other trees, choking each other as they shot upwards. I didn’t see any living person, other than Amber, who was also looking around with her phone flashlight on now. I decided that either the person calling out to us must’ve been hiding behind a tree or something. Their voice, deep, old, and masculine, came so clear that to me, the person had to have been close.
I decided that the best option was to just show that I was not hostile, nor a clout-chaser, nor suicidal. I put up my hands and cleared my throat.
“今日は!” (Konnichiwa!) I shouted as loud as I thought was reasonable, since I still wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from. “My name is Tate Shirudo! I’m a college student (name school here?) trying to research Metapneuma! I was under the impression that a Metapneuma user lived here..?” I couldn’t help but mess up my inflection because I wasn’t sure if I was making a statement or asking a question, or if I should even be saying that at all.
“What the hell gave you that impression?”
“I saw someone using Metapneuma here in a video recently!”
“A video? Here?! Impossible!”
“It’s true! It was a metamartial artist and vlogger known as Xing-Xing Yi-chen, also known as XIX on AntaKan!”
“What the hell is a vlogger?!”
Amber started to laugh. “You don’t know what a vlog is?!” She jabbed at the disembodied voice. “Are you stupid?!”
“It’s when a person records videos about their life and hobbies!” I explained, remembering that there is very possibly an old, insane metamartial artist with incredible supernatural powers living here. Since this person didn’t know what a vlog was, maybe he didn’t know what cameras look like nowadays. “Oftentimes, vloggers record videos on their phones, like the ones we have in our hands!”
“Ah. I do remember a young Central Kingdom man coming by with a rectangle similar to yours. So he was recording me, was he?!”
All of a sudden, both of our phones simultaneously cracked, then twisted and crumpled themselves up in our hands. Sparks and smoke flew up from our precious devices as they appeared to commit suicide together. With our phones now gone, so was our light.
“WHAT THE FUCK, MAN?!” Amber screamed. “WE WEREN’T RECORDING YOU!!”
“We were only using our phones’ flashlights!!”
“You can use a phone as a flashlight?! Impossible!”
“Please believe us, sir!” I said, accidentally slipping up and assuming this person’s gender. “I just want to study Metapneuma!”
“Why?”
Something about the voice compelled me to tell the truth, and not just out of fear. “Because I’m Midenite! My parents were murdered when I was a baby! Midenite culture is my only connection to my heritage!” The more I spoke, the more comfortable I felt. “I’m honestly desperate to find another Metapneuma user, and I have no idea how to find one otherwise.” There was a pause long enough for me to notice that there was some kind of change in the air that I hadn’t felt before this man started speaking.
“Who do you think I am, young man?”
That question threw me off a little. “Um, I think you’re Sophus Doragon-sensei!”
All of a sudden, a glowing man materialized in front of me out of thin air, causing me to yelp and step back instinctively, slamming into Amber by accident, causing her to fall to the ground.
“Watch it, you–HOLY FUCK!!” Amber said, interrupting herself to scream in awe at the man floating before us, wearing an iridescent white gi, which matched his long hair and stringy mustache. All the hair and fabric silkily wafted and waved around. It looked as if his hair and clothes would've floated away if they weren't bound to his body, which seemed too muscular, too perfect to belong to a man in his sixties.
“You’re correct,” said Doragon-sensei. He grabbed his mustache from the base and stroked it all the way down to the tips. The floating hairs sprouting from his lip straightened themselves out as his calloused, veiny hand passed over them, then wriggled around freely again when he let go.
“Come,” he said, sticking his hand out to me. “I’ve been waiting for a man like you to arrive.”
I took it, not realizing that this would change my life forever. Then, Sophus Doragon teleported us to his home.