Kas shook his head and ran his hand down his face, looking very much his age in the moment. My stomach tumbled a bit at the sight. I had just finished giving him the rundown on the past few days, and didn’t feel great about dropping all this on him. It couldn’t have been what he thought he’d signed up for when he’d offered to mentor me in stunt acting.

Grumbling to himself, he fetched a bottle of creme liqueur and another of high end vodka and sat back down. A shot of the first and two of the latter were quick to be stirred into his coffee. He pushed the bottles towards me.

I raised an eyebrow. “It is not even ten o’clock.”

“So?” he said exasperated. “We don’t have real jobs.”

“It’s more the principle of the thing.”

“Exactly. We’re actors, we’re supposed to live large. But hey, you don’t want to drink, don’t drink. I on the other hand need one after everything you just said. Shit, need two. You know, you’re a lot more work than most mentees.”

I winced. “Sorry.”

“Ah, shit, sorry, didn’t mean it like that. It’s a good thing. You’re like…marble, right? Everyone else feels like clay now, like they were practice for the real thing. No offense to them, of course.” He took a sip of his Irish coffee, before deciding to add another splash of vodka to it. “I’m lucky, get to carve you into a masterpiece.”

I shrugged and made myself a cocktail to match, albeit with lighter pours. “Fuck it. Let’s live large.”

“You know, James,” Kas looked at me seriously, “when we met, I think I said something to you like, ‘You could really be something, kid.’ Well, I’m amending that statement. You’ll be one of the greats one day, if you don’t get yourself killed before then.”

“Big if,” I said into my drink. “What do think though, about mine and Annie’s changes?”

He barked a laugh and scratched his neck. “Oh boy. I know I never told you how I,” he did finger quotes, “‘unlocked’ my Qi. But I’m guessing your family didn’t tell you many specifics either.”

“Train hard, train diligently was all we were ever told.”

He nodded. “Makes sense, that’s pretty universal across the Arts.”

Kas stared off into the distant for a moment with a half-smile on his lips. “Want to hear how I did it?”

“Sure.”

“I was thirteen when I enrolled in Uzumaki Shinken Ryu Karate – my sensei in Germany had sent off a video of me training without telling me much about the place. And what he had told me had sounded like it was straight out of a movie. I’d been to India and America by that time, but Japan was like this magical world apart in my teenage brain, you know? Anything was possible there, especially when it came to martial arts.”

“It was my first time travelling alone. A senpai met me at the airport, and from there we took a sea plane out to the small island the dojo sits on. There’s an actual road, but for the first time, tradition demanded we go up the cliffside path, up these tiny, sea-slick stairs. My senpai, when we were about to start, smiled, turned to me, and said, ‘Don’t fall. The currents will drag you to the bottom and smash your head open on the rocks.’”

“It was slippery, but the hardest part was not getting fatally distracted by the stark beauty, the waves battering the Japanese shoreline. On the way up, he slapped me on the shoulder to get me to stop and pointed out at the sea. There was a whirlpool there, not too far from the shore. He said, ‘You see that Kassem-chan, it’s our namesake, Uzumaki. When you’re ready to learn our secret techniques, sensei will wrap you in chains and drop you in the center. Then you’ll be able to hadoken like Ryu from Street Fighter.’ It was super popular at the time.”

I looked skeptical. “That sounds like something I’d tell a teenager to fuck with them.”

“Just wait, you might be surprised.” He grinned. “Anyway, cut to a 17-year-old Kas. At this point I’ve spent three Summers at the dojo, I’m feeling myself, and I’m itching to step it up to the next level. But every time I bring up the whirlpool, I just get laughed at, told to do more repetitions or kata.”

“Well, like every good story, there’s this girl, Mana. She’s gorgeous and sweet, but she’s got eyes for this other absolute jackass, a real arrogant mother fucker. And to my great shame, he’s much better at Karate than I am. Not that it actually mattered to Mana, but in my dumb 17-year-old boy brain, it mattered a lot.”

“Classic,” I said.

“Agreed. A rival in love and martial arts,” he nodded. “That piece of shit right there,” Kas pointed at a picture of him at his wedding, standing next to a shorter Japanese man serving as his best man, “Goichi, drove me absolutely crazy.”

“So, it’s close to when I’m supposed to go back to Germany, and I am no longer feeling myself. We spent the Summer in grueling training, but it wasn’t much different from the year before. Goichi’s kicking my ass, both literally and in terms of Mana. One night I catch them kissing, and I decide right there that there’s no way I’m leaving Okinawa without tapping into my Qi. It’s time to step it up, you know? That way, I figure, I can learn all sorts of special techniques then come back the next year to kick Goichi’s ass. But, I needed the whirlpools there, I need the Uzumaki if I want tap into the next level of Uzumaki Shinken Ryu.”

“That night, I make a thermos of this green tea that helps you meditate and I head up to the cliffs by myself. I tell everyone I’m going to spend the night meditating to the sounds of the waves, and because this is a dojo in Okinawa, everyone just accepts that. What I actually do, is head down to the beach to where I keep a paddle board.”

“It’s pitch black dark out, no moon to speak of. Normally, that would be a nightmare to be out on the water, but it works in my favor. You see, the water has this very dim bioluminescent algae that glow when disturbed, which mean that the whirlpools are actually glowing like targets.”

“You can guess the next part. I drink that tea, try to focus on the nature of our Art, wrap a chain around my waist, and jump my dumbass into the spiral.”

I shook my head. “God, you were a really stupid teenager.”

He laughed. “Just hang on. Bear with me, you might be surprised. Well, the water pulled me down and under right away. I’d shot for the biggest whirlpool I could see. It didn’t look fast, but believe me, it was deadly strong. And there’s this complicating factor, like, I don’t actually know if I’m supposed to be trying to escape or if I’m supposed to be contemplating the Art.”

“That confusion lasts for ten, twenty seconds max, and then I’m panicking. I’m being tossed around and spun in every direction but up. I’m fucking drowning, right. And you know what happens with my Qi?”

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. I can’t focus on anything but trying to escape and getting the damned chains off my waist. I don’t even remember much about the struggle, just the end. I’m in a cloud of blue algae, blind to everything, running out of air, and I realize, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to die.’ And you know what happens with my Qi?”

I leaned forward, enraptured by the story.

“Nothing,” he said. “Fuck all. But, I survive, obviously. Not sure how, but I wake up on the shore with a huge stick of driftwood caught on my chains. I guess it happened to drag me out to safety. People are above me when I wake up – Goichi gave me CPR, the bastard, absolutely ruining our rivalry by saving my life. They’re asking me questions, but it takes me a while to answer because I’m having this massive realization.” Kas paused for dramatic effect. “I realized…that I didn’t learn anything about martial arts by doing that. Like, nothing at all. Turns out, that’s just an old joke they tell every new recruit to fuck with them. You were right.”

There was a long silence as I waited for him to continue. My jaw dropped. “Are…are you serious? You said I’d be surprised. What’s the surprise, old man?”

“No.” He pointed at me. “I said you might be surprised.”

I groaned, triggering a fit of raucous laughter from my mentor. “You are such an asshole. What did that have to do with anything?”

“You mean other than the fact that you basically did the same thing 17-year-old me did, except with an anchor tied to you and Annie?”

I frowned. That hit me like a gut punch. “Oh, yeah…” I massaged one of my temples. “Shit, Kas. I’ve really got no idea what I’m doing, man. Feels like I’ve been caught in the whirlpool since last Thursday.”

“That’s life, kid, for everyone. At least you’re handling it better than I would have at your age.”

Was I? Yesterday had been amazing. My power had grown in leaps and bounds, I’d had a great time, and made a close friend, student, and lover out of Annie. It had been a success on multiple levels in terms of the Game and the show – I was sure the Producers were ecstatic. But morally, ethically…I had taken a student while in the middle of a gang war, nearly killed her on the first day of training, and then magically manipulated her dreams to give her a new fetish. Sure, I’d told myself it was necessary to survive tomorrow’s ghost hunt, but my actions had hardly been heroic.

“For all this power and shit, I don’t know if I like the person I’m becoming,” I said.

“Never met a sane top level martial artist, James, just don’t happen. And I’ve been around too. What’s that shit you kung fu guys say, ‘To sup on the path to Kunlun is to drink the blood of foe and friend alike’? I mean that’s a pretty psychotic statement, is it not?” Kas scratched his chin and hummed. “Let me ask you this, would you change how you’d do the week if you could go back to last Thursday.”

“No,” I said without thinking about it. Someone was still going to have to hunt that ghost. “That’s what I don’t like.”

“Yeah, that’s how it goes,” he said with a sigh. “Look, you don’t judge others in a vacuum. Afford yourself the same kindness. Your life is hectic right now, anyone would fuck up a little. Nothing catastrophic’s happened yet, take it easy on yourself.”

I grunted. “I crossed the line with Annie. That was way too risky.”

“Maybe. She’d disagree though. Don’t forget it worked out though. Plenty of people in this city that would love to prey on a girl like Annie. Now it’s not so easy anymore. You did that, James. You’ve given her the ability to live her life with the freedom that only the strong can know.”

“Right, it worked.” I took a long sip of my Irish coffee while trying to wrap my head around that. Enough brooding, I was here for a reason. “What does that mean, Kas? What is happening to Annie, then?” Remembering that I was supposed to be confused about my changes too, I added, “What’s happening to me?”

“To Annie? I’m not sure. But, the girl had a six foot vertical before she was ten – she was obviously pretty gifted with some natural talents. If I had to guess, she probably had some ‘spice’ in her bloodline that you accidentally overcharged.”

“Spice?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. I try not to think about all the things that can walk around with human faces. Better for my mental health. Demon maybe? Djinn? Those are made of fire, right? Lots of shit out there.”

I sighed. “Better than nothing. I’ll have her look into her family history, I guess.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Nothing is impossible in this world, which is usually for the worst by the way, but you damn near did it with that ritual. I wish I could help you more but it’s way outside my specialty. There are people I can ask about it, but it’ll be hard to do that without revealing personal details. If you want, I can start looking into it.”

“Do you trust these people?”

“Not really. But I don’t distrust them. You’ll find that most people who do or study, or are even peripherally involved in, magic and sorcery to be paranoid assholes. I try to avoid that stuff. I’d tell you to do the same, but it looks like you’re deep in the mud already.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I hesitated. Annie was probably going to be fine, but the only reason I had to believe that was that I knew how many Successes I’d gotten. I was metagaming, pure and simple. There was no good way of communicating that, but at least I could be relatively certain she wasn’t going to erupt into flame in a few weeks. I wanted to say yes of course, to pass this problem off onto Kas for him to handle for me. But I knew that would be too good to be true.

“Nah, don’t worry about it, man. I’m not sweating it, Annie’s not sweating it, and my gut tells me it’s a positive change. I have too many problems in my life to be adding scheming wizards into the mix, right now at least. Still, I do want to learn more about Qi Sorcery. If you know anyone willing to train me or pass on some knowledge, I’m sure I can find some way to make it worth their time.”

Kas nodded and smiled. “Hey, it’s important to follow your gut. That’s been my M.O. since day one. Just be careful you don’t go all in on it, or else you’ll end up like me.” He gestured to the room.

I looked around confused. “Fantastically successful? A…homeowner?”

He laughed and spread his arms. “Divorced!”

“Ha! Fair enough. But the way my life is going, I’ll consider anything short of death to be a win. Speaking of, it sounded like you had a theory on what’s happening to me.”

He slapped the table. “That’s right! I think I’ve got it figured out. See, I’ve been around for a minute, and met my share of legendary badasses in that time. Andina Katz and I were pretty tight for a bit, you know?”

“The murderer?” I narrowed my eyes. “And how tight?”

“Please, the assassin, there’s a difference,” he corrected. “And a gentleman never tells.”

“You had sex with the woman who killed the Spanish royal family?” I paused and did the mental math regarding their age difference. “Wait, that was in the early 80’s. You had sex with her after?! Jesus Christ, man, she did the kids too, didn’t she?”

“Look, brother, when a woman who headbutts tank shells out of the air slaps you on the ass and slips her room key into your back pocket, you’re along for the ride, alright? Not my proudest moments, but it is what it is. Anyway, what I was saying, is that all of the greats of fighting have one thing in common – luck.”

“Sure. They’d have died otherwise.”

He waved his hands ‘no’. “Not just good luck, but bad, and weird too. Or, maybe luck was the wrong word. Fate! That’s it! You get into a room with one of these people and it’s like the world starts to revolve around them, know what I’m saying? And the more time you spend with one of them, the greater that feeling gets, like you’re just a background actor in someone else’s story. Listening to your story, it was like flashing back to being with Andina.”

Well, shit, Kassem Kahn was more insightful than he came across by miles. Still, I could hardly give this one to the man – in universe it was a completely insane theory.

“You’re saying I’m a main character?” I asked, voice dripping with skepticism.

He smiled proudly. “Yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

I shot him a withering look. “Your brain has been broken by Hollywood, old man.”

Kas laughed. “I’m telling you, I felt a touch of destiny the day I met you, and I’m feeling it heavy right now.”

“I love the flattery, but that is the single dumbest thing you’ve ever said to me. How does that work in your head, anyway? There’s an audience of people watching me, voting for me in popularity polls and shit?”

He sighed dramatically. “Such knowledge is beyond my mortal ken, James. But I’m telling you man, live as long as me and you learn that absolutely nothing is impossible. Stranger shit happens everyday.”

“Stranger than me being on an interdimensional reality television show?! Stranger than that, Kas?! Really?”

“No, no, give yourself some credit. You are definitely a Prestige TV premium cable series on Heavenly HBO. Heaven Box Office, if you will. And I don’t know why you’re pushing back so hard on this. You are literally being menaced by an overweight rat using high level ninjutsu. Other people have regular rat problems, you have anime rat problems.”

“That rat is a menace to everyone in this city, damnit! We don’t know he isn’t teaching his art to the other rats. They’re social creatures, Kas. Can you imagine the havoc?” I stopped myself before launching into a full rant. “Regardless, that can’t be your only theory for what’s happening to me.”

He crossed his arms. “You’re just special, kid. Don’t know what to say.”

“That literally doesn’t explain anything. Do you have any thoughts on the mechanics of what might be happening?”

“Nope.” I glared at him silently in response. Kas laughed, putting his hands up in surrender. “I’m kidding. All I’ve got are thoughts. I’ll look into it, alright. Relax. Oh, hey!” He snapped. “I’ve got some tangibly useful advice. I was going to tell you about Dark Media. Check it out.”

Kas threw me the rolled up newspaper he’d whacked me with earlier, The Harbor Moon. He had said the paper was print edition only, an unthinkable business model in today’s age. “Lighthouse Press,” I read aloud, thumbing the symbol at the top corner of the frontpage. It looked so familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen it before.

The main story claimed that the New Jersey State Congress was set to repeal all obscenity laws to get ahead of the curve. Apparently, a bipartisan national repeal was all but certain to pass and be signed by the end of the year, and New Jersey was hoping to have businesses primed to take advantage of the new laws ahead of other States. I wasn’t exactly sure what that entailed beyond setting up more pornography studios and strip clubs. The story, no author listed, claimed that the bipartisan push would be for less nanny-state oversight from the political right, and artistic freedom from the left, and that Senator Jilly Stevens of New Jersey was set to co-sponsor the federal bill after a successful rollout at the state level. The bill was also rewriting expectations for the globally important banks and credit processing companies to be less puritanical with their loans and services, deregulating them considerably in general – no doubt the biggest reason for the legislation.

“This is insane,” I said, looking up from the paper. “How have I not heard about this? It should be all over the news. What about religious organizations? I feel like they’d be freaking out.” I was kind of freaking out myself. This had SkinDimensional’s fingerprints all over it.

“Probably why it ended up in Dark Media,” said Kas. “I’m guessing there’s too much profit riding on it to let any resistance to the repeal build up steam.”

The implications of that were absurd; man screaming on the side of the street level crazy kind of conspiracy. “But that’s—so every normal media organization is controlled then?”

“Of course. Are you serious?”

I guess that made sense, I was in a world with immortal supernatural threats, but it was hard to wrap my head around the logistics of that. “What about the internet weirdos that listen to CSPAN and read congressional bulletins? Shouldn’t there be blogs and shit? I mean, how do you keep something like this under wraps?”

Kas shrugged. “They’re probably posting about it. I wouldn’t know, I don’t trawl through obscure political blogs. Grandma and Grandpa Voter in Middle America don’t either. And it’s not like it’s going to go viral, right?”

Right, of course the internet would be tightly controlled in this world. There was a cyberpunk island dystopia in the Pacific.

I shook my head, astonished. “I just—I don’t know. This is a conspiracy of thousands of people.”

“I’ll say it again, kid, nothing is impossible, and that’s usually a bad thing. This one is pretty simple though; it’s just basic economics. Take a guess how much I pay to get the Harbor Moon delivered twice monthly.”

“I don’t know, a couple grand a year.”

“Try a month. Each issue is a thousand two hundred dollars. I’m not subscribed to other Dark Media papers, but I figure that’s about average for the privilege.”

I whistled. “Holy shit.”

“It makes sense when you think about it. There’s a reason the obscenity repeal is a front page story and the chaos at the docks is on page three. It comes down to money. I already called my financial planner to move money into adult entertainment – and marketing firms, since you know beer company ads are about to go fucking crazy. If I was really serious, I’d ask around a few porn studios or nightclubs until I found one to buy into. Hell, me and you are pretty well suited to make money off this sort of thing. This is naturally going to mean an upswing in the film industry in general for the city, big money’s about to move in after all. If you played your cards right, you could be a millionaire off the back of this. Obviously, other people are going to better suited to take advantage of different breaking stories.”

I nodded. “And why would anyone blow their chance at a golden ticket. It doesn’t need to be a cohesive conspiracy if everyone involved is just looking out for their best interests.”

“Exactly. You think movie residuals paid for this place? With the way I spend money?” He shook his head. “I went in twenty percent on a salvage company two months before the Governor announced the big coast clean-up initiative. We’re talking a four hundred percent ROI within a year. Then they sold to a bigger company the next year. I bought this place cash.”

I flipped to page three, to read about the chaos at the docks. The story wasn’t long, a few hundred words at most, but it was more than I’d read anywhere else. I lived fairly close to where the story reported a full on melee occurred, and yet hadn’t heard a word. The paper didn’t give specific names, or explicitly name the organizations involved, but reading through the lines, it looked like the Albanian mob’s heavy hitters had fought with the private security aboard a small Greek freighter. There may not have been names, but there were enough details about the combatants, their weapons of choice and rough descriptions of their styles, that I could probably identify them in a fight.

It finally clicked what I was looking at. “This is a newspaper for the Underworld.”

“More or less. Definitely for the Martial side of it. Some things are never going to end up in writing, but it’s there if you know what to look for.”

Palpable relief relaxed a near week old tension in my shoulders. Finally, some much needed intel; I was no longer running completely blind through the night. The weight of ignorance had been wearing at me. I felt lighter. Confirming that the world was controlled and cloaked by Great Powers should have been an equal burden, but I had always known they were there. And before, they had loomed like invisible specters over the horizon, now at least, I could make out their shadows.

I opened my mouth to ask Kas if I could borrow the papers, but he anticipated my question.

“I keep the older editions in boxes in the office closet. Here.” Kas threw me a key. “I know you’ll be fine, but I still felt bad about leaving you without a coach before the Qualifiers, so I prepared some surprises. The place is yours while I’m away. And while I’m here too, plenty of guest bedrooms.”

“Thanks, Kas, for everything. I was beginning to feel like a stranger in my own city.”

“Hey, no problem. You could even move in if you wanted. You know, ditch your rat infested concrete bunker in the slums for a luxurious Riverside brownstone.”

“It’s not rat infested, there’s only the one rat. And at least I can mine him for ninjutsu techniques. Your place is surrounded by art students and ten dollar coffee joints. Now that’s an infestation.”

Kas leaned forward in disbelief. “You think you can mimic a rat’s martial arts?”

I smirked. “Want to bet?”

“No, thanks. I already have a bad feeling about our first one. Speaking of,” he rolled his shoulders, “ready to get this show on the road?”