Joy was flabbergasted; he was in shock. He had never been so thoroughly beaten by someone, and in such a stupid way. Who would have thought that a massive duck suit would get in the way of chasing a thief through the streets of Vena Cava?

He had worn the duck suit because he was planning to hit Theo and Lillian with a good pun about ‘ducking’ later in the night, but now that pun seemed far away and unfulfilling.

The suit itself had also disguised him from the crowd of adoring fans and dedicated haters. He had become a divisive figure almost instantly in the Knight Tournament. Everyone who wanted to uphold the integrity of the sport thought that he was a rapscallion who needed to be shown a lesson, but the common folk seemed to think of him as the best source of entertainment they had seen in a while.

Joy himself didn’t know what to think, but he was glad that barely anyone recognized him with the stupid suit on. He didn’t have to deal with any of the annoying sorts of his fans because of it, but the suit had also lost him his entry ticket to the tournament. So, there were some ups and downs to the disguise.

The man who had stolen his and Lillian’s coins had vanished into the crowd long ago, and Joy didn’t quite know what to do with himself. His honor dictated that he go tell Lillian about his mishap, but for some reason his sense of self-preservation completely denied that option.

Which only left one more option for Joy. He was going to double down. He was down two coins, but there was only one thing Joy was truly good at in this life, and it was getting money back. So, Joy was going to get those coins back no matter what.

With a newfound determination, Joy stripped out of the duck suit in the middle of the street. He left it lying on the ground, assuming that someone with good taste would find it someday and wear it. There were a few odd looks from people walking by, but no more so than the looks he got while wearing the suit.

Without the extra baggage, Joy was a lean, mean, coin hunting machine. He wore dark baggy clothes that whipped menacingly in the wind and made him look like a lowlife on the prowl.

Joy had no experience tracking people, but he was supremely confident in his abilities, nonetheless.

He sniffed the air and caught a whiff of dastardly evildoers in the distance. His nose had never led him wrong before. Though his nose had only led him to food in the past, the sentiment still stood.

Joy prowled through the night, looking over his shoulder and whipping around corners.

Joy had designed his prowl to be menacing, the problem was that Joy didn’t quite understand what menacing looked like. Instead, he ended up looking like a clown that had a fear of the dark.

Eyes turned in the night and the true hunters of the dark started following the plucky young man. These men and women were fiendish ghouls, they had sold their conscience to gain power on the streets and they were always hungry.

Joy didn’t notice the finger caressing knives, nor did he notice the strange abnormalities on the people following him. They were freakishly large with great, long limbs that were disproportionate to their size. Their skin had grown into a frightening orange color and their eyes burned a deep red.

The first one made contact with Joy. A large hand gripped an oversized knife that was plunged into Joy’s stomach with an unnatural amount of force. Joy looked down, surprised. He had felt an impact on his stomach, and he saw the blade, but there was no blood, nor was there any knife wound.

The knife had somehow gotten caught in his belt buckle, and the poor craftmanship of the knife allowed the blade to slip out of its handle, causing the punk to punch Joy in the stomach while leaving a perfectly serviceable knife blade caught in his belt buckle.

For the first time, Joy looked around at the gathering of punks and hooligans. He noticed their large proportions and their odd skin coloration, and it finally occurred to him that his infallible nose might have caught onto the scent of a different crime than thievery.

Joy swayed out of the way of the clumsy man in front of him. After the dumb luck with the knife the man decided to try and beat Joy with his fists. But Joy swayed this way and that letting the punches slide right by him.

He got a sizeable distance from the group of villains; at least as much distance as someone could get in the narrow confines of an alley. Then he spread his arms wide and took a theatric bow.

“There is only one thing I can say to such a group as yourselves,” the motley crew bared their teeth, which seemed uncomfortably sharp in the dim lighting, “do you want to play a game?”

The air shimmered and the world seemed to take a breath in, Joy saw at least two dozen of these folk standing around, but he had no idea what game could get him out of this mess.

A voice rang out in everyone’s head, “mercy. Do any of you need the rules explained to you?”

Joy was instantly wracked with pain. The pain was unlike anything he had ever felt in his life. It was like worms were crawling through his skin, he wanted to claw them out. He stared up at the sky and tears streamed down his face.

Joy shuddered and through chattering teeth he asked, “what sort of game causes pain like this?”

Even though the question wasn’t direct, the voice still deigned to answer. “The game is simple. All pain felt by all challengers is shared. You can give up at any time and the pain will stop, just say ‘mercy’ and mean it, but your body will stop moving and you will be left immobile. Good luck, Joy.”

Sobs crashed through Joy’s raw throat as he tried to scream, but no noise came out. His head was on fire, the pain was destroying him. Then Joy looked at the people around him, they didn’t seem to feel a thing. Their misshapen bodies and grotesque did not even quiver with the tiniest bit of held back pain.

How could Joy be feeling this while they stood there impassively?

One of the lumbering men sauntered over to Joy’s prone body. In his hand was a cleaver of immense size; they were planning on taking a little off the top. It wasn’t quite the haircut Joy dreamed of, but he hoped something could make the pain stop.

One glimpse changed everything though.

Joy saw into the eyes of the man with the cleaver. The eyes were full of terror and horror, the eyes were full of an almighty pain that never ended. They were the eyes of a prisoner in their own body.

With that, Joy made a decision. His foot almost daintily caught the man’s wrist and caused the cleaver to go clattering down the street.

The man’s hands gingerly tried to grasp Joy’s throat, but Joy batted the feeble attempt aside.

Joy let the tears drip down his face as he forced himself to stand, ignoring the overwhelming pain building up in his soul.

He shouted at the crowd, “your pain can end if you say ‘mercy’ and give up. I truly feel what you feel, please give me your pain for a moment.”

The man who had been disarmed of the cleaver stood, and his body jerkily tried to grapple Joy, but his mouth moved ever so slightly, and he mumbled, “mercy.”

His body immediately dropped to the ground. He moved less than a corpse, but Joy hoped that he was truly free of the pain for a moment.

The man on the ground croaked out, “thank you.” A weight seemed to leave his shoulders as he lay on the ground, tears streamed down his eyes as he was unable to feel the pain.

A chorus of “mercy” came out of the crowd, followed by thumping of bodies and the trickling of tears falling to the pavement.

Joy stood through it all, unwilling to let their suffering go unnoticed. They were in pain, and he could help for a brief moment, so he was going to.

Soon, every single one of the men and women who had been surrounding him with murder in their eyes were laying on the ground; they were unable to move yet were freer than they had been in a long time.

The game Joy was playing was cruel though. To give all these people the sanctuary they so desperately needed, he had to shoulder all their pain on his own. The weight of all these people’s pain pressed down on him, making his back ache and shoulders quiver.

He knelt next to the first man who had fallen. Joy grasped the man’s hand between his own and looked deeply into the man’s eyes. “Where are the people who did this to you?”

A whisper barely escaped the man’s throat as he lay immobile on the ground. “Beneath The Brick Oven.” The man started humming a tune beneath his breath. It was a sad song, and Joy couldn’t quite place where he had heard it before.

Joy took one step after another. He didn’t know where or what The Brick Oven was, but he was going to find it and burn it to the ground.

He didn’t look where he was going. Joy simply took every turn that felt right to him. He could smell the evil in the air, the dark rankness of those who took advantage of others. These weren’t the petty thieves of the world, these weren’t the tax evaders, these were the people who clung to the underworld because it was the only place left that would accept them anymore.

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Joy’s feet had taken him to a tavern. It was a dirty old looking thing with rats scurrying out front. The walls had once been a bright red, but there was so much grime and gunk smeared on them that they had morphed into a muddy brown color.

Drool spilled down Joy’s mouth as he walked into the room. He had disassociated from the pain as far as he could. He had left his sense of self behind. Joy knew that there was a task to be done but couldn’t remember what exactly that task was. The pain lived in him; it sang a slow dirge that ground his being into dust.

There were only two people in the bar. There was one man sitting on a stool nearby the bartender, the man was short and missing quite a few of his teeth. His eyes spoke of a hidden intelligence, while his breath was one drink short of being flammable. The bartender had a cold look in her eyes, she twisted a glass back in forth in front of her chatting softly with the man on the stool.

The man said, “can I offer you a drink?” The bartender started making it, while the man on stool started chatting to Joy.

“I spent a lot of money getting this operation off the ground a long time ago, but now it’s just a dump that no one goes to anymore. Do you think you could tell all your friends of the wonderful drink you had here and give them your five-star review?”

Joy sat there and let the words go in one ear then out the other. There was no conversation, there was no friendliness, there was only the pain and the way it ate at him.

“Not really much of a talker, are ya?” The man was chewing on his lip and Joy noticed that he motioned at the woman bartending and she turned away from the two of them with the glass that contained Joy’s drink.

“How would you like to feel strong, young man?” The man had morphed from a kindly stranger into a con artist, his entire posture and behavior had changed on a dime. He was trying to find a way to get into Joy’s mind, but there was no mind, only a puddle of jelly that could feel pain.

The man’s hand brushed Joy’s arm and he felt a rush of strength enter his system. His body grew a few inches, and his hands turned a light red color, Joy could feel a grinding pain in his head, truly a dull ache in comparison to the overwhelming pain but still a new sensation, and he felt stubs of horns growing out of his skull.

“Doesn’t that feel good?” The man licked his lips in a disgusting way, dangling his hands as if they were the Light and Life themselves.

“No, it doesn’t feel good.” Joy wasn’t sure where the words came from, but he growled them out as he kept himself from screaming through pure self-control.

The man’s gaze was briefly calculating. He judged the odds and decided that they were still in his favor. He had some loaded dice that he was about to throw, or at least that was what Joy would’ve thought had his mind not been a hot pile of sludge.

The man gestured with two of his fingers towards the bartender who slid Joy a cloudy drink. It looked like someone had pissed in the cup, but Joy’s hands mechanically reached for the cup and brought it to his lips.

Maybe the pain would be quenched by the liquid?

The liquid did not quench his pain, the liquid was a ruse. Hidden underneath the layers of cloudy alcohol sat an insect and it crawled into Joy’s mouth.

It dug and clawed its way through Joy’s mouth trying to work its way into his brain. Joy gnashed his teeth and tried to snatch the insect out of his mouth with his fingers. But it was a slick beastie and refused to be caught. It was segmented into hundreds of parts and each one had many little legs sticking out of it, ready to run away from prying fingers and gnashing teeth.

Joy howled at the top of his lungs as the bug finally made its way up his nose and it started crawling into him. He knew that the bug was going to take something from him, something that even the pain had not been able to take.

With one finger for each of them, Joy pointed at the two people who had made him so miserable. He moaned and screamed into the air, gesticulating wildly as the bug crawled into him ever deeper.

With one final utterance he said, “make them join.”

It was a final plea for help beyond what the key could do. Joy had long since known the limitations of the key that he had been given so long ago. So, he prayed and wished for this reality to come.

“Just this once, Joy. No more help from me.” The voice was a little different this time. The voice seemed younger and fuller of life than normal, but it was still unmistakably the voice that spoke every time Joy challenged someone to a game.

The man and woman immediately started convulsing. Their bodies hit the floor in a second as the wild pain started to push through them. The pain of everyone they had made suffer this fate, along with the visceral pain that Joy was feeling as the insect wormed its way into his brain, coalesced into a pain that consumed them.

Foam exploded out of the man’s mouth and hundreds of bugs skittered out of the woman’s body. Each of the bugs started convulsing just the way that their master had been, and blood ran out of her nose and mixed with the foam coming out of the skeevy man’s mouth.

The bugs died, and for the first time in what felt like ages, Joy had a painless thought. He thought that could’ve gone worse.

Joy snorted the bug out of his nose bit by bit. At one point he accidentally broke the bug in half and had to start his sniffing process over again. The two people on the floor silently convulsed and Joy made no effort to alleviate their pains. He had felt what the two of them had wrought onto others, if they couldn’t handle it then that wasn’t his problem.

With one final shrug to an unseen audience Joy bowed and said, “I have won the game.” It was a question and a statement at the same time, but slowly Joy felt the metaphorical fingers of the game let him go. He was free from directly feeling everyone’s pains, but that did not stop his sympathy for the damage these two had brought into the world.

He picked them up by the scruff of their necks and dragged them out of the door, letting their feet drag a sad path in the mud behind him.

___

Parents often think of giving their twin children fun names. They think that if they rhyme or if they start with the same letter that it will somehow bring whimsy into their children’s lives.

Maybe Trent and Brent had started drinking because of that. Their parents always said that the men in their family had a predilection towards alcohol, but neither one of the twin boys had cared enough in their schooling days to learn what those words meant.

All that they knew now was that they were lush in fame and fortune.

Both were going on their third year of making it into the Knight Competition. They both had powerful abilities and swagger that got the crowds roaring. The only thing that matched their battle prowess was their tendency towards making stupid bets.

Trent and Brent were kind souls and had joined the order of knights out of a sense of justice. Their parents had been well off and sequestered in the inner circle of Vena Cava but that didn’t stop young men from exploring the seedier parts of the city.

From their privileged standpoint the two young men had thought that crime was a thing of the past, but they had both received a quick introduction to violence and pain on one of their excursions before they had gained their gifts from the gods.

Both had learned that the world was not as rosy as it should be.

So, they had become paragons of justice; meting out a heaping spoonful of pain to all those they saw as evil.

The problem was that heaping spoonfuls of justice wasn’t exactly what the knights did. There were a lot of procedures and laws and courts. Most of a knight’s job was to tour around the countryside and take care of the local nasties.

There was one crime pair that Tren and Brent would never take down. The two were careful and covering their tracks, but the leftovers of their work had haunted both brothers’ dreams for ages. The red skin and the insects worming away underneath someone’s skin.

The pair was simply called Matt and Patt and they were untouchable. They did lots of under-the-table jobs for the rich and wealthy around Vena Cava and it let them stay above the law.

On this particular night, Brent and Trent were glowing under the adoration of their fans. They had just won another round of the tournament and were enjoying the spoils of their victory. These spoils involved a lot of free drinks, which led to a lot of loose tongues.

Brent and Trent told their stories of the pair Matt and Patt. They told all those who would listen to never go down an alley with a man who had red tinted skin. They told everyone that the world would be a better place if those two were put into a deep, dark hole and forgotten about.

When drinks are flowing and tempers are flaring, fists fly. Fights are common things in seedier bars, but fights leave only some lasting impacts. The impact of a fist in a face is a powerful feeling, but there are some things that flow even more freely than fists and pain when men are drunk. Words that men regret slide right off their tongue like eels through a grasping hand.

Trent said with no intention, “if any one of you brought Matt and Patt to justice, me and my brother would give you our entry coins into the knight tournament, and you can take all the fame and fortune.”

Brent looked at his brother sideways. He had always been the cautious one, but it was deep into the night and neither of their brains were working at full capacity by this point. It was empty words with an empty meaning behind them.

The night continued after the momentous words had been spoken. Words that would adjust these men’s lives, yet the night just continued, without a care for the power of those words.

Later into the night when even more drinks had been consumed and a few songs had been sung a sound came from the door.

Click, click, drag. Click, click, drag.

The bar was crowded, so no one looked at the disturbance. But the unmistakable sound of boots clicking into the wooden floor, followed by the dragging of two bodies flowed through the crowd towards Brent and Trent.

A man with short cropped brown hair and tired eyes looked down at the twins. He saw their shining armor and gleaming badges of office and gestured to the two bodies he had dragged in behind him.

“They are the worst scum of the world. Where can I take them?” His eyes were filled with disgust and a resoluteness as he gazed upon his charges. The man who was being dragged started to stir awake again and the resolute man’s boot savagely connected with his face, encouraging the barely aware man to not stir up any trouble.

Brent looked in horror at the man standing in front of him. It was one of the other competitors from the knight tournament, but that was no excuse for his utter lack of decorum. No one just barged in with two unconscious people, that simply wasn’t right.

Brent was about to uphold justice when his brother tapped him on the shoulder. Brent stood up, but the tapping grew more insistent, and Brent looked at his brother who pointed at the man and woman on the floor.

He saw. There on the floor laid Matt and Patt. The two that had haunted their nightmares for years, the two that were just out of reach.

“It’s them.” A single declaration, that meant so much to the brothers.

In a drunk stupor without even thinking about it, they bought a round of drinks to go to the entire bar in celebration of the downfall of the two wickedest people they had ever had the misfortune of meeting. The man with resolute eyes was forgotten in the hubbub, but he never left his spot, waiting for the brothers.

Everything was perfect, and the brothers were making their way out the door when one quiet voice spoke up.

“Aren’t you going to give your qualification coins to the mister?” A young lad who had probably never been to a bar before and was so deep in his drinks that his breath would probably be lit by a match.

But that reminded everyone of the fateful words spoken. And a crowd never forgets.

The brothers saw no way out of their predicament, so they gave their coins up dejectedly to the man with resolute eyes. His eyes sparkled with humor as he received the coins, as if he was in on a joke that the brothers were not. Then the brothers took the two horrific people to the knight headquarters where they would be properly pacified and tried.

But after they had heard enough cheers for their glory and the defeat of two wicked villains, the brothers hurried to meet their supervisor and told him the story. With a lot of apologies and wringing of hands the night’s fortunes and misfortunes were shared.

Their boss happened to be a man named Gunther who would cloak himself with the space between the stars, and he was mighty displeased about his two young whipper snappers losing their qualifying coins. Luckily, he just happened to have two spares lying around.

Luck is a fine mistress.