A weak, pale hand, whiter than freshly fallen snow, slithered across the table toward its unsuspecting prey. The victim, caught entirely off guard by the hand's cold fingers clamping around its neck, was captured in a vice-like stranglehold. With a sudden, relentless movement, the prey's contents were drained directly into the hand's owner's mouth.
Espy had long since lost count of how much of that stale coffee he had drained, nor was he aware of how long he had stayed awake because of it. What he did know was that there was no way he was going to leave this basement until he solved the maddening conundrum before him. His mind was as jittery as his hands, the caffeine-fueled haze only sharpening his sense of urgency.
It seemed like another simple and malign task when he was first ordered to reorganize the legacy files, but he could not be more wrong. The oddities slowly crept up on him. They started small, easy to dismiss as mere clerical errors, nothing unusual. But as hours turned to days and days to weeks, the discrepancies grew more frequent, more glaring. However, the issues compounded, and more inexplicable mistakes appeared with concerning consistency until he could no longer deny it. A conspiracy was afoot.
To put it humbly, the records of the Tournament Corporation were the most disgusting cataloguing heresy he had ever seen.
The first red flag was that the Tournament was not even run by the Tournament Corporation! That's right—history's most revered and celebrated event, the one the corporation had built its name on, wasn't managed by the people who publicly oversaw it.
It seemed that the Tournament was organized by a single individual: some mysterious entity simply labelled as the Chauffer.
Even more unsettling, The Chauffer never interacted directly with the corporation. No, it only communicated with two other parties: the arena Directors and a cryptic figure referred to in the records as DG—or, disturbingly, Dead God.
From there, the rabbit hole only went deeper.
As it turned out, despite their position as the de facto rulers of the Tournament Corporation, the Arena Directors weren't actually part of the corporation at all. Instead, they reported directly to The Chauffer, bypassing the corporation's established hierarchy.
But it grew stranger still. The Directors weren't even citizens of any nation. Espy scoured the records, but there was no trace of their birthplaces—not even a record showing they had ever set foot in Trammel. It was as if they had materialized from the void itself.
Except for, of course the Director of the Arena of Thrones, Thrones himself. The only reason the files for that Director existed in this arena was that Throne was once a contestant in the second Tournament. Upon winning the Tournament, he was granted a position as a Director to fulfill his wish of becoming a devadoot.
That then led to the whole issue regarding the devadoots and 'Dead God.' As Espy dug deeper into the files, he became increasingly convinced that the title 'Dead God' was an in-house mocking name for the devadoots themselves.
But that didn't add up. The Tournament predated the White Witch's usurpation of the devadootian church and the subsequent refutation of their divine status. The timing was all wrong, yet the connection was still undeniable; it felt almost prophetic.
The idea that the devadoots might be Tournament investors did make a sort of odd sense. It would certainly explain the strange rule that allowed mokoi, monsters, and mutants but forbade any devadoot from entering the Tournament. After all, it would raise more than a few eyebrows if the largest investor competed only to win the Tournament outright.
But that still left more questions than answers. Why were the devadoots funding the Tournament in the first place? And why had Throne's wish to become a devadoot been granted through a directorial position? Were all Directors devadoots? Espy didn't think so, but the records in this arena alone didn't offer nearly enough data to draw any conclusions.
Once Espy had discovered that Throne was once a contestant, Espy just HAD to search over all the past contestants to see if there were any other characters of interest.
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Espy was not disappointed.
The winner of the first Tournament had no wish granted at all, and the fact that someone capable enough to win the Tournament was a complete unknown who left no historical mark behind was a whole other level of suspicious. A mokoi in the third Tournament had a life expectancy of three days, but invitations were always sent out a month before the first round. The Mokoi Khan was invited to the fourth tournament, but if the devadoots were the Tournament's biggest investors, why would they allow their greatest enemy to ever enter? The Mokoi Khan obviously won, but then its wish wasn't for world domination or anything like that, but instead for a child?
After all of the discombobulating unease, it was nice to be able to read about his professor's escapades in the fifth Tournament. It brought a much-needed smile to read about his professor being a young, wide-eyed twelve-year-old traipsing through this world of giants. Professor Ream had been the first contestant's file that Espy meticulously read cover-to-cover. Unfortunately, such a keenly detailed review had him stumbling onto whole new layers of discrepancies.
There were data entries… simply missing. Every contestant was usually documented in painstaking detail for each of their actions within the arena. But in Professor Ream's log, there were several moments where he seemed to vanish entirely—his actions completely unrecorded, as if he'd never existed in the arena at all.
Intrigued and now on high alert, Espy began combing through the data logs of other contestants, and what he found only deepened his unease. Not all the logs were like this, but a disturbingly large number of them contained similar gaps—brief, eerie stretches of time where the contestants seemed to cease to exist.
It took hours of searching, countless cups of coffee, and careful analysis, but Espy finally uncovered the common thread linking all the contestants with missing entries in their schedules. The answer lay within the fights themselves.
The Tournament Corporation kept extensive records detailing every minute action of each fight. Espy hadn't thought they would contain any information pertinent to this conspiracy, but he read them nonetheless. He perused them more out of curiosity, a way to unwind between gruelling hours of work. After all, they were fascinating to read.
Thanks to this "light reading," Espy noticed a pattern. The schedule gaps always appeared among contestants who fought in a way that was entirely unique to any other fighter in the Tournament's history. And the blanks themselves? They always occurred one day before a scheduled fight.
Another finding was that each one of these contestants only had a single schedule blank, except for two—Professor Ream and the three-armed dragon.
These schedule blanks reminded Espy of back when he was reading up on the Directors. The Directors were not technically a part of the Tournament Corporation, and a large majority of their activity was accomplished off the books, a fact that greatly concerned Espy.
A quick double-check of the Directors' schedules confirmed his suspicions: there seemed to be a direct link between the Directors' disappearances from the records and the contestants' own missing moments.
It was hard to draw any definitive conclusions, given that this storage room only held extensive data on two Directors—Empedocles and Throne. Though most of Throne's information was regarding his time as a contestant, and details of his life as a Director were slim to none. But even still, just comparing their schedules revealed enough overlapping gaps to raise serious questions.
Espy was certain that if he could access the schedules of the other Directors, he would find more blanks—ones that aligned with the few contestants whose disappearances didn't coincide with Empedocles or Throne.
A theory began to form in his mind: the Directors, and by extension the mysterious Chauffer, and perhaps even the devadoots, were after something from these unique fighters. The Tournament, it seemed, was merely a tool to gather them. This would explain the rule that no contestant could participate in more than one Tournament. It was a convenient way to ensure they didn't waste resources on those from which they had already extracted what they needed.
Espy shivered at the thought. Of course, he didn't need to take it to apocalyptic extremes. It could be that the Tournament itself was still the primary objective, with whatever they were collecting from the contestants merely a side benefit.
What sort of conspiratorial nonsense was he talking about? He needed some more coffee.
Espy shuffled back to the bags of stale coffee beans, intent on brewing another cup. The coffee tasted horrendous, probably because these beans were centuries old, but there was no time to venture to the surface.
Sadly, and also confusingly, the bags were empty. There were enough bags to last an entire family half a year, how was it empty? Espy decided to cast a small scrying spell to check what day it was, and to Espy's bafflement, it had actually been half a year!
Espy decided to leave the basement for the first time in six months. He had no idea that he had spent so long down there. He had only ever slept a dozen or so times; perhaps his body-enhancing magic was more potent than he thought. It was probably for the best to stretch his legs, get some proper coffee, and maybe ask Mark a few questions.