Practice

The palm reader couldn’t find his friends. He knew he was their friend because he had read that information right off his own third hand, of the four that he had. How he got four was a mystery. One day the second pair was just there, one scratching his back while the rest stretched into the air with a morning yawn.

There was no one to mentor him in the skill of palm reading; it was just something he learned by immersion, like someone dumped into a foreign land adjusting to the language. Almost everyone had palms, so it seemed strange nobody else responded to that pressure the way he naturally did, by struggling to understand them.

So he probably grew two more so he would have more to read and understand. It was doubtful anyone in the hanging gardens of Babylon knew more about themselves than the palm reader did, which was a touch frightening since he didn’t even know exactly why he had the number of limbs that he did.

Many people had come to the gardens, but none knew what to do after. They came to the palm reader for insight, but he could only supply them with predetermined facts, and not motivation. More frustrating still was his disclaimer that not all facts were predetermined, and only showed up on the body as scars and in the mind as trauma.

Still they lined up, presenting their hands, to get his perspective on their past, present, and future. No advice was given, only the reading, which sometimes created conflict. The palm reader never fought back. His initial hands only ever defended themselves, but the second pair didn’t always obey his soul. They sometimes took offense. The reader didn’t try to stop them, because they came to his body with scars, with trauma, and he could no more help them through it than he could help the people attacking him.

But it wasn’t a disgruntled customer or his extra palms and digits that started that day’s chaos. He didn’t know who it was yet, as they had swept in and opened the vents. Crowds tended to gather around the palm reader, so he had moved himself higher in the gardens so as not to disturb other vendors, which was very easy to do when they were the kind of vendors that actually charged for their goods.

The best place he could find was an enclosed rotunda, unused by anyone else but the mossy mounds upon the floor and the roots of what must have been a gigantic tree emerging seamlessly from the ceiling to then curl around lamps and hold them aloft.

Vents about the roots remained closed whenever he was there, but they had to open some time, at the behest of the gardens themselves presumably, since none claimed to have built them. Higher in the gardens the orange-gold clouds outside tended toward aggression, encircling living things when given the chance, and it was theorized that contact with the heavenly vapors prolonged the life spans of the garden’s plant life. How else could single trees extend their trunks through thousands of floors, and remain healthy despite having tunnels bored into their sides?

Whoever had invaded his space had forced the vents open, and the vapors of their eternity had flooded in, obscured everything in a bright haze. It was right in the middle of a reading too, the reader only managing to trace a line a third of the way across its owner’s palm. That was more than enough information to discern several things however.

He learned they were a warrior, and not by choice. Someone in the gardens was after them, having failed enough times that their quarry had to pivot to a much more violent life to move forward. Their spirit still resisted, but that resistance was waning. Their other hand was already drawing a weapon when the gases rolled in; they had expected to be attacked there.

Their palm spoke of a bond with three other people, forged in this new violence. One of those tributaries in the skin was cut off, likely by a death, and they were still feeling the emptiness. But they still had two left, and those two hardly ever left their side, indeed were with them that day to protect their friend.

Finally, the palm reader learned he was to take the place of the one that had fallen. It was written in their hide, and matched a mysterious mark on one of his own newer palms. Today was a day that two rivers joined and mixed waters. Coming together in this way meant the four of them were friends, even if they didn’t know it yet.

The palm reader did not know where any of them were in the fog, but his second set of hands did. They slapped the floor to get him on his feet, pointing into the murk, unbothered by the screams of his other potential customers as they blindly groped for the exit. Suddenly something attacked him from behind. A newer hand pulled out a chiseled stone dagger coated in blood.

The hand did its best to apply pressure to the wound while its partner fanned its fingers, searching for the reader’s unwitting partners. He found something before he found another ally or enemy, threads of thought drifting in the vapors. They had to be connected to someone, someone with a connection to him no doubt, but it sounded like nonsense when it passed through his mind. Perhaps they were thoughts of ancestors, or descendants, confused by gases that never so much as acknowledged the flow of time.

This isn’t the best character for the situation Dad. I told you to pick between the gargoyle and the panda.

But I like this one. It’s a game. It’s supposed to be fun, right? You pick the one that looks the most fun. That’s this guy! He’s got four arms. Wish I had four arms, could work the table saw and sip coffee at the same time.

We’re not trying to mint a new meta here. We’re min/maxing. Only a small selection of characters are viable at the highest level during any given balance patch. Palm reader’s not on that list, at least not for the rotunda map.

What does any of that even mean?

It means if we don’t optimize our decision making we don’t stand a ghost of a chance, okay? Fun doesn’t factor in. It’s a game only in the sense that there’s a winner and a loser.

Then I’ll win with this guy. Come on. The gargoyle’s your thing. I need my own thing. Pretend you have to play the palm reader. How do you optimize him here and now? And what happens when I hit Q?

The palm reader surged forward by his most confident hand. There. It had sensed the hand he had just been reading, was still tracing the line to its conclusion across a desperate palm. He found himself right next to them, right next to her. There was no reason to ever look at their faces when the palm told such a complete narrative, but he saw now that she was on edge, even with a bow and arrow in her hands, even with a lit firework mounted to an arrow.

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The creature that had stuck him in the back reappeared, wielding another dagger clenched between its teeth. The palm reader examined it during the brief moment it was stunned to see him coming between it and its prey.

Not a creature at all, but a young man. No clothes but a loincloth. A wild beastly look in his eyes. A snarling nose. Long ratty hair. Back on Earth he was a feral child, abandoned by his parents, raised by wild dogs and monkeys. Upon achieving the hanging gardens he learned only enough language to listen, not speak. He refused to give up the animal ways, the hunt, so all that remained to him was violent work.

He didn’t care why someone wanted the firework archer dead, just that he could get it done with a blade against her throat. Much of this information was hidden from the palm reader, for the feral child was upon all fours, palms obscured by floor and filth. What a way to treat them, the reader thought, affronted. It was a creature after all, perfectly willing to sand off its own fingerprints if it could wrap the rest of them around a foe’s windpipe.

The feral pounced and the reader threw up all four hands to catch the scraggly beast and throw it back into the orange-gold fog. The archer sent an exploding missile chasing after it, but they could hear its palms and the soles of its feet slapping against any patches that weren’t covered in moss.

The sounds headed away from them. No, toward another friend he hadn’t met yet. They were all targets. The palm reader held out his angriest hand, which had already made itself into a fist. Again he let himself be dragged through the battle, by a combination of fury and fate, until he stopped in the perfect position to guard his close ally: the grape stomper.

The feral child came in again, and the reader grappled with it a second time, but there was a wound left after the creature was thrown away. The reader’s side was bleeding, and he could only sacrifice so many palms to stem the flow.

The patter, he heard the patter again. All he could do was repeat the process, this time learning that he was bonded to some kind of vampire-pirate hybrid. Whatever there was to love about the undead thief, he would surely learn it soon. Better the man be at least alive-ish when he did.

Now he was outnumbered, as someone else emerged alongside the feral to deal a blow. The reader didn’t even get a clear look, but he did get clear, obvious, painful injuries. The vampirate was safe, but at the cost of more of the reader’s stamina and strength. The alarms in his mind and in his many wrists didn’t slow or cease; the assault was far from over.

As long as he stood he would protect them, but he understood that the possibility was dangerously open. There was one unbearable hanging question mark that came with his additional set of palms. Which one told of his true fate? One set opined that he would live a much longer and fruitful life.

The other was broken up by scars, his lines dammed up in several places, one of them being here and now, thanks to a fresh cut from a stone dagger. One way or the other, his fate was his own, and he trusted the forces that had gifted him with the ambiguity. That trust fell out of him in rivulets every time he took a blow for friends that wouldn’t understand why he sacrificed himself.

Over and over he moved between them, protecting them from as many sides as he could. Every success was paid back in slices and shreds. Eventually he could only stand if his two newer hands held his quivering legs steady. There was a thought that perhaps he should’ve looked at his own soles for a possible third fate, but that time had passed, and with one final swipe of the enemy’s black weapon, so had the palm reader.

The only mercy in his end was that he did not see the others fall, but they did, in much the same fashion. If there was some grander purpose to their suffering, none of them knew it. All that changed was that the orange-gold clouds had a few sips of blood and eventually left, leaving four bodies in their wake.

“That was… that was us losing right?” Mr. Vallet asked as he took his hands off the keyboard and mouse. He looked at his belt to make sure he didn’t have two more arms sprouting anywhere. Video game graphics were a lot better than he remembered. Was that sweat on his forehead?

“What gave it away? The giant word defeat across the top of the screen?” his son grumbled. “That was a bloodbath.”

“It was his first try,” Plusplus said. “I was worse than that on my first try.”

“Yeah, we can work with this,” Handzy insisted, slapping Mr. Vallet’s shoulder, causing her to also realize how sweaty he was. “He’s good at taking hits, so we just put all of his customization and items into that strategy instead of making him… you know… aim at things.”

“We use him as a shield,” Flippers agreed. “Palm reader can be viable that way. He has the ability to teleport to anyone who starts taking damage, he can block multiple attacks at once automatically, and he doesn’t have to pay too much attention to positioning, only timing. This is it. This is how we get to the top of the loser’s bracket… with some more practice.”

“So who did we just lose to?” Mr. Vallet asked.

“The computer.” The man went goggle-eyed.

“Wait, those weren’t other people? I just got killed by the game itself?”

“Yep,” Handzy confirmed, “but don’t feel too bad. We cranked the A.I. difficulty as high as it would go. Nobody can beat it on that setting because it doesn’t miss and it always knows where your team is. It was just to gauge your ability.”

“Specifically to gauge it against Microdose Berserk, because if we make it all the way to the finals that’s probably who we’ll be playing against.”

“Micro what now?”

“Microdose Berserk. They’ve won the last four tournaments they’ve competed in. They have corporate sponsorship. All the top E-sports teams have really stupid random names like that.”

“The feral was-”

“The one that kept stabbing me with the daggers?”

“Yeah that’s the feral,” Flippers confirmed. “He’s an assassin, and the main character of a player named Cover-up. He’s the star on Microdose Berserk, often out-killing his brawler and his ranger combined. He’ll be, by far, the biggest threat, assuming we can win our next handful of matches and get to him.”

“So he’s like a veteran?” Mr. Vallet asked. “How many years has he been playing this game?”

“This is his first season,” Plusplus explained, diving into one of the more unpleasant aspects of their industry. “He’s only sixteen.” The man was visibly confused. “You need the fastest reaction time to win these things, and that starts to slip in your late teens. Aside from you, nobody older than twenty-five is still in the Hangers-On Open at this point.”

“Didn’t you want to make a whole career out of this?” Mr. Vallet turned to and asked Handzy. She was keenly aware that at eighteen she perhaps had a sliver of her prime left. If she returned to college it would be as, by her standards, a fossil compressed to two dimensions by the tectonic plates of time.

“If you get a few accomplished years out of it you can transition into being a commentator,” she excused, “or a streamer or content creator. And there’s always other games that don’t need reflexes as much… but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that we keep our nose to the grindstone.”

She cracked her knuckles explosively, making the middle-aged man with more calluses than pores cower in fear.