Play Test: Stuck in Another World as a Reality TV Contestant

Maki pursed her lips before angrily texting her mother back, the white light from her phone bouncing off the underside of her umbrella, framing her pale face in a dim halo. She was sublimating her embarrassment into annoyance; that microsecond pause between pursing her lips and getting upset was her tell. Her burgeoning attraction to me irked some part of her personality enough to drive her into denial; a process I couldn’t get enough of watching. Over the course of our long meal, I had finally learned to read and interpret the subtle cues that revealed the inner workings of Maki’s peculiar mind.

I immediately seized on the chance to tease her a bit, unable to resist. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “We still have permission?”

We were walking an arm’s length apart on our way back to the Shrine, though not because of a sudden falling out. I had deliberately sped up my metabolism with some creative use of Fire Qi via an Endurance + Elemental Control roll. It was working, but as a side-effect, I was currently radiating an intense heat; so much so that the sidewalk beneath my steps was left dry as I lifted my feet, and I was shrouded in a faint cloud, the lingering mist turning to vapor as I walked.

Maki kept her tone neutral and answered matter-of-factly in an attempt to move on quickly. “It’s nothing. My mother just wanted to know when she should check up on me. We can assume we’ll have some privacy then.”

“What did you tell her?”

She hid her face with her umbrella. “Tomorrow morning,” she said primly. I could hear her blush. “What else could I say?!”

I laughed boisterously, the sound echoing off the brick and glass of Little Tokyo. It was late enough that the families and responsible working adults had cleared out of the neighborhood, but still too early for the nightclub scene to be out and about. Without the crowd noise drowning out the echoes and the sounds of distant wind, the space felt much larger. We were sharing the streets with other couples and locals going about their nightly chores, for the most part.

And the Yakuza, but it was business as usual between us. They weren’t shy about staring, but there weren’t noticeably more of them than earlier, and they weren’t hostile. I got the impression that someone higher up had called dibs on me; there was an air of bureaucratic tension about them, more like scared employees than wary gangsters. I made a note to attend tea with my anonymous benefactor before some other big wig got involved. One boss at a time, please.

We did the purification ritual once we reached the Shrine, washing our hands over the basin, standing in the long shadows cast by the lights projected onto the fearsome faces of the guardian dog statues. There was no gust of wind as I stepped beneath the torii; evidently, I wasn’t as interesting the second time around.

Maki unlocked the door and ushered me inside. She flicked a few of the lights on, revealing a dim and thankfully empty hallway. I sighed with relief. I hated jump scares and had been worried there was going to be a freaky Junji Ito style spirit waiting in the dark for me. The Shinto Shrine struck me as a place where that could go down.

“Wait here. I’m going to get changed.”

“Got it. I’ll be here metabolizing as fast as I can.”

She sipped her teeth at that, walking through the door into the offices and closing it behind her. Maki was still upset by how much I’d eaten at Tamaki Grill – I didn’t know why; It had objectively been a great idea. I was about half-way done, and I’d already gotten an incredible buff: my next Recovery Check was guaranteed a number of Successes equal to my Injury Threshold.

That was an outrageous boon, especially with my Circular Breathing technique. I couldn’t tell what about the meal had triggered that specific bonus, but it was good to know that all I had to do to sleep off a shattered limb, was to drop a few thousand dollars at a sushi restaurant. Obviously less relevant for me, but what I wanted to know was, would it work for Annie and others? Something to test, if I lived through the night.

The hallway, empty and liminal, swallowed me whole like a great, ponderous worm. Psychic sensations of being watched danced across the back of my head, their points-of-origin leaping from brick to brick in the walls behind me. It was silent save for the hum of the ventilation system, yet like a chorus of cicadas, the pressure of their attention grew louder and louder in my mind as the minutes stretched out.

I stood relaxed, focused on my breathing, and continued to stare blankly at the wall of children’s drawings. While deeply unsettling, I didn’t want to show any signs of weakness. The attention wasn’t malevolent, just feral, like I was being circled and inspected by curious coyotes. Nausea began to turn my overfull stomach. Normally, I savored being watched – I was savoring it now, thinking about the Producers watching me during this mission – but this was oppressive. I felt like a small child being paraded around a room of drunken elderly relatives, and I could ‘hear’ on the back of my neck their remarks about me, the words alien but their tone teasing.

Small – that was the word. I never had smallness come crashing down on me before. The longer I stood alone in the hallway, the more I was assaulted by an external and growing sensation of megalophobia.

Then, slowly, I felt what I assumed were the kami wander off and away, perhaps bored by my lack of reaction. Fewer and fewer pin-prick urges to turn-around-and-look lingered until there was only one, hidden in the crack beneath the door to the stairwell. I checked my phone; it had only been five or so minutes since Maki had left. I would have sworn at least thirty had passed.

The silence fell like a knife, quick and cutting, the rattles and hum of HVAC and distant appliances draining away, leaving me with only the sound of my heartbeat pounding in my chest. Darkness followed after, my screen going black, before I was left standing in a void. The doors to the stairs opened noiselessly, illuminated by a sourceless dull red light, and I could just barely make out my own silhouette. Apart from that, I was alone amongst nothingness.

Immediately, almost like a fear response, I summoned a ball of fire into my palm. It roared to life, lighting up my body, but failing to show anything in the inky black surrounding me. I held my hand up and over my head like a lantern and began to will it to grow brighter, but within seconds the fire dwindled away to less than a match-flame.

A chill wind blew in from all around me and snuffed it out. With it came a voice, speaking in archaic Japanese. “Thy mortal arms fail thee, whether they be artifice or natural.”

[Quest Completed: Enter the Shadows!]

Encounter the supernatural underbelly of the City of Shadows.

Reward: 25 XP, +1 to Aura, Affinity, OR Attunement (Aura Selected)

I had been counting on the Quest to push my Aura up to 10 before the confrontation with the Hungry Ghost, but the surge of power still caught me off guard. The linear increase in Attribute Dice did not resemble a linear increase in power – this was almost twice over what I had experienced at Tamaki. My Qi network spasmed, and it was all I could do to send the coursing river of flame outwards, pushing it through my hand. A white-hot ring of fire surrounded my closed fist, spinning at incredible speed and screeching heat into the void. For a moment, the shadowed veil the Kami had cast over me wobbled, as though it might break.

A staccato, rasping laughter echoed from the dark. “Thou dost not disappoint, Son of Li. But stand ye in the Divine World.” The ring of fire disappeared, blown out by another cold breeze as easily as I could blow out a candle. “Know thy place.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hands on my hips, at a loss for what to do. “That’s fair. I did walk through the torii. What’s up, man? How’s it going?”

It was a bit flippant, but I assumed the Kami wanted something from me or else it wouldn’t have bothered with the theatrics. And frankly, I was panicking ever so slightly. I didn’t have much in the way of solutions to being trapped in the void. In fact, wracking my mind, I couldn’t think of any at all.

“Ahhh,” came an exhale of relief, “yes. We have waited for this day, and how sweet it tastes. The others were fools to turn away from you, but we know better, for we have watched you with interest from your birth.”

That was worrying.

“Uh huh, cool,” I said nodding, trying to rack my mind for ways to get out of this. Would Maki be able to rescue me if I stalled for long enough, or did this thing have control over the passage of time in this place? “That’s sick, man. Yeah, um…tight.”

The voice chuckled. “Fear not, mortal. Thou were conceived in our home and born into our arms. We are Funikugami – Carrion God. King of Killers and the Killed alike. Thou have a place for us in thy heart. Know it to be true.”

The command sank into my chest, the words conjuring images of my fight with Kuze, the smell of blood, and the joy of combat. I shivered, shaking my mind free from the memories.

“I don’t know about all that. Pretty sure I haven’t killed anyone yet.”

“Not yet, but it will come to pass. Thou are destined to stand amongst corpses. Come, let us show thee our memories of James Li.”

The doors to the stairwell swung open, though I could see only fog beyond. I turned my head to where the office that Maki had entered would be, were this only an illusion. If that were the case, all I would have to do was to stay here and call out loudly. At the very least, it was sensible – the cautious strategy – to try before playing along with the Carrion God.

Yeah, sensible and cautious weren’t my style. I strode with faux confidence past the threshold and into the fog.

The dense clouds, painted an eerie red from what little light there was, swirled around me, growing grey and then thinning out to nothing. Even before the fog departed, I knew the place that Funikugami was bringing me by smell. It was that mix of piss, trash, and the distinct perfume that hung around the entrance to Damn Henry’s, the gambling den my dad had once frequented. My nose wrinkled just like it had when I was a child, dragged here by my father’s unscrupulous dealings.

I walked through the diminishing mist until I found myself in a familiar scene. Time had paused in the alleyway that led to Damn Henry’s, with a younger version of myself, maybe nine-years-old, holding his little sister’s hand, following a few steps behind our very hungover father. It was jarring to see him like this, over ten years younger than when we’d last met in person but far unhealthier. He looked harrowed, his clothes unwashed and with great, big bags under his eyes. This must have been shortly before the divorce; I’d hated it at the time, but separation had done wonders for both of my parents’ physical and mental wellbeing.

“Ugh, Damn Henry’s, never liked coming here.” My father commonly made us stop by on the way back from school or grocery shopping. “Well, I guess if there’s anywhere the Carrion God would find homely, it would be here.”

“The den of vice is too dull for our tastes. Dost thou truly not remember this day? We have had a question for thee since.”

I scratched my head as I thought back. “Nothing in particular stands out.”

“Fitting. That violence means so little to thee speaks highly of our affinity. Watch, then.”

Time started flowing as he finished the sentence. I felt the breeze on the back of my neck as though I was really here and heard the sounds of city traffic around us. The illusion was indistinguishable from reality no matter how hard I tried to test it with my senses; the bricks even left dust behind on my fingers as I dragged them along the wall. Funikugami had a hell of a memory. Was this how gods perceived the world?

My father rubbed his jaw and winced. He was muttering to himself and slurring his words slightly. “One day late and I get punched in the jaw for it – unbelievable. I’ve been early before, you’d think that’d cancel out a mistake or two.” He sighed and patted his pockets for his cigarettes. “You two make sure you get real jobs. Even if you do poorly in school, just find a job where you can sue your boss if he punches you.”

He fished a cigarette out and put it in his mouth and started the search anew, looking for a light this time. “Shit. Never a cigarette when I got a lighter, never a lighter when I got a cig.” He cast a guilty glance back at his two young children. “Hey, either you wouldn’t happen to have—”

“Here.” The younger James Li lobbed a book of matches to his father.

“Huh, didn’t think that would work.” He lit the cigarette and took a long drag before jumping a bit with a realization. “Oi! Why do you have matches anyway?”

“To start fires, duh,” said Young James.

“Duh,” echoed Crystal, sticking her tongue out.

“Tch, when did you two become so rambunctious? Just for that, I’m keeping the matches. You should show me more respect – I’m still your father.”

A man shimmered into visibility from where he had been leaning against the brick wall, just in front of my father. I recognized the camouflage technique as the Tiger Style’s Crouching Tiger Stance. “Seems to me they’re smart enough to know you deserve none.”

“Ah, fuck,” said my dad.

“Language, Johnny-boy,” said another man, stepping out of the shadows across from his fellow triad. “There are kids present.”

“What do you guys want?” grumbled my father into his cig.

“Ha! Are you serious? You can’t be serious,” said the first man. He paused and leaned in, examining my father’s face closely. “Holy shit, you’re actually serious.”

“No,” said the other, “he’s just a good liar. Look, Johnny, ignorance wouldn’t have saved you either way. This is happening whether you want it to or not. You’re leaving with us, or you’re leaving in a body bag – no alternatives.”

“It’s real low of you to do this in front of my kids. Stupid too.”

The second man waved his concerns away. “Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to get them back to their mother safe and sound. We aren’t suicidal.”

“Eh? What about me? I’m her husband too. You don’t think she’ll want to avenge me, you bastards?”

“We hear you two are on the outs.”

“No surprises there.”

“Either way, we’re ready to die by your missus’ hands if it comes to it. We’ve got these things called ‘principles’, you know? Mighta heard of ‘em.”

My dad shook his head and turned back to young me. “You two turn around. And James, cover your sister’s ears.”

The second gangster rolled his eyes and threw his hands up. “Oh come on, Johnny, you’re a thief, not a fighter. You couldn’t take either of us, let alone both of us at the same time. Give it up, idiot.”

“You’ll spend a few days with us, do a job or two, and by this time next year it’ll all be water under the bridge.”

John Chang – he never took the Li name – cracked his knuckles and shrugged out of his dirty leather jacket. Underneath the oversized coat and veneer of hapless incompetence was a wiry and dangerous man. He took two steps forward to be equidistant from both men, and appeared, even to my trained eyes, to take an imbalanced and easily toppled stance, feet slightly crossed and far too close together.

“Right, I remember this now,” I said aloud, slapping my forehead. “Can’t believe I forgot.”

Time stopped again. “Here was born my question. Why did thou stop the girl from turning away?”

I glanced at the younger version of myself and Crystal. I’d been so enraptured studying my father’s stance that I had almost forgotten they were there. Young James had a hand on his sister’s shoulder, stopping her from looking away, and a finger over his lips. Crystal was wide-eyed with gratitude and excitement.

“And stop her from seeing dad fight? No way. Our mother was so strict about him not corrupting us with his ‘vulgar’ Arts that we rarely even got to train with him.”

“So simple? No hatred, no malice?”

“Of course not. Plus, look how happy Crystal is about me letting her watch. She would have sulked for a week if I hadn’t.”

It was strange. Obviously, at the time, letting a six-year-old girl watch her father fight two men to the death carried less emotional weight to it. After all, I was nine; Crystal wasn’t that much younger than me, and I was, in my mind, definitely old enough to watch. But what I was struggling to wrap my head around, is that I didn’t regret the decision. Alan would have been – was appalled at the idea of potentially letting a child watch her father die, but James wanted to know if the child was a martial artist before making a call.

Until this moment, I…hadn’t quite realized how different the two halves of me could be.

“Brotherly love and a child’s joy…so rarely found within our Domain.”

Time started up again.

My father mussed his hair, his palm obscuring most of his vision, and yawned. “We doing this, or not?”

The fight, like most real ones, started with an explosion of violence. The first man reached behind his back and was in the middle of drawing forth two hatchets when my father buried a push knife into his ribs. I hadn’t seen him draw the blade and couldn’t tell where he might have hidden it. The second triad lashed out with the Tiger’s Claw technique, one hand reaching to rend dad’s face and the other his neck. Dad slipped the first claw and rolled under the second like a boxer, his hands a blur as they countered by slashing at the tendons in the forearms. The first man recovered quickly enough from the stabbing for an overhead chop with both hatchets, but Dad twisted around the attack, somehow leaving one of his push knives behind deep inside the triad’s thigh. Where was he getting all these knives? And why did he never keep a lighter in the same space?

I sucked in a breath of excitement as I had a realization; Funikugami’s memory was detailed enough for me to use Style Maker to pick apart my father’s style. Finally, I’d been waiting to learn from him my entire life. This was the ‘Startled Cat Stance’, a high-level technique from my father’s thievery-based martial art that let him make a counterattack every time he successfully dodged a blow. The skill requirements were all designed around a cat burglar’s needs, but it was undeniably perfect for Black City Kung Fu.

Dad didn’t look very impressive, every attack seemed to shock and surprise him, and his movements were erratic and ugly from a body mechanics point-of-view. His style was incredibly energy inefficient, and I could immediately tell it had been a long while since his last real fight, but that mattered little. He was dodging every attack, and while his counters were by no means devastating, they were adding up.

In under two minutes both men were dead, slumped against the alley walls. My father was covered in their blood and breathing hard but uninjured, a lit cigarette still dangling from his lips.

He turned around to see both of his young children staring at him, practically bubbling with excitement over the fight. “Neither of you looked away, did you?”

We shook our heads no. He rubbed his face, exhausted, and leaned down. “Okay, listen. Daddy’s going to go see Uncle Hank and use his shower, and then I’m going to need to take care of some things. But I need you to do something very important, you absolutely cannot tell your mother about this. Promise me you won’t tell her.”

Young James and Crystal looked at each other and frowned.

Dad waved his hands in a panic. “Okay, okay, hear me out. If you promise not to tell your mother, I’ll have Auntie Shreena take you to get McDonalds while I’m taking care of business. Pretty neat, right?”

We shared a look of disbelief and repressed anticipation – processed fast food was verboten to our mother. “Really?” young me asked.

“Really, really,” he said.

“Yes!”

Young James pumped his fist while Young Crystal started jumping up and down, smiling and carefree, just feet from the two dead gangsters. I could not believe the only thing I remembered from this day was getting McDonalds with Auntie Shreena.

Fog swept the scene away. I stood there in shock, shaking my head in disbelief. My first reaction had somehow been, ‘How could I forget such a sick fight?’ and not, ‘How could I forget my father killing two men in front of me?’. Was I, maybe, completely insane? Asked the Alan half of me. I felt like a normal, mostly rational guy, but I guess most maniacs would probably say the same. Maybe Black Harbor wasn’t a great place to raise kids.

“Wholesome, was it not? There is an innocence to this memory that we have savored often.”

“It was weirdly cute, certainly not what I was expecting. But I don’t know if it means I’m ‘destined to stand amongst corpses’.” Granted, I was literally standing by two dead triads in the memory, but the implication had been that the corpses would be of those I killed.

“It will come to be. The trove of evidence contains more than this day of your past.”

“You’ve…actually watched me since I was nine?” I didn’t know how to feel about that.

“No, we have watched thee since thy conception in a pool of blood and viscera.”

The fog began to swirl again to bring me to another scene. I started waving my hands wildly.

“Woah! Hey! Please tell me you were not about to show me my parents fucking. I’ll take your word for it, alright. Damn.”

“Forgive us. Mortal inhibitions are not well understood. Then, we shall show a scene from thy first days. Consider it a gift. Thou enjoyed greatly watching thy father fight, we see. Walk forward.”

The obsequiousness of the death god was beginning to chafe; I couldn’t see a world in which it was being entirely sincere, if at all. But in for a penny, in for a pound.

A child’s terrified screaming urged my feet forward; illusion or not, I couldn’t stop myself from hurrying towards the infant’s cries. The howling of wind and rain, shaking and battering the windows, joined in the cacophony as the fog faded, leaving me standing in my mother’s apartment sometime in the distant past. It was amazing how little had changed; apart from how new the furniture looked, and the ancient TV and radio, the only real giveaway I was in the past were the missing framed pictures of our family vacations.

The cries were coming from my room, while sounds of banging and clattering were coming from the kitchen. Reminding myself that rushing off towards my past self was pointless, I poked my head into the kitchen out of curiosity. A very young version of my father was prone on the ground, writhing and wriggling to escape what appeared to be ropes made of soaking wet hair. They were wrapped around his neck and limbs like living serpents, strangling and crushing him with enough force that his eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head, his face bright red from the pressure and strain.

I backed away, my stomach churning at the sight of him on the verge of being killed. In my room, stood a woman in a tattered Hanfu dress next to a crib. Her flesh was pale grey, with greenish blue bruises, and all of her, from head to toes was soaking and dripping with water, as though there was a localized rainstorm an inch above her scalp.

“My sweet baby boy,” she cooed in an accent of Mandarin that I didn’t recognize. “Don’t cry, sweet one. Mama’s here.”

I recognized her as a Rain Woman from the horror stories told by my older relatives. They were said to be the cursed spirits of mothers who had lost their children after birth, driven mad with grief to the point of suicide. On rainy days, they haunted the homes of new mothers, scratching and banging on the windows to be let in.

Her hand went to cradle my infant head, and I, the modern-day James, shivered as an ancient sense-memory of those cold, wet fingers came unbidden to mind. Past James screamed for his life, too helpless to even fully turn his neck away from the unwanted touch.

“Oh my dear son, sweet son. Mama will take you home.”

The Rain Woman leaned over the crib to pick me up and though I was standing to the side, an image of her cold, dead eyes and rotting, bloated face flashed in my mind, buried in some crevice of my brain. Pre-vomit acid started to boil up to the back of my throat.

“AHHH!”

A scream of primal fury erupted from behind me before Lily Li, my mother, rushed into the room like a golden blur and tackled the demon to the ground. Her hands were locked in the Eagle’s Talon and glowing with golden flame as they sank into the cursed flesh, her face a rictus of anger. She took a full back mount, legs controlling the demon’s hips, one hand digging into the thing’s neck while the other pinned its arms to its torso. Her battle spirit wreathed her in a visible aura, taking the shape of dozens of talons, tearing and clawing at the creature as they came in and out of physicality. Mom had essentially turned herself into a living woodchipper.

The Rain Woman let out a haunted sob, emanating a wave of mind-crushing grief. Even though it was a mere memory of the moment, the attack forced me to one knee, but my mother only yelled louder and dug in deeper. When that didn’t work, the demon began to thrash around, trying to escape with every fiber of its being. And here I finally got to see the true pinnacle of the Li-Family Eagle Style. Every twitch of the Rain Woman’s body tore at her flesh, spilling open and unleashing a wave of dirty red and brown water. She was killing herself in the struggle. My mother only had to stay latched on and maintain the grapple as her opponent ripped herself apart with her escape attempts.

It was brutal and efficient, every second seemed to hasten the inevitable and before long Lily Li was kipping up to her feet, soaked to the bone and dripping onto the nursery floor. The Rain Woman had dissolved into a stinking puddle of filthy water. My father ran into the room, coughing and clutching at his neck, as mom scooped me into her arms and hugged me tight to her chest.

“Johnny,” she hissed, trying not to further alarm the baby, “what happened?”

He coughed, pointing back at the kitchen. “Came in – ow, shit – through the window. Cracked it open when I was cooking. I thought the talismans would have worked regardless.”

“Sabotage,” she spat. “The only answer for why they wouldn’t. Give Zhiqiang a bath. I will bring retribution to the dogs that did this.”

Mom thrust me into dad’s arms and was already taking off her wet shirt and walking away quickly by the time he could properly cradle me.

“What?” he said, following behind her while rocking me back and forth. “Lily, be reasonable. You gave birth three days ago.”

She spun around on her heels. “They tried to kill our son!”

He cradled me in the crook of his arm and took a step forward, placing a calming hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said slowly, “I’m no less upset than you. But Zhiqiang has two parents, right? Let me make a few phone calls – get a plan together for god’s sake.”

“Good idea,” she nodded, brushing his hand away. “Tell your friends to come and help protect the two of you while I’m away.”

Dad groaned. “Goddamn it, woman, you know that’s not what I was saying.”

She ignored him, already halfway to their room. “And put some ointment on your neck,” she called back. “Don’t skimp on it either, Johnny! Use the full dose!”

He sighed and shook his head, giving me a tired smile. “Aiyah, Zhiqiang, make sure you don’t follow in Daddy’s footsteps and fall in love with a martial artist. Strong women might be sexy, but they’ll drive you crazy in the end.”

I heard her disguise a laugh with a cough. “What are you telling my son, you bastard? Of course, he’ll marry a martial artist. Any girl who wants my Zhiqiang will have to beat me in battle!”

Dad blew a raspberry into my belly, eliciting a giggle from my baby-self. “You’re going to marry a librarian, aren’t you, Zhiqiang?” He blew another raspberry. “That’s right, you are! Or a schoolteacher, eh, Zhiqiang?”

Mom reemerged from their room in a pair of jeans and a wool coat, two sheathed butterfly swords dangling off her belt. She moved with lethal purpose towards the front door, not even glancing at her husband and child. “I’m serious about the medicine, Johnny. There better not be any ointment left when I get back home.”

“Eh? At least, kiss your son goodbye before you go off killing.”

She paused at the door, her face softening before walking back over to the pair of us and planted a kiss on my forehead. “Goodbye, my darling son. Be good for your Baba and his friends.”

“Does Baba get a goodbye kiss too?” asked my dad with a cheeky grin. Mom obliged him with a roll of her eyes, planting a soft kiss on his lips. “I love you. Come back to me, yeah?”

“I love you too. Don’t be cheap with the medicine. I’ll have my aunt send us more.”

Dad held me up as she left, bouncing me in his arm. “Wave goodbye to your mother, Zhiqiang. She has to go build a mountain out of corpses. Say, ‘Bye-bye, Mama! Bye-bye!’ Say, ‘Good luck with all that killing, Mama!’”

Mom smiled and shook her head, pausing once more at the door. “Damn it, Johnny, you ruined my cool exit.”

The scene dissolved into fog. I stood for a moment in silence, a sad smile on my face. It had been a long time since I’d seen them so happy together, and amidst such strained circumstances too – it was…nice, nostalgic.

“Thank you,” I said, “for showing me that. All said though, I presume you were going somewhere with this. Why take me down memory lane?”

The fog shuddered, then suddenly I was standing amidst a town square surrounded by smoldering buildings and a grim battlefield. Clouds of rising black ash mostly obscured the sky and bones littered the ground for as far as I could see, crunching under me as I shifted my weight from foot to foot. I nearly gagged at the thick smell of blood and gore that seemed to waft in from every direction.

A crow-headed boy wearing a plain tunic sat on the lip of the well in the center of the square. Apart from the crows and vultures which circled overhead in the uncountable thousands, he was the only living thing in this horrible place.

“Because you would have rejected me out of hand had I not,” said the crow-headed ‘child’ in perfect English. “Hello, James Li. It’s good to finally meet.”

“Funikugami?”

“Not what you had in mind? This is my least visually distasteful form, and the best spoken. I thought you’d appreciate it. Welcome to my home.”

I looked around at the hundreds if not thousands of corpses in various stages of decay. “Thanks. It’s, uh, something alright.”

“It is an honest sight. I do not veil my nature.”

“Admirable,” I said dryly. “Some people might have moved all the bones into piles, but you like what you like, and I respect that. Even if what you like is a carpet of corpses.”

He quirked his head. “Hm. You still deny your place here by my side after what I’ve shown you of your own life?”

“Back in the fog, you were for sure starting to sway me. But, uh, I mean holy shit, man,” I gestured to the Bosch painting we stood amidst. “This is clearly hell, right? Like, what else would you call it?”

The crow-headed boy chuckled a strange, throaty laugh. “Ho, funny. Do you recognize the skull by your right foot?”

I grimaced at the half-crushed, still bloody skull on the ground. Its face, thankfully, was gone so I was spared that horror, at least. “Oh yeah, this is the dude that played Yorick in Hamlet, right?”

He laughed again. “The village you see is that of where I was born. I crawled unwanted into this world from the blood-soaked soil of this battlefield over a thousand years ago. But every single body you see displayed around you is taken from my memories of just this place, Black Harbor. Each man, woman, and child decorating my fields today died violently in this city in only the past century in which I’ve been here. This is the truth of your beloved city, James Li; all its fruit are fertilized with blood.”

I inspected the body again. It was dressed in black, ratty clothing that wouldn’t have been out-of-place in a scene club. There was something familiar about that outfit, though I still couldn’t place it.

“His name was Josh Bhatti. He met his death during a gambling game gone wrong while still recovering from injuries that you had given him.”

“No kidding. Man, this guy was a real menace my sophomore year. Always wondered what happened to him.” Maybe I should have felt bad about the news he’d died after our last fight, but he did suck as a person, and it wasn’t like I’d personally killed him or made him go gamble illegally.

Still, knowing that all these people had been fellow residents of Black Harbor changed my attitude towards this place. It had gone from extremely, almost violently, ominous to flat depressing.

“Well, this is a bummer. Thanks for showing me those memories of my parents and all, but, uh, I sort of have some shit to do tonight, so…”

Funikugami bobbed his head. “Yes, you must hunt a foe of mine. I will be brief. The Huntress Spirit wishes to empower you as a tool to avenge the death of her last champion, but I have my own motives to see the creature defeated. I offer an alternative that benefits us both.”

“Elauwit,” he continued, “would grant you temporary strength, and while you would be doing a favor by assuaging her wounded pride, you would leave with nothing. I offer you this: instead of treating this like a hunt, we shall treat it like a trial. I will place two curses upon you before you leave, and if you succeed, I will grant you permanent power and name you as my champion. The first curse will guarantee you meet the Egui in battle tonight, something you would have had to pay Elauwit for. The second curse must remain secret if you are to survive it. What say you?”

I let out a long breath. “Eeeh, I don’t know, choose between a maybe hot Native American spirit with a gift, or a fucked-up crow-boy dual-wielding curses – it’s a toughie. You got to understand where I’m coming from. I mean, I’m snapping bones and squishing guts every time I move my feet. This is an objectively miserable hellhole.”

“The Huntress, and the rest of the Kami of this shrine, see you as you present yourself to be, as a well-natured, good-intentioned hero. I see you as you are, a blade fresh from the forge, ready to be quenched in blood and tempered by the fires of battle. They cannot help you as I can. But I hear your concerns. Take this.”

Funikugami opened his beak and spit up a wet eyeball into his palm before throwing it to me. I caught it, despite myself, and could feel the not-quite-Qi burning inside the mangled, slimy mess.

“Eat it. It is a taste of the power I can give you, freely offered and without strings. If you still express doubts after, then I will return you to the Miko and the Huntress without further delay. Regardless, the power will be yours to keep.”

I looked back and forth from the crow-headed child to its disgusting offering and cursed my decision to shoot for the position of strongest in the city. “Fuck it.” If only I’d chosen Survival over Glory back at Tamaki. “This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” I grumbled before popping the eyeball into my mouth.

[Special Feat] Smells Blood

The Carrion God has bestowed upon you the ability to sense the desire to kill in those around you. This is distinct from the intent to kill. The range of this ability is determined by your Affinity Attribute, and how much you can learn from it is determined by your Empathy Attribute, including if the murderous desires are directed at you. Smells Blood can reveal beings even supernaturally hiding from you.

“Huh,” I said, reading through the ability again.

“Helpful?”

“Extremely.”

“It is but a fraction of what you will gain if you survive my trials. I will not lie, both curses will make your night more difficult than if you would have taken Elauwit’s offer, but you will be compensated well. Your answer?”

I sighed and ran a palm down my face. “Maki is going to kill me. Yeah, alright, goddamn it. Let’s do this.”

“Delightful.”

[Hidden Quest Completed!]

Make a pact with a Kami.

Reward: 10 EXP, +1 Affinity

Bonus, It was Funikugami: +2 Intimidation, +1 Perception