Inception: A Contest of Champions
The Contest of Champions
Everywhere, the response was overwhelming: Businessmen found their cell
phones suddenly and inexplicably in their hands, ArchMagi spelled their way
straight through the transdimensional ley lines to the Sorcery
Interface/Database of KOMBG's marketing division. It was a good thing the
KOMBg board had agreed to lease their telemarketing service to the JLA,
over the next couple days; anything less than the ctotal resources of the
largest corporation in All Realities would have shattered under the massive
amoutns of ticket requests recived in the first hour after the hypothetical
gates opened.
Khazan Arena itself had unlimited seating, of course, stretching the laws
of space and time (or perhaps redifining them) to fit as many people as
needed, playing with the variables of light, time, and distance to enure
that all had a perfect view. What it did not perovide, however, was living
space.
Before the first day was out, every hotel in Khazan, right down to Crazy
Bob's Volcanic Island Skeete rPark, was packed, as were all the rooms
available for star systems in every direction. By the second nightfall,
Dollarcorp had made 1.27 Trillion Khazan dollars by letting out square
meters of floor space in a few of their unused stretched-reality storage
sheds. When the first week of ticket sales ended, every hotel in the
universe of Khazan proper, and any universe within .002 probability
factors, was booked.
Hotel and transdimensional transport stocks on the Khazan Stock Exchange
doubled in price; telephone companies found their switchboards burning out,
and restaraunts throughout Khazan city conveniently tripled their prices.
Not only did the rank and file arrive, but so too did the true upper crust,
the highest echelon of ten million and more universes. Men and women who
bouth and sold entire systems exercised their membership privelages at the
Khazan Hilton, smiling faintly at the receptionist's amazed expression as
they tosses away the million dollars Khazan necessary to summon their
pocket-dimensional room and link it to the Members-Only Door, in reality a
miniature portal designed to take the invoker to any one of a theoreticall
infinite number of lavishly decorated suites, scattered throughout the
thick subquantum space of the Nexus of all Realities. They arrived slowly,
taking their time, wearing suits, dresses, and other garb, any one piece of
which could be worth the GNP of an entire coutnry. Men came with girls on
their arm, women with boys, the deadly aura of all-too-visible security
surrounding them both. No two came paired, male to female; it was too early
as yet, the delicate, thrilling game of seduction and temptation was one to
be savored, not nipped in the bud.
They came in stretch limosines, in repulsor craft, through dimensional
rifts and helecoptors, materializing from thin air or falling gracefuly,
with no apparent means of support, out of the night sky itslef. They came
silently, and that silence was marked with discomfort by worlds beyond
human comprehension; they came whistling tunes that became instant hits
across galaxies.
Lester William DuLupin LaCroix XVIII, lord of a transdimensional shipping
industry that supplied fully a seventh of the heavily industrialized
cosmos, arrived wearing a suit from an unknown tailor on a backwater
palanet, accompanied by a similarly unknown, but stunningly beautiful girl
wearing a dress made of flowing silver and red ribbons and nothing else,
the ribbons somehow always contriving to concceal that which the male
reporters clogging the sidewalk most wanted them to reveal. The tailor
became an instant star, and by the end of the week was so rich he bought
three factories to make his clothes and a planet to store them on. The
dress, discarded in the throes of passion not tne minutes after they
checked in to Lester's suite, became an instant fashion icon, worn by the
wives of mere trillionaires across several universes. The girl herself, in
the little free time she had the next morning between giggling, squirming
with pleasure, and groaning with lust, signed a $6 Billion Khazan recording
contract, a book deal, three motion picture agreements, and two holies. She
became an instant stalker target, and (again, in the slender time she had
away from Lester's bed) had to switch to an unlisted e-address.
They came looking for fine, for excitement, for pleasure, for pain, from
nearby and far away, from species humanoid and alien. One way or another,
they came. Khazan shuddered softly at their approach.
*
Oblivious to the furor over the newly-announced Contest of Champions, a man
walked the streets of Lowtown, softly whistling to himself. He walked with
a slight spring in his step, despite his recent defeat. In his arms, he
held mounds of clothes, old and new, picked up at random thrift shops all
around the city. Children young and old, beggars who lacked the strength to
stand, shoved against each other to get close to him, this gullible
stranger with clothes and cash. It was enough to make his slender mouth
crack a smile. How ironic, he was actually doing good for a change.
The individual who had contacted him had given quite exacting instructions,
of course. His smile, so seldom seen on that dark plane of a face, widened
another fraction of an inch. Defeat had been painful, humiliating. To cut
wide a swath of terror over hundreds of worlds, only to be stopped by a
pathetic human HERE, at the very gateway to all realities! But, the
stranger had promised a way around all that. And all he needed to do, was
something he did normally. The power he would recieve, on the other
hand.... Enough to make any defeat worth his while.
Sifting through the pile of clothes, he selected an old, not-quite
threadbare red cloak and dropped it into the lap of a dejected old bum
sitting on the side of the road. "Here you go, old father."
"Creator's blessings on you, Son."
He laughed. That was rich. Creator's blessings, when he had been created to
be nothing but an abomination, a scourge to be hunted and destroyed in the
name of power. Blessings indeed! Noting the old man's concerned expression,
he dropped a One Khazan Dollar gold piece atop the cloak. Suspicion
vanished in a heartbeat, along with the gold, and the man continued on. A
young boy looked like he could need some gloves. On the way, he threw ahandfull of coppers to the road, watching the detrius of society scramble to gra
b them up. An amused light twinkled deep inside his eyes.
John Doe walked on. As he left, the beggar with the new, red cloak began to
cough.
*
As Khazan adjusted to the massive influx of tourists, and the Upper Crust
settled into their suites, the social scene began to bloom. Like any
organism, the delicate lace of parties and dances, pot-luck dinners and
power luncheons that form the social life of any city thrive on one type of
food or another. In Berlin, during World War II, parties, like so much
else, thrived on warfare. In Khazan, it flourished in chaos.
Social klatches formed between floors, hotels, forced roommates. Men and
women met at tea, in stores, at dance clubs, relationships flowering
brillaintly, wilting, and dying off all in the same evening. The financial
nobility at the Khazan Hilton met in skirmishes at the front desk, over
coffee, in the halls. Before the first day was out, many had discarded
their original partners, playthings and toys brought from home. For them,
the game was now to begin in earnest, seduction and counter-seduction on a
level undreamed of by anyone in history. In the sex game, there were no
formal rules, but thousands of variations: ninety-two hundred variant forms
of kissing between humans alone, not counting the thousands of lesser
modifications. Seventeen thousand ways of touching hands, forearms,
shoulders. Blue blood pounded with the thrill of chasing and being chased,
when the game had yet to truly begin.
The first blast of the hunter's horn came in the form of invitations,
small, printed on actual wood pulp paper with natural gold and silver ink,
rather than one of the countless thousands of replication techniques
mastered by societies throughout the cosmos. They were, outside of that,
quite simple, bearing words calligraphed in a delicate, artful hand. Those
versed in things of quality (and all those who recieved the invitations, of
course, were) spotted the subtle signs that the messages had been inscribed
by hand, rather than with a printer or engraving machine. That only drew
their attention closer to the message itself.
"
The Khazan Hilton, Representing the Interests
The first move had been made. With eager hands, they reached for phones and
pagers. The hunt was on.
*
Stell relaxed in the SLJ lounge. She had hoped to avoid all the mucking
about with super-teams that seemed to grab every otherwise-normal
extraplanar being in the Greater Khazan area, but, as it turned out, there
simply were no rooms to be had. She didn't have the background to purchase
a room at the Hilton, so it was a superteam's bunk, the one sleeping place
on the entire planet that couldn't be bought out, or nothing, and the other
options available to her were... tasteless.
With a slim smile on her round face, she leaned back in one of the SLJ's
black nauguahide sofas, nursing an hour-old glass of red wine. A red,
one-piece dress hugged her slender, lush figure, light gleaming off of
creases in the delicate silk fabric. The jeans, t-shirt, and leather jacket
that formed her outer wear were now folded up near her bed in the snug,
cozy dormitory. Her feet were bare, legs gleaming. Sometimes, she
reflected, it was best just to forget about the outside world for a little
while.
Even so, no matter how she tried to forget about her current troubles and
immerse herself in the heady taste of the wine, in the soft embrace of the
faux-leather, in the lightly flowered aroma of SLJheadquarters, the
situation galled her. She thought, after all that time, that she had made
her peace with the world, and with herself. No matter what was said about
her, she persisted, lived, loved. Her other self, that which stretched
beyond the mortal, had lain untouched for so long, she had forgotten about
it.
Well, that was a mistruth. There was no way to forget It hurt still, aeons
later, long after... She shied away from the memory. No use, dwelling on
wounds old, and others even older.
It had been nice to see Sam, though. For a moment, she had thought-
She shook her head sharply. What was so entrancing about Paradise, anyway?
The very idea of the way the place used to be, the way she was quite
positive it was still run, was abhorrent to her. There was every logical
reason for her not to want to go back, and yet, once in a millenia...
In a second, she was on her feet, padding across the bare, cold floor
towards the elevator. Her fingers trembled as she keyed for the roof. She
was not supposed to be doing this. She hadn't for years, for centuries, and
yet her feet planted themselves, one in front of the other. The elevator
doors opened, she stepped inside, and they closed behind her like the mouth
of a metal beast. She made no move to stop them, kept her hands by her
sides, face straight, mouth set in a determined expression. Muscles
twitched nervously beneath her skin.
The elevator slowed to a stop, the LCD display atop the doors gleaming:
"