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

I was death-wish-tired stepping out of my childhood bathroom, showered and with a freshly ruined, blood-soaked towel around my waist. The adrenaline crash had done to my migraine what gamma radiation had done to Bruce Banner. The Injury Threshold pain was one thing, but it wasn't until the dust had settled that I could feel what my mother's fighting spirit had inflicted upon my Qi network – a thousand paper cuts on my soul, was the best I could think to describe it. There had been no intent or technique behind the damage, mere proximity to her battle aura had done it. I could see why she'd sent Ami downstairs and away from the battle.

I needed a vacation or at least a weekend, but at this point, I'd settle for a break of any kind, preferably one in which I could fully relax and be blissfully unbothered by the mounting consequences of my actions. None of New Jersey's beaches were far enough away from the city to be entirely safe, but maybe Annie and I could head down to Rehoboth, Delaware in her minivan, surely nothing that mattered could be happening in Rehoboth. We could get fat on its inferior saltwater taffy and shoot the shit with the local retired gays over pitchers of margaritas…

Goddamn, I was really fucked up right now, wasn't I? I needed a break that wasn't coming, not today, maybe never.

I could just barely hear Ami in the kitchen clearing a space amongst the wreckage over the ghastly sounds coming in through the broken windows of what must have been hundreds of crows and seagulls fighting. Throwing on a pair of old boxers that should have been thrown out years ago, I joined her with an awkward, "Yo."

Unlike the living room, which was no longer inhabitable due to the holes in its outer wall, floor, and ceiling, the kitchen was only half destroyed. The oven had been on the far wall, i.e. not the one that I'd been nearly headbutted through, and had survived undamaged, which was exceptionally lucky considering the gas stove. Ma and I had nearly blown us both to hell, what a surprise that would have been. Somehow, Ami's lotus root soup was still contained in the heavy, tall pot she'd been using, though, unfortunately, all of the bowls had been in the cabinets that had been knocked clean off the wall, and there was a maybe inedible amount of drywall dust in the broth now. People used gypsum when making tofu, didn't they? It would probably be fine.

"Hey," said Ami.

My mother's new closed-door student held up a tin of medicinal paste labeled in Madame Wang's handwriting. The old crone was unarguably the best moxibustionist in the city, but I preferred Doc Pham for my medicine. He was cheaper by far, and still insisted on giving me a lollipop anytime I stopped by – it was the little things, you know?

"Yeah, one sec." I stepped around the shattered ceramic and fallen cabinets, picked up the soup off the stove, and took a long drink straight from the scalding pot, its heat harmless to my Fire-natured body. "It's good," I said, coughing. "You can barely taste the dust, kinda adds a zing to it."

She glowered at me – good, I thought with a grin, as her older brother it was my job to annoy her. I settled down next to her on one of the two surviving chairs with a heavy groan. There was just about no part of me that didn't hurt, but I was waiting to use my Circular Breathing until after the medicine had been administered; I wanted as many charges as possible going into my meeting with Cranes.

Ami handed me a metal pill bottle; on it was the traditional Hanzi character for Qi in handwriting that I didn't recognize. "Shifu says you have to take all of them."

Inside were five ugly grey, pressed tablets that smelled vaguely of bone marrow and herbs. I dumped the contents in my mouth and paused, nearly spitting them back up, not from the taste, which was awful, but from the spiritual sensation coming through my tongue as they began to dissolve. Good lord, these must have cost thousands of dollars each.

"All of them," repeated Ami with a pointed glare. I could see why Ma liked her; they shared the same prickliness.

I dry-swallowed the five pills with a grimace. They had the texture of spiky chalk, and the flavor lingered at the back of my throat, but they held true to the old maxim of the worse it tastes, the better it works. Their effect was immediate and absurd, with each adding five guaranteed Successes on my next Qi maneuver. Forget thousands of dollars, they must have cost Ma some form of favor or promise to secure – that may well have been bull elephant bone marrow I'd tasted in them.

"For the love of god, please tell me she wasn't keeping those in the medicine cabinet."

She shook her head. "Floor safe downstairs."

Ami unscrewed the tin, scooped two fingerfuls of the noxious paste out before I could stop her, and paused, at a loss for where to begin. I sipped my teeth.

"That's probably unnecessary now."

"Shifu said—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Just focus on the worst of them."

Ma had left a lopsided star-shaped gash on my sternum from the repeated, targeted blows and had shattered two of my ribs to the point that parts of them were poking through my skin. I'd picked the longest of the wooden splinters out of my back in the bathroom, but the rest of it had been so thoroughly flayed that it was hard to tell which of the slivers were made from plastic and glass, and which were meant to be a part of my bones.

Ami was gentler than I expected as she got to applying Madame Wang's jelly to my chest. If she carried any grudge from what had gone down last Friday with me and Kuze, then I couldn't tell. I was about to roll a Charisma check to try and figure out how she'd gone from Tanaka's lackey to my mother's closed-door student, but she spoke first.

"I'm sorry for the part I played in the dojo challenge. I could tell that something was wrong going in, but I…"

I switched to Japanese and replied in a low tone, "Speak Japanese; don't know who's listening. And it's all good. I've got nothing against you or Tanaka."

Her head snapped up, and she responded in kind. "Eh? Your Japanese is stupid! It's better than mine," she grumbled, not being entirely fair to herself. Ami spoke the language like someone raised in Japan, she just had a slight Hokkaido accent and a tendency for slang.

"Thanks, I've been getting into languages recently," I semi-lied. "Learning new languages teaches your brain to think in new ways and makes you better at problem solving."

"You think it makes you better at fighting?" She sounded hopeful; Ma was probably teaching her Mandarin and/or Xiang, the language of our province of origin, Hunan.

I grinned. "Everything makes you better at fighting if you let it. I could spend a few days reading Winne the Pooh and think of a new technique or two."

"Huh. You're the same as Aniki. 'Everything is training, Ami. Put some rocks in a backpack and mop the floor with a rag if you don't believe me.'" She smiled sadly and trailed off into silence.

"My kind of guy. Man, in another life, eh? How is the big lug, anyway? Hope I didn't kill him yet. I want to get in at least one more fight before one of us dies."

"I don't know, we're not—" she cut herself off, shaking her head. "He's on a training trip outside the city."

"Oh great. Tanaka's going to come back with some bullshit, I just know it. He'll probably punch me into the Undercity two weeks from now with pure fighting spirit. I wouldn't worry about him if I were you. Kuze's my rival so he'll always be strong enough to keep things interesting."

She squinted at me skeptically. "I don't think it works like that, er, Aniki—"

"Gege," I said, using the Mandarin term for older brother. "Or James-ge or just James, those are fine too, never been one for formality. You can call me Zhiqiang, but only in Chinese – anytime I hear it by itself, I feel like I'm about to be scolded. Kuze can be your Aniki. I don't want it to get confusing whenever he shows up."

Ami nodded seriously. "Gege. Okay."

I let her continue in relative silence with my eyes closed and would have meditated if it weren't for the racket of crows and gulls outside. The poor vegetable-cart granny was yelling at them to stay away in Chinese – I cursed Funikugami in my head on her behalf, certain he was responsible in some way or another for the scavengers. Ami's hands, which had been gentle but indifferent to begin with, started to move with grateful tenderness. I got the impression that for all of her cactus-like exterior, beneath the surface she was in bad need of real human connection.

A bone-deep weariness called on me to revel in this quiet, comfortable atmosphere, and my sense of brotherly protectiveness insisted I let Ami acclimate to our relationship on her own time, but she knew too much about the Tigers to let the moment pass. My eyes still closed, I rolled a Charisma + Empathy to try and tease out what I could without coming across as an asshole.

Three Successes was a little under the average for the Pool, but it would do. "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to, and I don't want any of Kuze's secrets or nothing, but I got to ask, how the hell did this come to be, with you as my mom's apprentice? Why did you come back on your own?"

Ami was quiet as she continued to work the paste into the star-shaped wound over my sternum. The medicine stung, but it totally stemmed the bleeding and, mechanically, I could sense that it would automatically convert one of the points of Murderous Damage into the regular sort the next time I made a Recovery Check.

Once the first major injury was finished, she began to speak, moving on to where my ribs were poking out. "I think that when all is said and done, and all that's left to do is count the bodies, people will look back on that duel between you and Aniki as the end of the Triangle-Truce, the night it all went to shit."

"Triangle-Truce?" She looked surprised by my question. "I'm not really a part of that world," I explained.

"The current agreement between the Tigers, Cranes, and Dragons to never escalate beyond small-scale confrontations and to operate with plausible deniability, to keep the war cold, in other words. Of course," she let out a bitter laugh, "their greed and ambition means they'll never stop killing each other, but the old way o' thinking was that it's more profitable for everyone to keep things to a low simmer. Now the whole damn kitchen's about to go up in flames, all 'cause of that dipshit, Junior – no, it's not all his fault, Guangzhou's to blame too. Assholes."

"What, the whole city? I've only been there once for a few days, but I thought it was alright. The opera house looks cooler in person, you know."

"Tch. It can all go to hell if it means Tiger leadership goes with it." Her finger slipped and accidentally jabbed my jutting rib. "Ow!"

"You alright?"

She examined her finger, a little line of red was beading out of a cut. "It's fine, the paste sealed it up." Ami tried for a reassuring smile – not an expression that looked at home on her face. "We're blood relatives now, Gege."

"Neat."

Ami continued applying the medicine, this time much slower. "I meant what I said that night, the Tigers do only care about strength. Power and respect are all that matter to them. They aren't like the Sicilian mafia, ethnicity means nothing; they were born from political ideology and a rebellion. The only reason you don't see more Japanese in the Tigers is because those Yakuza cunts have a dumb strong presence here, but in New York, you'll see anyone, blacks, whites, it doesn't matter to them – so long as you can speak Cantonese, of course. Can't have people at the table who can't understand the orders. That's why Ro and I weren't allowed to officially join." She sighed. "All that time wasted; I'll have to start all over again with Mandarin."

"Pah!" I said, waving it off. "Give me a few days with you, and you'll be able to follow a conversation fine. That's about all that most of the kids born in Chinatown can manage anyway."

"A few days?! Really?"

"Maybe only one if we spend the whole day on it," I said, thinking of my teaching Feat. I'd be investing in some more of those before the 'Training Montage' with Annie too.

"I don't think that's possible, Gege, not for me at least."

"Dare to dream, little sister."

She blushed, and stammered out a "Maybe," before switching back to a safer topic. "Anyway, like I was saying, Ro and I never officially joined or nothing, so I don't know any details or secrets. Aniki got paid a salary and he hired us as his contracted help. That's the way it works for the most part. You got a boss who pays their captains, captains pay their lieutenants and whatnot, all the way to the bottom. It ain't a family, like the mafia, or a Black Society like the Dragons, more like a…"

"Corporation?" I ventured. It sounded pretty mercenary to me.

"Ha! They'd dress it up fancy, call it a movement, but pretty much. I'd probably still believe their horseshit if Boss Gao was still alive, but this new guy, Junior," she shook her head, "just a shark in a suit is what he is."

"What happened to Gao, anyway? I didn't even know he died. Last I heard, the old man was living on some golf club in the Greenbelt."

Ami looked genuinely sad for a moment. "Nah, he was dying for a while. They used to fly him out to different clinics around the world, but it comes for us all in the end, big and small, rich and poor. Don't know why they kept his death under wraps though, I bet half the neighborhood would of wanted to pay respects at a funeral. Word on the street is that you're like a hero or some shit, but Gao did some good too, you know? Ro and I were pulled out of a Yakuza shipping container with a lot of other people, by Aniki and his master, but at Boss Gao's orders. Fucking Yakuza dogs would of killed us all to cover their tracks or save face if the cops had done the rescue, but Gao found places for us to work in the organization, and not as slaves neither, real jobs. I was thirteen and figured I'd end up in a brothel after all, but Gao gave me a job as a corner scout – one of the kids that goes running when the cops show up."

"How generous of him."

She glared. "It's not like that. I had no home to return to, and the Yakuza would have raped me to death for revenge if I'd just been sent to some school or some shit. Gao looked after me for long enough for them to move on to the next grudge."

I growled a deep grinding sound that came from the center of my chest. "If anyone ever so much as thought about killing somebody I rescued, I'd turn their world into fucking ash. Shit, sorry." My voice had gone echoey there, uncomfortably close to the way Funikugami sounded outside of his crow-headed child form.

Ami had frozen in place wide-eyed and turned stark white. A single tear started rolling down her face. I did breathing exercises to wrangle the killing intent that had ripped out of me, but my knuckles only gripped the handle of the Hakkotsu no Ha, the Bleached-Bone Blade, harder—

The Bleached-Bone Blade?

"What the fuck?!" I jumped, startled to see the white metal of the wakizashi in my hand, and threw the thing into the sink. "Stupid, goddamn sword. Showing up unannounced—Would it kill you to knock?" I turned to Ami, extremely apologetic. "I am so sorry about that."

She pointed down, finger shaking. "It-it came out of you, f-from your rib. You pulled it out, you, I saw, b-behind you—" she shivered, her whole body now trembling.

I looked down at a massive – and new – gash in my side, just now aware of the fact that I'd taken another three points of Murderous Damage. Had I lost some time there for a bit? "Oh yeah, look at that." I shrugged. "Eh, what are you gonna do? Shit's cursed and made from the god I champion for – blech, I hate how that sounds. Where were we at? Right, I remember. Okay, so I get why you were working, or subcontracting, for the Tigers, but how and why are you here?"

Ami wiped the tear away and cleared her throat. "Y-yes, sorry. I, uh…"

"Take your time."

"I'm fine. Right, so, after Gao died," she gulped and took a deep breath to center herself. "There were plenty of captains that got skipped over for the position from Black Harbor, but Guangzhou sent this annoying social climber dumbass from New York, as though he could do for here what the Tigers did in Manhattan. Like, most people are from South China in Manhattan, it's a totally different culture and history. So braindead. Turn around."

She sucked in a breath as I sat on the chair backwards like a youth pastor trying to look cool. "Tss, Gege, I'm not sure where to start here. Shifu did a number to you, hm?"

"Just slather it on as you please. I'm only letting this happen so Ma doesn't yell at us for 'skimping'. What happened after this 'Junior' came?"

Ami started working a line down my spine. "Not much to tell beyond that. Junior set about shaking things up, trying to put his stamp on things. Obviously, he didn't want to share power with the Cranes and Dragons, but he couldn't just outright start the war because then they'd team up, so he's just been poking at stuff, stirring the pot. Aniki started getting worse and worse jobs; he'd get paid more for them, but not like that matters if you're dead. Then there was the 'dojo challenge' – tch, what a fucking joke. Sent him to his death, they did. He got lucky that you were teaching that night and not your mother – everyone knows it too, knows you let him off easy. He hates that you didn't kill him, but honestly, I think he kind of likes you. Aniki was more pissed that you got dragged into this whole mess than at you specifically. I think if he had his way, he'd be a hero like you, and not a gangster like his master. Maybe if it had been you—well, that's his story to tell. Ah—"

She paused, and after an awkward silence, said, "I forgot to thank you." I heard her get off her chair and the next thing she said came from beneath and behind me. "Thank you for sparing my Aniki's life. I owe you big time, anything you want, just say the word."

I sighed. "Ami, if I turn around and you're kneeling on the ground, I'm going to burn one of your eyebrows off." She scrambled back into her chair. "Just look after my mom, alright? She might seem invincible, but she's still human. Talk to her about her C-dramas, she'll love that. Play mahjong with her. I could never get into it."

"Of course, Gege. I—I don't know why I came to her, maybe I was looking to die. Technically, I was here to apologize, but, I don't know. Aniki told us to get out of town after we dragged him back to safety, but this is the only place in America that I've ever lived, and shit, it might suck sometimes, but it's my home. Ro went up to New York; his Cantonese is way better than mine, and he always dreamed of being a hotshot gangster. Pussy's in for a rude awakening one of these days. I just," she cleared her throat, "I just wanted anything, man, a life, a family, anything – something that was mine. When I came and saw shifu, the woman who cut a hole out for herself right in the middle of three different gangs' territories, she was everything. One look and I knew right then and there that I'd die to be like her, do anything. I finally got it, what Ro saw when was looking at higher-ups, that dream. I got on my knees and begged her to take me as a student, thought she'd beat the shit out of me for the dojo challenge, but all she did was ask me one question—"

I interjected, smiling. "How do you feel about pain?" Ma had no less than five different speeches that started with that question, the goddamn psychopath. "What did you say?"

"Nothing, I broke my finger - snapped my pinky back flat to my hand."

I laughed. "No wonder she adopted you. That's hilarious."

Ami chuckled. "Yeah, guess it is. She cuffed me on the ear and asked, 'Why did you do that, idiot girl? Now I'll have to take you to the healer before we can start training!' The rest is about what you'd expect. Jiejie was really nice, by the way," she added, using the Chinese for older sister, despite being if not the same age then older than her, I was pretty sure. "We did a video call. Your whole family's so pretty."

"Our family. And what the fuck, Crystal knew Ma adopted you? Does no one tell me anything?"

I could hear the mirth in Ami's voice, a pleasant change from earlier. "She asked me to get a video of your face when you found out, actually."

"Typical," I grumbled. "Well, Meimei, you can let her know that I'm going be real creative with the pranks when she gets back from school."

She laughed. "But wouldn't you prefer if I didn't warn her? We're out of jelly by the way. Hold your arms up. I'll get started with the wraps."

"Don't bother. Watch closely, this is our family's primary fast healing technique. It has some weaknesses, I was able to keep Ma from using it for a while in our fight by keeping pressure on her diaphragm, for instance, but it's pretty strong otherwise." I took a deep breath, using a single Circular Breathing charge to return myself to complete health, the wound jelly and the twenty-five guaranteed Successes from the mystery pills absolutely carrying me. The migraine was gone, and I could no longer feel the soul pain left over from Ma's battle aura. "Ahhh, so much better."

I stood and stretched my back with a satisfied moan. Without the crushing headache, my day was back to being excellent, all things considered. Ma was immortal, I'd won the Viewer Popularity Poll, got a new sister, and had earned an outrageous amount of Experience from Quests that I wasn't thinking about.

Ami ran a disbelieving hand across my newest scars, mouth slightly open, before snatching it away with a blush. "Where did the blood go?"

"I'm freshly showered, you see," I said, totally failing to explain anything about the Special Feat that was actually responsible.

"But, what? I…huh?"

Man, that would never get old. I patted her on the shoulder condescendingly and smiled. "I should get going, but let's meet up for Mandarin lessons. Let me get your num—" A sudden realization made me palm my face.

"What's wrong?"

"Just give me a second." I put my hands on my knees and groaned. God, I was so tired. "Do me a favor and grab my ruined pants from the living room."

"Sure."

I kept my eyes closed, listening as she went and returned. "In the right pocket, there should be a phone."

"Oh, umm…"

"It's broken, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Mhm." I nodded and walked over to the stove.

"What are you doing?"

"Stress eating," I said, picking up the pot. "Want me to save you some? Speak up quickly, or else I'm downing this shit."

"Oh no, Gege, there's so much dust…"

"More for me, then."

I tilted the pot and poured the contents into my wide-open mouth. Ami watched horrified with her hands atop her head. The soup tasted like pond mud, but it was nice to have a sister in town. I'd missed that look.