“Ohhhhhh yeeeeaaaaaah.”
Phynn woke with the words still echoing in his head. He lay on his pallet and wondered if he had dreamed them or if someone had spoken them out in the street and the words had drifted into his room through an open window or crack in the wall. There was something familiar in those words, yet he knew that he had never heard them spoken in that way his entire life. It didn’t matter. Mother’s funeral service was tomorrow, and he needed his sleep.
***
“Ohhhhhh yeeeeaaaaaah.”
The words returned the following night, and when Phynn woke the following morning he felt exhausted, as if he had not slept a wink. The walk to the necropolis was several miles and across three burgs. The physical exertion kept him awake almost as much as the respect he felt for his mother. Her passing wasn’t unexpected, but it hurt all the same. The least he could do was walk with her and keep vigil over her body for one final day.
***
It was well past sunset when he returned to the small second-story apartment he and his mother shared. He shambled through the doorway peeling clothes away from his body as he neared his pallet which he fell onto without ceremony.
“Good night, mother,” he almost said as he had every evening since before he could remember. Tears threatened to come, but he was asleep before they could rise to his eyes.
***
“Ohhhhhh yeeeeaaaaaah,” came the voice that had plagued his dreams for night after night. It was deep, gravely, and yet breathy.
And that was where Phynn was, in his dreams, standing at the wall of dead where his mother had been interred. He was unable to read the puzzle of letters and scratches on the wall, a function of his dream state, but he knew that the gibberish scratchings were her name and indicated where she was placed eight feet above the ground. The height was only as expected for a respected commoner. In the necropolis, people were interred as they lived. Those of the lowest stations were buried within the earth while those of the highest station spent eternity near the top of their wall.
“Eight feet, mother,” Phynn said, smiling while he reached up to caress her name. “Not bad for a seamstress. They will probably bury me in the ground.”
“Ohhhhhh yeeeeaaaaaah.”
The voice bounced around the field of burial walls, seeming to come from all directions and none at the same time. The walls were more akin to buildings three or four stories tall, except there was no open space on the interior of the construction, just four walls back to back to back to back and each thick enough to contain three to twenty columns of bodies. The roads between the walls were made from circular flag stones. The roads running one direction, Phynn was unsure the cardinality of said direction, were wide enough for two wagons to pass without stopping or interfering with those visiting their loved ones at either wall to the sides. The roads crossing those were half as wide. From near atop the hill of the necropolis, the regularity of wide streets and walls gave an eerie chill. The disembodied voice helped none at all.
Phynn was getting really annoyed at the voice. How many nights would it invade his dreams and keep him awake only to feel like a zombie the next day? He’d had enough.
“Why don’t you come and say that to my face?” Phynn yelled into the necropolis. “Come here and show me what you are so agreeable to!”
“Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” said the voice. This time it came from right next to Phynn and just behind him.
Phynn jumped in surprise and spun, ready to come to blows with the speaker if need be. What he saw stopped him dead. There, now in front of him, stood a man half a head shorter than Phynn’s unusually tall 7’ height, but the aura that exuded from the man was pure masculinity and pure savagery despite the outlandishly colored short pants and shirt he wore. Phynn couldn’t tell what color his eyes were because the man wore dark goggles, and he would have had trouble determining the color of the man’s hair which was hidden under a garish bandana if it were not for the man’s dark reddish brown beard and copious body hair.
“Oh yeah,” the man said in his deep gravelly but somehow breathy voice. “Hey kid. Phynn? Yeah. You’re lookin’ good. Yeah. Remind me of your old man, a real tall brick shit house he is. Yeah. But you still need to put on some muscle, yeah, before you could hope to take on one such as him. Yeah.”
This man knew his father? Phynn didn’t even know his father.
“How do you know me? How do you know my father?”
“Oh yeah, I know your old man. Yeah. He’s the greatest wrestler to ever grace the stage other than me. Ohhhhh yeahhhh.”
“Wrestler? Stage? Gods, this is the strangest dream I’ve ever had. Who the fuck are you?”
“You can call me, Rando. Yeah. I’m the greatest Inter-Sprawl Federation champion to ever live. OH YEAH! I knew your father when I was alive. Yeah. Good man, yeah. But then some worthless title whores wanted to take my cham-pi-on-ship belt from me. Yeah. And you KNOW they couldn’t do it the right way - in the ring - yeah. So they ended up having assassins kill me.”
“No,” Phynn said somehow drawn into this Rando’s story.
“Yeah. They killed the All Time Number One In-ter-Sprawl Feder-a-tion Cham-pi-on-ship title holder when he was enjoying the company of a good woman. Oh yeah.”
“And my father?”
“Oh. Yeah. Your father tracked them down. Oh yeah. And he took vengeance out on those no good assassins and the people that hired them too. Yeah. I was proud to watch the man work. Oh yeah. But before he could finish the job, he got hurt. Yeah. Sad. Yeah. Now he can no longer fight. Yeah. BUT HIS WORK REMAINS INCOMPLETE! Do you hear what I’m sayin’? Yeah.”
“You’re saying the people who hurt you are still out there, and I’m guessing you want revenge now. So what? Do you think I’m going to roll over and do the bidding of some ghost friend of a father I never knew because he’s unable to do it himself?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Well no,” Phynn said immediately and turned to walk away. He paused for just a minute to tell the man to also stop waking him up and invading his dreams but stopped when he saw Rando’s crestfallen posture.
The other man licked his lips, stood straight once more, and stuck a beefy finger in Phynn’s face. “Listen here kid, yeah. And listen goooood.”
There was something about the man’s tone and presence that caused Phynn’s full attention to snap back to the savage yet garishly dressed man.
“Your father is one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. They called him The Oger, yeah, and he didn’t need to help anyone, yeah. Ever. Yeah. But he did, oh yeah. And you know why, little boy? Yeah.”
Phynn almost thought the man answered his own question except for his terrible habit of interjecting ‘yeah’ into almost every phrase, and before Phynn could even consider answering, Rando answered himself. It was like the man could hold an entire conversation by himself.
“OH YEAH. I’ll tell you why because it is obvious you have no clue. Yeah. It is because The Oger was born that way, yeah. Born a champion. Yeah. Born a good man, yeah. And despite your little piss ant attitude, yeah, I know you’re a good man too, yeah, and maybe even a champion of your own. Oh yeah. Because just like him, yeah, it’s in your blood. Oh yeah. And you can’t ignore blood, yeah. So tell me boy, yeah. Are you a boy, or are you a man? Yeah. Do you walk away and foolishly think only of yourself? Or do you take responsibility for yourself, your family, and the good people that live around you? Oh yeah. I know the answer. Yeah. And if you look deep within yourself, yeah, you’ll see it too. Yeah.”
Phynn’s eyes opened, and he was in his and his mother’s apartment.
“Oh yeah. Be a man, a good man, yeah, and make your father proud. OH YEAH!” Rando said as his voice faded from reality back into the ether of dreamland.
Something stirred within Phynn, and he hated to admit it, but the strange macho dream visitor had been right. Phynn had felt an undefined need for almost a year, but nothing he ever considered had filled it. He assumed that the need had been for independence or perhaps for the kind of power or authority for himself that would allow him to provide healing for his mother, but despite all of his ruminations on the matter, nothing he considered did more than quiet the feelings for more than a day as the euphoria of having ‘figured it out’ ebbed and the need reasserted itself. This ‘champion of the people’ idea felt somehow real, somehow pure.
As soon as Phynn decided to be the next champion as Rando suggested, the burg’s bells chimed midnight. Phynn hadn’t been asleep more than a few hours, yet he now felt more rested than he had in weeks, maybe months as keeping his mother comfortable as her health deteriorated had been an all-hours ordeal. An odd energy coursed through Phynn starting in his finger tips. The energy ran up Phynn’s arms, down his body and legs, into his toes, and then back. His eyes began to glow.
“The next champion. Oh yeah,” Rando’s voice came from far away as Phynn stood and walked to the workspace he and his mother had shared.
“Cover your face,” a deep familiar voice came. Phynn thought it might have been his father’s but knew that was wrong. It was his grandfather, perhaps his great grandfather. “Champions should be known on sight, but not all must use their real names.”
Phynn drew several sketches of costumes. None of them looked at all like any of the others except on two points. First they all had a cape of some type, and second they all had a mask, the same mask every time.
“Anonymity brings its own power,” another voice said.
“As does legend,” said another, this one female.
Time blurred around Phynn as he worked. He used chalk to draw the pattern free-hand on the finest cloth he and his mother had. His mother’s sheers, his sheers now, cut the fabric perfectly, and needle and thread followed. The voices continued the entire time, encouraging and directing. They taught him all of their secrets and more.
***
“Oh yeah,” a voice said waking Phynn. “This is the place.”
It was not the voice from his dreams.
A loud knocking came from his door, and Phynn bolted up, the chair he’d fallen asleep in was kicked behind him and fell to the floor with a crash.
“Yeah, someone’s in there. Probably the son,” came the voice again.
“Yeah, yeah,” the voice said again shortly after in reply to a muffled sound from his side of the door.
The knocking returned, louder than before.
“Hey open up. We can hear you in there. You need to leave.”
Phynn moved toward the door but paused to look at his hands where he held the mask he barely remembered sketching the night before.
The knocking returned.
“Look kid, I’m sorry about your mother, and I hate to do this, but this isn’t your place anymore. It never was. It was your mother’s. You got to get yourself out so the new tenants can move in.”
Phynn stowed the mask in a pocket and answered the door.
“... get into my new apartment now!” a thin aged void whined as Phynn managed to door open. “Finally!”
A small human woman - or maybe a tall halfling woman - of advanced age whipped around the apartment manager and into Phynn’s residence.
The apartment manager stood with one hand raised as if to knock again and then wiped his forehead and hair back instead. The normally gruff man appeared haggard and uncharacteristically abashed as he met Phynn’s gaze.
“Hey kid, sorry about this, but you got to get out.”
“... put my chase here, and the orange table right there … “ the woman in Phynn’s apartment prattled as she did her best dervish impression around the space.
“Get out?” Phynn asked. “To where? That lady’s apartment?”
The manager laughed, “Oh no,” he said before the sudden mirth left his face and was replaced with embarrassment. “No, someone else is lined up for her apartment, and before you ask, someone else is lined up for that one. No. We have a space for you, but it is in the sub-basement. I’ll show you where. You have fifteen minutes to gather anything you want to keep. Everything else will be destroyed so that the new tenant can move in immediately.”
“Destroyed?” Phynn asked, aghast.
“Oh yeah. Magic engulfs the entire apartment for thirty seconds destroying everything that was not original to the space including dirt, insects, plants, and um … animals. So if you have any pets, you better get them out too … or not. I don’t care.”
“What about her? She’s talking about moving furniture up here. That’ll take half a day or more. I can’t have as much time to move out?”
“She’s been waiting for this apartment to open up ever since news of your mother getting sick became public knowledge. She’s paid for an extension of time as have the folks getting her space, and the folks getting their space, and so on down the line. Oh and that reminds me, your room won’t be ready for a few days as people move from apartment to apartment.”
“What?! About a third of the apartments in the basement are empty. Why can’t I take one of them for the time between?”
“Well you could, if you had a permit.”
“Can I get one today?”
“You could apply for one today, but they take a couple weeks to process.”
“Why didn’t someone tell me any of this?”
“Well … I wanted to, but with your mom so sick, I didn’t want to bother you with more bad news.”
Phynn knew better than to argue Sprawl semantics with someone who was the equivalent of a nothing level bureaucrat. They never budged from the rule of law unless you had more money than Phynn did to bribe them, but if he had that much money, he wouldn’t be kicked out of his apartment either.
Thirteen minutes after Phynn’s conversation with the apartment manager ended, he held everything he could just outside of the room as white-hot flame filled the apartment from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Phynn held his mother’s sheers and sewing kit, almost a full bolt of her favorite cloth, half a bolt of his, all their remaining coin, and anything else of value he could lay hands upon. Every other possession and memory he had was ash and dust within minutes.
“OK kid. See you downstairs in three days,” the manager said as he turned and left.
The tiny old woman, Phynn was now certain she was human as her rheumy eyes held none of the gemstone beauty of the halflings, turned to look at him with the grandest of smiles.
“I finally get what’s mine, a second-story apartment,” she said beaming. Her smile broke almost immediately as she seemed to finally realize Phynn’s existence. “What are *you* doing here on my floor? Get out of here or I’ll call a security cog!”