Chapter One
The sound of a phone ringing reverberated up the stairs and into the ears of a burly man who was until then asleep on a bed with three pencil-thin legs, which tilted unsteadily as he roused himself. Realizing his dilemma in the vague consciousness of a surprise awakening, the man deftly cartwheeled up and out of bed on one muscled arm, finding himself walking towards the stairs far before he was aware of the situation. He grabbed a mask from one of his many stash spots and noted the colors: red and blue, with alternating stripes. From the console release party with Prof back in the day, good times...
Stepping around a haphazardly-placed set of weights and a recently broken training robot, the man gingerly picked up the cellphone glowing on a table in the corner of his home gym and chuckled to himself. The picture on the phone was of an old friend, a large man in a black and yellow coat, stuffing three hot dogs into his mouth at once, eyes bulging comedically.
"Long time no hear, Prof." His voice held a warmth that his students might never hear as he greeted his old friend.
The man on the other end the line echoed the sentiment. "Senor Booyah! Old friend! It has been too long."
"Didn't we just catch up at the Pequod's in the Chilblains last month, Prof?" The luchador's tastebuds were craving coffee all of a sudden. He took a look at the time on the phone's clock: 4:25 AM.
"Er, yeah, the usual social somethin' or other," gruffed the Prof. He sounded more awake than Booyah had ever heard him in the wee hours, at least recently. "This's all business though, friend."
"Do you even do business any more?"
He could hear the rustling of clothing on the other end of the line from a drawn-out shrug. "It's been a little tricky since Fizz Corp. yanked all our funding, but kinda? Managed to get a fictionaut rig back from a private collector the other day."
Booyah whistled. "Wow, that's some ancient tech, Max! I remember the days when our whole lives seemed to revolve around exploring the potential of..." His brain rattled trying to remember the phrase. "fictive-limited ficton travel."
"Yeah, those were the days." The voice on the other end sighed. "It's actually been kind of nice to go back and see the old haunts, but things have changed a lot in there."
"Aren't they supposed to?"
"Yeah? Maybe?" Prof groaned a little as he tried to pull together the proper words; judging by the time, the luchador assumed that he'd had a helping of his special medication. "Fictive fictons were assumed to be static by way of empirical study but it's really been nothin' but those crazy enough to look into the theories from the old days, and crypto bros who think they can escape a global apocalypse through clever fictoneering, without realizing that even today, ficton-travel is limited to pseudo-existence from the 'home' ficton..."
The nerd talk had Senor Booyah up and awake, and he moved through the gym to the kitchen as the Prof recounted the most recent history of one of his earlier fields of studies, knowing that this conversation would likely take a good while. "Which is why you always told us 'If you die in the game world, you die in real life!'"
"And vice versa," said Prof. "It's not a portal so much as it is something like a full-dive VR experience, albeit one that can create and store duplicates in other fictons."
Booyah thought briefly of his own experiences running through worlds that felt both familiar and entirely removed from reality, experiences that he'd nearly written off as illusory in the decade since the shuttering of Hazard Laboratories Fictionaut Wing, alongside several other particularly specific moonshots that had once been bankrolled by an old friend's excess of soda money. "Hold on, did you say store?"
"If one was deleted and you tried to go back to that ficton you might die, so yes, store."
"Wow." The coffee was complete; Senor Booyah sipped a cup with a pinch of cayenne and a high protein non-dairy creamer blend.
There was a throat-clearing, attention-getting ahuhm from the other end of the line. "Anyone who hasn't been ripped to shreds attempting fictive-limited ficton travel without proper precautions has probably learned by now to be extra careful."
"And you've been careful thus far, it seems."
"Oh yes, I haven't even been in the rig. Like hell I'm dying any time soon."
Under his mask, Senor Booyah raised an eyebrow. "Then how did you-"
"I sent a bot!"
Another sip of slightly spicy, slightly sweet coffee, and Booyah's mental faculties felt themselves turning on rapidly. "A bit dangerous for the bot? Aren't you worried about bot-rights laws?"
Prof guffawed. "Oh I'll be dead long before those catch up to me, trust me old friend!"
The masked man with the phone felt a chuckle of his own from the Professor's trademark lack of fear of legal consequences, but kept it to himself while he mulled over the course of the conversation. "So what did this bot find?"
"A wrestle man of some sorts. I thought maybe you could come check the tapes sometime, let me know if he looks familiar."
"Couldn't you send them to me in an email?"
"Absolutely out of the question, friend; you don't want to know how many people are watching my every electronic communique and missive, trying to steal some thing or another that man is not meant to know. There's a reason I live in a flying labship with complicated cloaking and electronic countermeasures suites!"
"Could you send the bot?"
"Also a no-go. The bot in question was vaporized."
Booyah felt a vein in his neck twitch. "Vaporized? Are you sure we're talking wrestle guys? That sounds a lot more like... super guys."
"You've fought super guys before, luchador; how would you feel about fighting a super wrestle guy soon?"
He muted the phone for a second and cracked his knuckles, loudly. "I'd say how soon?"
"...hello? Are you still there?"
Beep, unmuted. "Sorry, I said how soon?"