Battleball

Battleball

Good mornings brought the Yabans out.

Above Armstrong City, blue-lined white clouds rose like alpine mountains over the pines. Their shaded green went so deep it turned blue in places, an empire of light occupied by shadows. The city’s towers stood far off beyond the suburb, titanic panes of glass and steel half-lost in morning haze, their edges made ghostly by distance. The through-road carried cars toward them and away from them, a steady middle-distance hum. Mourning doves worked through their three-note call in the hedges. Somewhere high in the trees, a cicada had started early and was working through the problem of being awake. Closer by, a single lawnmower started, died, started again.

The air was cold in the shade and cool where the sun fell.

Up on the aluminum bleachers of Strawberry Fields, Yulaan and Kevelnege sat across from each other with their arms and legs folded and their eyes closed. Yulaan’s long black bangs covered her eyes completely, as always. Kevelnege’s spiked hair lifted from her head in wild black blades, her sidelocks hanging sharp at her cheeks. Both wore the same plain black spandex leggings and black spandex tanktop, which on anyone else might have looked like exercise clothes. On them it looked like the reduced uniform of a species that considered exercise a soft word for violence.

Below them, the football field was still half-dormant. Winter had left the turf tired and patchy. The yard-line paint had faded to chalky ghosts. The goalposts were dull where they should have been bright. A plastic bag had caught itself on the chain-link behind one end zone and kept swelling and collapsing in the breeze, trying to decide whether to escape.

Nobody had been here since the last game of last fall. Nobody would be back for practices for another couple weeks. For this narrow stretch between seasons, the place belonged to whoever found it.

Esmeralda Xaxalpa had found it because Yulaan had invited her. That was already enough to make the morning sacred. She sat leaned forward on the bench with her elbows on her knees, dirty-blonde hair spilling out from under her hood, jeans tight at the knees from the way she kept bouncing one leg. Her light sweater was too thin for the bleacher chill, but she had refused to complain. Complaining would have meant admitting she was cold, and admitting she was cold would have meant Vicente had been right to tell her to bring a better jacket.

Vicente Xaxalpa stood a few rows above her in a green zoot suit, coat collar raised against the wind, dark hair combed with more ambition than the morning deserved. He had the slouch of a young man who had agreed to chaperone his little cousin to a Yaban training exhibition and was three-quarters of the way through regretting it. Or rather, three-quarters of the way through the pleasurable phase of regretting it. Vicente lived for that phase. It gave him something to complain about while still getting exactly what he wanted.

Neither of them understood why the two bollois considered sitting still a form of training.

Vicente had views on the subject. He had many views on many subjects. Yet the evidence did not lie.

The longer Yulaan and Kevelnege sat, the heavier the air became. The crisp nip of morning stopped feeling like cold and started feeling like pressure. Around the bleachers, the air bent in an invisible bubble, flexing inward and outward with small violent corrections. The cicada stopped sawing. The mourning doves went quiet. Even the lawnmower down the street seemed to lose courage.

Esme’s eyes widened.

Vicente, who could not have explained what he was feeling and did not intend to try, gripped the bench beside him. “This is that qigong lunacy again.”

Esme whispered, “Shh.”

The air popped once.

Yulaan and Kevelnege fell backward as if shoved, both landing hard on the bleachers. They panted, then laughed, then sat up grinning.

“They’re here!” Yulaan said.

She looked down from behind the black curtain of her bangs toward the field below.

Space opened under the bleachers.

The hyper-hole appeared as a hypersphere turning itself inside out. Violet, black, white, cyan, navy blue, colors too digital to belong to morning and too physical to be called light. It opened and opened without getting larger, a hole with no proper rim, a center that refused to stay centered. Four silhouettes formed within it.

The wind moved through Strawberry Fields. The plastic bag on the fence gave up and went.

The afternoon before, back at Ramon and Johanna’s house, Yulaan had explained the plan with a mouth full of cereal.

“It’s called Battleball,” she said. “My pal Ghojin is basically the equivalent of a linebacker.”

Kevelnege, sitting backward in the computer chair, had been scrolling through an Angelfire-hosted football fansite with a look of severe academic disappointment. “I’ve watched a bunch of your gridiron. I must say, it’s far more tactical than Battleball.”

Esme had lit up. “So Battleball’s like football?”

Yulaan had swallowed, then grinned. “Football if football wasn’t scared of itself.”

Now the demonstration had come to Earth.

Ghojin walked first through the hyper-hole. She wore vitakoze armor in the Yaban style, close enough to the Saiyan armor Esme knew from Dragon Ball Z to make her heart kick, different enough to make the comparison feel cheap. Under the armor was a dark violet sleeveless spandex unitard. The shoulder pads swept sharp and high, and the chestpiece had an airbrushed chrome silver finish that caught the morning in pale streaks. Her hair was black and enormous, gathered into a superlong spiked ponytail that fell and flared behind her like a comet tail with a bad attitude.

Esme pressed her hands between her knees and tried very hard not to make a noise.

Seeing Yulaan and Kevelnege together was already wonderful. Seeing Ghojin with them made it worse. Three wild-haired space monkey warriors on a suburban football field, all female, all impossible, all carrying themselves like violence was less an action than a weather condition. Television had never given Esme anything like them. Anime got close, then turned cowardly. Earth sports sometimes got close, then put up rules and pads and penalty flags. This was something else. This was the thing she had been waiting for without knowing she had waited.

Beside Ghojin came Torgaljin, a nagoi Vicente had met once and had immediately decided looked like trouble with good posture. He was tall, broad, and squint-eyed, with short spiked hair and a thin ponytail trailing down his back. His vitakoze used black spandex shorts instead of full leggings, with dark sleeves over his arms and a heavy chestplate shaped to leave no doubt about the body underneath. To Esme and Vicente, he looked powerful even standing still, as if bioelectric voltage would have been redundant.

The next two arrivals looked like they had wandered out of an Xbox game that had been banned in three countries and advertised badly in magazines Vicente thought he was too cool to own.

The first was a dark-blue Narakan, an abolian built from every warning Earthlings should have received before meeting one. 

Huge. 

Brutish. 

Thick-necked. 

He wore a slender bodysuit under heavy dank-green armor that looked less like athletic gear and more like something from a science-fiction gladiator pit. A gritty faded Q marked his chest.

The second Narakan had beige-red skin and a leaner build, though lean for him still meant his bare arms carried more muscle than most prizefighters. He wore black kung fu pants and no shirt, which seemed less like fashion than a challenge. His dreadlocks had been cyberpunk-stylized with glowing beads and unnecessary techno flourishes. Vicente looked him over once and decided the man’s entire wardrobe had been designed by a Mortal Kombat-obsessed cyber goth during a power outage.

Ghojin grimaced, as Ghojin did. “This is just a two on two. But watch.”

Torgaljin held the ball.

At least Esme supposed it was the ball. It looked like a crystal skull, smooth and pale, with a marble finish that made it seem more suited to a junkie tobacco shop than a sports field. He carried it in one hand as if it weighed nothing.

The four fighters moved into formation. Ghojin and Torgaljin on one side. The Narakans on the other. They crouched in a rough semicircle, close enough to football stances for Esme to understand why Yulaan had made the comparison, far enough from football that Vicente muttered, “That is not regulation anything.”

Yulaan snickered.

Ghojin shouted, “Sha!”

Torgaljin tossed the skull into the air.

It struck the turf, bounced once, rolled, and the four of them moved.

The red Narakan reached it first. He scooped the skull in both hands and cut right, heavy feet tearing black divots into the field. The blue Narakan turned at once and charged Ghojin. She met him hand to hand, fingers locked, arms flexing into a test of strength that sent a tremor across the turf. The blue one drove forward. Ghojin’s boots slid an inch. Her grin widened.

That left his side open.

Torgaljin came in fast and struck him with an open-palm blow to the ribs. The sound was not a slap. It was a door being kicked off its hinges. The blue Narakan went down, rolled, and tore up a stripe of grass with his shoulder.

Ghojin broke off and chased the red one.

He had almost reached the opposite end zone when she overtook him. She passed him on his left, pivoted in front of him, and drove a haymaker into his face. His head whipped sideways, then his whole body followed, spinning him around so many times Esme lost count before his back smashed into the turf.

The skull popped loose.

Ghojin snatched it out of the air and lurched toward the end zone.

The red Narakan, still flat on his back, caught her ankle.

Ghojin hit the ground in a hard arc that made Esme’s teeth clack together. Before she could recover, the red Narakan brought his foot up and kicked her under the spine. She lifted from the turf and landed face first, bounced once, and lay there for several seconds, winded, until she pushed herself to sit up with a wheeze and a laugh.

“Good god!” Vicente shouted.

The blue Narakan had the skull now. He had taken too long enjoying this fact.

Torgaljin caught him with a gut uppercut so loud the bleachers rang. The Narakan folded over the blow. The skull dropped from his limp hand.

Torgaljin extended one palm and caught it.

With the other hand, he gave the collapsing Narakan two sporting pats on the back and let him fall.

Esme stood up without realizing she had done it.

Vicente looked at her, then back to the field, slack-jawed. “How do you even survive a game like that?”

Yulaan cocked her head. Her bangs brushed her nose. “Observe.”

Torgaljin had not run more than three steps before the skull cracked. Light flickered through the fractures. The whole thing shattered and blew away into ash.

He stopped, brushed his hands off, and shrugged at the bleachers.

“Match over!”

Esme’s mouth hung open. “That’s it?”

Kevelnege patted Esme’s back once, hard enough to make her shoulders jump. “That’s it.”

Yulaan leaned her weight against Kevelnege. “See? You owe me.”

Kevelnege shoved her off. “That was barely a play.”

Yulaan shoved into her again. “Still a match.”

She leaned back and braced herself. “That was an opening cough.”

Yulaan tried to shove but wound up rubbing cheeks with her. “A winning cough.”

Torgaljin jogged back to Ghojin and offered a hand. She slapped her palm into his and let him pull her up. The red Narakan did the same for the blue one. Torgaljin had escaped without obvious wounds, and this seemed to frustrate him. He had the look of a kid who had not been allowed to score at recess. The other three were bloodied, bruised, grass-stained, and delighted.

None of them limped. None of them stayed winded.

“Any of those blows would have put any of the best players in the NFL out for good,” Esme said.

Vicente scoffed and said, “Any of those blows would’ve gotten a player kicked off the field.”

“Y-yeah…”

Her voice came out too reverent to be funny.

She had always loved the dumbest, most physical, and manly sports available, which was unfair because her own body had no intention of letting her join in. Football, wrestling, boxing, martial arts movies, roller derby clips, strongman contests, anything where bodies collided and the whole world briefly made sense. She had watched them all with a hunger that never found its meal. She wanted the charge. The clean line between courage and impact. The kind of strength that made a crowd rise to its feet before thought could interfere.

Battleball landed in her like revelation.

The cicada picked back up. Whichever one it was, or a new one, it started sawing again with the mourning doves and the robins, as if the whole field had decided the danger had passed.

Vicente watched the bloodied trio pass near the bleachers. “And I repeat…”

Kevelnege, wrestling with Yulaan, snarled the words at him, “Sometimes you don’t,” as she tried grabbing at her friend’s face, but the two gave up their assault when Ghojin climbed onto the bleachers and sat hard on the metal bench. The aluminum popped under her dense weight. She rubbed blood from her mouth with the back of her wrist, then looked at the red smear with a private satisfaction. Combat consequence, Esme had come to understand, was one of the great Yaban trophies. A bruise was not a bruise if it had a good story. A split lip was not damage if it proved someone had made contact. She knew Ramona and Mom hated that. They said the Yabans talked about blood as if only battle could make it honorable. Esme had not understood the complaint until recently, when her own body started keeping score without asking her.

“And that’s the basics,” Ghojin said. “Football meets martial arts, like Scrunt said.”

She reached over and noogied Yulaan’s moptop hair.

Yulaan swatted at her. “Quit it.”

“No.” Yulaan stood before her mouth even closed. Ghojin stood with her. A second later they were wrestling between the rows while Kevelnege whooped for Ghojin to take her down.

Esme wanted to speak. She opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

The big blue Narakan walked up to the bleachers and grinned at the humans with teeth too square and too numerous to look friendly. “Imagine, Earthling, the carnage and thrill of three teams competing for the skull at once. Especially in a proper arena!”

He bellowed out a heavy chortle. The red Narakan joined him. The two slapped palms, tensed their biceps, and walked in a half-circle as if already eager to practice again.

“Festivals of chaos!” the blue one called.

Esme almost bounced out of her shoes.

Vicente facepalmed.

Ghojin sat back down, snickered, and flicked her head, sending that long black mane over her shoulder. “Hey, Quzar. You were at the RAVE Games. Remember the Gosamyrs’ thoughts on Battleball?”

The blue Narakan, Quzar, stopped laughing. For a second his face went dazed, as if memory had hit him harder than Torgaljin had. Then he blew his cheeks and said flatly, “They will never understand.”

He stomped away toward the hyper-hole.

The red one followed him, still chuckling.

“Thanks for the demonstration,” Ghojin called. “We’ll be back at it next week.”

She waved her tail as the Narakans passed through the hyper-hole and vanished into the impossible color. Torgaljin followed last, giving Yulaan a quick two-finger salute before he disappeared.

The hyper-hole folded inward. The colors collapsed into a bead of light, then nothing.

For a few breaths, Strawberry Fields was only a field again.

Wind slid across the turf. The far towers of Armstrong City glinted blue in the haze. A cloud’s shadow passed over the pines and turned them the color of deep water.

Ghojin stretched her arms across the back of the bleacher row. Her scowl had returned, heavy as weather, though it betrayed the scoff she dropped into the morning.

“If you ever want to see a real version of one of those televised gladiator game shows, visit Sarrat. The Gosamyrs are the ultimate glam-capitalists.”

Esme looked into Ghojin’s lavender eyes and felt as if she were looking into another universe. Not a metaphorical one. A real one. One with arenas and skull-balls and demons and girls who could take a spinal kick, sit up laughing, and wipe blood from their mouths like it was lip gloss.

Thirteen years on Earth had suddenly become an insult.

She scooched closer until her jeans rubbed against Ghojin’s spandex-covered thigh. Vicente saw the movement and narrowed his eyes.

“Esme,” he warned.

She ignored him and tilted her head up at Ghojin, hands tucked under her chin. “Say, what’re the RAVE Games like? How strong ya gotta be to get a spot in them?”

Ghojin’s grin appeared so suddenly it looked unnatural on her. She wrapped an arm around Esme and yanked her in hard enough to make the girl yelp.

“Oh, look here. The Earthling kid thinks she can tussle with Ravers.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You thought it loud enough.”

“I did not!”

“You did, kid.”

Ghojin squeezed Esme’s upper arm between thumb and fingers, testing biceps and triceps with insulting ease. Esme felt her own arm turn to noodles under the comparison and hated how badly she wanted that strength.

“You don’t gotta be terribly strong to start out,” Ghojin said. “Not for the baby leagues. But if you want a chance at Interplanetary Battleball or Chaosbowl, then you train.”

Esme swallowed. “How much?”

Ghojin looked down at her sore little Earthling arm and snorted. “More than your species likes.” Her tail smacked Esme across the face, but not with any force, hitting more like a bored cat’s.

That should have discouraged Esme. It did the opposite.

Ghojin let her go, let her tail fall under the bleachers, and turned back to Yulaan. “You finally built the Death Chamber yet?”

Yulaan stood so fast the bleachers rang. “You bet!”

Kevelnege rose after her, already grinning.

Ghojin cracked her neck. “Then we ought to test it.”

The three bollois lifted from the bleachers. No takeoff run. No ceremony. One moment seated, the next airborne, hair and tails moving in the wind. Yulaan’s tail lashed once. Kevelnege folded her arms midair. Ghojin rose last, lazy and predatory.

“We ought to what?” Vicente called.

They were already trailing off across the sky, headed toward the suburbs and the distant city beyond, three black shapes passing under the white-blue mountain clouds.

Esme and Vicente sat there, mesmerized, dazed, confused, and quite chilly.

Esme rubbed her now sore and tender arms. “I wanna go there.”

Vicente dropped his head into his hands. “Your mom would kill me. No.”

“I just wanna watch.”

“No.”

She slapped his hat off.

Vicente caught it before the Atlantic breeze could take it across the bleachers. Slowly, with all the dignity he could recover, he put it back on and turned to face her.

“And I repeat.”

“Aw, come on, cuz. Dontcha wanna see all those freaky aliens and demons they got in Yule’s world?”

Vicente looked past her toward Nicolai’s Tower, its spire shining in the morning light. Beyond it, a mountain range of storm clouds was building over the horizon, high and white and blue-edged, moving in like an atmospheric tsunami. The mourning dove had started bothering him now. It would not stop calling. Three notes, again and again, as if the world were trying to make a point in a language too stupid to decode.

She was right.

That was the problem. Esme was often wrong in the useful ways, the ways that let Vicente say no and feel adult. This time she was right.

He lived for the paranormal. He lived for the things beyond the milky walls of reality. He lived for the stories that made sane people lower their voices, the corners of the universe where the rules got lazy, the creatures that should not exist and then did. God knew what Mr. Kazuma would say if Vicente brought back some exotic inter-universal creature, or introduced him to a real-life Tribble, or proved the Xaxalpas had somehow ended up with a family friend who could open doors into death-game civilizations.

And there was Esme’s biggest bitch move: those puppy-dog eyes whenever she wanted him to bring her along to something that would, with anyone else, get them killed or marked.

He sighed.

Then he sat cross-legged on the bleachers, folded his arms, and shut his eyes.

He was not remotely good at this. What was it supposed to be, centering his breathing? Vitalizing the anja chakra? Yulaan had explained it once while eating a burrito and had made it sound as easy as yelling across a room. Vicente had figured out enough to do it reliably, though every time he tried he felt as if he were pretending to understand a religion invented by concussed aliens.

A jogger passed on the sidewalk outside the field and looked over at him.

Vicente kept his eyes closed.

He breathed in.

The aluminum bench was cold under him. The wind moved against his face. The city hummed. Somewhere far away, Yulaan existed like a black spark behind his forehead.

He reached.

In his mind’s eye, Yulaan materialized above the outer city districts, flying with bukujutsu low over roofs and cul-de-sacs with her bangs whipping around her face. She zipped through morning air in the direction of home, Kevelnege and Ghojin ahead of her.

“Yulaan!”

She snapped into focus. “Hmm? Vicente, what is it?”

He kept sitting there on the bleachers with his arms folded, looking to any passerby like a young man ruminating on life and not like an accessory to whatever disaster Esmeralda was trying to arrange.

“Esmeralda wants to watch the next RAVE Games. How lethal would an audience seat be for an E-class type?”

Yulaan thought back without hesitation.

“The audience in a Gosamyrian death-game isn’t anything like the Makai Budōkai. You’d be safe.”

A pause.

“Usually.”