The room that Klein walked into was bare and white, like an empty vessel. There were two life-sized mannequins resting at its center, laying half on top of each other in a heap with strings folding down around them. As he approached them, the strings pulled them up against the sides of the room on either side of him, leaving one of each’s arms interlocked with the other’s at the center as they’d ripped from their artificial sockets. The mannequins then started spinning around the room dizzyingly as splatters of blood somehow appeared on the walls.
They were trying to go for his weak spot, he could tell. A worker losing a limb because of him had been one of his most formative events. By creating a horrific, though contrived, scenario that forced him to contemplate the horror of dismemberment, they were hoping that their psychological warfare would soften him up for whatever opponent waited ahead. He closed his eyes and, focusing, chanted while performing Kuji-In. He may not have had any magic powers, but if there was anything he’d learned, it’d been how important it was to control his own mind.
When he opened his eyes, the blood and mannequins were gone.
Walking into the next room, he found that, rather than having been bare white like the mannequin room had been, the floors, walls and ceiling of the room were all composed of interconnecting series of black and white tiles, like a chessboard. There was a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and long tables on his left and right were covered with plates, glasses and utensils set down over two long white tablecloths. There seemed to be no way out of the room on the other side – it seemed like a dead end.
The most notable part of the room was still the lobster in a tuxedo wearing a monocle.
He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised considering some of what he’d seen, but the turn of events continued to find ways to break the skunk’s expectations somehow. “I knew you’d come here,” the dignified crustacean had said to him, “it was inevitable.” Klein didn’t care for that kind of thinking. “Really?” he’d said dubiously. “But of course,” the muscular cultist had answered as he’d adopted an English boxing stance, “it was the work of the Fates.” The skunk didn’t like the look of those decidedly untied claws. “There’s no such thing as Fate.”
Klein descended into his customary battle swing. “Fate doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not.” The Englishman shifted his stance abruptly, hoping to startle the skunk into giving him an opening by doing so. “Every factor that led you here was pre-ordained, just as our Prophet foretold our rise to power.” Klein noticed a Jesus fish hanging around the boxer’s neck. “Do you know what that means?” he’d asked the eco-terrorist. “Of course I do. It’s the symbol of the Coming of Fish Supremacy.” The skunk had laughed. “Laugh all you want.”
Klein ducked forward to the lobster’s side under his sharp hook. “Fate will get you in the end.” As the skunk tried to shift his dodge into a kick the way he usually did he felt the floor start shifting under him. “Fate is like a conveyor belt, you see.” He saw that whole alternating vertical and horizontal lines of black and white squares kept shifting by one space at each tick of the clock’s second hand, without affecting the tables on the sides somehow. “We’re only pawns in its game.” Klein contorted his body to avoid having a floor shift make him walk into a punch.
“Take a lobster in a tank, for example,” the crustacean said, “to take a completely random example I’ve made up off the top of my head.” The skunk tried to stay close to the ground but the claws seemed to know where to find him. “Would you say it has much of a chance of doing anything against the workings of the Fates?” he asked. “Of course not,” he answered himself. “So when over-grounders oppress sea-dwellers for centuries, and we finally get the chance to submerge you all, to get the upper hand...” he continued as Klein barely tumbled over him.
“... You are all lobsters in tanks to us,” he finished as his backhand knocked the skunk back.
“It’s only a matter of time until the stars are right.” Klein narrowly rolled back out of the way of a sharp descending strike which the shifting floor almost led him right into. “The rest of the complex is already filling with water behind you as we speak,” cultist said ominously. “Whatever happens, there’s no escape for you from this place.” It hadn’t occurred to the skunk that they would’ve done something like that, although it seemed really obvious that they could in retrospect. He wished he’d thought of it when it could’ve still made a difference.
“Just as there was no escape for her,” the Englishman drilled in.
“That’s a bunch of determinist bullshit!” Klein was done containing himself. “Everyone I came across over the course of my life tried to steer me this way or that way,” he said, finally landing a kick on his opponent’s shell while moving out of the way of another blow, “and if any of it had worked, I wouldn’t be where I am here and now today, about to hand you your ass on a silver platter,” he smirked, indicating an actual silver platter which was conveniently situated on one of the tables that had been set up next to them. “Then it wasn’t your Fate,” his foe waved off.
“You think you can defeat me?” the boxer scoffed. “I’ll kill you before you get the chance to drown,” he went on, going in for the kill yet again. “The last thing you’ll think before you die will be the realization that none of us can ever escape our Fates.” The skunk redoubled the inventiveness of his escapes from the eco-terrorist’s rapidly multiplying trajectories of attack. “There’s nothing any of us can do about it.” He wished that his kicks would’ve seemed to have been having more of an effect against the shell. “You’ll just have to accept it like the rest of us.”
Jumping over a low strike, Klein managed to land standing on the lobster’s shoulders and, sending one of his feet up in the cultist’s face, back-flipped back down onto the ground behind himself. The skunk was confident that he could win and make it out alive no matter what. He leapt up on one of the tables to avoid a claw swipe and leapt over the Englishman behind him over another one, the boxer knocking one of the glasses off from the table as he did.
Neither of them had expected the falling glass to stop to hover in midair on its way down. As the glass was delicately, mysteriously put back on the table which it had been knocked off from, a blood-chilling chuckle began to echo through the room. Klein’s confidence faltered for a moment, afraid that his problems were going to become a lot worse when he recognized the Cheshire grin that the laugh was now clearly emanating from.
“Bad fish, breaking glasses,” Boko chided. “Looks expensive, too.”
