Betting Against the Masks
That Haunt Us Most
By Traktor Traylor Hitchens
September 1, 2025 — In one fell swoop, that psycho shitbag Zulkazan sliced Guy from throat to nutsack. Looked like he unzipped Guy’s flesh suit and let all the organs and innards trapped inside spill out. Then, a blink later, the emptied flesh suit collapsed to the blood-and-guts-soaked stone floor.
I had to choke down upchuck while forcing my eyes to stay fixed on the awful, savage scene. Needed to sear it into my memory so I could remember it later. After decades of Calvinballing and mixed martial confidence artistry, I’d seen my share of gruesome injuries. Broken bones busting through skin. Arms and legs twisted in ways that would make plastic Dynamic Action Fighters® cry in pain. None of those can even sniff what I just witnessed.
I was never close to Guy. Only knew him as a decent journalist and a bit of a dweeb. I did kind of pick on him at times. Nothing mean, just good-humored office fun. But he was a person. A living, breathing person. He didn’t deserve an ending like that. Nobody does.
Balarabe handed his bioglass dagger to an attendant, who wiped it down and then slunk away backwards into the chamber’s shadows, no questions asked. The nonchalant SOP exchange was almost as disgusting and alarming as Guy’s murder. It meant they’d done this before. Or at least practiced it.
Just like Guy, I’d also double-crossed Orforcorp. And, upon official review, I whiffed big time by spilling that secret to Balarabe when I showed up to hide out from the fallout of my face-off with that Chip Martingale asshole from Camelcase. They wanted me to be a grubby rugpuller. But I’m a born boardflipper. I guess sometimes we make allegiances just so we can end up breaking them when it benefits us most. Or screws us over the most.
Here I thought NoZa was a neutral zone. Big mistake. Now there was a high statistical probability that that walking shitbag flips out again and guts me like he did Guy, leaving me a busted pile of oozing wet human garbage.
A massive explosion outside shook the building and rumbled the ground. Outside sounded like a warzone. I had to get out of NoZa. Fast.
“Crush the enforcers, crush them!” shouted Macro Excellerator Balarabe Zulkazan. “Crush them so that we may go forth and liberate the heathens from their flesh-obsessed decadence and save them their earthly deaths.”
A flurry of admins-errand rushed to disembark on their quest, and they gave me the distraction I needed to backpedal into the shadows and slip out of the court chambers. I found a pile of masks and robes and dresses, and donned a disguise. Outside the upsidedown pyramid, sirens and alarms and a jangled roar filled the sky — the opposite of a roaring crowd cheering you on to victory. I had to criss-cross, zig-zag, backtrack, un-dead-end, and circle round a thousand times, but I finally found an open lane out of NoZa.
A Lack of Signal and an Overpacked Symbol
Even after my worst defeats and most exhausting scrumbles, I’d never felt the pull to lie low and chill out more than I did after leaving NoZa. But I also never felt the need to figure out what the hell was happening more than I did. There’d been some kind of doodad blocking phone signals in the neighborhood. Wasn’t until a few blocks away from NoZa that I managed to get a signal and could finally scroll my feeds and catch up on what the fuck was happening.
Only took a few thumb flicks until I saw Aunt Judy’s carnival livestream. For the second time today, I nearly threw up. I wanted to look away in horror but I couldn’t pull myself away.
Then, some big yellow blurs in the background caught my eye. I rewound and watched the scene again. Fuck me. Sure enough, there in the background were Fanboys wearing my scrumbling mask and practicing O Jeito Do Fã… and they were using it against helpless, defenseless innocents.
My world was going topsy-turvy faster than an uphill scrumble. Fanboys… people using my patented mixed martial confidence artistry… were using it for violence. For evil. They gave me no choice but to step up and use the way of the fan for its true purpose of cooling heated tensions.
When I spent time base jumping, I learned about the Magnus effect. It can alter your trajectory and create unexpected deviations that raise the chance of an accident. And in that sport, any accident is a brutal one. I thought I had things planned out. Thankfully, all my years of training have kept me ready for any type of Magnus effect that tried to alter my trajectory.
No Batter, No Better, Know Better
From the livestream, I knew I had to head to the Orforcorp Corridor midway. After speeding toward the parking lot and then hopping out of my still-accelerating car that I let cruise off into the pedestrian-laden horizon, I ran as fast as I could toward the carnival’s entrance. Took a hot second in the entrance line. Apparently, everyone still wanted to get into the carnival. Not sure of the logic here. I thought everyone would want to get out. But there I was, stuck waiting in line to enter this FUBAR fiasco, and people were filming the rush to get it.
Inside, I was greeted by tents and booths on fire, and smoke everywhere. And the bugs. So many goddamn bugs. Swarms of flies so thick, I had to swing my arms and brush my way forward. I’d always thought that smoke kept bugs away. But I guess smoke doesn’t matter when it’s time to feast.
As I ventured further into the fire-drenched carnival, it was just pile of dead bodies after pile of dead bodies, sliced into pieces, lumped up like overstocked mannequins, and burning up a stench so awful, I couldn’t choke down my upchuck any longer, and let loose a firehose of vomit that blasted out all over the place. It was too much. How could this have happened?
But that’s when I saw them with my own lying eyes: A roving and rioting gang of Fanboys, all of them wearing the face that I made famous as my Calvinball mask: a rubbery oversized Bartholomew J. Simpson.
They’d crossed the line of scrimmage. Just like Calvin, I held Bart as a saint, the patron of overachieving underachievers. People like me. And I’d be damned if I ever let the name Bartholomew be associated with real-world violence or a culling, let alone a massacre.
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I straightened myself up after blowing chunks, ready to face the corrupted masks of the monstrosities I’d made. All around us, the powerless carnival gurgled in its death throes, a smoldering graveyard of twisted metal and tattered canvas where fun came to die violent deaths. The smoke of burning cotton candy mingled with the metallic stench of blood, buoyed by the desperate screams of some carnivalgoers fleeing in every direction like startled antelope, and some people drawn to the burning chaos like moths to their sudden scorching deaths.
Within this apocalyptic wasteland, the Fanboys slowly approached me, their oversized rubber Bart Simpson masks bobbing grotesquely as they swung their arsenal of destruction — baseball bats, crowbars, metal pipes, and broken pool cues — with the methodical precision of seasoned executioners.
They surrounded me and paused, soaking in the moment like feckless menaces they were.
“So,” I shouted, letting a pause linger for a moment before continuing, “it’s come to this.”
One of the big Bart-headed Fanboys pointed at me with a two-by-four, “Look at this old, broken, disgusting slob. Look at him! An unfunny joke of a man.”
“I won’t let you give O Jeito Do Fã a bad reputation,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and calm. I wanted my warning to be understood clearly. Even though I was fighting like hell to stop my legs from fleeing.
Another one of the big Bart-headed Fanboys spoke, this one pointing half a hockey stick at me, “Got too much coin stacked on this prop bet, pops. Ain’t about you. It’s about getting paid.”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the Fanboys like the wave rippling through the fans during a scrumble.
“Already made ten K today.”
“Been curving OGEE and stacking coin since I rolled up.”
“Got a milly your killy.”
I wanted to rip out all their eyes. The real and plastic ones. They were using TrakBets, my branded gambling app, and O Jeito Do Fã, my patented form of mixed martial confidence artistry, to ransack and rape the weaker carnivalgoers in a sad and brutal attempt at trying to earn some tiny slivers of $OGEEcoin. No. The truth was, I wanted to rip out my own eyes in penance.
“TrakBets is a scam!” I yelled. “OGEEcoin is a scam! It’s all a scam! Why can’t you understand that? They’re ripping you off, and they’re gonna pull the rug any day now. You can’t seriously want to fight for the people slurping up your savings?!”
“You’re the scam and the scammer!”
“You just salty we outsalted you!”
“Out-manuevered you!”
“Out-earned you!”
“We fighting for OGEEcoin. What what?”
“OGEECOIN!”
“What what?”
“OGEECOIN!”
My words had lost what little power they might’ve held. Trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, I slowly started shifting into the Spinning Arm Shield Defensive stance, hoping they wouldn’t notice. It took me far too long to learn, and even longer to admit, that valente não existe (basically, "there's no such thing as a tough guy") wasn’t an insult directed at me personally. It was like the saying, “The oak snaps in the storm, while the willow sways with the wind.”
That’s why O Jeito Do Fã teaches you how to understand combat’s inevitable airflow patterns, so you always know that this move works against that move and that move works against this move. That helped me escape my scrapyard scrapping. But this wasn't the same situation at all.
The Fanboys started moving in closer, and I knew my only chance to survive was to rely on my heart, my energy, my zeal.
Overpowering The Paradox of Predetermined Improvisation
The first Fanboy swung a bat at me in a move that I didn’t recognize. I shouldered my Spinning Arm Shield to parry, and a blast of pain jolted through my arm. From there, they overwhelmed me from every angle. I couldn’t land any Vortex Sworl Swipes, couldn’t get into my Flat Blade blocking form, couldn’t even attempt to implement an Oscillatation Off-Balancing counterattack.
At I thought that, given enough moves, I’d easily be able to detect if any of these faux-Fanboys were one of my actual students. Body movements were no different than dynamic fingerprints. But the more the big Bart-headed Fanboys swung and clobbered me, the more I realized I couldn’t tell whether they were even using O Jeito Do Fã moves. Their limbs moved so fast and came at me from so many directions that everything I thought I’d created with O Jeito Do Fã flew out the window like a stack of papers on a breezy day.
“Oh, we’ve got our downline funneling up-chain rotational revenue for our Initiating Blade Mentor,” said a Fanboy with a devious chuckle.
I was sputtering out of control, all bloodied and bruised, and I needed to slap some sense back into myself.
Then I did something I swore I’d never do: I pulled from my bag of previously used Calvinball tricks, and ones I’d seen other scrumblers perform — the biggest no-no taboo move in major league sports.
I flapped a flaky flum flem and twisted into a jimmied shimmied shake-and-quake with a Whirling Slice-o attack.
A pipe thwocked my side.
I clitter-clattered a double-cross-step and leapt forward with a Top Speed Twirler.
A swinging bat met me headfirst. Fireworks flashed in my eyes, leaving stars dancing around my head.
I hit the ground and splayed on my stomach. Blood dripped from my nose or mouth or both. There were too many of the big Bart-headed Fanboys for me to fight at once.
With less than a Hop Skip and a Wink left in my tank, I knew my body was busted to bits and all I had left was my heart, my energy, and my zeal. Using every last ounce of juice I had left, I pulled myself to my feet.
The Fanboys howled like hungry hyenas. I squeezed every (admittedly out-of-shape) muscle in my body, focused every last ounce of my attention, my energy, my heart, and my zeal — really wrung that sweaty towel — and I directed it all inward, channeling it all back into myself like a loop-de-doop carnival ride, trying to truly fuse my make-it-up-as-I-go-along Calvinball flow-with-the-moment skills with my preplotted O Jeito Do Fã techniques into a predetermined-free-will hybrid. Trying to truly become the blade that powers the mill that grinds the grain that bakes the bread that feeds the hand that breaks the board.
A strange sensation blossomed inside of me. It was like that full-body tingle you get when you’re comfy in bed and still half-awake but slipping into sleep. I opened my eyes, and I swear I was glowing green. Like some kind of radioactive dude. The illusion immediately disappeared. I figured it must’ve been a trick of the carnival lights, but it was pretty dark and powerless here, and I didn’t see any green lights anywhere.
Something inside of me felt different. Like a sudden momentum shift during a championship scrumble. Something indescribable in the air — and coursing through my body.
The next thing I knew, it was like my mind’s eye sat back in a recliner to watch the scene unfold as if in a movie. My body went to work, whirling, kicking, tumbling, dodging, spinning, fanning, all while I popped mental popcorn and my eyes soaked up the visuals like hemostatic gauze for action flicks. Through my own eyes, I watched myself become the invisible blade of confident power that slices through evil like a hot katana through the cotton candy. I embladed the confident skill that could only be obtained by becoming a living, breathing fan capable of generating truly renewable energy and devastating offensive power.
A Free-of-Charge Favor Call at the Free-For-All Carnival
Finally, it was over. I blinked and was no longer looking at myself, and I saw through my own eyes again. I didn’t really know how to process what I saw. My bodyblade had sliced through the Fanboys and diced up their blasphemous Bart masks, leaving behind only severed limbs and shredded clothing and yellow rubber strips strewn around the ground. I thought it looked like dinosaur vomit, then kicked myself for thinking something so thoughtless at a time like that.
They’d dishonored themselves. Dishonored O Jeito Do Fã. Dishonored Bart Simpson. They dishonored me. They broke omertà. They were rabid rats that needed to be put down. I did the City a favor. Free of charge, no less. And I don’t come cheap.
But most importantly, the hero won.
How do you know when you’re in the presence of a hero truly endowed with unsurpassed strength and ability and grit and heart and zeal? When you get those gut flutters from watching a turbocharged athlete’s afterburners in action, like the clinic I presented against those dishonored, disloyal, and disgusting Fanboys. After all, isn’t that what the public looks for in a hero? A person who not only never quits but who gets turbocharged when they’re told they never will. I just hoped my combate de hélice master, Alberto Santos Dumont IV, would finally be proud. You better bet on that!