The weather was clear, and the clouds naturally parted on the Golden Stadium of St. Karruda, where the legendary trickster Jester was hosting his performance.
"Remember—don't blink, else you won't even realize what just happened." he whispered with his microphone, fully confident in his near-superhuman performance.
With a flick of his finger, he threw his signature playing cards, which fit perfectly in a tiny hole on the pockets of a wealthy patron dozens of seats away to start his monthly performance. Then with a smooth wave of his sleeve, he made his black dice vanish and reappear on another wealthy patron's limited-edition gucci bag like magic.
Again and again, he astonished the entire stadium alone with his monstrous, almost inhuman manipulation of small objects such as playing cards, dice, and chips, each trick, shuffle, and flourish a testament to his extremely precise and ultra-fast mind.
"The Joker smiled while looking at me!!"
"Hahaha, selling my wife's car was definitely worth the price! Seeing such a performance in action, i wouldn't regret doing such a thing countless lifetimes over!"
"Uwaaa! Please be my girlfriend!! Your skilled hands would be a waste with only those tricks!!"
"Show us another impossible trick!"
The crowd roared from the red velvet seats of the sold-out theater, their faces illuminated by the golden stage lights as he sent cards cascading through the air like a waterfall. His practiced smile was always embedded in his face.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" he shouted in the mic, watching the front-row patrons lean forward in anticipation, champagne flutes clutched in manicured hands.
"What everyone is about to witness defies logic itself!" His tone was bright, amplified by the microphone, yet the words somehow tasted stale in his mouth.
A performance every month for three years in this gilded, repetitive cage had hollowed him out, leaving only contemplation of life where expectation once lived. As the spectators gasped on cue, he found himself scanning the exit signs, wondering what experiencing real danger might feel like.
The crowd roared from the red velvet seats of the sold-out theater, champagne flutes raised, faces glowing under the golden stage lights as cards cascaded from his fingers like waterfalls. And yet, he felt none of the thrill they believed they were witnessing. Every trick, every flourish, was a game he had already mastered in mind long before it happened.
After a long while, amidst the reluctant waves of the massive crowd, his performance was over, and another performance was set to come in the stadium.
An experienced stagehand stepped in to take his microphone and announce the next performer. Leaning close to take the mic, he asked a question that had lingered in his mind for quite a long time—
"Hey man, you ever messed up yet?"
"Still waiting to." He answered with an empty voice as he handed the microphone.
He slipped out through a service door beneath the stage just at the split-second when all the surrounding people wasn't glancing, past the dancers and grumbling stagehands, his mask stuffed into his waist. Outside, the chill was biting. He relished the mute hostility of the night: the jeering wind, the halo of sodium lamps, the garbage slicked in black puddles.
His home was a studio in the dead part of the city, a failed attempt at luxury converted hastily from a bankrupt casino. The only signs of previous decadence were the stubborn gold trim on the elevator buttons and the persistent smell of cheap cigar. Jester's own unit was up eleven floors, a code-locked door, the hallway lined with bland origami sculptures he'd folded from junk mail and salon flyers.
He peeled off his coat and kicked his shoes into the corner. The room was almost empty: a bed with no headboard, a glass table with a single burnt-out lamp, a kitchenette stocked with instant food and protein bars.
He then went through the motions. He microwaved water for instant noodles. After a while, he washed his face, staring at himself in the mirror, as if mocking himself for ever having expectations in this boring cage called earth.
He didn't perform shows for money, but for the thrill of performing. However, in the end, he never found what he was actually seeking.
He sprawled on the bed, played a round of poker on his phone against AI opponents, and lost on purpose. Again and again the "Impossible Mode AI" proved to be stupidly predictable for him. He switched to chess and attempted Scholar's Mate with black, stifling a yawn. After four moves, the phone's AI offered a draw. He closed the app, flipped the phone onto the glass table, and watched it bounce once, twice, then settle.
He thumbed through his bookshelf—a single shelf, really, a warped plank with a half dozen battered books scavenged from the apartment complex's free bin.
Next, he watched a documentary on infamous con-men. Their faces glowed grainy on his wall projector; they all looked haunted, not by guilt but by their lack of worthy opponents. He scrubbed through their stories in fast-forward, scoffing at the lazy tricks.
By ten he'd casually feorganized his entire apartment, just to prove how little time it would take: two minutes to refold all his origami into perfect symmetry, one to rearrange the kitchen cabinets, thirty seconds to swap his bedspread from black to grey. With every act of idle perfection he felt the sting of pointlessness sharpen. He flopped onto the bed, and once again sank into his thoughts. Staring at the ceiling, he thought, "If every answer comes first, what's left to ask?""
Jester's tricks had not been forged by talent alone, but by obsession sharpened over countless empty hours. His calculations were almost instantaneous, thoughts firing faster than the speed of sound, his body responding before danger could fully exist. Every muscle obeyed him with precision, capable of halting, twisting, or accelerating in fractions of a second, as if his body wasn't flesh—a testament to the cruel training he inflicted on himself.
However, this very training he did was now the root cause of his dilemma, a bitter irony that left him paralyzed between gratitude and resentment.
Numbers, angles, and probabilities unraveled themselves in his mind the moment he observed them, calculations blooming and resolving with minimal effort. His intelligence was not academic but built for the jungle, one that allowed him to predict people and possible outcomes several moves ahead. In a world with limited possibilities, he already knew the answer before it started.
Time and time again, the cage called earth proved it was no longer possible of containing a sleeping dragon like him. Fear never surfaced, panic wasn't in his dictionary, and hesitation had long since been ejected out of him in a world where he could predict every next move like a chess grandmaster seeing twenty steps ahead.
He pictured himself leaping from a building, not in suicidal despair but in curiosity, just to see what the updraft would do to his body. Would he somersault? Spiral? Or simply plummet and end his emotionless life, cards scattering from his sleeves, caught in the cyclone of a man too tired to do anything honestly.
But suddenly, when the clock struck exactly 12:00 AM – a small red die out of nowhere rolled in his open front door, and started glowing until the entire room was stained crimson!
At this moment!
Jester's thoughts, repeatedly calculating possibilities in his head, froze for the first time since he was born!