Joy was in the clouds again. He had used the gift given to him so long ago and now he stood in this world that existed beyond human perception.

  Directly to his left was a gibbering fool who was trying to attack Joy with every dirty trick in the book, and some that even the malicious authors of said book weren’t willing to put in.

  Ramses had not been pleased to find himself brought into the penthouse of a god and was even less pleased to find out that violence was not allowed in this realm. Certain controlled acts of violence were, but nothing like the wanton rampage that seemed to be going on.

  Invisible barriers kept being put in the way between Ramses’ fists and Joy’s body. The barrier wouldn’t harm the person attacking, so Ramses had not stopped fighting since he had arrived. He used every body part of this mysterious woman and every part of his own body to get at Joy, yet nothing was able to get through the penthouse’s defense protocols.

  Joy sighed as he willed an armchair into existence. The room itself was vaguely different every time he used it, and he enjoyed seeing the minute differences every time.

  The walls were covered in elaborate tapestries in varying shades of red and gold. They depicted scenes from Joy’s own life. Much of it would be boring to the random viewer, yet Joy relished looking back on the simpler times in his life. When he felt at peace.

  There were many scenes of Joy as a child just spending time with his parents. His mother was baking cookies for him in one. In another there was the first and only time he had tried to help his father in the fields. It was truly nostalgic.

  Joy couldn’t will a cup of tea into existence at this moment. The main stipulation of this penthouse was that anything could be created, but it needed to be in service towards some sort of game or competition. The chair had just been a freebie. Tea apparently was asking for too much though. He would have to challenge Ramses to some sort of game to get a nice cup of tea.

  Ramses was starting to run out of steam. He had used every possible physical attack, and he had started moving on towards emotional damage. He had peed directly towards Joy, but the room magically whisked the stream away. He was now shouting insults about Joy’s manhood and general propriety towards unattractive members of each sex.

  Honestly, Joy was excited to see where this tirade would go next.

  But Ramses’ voice was getting hoarse, and he was starting to sway in place. He struggled to move or speak as he crashed to the floor, resigned to his fate.

  “Would you like to hear the rules of this place?” Joy asked tentatively, hoping that his question wouldn’t set the other man off again.

  Ramses didn’t speak, just lightly shifted his head. Joy took that as an implicit yes. He was making progress.

  Joy then explained the basic rules of this space. The two of them would be moving at an increased flow of time while competing for everything. The room could provide anything the two of them desired it just had to be in service of some sort of game. And to leave the room Ramses had to challenge Joy to some sort of game where they both bet equal things of value.

  Ramses was silent for a long time as he digested the information. He thought and thought about everything he had heard and every possible way he could beat Joy. Ramses had not lived a life of leisure; he was not familiar with all these games, so he felt at a slight disadvantage. Was there a game he could beat Joy at?

  A grimace flashed upon his face as he faced Joy.

  “I challenge you to a game of ‘who knows the life of Clara better.’ I want you to wager my freedom. What can I offer of equal value.”

  Joy was not quite sure what to make of this offer. The game seemed incredibly weighed in Ramses’ direction. Joy assumed that this Clara was the girl that Ramses had fallen in love with as a child and that led to the great tragedy that Joy had heard from Luna.

  Normally people at least tried to pretend that the games they would play against Joy were fair.

  “My terms are that in exchange for your freedom I want you to wager letting me win our match in the tournament. And I have one stipulation.” Joy paused as he knew what he had to do. “I want the room to come up with the questions, not you.”

  Ramses nodded vehemently; the pact was sealed. Ramses was beyond confident that he knew more about Clara. So, he had a cocky grin on his face as the room started shifting around the two of them, preparing them for the battle that was to come.

  Two desks grew out of the ground. They started as little sprouts then slowly grew until they were full sized desks that the two men could use.

  From behind Ramses and Joy, a man in a suit and tie appeared dragging two chairs. They made an awful racket against the ground as he walked, but he had an imposing presence.

  His suit and tie were charcoal grey. His eyes were charcoal grey. His hair was charcoal grey. His skin was charcoal grey. The man was completely one tone, and he oozed efficiency.

  This was not the sort of man who you played games against.

  The man placed the two chairs next to the matching desks that had grown out of the ground and walked to a podium that had not been there before this very moment. He made a sharp turn and faced both Ramses and Joy while pulling out a sheaf of paper from his jacket pocket.

  “Pick up your papers at your own leisure, gentlemen.” He barely pronounced the word gentlemen, it just slipped off his tongue like water off a duck’s back.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “This test will be administered orally. I will pose a question for you both, then the two of you will write out your answer to said question on the paper. Please number the questions as they come along, it is poor form to be anything other than organized.”

  Joy slowly walked to the front podium and picked up a single sheet of paper as well as a pencil. He licked the tip of his pencil because he had seen one of those scholarly folks do it once and he wanted to seem intelligent.

  The charcoal man and gestured for Joy to sit with one hand while gesturing for Ramses to get his papers with the other.

  Although he had said, ‘at your leisure,’ he obviously didn’t mean it.

  Joy and Ramses both made themselves comfortable at their tables and prepared for the test. Joy scratched his head with his pencil while Ramses had a smug grin on his face.

  The charcoal man cleared his throat and said, “we begin.”

  “Question one. What was Clara’s favorite color?” A sudden scratching of a pencil filled the room as Ramses immediately wrote down his answer. Joy looked around the room and settled his eyes on a beautiful shade of red on one of the tapestries on the wall. Who wouldn’t love that color?

  “Question two. What was Clara’s greatest regret in life?” Another quick scribbling from Ramses’ side and Joy wrote down the answer he would expect after hearing Luna’s tale of the tragedy of two lovers.

  “Question three. What was Clara’s favorite flower?” A slight pause from Ramses. He eventually wrote down his answer with confidence, but it wasn’t an immediate answer. Joy simply picked the first flower that came to mind: a sunflower.

  The questions continued in this way for a while. A question would be posed by the grey man, then Ramses would take a moment to answer. On the other hand, Joy would simply pick a random answer. He didn’t know this lady at all, how could anyone expect him to know these things about her?

  “Question forty-seven. If Clara had not died, what would her life have looked like?” Ramses didn’t move. The customary pauses before scratching down an answer were broken. He sat and stared at the paper, trying to come up with an answer.

  Joy simply wrote, ‘she would have eventually moved on past the boy she was obsessed with. Then she would have lived a happy and enjoyable life in her own way.’

  The grey man coughed at Ramses, trying to get him to speed up. So, Ramses rushed an answer out, without worrying too much about it.

  “Question forty-eight. If Clara saw a small man getting beaten down by several other men, would she help?”

  Again, Ramses didn’t have the answer. He was floundering, and something inside of him was screaming.

  The test continued in this fashion for quite a while. Ramses’ pauses got longer and longer as he stopped knowing the answers. Joy’s style never changed. He continued to put random things down in hopes that maybe a few of them would be correct.

  Finally, the end was there, and the misery of the test was ending.

  “Question one hundred. This one isn’t a question, more of a demand from your teacher. Describe the way Clara looked in exacting detail.” The grey man smirked a little at this one. He obviously found the fact that the final question was not even a question very entertaining. Joy was inclined to agree and muffled a giggle. Ramses didn’t even notice he was trying to focus so hard.

  Joy started to doodle on the paper. He figured that with the open-ended nature of the question, that the grey man couldn’t dock him points for drawing the person he imagined. Also, he didn’t know this lady, so there was no way for him to describe the way she looked accurately.

  Ramses stared at the blank page. Then he started writing everything he could remember about Clara. The way that her fingernails were always dirty, as if she had freshly come from planting something new. The way that her nails were always perfectly manicured and cleaned to perfection. The way her skin was tanned from the long hours she spent in the sun. The way that her skin was the color of the moon glowing on a perfect night.

  His head was splitting in two.

  He couldn’t see her.

  The images of Clara that Ramses had built in his head started to collide and patchwork monsters flashed beneath his eyelids. But still, he could not remember what Clara truly looked like.

  The test was over, and Ramses was sitting at his desk. He was pensive. Maybe he should talk to his therapist about these feelings that he was having. Why could he not remember Clara in detail anymore?

  The grey man picked up their tests and started grading them. He had a red pen that he viciously slashed through the answers that were incorrect with no small amount of glee on his face.

  Joy lounged while Ramses contemplated.

  Finally, the papers were graded, and the grey man smiled at the two men, both lost in their respective worlds.

  “I have the results. With a poor score of fifty-two out of one hundred, Joy comes in second place.” Joy nodded to himself and was quite pleased. Maybe it wasn’t a passing grade, but he didn’t even know this lady.

  “And the winner, by a single point, is Ramses. With a whopping fifty-three out of one hundred.” The sarcasm oozed off the grey man’s tongue as he grinned evilly at Ramses.

  The world started folding in on itself. The game had been played, and thus Ramses was released from his imprisonment above the clouds.

  But he didn’t even notice.

  Joy watched as the two of them reappeared on the arena floor in a puff of golden light. The crowd was booing as they appeared, but it quickly changed to cheers as they saw the two men reappear. The time dilation meant that they had only been gone a few moments from the crowd’s perspective.

  But Ramses was just sitting on the sandy floor of the arena, unwilling to lift his gaze from the floor in front of him.

  “How could I barely know more about her than… than you.” Ramses’ voice was filled with pain. He was suffering from the knowledge that he had not trounced Joy in this competition of his own devising.

  Joy paused for a moment before sitting down next to Ramses. “It’s because you never knew her in life. You never loved her in life. You have fallen in love with the image of Clara, not Clara herself.”

  There was a tight silence in the air and Joy was worried. It felt wrong to state to Ramses what he was feeling. But it was so clear to Joy. This was a man that was self-flagellating himself with a love that never was and never could be. He badly wanted to be in love with Clara to bring justice to her memory; but justice was not love.

  “I love Clara.” A few small tears dripped down off Ramses’ nose. He was shaking next to Joy, unable to contain the overwhelming emotions that slipped out of him.

  Joy could feel the air shimmering around the two of them. Ramses was trying to use his gift to bring a version of Clara into the world. To use his love to bring a piece of her to life. But it wasn’t enough.

  “No, you worship her. That is not love, my friend.” Joy slipped an arm around Ramses’ shoulder, trying to console someone who had just had their world rocked. Joy didn’t know that this would happen because of the games they had played in the world above the clouds, but he deeply regretted it. This was a broken man now.

  “I love her. I love her. I love her. I love her. I love her. I love her.” Ramses started muttering to himself and rocking back and forth in full view of the audience who so dearly wanted to watch this.

  People with certain gifts made their livings by going to far off towns and projecting the events of the knight tournament to the townsfolk. And all those people from the little towns crowded around these people with projecting gifts. And everyone in the arena leaned forward. It was as if the entire world took a breath in to watch Ramses break.

  Joy slowly turned to the crowd and simply stated, “I think I have won.” Then he turned and started to leave the arena.

  There were no cheers for Joy.

  No one celebrated his victory.