Chapter 2 — Motive
And thus begins Chapter Two.
Now, children.
Mith arrived.
No thunder.
No splitting sky.
No celestial choir announcing:
THE BROTHER HAS RETURNED.
Just
doorbell.
The council pauses.
Refreshingly normal.
Yes.
I opened the door.
Mith.
There.
And immediately
hug.
Tight.
Children.
There exists a peculiar belief subscribed to by a surprising number of men.
Men strong.
Men stoic.
Men no cry.
Men greet closest friend after months apart with one nod and perhaps a shoulder slap.
Nuo?
No.
Never.
Past Nuo?
No.
Present Nuo?
Still no.
Future Nuo?
Unless some horrifying software update occurs
also no.
Children.
If I love you,
I hug you.
Simple.
And there is a tactical advantage.
If you hug someone tightly enough,
they have only two options.
One:
hug back.
Two:
stand there like a confused lamppost while Nuo continues hugging them.
Most humans choose one.
The council considers.
Checkmate.
Exactly.
So I hugged Mith.
Mith hugged back.
Tight.
No awkward masculinity.
No:
Bro, enough.
No.
Just
brother.
There.
Good.
Then eventually
release.
Now.
You might assume Mith fulfilled the usual best friend role.
You know the dynamic.
Nuo
chaos.
Friend
order.
Nuo
poor decision.
Friend
“Maybe don’t.”
Nuo
wanders into fire.
Friend
owns extinguisher.
Children.
That structure has existed.
Hex certainly occupied parts of it.
Social Interaction Department.
Logistics.
Nuo Management.
Cow Milking Division.
A broad portfolio.
So perhaps Mith was simply the next competent adult assigned to supervise me.
Negative.
The council becomes worried.
Very.
This was not one chaos creature
and one handler.
This was
two chaos creatures.
Different builds.
Same party.
By this point in Manipal,
Dee Tee was not some mysterious new environment.
Children.
I knew Dee Tee.
I knew the rhythm.
Go out.
Drink.
Talk.
Flirt.
Smoke perhaps.
See where the night goes.
Try to meet people.
And yes
young Nuo often hoped one of those mutually interested encounters became bonk.
To Story Nuo,
Dee Tee had become a way of life.
A sacred little cycle.
Not new.
Not intimidating.
Routine.
And Mith?
Mith had arrived with one explicit ambition.
Experience it.
Children.
The Manipal Lifestyle.
Three day free trial.
No enrollment fee.
No orientation.
No course materials.
Just:
Follow Nuo.
Try not to get arrested.
Do not make prolonged eye contact with the bouncer.
The council looks up.
Why the bouncer?
Children.
Some wisdom is experiential.
Moving on.
So Mith arrived.
Hug complete.
Mission established.
Then
time.
Roughly four in the evening.
The council checks Dee Tee operating conditions.
Peak chaos?
After eight.
Exactly.
Which gave us
four hours.
Now.
Mith was visiting a famous university town.
A place with restaurants.
Campuses.
Nearby beaches.
Viewpoints.
Temples.
Cafes.
Entire ecosystems of student culture.
One might reasonably ask:
What did you show him?
Children.
Dota.
Silence.
And weed.
The council sighs.
Of course.
We smoked.
Opened laptops.
Dota.
Because sometimes sightseeing is just what other people call not gaming.
The council refuses this definition.
Fine.
But Mith loved Dota too.
Very important.
This was not me trapping a guest in a room while I ignored him for four hours.
No.
Children.
He was in it.
Queue.
Game.
Smoke.
Game.
Smoke.
The Chennai itinerary
returned.
But upgraded.
The council looks interested.
How?
Quality.
Supply.
Company.
Children.
Chennai had been:
low tier weed.
scarcity.
resource management collapse.
national currency crisis.
cow.
This?
Manipal.
Better pot.
Plenty.
No demonetisation.
No rationing constitution required.
Luxury.
The council checks classification.
Luxury Pro Max.
Exactly.
Smoke.
Dota.
Repeat.
No need to count bong shots.
No need to design ridiculous reward systems where kills,
deaths,
and existence itself all trigger consumption.
There was enough.
Children.
Abundance is wonderful for preventing cow related side quests.
The council agrees.
And during those hours,
Mith slipped naturally into the role once occupied by Hex.
Not identically.
People are not interchangeable.
Important.
But functionally?
Children.
There were similarities.
Best friend.
Dota addict.
Person comfortable with Nuo nonsense.
Someone who could exist beside me for hours
without requiring us to perform friendship.
And yes
I sometimes joke that I replaced one Dota best friend with another
the way one replaces a phone after the old model reaches end of support.
The council looks uncomfortable.
A little cruel.
Children.
It’s a joke.
Hex was a human being I loved.
Life drifted.
That mattered.
Mith did not erase him.
But the structural similarity was funny enough that even Present Nuo cannot ignore it.
Same category.
New year’s model.
The council opens comparison table.
HEX:
Best friend.
Dota.
Competence.
Nuo Management.
MITH:
Best friend.
Dota.
Competence.
Nuo Management.
Additional features?
Ah.
Yes.
Children.
Mith came with upgrades.
Feature One:
Strength.
This man was
large.
Gymrat.
Strong.
The kind of person whose shoulders imply he may occasionally move furniture recreationally.
The council asks for exact measurements.
Archive unavailable.
Good.
No fabrication.
But broad classification?
Hulking monstrosity.
With the personality of
soft baked bread.
The council pauses.
Poetry.
Yes.
Children.
Imagine a man built like he could throw Nuo through a wall
who instead radiates:
You okay bro?
Beautiful.
Terrifying shell.
Warm interior.
Like if a tank developed empathy.
The council approves.
Feature Two?
Legal Council.
Pause.
Was Mith a lawyer?
Children.
Please.
No.
This man was approximately as gainfully employed as I was.
Which is to say
career status:
loading.
But his father?
Police officer.
And years of proximity to law enforcement had apparently given Mith a peculiar practical literacy.
Not:
constitutional scholar.
Not:
licensed attorney.
But enough familiarity to distinguish
bad idea
from
bad idea that becomes paperwork.
The council leans forward.
Useful.
Extremely.
Mith understood the strange borderlands.
What might get ignored.
What might escalate.
When to shut up.
When to move.
When a joke stops being a joke because uniforms have arrived.
Children.
Legal Council.
I refuse to elaborate further.
The council attempts to open classified folder.
Denied.
Good.
Some Archive doors remain locked.
So our party composition was strong.
Nuo:
chaos.
Mith:
chaos with muscles and legal adjacent instincts.
The council becomes more concerned.
This does not sound safer.
No.
It sounds more capable.
There is a difference.
Children.
A weak idiot encounters consequences quickly.
A strong idiot with procedural awareness can reach consequences that live farther away.
The council writes this down ominously.
But for now?
Nothing dramatic.
Just
Dota.
We smoked.
Played.
Won some.
Lost some.
Argued over nonsense.
Probably insulted one another’s decisions.
The exact matches do not matter.
You have already survived one Dota marathon in Chennai.
I will not make you learn drafting strategy now.
Children.
Mercy.
Four hours passed quickly.
Of course they did.
Dota eats time.
Weed removes the receipts.
The council checks clock.
Eight ish.
Yes.
The window had opened.
Dee Tee.
Children.
The real itinerary.
The free trial was leaving tutorial mode.
Laptops closed.
Or at minimum,
games ended.
We got ready.
How?
Probably with all the elegance of two men whose evening objective had been designed by libido and poor foresight.
But ready enough.
The council checks Story Nuo.
Excited?
Yes.
Mith?
Also.
Because this was what he came for.
Not Manipal sightseeing.
Not academic nostalgia.
Not:
Show me your university library.
Children.
He wanted Nuo’s Manipal.
The pubs.
The night.
The ridiculous possibilities.
The little ecosystem where young Nuo had spent too much time pretending he was a Casanova
when his actual strategy frequently consisted of:
Stand near attractive person.
Say something stupid.
Hope personality does rest.
The council nods.
Manipal Authentic Experience.
Exactly.
And Dee Tee waited.
Now.
Children.
There is something amusing about reconstructing this beginning knowing what comes later.
Because at that moment?
The night felt controlled.
Familiar.
Almost routine.
Mith visiting.
Smoke.
Dota.
Pub.
No warning.
No bad omen.
No strange phone call.
No mysterious person saying:
Hop on.
Just two friends getting ready to go out.
The kind of evening that has happened millions of times across college towns.
Nothing special.
Nothing sacred.
Nothing that screamed:
ARCHIVE THIS.
Story Nuo did not know this was a Wandering.
Again
the word didn’t exist.
He knew only:
Mith is here.
Dee Tee next.
Tonight should be fun.
The council looks ahead.
And was it?
Children.
That question requires nuance.
Because this was about to become what I would later classify as
an absolute fucking shit show.
Pause.
The council sits up.
Ah.
Yes.
Not disaster necessarily.
Not tragedy.
Just
shit show.
The kind where one little event pushes another.
Then another.
Then another.
A domino chain assembled entirely from bad judgement,
chance,
and the fact that two idiots had decided the evening needed no adult supervision.
The council checks Mith.
But he is Legal Council.
Exactly.
Which made us feel supervised.
A dangerous illusion.
Children.
Competence in one domain does not make you God.
But young Nuo often treated any competent friend as a transferable life license.
Hex knows buses?
Excellent.
Hex knows all reality.
Mith understands cops?
Excellent.
We may now commit to existence with reduced caution.
The council bangs the table.
No.
Present Nuo agrees.
Story Nuo?
Onwards.
And so
four hours after Mith arrived,
the free trial advanced.
Tutorial complete.
Dota closed.
Weed smoked.
Energy high.
Two friends ready.
Dee Tee ahead.
Manipal night beginning.
The council opens the event log.
MITH:
Present.
NUO:
Present.
POT:
High quality.
SUPPLY:
Abundant.
DOTA:
Completed for now.
LEGAL COUNCIL:
On staff.
MUSCLE:
Also on staff.
COMMON SENSE:
Shared custody.
DEE TEE:
Awaiting.
OBJECTIVE:
Enjoy Manipal nightlife.
POTENTIAL SECONDARY OBJECTIVE:
Mutually interested company.
CHANCES OF AN UNEVENTFUL NIGHT:
The council looks at Present Nuo.
Don’t.
Correct.
No statistics from hindsight.
We let the night earn itself.
But children
I remember the feeling before we left.
That ease.
The confidence of familiarity.
The belief that I knew how Dee Tee nights worked.
I had done this before.
Many times.
Mith was here.
I knew the city.
I knew the pub.
What could possibly
The council throws something at me.
Fine.
We do not complete that sentence.
It is cursed.
So we left.
From room.
Toward Dee Tee.
No pilgrimage.
No mystery.
Just Manipal streets
and two friends heading into a familiar pub
with very ordinary intentions
and absolutely no understanding
that the first domino was already waiting.
Children.
Sometimes a Wandering begins when you board a train.
Sometimes when you get lost.
Sometimes when a stranger calls.
And sometimes
you already live there.
You already know the roads.
You already know the pub.
You already know the routine.
The Wandering begins anyway.
Because familiarity does not protect you from story.
The council nods.
And this one?
Story had teeth.
But not yet.
For now
Dee Tee.
The doors ahead.
Music somewhere beyond.
Mith beside me.
Nuo ready.
Children.
The three day free trial had officially begun.
And the first domino
was about to fall.
Thus concludes Chapter Two.
The Doorbell.
The Tight Hug.
The Rejection Of Emotionless Masculinity.
The Checkmate Hug Strategy.
The Failure Of The Chaos And Order Best Friend Formula.
The Manipal Lifestyle Free Trial.
The Four Hour Window.
The Decision To Show Mith Absolutely None Of Manipal’s Culture.
Weed.
Dota.
The Replacement Phone Best Friend Joke.
Hex.
Mith.
The Hulking Monstrosity With Baked Bread Energy.
Legal Council.
The Police Officer Father.
The Refusal To Elaborate.
The Luxury Pro Max Two Item Itinerary.
The Clock Reaching Dee Tee Hours.
The End Of Tutorial Mode.
And
The Walk Toward The Pub.
Children.
Mith had come to experience Nuo’s Manipal.
I was delighted to provide the tour.
Unfortunately,
Nuo’s Manipal did not believe in refunds.
And somewhere inside Dee Tee,
the first domino waited.
