BIG EATER PT 1

BIG EATER (eventually there will be a cover page here) <div class="foot"> > [[Prologue]] </div>

(append:?SideBar)[ [[Main Title]] [[Cast]] [[Prologue]] [[Chapter 1 Pt I]] ]

Paulo Silva (Sifu Paul) -Big Eater Aditi Sunku - ??? Author - DarthContusion

Boxing is a great and terrible sport. Many people were well aware of both of these properties, but among the most aware was a man named Paulo Silva. Mr. Silva was, at 26, the greatest lightweight boxer in the entire world. That's how it felt to him at the time, anyway, and not many folks would have argued against that premise and won. Mr. Silva's large and well documented family tree was well populated by afficionados of fighting sports. It was in his blood that he would see some amount of success in the ring. That was the expectation, that was the great weight upon Mr. Silva's shoulders. It was, at the time, a great weight that he carried well. A great weight that he barely felt. Well, he felt it a little bit. Most of his kin were not exactly lightweights, but there wasn't really a lot of shame in being a lightweight. Only a little bit. A few days later, at 27, Mr. Silva would never again claim to be or feel like the greatest lightweight boxer in the world. A few days later, Mr. Silva would stop being able to see or feel with the right side of his face. <div class="foot"> [[Main Title]] <> [[Chapter 1 Pt I]] </div>

(align:"=><=")+(box:"X=")[Chapter 1: Musings on Sifu Paul] Years passed since that fateful match. Who knows how many. Mr. Silva would have had to cross reference the year on his ID with the year on the calendar just to be able to tell you his age. His influence in the culture had long since waned, and so had he. He woke up tired every day. He ate small breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. His small salary plus food stamps allowed him to get by, at least. No longer able to draw audiences, his distance from the other members of his prestigious bloodline grew longer and longer, and his shadow grew thinner. He wondered if some day the mop he wielded as a custodian would be as heavy to him as the big dumbbells sitting unlifted under his bed. At some point he'd gotten quite good at Tai Chi, and had a side gig assisting a local instructor giving lessons to children as "Sifu Paul." He loved those kids. It didn't feel like honest work. It felt like a lie he was repeating to these children, this stuff about tranquility and inner peace. And qi. Qi was such horseshit. Unlike ghosts. Ghosts were as real as God himself. That's how it felt to him, anyway. He knew that feelings could be deceiving, like, the feeling that you're going to keep winning forever. <div class="foot"> [[Prologue]] <> [[Chapter 1 Pt II]] </div>

It's easy to doubt the existence of ghosts if you can't see them, but Sifu Paul could see them pretty well, for a layman! He could even hear them! They didn't make much sense though. The only "ghost" that seemed to make sense to him, if you could call Him that, was Jesus Christ Himself. That's right, Jesus was always there for Paulo whenever he needed Him. He was kind of a strange Jesus, always suggesting that Paulo eat more or indulge his temper. "You should eat more, Paulo. Always eat more. To invigorate the soul and face what is yet to come." Thank you, Lord Jesus! Prudent and relevant advice! "THE BREAD IS MY BODY, PAULO!" THANK you, Jesus. Paulo did not eat more bread despite his Lord's advice. <div class="foot"> [[Chapter 1 Pt I]]<> [[Chapter 1 Pt III]] </div>

The place Paulo lived and worked in would eventually come to be known as "Kaiju Alley, USA." It was a shitty mid-sized former factory town in the southern United States whose primary sources of employment large chain superstores. In a perfect world, it would be an untouched desert eco-system, but in the real world some idiot in the 1800s managed to dig up enough precious metal deposits to cause people to settle there. Rent was cheap. It was a great place to settle into irrelevance. The people were frequently insanely religious, something Paulo liked to think he had in common with them. This was a lie he told himself so that he could function in their world without being paralyzed by fear. Numerous head injuries may or may not have resulted in a below-average processing speed on Paulo's part, but that didn't make him stupid: no way was he telling his pastor that he was seeing visions of Jesus. "You should keep it to yourself that I am watching over you personally," Jesus advised him. Thank you, Jesus! <div class="foot"> [[Chapter 1 Pt II]] <> [[Chapter 1 Pt IV]] </div>

So, as we were saying, even though it would eventually be Kaiju Alley, it wasn't, not quite yet. Sure there were a few Kaiju incidents here and there in the vicinity, but nothing out of proportion with the rest of the continental United States. In fact this specific town hadn't seen a single incident. The prediction of such incidents was still a young science, so no one really saw the warning signs quite yet, and the US KNF (Kaiju Neutralization Force) was slow to mobilize in such a sparsely populated part of the country, relatively, whereas big population centers in, say, Texas, which were seeing an incident every month at this point, may as well have been under martial law. These things didn't really weight on Paulo's mind any more than it weighed on anyone else's, but it's worth bringing up the historical context for what was about to happen. Which is to say, something without a whole lot of precedent at the time. <div class="foot"> [[Chapter 1 Pt III]] <> [[Chapter 1 Pt V]] </div>

Anyway, back to the subject of ghosts: Paulo usually could tell the difference between a ghost and a living person, in his estimation, and it came to him intuitively. This meant he would have a very hard time telling you what the difference was, just that he knew it. Maybe the result of some form of ESP, you might wonder. Jesus was different from ghosts though, Jesus may as well have been there in the flesh, according to every sense of, well, sense that Paulo could bring to bear on Him. Whatever name or label you or I would give to this... Jesus, He most likely wasn't the result of hallucination or delusion. I know that overlaps with macro-space do funny things to the human brain, but just do me a favor and keep that in mind. Ghosts couldn't be interacted with: they just went about their business. Jesus could. <div class="foot"> [[Chapter 1 Pt IV]] <> [[Chapter 1 Pt VI]] </div>

This fixation on Jesus leads us to this one kid, right? This one kid that showed up to Tai Chi class unprompted and uninvited. This 15 year old satanist looking motherfucker. Long black hair, inverted crucifix necklace, black shirt black pants... his name was Daniel and he was so perfectly evil looking, so utterly offensive to Paulo's Christian obsession-fueled sensibilities, Paulo could only offer a short prayer for deliverance every time Daniel entered his field of vision. Sifu Steve wasn't about to raise a stink over it because, well, he did show up with 40 bucks to pay for lessons, and that's good enough for Steve. Daniel was extremely polite and receptive to everything said in class, he even asked questions. They were all questions directed at Paulo. As a result, Paulo was a little more visibly non-plussed than Steve was. What was worse, what was //way// worse, was that this kid was absolutely fixated on Paulo. Just 100% dialed in on him. There was only one thing that could possibly be worse than that: Jesus wanted him to speak with the kid. "Oh Lord of Heaven and Earth, let this cup pass from my lips!" Paulo silently and desperately prayed. "No!" Jesus replied cheerfully. <div class="foot"> [[Chapter 1 Pt V]] <> </div>