One Man Short / 三缺一
The disappearance of a friend drags the group down the rabbit hole of Fantoni organized crime.
Cobalt, Nightingale, Skyhawk, and Kaleidoscope were college students, a four-person majiang club, and also an inseparable group of friends.
As their friendship grew, Kaleidoscope and Cobalt grew into something more than friends. They started calling each other "Kally" and "Co," and would always snuggle around each other1.
But on the day Kaleidoscope formally confessed to Cobalt, he went missing. They looked for him, called the police, all in vain. The shreds of evidence they had suggested possibly an abduction: he had gotten himself tangled up in the messy labyrinths of the Fantoni underground.
Kaleidoscope's fate
What the other three friends didn't know was that Kaleidoscope had a gambler dad. He had gambled away all his family's money and resorted to taking out loans from loan sharks. When he suddenly died head-first onto the table, Kaleidoscope was glad to be rid of him, but the sharks didn't stop. They kidnapped him and forced him to work for a mafia operation until he earned enough to pay back his father's debt — which, accounting for interest, meant that he was stuck there for the rest of his life.
He made great care to hide from his former friends because he didn't want them to worry. He wanted them to think he was dead — because he might as well be — and just move on.
The friends' first steps
To find Kaleidoscope, Cobalt and her friends needed to find a way into the criminal world. But what can a trio of stupid college kids do? Quite a lot, in fact. You see, at that time the soul market in Fanton was up and rising; an extremely profitable trade with your major clients being powerful organized crime bosses. If they got into that, it could lead them closer to Kaleidoscope.
When the Sylvandian psychic and soul-extraction master Moonbeam traveled to Fanton, the friends took the chance to study the art of classic Sylvandian soul-extraction. Moonbeam was only willing to take one student, so Cobalt stepped up.
But at the end, when she had also learnt to extract souls, Moonbeam asked her to pay the price — with her body2. She took Cobalt's soul out, and fed it to another body, keeping Cobalt's original with her as she journeyed on. Cobalt returned to her friends in an unfamiliar body, not even knowing the original owner of it. To make matters worse, the body had spaghetti limbs and about a hundred chronic diseases. (Almost like a Qibli clone.)
With the skills all acquired, they set sail in the soul market, catching people, emptying their souls, selling the body to organ harvesters, all the likes. Thankfully, she didn't stay in that dumb body for long. Each time when it fell victim to her a body that seemed good — strong, healthy — she would get into that with the help of her friends. She was no longer stranger to body-hopping, though she stayed in her favorite one for a long while: one with big arching horns3.
When they finally found Kaleidoscope, would he recognize the woman with Co inside? Would she recognize the man Kally had become?
Cobalt's Ironheart mishap
Cobalt got into the body of Ironheart one day. See the events of Ironheart Assassinated.
Climax, I guess
Kaleidoscope's mafia ran into a wee bit of a problem, and needed a scapegoat to go to jail — and possibly face execution — for them. Who else, than their least-favorite slave, Kaleidoscope?
But somehow Cobalt found out and they, uh, showed up in court giving him an alibi or something? idk i havent thought that far
