Chapter 2: The Underground Tickle Academy
The Warrens didn’t so much begin as the world above simply dissolved around them. The crisp, riot-tinted air of the arena’s service corridor blurred into a damp, earthy coolness. The walls softened from dressed stone to packed earth, braced here and there with old timber. The glowing moss Elara had mentioned wasn’t just in sconces; it grew in wild, pulsing patches along the ceiling and walls, casting everything in a shifting, aquamarine light. The air smelled of wet soil, old mushrooms, and something else—a faint, sweet scent that reminded Anesan of childhood bubblegum.
“Stay close,” Elara murmured, her voice barely a whisper against the sudden, consuming quiet. “The paths twist. It’s easy to get lost, and not all the residents… appreciate visitors.”
The silence was relative. As they descended, other sounds emerged. The distant drip of water. The skitter of unseen small things. And, woven through it all, a soft, pervasive hum. It took Anesan a moment to place it: laughter. Not the raucous, crowd-fueled roar of the arena, but private, intimate giggles, echoing oddly from side tunnels and behind hanging reed mats that served as doors. It was the soundscape of a hive, busy and secretive.
Elara moved with a predator’s grace, every step silent. Anesan, in her cheap sneakers, felt like a lumbering troll. After what felt like an hour of winding descent, Elara stopped before a seemingly solid earthen wall. She pressed her palm against a specific, dark knot of wood. There was a faint click, and a section of the wall swung inward without a sound.
Light, warm and golden, spilled out, along with the sound of rapid, rhythmic tapping and a high-pitched, mechanical giggle.
The chamber was larger than Anesan expected. The walls were lined with the same padded mats she’d seen in the arena, but these were worn, stained with sweat and use. Strange contraptions hung from the ceiling: dangling straps, spinning wheels with feathery appendages, complex wooden frames with jointed arms. In the center of the room, a figure was a blur of motion.
It was a young man, barely five feet tall, with a wild shock of bright green hair tied back with a leather strap. He was barefoot, dressed in simple, patched trousers and a loose tunic. He danced around a human-sized straw dummy, his hands a flurry of pokes, jabs, and skittering touches. The dummy, rigged with some internal mechanism, jiggled and shook, emitting a repetitive, tinny “hee-hee-hee!” with each strike.
Zephyr Bumblefoot was completely absorbed, his tongue poking out between his teeth in concentration. He didn’t see them at first. He delivered a final, rapid series of jabs to the dummy’s sides, and it let out a last, long “haaaaaaa!” before going still. Only then did he step back, wiping his brow, and notice the newcomers.
His eyes—a vibrant amber—widened. They swept over Elara, then locked onto Anesan. A slow, wide grin spread across his face, revealing a slightly chipped front tooth.
“Well, slag me sideways,” he said, his voice lighter than she expected, tinged with a warm, whimsical accent. “The champion returns with a prize. And what a peculiar prize you are.”
He hopped over the limp dummy, circling Anesan with an appraising, almost scientific curiosity. He didn’t touch her, but his gaze felt tactile, like he was mapping her pressure points with his eyes. “Clothes from nowhere. Ink from a angry scribe. And the posture of someone guarding a vault.” He stopped in front of her, looking up. “You’re the one from the sands. The one who broke the arena.”
“I didn’t break anything,” Anesan said, crossing her arms. “It seemed pretty broken when we left.”
Zephyr’s grin didn’t falter. “Semantics. Elara yielded. Elara never yields. She saw something. Felt something.” He tapped his own temple. “Word travels fast down here. The whispers say you didn’t laugh. They say you… short-circuited.”
Anesan shot a glance at Elara, who was leaning against the doorway, watching silently. “That’s the term we used.”
“Fascinating,” Zephyr breathed. He scampered over to a cluttered workbench and rummaged around, coming back with a pair of objects. They looked like armored gloves, but delicate, made of supple, dark leather reinforced with thin, flexible strips of metal over the knuckles and the backs of the hands. The fingertips, however, were exposed.
“Here,” he said, tossing them to her.
Anesan caught them on reflex. The leather was warm, already worn soft. “What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Put them on,” Elara said from her post by the door. “Your first lesson.”
“Lesson in what? Underground knitting?”
“In how not to die the next time someone tries to touch you,” Zephyr chirped, hopping back onto the mats. “Or, more accurately, how to touch back. The game here isn’t about not getting tickled. That’s impossible. It’s about control. Endurance. Strategic surrender. You, my friend, have no game. You have a panic button.” He pointed a stubby finger directly at her midsection.
Anesan looked down at the gloves. They were finely made, practical. She thought of the riot, the blind, chaotic fear of those probing fingers. She thought of Elara’s precise, almost clinical analysis in the corridor. A live wire. Or a void. She slid her right hand into a glove. The fit was perfect, snug without restricting movement. The exposed fingertips felt strangely vulnerable.
“Okay,” she said, pulling on the left one. “So what’s the play?”
Zephyr clapped his hands together. “The play is: don’t let me touch you.” And he moved.
He was faster than Elara, but in a different way—less flowing, more erratic. He didn’t come straight at her; he zig-zagged, a green-haired hummingbird. His hands darted toward her ribs. Anesan flinched back, throwing up her gloved hands in a block. He wasn’t aiming for her ribs. It was a feint. His real target was the inside of her raised elbow.
His fingertips brushed the skin there.
A jolt, electric and sharp, but manageable. It was a tickle, sure, but one that sparked a reflexive giggle in her throat, not the paralyzing terror of the arena. She choked it back, stumbling away.
“Ha!” Zephyr crowed, dancing back. “See? Not a kill zone! A live zone! Different!”
Elara pushed off the wall. “You’re thinking like a victim, Anesan. You’re guarding. This isn’t a shield.” She held up her own bare hands. “It’s a weapon. And a tool. You don’t just block a strike. You redirect it. You use their momentum.”
For the next hour, it was a blur of motion, correction, and baffling philosophy. Zephyr would attack with dizzying speed, aiming for the “safe” zones—sides, waist, the back of the knees. Anesan’s instinct was to curl up, to protect. Elara and Zephyr drilled her out of it.
“Meet the hand!” Elara would command, guiding Anesan’s own gloved hand to intercept Zephyr’s, not to grab, but to deflect, to push the attacking limb past her body. “Control the space!”
“It’s a conversation!” Zephyr would squeal as he was deftly parried, his own wrist guided harmlessly away by Anesan’s forearm. “You’re not saying ‘no!’ You’re saying ‘try over here instead!’”
Anesan was sweating, her muscles aching from unfamiliar tensions. But she was learning. The panic that had frozen her in the arena was being channelled, slowly, into a hyper-awareness of the space around her, of the trajectories of Zephyr’s playful, relentless fingers.
Finally, breathing hard, she called a halt, holding up a gloved hand. “Okay. Time out. I need water and for someone to explain why any of this is necessary. It’s just… tickling.”
Zephyr’s playful smile faded. Elara’s expression grew solemn. They exchanged a look.
“Just tickling,” Zephyr repeated softly. He walked to the straw dummy and pressed a hidden button on its neck. It began to giggle again. He looked back at her. “Where you’re from, is a punch ‘just a punch’?”
“Well, no, it’s—”
“It’s a means of communication,” Elara interrupted, her voice low. “A assertion of power. A test of will. A release of tension. A show of affection. A tool of torture. It is the most basic language there is. Everyone understands it. Everyone speaks it, whether they want to or not.” She stepped closer. “Your reaction on the sands… it wasn’t speaking the language. It was screaming in a different tongue. That is dangerous. To the powers here, something they cannot understand is something they must control, or eliminate.”
Anesan slowly peeled off the gloves. The cool air on her sweaty hands was a relief. She looked at her own tattooed arms, then at the giggling dummy, at Zephyr’s earnest face, at Elara’s fierce, worried eyes. A secret part of her, the part she’d locked away since adolescence, thrummed with a bizarre, unwanted recognition. This world had taken her deepest, most private source of both shame and secret thrill and built a civilization on it.
And she was the illiterate one.
“So,” she said, her voice dry. “You’re telling me I need to learn grammar.”
Zephyr’s grin returned, wider than ever. “Bright one! Told you she had the spark, Elara!”
Elara didn’t smile. Her green eyes held Anesan’s. “I need to understand what happened to you. What you are. Because if the High Tickers find you before you can speak our language, they will make you scream yours until there’s nothing left. And I…” She glanced away, a rare flicker of uncertainty crossing her features. “I find I do not wish to hear that sound again.”
The dummy’s mechanical laughter sputtered and died. In the sudden quiet, the hum of the Warrens seeped back in, a chorus of unseen, private conversations happening all around them. Anesan looked at the gloves in her hand, then tossed them onto the workbench.
“Alright,” she said, nodding to the dummy. “Show me again. But this time, explain it like I’m debugging a very stupid, very handsy piece of code.”
Zephyr cackled, a genuine, infectious sound that filled the padded room. Elara finally allowed herself the ghost of a smile. The lesson began anew.
The lesson began anew, this time with purpose settling into Anesan’s bones. It felt less like play and more like mapping the architecture of a system. Zephyr attacked, his fingers aiming for her ribs, a rapid binary tap-tap-tap. Her gloved hand swiped down, not just blocking, but redirecting his wrist out and away, exploiting his forward momentum. His balance shifted.
“Good!” he yelped, recovering with a roll. “Now, see how you opened your own flank doing that?”
“Compartmentalize,” Anesan muttered, her mind converting the movement into code. She reset her stance. The giggles echoing from the Warrens outside weren’t just noise now; they were data packets, each one carrying information about intensity and duration.
Elara watched from the edge of the mats, her arms crossed. Her silence was a heavier presence than Zephyr’s constant commentary. Anesan felt those green eyes tracking every flinch, every controlled exhale. The "live wire" comment still echoed. She’d been wrong in the arena. Anesan hadn’t short-circuited. Not yet. They were trying to install a new operating system on top of a corrupted drive, and everyone was terrified of what a full system crash might look like.
“Alright, switch!” Zephyr called out, skittering to the sidelines. He grabbed a waterskin and took a long pull, wiping his mouth. “Your turn, master. Show her the poetry part. I’m all rhythm.”
Elara nodded. She shed her light leather jerkin, standing before Anesan in a simple sleeveless tunic. Her arms were corded with lean muscle, a map of old, faint silver scars. She held up her bare hands, fingers slightly curved. They weren’t weapons in this moment. They were instruments.
ELARA DEMONSTRATES. “The goal is not avoidance,” she began, her voice low and clear. “It is invitation and redirection. Watch.”
She didn’t launch an attack. She stepped forward, deliberate and slow. Her left hand floated toward Anesan’s side, an obvious, almost lazy arc. Anesan, primed by Zephyr’s frenzy, snapped her own hand up to parry. Before contact, Elara’s hand melted away, her right fingers already skimming a whisper-light pattern up the underside of Anesan’s raised arm.
The touch was a shock—not of pain, but of unbearable sensation. It bypassed her new training completely, a feather-light code she had no firewall against. A sharp, involuntary snort of laughter burst from Anesan’s nose. She twisted away, her face flushing hot.
“You were focused on the obvious threat,” Elara said, not pursuing. Her hands returned to a neutral position. “My first move was a decoy. A feint. My real attack was already in motion, targeting the space your defense created.”
“That’s dirty,” Anesan breathed, rubbing her arm where the ghost of the sensation still danced.
“It’s language,” Elara corrected, a faint, serious smile touching her lips. “I said a sentence. You heard only the first word.” She moved again. This time, her hands flowed in tandem, one high, one low. Anesan tried to track both, her brain overloading. Elara’s right fingertips grazed the sensitive hollow just above Anesan’s collarbone.
A choked giggle escaped Anesan’s throat. She slapped her own gloved hand over the spot, mortified.
“You see?” Elara stepped back. “Your own hands become my allies. You guard one place, you expose three others. The body is a conversation of vulnerabilities.”
“Mine’s a shouting match,” Anesan grumbled, dropping her hands. The vulnerability, the exposure, was worse than the physical sensation. It was the loss of control, the raw, reflexive response being pulled from her like a confession.
“Then we learn to whisper,” Elara said.“Again. Don’t block the feint. Read it. Let it come. And answer.”
They continued. The padded room grew warmer, the air thick with the scent of their effort and the earthy perfume of the Warrens. Elara’s demonstrations were a brutal, beautiful education. Anesan learned that a touch to the waist could be a question, a prolonged scribble at the ribs a demanding paragraph, a fleeting tap behind the knee a punctuation mark. She was failing, constantly. Laughter, real and unbidden, kept punching out of her in short, embarrassing bursts.
But she was also learning to answer. Not well, not yet. But she managed, once, to deflect Elara’s leading hand and use the opening to dart her own gloved fingers toward Elara’s side.
Elara didn’t just evade. She folded, her torso twisting with impossible fluidity, letting the attack pass harmlessly. As Anesan’s hand sailed by, Elara’s own fingers trailed up the exposed, tattooed skin of Anesan’s underarm.
The effect was catastrophic.
It wasn’t a tickle. It was a detonation. Every molecule of self-consciousness, every childhood memory of vicious playground pokes, every secret, shameful thrill she’d ever felt, roared to the surface at once. A sound ripped from her—a wild, strangled shriek that was equal parts agony and helpless, dizzying release. She crumpled to the mats, curling into a tight ball, arms clamped over her head, her whole body shaking. Not with laughter. With the sheer, overwhelming systemic shock of it.
The room fell silent. The only sound was Anesan’s ragged, muffled breathing.
Zephyr’s playful energy had vanished. He stood utterly still, his amber eyes wide.
Elara knelt slowly, a safe distance away. Her face was pale, her expression one of dawning, horrifying comprehension. She had found the vault. And she had just blown the door off its hinges.
“Anesan,” she said, her voice careful, soft. “Look at me.”
Anesan uncurled, just enough to peer over her own arm. Her eyes were wet, furious, humiliated.
“That is your void,” Elara whispered, the words hanging in the air. “That is the scream they want. That’s the power you contain.” She didn’t touch her. “And that is what we have to teach you to wield. Before they come to mine it from you.”
Footsteps, urgent and fast, echoed from the tunnel outside. A young gnome with soot-streaked cheeks appeared in the doorway, her eyes wide with alarm. “Zephyr! Sentries report a cordon topside. Registry Enforcers. They’re questioning everyone about a surface-world anomaly with arm ink.” Her gaze flicked to Anesan, then back to Zephyr. “They’re moving toward the Warren entrances.”