You are a flailer, one of the few reckless fools to seriously take and wield a flail in battle in the history of your offshoot of the human species. Of those few, you are one of the few to survive, and of those few, of those few, you are one of the few to persist in a lifetime of flailing. You are one of the few, of the few, of the few to turn the flail into a serious weapon and fight with it for a living in the many wars of your homeworld. You have spent many years in combat and your mastery has been noticed. Shortly after you realized you are likely the foremost flailer of the land, you were approached by a stranger in an ornate mask.
His spoken tongue was foreign to you but your brain made sense of it. There is a vast empire beyond your world spanning many realms and worlds. You don't care because this has nothing to do with the flail but the stranger insists so you keep listening. More importantly, this empire has a thriving arena culture and the numberless crowds and their numberless riches crave novelty. Swordsmasters are abundant, but flailers who can wield a flail to fight are rare, and flailers of your skill are once in a millennia for most worlds. Because you are rare, you are valuable, and this masked stranger introduces himself as Yeb, an exotic commodities merchant very eager to add you to his stable of gladiators and patron your skill. Because this land finds your passion for the flail laughable or contemptible, you agree, to prove the flail's superiority in combat once and for all. Yeb is pleased by your acceptance and shakes your hand. Both of you vanish.
You feel a sense of blind weightlessness that lasts for an instant. Unlike most first-time teleporters, you don't feel any nausea. As a flailer, your sense of balance is supreme. You stand in a modest, although completely green and weirdly curved, office room and Yeb takes off his cloak. Just now, you notice that Yeb is actually a many-limbed insectoid horror with numerous grasping tongues flicking out of a maze of serrated, salivating mandibles where his face should be. Despite this being the first nonhuman you've ever seen, you don't care. Any being that appreciates the beauty of the flail is a friend of yours. Yeb notices your stoicism and speaks again. He's impressed. Most first-timers have a harder time.
