Blog

Step Into The Ring

It’s no secret that Edmund considers himself an athlete, and particularly a fighter. There’s no combat sport that he wouldn’t try at least once, to learn what he could from it. Boxing is a tradition that goes back centuries, longer than the plane of Crossroads has existed. Naturally, Edmund was acquainted, not just with the history of the sport, but with its practice.

He told his Teach one day, off-handedly, that he would love to try his hand at a boxing tournament. And to his surprise, Enigma told him that he had been keeping tabs on a underground boxing association that had started to spread across Crossroads. In fact, an old friend of his had been making a name for himself as a competitor, and he wouldn’t mind referring Edmund over.

To his surprise, the “old friend” had turned out to be a tiger like him, except with sapphire-blue fur and eyes of hazel. Introducing himself, Feng told the young competitor that while Enigma is a solid judge of character, there’s no substitute for a good sparring match when gauging a fighter.

So it was that they ended up in the ring. It’s not clear who ultimately won their fight, but either way Feng walked away happy enough to vouch for Edmund’s entry into the next tournament.

I’d been following Ehud Kurzweil‘s art for a while, and so had my friend Feng the Blue. We had been discussing possible co-commission ideas, and one of them was to have our characters step into the ring, since both of them are martial artists. With everything aligned, we went halfsies on it, and the results were excellent.

Naturally, such serendipity warranted a bit of storytelling to go with it. As a rule, if one of my characters is fighting one of my friend’s characters, I don’t like to have definitive winners. It’s better to let the result be ambiguous so that both of them get a chance to shine (unless we agree there’s an obvious winner).