The Weird Chess Tournament

“ALIZA! ALIZA!” The crowds cheered up on the left while the right ones were cheering for Atari. Aliza entered the battlefield, wearing her glasses that looked cool but served as a blindfold for her. She took her glasses off and looked towards the crowd. She spoke up, “Today, we have come to the showdown.”

Her observation shifted to the opposite side. The Crowd were cheering for the player that still didn’t enter the battlefield. “PEA IS GOING TO WIN!” one person shouted.

Aliza walked up to a security guard. “Um, sir, where is Pea- I mean Atari?” she inquired. “He’s in the restroom.”

Aliza, “WHAT!?”

“Yes, He is having a stomach ache.”

Aliza, “That so in a finals game?”

“Yes ma’am.” She made a weird face. “Ma’am is there something wrong? Can I-”

Aliza, “I’m very disappointed of you…”

“But it was Atari who was ill, shouldn’t have told it either.”

After half an hour, the Pea entered the hall.

Atari, “The wait is over as Pea is here, small yet smart.”

Aliza, “You don’t look like that though…”

The game started with White (Aliza) playing E4.

Halfway through the game, Aliza felt thirsty. She checked her clock to notice it was already past her time, it was night while the game was expected to end by evening.

Her hand reached her bottle and as she looked down…

“What?” she gasped. There was an absurd shadow forming near her hair. It changed shapes when she looked at her, from an oval to a rhomboid.

Losing her focus, she played a blunder on the chessboard. The shadow slowly started to cripple out. She looked back on the chess board but it was too late. Atari had checkmated her.

Atari, “Saw it, this pea is better at chess than you elephants!”

Aliza was wordless. She stared towards her shadow, thinking of that weird formation.

Accepting her defeat, she got up from the game and went home.

Aliza mumbled to herself in her bedroom, “What was it? How did it form? Was it a hallucination?” Clueless, she went to her laptop to research.

“Hey Gemini, do you know why weird shadows form on my hair?”

“As per your saved data, women usually hallucinate it during chess as they think the boxes in the chessboard are cookies.”

“Who even taught that to you?”

“You”

“Forget those, start a research for it.”

“I sniffed up all the corners of the internet and also ate some cookies. It’s a very astonishing and weird report.”

“SPIT IT OUT!”

“As in the report, Japanese students are weirdly disappearing, soon after or during Halloween without any trace. Their journals expressed depression, mental pressure and sorrow before the incident.”

“What? Do you have more?”

“Yes. Another Japanese student who later appeared back in Arizona stated that he had been teleported to another dimension and was tortured by ghosts. He somehow managed to find the portal and escape.”

“So bad! Can we team up to find him?”

“I cannot carry out actions, but I can if you give me life.”