His name hadn't always been Gene Takavic. In another world, under a sun that beat down with a different, more familiar kind of oppression, he was Jonathan Brown.
Jonathan Brown of Florida, born in 1995. He had a head of unruly black hair and eyes the color of dark earth—ordinary eyes that learned to see the world not as it was, but as a series of systems to be gamed. His father was a lawyer, a man who wore his respectability like a suit of armor. His mother, his real mother, was a ghost in the family album, having died when he was too young to properly remember her. The void she left was filled by his stepmother, a woman whose smile never reached her eyes and whose love was conditional on a perfection he could never achieve.
The house was a battlefield of quiet resentment. Jonathan was a smart-ass, not out of malice, but out of a restless, probing intelligence that saw rules not as guidelines but as puzzles. Why walk in a straight line when you could cut across the grass? Why do chores in the prescribed order when you could find a faster, more efficient way? His stepmother saw this not as cleverness, but as defiance. Her punishments were swift, harsh, and often emotionally abusive. A sharp tongue, a backhanded comment that stung more than a slap, the cold withdrawal of affection.
His father was the great disappointment in this domestic war. Sometimes a pushover, cowed by his new wife's icy will; other times simply absent, buried in case files at the office. Jonathan looked up to him, this figure of authority and intellect, but the man offered no protection, no validation. He was a statue on a distant pedestal, admirable but useless.
Jonathan grew up with this dissonance ringing in his ears. He was good with people, charming even. He could talk his way out of trouble, into favors. But he had no real friends. Every conversation was a puzzle, every interaction a game to be won. He was always looking for the angle, the loophole in the situation, the way to be right or to get something—anything—out of the encounter. It left him profoundly lonely, a brilliant operator in an empty room.
After high school, he was adrift. The "straight line" of college, a career, a steady life—it felt like a prison sentence. He couldn't tolerate made systems, the plodding, predictable march of conventional success. But he craved direction, a purpose. And despite everything, a part of him still yearned for his father's approval. So, he decided to become a lawyer. Not out of a love for justice, but because it was the family business, and more importantly, it was the ultimate system to hack.
He didn't go to university. The thought of lectures and dorms and student debt was suffocating. Instead, he found a new, novel, and largely disreputable online program. He studied remotely, supplementing it with his own voracious reading of legal texts. And he discovered he loved it. Not the dry paperwork or the careful precedent, but the thrill of the hunt. He loved finding the ambiguous clause, the forgotten statute, the procedural error that could bring the whole towering edifice of a case crashing down. He loved getting around order.
His parents were not impressed. His stepmother belittled his "lazy" approach, his father openly scorned the legitimacy of his program. The house was filled with a constant, low-grade hum of disapproval. "You need a real career, Jonathan." "When are you going to get a real job and contribute?"
The day he finally finished the program, certificate in hand, he felt a surge of triumph. He presented it to his father like a knight offering a hard-won trophy. His father took the paper, looked at it, and his face didn't light up with pride. It crumpled with something closer to pity and disdain.
"That... that program is absurd, Jonathan," he said, his voice tired. "That doesn't make you a real lawyer. You need to go to university. Get a proper education."
It was the final, definitive rejection. The pedestal shattered. The fury that erupted in Jonathan was white-hot and absolute. He didn't shout; he just turned and walked out of the house, the flimsy certificate crumpled in his fist. He never went back.
The real world, however, agreed with his father. No reputable firm would touch him. His "title" was a joke. He was broke, alone, and filled with a corrosive sense of failure. He was done.
That was when the lowest of the low found him. Or rather, he found them. Desperation led him to the kind of people who didn't care about credentials, only results. He started doing legal work for thugs, felons, loan sharks, and racketeers. And he was good at it.
He didn't just defend them in court. He would dig up dirt on the opposing lawyer. He would use his own clients to intimidate plaintiffs and witnesses, using loopholes in privacy laws to harass them, filing frivolous motions to drain their resources and spirit. He became a master of fraudulent tactics, a legal saboteur. He won cases he had no business winning, freeing guilty men and burying the truth under a mountain of legalistic rubble.
He made a living. A good one. He could afford a decent apartment, the illusion of success. But deep down, in the quiet hours of the night, the shame was a constant, gnawing companion. He was using his intellect, the very thing he had once been so proud of, to serve the worst kind of people. He had become everything his father had implicitly accused him of being: a fraud, a cheat, a blight on the profession he'd once, in his own twisted way, admired.
One day, walking through a part of the city he usually avoided, he saw a book on a rickety sidewalk stand. The title was ludicrous: "Quintessential Divination Techniques of the Guan Dynasty." The cover was a garish mess of mystical symbols. He bought it as a joke, a piece of kitsch to put on his shelf and laugh at.
Back in his apartment, he skimmed through it. It was full of nonsensical ramblings about aligning one's spirit with cosmic currents, reciting mantras to alter reality. He found a particularly flowery passage and, with a smirk, recited a few lines out loud in a mock-serious tone.
"How dumb," he chuckled to himself, closing the book and tossing it onto the coffee table. After re-watching a couple episodes for the third time of Better Call Saul, his favorite show, he went to sleep, the day's moral grime still clinging to him.
He woke up to a searing, impossible pain in his head, as if his skull were splitting open. He gasped, his eyes flying open.
He was not in his bed.
He was slumped over a desk, his cheek pressed against cold, unfamiliar wood. The room was dim, lit by a single gas lamp, and the air smelled of dust, old paper, and something else… something metallic.
His hand was clenched around something heavy and cold. He looked down.
It was a revolver.
And when his swimming vision cleared, when he managed to push himself upright, his heart freezing in his chest, he saw the blood. A dark, spreading stain on the wooden floorboards beside the desk. A lot of blood.
Gene's voice trailed off. The narration ended as abruptly as his previous life had. The memory of that moment—the disorientation, the terror, the revolver in his hand—was as vivid as the whiskey glass in front of him.
He looked at Lutz, his eyes wide with a shared, haunted understanding. "Roughly 3 months ago, I woke up in this body. Hatch Geiss. In this… this world. With a gun in my hand and someone else's blood on the floor.
"Hatch was the son of a small-time merchant. A good-for-nothing spoiled bum, by all accounts. He'd grab his father's money and spend it on stupid things—gambling, drinking. He got into serious legal trouble. Being pampered and sheltered, not being used to any real pressure, I guess he decided to end it."
He gestured vaguely with the hand that had held the revolver. "When I woke up here, in that room, with the gun and the… the blood… I panicked. Pure terror. When I finally calmed down enough to think, I decided to just roll with it, not like I had any idea of how to go back, I understood the situation and made a plan. I found court summons, legal documents. There was a trial in one week."
A grim, determined light came into his eyes. "One week. I spent that entire week buried in law books. Any I could find, buy, or steal from a library. And I found it… simple. Compared to back on Earth, the laws of this world are still primitive. They're full of gaps you could drive a carriage through."
A ghost of his familiar, cynical smile returned. "The trial came. I defended myself. No, Jonathan Brown defended Hatch Geiss. I picked their case apart. I found procedural errors, contradictory testimonies, poorly written statutes. I talked circles around the prosecutor. I won." He said the last word not with triumph, but with a kind of weary disbelief. "I walked out of that courtroom a free man, and Geiss's father… he looked at me like I was a stranger. Which I was."
He shifted in his chair, the memory clearly uncomfortable. "After that… I decided I couldn't be Hatch Geiss. If i got thrown into this world, i wanted it to at least be MY life. So I grabbed what money I could from the grateful-but-bewildered merchant dad—a severance package for services rendered—and I left. I rented that shithole you found me in and started going by Gene Takavic. One of my first clients in that hole had connections. He got me falsified papers for the identity. And I started working. No studies here, no credentials. But people saw that I could make them free. So I survived."
He paused, taking a moment to refill his glass from Lutz's decanter without asking. The liquid sloshed, a testament to the slight tremor in his hand.
"Eventually, I had a strange client. Rich, quiet, didn't say much. He brought me a case that was… difficult. Incredibly complex, with powerful people on the other side. It was a property dispute that tied into ancient feudal laws nobody remembered. I lived in those law books for the entire past month. I found a loophole. A tiny, forgotten clause about mineral rights from three centuries ago that invalidated the entire modern claim. I won the case." He shook his head in remembered awe. "Not only did he pay me generously, he gave me a piece of paper. He said, 'You'd make a great Lawyer.' At the time, I thought he was mocking me. Calling me a false one, like my old man did."
Gene's voice dropped to a near-whisper. "On the paper were directions. A place, a time, a code phrase. Long story short, I was invited to this place under town, The Winter Garden, there's all types of crazy stuff down there."
Lutz's eyes sharpened at the name. So Gene had found his way there too. Of course he had.
"There, I started to hear things. I came across some knowledge of Beyonders. It sounded like madness, but after waking up in a new world, I was past dismissing anything. I found someone selling a potion formula. Sequence 9: Lawyer."
He let out a short, humorless laugh. "Can you believe it? It felt like the universe's idea of a sick joke. I saved for it. Scrimped and saved from my shady practice. Then I slowly, painstakingly, found and saved for the ingredients. Two weeks ago… I made the potion. In my shitty kitchen, with a saucepan. I didn't know what to expect."
He looked at his hands, flexing his fingers as if seeing them for the first time. "It was… cold. Like drinking liquid logic. When it settled, the world just… snapped into focus. It increased all my reasoning capabilities when it comes to law. I can see the connections between statutes instantly. I can craft clauses that are perfectly deceiving, elegantly exploitative. I can read a contract and not just see what it says, but all the things it doesn't say, all the spaces in between the words where the real truth hides. It didn't make me a better person though."
He fell silent, the story complete. The story of Jonathan Brown had culminated not in redemption, but in him becoming the very thing he'd been accused of being—a consummate legal predator, now empowered by the supernatural laws of a world that was not his own.
Lutz had listened without interruption, his face an unreadable mask.
He looked at Gene, a new, profound respect in his gaze. "You're not a victim, Gene. You're a natural. This world, it's a playground for someone like you."
Gene looked stunned, as if he'd been braced for condemnation and received absolution instead. The tension drained from his shoulders. He let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding.
"A playground," he repeated, the word tasting strange. He then managed a weak, but genuine, version of his trademark smirk. "Yeah. A playground full of crazy shit, horrors, and guys who wake up hanging from ropes. But hey, the legal system's a joke, so I've got that going for me."
Lutz actually smiled back, a real, albeit grim, smile. "We've both been to hell, Gene. You just took a different route." He raised his newly refilled glass. "To not walking in a straight line."
Gene clinked his glass against Lutz's, the crystal ringing with a clear, sharp note that seemed to seal their pact more firmly than any handshake.
They drank, the fine liquor now a toast to their shared, monstrous origins. They had laid their cards on the table.