One Man Short
Cobalt, Nightingale, Skyhawk, and Kaleidoscope were college students, a four-person majiang club, and also an inseparable group of friends.
As their friendship grew, Kaleidoscope and Cobalt grew into something more than friends. They started calling each other "Kally" and "Co," and would always snuggle around each other1.
But on the day Kaleidoscope formally confessed to Cobalt, he went missing. They looked for him, called the police, all in vain. The shreds of evidence they had suggested he had gotten himself tangled up in the messy labyrinths of the Fantoni underground.
To find Kaleidoscope, Cobalt and her friends needed to find a way into the criminal world. But what can a trio of stupid college kids do? Quite a lot, in fact. You see, at that time the soul market in Fanton was up and rising; an extremely profitable trade with your major clients being powerful organized crime bosses. If they got into that, it could lead them closer to Kaleidoscope.
When the Sylvandian psychic and soul-extraction master Moonbeam traveled to Fanton, the friends took the chance to study the art of classic Sylvandian soul-extraction. Moonbeam was only willing to take one student, so Cobalt stepped up.
But at the end, when she had also learnt to extract souls, Moonbeam asked her to pay the price -- with her body2. She took Cobalt's soul out, and fed it to another body, keeping Cobalt's original with her as she journeyed on. Cobalt returned to her friends in an unfamiliar body, not even knowing the original owner of it. To make matters worse, the body had spaghetti limbs and about a hundred chronic diseases. (Almost like a Qibli clone.)
With the skills all acquired, they set sail in the soul market, catching people, emptying their souls, selling the body to organ harvesters, all the likes.
When they finally found Kaleidoscope, would he recognize the woman with Co inside? Would she recognize the man Kally had become?
