Chrissalin nocked the arrow and drew it past her ear. Her target was 700 meters away, which meant it was impossible to hit. So she chose a new target. This one was two feet away. She had to quickly perform the conversion from metric to imperial so she could ascertain whether it was hittable. 0.6096 meters. That was easy. They didn’t call her The Hitter for nothing. It’s because she could hit anything 0.6096 meters away so she let fly and completely destroyed her target: a small bush. The arrow flew straight. The bush blew up in a catastrophic explosion of blue screams.

Scattered applause rippled through the audience. They were very impressed! Nobody could hit a bush from 0.6096 meters except for Chrissalin, famed archer and fabled poet. She never wrote poems which is why it was only fabled that she did so. She moved her black/white hair out of her face, annoyed at the badly formed sentences singing her exploits, and bowed to the blind audience. Admission to the tournament was the removal of the spectators’ eyes. A blind audience could appreciate the nuances, so went the Charter, that were imperceptible to those with vision. They could not see her bow, but were aware through other means that it did occur.

The Tournament Arena Center was a complex structure capable of seating 60,000 people, but today it was filled with 120 billion. Today was the annual Big Deal where archers from all over the village competed with other archers from the same village to shoot arrows.

Chrissalin completed her bow that had lasted ten minutes and turned toward the tournament director. He had been hit by a few arrows from previous contenders so he was a bit shaky but seemed to be alright.

“EXEMPLARY PERFORMANCE, CHRISSALIN THE 333333333RD,” screeched the director, plucking an arrow out of his eye without difficulty, as though this sort of thing happened on the regular, which it did. The audience went wild and ushers employed violence to settle them down (usher law).

Chrissalin bowed again, unable to speak because she had no capacity for speaking. Her tongue had never existed.

“WE AWARD YOU,” continued the screeching man, “THE HIGHEST HONOR AFFORDED TO RESIDENTS OF OUR HUMBLE VILLAGE.” He collapsed and fell into a pool of his own interesting delusions.

Another man appeared from off screen, sprouting arrows like a bleeding pincushion, holding a small trophy. He was smiling but Chrissalin could tell it was actually a controlled grimace of agony. The crowd went absolutely fucking ballistic this time and there was no controlling it. The ushers were flattened in seconds and chaos was the order of the day. Loud bangs and screams sounded from every direction.

Chrissalin snatched the trophy from that man’s hands and fled the scene, which was not possible, so she remained trapped. The narrator neglected to mention she once had wings, and if she still did she could have flown away, but wings were disallowed in the Big Deal so they had been chopped off shortly before the competition.