Titania watched an instructor reject yet another participant's dish.
The second phase was a cooking competition.
The participants had been asked to kill a wild boar from the marsh and prepare a dish with its meat. Titania had thrown enough rocks to eventually nail a boar on its weak spot, the forehead, before she could be run over. She had then joined everyone else in dragging her kill through the marsh for her cooking station.
This sort of test, Titania could handle. Once the obligatory life-threatening part of the phase was over, Titania settled into the zone and started sectioning her meat. The participants around her were essentially submitting identical dishes — roast pork — and only recent applicants had considered putting effort in their plating.
She was no master chef, but she had been a college student. After cooking the same food for herself everyday, there came a point where a college student would start experimenting with the limited supplies she could afford. In the marsh, Titania had access to strawberries from dead dinosaurs, and the pantry items that had been provided in her cooking station. She wasn't confident in locating rosemary or its local equivalent in the wild, but she could still cook pork chops with balsamic strawberry sauce. She could even restore her energy by eating the leftover meat.
If the rest of the exam was like this, she had a shot at passing.
"Too imbalanced in flavour!" one of the instructors, Menchi, whined after taking a bite of the pork chops. "Rejected!"
What.
The participants stared at each other, having summarily failed.
Menchi bellowed across the courtyard. "This phase was not a comparison between participants' dishes! You had to trump my standards!"
Titania gaped, and nudged her cooking station neighbour. "How are exam instructors decided?" she whispered.
Kurapika murmured back, "Apparently, they're all volunteers."
Well then. Hours of no pay and wasting time with people inferior to oneself? So far as Titania was concerned, these instructors could do whatever the hell they wanted. She would have.
"That's no good, Menchi. You forget this exam is for all prospective hunters, and not just gourmet hunters."
Titania blinked. An old man had materialised in the middle of the courtyard in a puff of dust.
Actually….
Titania peered upwards and spotted a blimp suspended over them.
Had the old man just jumped!?
"Director…!" Menchi exclaimed.
The old man gestured to the participants. "You fell back into your bad habits as a gourmet hunter. Give these applicants another chance."
Titania frowned with mistrust. The proposal was too forgiving. Was this another test?
Additionally, Titania wasn't shocked to learn that this geriatric athlete was in charge of the exam. He seemed reasonably over-the-top and suspicious.
"Very well!" Menchi declared with hands on her hips. "I challenge you participants to return here with an eagle-spider's egg! They are a delicacy when boiled. Chop chop!"
Titania followed Menchi, her fellow judge, and the old man to where they could find eagle-spider eggs. The group stopped at the edge of a cliff overlooking a silk-webbed ravine.
The bottomless crevice moaned with a gust of wind.
These people had to be joking.
Menchi demonstrated leaping down, grabbing a stretch of silk, and dropping herself to grab an egg at the bottom of the web before an updraft shot her back up to surface level. The instructor landed with triumphant ease, lifting her egg up for everyone to see. Titania trembled where she stood.
The crowd of participants rushed past her and leapt down to grab a webbed string.
"Wait—" Titania exclaimed.
She knelt at the edge in time to witness a dozen participants let go of their string and grab an egg, only to continue falling into the ravine without an updraft to carry them. Their frightened screams echoed in her skull.
This was a tailored nightmare. Death by falling.
Titania shook like a leaf.
The old man stroked his beard next to her. "You won't grab an egg from here, you know."
Heartless, overpowered old man! Of course Titania knew that! She knew she had to possibly die in order to not possibly die!
"Will that web hold me, though?" she murmured.
Below, the rest of the participants were realising their mistake.
"We can't let go yet," Gon spoke to Leorio and Kurapika down with him. They were discussing the tensile strength of the web. "I know when a gust of wind will come. Not yet."
At least Gon had the survival instincts of a superhuman. Titania trusted that her walking club wouldn't fall to their deaths.
But did she trust Gon with her life?
Her precious life?
…She had no choice.
Titania leapt down to join her walking club and caught herself on a stretch of silk. The entire web rippled, threatening to tear.
"Now?" Leorio sweated.
Gon paused, and nodded. "Now!"
Everyone fell, grabbed an egg, and was lifted back up to solid ground with a gust of wind. Titania rolled onto the ground, clutching her egg like a lifeline. She suddenly needed sugar again.
"Let's go!" one of her group mates tugged her along. "We have a test to pass!"
This had to be the worst phase of the exam.
At the end of the day, Titania didn't know if Menchi was right. The otherworlder could barely taste her boiled egg.
The director then offered the surviving participants a ride on his blimp to their next destination. Titania ate, showered, and slept for the entire ride. In the time she wasn't addressing her needs, she tore and hacked at her clothes with a kitchen knife until she was wearing a sleeveless sweater and jean shorts.
A discarded sleeve went around her head like a bandana to keep the hair out of her face, and to cover the bandage over her forehead wound. Another piece of torn fabric was used to tie her water bottle to her belt. Titania would have to untie it to drink from her water bottle, but it was better than tackling the next challenge with nothing. She then tied her hair back with a piece of usable torn fabric like string.
What she wouldn't give for a hair tie right now.
Titania wasn't the picture of beauty, but she now had a better chance at surviving another marathon than she had before.
The blimp arrived at a tower on top of a wider tower, collectively taller than any skyscraper she had seen. The participants were dropped off on the flat roof of the top tower, called Trick Tower, and told to reach the bottom of it within six days. Then the blimp took off. Anyone who tried leaping off the sides of Trick Tower was snatched by flying six-legged beasts that apparently lived in the area.
Why didn't the instructors test other fears, like that of needles or of thunder and lightning?
Why did it always have to be heights?
Titania walked closer to the centre of the tower's roof for her peace of mind, and abruptly fell through a tile.
"KYAAAA!" she screamed before she hit solid ground with her tailbone. Titania groaned, picking herself up with a gentle rub to her backside.
"Guys?" she called upwards, but the rotating tile she had fallen through sealed shut overhead.
The noises of the outside vanished. Titania was now alone in a stone room of Trick Tower lit only by torches.
There wasn't an obvious door or pressure plate to reveal an exit for the room, and the only furnishings besides the torches were a pedestal with two bracelets on it, and a sign on the wall written with characters Titania couldn't read. While she could communicate well enough, literacy was an entirely different challenge.
It was a closed room mystery, and she couldn't read.
Titania warily picked up a bracelet and turned it over in her hands. It only had two buttons, a circle and an X, which comprised a metal face of the bracelet like a watch. She walked around the room with it like she held a metal detector, hoping for something to react to the accessory. Without changes, she resorted to knocking on each floor and wall tile of the room she could reach, wondering if one would flip over like the ceiling tile had. Pressing the buttons on the bracelet proved fruitless, as did wearing both bracelets at once.
That was when a ceiling tile suddenly overturned, dropping a participant on the ground next to her in a cloud of dust.
Good lord, let it be a tolerable character. Anyone but Hisoka. Tonpa! She'd take Tonpa!
Please let it be Tonpa.
THUMP.
"Ah…Number 22?"
"You're kidding me!" Titania wailed. She watched a certain clown pick himself up and slowly step towards her with an outstretched hand.
Titania flinched with clenched fists.
Hisoka paused. "Won't you hand over a bracelet? Or don't you want to leave this room?"
Titania glanced over her shoulder to the sign on the wall the clown must have read. If two participants each needed to wear a bracelet in order to proceed, that meant so long as Hisoka wanted to continue the exam, he couldn't kill her for any reason. The circle and X on the bracelets were also written on the sign….
Ah, were the bracelets like classroom clickers? Each button represented an answer choice for a question? In which case, the first question would have to be along the lines of if the participants wanted to leave the closed room. Unless the instructors for the third phase were unsurprisingly cruel, and had instead written, "who do you choose to leave this room?"
Wait. Didn't that mean both participants always had to be in agreement?
Titania hesitated. "Let's make a deal."
The clown wore a lot of makeup. Titania couldn't tell if he was irritated or bored. "Oh?"
"I'll give you a bracelet," Titania offered, "and you read aloud every sign we come across, starting with this one."
"You can't read."
"…I don't have to answer that," Titania spluttered.
"Very well," Hisoka replied, unexpectedly decisive. Titania took off a bracelet and dropped it in his hand. "We can only proceed with two participants each wearing a bracelet," he summarised the sign. "At a crossroad of opinions, we are to vote with our bracelets. Majority vote wins. In a tie, we must vote again. The first challenge is to vote on if we want to leave this room."
Oh, thank goodness.
Both participants clicked O for yes, and a hidden door in the wall parted, revealing a twisting stone hallway lit by torches.
Wary of Hisoka's temper and of the clown himself, Titania meekly gestured. "After you."
In order to leave a building, she had to use a violently perverted clown as a screen-reader. Holy crap, she was screwed.
The two participants passed through their thirtieth fork in a hallway, agreeing to vote the same direction again. Aside from their footsteps and the crackle of the hallway's torches, the tower was quiet.
Titania's hairs stood on end. Call it paranoia.
It wasn't even from the homicidal pedophile walking in front of her.
"…Hisoka…san."
After hours of mostly silence from Titania, her initiation was uncharacteristic. Hisoka neutrally hummed. It hadn't sounded like, "don't bother me" or "I'm not hearing you," so Titania tested her luck.
"The director had said Trick Tower was a prison, right?" Titania recalled. "He must have done so for either of two reasons: to get his kicks out of scaring us, or to give us a fair warning. Now, I don't trust the instructors at all, much less their director."
"The instructors do as they please," Hisoka confirmed.
Right. Tonpa had mentioned before that Hisoka was among other participants who had taken the exam at least once.
Hisoka had been disqualified for maiming an instructor.
Titania shivered. "S-Still, if they're going for consistency, then they'd give fair warnings for the dangers of each phase. Satotz hadn't told us the tunnel would have stairs, but he had warned us of the marsh's wildlife. Menchi had demonstrated to us the correct method for retrieving eagle-spider eggs. The director hadn't warned us of the flying six-legged creatures around this tower, but he had told us the tower was a prison. Logically, the only correct way down the tower is through."
"Meaning?"
"We're already in a trap," Titania concluded. "In a prison, the warden has to keep inmates from somehow escaping. That can include designing hallways that run in circles. Since these halls have no distinct features other than the equidistant torches mounted on the walls, we can't tell if we haven't been here before."
"We're descending," Hisoka corrected.
Oh.
It was as if he could sense elevation and distance regardless of optical illusions.
"W-Well," Titania pressed on, "the alternative is that we're being led to the punchline of a cruel joke…."
The stone walls opened up to a cavernous chamber dimly lit by torches. The faint light revealed stairs in the walls spiralling upwards to the next exit. In the middle of the chamber's floor stood a heavily-scarred man wielding curved blades and an equally-curved grin.
A wall of stone dropped behind Hisoka and Titania, sealing them in.
Hisoka's lips twisted with a smirk. He purred.
"I do love a killer one-liner."
The scarred man in the chamber rushed at them with a flick of his blades, sending them spinning through the air. He yelled something about revenge for his scars, but Titania's lizard brain was riveted to the four ways she could die, currently flying towards her…or rather, Hisoka.
Titania fled along the walls of the chamber while Hisoka danced around the blades, a few of them snagging his clothes. The scarred man snatched his airborne weapons and pressed his attack, doggedly chasing after Hisoka's blood with a howl.
Titania's current enemy was truly just a flight of stairs.
Without rails.
Her palms sweated with fear. Maybe after exposing herself to endless scenarios of intimidating heights, her fear would melt away. …As if. It didn't help that neither the scarred man nor Hisoka cared if the spinning blades flew close to nicking her, as the men were engaged in their own battle.
If it could be called that, the instant that Hisoka snatched the weapons from midair.
The scarred man had enough time to express his disbelief before Hisoka gleefully tore into him with his own weapons. Blood sprayed everywhere, even to the equivalent of the second floor where Titania was still climbing the stairs.
She flinched at the hot liquid. When she glanced down, Hisoka wasn't on the ground floor anymore.
He whispered from behind her. "…Are you worthy?"
"Stupid clown!" Titania panicked as she bolted up the winding stairs, regardless of the lack of rails and good lighting. She could slip at any moment to her death, but she could also be too slow and die anyway. "You can't proceed with two bracelets! You need me!"
CLANG!
"Oh my God!"
Titania tripped and caught herself on the edge of the stairs, hanging off of two-and-a-half stories of stone. Her sweaty palms were already giving away.
Hisoka stood over her with a weapon in each hand. In the dim light, she couldn't see his face, but she could sense the triggered bloodlust rolling off of him.
If ever there was a moment where she was permitted to bemoan having a second life, this was it.
"SCREW this shit!" she yelled. "You can fail this exam, but I can't! I don't want to die a horrible death!"
She was aware of the irony.
Take the hunter exam, That Bastard had said. Gain a peace of mind knowing you won't be able to die the way you had the first time, he had said. After passing the hunter exam, fate will stop chasing after you.
Then she would have been free to lead a peaceful, bubble-wrapped life in this world.
"…Number 22."
Yes, yes, it was a Catch-22. She knew that!
Hisoka crouched down, passively meeting her eyes. "Number 22."
Titania tearily gazed up from the ledge. "…Are you done?"
The clown tossed the blades aside with a sniff, already bored with them. "It was a very brief joke."
Titania pulled herself up into the stairs with Hisoka's pragmatic help. She wiped the edges of her eyes. "It'll be longer, if those blades were poisoned."
Hisoka ignored his shallow cuts. The violent pervert was probably also a mithridate, just to add to his portfolio of weird hobbies. That, or his mentality lacked self-preservation over self satisfaction.
When they passed through the exit at the top of the stairway, built-in speakers declared their arrival past the finish line and into a waiting antechamber.
"First place, Number 44, at six hours, seventeen minutes, and one second."
"Second place, Number 22, at six hours, seventeen minutes, and two seconds."
;
A/N: In every episode I see Hisoka, I tell my friends I hope this is the last time I see him. He gives me the creeps and is the sort of figure in my nightmares I constantly flee from while calling the cops. It doesn't help that he resembles a clown.
This dude is essentially my basic childhood fear.
My friends told me that they like Hisoka. "He's the only truly irredeemable evil character in the show!" Where is the likeable part in that!?
Anyway, they challenged me with imagining my sorry self not just taking the hunter exam, but doing so with Hisoka. Aside from instantly pissing myself and dying, this is my response.