“Well fuck,” I said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“To be fair, I tried, but—”

“I’ve heard rumors, of course. Who hasn’t? Losers, that’s who! But I never thought KEFVGAAIR was real.”

“Oh, it’s real, Doc. The last ‘R’ is for ‘Real.’ ”

Guess what? The little hunchback dude had a PowerPoint with him to explain the whole thing. Set his portable projector up right on my onyx dining room table. He moved pretty well for a guy with a hunchback and a knife wound, and the image he projected was high-definition, must’ve been at least 5K PPI DLP LCD OPP. I was impressed.

“Eons ago,” he began, “in the year 732, a great samurai warrior known as Takeo rose to power in Japan. He was a gifted warrior from a young age, trained in the art of the katana and winning forty duels by the age of twelve. He was ruthless, cunning, and he knew no fear. He killed other men in cold blood because it made him smile.

“But his true love was Sudoku. He was the world’s first gamer.”

On the wall flashed an image of Takeo. He wore elaborate lava-red samurai armor, his kabuto was adorned with mighty horns, and his face was hidden behind a vicious, demonic black menpo.

“Badass,” I said. “But I bet that mask doesn’t have any Sony technology.”

“False,” the hunchback said. “It had the latest prototype Ibuka Clan lacquer at the time.”

He switched to the next slide, of the samurai Takeo playing Sudoku and looking really pissed.

“Seeking out new competition, Takeo traveled to Hong Kong and held the very first illegal competitive Sudoku tournament, inviting champions from all over the region to battle him. He named the tournament ‘KEFVGAAIR’—which at that point stood for something completely different. We don’t even know anymore.”

He clicked to the next slide, a collage of various games and puzzles.

“Over the centuries, the games played at KEFVGAAIR evolved in technology and sophistication. Sudoku gave way to checkers. Checkers to chess. Chess to an early form of Trouble, with a prototype Pop-O-Matic Bubble. There were no electronics back then, of course, no flat-screens, no consoles, not even electricity, except when they rubbed their wool socks against rugs and shocked each other for sport.”

“Makes sense,” I grunted.

The next slide was an old-timey map with all these colorful arrows everywhere.

“And as its games evolved, the infamy of KEFVGAAIR spread—through the region, the continent, and eventually the world. Most people think Marco Polo traveled east for spices and silk, but really he wanted the Scrabble crown.

“Throughout history, the globe’s most brilliant leaders, thinkers, and competitors learned of KEFVGAAIR and traveled to Hong Kong to test their skills and prove their worthiness at the highest level of gaming.”

This slide was marble busts of Caesar, Moses, Lincoln, Genghis Khan, and Captain Kirk.