Jarred was a tall nervous fellow who smoked and played computer games competitively. He had once done martial arts and retained a wiry strength in his 2m tall frame.
But there was a light sheen to his skin and bruises under his eyes. He hunched and fiddled and would run when his friends were waiting for him.
Jarred was being haunted by a bright yellow dog-being called Puncho. Puncho wanted to transform Jarred into a warrior, and he would nibble expectantly at his ears with his ghost teeth until he scratched them without knowing why.
In addition to his awkward color (ghosts were not supposed to be so cheerfully coloured they looked like children’s toys), Puncho had a secret.
He was the long dead spirit of the Italian samurai warrior Punchonosi, whose legend had faded into the mists of memory, but whose fondness for chopping up his enemies with farming scythes and dropping them into barrels of goat droppings was legendary.
Puncho would squirm up behind Jarred as he played first person shooters, spraying ghost spittle victoriously onto the screen whenever Jarred disintegrated another player with a photon rifle.
And he would chant Japanese war cries every time Jarred slammed the table in disgust, his dismembered body expelled into the universal wasteland of Karthos.
One day Puncho decided he would possess Jarred to show him the meaning of real warrior spirit. In the moment intergalactic fusion however, Eskom shut off the power, causing an anomaly in the space-time continuum.
Puncho and Jarred fused together permanently to create the great hero known only as Japunchi.
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