John sighed as he finished typing yet another line of code. Closing his eyes, he rubbed his temples. The last time John remembered venturing out of his apartment to go anywhere fun was when he was twenty-two. Now John was twenty-seven years old; it was time to take a break.
As a freelance hacker who zeroed in on the private files of corrupt government officials and CEOs, John made a lot of money for a young guy, but never had the opportunity to really spend it. He was so engrossed in work that he had never gotten around to furnishing his apartment, which was littered with containers of half-eaten Chinese take-out, stacked high with documents from different companies and crammed with various computer parts. John was working on building his own supercomputer, but it was taking longer than he anticipated. Sometimes, John would work throughout the night and not realize until he looked at the clock that hours had passed.
John felt his right eye twitch involuntarily. It was settled then. If a vacation was not possible, a short break definitely was.
John opened up his MacBook Pro and clicked on Google Chrome. After just a few seconds, he had pulled up every club within a ten-mile radius of his apartment. Finally John found a club called Aura about three blocks away. The only problem was that John didn’t know the first thing about dancing. But being desperate to get out of the apartment, he shrugged it off. Grabbing his jacket, John left his cramped apartment.
Aura was harder to find than he thought. John was shocked that it turned out to be located underneath Double Destiny, the very Chinese take-out restaurant that he always ordered from.
The bouncer, a burly man with tattoos all over his bald head and an eye patch over his left eye, gave John a long look.
“Hey, haven’t I seen you here before?” the bouncer said in a surprisingly high voice.
“Uh, this is the first time I’ve been here,” John replied. “Maybe it’s someone who looks
like me?”
The bouncer rubbed his chin. “Eh. Maybe.” He scratched his eye patch, shrugged, and waved John into the club.
Inside the club John was immediately hit with the loud, percussive sound of techno music. There was purple smoke everywhere. John felt his way to the bar and crawled onto one of the high bar stools. The bartender nodded at John.
“You want your regular?” asked the bartender.
“My… regular?”
The bartender raised a shaggy eyebrow at John.
“Yeah. Your regular. A whiskey on the rocks.”
“Uh, is it good?” asked John, who didn’t really drink.
Instead of replying, the bartender stared at him and stomped away to serve another customer.
“Uh, okay, I’ll take that. The, uh, whiskey, on rock!” said John.
“Coming right up,” grumbled the bartender.
When his drink came, John hesitantly sipped at it, grimaced, and set the glass down.
John decided to go out on the dance floor, even though he didn’t know how to dance. Working his way into the crowd, he stood awkwardly in place and woodenly moved his hips in random circles, eliciting stares from the other clubbers. However, before his embarrassment made him stop dancing completely, there was a huge crash and a new billow of purple smoke. Standing on one of the small round tables was a man in a three-piece rainbow-colored suit. The suit was iridescent, and shimmered like fish scales. The man wore his dark hair in an oily pompadour. His sideburns went down the sides of his white, popped-up collar. On his feet were ankle-high crocodile-skin boots.
“Never,” said the man, walking straight towards John, “start a dance--any dance--without me! After all, I am, the one, the only--” He paused for dramatic effect. “--the Master of Dance!”
“Uh,” John struggled to find his voice. “I was just, uh, trying to dance. I didn’t mean to--”
“I refuse to hear why you danced,” the Master of Dance interrupted. “The fact is you danced without moi! And that, mon cheri, is the biggest insult.”
“Uh, I’m sorry, sir,” John stammered. “Uh, you can dance now.” John started to make his way off the floor.
“No!” said the Master of Dance, grabbing John by his shirt. “We. Dance. Together!”
And with that pronouncement, the music suddenly got louder.
John cried out in shock. He was dancing like he never danced before, and he had a feeling it was because of this so-called Master of Dance. His body was moving in strange ways. John felt as if his head had turned into a balloon and had floated off his shoulders. After dancing for what seemed like forever, John suddenly felt the painful throbbing of a massive migraine.
John asked the Master of Dance to turn the music off. But the Master of Dance was so busy dancing that he did not—or would not—listen.
   Groaning, John ran over to the speakers and yanked the power cords out of the wall.
Behind John came a sharp cry.
The Master of Dance lay crumpled on the floor, his face contorted in pain.
“My music!” the Master cried. “What happened to my music?!”
Suddenly all the lights in the club shut off. Everyone went quiet. When the lights flickered back on, the Master of Dance was gone but no one seemed to notice. Or care, for the matter. Everyone was dancing like nothing had happened.
“Where did he go?” John asked a blond girl in a silvery miniskirt.
“Who?”
“The Master of Dance.”
The girl stared blankly at John.
“Is this a joke?” she finally asked. “Because I don’t know what the heck is the Master of Dance.”
“Never mind,” John mumbled.
He asked five other people, including the bartender, whether they had seen what had happened. When each one of them reacted the same way as the blond girl, John left the club, his head drooping in embarrassment and confusion.
Returning to his apartment, John collapsed onto his futon and blacked out.
The next day John woke up and remembered the occurrences of the previous night. He opened his laptop and tried to look up Aura. Except it wasn’t there.
An error message occurred: Oops! Google could not find AuraClubbing.com.
John was now really confused. He had the urge to leave his apartment and run back to the club to see if the Master of Dance was there. But it was noon, and Aura didn’t open until 10 PM.
So John decided to work on his supercomputer.
The rest of the afternoon and evening were a blur. John opened his eyes and looked at the clock.
It was 10 PM.
John ran out of the building, dead-set on finding Aura. From what he recalled, the club was located right beneath Double Destiny--except it wasn’t there. John sprinted back up to the Chinese take-out on the ground floor and sheepishly asked the old Chinese lady at the counter where Aura had moved.
“Wha? Ah-rah?” the old lady crabbed, “No nightclub down here. Closest nightclub is downtown!”
“I was just here last night,” John said, but the old lady just frowned and shook her head at him.
On his way back to his apartment, John passed a trio of girls. One of them was the blonde girl that was at Aura. She stopped and gestured towards John.
“That’s the crazy guy in the three-piece suit, the one who was dancing in the middle of the street last night!” she said to her two friends, in between fits of laughter. “He called himself the Master of Dance. He thought we were in a nightclub called Aura! Isn’t that funny?”
“Hey!” the girl shouted. “Where are your crocodile boots? Hey! Hey! Dance for us!”
John felt his face redden as he pushed past them and rushed into his apartment building.
Aura did exist, and there was a Master of Dance, but it definitely wasn’t him. John entered his apartment and opened the closet to hang up his jacket.
Letting his jacket fall to the floor, John gasped in horror at what saw.
Hanging from one of the coat hangers was the three-piece suit worn by the Master of Dance. Right above a pair of crocodile-skin boots.