Some people would say that the ULW is rotting, that it's decaying, that a sickening tumor has metastasized and the prognosis is grim. Me, on the other hand, I just think that ULW is just inching further and further up its own ass week in and week out.
For some reason ULW thinks it's a caterpillar, the ropy coils of intestines of its own anus are its cocoon, and that once it gets all the way up there it will emerge as a pretty, IWC-colored butterfly.
Because not only has ULW decided to court, embrace, and get a mouthful of love trickling down their chin from the two biggest boils on the backside of professional wrestling…
Not only has ULW decided the let non-wrestlers rampage all over its television product…
Not only has ULW decided that having some people defend their title belts every is what the cool kids are doing these days…
But now ULW is getting to the point where I'm worried that it's going to murder the IWC, skin it, and wear the tanned hide around with its penis tucked back singing songs about putting the lotion in the basket.
Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen, rather than deciding to import any of the things that the IWC does right, I can't name any off the top of my head, but I'm sure they're there. My view was kind of blocked by the supporting casts of New Eden and Silas World when I was there.
Oh no, ULW's decided that they can bring in the IWC's Failure Culture to great (that is to say non-existent outside of Raymond der Vaart's Dutch Elm Disease rotted brain) critical acclaim. And when I say ULW decided, I mean that Lenore Price-Mason decided, meaning Silas World decided, meaning the Shadow Cartel decided.
Because some how getting a victory over a man whose figure is so svelte meth heads deep in the throes of their tooth-rotting addiction are telling the fucker to eat a sandwich is grounds for getting an X-Class title shot.
Apparently the way to rightfully earn an X-Class title shot is to get your ass kicked twice by a superior athlete and managing to rack up wins over such luminaries as Grace Morningwood, Mya Denton, and Piddle.
Not to say that Doc Gracie and Mya are abysmal bags of suck. But there's a reason why Mya's in the worst wrestled match of the night more often than not. Typically far more often than not.
And the good doctor is basically Willow Wilkes' morality pet and mascot slash chew toy. Not a real provocative, in your face type of character. She's fluff, she's filler, she's resume padding. She's a safe, low impact, teeny tiny waif of a professional wrestler.
Piddle. Mya. Morningwood. That's the be all and end all of whom Lenore Price-Mason has managed to beat in the ring.
Maybe I smacked her so hard that I scrambled her brains on top of busting her open in the last match we had.
You know, the one where I crushed her so badly that ol' Silas walked funny all the way down to the ring, cause he sat on his spurs see, and threw in the towel before I snapped his sister-cousin-wife in half.
And the entire world knows it. If Lenore lacked the sense your beetle-obsessed god gave a cockroach, she'd have tapped out within thirty seconds of Silas pitching his dirty laundry into the middle of the ring. And if not? Well, not being able to take a breath and get oxygen to the brain tends to cause most people to black out.
Referees can abide having the fans in the arena go to sleep, but having a competitor go unconscious is not a good thing. The brain begins to die after four minutes without oxygen, damage that becomes permanent after five. That's how long Lenore Price-Mason had left in the match, at maximum.
Despite what she and Silas World would have you believe, there was no way she was getting out of Orion's Bow on her own. I'm three fucking times her size, she's not going to be pulling us to the ropes with her little bitty stick arms. She's not going to overpower a fucking dragon when she's too busy turning several lovely shades of red and purple before venturing into sharing my skintone from hypoxia.
But you know what? She's got far more claim to an X-Class title shot that her sister-cousin-wife Cassandra. Bitchy ol' Cass whom we last saw getting thrown out on her ass and spending several months in the hospital for the massive internal injuries caused by the impact of landing on the stick that used to be lodged in her tuchus with the demented fervor of ULW the IWC Butterfly.
Because yeah, let's let somebody who's never wrestled in a ULW ring ever before get a title match within a month of their joining the company. Like THAT'S never managed to bite this company in the ass before. *cough* Alex Fayt! *cough*
Jesus Christ, Raymond, why don't you just throw up both middle fingers, do a stupid dance to a crappy rap over the tune of "The Hall of the Mountain King" and tell your entire hard working roster "Fuck all y'all!"
I'm the most popular wrestler NOT currently holding a title in ULW. I'm going to top the League of Superstars because Jason King is the Lays potatos crisps of beatings, you can't just smack him around once, and Willow Wilkes tends to take every third FUF off to sob into a tub of Haagen-Daas because someone said something mean on Twitter.
I'm by far the most durable competitor on the show, I'm a walking, talking meme generator which combined with a unique look makes me one of the biggest movers of merch in the company. I'm so fucking good that it takes two people to get a win over me.
If anybody here ought to be getting a shot at some title it ought to be me, the uncrowned queen of ULW. I got fucked out of two World title matches. Hell, with Silencer carted off to Dante's Dungeon of Debauchery I had to go it alone in the main event of FUF 8 in the most watched segment in modern ULW history! And not by a little, by A LOT. Dave Meltzer wanks himself to sleep thinking of that match and how good it was.
And what do I get in return for all my wondrous labors? Of making so talented and entertaining I make people NOT CHANGE THE CHANNEL when Angel Kash is on screen. Of being the rock solid foundation holding up this company's ratings by going out there and wrestling every single week. Of teaching the whole viewing audience what exactly sounding is and why screwdrivers have to have labels instructing you not to put them in your pee hole.
"Oops. We forgot about you. We didn't pencil you in for a match on FUF until you called the head office and melted the voicemail machine with the sheer heat of your language."
Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen. Somehow the people in charge of making ULW do whatever the knock-off analog of work that it usually does actually managed to FORGET to give the fucking SEVEN FOOT TALL FIREBREATHING BITCH a match this week!
Boy, you'd think after bringing home the bacon by providing over six million peepers glued to that TV set that they'd be tripping over themselves to give me more matches. Hell, give me fifteen minutes for an ice bath and I can fucking wrestle two or three times a show from now until the end of time.
No, seriously. I might literally be able to continue wrestling until the end of time. Higher ranked species of dragon literally cannot die of old age and never stop growing. My home world is basically a parallel manifestation of a dragon ascended to a greater plane of existence. That could totally be me in a few million years.
Am I ever rewarded for my valuable service to this company? Do I even get an "Atta girl" for going out there and wrestling the match of the night time after time? Hell, even being fucking acknowledged as an appreciated and valued employee would be nice. Give me a gold star for my stunning, perfect attendance record. Fucking something, anything that indicates that someone in ULW management actually gives two short shits about me working my tail off for this company every week.
Because right now I sure as hell don't see it. If I hadn't already vowed to stick with ULW to the bitter end, I'd probably have carted myself over to SCW by now, because fucking seriously there has to be at least one wrestling company in the world that actually treats their employees like actual human being and not disposable action figures.
If I had Willow Wilkes' pwecious widdle feewings, I'd probably be sucking on the barrel of a gun right now over the crushing despair of having to drag Angel Kash kicking and screaming once again to the positive drawing side of international television.
I mean I try to be positive sometimes and not merely slagging on all my opponents all the time, as if they have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I like beating the crap out of Lenore Price-Mason's bloated entourage. Willow Wilkes is singlehandedly keeping her two dozen or so friends fed and sheltered with appearances in her various promos and dragging them onto ULW television. End Effect continues to provide lessons in how to manage social media, by being completely fucking inept at it.
But Angel Kash? There is no fucking reason for Angel Kash to be employed with this company.
There's something called the Sexy Lamp test for female presence in various forms of media. Books, movies, TV, etc. It states "If you can take a woman and replace her with a sexy-looking lamp and basically nothing changes, YOU'RE A FUCKING HACK!"
You can literally replace Angel Kash in three fourths of her appearances with a sexy lamp and a tape recorder of cliched bullshit, and everything would be the same. She still doesn't wrestle her own damn matches, she still cuts the exact same asstastic promo filled with tired, long debunked talking points, and the sex appeal is still there. Hell, get the lamp from A Christmas Story and it'll look more realistic and less plastic and manufactured than Angel fucking Kash.
And you know what? Even as an inanimate object it'd be smarter than Angel. Angel, who has had the shit kicked out of her seven ways from Sunday by me. Who has been close enough to cop a feel and figure out that this is real skin. To use her eyeballs for something more than scoping out text messages and not figuring out how to make her Twitter account not spam announcements about how many bot accounts started following her on social media today, like seeing that there isn't any blue paint rubbing off of me and onto the ring. Or my opponents. Or anything I interact with.
This is a woman who has had SUBZERO TEMPERATURE BRIGHT BLUE FIRE blown in her face, a woman who has been picked up and thrown across the ring by a tail that weighs more than she does, WHO GOT HERSELF COVERED IN A BUCKET FULL OF SLIMY EELS THROUGH TELEPORTATION AND MOTHERFUCKING CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM, and STILL somehow manages to think that I am a fake fucking dragon.
You want unrealistic, think of all the hoops you have to jump through to get me. You'd have to have a prosthetic limb that is basically indistinguishable from real flesh and bone that is a fully functional fifth appendage that no human being has experience with using.
You have to have a wonder of miniaturization, special effects, and BREAKING THE LAWS OF MOTHERFUCKING THERMODYNAMICS in order to get me being able to breath cold fire on demand.
You have to have a real, functional portal gun to be able to do all the puddle-porting shenanigans that I've gotten up to over the past few months.
You have to have the genetic engineering capability to craft A TALKING, CAT-SIZED FLYING DRAGON THAT IS OBSESSED WITH INTERNET MEMES.
You have to have all of this, and someone so gods damned dumb that they'll playing with all this shit to make a character on a middling rank professional wrestling show, a genre of television which in and of itself is a poor gatherer of advertizing revenue and low ratings when compared to say the NFL. That somebody went to all the trouble of inventing this shit rather than making billions of bucks with it, or becoming a gods damned supervillain.
For fuck's sake wide-scale deployment of just cold fire and puddleportation would be a few billions on their own. California drought solved! Floods completely and utterly a thing of the past! Cold fire plants separating hydrogen and oxygen from water and burning it off throws off more cold than heat generated during the process by at least an order of magnitude. Cheap air conditioning in the middle of the desert where solar power is plentiful and quite possibly a way to offset global warming!
Come on! It's completely and utterly ridiculous. The things that one requires to FAKE being me are so unrealistic, obscene, and out of reach of your technologically stunted and magically inept culture that me being A MAGICAL FUCKING DRAGON FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION is actually the simple, logical, and realistic answer.
I'd honestly thought that people in ULW had learned their lesson and sent Angel Kash off to a farm where she could run, play with other professional wrestling embarrassments, and have all the soy low-caf half pumpkin spice half shamrock shake frappe mocha lattes she can drink. Or at least that's what they'd tell the kids, rather than they took her to the vet and put her to fucking sleep.
We had a nice, happy, wonderful month where we had no Angel Kash, where we were bereft of the one and only, singular human being who has never managed to positively affect a segment of ULW television positively in the ratings through her presence.
At least the only one that hasn't been beaten to near death by the other wrestlers or shot out of a cannon into a big net labelled "Unemployment." Mya fucking Denton, the chick I deride for having the worst wrestling matches in the company is better than Angel Kash. And not by a little, by a lot.
With Mya at least you've got the possibility that she's going to try and murderdeathkill somebody with a cattle prod. Usually that somebody being a big huge, Angel Kash-like tremendous bag of suck. Mya Denton is ULW's "You Must Be At Least This Not Shit to Have Continued Employment With This Company" line.
With Angel Kash? What do you have to look forward to with her? Fucking nothing. She's not even a good bad guy. You have to move fucking heaven and earth in order to actually have her wrestle her own gods damned matches, so the fans don't even get the sweet catharsis of seeing people beating the absolute shit out of her cliched, dreck-spewing ass.
Gods, you know what this is?
This is an attempt to make me challenge Lenore Price-Mason to a third fucking match. Because everything Angel Kash does, everything Angel Kash is, every facet of her existence as a professional wrestler, Lenore Price-Mason does better. She does the bitchy company CEO, the ridiculous entourage, the smug "I am awesome and entitled to everything, bow down and worship me!" schtick.
Angel Kash is literally a shittier version of Lenore who is absolutely inferior in each and every way.
And you know what?
I took the superior product, beat her bloody, and was well on my way to breaking her in half before her managed moseyed on down and lobbed in the spankerchief.
Angel doesn't have anybody looking out for her.
Angel isn't anywhere near the caliber of wrestler that Lenore is.
I mauled Lenore Price-Mason, Angel.
So just imagine what I'm going to do to you.
How I am going to make each and every moment out there in the ring with me a symphony of exquisite agony.
I will rip and tear through each and every person you bring out there to protect you, Angel. I'm not going to be satisfied with minions. I am going to get my hands on you and I am going to show you just how real I am.
And do you know what I just might do?
Infect you.
Corrupt you.
Twist you into the monstrous, freakish shape of mine that you so loathe.
It's within my power, Angel.
Probably more dark power than this world has seen in centuries, put forth to fix a little oopsy that happened to someone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. IE standing right next to me.
I'll be making far more of the mutagenic concoction than can be used for the transformation of a single individual. I'll have enough of the stuff to make an army. Or start a collection.
You'll drive yourself into the poorhouse spending your billions on plastic surgery to try and make yourself look human again. And try is all you can do. It'll never take. The draconic form is so much more resilient than you could imagine. It fixes itself perfectly. It's why we dragons age incredibly slowly if we do at all. And even then we keep growing, keep becoming stronger, better. Never sliding into decrepitude like you.
No.
No.
I wouldn't do that to you.
You're not worthy of my gifts. You're not good enough to be something wonderful, powerful, and beautiful like me.
The fate you deserve, Angel, is to be thrown out on your ass. Forced to slither back to that shithole dive of a wrestling federation that you managed to win a title belt in. Knowing forever that you are not worthy of competing in ULW, that everything you are, that everything you do, will always be done better by someone else.
Someone who hasn't even been able to hold a candle to me and my power, my grace, and my majesty.
Get the fuck out of my fed.
You don't belong here.
Because if we ever suddenly manage to magically find ourselves in need of any services you have to offer I'll have a sexy lamp and a tape recorder right here to provide the exact same shit.
And I know I'll get a better quality match by wrestling the motherfucking lamp.
I stomp off the sound stage, having worked myself into an absolute rage. I'm sickened by my treatment, about being brushed aside like an afterthought. I wonder if I would have been better served coming into ULW later, rather than being here at the beginning.
Because let's face it, the ULW faithful have not been treated well. We're overlooked in favor of Shadow Cartel projects like Willow Wilkes and Lenore Price-Mason, overlooked in favor of newcomers to the federation. Eli Legacy gets a shot at a title before I do. Cassandra Mason, who has never wrestled a match in ULW is on her way to getting a shot at a title before I do.
It's infuriating, frustrating, especially knowing that the key to my being able to return home lies in one of those trinkets. The respect and adoration of the fans manifests as raw, real power contained within the metal and leather vessel of the titles. They're symbols, representations of something greater that people believe in.
And that belief is something that I can tap into and utilize to cast spells of power. I'm a ritualist for the most part. I can't fling a fireball worth beans, at least not one that isn't produced somewhere between my lungs and my stomach. The only spells I can cast require precise diagrams, long incantations, and hours of work for some not particularly flashy effects.
I can turn lead into gold, but I can't call down lightning to smite my foes, or heal the sick.
Well, I can, but in a roundabout way.
I grab a water bottle and bite the top off, not bothering to untwist the cap. I chew the plastic noisily and swallow it, washing it down with a big swig of water before spiking the bottle onto the floor.
I call upon the limited, innate magic gifted to me by my draconic bloodline; control over the element of water. I can't do much with it as magicians from my world go, I can make it wiggle and wobble and sometimes I can get it to hover off the ground a little bit before I give myself a headache.
But I can link any two bodies of water that I know of together, making them act as one. It makes for effective teleportation, as I can tie the puddle I just made on the floor to the wading pool I placed in the corner of a warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
The thing was probably made originally for storing hay or raising turkeys or something on an industrial scale. But now it's a wide open space fifty miles from any major city. So if something fucks up in what is probably the most intricate, complex and powerful ritual spellcasting I've ever undertaken nobody is going to get hurt from the blast. Or the resulting ravenous undead.
Those fifty miles are enough to give me a good head start at hunting the critter down, as well as calling in reinforcements. Despite this world being a tremendous ball of suck magically, it does have its share of monsters, magical critters, and sorcerers of varying sorts.
Like Leeland Gaunt and his bound Eidolon Legion. While Gaunt wasn't the one who summoned me to Earth, he did take me off the hands of the rather irksome caster that actually did the deed.
The son of a bitch intended to call the Handmaiden of the Smoking Scythe, the Left Hand of Arimus, the blah blah blah seventeen other long and windy titles, with the intent of having a booty call. He apparently gets his jollies by summoning and binding powerful female spirits and doing the nasty with them.
Mr. Horatio, as I found he was called, came across the ritual in a book that was fished out of the Void, the space between realities. It contained the diagrams and incantations needed to call forth the current wielder of the Hand of Arimus, a sentient necromantic artifact of great power.
Of course I managed to get the damned thing grafted to my own left arm in the process of disarming a particularly unpleasant vampire of her primary offensive weapon. A spell that I jokingly refer to as "Got Yer Blood!" As if the very essence of life were the nose of a small child.
It was with the aid of the Hand, as well as another dark power, that I managed to cobble together a healing ritual. The Manyfold Matriarch is another voice in my head that I accidentally picked up along the way.
If you ever get the urge to pray and promise service to any divine power that will extract you from a particularly unpleasant and possibly deadly situation my advice is spend your energy thinking of a way to extricate yourself from the circumstances without divine aid, or just accepting things and outright dying. Otherwise you might end up sharing brain space with a cannibalistic hydra goddess who managed to consume her followers and her species, leaving her stuck in limbo until a certain blue dragoness muttered a totally unintended prayer in what was once her central temple.
It was the goddess that provided the bones of the ritual, while the undead-controlling gauntlet uncharacteristically provided the meat. Originally the process was meant to create a vat of transformative blood, the ingestion (or possibly plunging the willing minion/victim/subject/guinea pig into, she wasn't quite sure about how to apply the stuff) of which would infuse the subject with draconic essence, resulting in a transformation into a draconic rendition of whatever species the subject happened to be.
The newly created "dragonspawn" would gain features and aspects common to the bloodline of the dragon supplying the blood for the ritual, as well as being mentally and spiritually bound to said dragon.
Strengthen your minions! Enthrall your foes! Be the first in your neighborhood to have a scaly army at your beck and call!
Of course I didn't trust either the Hand or the Matriarch as far as I could throw them (and as one is grafted to me and the other is a non-corporeal entity I can't throw either of them.) But at this point I was too pissed off to care.
Having one of the dumbest people in professional wrestling calling me a hideous freak shouldn't bother me. But I wanted to see what sort of horrible twisting of the ritual and coupling of unholy undead whatsit with the most vile sort of dragon the Matriarch could recall from her memory would result in.
We'd agreed we didn't want yet another water dragon, especially not if my bloodline was going to be involved. I'm… weird. Attempts and magically divining my origins and parentage tends to result in exploded crystal balls, nosebleeds, severe headache, and projectile vomiting.
I tend to soak up ambient and targeted magic like a sponge. Well, more like pouring a cup of water into the grand canyon. I can't use enchanted weapons since I tend to suck 'em dry after a few days. Any magic thrown directly at me also gets sucked into the void harmlessly, which includes both things like lightning bolts as well as helpful things like healing spells.
As a result my magical gear has to be attuned specifically to me, be a font of magical energy that can replenish itself, be a sentient item, or be bound up in a self-contained package (like a healing potion.)
And a lack of healing potions, specifically ones for curing diseases is the reason for the ritual. A bystander managed to get herself infected with a demonic fungal infection called Abyssal Rot that basically ate up every non-essential part of her body, leaving her an agonized wreck that looks pretty much like a zombie.
Thanks to draconic heritage coupled with an Elven bloodline gift rendering me immune to most forms of mundane attack I'm pretty much immune to infections. Be thy viral, bacterial, fungal, or whatever in nature. So I don't carry potions that heal sicknesses. Casters who can fix those things are on every streetcorner where I'm from. Coupled with my puddleporting, help has always been minutes away.
But not here. Not on this magical backwater with ley lines that are the teensiest tinsiest trickles of rainwater in a curbside gutter compared to the raging rivers of home. Mr. Gaunt's the most powerful caster I've seen on this world, and his best thing is making fist-sized fireballs.
Gaunt's looked over the ritual markings I inscribed on the side of a metal vat. I think the thing was used to make chocolate at one point. I welded about a dozen dragon skulls to the side of the thing to provide enough elemental power and to serve as a totem of dragondom as a focus for the ritual.
Toss in a bit of blood, do some chanting, use a bit of power to set the whole thing in motion, and in a few hours you get a few bathtub's worth of transformative dragon blood. Just the thing to serve as an evil empire starter kit.
It's not the ritual where things are going to go screwy. From the combined experience of Gaunt and myself we're pretty sure the curveball is going to come from the blood used in the ritual.
The Hand of Arimus is, as I mentioned, an artifact of necromantic power. Undead stuff, ghosts, zombies, vampires, and shit. And a very useful thing for vampires is basically having blood on demand. It's like I'm carting around Dracula's soda fountain on my arm.
Mixing my blood with that of some other draconic species and coupling that with some other aspects from critters that the Hand's talons have drank from in the past will assure that the ritual doesn't just result in a dried up dragon zombie. But rather a fully functional individual.
There's some therianthrope (were-animal) in there to provide the needed regeneration and form shifting. But I have no idea what what other dragon (or dragons) they're going to be using, and what other things they're going to stick in it.
I could ask and drag out the process until I wormed out each and every little nook and cranny and loophole I could think of. But there's the rub; I can only nail down the bits I know about and can think of to ask about. If I don't ask about it, the Hand and Eleanor (Eleanor Rigby, died in a church and was buried along with her name, it's my nickname for the Matriarch) won't tell me.
And right now I don't care if Claudia ends up so ugly she turns people to stone like a fucking Medusa (Angel Kash and Silas Mason as His and Hers coat racks would be lovely), I just want to get this over and done with so I can see the end result. In the moment I want to know if the transformative blood from the ritual results in something suitable heinous to warrant inflicting on people I don't like.
Yes, transforming people into potentially hideous draconic abominations against their will is not very nice. But neither are the vast majority of the folks I'd love to inflict it on. And as my obedient thralls I could most definitely work on correcting the most unpleasant parts of their personalities as well as eliminating their most annoying behaviors.
I'm picturing a slightly less hideous Raymond der Vaart with a hunchback and me commanding "Book ULW fairly and stop bending over backwards to court non-wrestlers, part timers, and whatever the fuck Cindy Todd is," and he'd cackle, adjust his hump, go "Yeth, Mithreth!" and ULW would stop being such a wretched suckhole. The wrestlers would like it, the fans would like it, I'd like it. The only one who wouldn't like it would be der Vaart, but he willingly choose Scooter as his entry theme, so his opinion doesn't fucking matter.
I draw in a deep breath, crack my knuckles and spread the fingers of my left hand wide. "Let's get to work!"
"Finally! FINALLY you take a step down the path of utilizing me to my full potential!" the Hand says, cackling with glee. "Maybe we could raise..."
"No. No raising skeletal servitors. Or any other servitors for that matter." I say with a sigh. It's like that book "If You Give A Mouse a Cookie," if you let the Hand raise an undead eventually you're going to end up with a zombie holocaust.
"Maybe just a little one? Like a child or something. You can put them in a mascot outfit, stuff them full of polyfill, and have it serve you in the form of some cute character."
"Like I need to give the world more Barney the Dinosaur comparisons. You've done the blood thing before, so play it again, Hand!"
The Hand groans, "You know the line you're mangling doesn't even actually appear in that movie."
"Play it, Hand!" I say, drawing another disgusted sound from the dark artifact as I begin drawing forth the power to begin the ritual.
The end result, however, is a tale for another day.
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