-Promo-
Stop it.
I see you. I can see what you're doing clear as day. And even if I didn't ULW's legion of diehard fans will be sitting there all night refreshing the webpages wanting to be the very first to scoop up a little tidbit of news to twist and warp into a clickbait type headline and be the first to toss it up on one of a thousand wrestling news sites.
I get posted with one match up, and by the time the sun rises over the United States of America in a glorious explosion of guns, baseballs, eagles, apple pie, and 72 ounce gas station soda cups that match has somehow mutated into something else entirely.
See in the dark, wee hours of the morning once again I was put in the main event of FUF. And once again not only would I be facing ULW's champion Willow Wilkes, but I would also have the opportunity to get my hands on that little shit Eli Legacy. Eli and I were originally making the tag team main event a trios event.
But once again I get jerked around and tossed into a random three way match constructed without any regard for rhyme, reason, common sense, a decent build, or any sort of motivation for having it.
I mean last time at least there was the minor footnote of League of Superstars points between me and Colton, and also featuring Cameron "The Dick Pickle" MacNichol. This time we don't even have that.
Oh yes, SUPPOSEDLY it's a RingKing Preview match. But it's basically everyone in the tournament that didn't already have an opponent being treated like the bits of the animals that are left over after you hack off literally everything else that sane people will eat. This match is basically the hot dog of pro wrestling booking.
And it's not a particularly flavorful hot dog either. It's one of those cheap, bland off-brand fuckers you buy in a shrink wrapped plastic… thing. It's not a box, it's not a bag, it's not a package. It's vacuum sealed so that when you hack it open with scissors not only does greasy Limp Bizkit hot-dog flavored water splash all over everything, but then those dogs dry the fuck out because you can't close the package.
Hope you like eating weiners, because you'll need to finish all 43 of those fuckers off before they go bad. Why 43? Because they're in cahoots with the bun makers and want to assure that no matter what combination of packs of 10 and packs of 8 buns, you'll never have exactly the right amount. You'll always have one weiner going commando or slumming it on a slice of bread rolled up to fake being a hot dog bun.
But I'm pretty sure that Raymond der Vaart just LOVES eating leftover weiners. Hell, he loves eating leftovers in general. He loves eating, full stop. So he just throws together random shit like this after the initial card gets put together just to fuck with me.
This is another one of those "You know, I'm totally not a racist, but oh noes, Kalinda is pissy, evil, and totally a destructive animalistic beast! Calling somebody an inhuman bestial monstrosity is totally a not-racist thing to say. I swear down to my Nathan Bedford Forrest Underoos!" things.
Every time someone does something to me on ULW TV that results in me getting REALLY upset, magically I find myself pulled out of matches with ULW's World Champion, and get stuffed into three ways with expendable targets.
Some blogess, which interestingly enough is the Dwarven term for an aggressive, ambulatory strain of slime mold, got her face chewed up on the last show, and despite the half dozen people in ULW history who have expressed cannibalistic tendencies, I'm getting the blame shoveled on me.
It's a shame. After all, it's not like I've seen a hundreds of bite wounds from dozens of different creatures in my experience as an adventurer, bounty hunter, and general kicker of monstrous asses. If someone would be so kind as to ask me, I could tell you a great deal about what sort of scary, fiendish beastie attacked Amber Kendrix.
I could tell you about how big it was, how wide its jaws could open, what its likely diet is based on the wounds the teeth made, and if you're going to have to lock Amber up when the moon gets full.
Which is stupid, by the way. Therianthropes where I come from are tied to one of the moons, sure. But it's always when a specific one of the three greater moons that aren't in ascended orbit is directly overhead. And that only happens once every nine day week. In the middle of it. And that particular moon is the representative celestial object of a goddess of corruption, mutation, depravity, and all sorts of general ickiness. It's simple, easy, logical, and with all the dangerous beasties rampaging around it gives everyone a much needed day off in the middle of the work week.
Slaving away in your little office cubicles or having to be constantly reminded that hell is other people by working in the retail or service industries would be so much better if you only had to wait three days, tops, before you got some time to rest up, recuperate, and let your faith in your fellow man grow back from where it was worn down by people shouting "THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!"
That was an advertising slogan, by the by, and the guy that made it had his company yanked out from under him, went bankrupt, and died penniless and insane. It would be like basing one of your biggest life events on some diamond company's ad campaign insisting that a proper wedding ring ought to cost two months' salary.
Oh. Wait.
You guys do that too.
In 100 years there are going to be some of you fuckers that subsist solely on Bagel Bites because the ad campaign said "Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza at suppertime" and you asshats took it literally.
Anyway, how the FUCK does that whole full moon thing work? You have the same, stupid, boring moon in the sky all the time, with the same bit pointed at your ridiculous ball-shaped planet. It doesn't even generate its own light, it's all reflected sunlight.
Are you trying to tell me that your silly, magic-dry backwater of a crapsack world well on its way to being a corporation run, overheated by pollution, dystopian hellhole has phase state changing shapeshifters whose form triggers are so sensitive that they go off based on… what? A particular property inherent to the lunar regolith? Do you know how stupid that sounds? That your werewolves are powered by dust.
It's almost as bad as your decidedly not-dead sparkling vampires.
And speaking of sinister concepts and ideas reduced to a ridiculous, impotent laughing stock and butt of a thousand late night television jokes, hello again, Priesty-Poos.
Guess what? You listened to too much Tenga Toppa Gurren Lagann theme music, decided to fight the powah, and chokeslammed that skidmarked shitbeard Brandon Vow, and guess what your reward is?
The Fart farts you right into a match with me. Me. The person he believes is an unstable, immoral, face-biting killing machine who has become so unhinged that she's started gnawing on random members of the roster, and decided to start with the ones that nobody would miss.
I mean that's the first sign that it isn't me. Because if I started snacking on members of the ULW roster I'd start with the ones that are actually on the show and make other people's live unpleasant.
Then again I am Dwarven, which seems to have pick and mix features from Gaelic, Germanic, and Scandinavian cultures. So you figure that I might have some sort of fondness for weird, gross foods. Like lutefisk or hákarl, which is basically rotten, fermented poisonous shark meat.
So when I was denied the ability to chew on some fermented, poo-covered, pink-eye causing shitbeard that had been marinating in an Everglades swamp for fuck knows how long, apparently I decided to just nosh on whoever was handy after Vow got taken out of the picture.
And I suppose if that were the case that der Vaart would have a reason for me fighting Priest. After all I don't come down to The Devil's Wafflehouse and smack the snickerdoodles off of Priesty-Poos' plate.
But I didn't attack Amber Kendrix, and if other people want to beat the living fuck out of Brandon Vow and leave him lying in a pool of his own cooling blood on a nice, comfy concrete floor, I'm going to be thrilled. That dickweed deserves any and every beating that he gets, and if someone wants to break him into a bajillion little pieces so that he's never seen or heard from in ULW again, I'm not going to shed any tears.
Hell, I'll buy that person a drink. Or a pizza. Or a pizza-drink. I'm not one of those egomaniacal douche canoes that thinks everything belongs to them and would be "RRAAAAARGH HOW DARE YOU KICK BRANDON VOW'S ASS?! THE RIGHT TO DESTROY THIS MAN BELONGS SOLELY TO ME!" Because seriously, I'm not some sort of cackling mad, mustache twirling supervillain here.
And speaking of cackling mad, mustache twirling, puppy kicking, baby eating supervillains…
Seriously. Cindy Todd's already kicked the ever-loving shit out of Doc Gracie. Tossing her into the ring with a rabid, face-eating, skull-gnawing dragoness? Not cool, brah. I think der Vaart has a misery boner. I mean it DOES explain all the people with weepy sad sack backstories that end up here, after all. "Mmm, those tears! That frown! So hot! Fap fap fap!"
And even then this is a pretty serious mismatch. I think one of Priest's legs outweighs Doc Gracie. If you lopped off one of my arms and my tail, you'd have enough material to build two Doc Gracies. Blue ones, but the point still stands.
If Priest and I charge one another at the pace of a brisk walk and Gracie somehow ends up between the two of us, that's going to be it for her. It's like two full tanker trucks slamming head on to one another with a Smart Car stuck at ground zero.
If Priest and I cooperated and got a running start, I'm pretty sure we could probably chuck Gracie from the ring all the way up to the second balcony. I'm like four and a half times Gracie's size. This match is over the moment I can throw Priest out of the ring and sit on the good Doctor.
I'd say it's like a child made to wrestle two grown men, but I've seen middle schoolers that are bigger than Doc Gracie. I'm pretty sure we only signed her to the roster in the first place because if action figures got made of her they could be advertized as fun sized. Hell, if you're when ULW has an advertising deal with a cereal company you might actually find Doc Gracie in a box of Sugar Scabs as the prize.
Oh, sorry, you call 'em Frosted Flakes here. It's unpleasant having to wake up every morning with my favorite cereal, only to find the box adorned with a tiger version of Purple Aki, being waaaaay too interested in children's athletics.
Many a young adventurer got their very first dagger as a prize in a box of Sugar Scabs, gifted by Cap'n Fenleech himself, the one-eyed goblin pirate mascot, for use in fighting the never ending horde of the Snotties. Terrible things, snotties, they're hybrids of the two worst, most common, bog-standard monsters; bats and slimes. And they're always out to steal the balanced breakfasts of small children everywhere. Of course you guys have a toned down, far less interesting version, but he's on the wrong cereal! Bloody Cap'n Crunch…
Goddess below, I miss home, where everything makes sense and the brands are familiar. Where you can root out the dark heart at the core of a shadowy cabal, rip his heart out of his chest and rightfully be heralded as a hero doing a great service to the world. Where you can go be paid to go into a cave full of goblins and find a fuckton of goblins to fight, instead of being told there would be goblins and finding that your employer has changed their mind and that you will now be fighting kobolds, or spiders, or goddamned bats. Or spider-bat kobolds.
It's the downside of having a nice, polite, civilized modern technological society. You can't just go up to the little bald fat man fucking around with your life and challenge him in a fight to the death so that you can finally have a pleasant workplace experience and everything will be happiness and sunshine and rainbows.
There's some more proof that I'm not behind the attack on Amber Kendrix. If I wanted to hurt someone, really, REALLY hurt someone, I'd be starting with Raymond der Vaart. And depending on how things in ULW progressed, I might very well stop right there.
But then again if we ended up with another gleefully despicable and vile overlord intent on making his hardest workers miserable, I'd probably end up tearing chunks out of his face too. And the next one. And the next one. Until someone stepped into place that wasn't an unrepentant chucklefuck.
And do you know what? Maybe that's exactly what I have to do to make ULW a better place for everyone. Simply assault the little bald fat man in the suit and tie who cowers in fear behind the banner of civility and society.
A nasty, horrible little man whose edicts end up making so many people miserable.
And with each week that goes by I find myself tempted more and more.
I was offered a chance to get my hands on Eli Legacy, a chance that was stolen away from me hours later. I don't doubt that Eli did come down with a virus. All that being buddy buddy with Brandon Vow and cozying up with that filth-infested beard of his? Yeah, Legacy's probably got pink eye. That's what happens when you do the Crows secret handshake and super mega awesome Brandon Vow and Eli Legacy BFF's high five and then don't bother to wash your hands afterwards.
Because Vow never does.
Yeah, that's right. Eli Legacy's got one eye oozing grossness and probably cemented shut by dried mucus because Brandow Vow doesn't maintain standards of hygiene. Brandon Vow doesn't wash his hands after he poops, even if he shits on them. And then he strokes that pubic thatch he calls a beard.
I've wrestled him twice now and I can tell you that he is a stinky, stinky individual. I know my draconic blood makes my immune system all wonky and basically uninhabitable to pretty much anything mundanely viral or bacterial. But let me tell you, after each match I had I went and scrubbed myself from head to toe with bleach and then with soap. I even made sure to lather up my mouth, just in case I inhaled some Brandon Vow poo-particles and had them settle on my tongue.
The very thought just makes me shiver in disgust. Bleeeeergh.
I for one believe that we ought to adhere to minimum standard of cleanliness with regards to the wrestlers. Brandon Vow and Cameron MacNichol are our habitual offenders to the olfactory senses here in ULW.
Let me add that to the list of things I want. Fair and balanced treatment for all wrestlers in ULW. Minimum codes of hygiene and cleanliness. A magic portal to a world beyond the reach of modern technology and this backwater burg's limited magic. And hell, let's throw in world peace and a flying pink unicorn stallion to be the perfect boyfriend while I'm at it, wishing for impossible things.
But I do have a smile on my face these days, since I know something that nobody else does. I'm not going to spill the beans on this, but let's just say that as of today ULW is going to be a bit more interesting and a lot more batshit insane.
And my face won't be the only one that's smiling.
Because in the end I know who's going to have the last laugh.
-CD-
I wait for the little red light to go off on the camera before reaching up above my head, just out of the camera's view and grab myself a handful of multicolored hair, giving it a yank.
Claudia is promptly dislodged from her upside down perch where she's been making faces at me throughout the whole of the taping trying to get me to crack up. Her behavior has become somewhat obnoxious since the night of her transformation, but I suppose having a metric fuckton of memories that aren't yours dumped into your noggin will do that.
Honestly, between the dragonspawn ritual, having Spark and the Matriarch getting stuffed into her head, and spending a couple of months as basically a ghost I'm surprised Claudia's come out as sane as she is.
She's shot up a good six or seven inches in height, had her build thicken a bit to where it rests between her original frame and mine, and seems to have made out like a bandit in the bust department.
Then again neither of us has really been all that interested in basically being mobbed by curious onlookers while shopping, and it's not like you can get clothes fitted over the internet. So she's taken to getting most of her casual wardrobe the same place I get mine: from dusty old boxes of unsold ULW merchandise sitting in an old warehouse.
I'm cheap and I'm lazy. You don't attain a hoard big enough to sleep on by freely tossing away your comfy, delicious monies, after all. And to be perfectly honest most of the shirts look a lot better with the lower 2/3rds hacked off. That's usually where the pictures of the butt ugly wrestlers are just leaving the text and whatever hideous thing they've put on the back.
Because I swear that all pro wrestling graphics designers are required by law to make a cool design on the front, and then put something ugly, stupid, or obnoxious on the back to give you second thoughts about wearing the damned thing in public.
Claudia looks up at me with her orange eyes and grins. "Almost got ya, boss lady!" she says with a giggle.
"No you didn't. I was totally stone faced the entire time up until the end when I was talking about you. And then I was smiling on purpose."
Though she did specify no clowns for her transformation, she's ended up one anyway. I'm not sure what bits came from what, as I have no idea how many little bits and pieces my two supervillainous headmates decided to splice into my very first proper henchman, but she's ended up with chalk white skin and a big skull-like facial marking the color of old bone.
Because that's basically what it is. I'm not sure what exactly it's made out of, bone, scale, keratin, or something else entirely, but with her full draconic power made manifest Claudia's face is covered by a hard, bone-like mask.
"Channeling my inner WrestleMania 9 Brutus Beefcake to your Hulk Hogan, boss!" Claudia says happily, reading my thoughts.
That's something I'm going to have to get used to as well. The dragonspawn ritual is meant to make perfectly loyal, obedient, competent minions. They're linked to their draconic overlord mind, body, and soul. Well, not connected body to body like some perverse conjoined twin, but they gain the draconic features of their master.
I'm not sure what exactly she got from me and what she got from the other dragon (or possibly dragons) that the Matriarch tossed into the mix so that we could have a diverse dragon population. Not putting our eggs in one elemental basket, as it were.
So she gets a running feed of my surface thoughts, and if I concentrate not only can I do the same thing, but I can also basically use her as a remote sensor platform, seeing what she sees, hearing what she hears. If I really put my mind to it I could probably do taste, touch, and smell on top of all that. But I haven't wanted to. Especially considering what's been in her mouth recently.
"So did you chomp on Amber Kendrix for a reason or were you just having a little rumbly in your tumbly?" I say to my pet creepy clown.
"Well..." she says, trying to look innocent and failing miserably, "I figured that it'd be quicker to just suck out her fighting experience and take it for myself then spend FOR EVARZ learning it myself."
"And it's not like she was using it for anything. She's totes enhancement talent. And ULW's going to be paying her bills since it happened on the job. They'll probably chalk up the loss to brain trauma. All those concussions can really pile up and do a number on the ol thinkin' apparatus, don'tcha know?"
I scowl. "Am I going to have to follow you around with a squirt bottle going "No, bad clown! Put them memories down, drop 'em! Drop 'em!""
Claudia giggles, creepily of course, "Well I don't think I'm just going to go around with a straw sucking memories out of people's heads for no good reason. My noodle's already got a mishmash of who knows how many peoples up there already. There's me, you, Spark, Kitty, Pansy, Aria, the Hand, and a few hundred assorted scraps and tidbits from Our Lady of the Eternal Rumbly Tumbly."
She's picked up a few phrases from me and a hell of a lot of them from Spark, and it kind of works both ways, so I've found myself absentmindedly adopting a few of her own terms. Like the Winnie the Pooh-esque "rumbly tumbly."
Back home I've been dubbed the adventurer analog to an aircraft carrier. Usually somebody has one, or at most two soulbound critters. I've got so many that I have to sit down and think about it to remember exactly how many.
There's Spark, my chatterbox lightning elemental muse. A muse is a spirit of knowledge, meant to pass experiences from host to host. It just so happens that my muse is damaged goods because one time he accidentally the whole internet, leaving him mostly good for snark, memes, and pop culture references.
There's Dragon Kitty, my Bestial Companion, who is basically a large, furry mack truck with mole claws and a big goofy face. He's about as bright as a sack full of retarded puppies, but he does have a certain canine charm. Yes, he's a mix of wolf or dragon and named Kitty. I was four years old and was given a fuzzy purring thing with pointy ears. That made it a kitty and the name stuck before I realized that I'd made a mistake.
There's Pansy, my familiar, who is supposed to help me with matters of spellcasting and mana generation. The problem is that due to circumstances involving me not getting a whole lot of sleepy and Pansy and Kitty fighting, I kind of messed up the ritual and got things backwards. Technically I'm HIS familiar, and oddly enough it works.
As a full on dragon with ties to one of the divine bloodlines I'm basically a walking ley line, and as a faerie dragon Pansy is actually a whole hell of a lot more magically talented than I am. I can do ritual magic, but I can't cast properly for beans.
Aria's my Mighty Steed. She actually is a dragon kitty, and I can remember when I brought her back to the bar contained entirely in a shoebox. I'd spent the better part of a week trying to coax her out of my woodpile and long story short someone not very nice attempted to pull the whole kittens in a bag thing with her.
Oh, she's a three-headed hydra about the size of a small pony. So until Kitty stuck his nose into the shoebox and ended up with a multi headed midget beastie attached to his snoot, I thought I had a litter of dragon cats rather than just one.
I've also got a magic sword that I don't use very often because despite being seven feet of flaming metal, she's also the quintessential nagging Jewish mother type with a voice that sounds like someone's been smoking three packs a day and gargling with broken glass and gravel. Imagine being nagged by Harvey Fierstein about how you don't go out adventuring often enough with your dear Auntie and if it's because I'm ashamed of her weight, oh how she used to be a slim, lithe little rapier back in the day and so on and so forth.
I seem to be a magnet for artifacts with attitude problems as I also accidentally ended up with the Hand of Arimus grafted to my arm. The damned thing is intent on making me into one of those cackling mad, mustache twirling, Soon I Will Be Invincible type Evil Overlords.
Add in Eleanor Rigby aka Miss Hissy aka the Manyfold Matriarch, a cannibalistic dragon goddess who ate herself out of house, home, species, and devotees, and that brings my original load to a nice mystical seven.
Claudia makes for eight now and I find myself hoping that I don't manage to pick up any more assorted spiritual hangers on for oh, another couple decades yet. It's already difficult maintaining the menagerie I've got and still remaining relatively sane.
Relatively.
"You were mentally monologuing, boss lady." Claudia says pleasantly.
"Shit." I mutter to myself. I have all of the pleasant bits of the menagerie on lookout for any pending signs of my descent into tying damsels to the railroad tracks type villainy. Monologuing is one of the early warning signs.
"Ehh, I think you're just got a robust mental narrative going."
"No!" I wave a scolding finger, "Do not start with SPIDER's claptrap about narratives and causality and evil Invasive Eyes of Motherfucking Doom."
"DOOOOOOOM." Claudia intones, "With seven O's."
I just glare. Considering the company I keep I'm surprised I'm not a cackling loon already.
"Look, just don't go around eating other people's mind for no good reason, okay? Can you at least do that for me?"
"Sure, boss!" Claudia says with saccharine sweetness.
"Claudia, I can bloody well feel that you have your fingers crossed." I say, pinching the bridge of my nose.
"Phooey!" she says, sticking her tongue out at me. A good foot or so of long, black forked tongue.
"Can you at least promise me that you're not going to go around and try to make yourself Junior Matriarch by slurping up as many brains as possible in hopes of making yourself some powerful, all-knowing… knower?" I close my eyes and shake my head.
"Slurp ALL the knowledge!" Claudia says happily, having acquired a broom from somewhere in the brief span of time that my eyes were closed.
She's started doing things like that, and it's rather unsettling at times. It's like she's some sort of living, breathing cartoon character.
I hope she doesn't start breaking out the anvils.
"No promises there, boss lady!" she says with a giggle, "Totally no promises!"
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