When you're thrown into a casket, locked in, and set on fire oddly enough you end up with quite a bit of time to think about things before it gets really uncomfortable. It isn't the flames that end up doing the damage, but rather the heat.
If it had been a nice, pleasant pine box I would've been good. I could've punched through that sucker like tissue paper. It would've taken forever to burn. Think of how long it takes for logs on a fire to burn all the way through. Your average casket's got a good inch or so of wood between you and the outside world, and wood is a shitty conductor. Like Southeastern levels of shitty conductors.
But I wasn't in a nice, pleasant pine box filled with silken padded pillows and cushions intended to make the journey from living critter to a skeleton lying in a slurry of your liquified tissue as comfortable as possible.
I was in a nasty metal lockbox designed with the express purpose of boiling me like a lobster. I can bite through steel, but a bunch of flat surfaces gave me precisely zero angles to get in on the action.
Punching through the thing was out as well. I cursed myself for never learning the secret of the famed Bruce Lee One Inch Punch. The enclosed environment made for zero leverage when it came to punching.
I tucked my arms against my chest and just barely managed to roll myself over in the confined space. With my arms beneath me I managed to push with my arms and legs in order to make the bulk of the pressure go up into the hinged bit that was meant to open, instead of down into the slab of base metal not meant to do anything aside from keep the worms away.
A minute or two of solid work, and I'd snap the locks and be freed from my prison, upon which I was going to kick the ever-loving shit out of Brandon Vow, his shitty little cult, and especially his shitty, shitty, fecal-matter filled beard.
That was when I really started to feel the heat coming through. Metal didn't burn, but the plastic, fake-wood veneer they'd wrapped this damn thing in sure did a good job. With the UK's air pollution statutes, I was hoping that the nasty plastic shit they'd wrapped my erstwhile tomb in was throwing off tons and tons of noxious black smoke and that somebody was going to be smacked with a big governmental willy, and also a hefty fine courtesy of DERFA.
A bunch of lighter fluid wasn't going to do much more than turn the inside of a metal box into a slightly toasty sauna, give me an urge to beat myself with birch twigs, and fling myself into the snow like a deranged Finn.
But the plastic chemical fake wood that likely hadn't even thought about being a tree in a few hundred million years would be enough to turn my prison into an oven.
That was about when my hair caught fire.
Perkele, as the Finns would say.
Opposing elements did serious damage when you were a being whose body contained an incredible amount of opposing energy. As a young Ice dragon adventurer, I'd asked a high ranking member of the Faerie courts to enchant me against the fearsome flames as a reward for performing a quest.
The traditionalist bitch really didn't like the fact that I wasn't a shy, demure little spellcasting princess with a pansy-ass magical staff. In fact as a six and a half foot dreadnaught who liked to beat the living fuck out of everything up close and personal, I was the exact opposite of her fairy tale traditions; she made fucking sure I wasn't going to live happily ever after.
So I got my immunity to fire, alright. It wasn't going to hurt me, but I was prone to catching on fire. If things got hot enough it would start burning out my natural coloration, going from blue and red to princess pink and bimbo blonde.
And if I let the blaze go long enough, it'd rearrange a few organs and then rearrange basically my everything.
I wasn't always a seven foot specimen of draconic supremacy. Dragonblood augmentations don't tend to start kicking in until adulthood, so I was an itty bitty five foot nothing until puberty tapered off and DRAGON PUBERTY GRAWR kicked in. Yes, the grawr is necessary.
Growing up around a bunch of cat-totem elves with kitty parts, I kind of had a complex about my height, and their damned digitigrade legs on top of being taller than me to begin with really, really sucked. Cheating-ass elves.
It was when the dragonblood kicked in and went "Okay, you're not going to be a mere mortal any more. Time to start looking like a right and proper fearsome elemental engine of carnage" that I went from a 98 pound weakling to Charles Atlas strong.
Only problem is that all that's solid Ice energy. So kicking me over to elemental fire is basically a reset button on my growth spurt.
I do not want to be a tiny, pink, fun-sized Kalinda. All this pro wrestling shit is difficult enough being a gods-damned towering titan.
So that means getting out before I shrink in the dryer.
The locks don't budge, and being literally on fire is not helping.
Of course as a dragon I can breathe fire. How stereotypical, Kal, way to adhere to the expectations of society. Ppppbth.
But my fire is blue, and it violates the laws of physics.
Instead of spewing some immensely cold liquid nitrogen shit like most cold dragons do, I've got a bit of elemental Void in the mix, which makes impossible things happen. Like having blue fire that functions exactly like the normal sort, except that instead of heat, it pours off cold.
It made me very popular in the more traditional areas back home where they didn't have wondrous technologies from other worlds, and thus no refrigeration or, gasp, horror, air conditioning.
Of course the problem is that it behaves EXACTLY like plain old fire, except in new, brilliant wintergreen flavor. Including the part where it sucks up oxygen.
So while I'm in no danger of doing anything but turning into a midget at the moment, using my breath weapon to try and escape just might suffocate me.
And then the burning decides to spread from my hair to my back and I realize that it's sucking up the oxygen anyway.
Fuck this. If I'm going to asphyxiate in a box, it's going to be because of my own stupidity and not because of a fucking pixie-winged Stepford wife and the Johnny Appleseed of pink eye.
My flame does indeed suck all the oxygen out of the air, but it also sucks out all the moisture. I've got a spot right below me where the water's condensed and frozen into a frosty film.
I reach out with my gift, my command over elemental ice and water allowing me to link pretty much any given bit of water to any other given bit of water. Think Portal, but with water and ice instead of lunar regolith and paint derived thereof.
Vowing to burn down Brandon Vow's church with the damned lemons, I link my little patch of ice to a body of water that is kept topped off for just such an occasion. It's not a big enough portal to fit me, but I'm not interested in moving me at the moment.
I've opened my portal on the bottom of somebody's hot tub, and gravity takes hold and pushes the water down in the brand new hole I've opened. The water pressure overcomes the gravity on the opposite side, and the inside of the casket is now steamy and sizzling as water sprays off of me and splatters on the roof of my former tomb.
A second or two and I've got enough water to fill the whole bottom of the casket and without wasting a moment I do so, pulling myself through to the other side.
I'm sopping wet, frozen on one side, charred on the other, got a solid line of blonde and pink down my back where I was trying shoving the lid of the casket, and wrestled more matches in one night than the ULW Tag Team Championships have had title matches.
I flop against the side of the hot tub and just cling there for a moment, catching my breath, just imagining the horrible, horrible things that I am going to do to Vow and his feeble henchmen.
But I'm going to have to take some time off to do it, because there is no way I'm stepping into a ring with a big pink stripe down my back.
I got blasted in the face with a fireball a few months ago, and had been wearing a little Phantom of the Opera number to hide my garish, disgustingly girly disfigurement. It had just about half healed, though my hair was a total loss. Hair's not active tissue, you grow more at the bottom. So I was stuck with a streak unless I wanted to hack it off or try and find a suitable dye.
Fixing my current damage would take for fucking ever on this magic-dead little backwater shithole of a world. I couldn't try and drown out the heat energy I'd soaked up with raw cold, or my own coldfire. It'd be like trying to raise a river by scooping it out with a bucket and pouring it back in.
A source of raw magical cold would be best, but the ley lines on this burg were pathetic. As a dragon, the most innately powerful of all elemental creatures, I was basically a walking ley line. And with only a scant decade or so into DRACONIC PUBERTY GRAWR I was still brushing up against the top 25 or so fonts of elemental energy on the planet.
On the bright side, I could settle for second best. I knew exactly where I could find an energy-devouring artifact of suitable power. As a matter of fact it was just in the next room.
Of course convincing its owner to let me try it on would be easy. It was the part making sure the pants-wettingly strong entity inside didn't devour me mind, body, and soul that worried me.
I stepped out from the bathroom into Leeland Gaunt's office dripping wet, completely soaked from head to toe. The red suited mage turned off the TV, where that shitlord Vow and his cronies were celebrating. He actually lowered his sunglasses every so slightly and peered over them to get a better look at my rather singed, drowned rat appearance.
Gaunt just gestures at one of the chairs across from his desk, one of which has been covered with a tarp to prevent certain soggy dragonesses from ruining the upholstery with their dampness.
"You're looking particularly pink and blonde today, Ms. Kriegsdottir." he says with a smirk. I just let out a sigh of disgust and turn around, letting him see the full extent of the damage.
"So how bad is it doc? Will I ever play the piano like a grand maestro? I haven't even had time to get a good look at the damage myself." I say, trying to look over one shoulder.
"You've got yourself a pretty solid prissy skunk streak straight down your back and tail, blossoming out to a pair of butterfly wings on your shoulders."
A growl and a punch to the rather sturdily constructed fireplace in the middle of the room, where the Fist of the Legion sits in the midst of a bowl that eternally fills with oil, and thus eternally burns with the decidedly Flame elemental gauntlet stuck right in the middle of it.
I stamp across the room to the creepy bronze mirror adorning one wall. Instead of my reflection I find a veil of mist with eight glowing red eyes peering out at me with narrowed interest. I give the creature a prompt "Fuck off" and headbutt the mirror, giving it added incentive to get lost.
I scare the ectoplasm out of incorporeal critters around here. There's something in my excessively weird family tree that means that I can reach out and touch spirits. Usually with my fists. It could be the same thing that throws off magical targeting when I'm involved, or it could be related to something in my elven or dragon heritages.
I don't know, ever sorcerous attempt to seriously study my bloodline in depth tends to make things explode. Usually scrying devices like bowls of water or crystal balls, but one particularly haughty blood magus figured he was too good to take precautions and had his head explode. I showed up dressed for that as if I were going to a Gallagher show, raincoat, hat, umbrella and all. I hope his apprentices kept a goodly supply of club soda on hand to help with that.
"Damn it," I growl, "My back looks like somebody laid down a fucking Summertime Barbie Slip 'n Slide."
"So shall I tell Mr. Hush to break out the spandex and warm up the sewing machine? I think he's gone so far as to purchase and airbrush so he can make an effective Giant Gonzales cosplay. I'm sure he'd like to get some practice on making you a you-colored bodysuit with muscle lines and such." Gaunt says, still smirking.
"I wouldn't let him anywhere near me. He'll make a color swapped version for me complete with fluffy red armpits, and a massive, bushy fire engine hued pubic thatch. No thanks." I say with a sigh, slumping down into the tarp-protected chair.
"In actuality I'm not going to be wrestling for awhile. The transition between ice and flame leaves the whole area tender and sore for a week. And then the temperature differential is going to kick in and I'm going to start having hot and cold flashes, sweats, and eventually muscle spasms."
I reach up and pull the mask off my face. "That's why I've been wearing this on air. My face goes all twitchy every so often."
Gaunt's smirk goes away, and he looks actually concerned. "I wasn't aware that it actually damaged you."
"It doesn't. I'm perfectly capable of making the problem go away. It's just that it involves completely engulfing myself into a hellish conflagration and coming out entirely pink, blonde, and looking like Silas Mason's Bimbo Factory went and put out a new line for the millionaire fur-vert demographic."
Gaunt just stares at me blankly.
"Portmanteau of furry and pervert. Ask Mr. Hush."
The mage makes a disgusted face, "If that's the case, I think I will continue to be safer if I maintain my ignorance. I made the mistake this morning of asking what "waffle-stomping" meant. I tell you human beings are absolutely disgusting and that the act had nothing to do at all with crisp, delicious, gridded breakfast cakes."
"That's where you…"
"DON'T REMIND ME!" shrieks Gaunt, throwing his arms up in front of his face as if to shield himself from the horrific image of the act of shitting it the shower and smashing it down the drain.
Spark told me the term once, and if I have to live with the unpleasant burden of the knowledge, so do you. So nyah.
"Unless I can basically find that…" I cock a thumb at the enclosure protecting one of the top ten magical artifacts this world has to offer, "...in Cool Ranch flavor, I'm either going to be out for a year, or I'm going to have to borrow that damned thing and have it suck up all the elemental fire floating around my system right now."
Gaunt is silent for a moment, which doesn't happen often. "You do realize that putting that thing on means that you are inviting the Legion entity to use you as a host, and in doing so you basically commit your immortal soul to being slowly devoured over decades, individuality stripped away until you simply become another voice in the chorus."
I hold up my left hand, palm up, and call up a little illusion of a bunch of derp-eyed snakes writhing and twisting over one another. "I've already got a goddess and another moody-ass gauntlet that already have claims."
More silence from Gaunt, this may be a world record.
"Ms. Kriegsdottir, I do believe you told me, and I quote "That I cannot cast spells for crap.""
Fuck.
"I used to be able to, but with this damned thing stuck on my arm I'm no longer in complete control of my spellcasting abilities. This damned thing is capable of altering anything I cast that doesn't come purely from internal mana stores. Meaning if I do anything but my ice water dragon schtick, this thing dictates how that goes."
"Blowing up an entire orphanage when you were aiming to swat the birds shitting all over your picnic pavilion is enough to make anybody hang up the robe and wizard hat."
It wasn't an orphanage, but I did end up chucking a massively overpowered fireball that detonated when some tengu were trying to raid an outdoor gathering that I happened to be catering.
"I've never worn a robe and wizard hat, and I'm a wizard." Gaunt says, trying to sift the truth from the snark.
"Yes, and you are an absolutely shitty wizard. We're approaching two years since I got summoned to this mage-dead backwater of a stupid ball-world and my best shot at getting home was discovered entirely by me finding out that you people have accidentally made pro wrestling titles that function as effective mana batteries."
Gaunt smiles, "My dear, this room is perhaps the most well warded in the entire world. With what you've just done, it makes me wonder why you feel you even need my help at all. Rather than draw upon this world's rather lacking magical capacity, the Hand of Arimus just took a sip from that limitless font of magical power that you sport as a dragon, turned it into another sort of energy entirely, and cast a creation of light and air from what ought to have made several chunks of ice fall through the air."
Fuck. Being beaten to shit and set on fire makes me lazy in hiding secrets of magic from backwater hillbilly mages who on a cosmic scale are not even out of the "Hold my beer and watch this" stage of figuring out sorcery.
"It's like those ridiculous things you hear about on the news about cars running on water. No, they're not using water as a fuel, what they're using is electrically separated hydrogen and oxygen and using THAT as a fuel. You don't get more energy out of that than you put in. You're using the hydrogen as a battery. You might as well just skip the hydrogen and use an actual battery."
"You don't pour water into a car and make it go; that would be like carting around an entire oil refinery on your car to pour crude oil in one end. You're carting around a hell of a lot of extra weight for no ebenfit. If you insist on using things that way, you're better served parting the hydrogen generator from the car and using the hydrogen fuel cell like a sane person."
"But then you can't claim on the local 5 o'clock news that you made a car run on water. Because you aren't filling up the car with water. But then again you've never been running the car on water in the first place."
The shitty wizard just stares blankly at me, "Explain it like I'm someone that knows fuck all about cars due to having a chauffeur my entire life."
"Sure. You're building a skyscraper and you have the choice. One, wait a month to order the right screws and braces to hold the floor beams together and have your best foreman get out of the hospital after eating at Chipotle and having his ass turn into a geyser of blood and shit. Or two, use a bunch of Chinese knocks offs from the people that that brought you stinky, sulfurous drywall, and put together by the vice president of the company's cross-eyed, mentally retarded nephew who only has five fingers and is referred by my everyone as Stumpy."
"Sure, you can get it done right now and for a while everything might just be okay. But there's also a pretty good chance that something is going to fail catastrophically, and it's a matter of when and not if."
More blank stares.
"Okay picture if when Mr. Hush cooks your meals he used water instead of milk, high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar, ketchup instead of tomato-basil sauce, and all cheese was replaced with Wal-Mart Brand 100 Real Imitation Cheez-flavored Wood Pulp."
Gaunt shudders, "My god, the horror."
"Exactly. I want the real deal if I'm doing something as dangerous and suicidal as tearing a hole in reality and hurling myself through it. Thankfully I have a test subject who is virtually indestructible and that I've already proved I can call across dimensional boundaries."
"Your cat-wolf-dragon thing. Don't summon him here. Last time he systematically hunted down Mr. Hush while he was mowing the lawn, pounced on him, ripped the battery out of the lawn tractor, and devoured it in three big, messy bites." Gaunt says with an annoyed sniff.
"The heart of his kill, he calls it."
"So what sort of mana is needed to create a portal?"
"Void mana, of course. The stuff from between realities. The problem is that's pretty much the rarest sort around here. If it violates the laws of physics there's bound to be some Void mana in it. There's just the tiniest bit in my breath weapon, but I'd have to have half of California burning to fuel it."
I shake my head, "Undead'll generate it, and I can drain it out of them. But I'd need either one massively powerful, ancient immortal being who has had millenia to shore up defenses, take combat training, acquire a cult, and experience the wonders of compound interest coupled with an infinite lifespan, or a bajillion little ones."
"And when you say a bajillion little ones…"
"I'd need to murder, reanimate, and re-murder several thousand people. Or gather about one million non-sentient human undead. I rather think someone would notice an army of darkness moving on foot from graveyard to graveyard and be rather upset about it, even if I could do it."
"I might be able to technically pull it off by using some dirty tricks for exponential growth of power, but everyone who's tried it has gone irrevocably insane somewhere around the eighth or ninth iteration. I'd need twenty. And casting that would kill literally everything down to the microbial level in an area the size of Rhode Island."
Gaunt stares at me incredulous. "And winning a prestigious pro wrestling title would be able to give you an amount of power equal to that?"
I smirk, "Leeland, the hopes, dreams, and desires of one man are perfectly capable of changing the world. Millions of people give up several hours a week of their lives willing victory and defeat for men and women inside the squared circle. There's power in that. That's why there's so many demons and devils in professional wrestling."
"Tempting one soul into darkness is hard. Getting 50,000 people to hate you because you say mean things about their local sports team is easy. When the announcers say that a beaten down wrestler turning the tides against his foe is drawing on the power of the audience, it can very well be literal."
Gaunt throws up his hands and chuckles, "And here I was letting Legion beat the crap out of them because the vast majority are either horrible people or wretched sad sacks whose lives would be improved by a little constructive crippling to keep them out of the ring and the aura of misfortune that surrounds it."
I crack my rather sore neck to break up the sudden silence as we both ponder the way the Triad seems to soak up the worst kinds of people. People that come from broken homes with equally broken minds, dragged into a seemingly never ending downward spiral of misery. Oh, and the ULW's pile of dead babies.
"So are you going to let me put on the scary demon glove or not?" I ask, cutting right to the point.
"Well, if you're willing to risk it. If everything goes wrong there's no real skin off my back. Legion simply grows that much stronger. Though there's one question I have to ask of you."
"Name it." I reply, spreading my hands in a gesture of acceptance.
"How exactly are you going to fit a left hand gauntlet over your already existing left hand gauntlet?"
I chuckle, "Magic!" I reply with a grin. "The Hand of Arimus is ambidextrous. Or ambisinistrous as it were. It doesn't HAVE to be on the left arm, but I keep it there because I'm right handed, and the damned talons get in the way if I don't spend the mental effort to get rid of them."
With a wave and a snap of my fingers the black and grey metal covering my right arm dissolves into a rather unpleasant looking cloud of black mist and flows up my left arm, over my shoulders, and down my right arm. It reforms into a mirror image of itself, skull elbow decoration and all.
"He's rather offended you think so little of him. Did you think that the Hand of Arimus just clamps on and never lets go? Just imagine how unsanitary that would be. Or did you think that it devoured all flesh, leaving a withered, skeletal husk within?"
Gaunt shakes his head, looking a titch embarrassed, "Yes, actually. That's what necromantic artifacts around here tend to do."
"Yeah, well your necromantic artifacts suck. Literally."
I turn and look back at the Fist of the Legion.
"D'ya want to summon it, or should I just smash your protective wards and physical defenses?"
Gaunt rolls his eyes, "It's not the summoning it that's the hard part. It's putting the damned thing back when I'm done. It takes hours to disassemble the enclosure to the point where I can put the Fist back, and then even more hours to put it all back together."
He looks me over, "You're sure you want to do this?"
"Gaunt, the Hand of Arimus is a magical construct meant to muck with the very forces of life, death, and the mortal soul hand-crafted by a friggin' god. The Frankenstein's Monster your many greats grandpa…"
"Great uncle. Cardinal Marchand was celibate."
"Whatever. Whatever he accidentally made, I don't think that the Legion entity can play tug of war for my soul with a power that's capable of ripping souls out of heaven and hell alike and win."
"And if you're wrong?"
"And if I'm wrong we'll get to see how a Eidolon-devouring composite spirit handles drinking from the firehose of a soul that's biologically immortal and eternally growing stronger; whose physical form is the next best thing to invulnerable."
Gaunt stands up from his desk, "Well, if you insist. But I do warn you, that playing host to the Legion spirit can be incredibly overwhelming."
I chuckle, "You've met Spark. I've had that particular voice in my head for as long as I can remember, and I just keep picking up more along the way. Miss Hissy has shown her displeasure several times by cussing me out with all of her voices, with Spark shouting over the din for her to do an acapella version of "Through the Fire and the Flames.""
Gaunt chuckles, "Very well then. May the consequences be on your head. Or in it, as it were."
There's a flash of fire behind me, and an instant later one in front of me as the Fist of the Legion appears, clutch in Gaunt's leather-clad hand. I reach out and take it, feeling the hungry spirit inside.
"Hey big boy, let's see how you like a little spicy Southern-fried cuisine." I say just before slipping my hand into the demonic gauntlet.
I feel agonizing flames for the second time this evening, but this time it's my soul that's on fire.
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