Delilah Darkbolt.
Fuck.
While she was the closest thing I had to a friend amongst the dark elf nobility, I'd kind of been avoiding her for the past few days. Not for the usual reasons either. I mean the usual reasons why everybody else avoided her.
Delilah na Kinai, Scion of House Darkbolt, Firstborn True Daughter of Dara na Kinai, Heir to the Matriarchy.
Dark elves are born with innate magic, tied to the totem animals of their race, house, and family. It always manifests in the same three ways: sorcery; the application of raw magical power as destructive energy, enchantment; the application of magical power for strengthening one's self or allies and weakening one's foes, and channeling; the act of imbuing one's self with the raw essence of one's patron, gaining their traits and physical aspects.
Delilah was a pure Enchanter, and to compliment their powers of being able to enhance others most enchanters went out and found a fearsome beastie and bound it to them as a loyal protector.
Delilah had tried that. Dozens of times.
See, while Del was next in the line of succession her place was not in any way assured. Dara's sister, Dao-Mai, had been the Matriarch of House Darkbolt before being overthrown by her younger sister. The house spirits apparently adhered to baseball rules, meaning three strikes and you're out.
Dao-Mai had tried and failed three times to wrest the position from Dara, and thus could no longer pursue her sister's place at matriarch. Dara's eldest daughter, on the other hand, was fair game.
All Dao-Mei had to do was wait for Delilah to die. Pretty easy to do, considering the giant, lumbering bitch was a part of the dead but moving shambling corpse society. She was undead, a vampire.
Auntie Dao had used her influence to systematically pick off each and every creature Delilah had attempted to bond with. Every one of them dead before the year and a day span that would permanently secure the bond between the two and allow Delilah to reach her full potential as an Enchantress.
Dao-Mei was Channeler caste and she also had access to Sorcery. So even before adding in the whole vampire thing she had physical and magical superiority on her niece.
Everyone avoided Delilah like the plague, since nobody wanted to become collateral damage the moment Dao-Mai decided to challenge Delilah for her place in the line of succession.
Dark elves have a somewhat weird code of honor that's basically social darwinism made manifest. Whatever you can hold onto is yours, whatever you can takes from others is also yours. You just have to be somewhat subtle and not particularly blatant about it.
So sneak attacks and assassinations were common. Occasionally duels would be fought when accusations were levelled. Delilah couldn't call out her aunt's assassination of her bonded beasts, as that would mean a duel against her aunt over the matter. Wherein she would be crushed like a bug.
Enchanters could also bond with an undead creature, but doing so would mean that their powers would be forever weakened when cast upon a living target. And it wasn't such a good idea to have an undead servant around a powerful vampire, who could seize control of the thing with ease and turn it against its mistress.
So knowing full well the extent of her daughter's own weaknesses, Dara na Kinai had hired my grandmother, a former spy and dwarven master of the combat arts, to educate Delilah on how to survive.
And that of course was where I entered the picture. I was assigned to be Delilah's sparring partner. Well, they called me her sparring partner, but I was more of her punching bag.
While my ancestry wasn't dark elven enough to grant me innate magics, I did have ties to the Metsuki Tahari bloodline. Dara and Dao-Mai's mother, Metsuki na Kinai, known by the honorific Tahari, had been one of final victors of the Hero Wars, and was granted a single wish.
She wished for her bloodline to be immune to all weapons. The closer the blood relation, the more stuff they were immune to. Metsuki herself could literally not be harmed by any sort of weaponry, and her mastery of the forge and of enchanting items made her essentially immune to most forms of offensive magic.
In a rarity for a dark elf, Metsuki Tahari died of natural causes. Meaning of old age, rather than a dagger between the ribs like most dark elves.
As a direct descendant the only weapons that could hurt Delilah were ones that had been crafted by members of her own family with equal or greater blood ties to her grandmother.
As a distant cousin all I got was an immunity to non-magical weapons. It made cutting my hair and trimming my nails rather inconvenient.
What this meant was that I could be thrown around all day by a dark elven princess doing her best to learn how to delivery killing blows, crippling strikes, and agonizing holds. Just because it didn't do damage didn't mean that it didn't hurt.
We'd gotten friendly as I'd been paid to let her kick six kinds of crap out of me. As opposed to the rest of the dark elven race, whom I had to let kick the crap out of me pro bono. Dark elves don't like it when five foot nothing half-breeds beat the snot out of other dark elves who are typically over a foot and a half taller than then.
That was kind of how I ended up getting stuck down in the undercity and put on all sorts of shitty work projects. In some cases literally shitty.
I ground my teeth when Delilah walked in the door a few minutes later, answering the summons from the computer.
"You needed me for a bloodline calibration?" The dark elf asked of the AI, "Don't the maintenance workers usually… oh."
Her reddish-brown eyes found me from her six and a half foot height. During the wars between High Elves and Dark Elves the castes had been severely whittled down to the point where the far more durable Channeler caste had become the most populous.
With several successive generations of channelers having offspring with other channelers, eventually the entire race gained a faint reflection of the channeler's bestial totems.
House Darkbolt's totem beast was the Snow Leopard, claws, fangs, feline ears and tails were pretty much the standard package for a Darkbolt elf, and Delilah was no exception. Though born of a Channeler, Del was a bit more bestial than most.
Though she lacked the fur from the elbows and knees down that a full blooded Darkbolt channeler would have, she did sport the digigrade legs common to the caste. It was completely and utterly unfair. The configuration of her feet added a good six to eight inches to her height, and she was already taller than me to start with.
I tended to keep my hands in my pockets around House Darkbolt dark elves. I had a tendency to absentmindedly pet their tails. Their big, poofy, fluffy, soft, fuzzy tails. Half the time they don't notice until they start purring.
"Finally convinced the computer to let you stop making it explode?" The feline elf asked with a slightly fanged grin.
"Yup. It's only taken two and a half years." I grumbled in reply, eying the doorway and making plans to make a hasty exit.
"So I heard you were registering for some of the knightly orders," Delilah said, jumping right into the reason why I'd been avoiding her.
"Oh, look at the time! Gotta go!" I virtually squeaked and nonchalantly began strolling out the door.
The dark elf sighed, reached down, and grabbed my tail halfway down its length, lifting me up off the floor and having me dangle upside down.
"Kalinda, you've been avoiding me ever since you made your choice. What ridiculous knightly order did you register yourself at?"
I muttered something in the Low Fae tongue. Vowel heavy and pompous, it's basically French with an aversion to cold iron.
Delilah flicked her ears in annoyance. "I didn't quite catch that."
"Ordre des Repas Exotiques." I said through clenched teeth.
I was unceremoniously dropped on my face. "The bloody COMBAT CHEFS?"
"...yes."
"Of all the knightly orders out there you pick the one that involves cooking and eating monsters after you kill them?"
"And after studying them intently for weaknesses! It's the only order that involves my three favorite things; fighting, cooking, and eating!" I protested.
"You are exceptionally silly. Considering you love to use bows and arrows so much, the Acolytes of the Arrow are perfect for you with their innate enchantment. Yuriko's taken the Acolyte oath. She can use that little crossbow she wears on her wrist as a full on shield. I don't know what it would do with a proper bow like you use, but I'm sure it's something interesting!"
"Not really. Mostly they stuff training into your head about bludgeoning people with your bow when they get to close and give you a little enchantment that helps with sniping out in the elements. Heat, cold, wind, rain and such. I don't think I've been above ground in years. If I'm up close and personal with somebody, I'd much rather be using a weapon expressly designed for the purpose, rather than whopping them with a stick." I protested.
"The Lords of the Wheel make you capable of hiding from even supernatural senses! Even telepaths would have to look for you using their eyes, rather than trying to sense your thoughts."
"Delilah, I'm bright blue with fire engine red hair. That is a color combination that lends itself to being sneaky. Plus between Kitty and Spark in a combat situation I've got the world's loudest chatterboxes utterly ruining any capacity I'd ever have for stealth anyway."
"The Resplendent Radiants allow you to summon a magnificent set of indestructible armor made of magic!"
"That's the other way 'round entirely. You shine like a damned spotlight and the code of conduct demands you stride up to whatever you're fighting and issue a challenge like a complete and utter nitwit."
"But a chef! You don't want to be a valiant warrior or an infamous assassin?"
"Not really. I'd rather cook meals and make people happy rather than murder them in the face."
Delilah makes a disgusted sound and lets go of my tail. I'm unceremoniously dumped face first onto the floor, and because Delilah's higher up on the Metsuki Tahari family tree, it actually hurts. I can feel a bruise beginning to form on my cheek.
"Oops. Sorry Kalinda." Delilah says, wincing at the sight of the spot that's begun to form on the side of my face. "You should probably heal that."
"I'll uh… I'll do that later."
"Go ahead and do it now. I promise I won't make fun of you."
I glare at her. "You have your fingers crossed behind your back, as per usual." I said with a harrumph, crossing my arms.
"You are without a doubt the most ridiculous creature I have ever met. Go ahead, do your little bard-y thing and heal yourself!"
"I'm not a bard!" I growl, attempting to be all threatening, but it's hard to sound threatening when you're head, shoulders, and ribcage below most people.
"You're ever so slightly above average at spellcasting, moderately above average in your combat marks, seem to know a great detail about useless and obscure topics, and are a complete and total artsy fartsy type."
"I AM NOT AN ARTSY FARTSY TYPE!" I roared, giving Delilah a good, solid kick to the shins.
"You totally are! Your chosen career involves making things and your primary hobby is being a prissy little chef in a silly hat and apron."
"You lie! I do not wear a silly hat when I cook!" I replied, darting between Delilah's legs as she attempted to grab me, knowing very well what I was going to do next.
Rather peeved with her I proceeded to tie her tail in a knot.
"That is exceptionally mean, Kalinda." Delilah scolded.
"You deserve it!" I countered, sticking my forked tongue out at her.
"I just don't see why you'd join up with a knightly order whose primary boon is made completely redundant by the Tahari Bloodgift." she said, finally getting to the logic behind her protesting.
"Oh, uh..." I winced, "I'm not a direct matrimonial descendant of her like you are, Del. If somebody poisons my food or slips some disgusting disease into my drink and I gulp it down, odds are pretty likely I'm going to die." the Ordre's gift would protect me from a poisoned glass of wine or a dodgy meat pie, but poisons and diseases that came about outside of the digestive system were still in play.
Delilah's face fell. I'm pretty much her only friend in the world outside of her own immediate family, and sometimes she forgets that I don't have all the advantages that her and her sisters do. Most of her prospective bonded beasts had died from being poisoned, so bringing up poisoning was kind of a depressing subject for her.
"Anyway..." I say, trying to bring up the mood. "Provided they don't have contradictory codes of conduct I can always join another one. But none of the other orders that I qualify for had benefits that sounded like they were worth the trouble of adhering to the oath. I was going to look into some of the more obscure ones after I got my Post-Mortum Resources certification. That'd qualify me for some of the Maledictine Orders."
Delilah nods, "True. They are indeed very powerful and offer gifts that some might consider too good to be true. Their oaths, however, are closely guarded and not a matter of public record."
"Via your employment with Carapaced Queen LLC, a licensee of Applied Necrotechnologies Incorporated, you qualify for enrollment in the official company secret society. Very similar to your knightly orders in most ways." the AI said pleasantly.
"This could be very good, or also very bad." I said. If the oath to the order involved a mandatory wearing of a suit and tie I was right out, no matter how impressive the benefits would be.
"Membership in the Beneficent Brotherhood of Bleached Bone is a perk available to all Necrotech and Necrotech equivalent lead positions. The oath involves upholding the corporate policy of Necrotech Industries, to use the power of necromancer to allow the dead to promote the comfort and well being of the living, and to do one's utmost to stop predation of the undead upon the living in order to bring about a peaceful utopia where the living and the dead can work together to achieve harmony and mutual benefit."
My interest is piqued, "That sounds rather interesting. I've never heard of it, though. How many members does it have?"
"Due to the membership rolls being purged due to inactivity, the Beneficent Brotherhood of Bleached Bone currently boasts an enrolled of zero grandmasters, zero chapter masters, zero knights of the skull, and zero knights of the rib."
"Now wait a second, I know that there's a whole hierarchy set up running Carapaced Queen LLC. You're saying in the few hundred years since the dark elves set up shop in here, nobody's bothered to take up a position in the official knighthood of the place?"
"The default settings for individual to computer communication were set to speak when spoken to only by default almost immediately after the new occupancy arrived."
"Presumably they found being pestered with error messages at all hours of the day and night moderately annoying." I grumbled, being Maintenance Lead Subterranean meant I couldn't NOT receive the damned things.
"Enrollment in the order will see you immediately placed in the position of Chapter Master for Tomb-23. Grandmasters are confirmed by a test of skills overseen by at least three other grandmasters. As the AstralNet Communications Network has ceased to be functional beyond Tombs 22, 23, 24, and 25, suitable grandmasters cannot be gathered for confirmation."
With a little bit of magical finagling one could use the magical technology present in one of the Tombs to jump to the previous and next in the series. Tomb-22 was the first to have access restored to it. It was where the vast majority of the dwarves that had arrived with the dark elves way back when had gone. Tomb-24 had something go wrong and everything but the undercity was basically covered in magma that had long since cooled. Tomb-25 was full of crazy monsters and weird plants.
An effort was made to keep the arrival area of Tomb-25 clear of growth and to eliminate any monsters between the arrival bay and the two nearest warehouses of supplies. The really good preserved foodstuffs had been eaten up in Tomb-23 long ago.
I took a trip over there every few weeks to fill up my backpack with cans of orange soda and alphabetti spaghetti.
"Benefits for the chapter master include lodging in the chapter house, access to restricted Necrotech materials, and the personal use of an official Necrotech minor artifact. Benefits for a knight of the…"
"Sold! You had me at chapter house lodging! Goodbye former janitorial closet that still reeks of disinfectant! Just point me in the right direction and tell me where to pick up my artifact!"
The computer gave me directions and I went striding off happily, only to find Delilah hot on my heels.
"What? D'ya want to help me move?"
"No. I merely want to accompany you to find out what ridiculous musical lyrics and tunes you use to summoned up your newly acquired set of spells. Bardy bard bard." She teased.
I'm fine with the hand motions, but the ancient arcane mystical tongue bullshit I've never been able to do properly. In order to cast spells I typically had to tie them in thematically to a tune or some lyrics.
I spent most of my day humming "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" to get a bunch of tools and cleaning supplies animated and working in order to cover the amount of work I'd be assigned generally being meant for about a hundred people.
You get stuff accomplished around her you don't get thanked or rewarded, you just get more stuff dumped on you.
Thankfully I was far better at managing my magically mobile helpers than that damned mouse ever was.
"Ding dong bell…" I began.
"No!" Delilah protested, knowing very well what was coming.
"Pussy's in the… nah, just kidding." I said with a giggle. That was my water summoning spell. Delilah hates it when her big poofy tail gets all wet. I learned that one early on in life, all my introductory, beginner level cantrips like that are nursery rhymes.
"So why are you really following me?"
"It is my hope that upon being able to reanimate the dead that you will allow me practice in fighting them. I am not allowed out of the city, and every time I attempt to purchase some skeletons or zombies to train against, every place I visit mysteriously closes five minutes before I arrive, or inconveniently sells all their product on a phone order immediately before my arrival."
Ouch. Evil auntie strikes again.
Anyway my day was looking up. Which meant there was something lurking around later that was going to end up knocking me back down.
And oh boy was there ever.
Last time I mentioned that I didn't like tag team matches. I laid out a couple of the most likely scenarios, and lo and behold, they were exactly what happened.
I said I was not pleased with being paired up with Lilith Evans, who is nothing more than a low-ranked member of the Sinistry. An entry level goon. A minion. A henchman. One of those sorts of people that surround you in a group of a dozen and come at you one at a time. Little more than a speedbump to provide a few moments of dramatic tension and to get your adrenaline flowing while you crash through the dungeon in search of the evil boss critter.
And that's exactly what she was, little more than a speedbump to Cassius DeLight and Kathryn Pearson. I was momentarily not in a position where I could save her sorry ass from our opponents, and despite being hale, hearty, and ready to German suplex both my opponents at the same time, my team lost the match.
It's like one of those incredibly frustrating escort quests, wherein the escortee is made of fragile tissue paper and has the self-preservation instincts of an unmedicated bipolar day trader who's hit emotional rock bottom the day the stock market crashes.
And I'm sure the usual assortment of detractors are going to be bitching in their empty little heads going "Why Kalinda, if you wanted to win so badly, all you had to do was wrestle the entire match yourself!"
If I did that they'd be even more outraged. "How dare you wrestle an entire tag team match on your own! You're a selfish bitch who is taking food out of the mouths of Lilith Evans and the Sinistry, which she tithes a goodly portion of her income to! You are a grotesque blue hag who is out to steal the spotlight from the legitimate hard workers of blah blah blah blah blah."
Those of you who don't follow me on Twitter missed a gigantic fit of spoiled scions for pro wrestling families getting on my ass for daring to suggest that ULW was not a great and wonderful place to work, and what a horrible, entitled person I was for not tonguing Raymond der Vaart's flabby Dutch butthole and going "Yes massa" when he called me a lizard and ordered me to ride out to the ringside sitting on a log in a giant terrarium.
I'm doing my best to put the past behind me and not let all the crap that went down in ULW get to me, but when a pair of people who never had to lift a finger to get title matches start screaming about how bratty and entitled you're being because despite being the third ranked wrestler in the federation (missing out on the tied first and second place by one measly point), you've never gotten a shot at a secondary singles title. You know, the sorts of non-divisional titles that they hand out shots and contenderships to in boxes of Cracker Jacks.
It's disheartening to have people that you've beaten twice in a row in very decisive manners get shots at belts as a reward for their failures. While you get left out of autograph signings, banned from the buildings where fan meet and greets take place, and having large-nosed British assassins sent to discern your every weakness and keep you occupied on the largest pay per view of the year.
It's also disheartening to go out and wrestle a match in a tournament with title contention on the line, lose through no fault of your own, and then have one of your opponents basically go "Welp, that's a wrap on my pro wrestling career! I'm not going to wrestle my match next week, I'm going to retire, so long and thanks for all the fish!"
Cass is all "Bleeeh, I'm not wrestling my friend, Imma leave wrestling forevers!" And our general manager is all "Stop tweeting and call me!" And Cass is all "No, I've forgotten how to make phone calls, I can only type on my phone in 140 character bursts."
And it's going to end up as yet another obvious symptom of Pro Wrestler Derangement Syndrome, since logical and sane people would get this ironed out during the two weeks between shows. But nope, this is going to play out and get resolved (or not) on the air.
So, so stupid.
Anyhoo, my tag partner sucked and lost the match for both of us, got the rest of the Mormon Muddy Mission out there to intimidate me, and didn't even bother with proper mook chivalry by attacking me in single file, one by one.
You guys, seriously, stop doing that. Because eventually I'm going to get tired of it and you're going to get exactly what you want. You're going to get me in a fight with the lot of you. Do remember that I'm actually a competent fighter, unlike certain giants I could mention, am about the size of three of you put together, and have the majority of my actual combat experience in fighting outnumber horde of smaller foes.
I take attempts at extra-curricular assault on my person very seriously. Of the four people who have attempted it, one's ended up crippled, two have vanished from professional wrestling entirely, and the other one got her ass kicked in two matches against me and was awarded the consolation prize of an X-Class Championship match.
So yeah, decide amongst you lot which of you would like to have Social Security Disability, which two want to be beaten so badly they flee the sport entirely, and which of you gets the consolation prize of a singles title shot for having your faction pulled out from underneath you.
And speaking of members of the Sinistry getting their ass kicked, my god Myra, did you really have to do such unspeakable horrors to the Executioner? I mean the man actually showed a command of the English language for the first time, instead of a Tim Allen by way of Lurch from the Addams Family language of groans and grunts.
Then again those hammer shots to the head might actually have given him a further command of the English language, rather than back to his usual caveman grunts. I suppose we'll never know the results of this particular bit of percussive maintenance, since the big masked bastard is out for six to twelve months.
Considering ULW keeled over and IWC went on hiatus, UWA might be a smoldering crater by then! How dare you leave the world in suspense like that! How dare you deprive us of what was almost certainly the inspiration words of a keen and cunning mind! The Executioner was most certainly going to come out and dazzle us with his epic poetry and beautiful s… s… sing…
Bwhahahaha. I can't keep the joke going. I just can't. It's TOO silly, even for me.
I'm all for a member of the Sinistry getting put on the shelf, even if it's one of the completely and utterly ineffective ones. I've seen managers tap that guy out in like two or three minutes.
Then again, the Sinistry might be injecting him in the butt with demonic steroids to go along with the usual anabolic ones.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to state that while I may be seven feet tall and several hundred pounds of angry, snarling fury, I'm also somewhat more threatening than the Executioner.
Try that stunt with the sledgehammer on me, and I'll bite the damned thing in half, spit the splinters in your face, and then make you eat the heavy end.
Which is probably going to suck, because I'm pretty sure that human teeth don't hold up well to metal, human saliva doesn't melt iron, and your throats don't allow for the swallowing of such large objects. Not to mention the digestive issues.
It makes me wonder how in the hell you people managed to become the dominant species on the planet. I mean back home we have eight primary bipedal sentient races, of which humans are precisely one of them, and dozens, maybe hundreds, of individual subraces that are built off of those original eight.
Elves, fey, goblins, orcs, dwarves, and giants are all usually better in some way than humans. I mean the only race that would be less suited for populating an entire world is the damned gnomes, because they're like half your size and exceptionally prone to blowing themselves up.
Not like in wars with bombs and stuff, but like experimenting with alchemy, or explosives, or electronics, or alchemical explosive electronics.
Then again, y'all might was well be gnomes what with everything these days being soulless boxes of concrete and glass, fluorescent lights, and institutional tiles.
It's like somewhere along the way people lost pride in their work, people stopped wanting to make things happy, and pleasant, and beautiful and instead decided "Fuck everybody else, I'm just going to do what makes the most money."
Which is a sentiment you're quite familiar with, Myra.
After all, that's a tenant you've wholeheartedly embraced, now isn't it? Casting aside a decade of goodwill, of ruining everything that you worked to build with the professional wrestling fanbase.
You're a shining example of everything that's wrong with professional wrestling.
Well, not exactly you personally. But your history, your situation.
You were barely an adult when you came into this business. Around the time most young men and women are planning what to wear for prom, plotting out their higher education, or taking a journey of self discovery to figure out just what precisely they wanted to do with their lives, you'd already chosen your path. A path filled with VFW halls, National Guard armories, and smokey, shitty little dive bars.
You came up at a bad time for women's wrestling, during the days where persons of the feminine gender were utilized primarily for their attractiveness and sex appeal, rather than their martial prowess.
It all starts with the supposed greatest women's wrestler in pro wrestling history: The Fabulous Moolah. Because that's the way she made things. That's what she did. That was what she trained her "students" to do.
I say students, but they were basically whores. Moolah sent her girls around the territories, took a significant cut of their earnings, and basically sent them around to be fucktoys for the male wrestlers. They weren't there to be wrestlers, they were there to look pretty and function as workplace entertainment.
There were a few places where women's wrestlers were treated as just that, but for the most part the gals were just there to look pretty for the fans and be the village bicycle for the boys in the back.
This was back during the bad old days of professional wrestling. The days where you'd go to a bar after you'd wrestled, get yourself blitzed, go back to the hotel room, snort some coke, and head down to the gym the next morning to get your steroids.
There's a reason why a lot of folks from that era dropped dead of heart failure in their forties and fifties. And the culture of masking the pain, or hiding injuries, and compensating with pharmacological enhancement is entirely to blame.
A lot of the fans these days weren't around to see it, weren't around back before the days of the internet where the unseemly underbelly of professional wrestling would be documented by hundreds of little websites each looking for the scoop that will catapult their page counts into the millions and earn them their ad revenue.
What you had back then was perhaps a dozen guys and their newsletters. And even then some of this stuff didn't start to come to the forefront until there were trials. Until there were books. Until enough time had passed and enough careers had wrapped up to the point where folks felt comfortable talking about this sort of thing.
You're living a lie, Myra, and if you were any sort of professional wrestling historian, you'd know it.
The politicking, the crony capitalism, the faction warfare, the warring dynasties of professional wrestling families, the lies, the cheating, the manipulation?
That's professional wrestling's real tradition, button.
All the scummy, seedy, carnie bullshit.
Just look at some of the language we use, referring to fans as marks. A term from the days of when professional wrestling was a carnival enterprise, where the promoters and the wrestlers were con men, looking to fleece the crowds they gathered as they travelled from town to town.
It's only in the last few decades that professional wrestling has begun to have even the thinnest veneer of legitimacy and acceptance. And even then it's still an uphill battle.
Pro wrestling is some of the cheapest television to produce for significant ratings. But as good as those ratings are, we don't bring in the advertising dollars. Why? Because to the corporate world professional wrestling is a bunch of carny con men looking to scam bucks out of their toothless, inbred, illiterate, high school dropout, trailer park-dwelling, fat, ugly, fanbase.
These are not the people that they want to sell their products to. They can't afford them, for one. They wouldn't know how something as complex as an iPhone would even work, believing it to be a magic glowing box that can't possibly make phone calls, y'all, 'cuz there taint'ent even a cord there. And even if they did, they're not the sort of people that the luxury car manufacturers want to have driving around in their vehicles, the athletic clothing companies want sporting their logos on too-short shirts over their fat, hairy beer bellies.
But progress has been made. In the last 20 years our sport has shed some of its shady, scummy carnie nature in favor of adopting a different sort of slimy, scummy, shady culture. That of Corporate America.
Decisions being made by a committee who understand nothing of professional wrestling, and only slightly more of finance.
Decisions made to satisfy and satiate stockholders, not wrestlers, and certainly not something so fickle and unimportant as the fanbase.
For a brief, shining period in the 90's, for a few moments professional wrestling was a cool, hip, and trendy thing. Tens of millions of men and women tuned in to live vicariously through the struggles of their larger than life onscreen heroes, to heartily boo the despicable actions of their favorite villains, to discuss the goings on at what happened in wrestling last night over the water cooler, in the cafeteria, telling the amazing feats of daring-do to friends and family.
And what brought about this golden age of professional wrestling? The glaring governmental eyes of good ol Uncle Sam into the rampant corruption and steroid abuse. The insane drug and alcohol abusing culture that had popped up in the industry.
A scandal illuminated the darkness and turned the eyes of the world upon professional wrestling, and it was this transition away from massive, ripped steroid jockeys clubbing one another with only the occasional suplex to the faster paced, more technical, more cerebral style of professional wrestling.
Mindless brawling fell out of favor, and instead of the Roidy McGoos of yesteryear, instead there was a renaissance of the technical style of holds and submissions that had once been the staple of the sport brought about by the rise of mixed martial arts.
Something so simple as the tap out, that's an incredibly recent addition so far as pro wrestling is concerned. That showed up somewhere in the nineties. Before that there was the raising and dropping of the arm on an opponent who had passed out from the loss of oxygen or from the sheer agony of the pain.
On everything that didn't choke somebody out? Why there was the ever so exploitable verbal submission. An act that involved a wrestler placing their absolute trust in the official to be legitimate. An act that beyond the first few rows, was completely and utterly invisible to the crowd.
Why, a crooked referee could throw a match and no one in the audience would be the wiser. All one had to do was slip the crooked zebra a few buckaroos, slap on a submission, and have your pocket official turn and wave for the bell after a few moments of inflicted pain upon a foe to make it look good. So much easier than a fast count, a blatant act of cheating and corruption right there for the whole world to see.
And such a useful tool for management as well! Got a fiery young never-say-die hero that needs a little wind taken out of his sales? Bang, crooked referee, make it look like the boy couldn't take the pain and gave up.
Got a fellow you don't want to have around anymore? Loser Leaves stipulation and a shady ref and you're free of their pesky contract.
So why, oh why, would pro wrestling ever adopt anything so blatant as the tap out? A quite obvious sign of submission, of giving into the pain, of having enough and wishing to prevent severe injury.
Transparency. Trust. Showmanship. In a time where the sport was rocked with scandal, the tap out was a way to further legitimize the result of the professional wrestling match. A match's ending would be completely and utterly obvious to anybody with a functional set of eyes and a brain.
For a short time professional wrestling tried to be legitimate, tried to clean up its act. The US promotions started bringing in folks from overseas with new, different, and exciting wrestling styles. The Puroresu of Japan, the Lucha Libre of South America. It became a melting pot, where all the world's wrestling styles were smelted into an alloy that was greater than the sum of its parts.
For a few brief moments professional wrestling shined.
Until greed stepped in.
Until the bottomless depths of human arrogance and stupidity brought the sport to its knees.
These "new traditions" you want to install, Myra? They're not new. They're what brought the Golden Age of Professional Wrestling crashing down into a new fucking dark age.
Wanting to appease their supposed megastars, the corporations behind the wrestling federations showered them with lavish contracts, hired their friends, allowed them to virtually stampede all over their wrestling product.
With bloated rosters all thought of entertaining the fans was cast to the wayside. Gone was the twenty minute match that began with two opponents feeling one another out, slowly working their way through their arsenal of moves to work up to the crescendo of drama, having the crowd on the edge of their seat before attempts began to honestly put their opponent away.
Wrestling programs demanded as many small, short matches as possible, with wrestlers virtually being required to start dropping bombs right off the bat, hitting all of their signature moves in rapid succession without any rhyme or reason to do so.
Instead of the gradual wearing down of an opponent, it became a race to hit the big move first, to sacrifice one's body with high risk maneuvers in order to put their foe away in the quickest span of time.
And with these bloated rosters, of wrestlers hired as favors to other wrestlers, factions formed. Political entities tied to the big ticket superstars. Little feudal pro wrestling kingdoms each with their own sets of sticky, grabby hands wanting to seize everything for themselves.
Trickle down Hoganomics, brother, dude, jack.
And with the factions came the cheating. Of people interfering in matches where they didn't belong, seeking to aid their friends and hinder their foes. Gang warfare brought to professional wrestling with every set of goons in matching t-shirts seeking to rip away the glory of victory from any that they come across, eager to seize it for themselves.
After all, encouraged as they were to engage in short, simple, mindless matches they certainly wouldn't gain prestige from simply wrestling an excellent match. To come to the ring and display your fighting spirit and come out with the respect of the crowd and perhaps even your opponent simply by putting on a good show and being a good sport.
Coasting on their past exciting efforts, for a time this culture of selfishness had no impact on things.
That is until the swerves began.
Until it became apparent that the best way to acquire personal prestige, power, and glory was to stab your faction in the back. Betraying them, weakening them, seizing a portion of their power for yourself. Ripping it from the living flesh of your allies and carrying it, still dripping with the life blood oozing down your arm, to your new allies.
And for a time these betrayals increased the ratings. It was something new, it was something interesting, it was something to pay attention to since the shitty five minute matches weren't quite cutting it.
Sure, they were exciting, but they were simply "greatest hits" compilations of all the wrestlers' big moves. They were empty, lifeless, without meaning or emotional attachment. And they hurt. They shortened careers.
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. Without the feeling out period, without the chance to warm up, lacking the capacity to ready the body for damage by slowly ramping up the punishment, a wrestler gets injured easier.
Combined with an increased, frantic schedule wherein a wrestler was on the road three hundred days a year, wrestling on television three times a week and twice on non-televised shows, the wrestlers bodies were never given the chance to recover.
Instead they just wore down until something broke. Sometimes fixable, sometimes not. And if you weren't in one of those factions where you had the shining center of your little cult of personality to get some support out of the company, you weren't paid.
Downside guarantees weren't a thing back then. It was nice if the company would pay for your injury that occurred on the job, but it wasn't required. Hell, they didn't even have to provide health care. Most places still don't. Most wrestling federations purposefully have us as independent contractors, not employees, so they can avoid having to pay wrestlers when their 300 days a year on the road, 220 matches filled with giving and receiving the most devastating moves in one's arsenal eventually wear the poor sons of bitches down.
And it was sons of bitches, because the daughters weren't allowed to wrestle actual matches.
For a few brief months the specter of the Fabulous Moolah, Pimp Queen of Professional Wrestling, was exorcised and women's wrestling was treated with respect in the United States for once. Up until the moment where all the effort into making the women's division look legitimate ended with one of those aforementioned swerves, where the Women's Champion was snatched out from under the noise of one company by another. Upon which she appeared on the rival program with that belt and threw it in the trash.
Professional wrestling as a whole went "Fuck it. We're not going to hire any more of Moolah's whores, for fear that Uncle Sam's red, white, and blue cock fucks us in the ass. Women are backstabbing, traitorous bitches who cannot be trusted. Fuck it, we can hire a bunch of models for cheap and teach them the rudimentary basics of wrestling. That's all Moolah taught her girls, and no one gives a shit about women's wrestling."
And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The wrestling federations didn't give a shit about women's wrestling, so bereft of a quality product, the fans didn't give a shit about women's wrestling, just like the wrestling federations taught them to.
And what the world ended up with was a bunch of bland matches with all the heart and soul sucked out, with cheating, corruption, and run ins everywhere. With the gods damned company providing wrestlers incentives to nonsensically turn on their friends and family in the name of seeking the ultimate swerve.
But after awhile surprise betrayals stop being surprising if they happen all the time. Short matches filled with big moves no longer impress and become the new normal. Dastardly cheating villains having their factions run out and help them win matches cease to fill the fans with righteous rage, instead merely filling them with apathy.
Professional wrestling went from a shining, glorious high to running itself right smack into the ground.
The damage was done. The fans were trained for short attention spans, to treat women as mere sex objects, to have wrestlers do nothing but big moves.
The corporate overlords had seen the rise of professional wrestling, saw it being profitable and trendy, and seized it in their greedy mitts and attempting to wring every last dollar from it that they could. Never stopping to ask themselves "Is this sustainable? Will our greed for silver today destroy the gold we could have tomorrow?"
And it wasn't the corporate overlords that sufferred. They got their golden parachutes, they got the bucks from selling off the corpses of their companies, they were given pats on the back from the other CEO's and went off in search of fresh, living companies that they could insert their despicable proboscis into and leech off the lifeblood of another healthy corporation, before running it into the ground as well. Cannibalizing it for cash on behalf of the board and the stockholders, killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
And the survivors of this age of professional wrestling looked upon the misdeeds of the companies that had taken the wonderful, popular, mainstream acceptance professional wrestling had had for a few brief, glorious months, before corporate greed ran it into the fucking ground, and they said "Never again."
But for some of them the damage was done. Broken bodies were worn down to the point where the only thing keeping a wrestler from an existence of complete and utter agony was an every increasing dosage of pain pills.
The brief glut of popularity brought a whole generation of wrestlers from earning fifty bucks a night at the local VFW to earning hundreds of thousands, or even several million dollars in the blink of an eye.
They weren't prepared for that, no one takes you aside in this business and goes "Hey, you need to get yourself a good financial planner to help you take this money and invest it. Give yourself the foundation of financial comfort to last you the rest of your life."
It got blown on houses that with the crash wrestlers could no longer afford. Expensive cars whose value fell to fractions the moment they were driven off the lot. Parties, gold, jewelery, trips on the few days they WEREN'T on the road.
The artificially inflated market had the bottom fell out, the bubble popped, and an entire generation of professional wrestlers realized that when the big companies blew themselves up, that everything had peaked. They would never be that popular, that widely spread, and that well paid ever again.
And more wrestlers started dying in their forties. From problems with pain pills. From suicides.
And it was from the wreckage of these horrors that the world of professional wrestling that you know of came to be, Myra.
How does feel, Myra, to be living a lie?
The world of professional wrestling that you, know, the one that you turned your back on, the one that you're seeking to burn down is younger than you are. Hell, if it were a person, the goddess damned thing wouldn't be able to vote or drink alcohol yet.
You don't want to abolish history and tradition, Myra, you want to strangle it in the motherfucking cradle and go skipping gleefully back into the arms of the bad old days.
People had to fucking DIE before this industry opened its eyes to the problems it had.
There's a reason why the Triad only does shows every week or two, instead of constantly.
And even then sometimes it's still not enough.
Do I give people like Jason King and Willow Wilkes shit for never wrestling the show immediately following a title defense. Hells yes, I do. I'm glad that things have progressed to the point where they're able to take care of themselves like that. If they're still not feeling 100 percent two weeks out from a great big match, fine, let 'em rest. Good for them.
But I'm not like that. I don't wear down. I don't wear out. I don't get injured. I don't bend. I don't break. I can land on my head thirty times a night, every night, soak in some ice water, come back out fifteen minutes later and do it again. And again. And again.
And no one notices this. No one seems to realize it. Nobody has the sense to go "Hey, maybe we ought to put this gal in contention for a major title. She can go out there and defend the thing each and every week, week after week, without fail."
I don't get injured, Myra. All that happens to me is that I feel pain. The mortal mind isn't set up to handle being basically indestructible. We're wired to go "This does not feel good. We have to stop doing this and get out of this situation before we end up wounded."
Wrestlers wear down, Myra. Some faster than others depending on the style of wrestling they favor, the style their opponents favor, the stipulation the federation throw out, the number of days that you're made to spend on the road, and the number of matches you have in a year.
And do you know something? I feel for you, I really do, because you came up in pro wrestling at a really, REALLY shitty time for women.
The big leagues weren't hiring actual woman wrestlers, they were going out and grabbing pretty girls from all walks of life, models, cheerleaders, actresses, running them through the basics, stuffing them in skimpy outfits, and tossing them in the ring.
And then one day they caught lightning in a bottle, and a Canadian fitness model learned how to wrestle, defied all expectations, and actually started to put on quality matches.
"This is it!" Professional wrestling screamed, "This proves that we don't need actual womens' wrestlers, we can just make our own. In a cave. From a box of silicone scraps."
All the disastrous politicking, the faction warfare, the cheating and corruption that dragged pro wrestling down into a dark age that it's only just recently begun to recover from… all that was at the hands of the veteran wrestlers. The older guys who had decades of experience back room dealings behind them, having built connections, having gotten themselves buddies in the business.
It was the corrupt veterans who had ended the golden age. So around the time you were coming up in pro wrestling there was something of a youth movement. Companies didn't want too many of the older guys hanging around, lest they start bringing in their buddies and build up factions big enough where failing to give them what they wanted would mean one day a quarter of the roster refuses to come into work.
Wrestling federations hired a glut of fighters in the late teens and early to mid twenties. This perception of wrestlers as young people of college age became the new norm. To the point where in the year of our lord 2006 the then 34 year old Desolation, voted the greatest wrestler in ULW and IWC history, my mentor and trainer, was considered at that time by his peers as incredibly ancient and washed up.
Remember, though, that these people were cutting their teeth on the business when pro wrestling as a whole was at its most uncaring and callous. When wrestlers were made to wrestle five times a week, weren't given health care, didn't get paid if they didn't wrestle, wrestled in short, brutal matches filled with nothing but big spots and weapon shots.
Five years of that would make anybody a crippled wreck. A shell of their former selves.
For a lot of wrestlers, that was true.
And unfortunately, Myra, for the women it was the truest of all. Not because the lady wrestlers wore down, but because they aged.
Your culture is a disgusting, sick, grotesque thing, Myra. I suppose it stems from being a single sentient species. I mean human beings are pretty much anatomically identical save for a few differences in the shape and scale of various bits, and the coloration thereof. There isn't a lot that makes you different from one another.
It's like office politics applied to sexual selection. The biggest most destructive, knock down, drag out campaigns of hatred and loathing are always over the lowest stakes. And with so few differences between individuals, beauty falls into such a narrow band of tolerances.
Look at me. I'm the way I am, blue, seven feet tall, fire engine red hair, with a tail because somewhere back in my family tree a pointy-eared nature-loving quasi-fey fell in love with a member of a four foot tall scaly race created to be slaves to the draconic race, had a baby, and said baby grew up to boink on of the aforementioned four legged, winged, fire-breathing overlords.
I mean holy fuck, you've got people in this world that are willing to dress up like ghosts and hang other people from trees based off of skin coloration and what country your ancestors came from.
You've got an short-fingered orange goblin with shitty hair running for president who has a goodly portion of his platform based on the complete and utter removal and isolation of a religious group that worships the same deity as the majority of the citizens of this country, just in a slightly different way.
It's nuts, completely and utterly nuts. The way human beings will section themselves off into such tight, narrowly defined groups that they're willing to completely and utterly destroy other human beings over the slightest differences in appearance or culture.
And it's because of those slight differences, differences that make you fall outside of the narrow band of what society considers "optimally attractive" that you have problems.
It's taken years to fix womens' wrestling, something that was completely and utterly fucked up for most of the history of our sport. Whores and supermodels, Myra. For decades that was what was expected of women who stepped into the squared circle. Not warriors, not fighters, but sex objects and eye candy.
Wrestling federations treated their women as tissues. You pull them out, fap, and then you throw them away. Completely and utterly disposable. Because they didn't tend to hire women for wrestlers. They hired them to be props, to be scenary, to be managers, to be dancers, to be valets, to be props that on occasion would go out and wrestle a short, shitty match using moves they barely knew, and seldom practiced.
Federations didn't hang on to the same women over time, because why would they? The vast majority of them were pretty and talentless hacks who didn't know the difference between a wrist lock and a wrist watch.
Why would they bother paying a multi year veteran of their federation an increasingly large paycheck when they could just go out and find some new, young pretty thing and pay her a pittance?
Who cares that you can wrestle circles around some empty headed, bitchy supermodels and can carry a fucking broomstick to a 4 star match when you're not quite as pretty as you used to be?
Who cares that you've won world titles when this blonde bimbo over yonder has had surgery to get tits that are bigger than your head?
Why would we ever bother hiring a woman, who over time is going to become increasingly less and less in that narrow band of attractiveness when we could hire a man, who is just going to look more handsome and distinguished with age.
Well, unless he gets busted open a few too many times and gets a huge, hideous scar on his forehead that erupts in a geyser of blood when you look at it funny.
It's not fun being treated like a thing instead of a person, Myra, and I know that feeling all too well.
But things have begun to change, and change for the better.
Because we've had wrestling federations who weren't afraid to do something new, to try something different. To tell tradition to go fuck itself and start a brand new tradition.
One where nothing matters except how good of a match you can put on. Where it doesn't matter if you're a man, a woman, or an obese, genderless member of a hive mind called Bob. So long as you can go out and entertain the crowd, you're fine. The Triad told tradition to go fuck itself and started having intergender matches over a decade ago.
But the Triad isn't the whole of professional wrestling. It's no use trying to teach a puppy how to go outside to go to the bathroom if when you leave for work your lazy housemate doesn't care and just lets the thing piss and shit everywhere to its heart's content and leaves it for you to clean up when you get home.
The Triad cannot fix all the stupid shit that all the other wrestling federations have taught their fans to expect. At least not right away. You don't smack the puppy, yell at it, and rub its nose in the mess if you want it to behave and stop messing in the house. You have to be kind and give it positive reinforcement when it piddles and plops outside.
But the Triad having success with intergender wrestling matches isn't the only reason why womens' wrestling is on the rise.
See, those old shifty vets whose faction warfare, bloated contracts, and politics playing brought our sport to its knees never went away. A few of them are still out there, bodies held together on a hope and a prayer, wrestling matches.
But a lot of them, they took their big bucks, they decided that they didn't want to look like a bunch of old fools trying to relive their glory days whilst on their third or fourth hip replacement, and completely artificial knees.
And now enough time has passed to the point where they've got children that are fully grown, children who grew up watching Daddy on TV in front of tens of thousands of people on international television and they go "I want that."
So rather than putting the political cash machine to work getting jobs for themselves and their equally over the hill buddies, the old monsters that ruined pro wrestling for a generation are now putting the campaigns to work on promoting their kids.
And they most certainly don't want their flesh and blood to be supermodels and whores. Of course not! How degrading and demeaning! Their daughters will fight on equal footing with the men, not segregated into their own division. Their babies will win World titles, it's no less than they deserve, having sprung from the loins of greatness!
And they are of greatness, after all! Who else would have been given massive, multi-million dollar contracts to run professional wrestling right into the motherfucking ground?
These days we don't have an endless horde of grungy, long haired wrestlers in jeans and black band t-shirts wanting to tear down the establishment like we had in the 2000's. We don't have the endless wrestler-as-a-second career types that were common in the 90's, no wrestling plumbers, wrestling hockey players, wrestling farmers, wrestling musicians, wrestling chicken franchise mascots. We don't have the back-ne sporting Roidy McGoos that made pro wrestling suck and made the locker room reek with the telltale body odor that comes from abusing anabolic steroids.
What we have is an endless parade of second and third generation wrestlers, who didn't have to struggle through the territories and work their way up the independent scene like their parents did.
A never ending parade of whiny, spoiled, entitled bitches and bastards that want everything on a silver platter, and who want it now.
You're not one of them, Myra, but you're starting to act like one of them.
The political machine that took our shining success of a sport and made it into a laughing stock has returned. All the signs are here.
The secret deals made in back rooms.
The courting of wrestlers tied to particular factions and dynasties, awarded big money contracts far more than they would ever be worth, simply as a matter to appease the spider at the center of the web of each and every little cult of personality.
The factions are back. So is the gang warfare. ULW suffered from matches ruined by endlessly run ins that became inane and boring with their predictability and regularity. Those factions are right here in the UWA, ready to begin sucking the life from this federation anew.
The scheming, the cheating, the politics, the corruption. That's what you want to embody, Myra? That's what you want to be?
After years of suffering through all the bullshit professional wrestling has to offer you take a step back, shake your head, and go "I'm tired of having to fight uphill against all this crap. I think I'm going to be part of the problem now, rather than the solution."
Oh yeah, sure, of course at first you're going to experience some success. You're going to win a few matches, maybe grab a title reign on something. But eventually you're going to run up against a better cheater with a more complex and subtle political machine behind them. You're going to find a foe with a bigger sugar daddy applying their pocketbook to things.
And then you're going to be just as fucked as everybody else who isn't playing the "make professional wrestling complete and utter shit for everyone else but me" game.
It's like a public toilet seat in the women's restroom, Myra.
Everything is nice and fine and clean until somebody goes "I'm too good for this. I'm not going to put MY beautiful skin on this toilet seat for commoners! Who knows how many people have touched this!" And then proceeds to hover over the seat and piss all over it.
So now the next woman is given the choice of either clean up somebody else's mess, get dirty, or go and play the hover and piss game herself, making the situation worse for the next gal. And the next. And the next. Until some poor janitor has to come in and hose down the entire stall because there's piss all over the seat, over the floor, on the stall walls, and somehow on the motherfucking ceiling.
All because some spoiled, entitled bint didn't trust in the power of Lysol and decided she's too good to put her butt on the seat, and each successive user of the bathroom hovers a little bit further from the mess, and a little bit further, until you've got a woman standing out in the hallway squatting across the threshold and shitting in plain view of everyone like they do in motherfucking India.
Why do you hate indoor plumbing, Myra? Stop pissing on the seat for fuck's sake!
You want to return professional wrestling the the bad old days? To where it was nothing but a bunch of competing little feudal fiefdoms all sabotaging the other and trying to suck out every last drop of money, power, and prestige the wrestling federation has to offer?
You think you're going to be able to throw down with the power players all on your own, Myra? Just you, your sledgehammer, and that voice in your head screaming "I'M NOT WASHED UP, I'LL SHOW THEM, I'LL SHOW THEM ALL!" And dissolving into a fit of hysterical, mad, supervillainous laughter.
Or do you have something else planned, hmm?
I mean after all, you DID fuck your way into destroying one relationship.
Maybe you liked it.
Maybe you realized that you missed your one true calling in life.
Maybe you don't want to be a wrestler anymore, Myra.
Maybe you WANT to be a whore, just like all the girls were back in the day.
Oh. I know what it is. You don't want to be a whore. You want to be the new Moolah. You want to be the Madame for a new generation of poorly trained sluts. Pretty girls run through a scant few training sessions, tossed in the ring to suck, and then thrown backstage. Also to suck, but in a totally different way.
I think you realized that your ex-husband was a complete and utter sack of shit. But I get the feeling that there's something you won't admit to yourself.
All you ever wanted in life was for your father to go, "I was wrong to treat you the way I did. You've done well, I'm proud of you."
But the son of a bitch offed himself rather than accept your plan for your own damned life.
So you went out and found somebody just like him, tried to make him happy, tried to get him to say those magic words, "I'm proud of you." And then when it turned out he was as big of a piece of shit as your old man you kicked him to the curb.
You've literally lived the life of a woman in a feudal dynasty, Myra. You know the feeling of powerlessness, of having someone else control and manipulate each and every moment, each and every facet of your life from the cradle to the grave. Of being treated like a piece of meat, to be bought and sold, to be given away to somebody to use as a fucktoy.
And now that's what you want to resurrect. That's what you want to bring back. You want to take the wrestling out of wrestling and make it into a never-ending campaign of political intrigue. You want to turn pro wrestling into a patriarchy.
Because let's face it, Myra, all the wrestlers who have the big bucks, the massive fortunes to throw around and make the connections and the secret deals with? They're sure as hell not women.
There haven't been great big bucks in professional wrestling since the 90's. Oh sure, there might be folks around who have a million here, or a million there. But the only women who are going to be able to play the chess game are the ones like you. Ones who inherited their money.
And you couldn't have inherited much. After all, you got what? A quarter of papa's fortune, and you blew threw that in a couple of years as a pro wrestler? How's that going to compare to the guy who spent years wrestling in the 90's with a multimillion dollar contract who's had it in solid investments for the past 20 years?
He's got nine figures of bank balance to spend picking out his pieces. And he's going to have more pieces than you, after all, he's been playing the game since before you were born. He's going to know the rules better than you, and he's going to know how to cheat.
Where your "new tradition" ends, Myra, is with the 60 year old wrestler who made his fortune in the 90's deciding who gets to be World Heavyweight Champion. Including himself if that's what he wants. Verne Gagne did that, after all.
Your "new tradition" ends up with all the power back in the hands of the people of the "old tradition," the old white men who that were the wrestling superstars of yesteryear. The out of touch old farts that damned near killed off professional wrestling once already, and you want to give them another fucking chance?
But now that I think about it, there might be something even worse lurking on the horizon. The other half of the equation that doomed professional wrestling. The meddling of corporate overlords with massive amounts of cash and a knowledge of precisely fuck all of how pro wrestling works.
And those types aren't going to be women either.
Either way what we're going to end up with is somebody who doesn't have the slightest clue how professional wrestling works these days. We'll have someone buying the belt for his kid to use to keep their pants up or we're going to have someone who is going to try and cut all the life and happiness out of pro wrestling in order to extract every last penny it can wring out of the federation before discarding it like a crushed up, empty juice box.
Because I know the way these people think. When I got here I sat down and I watched the better part of 50 years worth of pro wrestling history to know what I was getting into. I read books, old newsletters, websites.
And it became clear to a complete outsider that in order to run a professional wrestling company, 99.9 percent of the time you have to be completely and utterly full of shit.
Why? Because damned near everyone seems to think that pro wrestling is a cyclical business with regular ups and downs.
No it's not, you dipshits. It's cyclical because the bottom falls out, you start throwing things at the wall until you find something that sticks, then you ride that fucking thing until the wheels fall off, the bottom drops out of the business, and then you go scrambling to find the next new thing to ride until it dies.
Stagnation, Myra.
Stagnation is what kills professional wrestling.
And that's what you want to bring about. The best manipulator, the best mastermind, the man with a plan and the biggest pocketbook deciding who gets to be World Heavyweight Champion.
Honestly, I think you're fucking nuts. I don't see how you can possibly believe that you have any chance whatsoever of being the UWA's premiere chessmaster.
All you've got, Myra, is yourself, a sledgehammer, and some serious delusions of grandeur about how you're going to catapult yourself into super stardom.
In the end you're going to have made your mark on professional wrestling, but it'll be a skid mark. A long streak of dried filth rubbed all over the sport with a dozen other shit stains left by people who were intent only on leaving a mark, rather than leaving the sport in a better position than when they entered it.
All it takes to get rid of a mark like that, Myra, is for somebody to come along, somebody who doesn't mind getting a little bit dirty in order to clean things up. Somebody to come along with a can of Scrubbing Bubbles and a hose.
Don't shit on my sport, Myra.
Stop pissing on the seat, Myra.
Your father could never accept you being you. He's dead. His body's rotting in the ground, and he's burning merrily away in hell with Satan shoving a thermonuclear pineapple in and out of his rectum.
You're never going to get acceptance from a corpse.
You weren't happy with him as a father.
You weren't happy with someone just like him as a husband.
You sure as hell aren't going to be happy trying to be him, Myra.
He wasn't even happy being him.
He hated being him so fucking much he killed himself.
Is that what you're seeking, Myra, with all this antagonism, all this violence?
Do you want to die?
If you are, button, I'm more than happy to send you on your way. Or at least get you part of the way there.
All you need to do is to try and bring your little sledgehammer into our nice, happy little wrestling match.
Because the moment you go for that weapon? I have all the excuse I need to take you down.
All my anger, all my frustration, all my bitterness, all my hatred about what people like you are doing to the sport of professional wrestling…
I get to take it out on you.
On a meager slip of a woman who has burned all her bridges, put herself on the Sinistry's shitlist for taking out the Executioner, and wants to start playing politics with the big boys.
Because you've gone and alienated anyone and everyone who has ever cared about you, Myra.
When I put you down like the rabid dog you've become, no one will mourn. Everyone will rejoice.
Everyone, I suspect, including you.
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