I stared at my minion like she'd grown a second head, or had her skull spontaneously burst through her skin. Again.
I'd explained the basics of the system used to measure magical power, how much was contained in a typical human being, how many would be earned with a victorious title match with a prestigious wrestling title with a million people watching, and the massive amount of power it'd take to breach the barrier between realities and be able to safely deliver my big blue butt back to where it belong.
And of course the batshits insane clown dragon thing manages to make a logical point: if I'd started draining one relatively nasty demon a week, I'd have about enough magical oomph stored up to get myself home by now.
But that would be adventuring. I hate adventuring.
I let out an audible groan, I can't help it, it's my instinctual reaction to someone bringing up getting my tail out there to start back in on the old grind.
"What are you groaning about, boss? I've heard you complaining about how there aren't any convenient warrens of goblins to go and kick over when you're pissed off."
"Well, Claudia" I begin "Engaging in the wholesale slaughter of goblins isn't really adventuring. It'd be like calling McDonalds a fine dining establishment. It's a quick, easy, convenient, cheap version of the real thing.
"Proper adventuring, well, there's quests involved. And quests are like weeds, once one pops up there are another dozen lurking nearby that'll sprout up if you pay attention to the first one.
"You start out wanting to off a demon a week, and within five minutes you've got some unwashed peasant smelling of cow dung on a farmstead wanting you to deliver a pie to his dear old granny in the woods in exchange for a few silvers pieces, a crappy soul gem he found in the woods, and maybe some ratty old slippers that radiate faintly of magic."
Claudia snorts "There aren't any peasants in this day and age."
"Oh, I've sprained my ankle walking to the mailbox getting my coupons for buy one get one free Whoppers. Can you please deliver this box of testing supplies to my grandma, she has the diabeetus. I can just smell the lack of deodorant, the cheeto dust, and the Rascal scooter."
My minion glares at me. "Things don't work like that here. What if I did the hard part of tracking down the demons and such?"
I narrow my eyes, "Tracking down demons is the hard part?"
"Well, yeah. The last time we fought some there were like six of them and they went down in under a minute."
"Claudia, the minions would rate maybe three Mals on a good day, their leader would've clocked in at about 25, if he'd eaten his Wheaties that morning. In order to be worthwhile we'd have to be facing things at least four times stronger. Preferably closer to ten times, or 250 Mals.
"My best guess is that the strongest thing that we could ever potentially come across here would be around 2k, which is about the highest I've taken on without a hell of a lot of help. The vampire bitch queen I got the gauntlet from rated about that."
"So where do you stack up on the scale, boss?" Claudia asks.
I shrug "No idea. It's hard to get metrics of power with a dragon, because the easiest method of testing, funneling your spell power into raw destructive energy until you pass out doesn't work.
"The whole being a walking font of elemental energy thing makes that pretty much impossible. Most people are buckets, while dragons are like a fire hose."
"Can we just try one and see how it goes?"
"I think you just want to be able to messily kill something and not get in trouble for it."
"Well yes, but that doesn't mean that we also can't start working on accomplishing one of your goals as well!" she says, all smiles and puppy dog eyes and cuteness.
"Claudia, put those away. I don't even want to know where you got them" I scold my minion, who has managed to produce a jar full of gleaming, glistening eyeballs. Thankfully plastic ones.
"C'mon, it'll be fun! A little master-minion bonding! Tempering our friendship in the fires of combat! Nurturing the camaraderie found only in battle!"
"Stop reading Spark's fantasy novel collection. Those things will rot your brain, and you don't have enough brains to let some go around decaying all willy-nilly."
Claudia sticks her forked tongue out at me and blows a raspberry. I don't know where she gets it from. "Meanie! I want to go on a proper adventure, not lurk around in the arena with a bunch of sticks in the mud that you won't let me play with!"
"Because you sucked the memories out of the LAST two I let you play with!"
"Not true, not true at all! I was wrestling proper matches while you went off the radar after the whole being set on fire and stuffed into a casket thing."
"I was stuffed into a casket and then set on fire. The order of operations is important."
"Come on! One little demon hunt to start things off. What's the worst that can happen?"
I grin. "Well my LAST major adventure, the one I sought out, not one of the ones that got dropped into my lap, ended with the fairy noblewoman who had put out the word for adventurers fucking loathing the way I did business.
"So instead of properly fulfilling my boon of being immune to fire like I asked, she didn't like the fact that I was a six foot tall warrior-woman instead of a demure, prissy little heal-bitch in a dress or a robe with a staff or a rod or a bow and arrows or some shit.
"So I'm immune to fucking fire, all right. But I also get tiny, pink, blonde, disgustingly cute, and look all of twelve years old at five foot nothing with zero cleavage.
"Sure, if I stayed in that state and started sucking in the fire energy I'd grow, but I'd also still be neon fucking pink, blonde, and looking like jailbait!
"And if I wear anything longer than two hours it turns into a fucking dress, which becomes fancier, more elegant, and less practical the longer I have it on!
"I go to bed in a t-shirt and panties, I wake up looking like motherfucking Queen Victoria!"
"That uh… that does not sound like fun. I can see why you went off the grid for a few months while you got that all worked out."
I grit my teeth. "It's not… quite all worked out."
"Oh?"
"I still owe Gaunt for letting me borrow the Hand of the Legion to shunt all the flame mana into. He'd probably want me to go kill a demon or something on his behalf so that he can double book and earn twice the f… NO!" I can see where Claudia's mind is going and I don't like it.
"But that means the hard part of locating the demon is done and we can just go and kick it's ass and be done with things lickity split! No peasants and no Rascal scooter-riding fatties whining about their diabeetus!
"And since you owe Gaunt a favor anyway, we kill two birds with one stone! I'm going to go give him a call and get things set up."
"No! Don't do…" But I'm too late, Claudia's ducked behind the chair, which means I can't see her, and if I can't see her that means that she can move around however she likes because she isn't being actively observed.
She's like a horror movie monster or a cartoon character that way. The moment you take your eyes off her she can move incredible distances with seemingly zero effort.
It's a useful trick, and if she's absolutely adamant on going demon hunting, I hope she's got even more tricks buried in a great big ol bag of them.
We'd probably end up needing them.
-o-
You're good, Lilith, you're really good.
You may be absolutely horrible as a minion, and a titch lacking as an in-ring competitor. But my god, are you ever amazing at the role they've given you.
I almost fell for it. I really did. Me, of all people!
I had this big plan all worked out, Lil, and it took about two days of my subconscious picking at the problem before I realized that my cunning and valliant plan filled with heroism and goodness and sympathy and crap was exactly what was expected of me.
Just a refresher on things for the folks who might've missed my previous discussions on the topic of Lilith Evans, Sinistry Henchperson, she's running what back home we call a Pitiful Thrall.
Long story short she fails at doing minion-y duties, gets punished by her Evil Overlord, and attempts to get heroes to get all sympathetic and compassionate and shit trying to save the poor, feeble mook from the crushing power of her superiors in the Darkness.
And after last week, I almost fell for it. After seeing Mr. Lord of the Flies using his belt to asphyxiate someone who isn't himself for a change, I actually found myself going, "Gee, you know what would probably be the best thing to happen to her? If I injured her. Maybe broke an arm, snapped a leg, cracked a few ribs. Something that'd keep her out of wrestling long enough for the Sinistry to forget about her and have a whole new crew of mooks my the time she heals."
And I almost fell for it.
Then I remembered the bullshit narrative that the Shadow Cartel is trying to pin on me.
Have I brought them up in the UWA before? I don't remember. But what they are is a loose affiliation of wrestling dynasties with pull and power. They basically ran 90 percent of the IWC back in the day, half of them centered around Ba'al, and the other half around Taylor Chase.
It's not hard to see the man behind the curtain pulling the strings when a couple factions that ought to be at each other's throats seem to have gotten together in order to compare notes and get their stories straight.
I mean you have the Price-Masons, the Sinistry, and New Eden all having tried at one point to tar and feather me as being this horribly reckless, dangerous, fearsome, barely controlled monstrosity that doesn't belong in a professional wrestling ring for fear of the safety of my opponents.
It's hilarious. I mean in the past month we've had two fucking non-wrestlers in this federation go absolutely cuckoo batshit bugnuts loco and attempt to choke, suffocate, smother, asphyxiate, lynch, and/or garrote their supposed teammates on international fucking television.
And what has the big, scary, fearsome animal who deserves to be put in a zoo done? Wrestled four people and attempted to murder precisely none of them. Hell, Danny Darko fucking congratulated me for winning and told me that I was entertaining.
Number of children who are going to have recurring nightmares and/or a choking fetish from my UWA segments? Precisely zero.
And remember that everyone that I've ever injured, both of them, deserved it. They attacked me first. I didn't just decide one day out of the blue "You know what would be fun to do today? To put some spikes through some poor bastard's palms."
And Adam? I'm not even sure that I actually ever fucking DID anything to Adam. If there was some dire, career ending injury from a Prismplex, he sure as hell didn't show it when he, you know, walked right out to the ring with the rest of New Eden later in the night.
I think Willow or Cindy Todd or somebody realized that he was a pretty shit lackey and that having Dante on their side was a step up, and the son of a bitch got a barbed wire necklace (one without fucking gemstones on it this time, Cindy, I know fucking costume jewelry and makeup when I see it) or a Saran Wrap special and dumped into a shallow grave somewhere.
See, it was thinking about Dante and Adam that made me take a second look at this whole situation, Lilith. The usual crew of dipshits have been up my ass about ending Adam's career since the day it happened, and the set of circumstances seems awfully similar.
I show up, declare that I'm going to put my foot down on the Sinistry/New Eden national pastime of mass interference in matches where they don't belong, they attempt to mob me and beat me down for daring to stand up to them, they've recently traded up from an ineffectual minion to a teleporting sex dungeon enthusiast.
Back in ULW it was shortly after the whole Adam thing where management really started to have a bug up their butt regarding me. Hopefully this year I won't have to wrestle a paid assassin on the biggest card of the year, which is desperately stocked with part-timers rather than legitimately built up current stars.
So in order to prevent the UWA from digging Lethal Weapon out of mothballs again, I'm going to derail the whole story right here.
So no, Lilith, I'm not going to snap your leg by jumping on a steel chair. I'm not going to get a running start and punt you in the head. I'm not going to stick one of your little twiggy arms in my mouth and snap your radius and ulna like strands of uncooked spaghetti. I'm not going to debut my new fragrance in an atomizer and blast you in the eyes. I'm not going to wear a ski mask, thwack you across the back of the knee and go on to have an endless run of awful personas. I'm not going to powerbomb you into the turnbuckles. I'm not going to chokeslam you over the ropes with a cross made of light tubes duct taped to your arms and back, as cool an image as that would be.
Because that would be the heroic thing to do. With the Evil Overlord having choked the very life out of you for daring to state your desire to be independant from his Army of Darkness, the way to save the emotionally distraught, abused minion would be to reduce her value in the organization to zero.
After all, if you can't fetch Ba'al his shitty German craft beers and rub Jessica Wilde's feet with vastly overpriced essential oils, what good are you?
And it's not even like they could peg you with a "You have failed me for the last time" thing and toss you in the piranha tank. You're you, I'm me, and anybody who has ever even remotely entertained the possibility of you taking me out is sitting around with a shit eating grin thinking that that Nigerian Prince is going to come through with their money any day now.
Aaaaaaany day now.
But d'ya wanna know what really spoiled it for me, Lil? Just how bloody thick you and Needle Dick the Bug Fucker were laying it on last week. You went full on Adam Sandler screaming "SOMEBODY KILL ME PLEASE, I WANT TO DIIIIIIIIIE!" and then when somebody went to kill you, do didn't die.
Never go full Adam Sandler.
But what really clinched it for me was just how fucking dumb you'd have to be to go to the Diet Mr. Pibb of Evil, Ba'al, all polite like with your hat in hand going "Oh gee, Mr. Evil Overlord, sir. I'd like to put in my two weeks notice and get a letter of recommendation to pursue a new career with another company."
Because I don't believe that anybody could possibly be that fucking dumb.
Oh sure, there are battered housewife types out there that are like that, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, cleaning the lint out from between their husbands toes when he comes home from work, a steak and a blowjob at the ready. Abused folks who have been had their sense of self purposefully crushed into little bitty pieces.
But you're a professional fucking wrestler, Lilith. You get paid to beat the fuck out of people. Well, on paper. Mostly you get paid to have people beat the fuck out of you.
I'm supposed to believe that you'll throw hands with a seven foot tall, bright blue amazon from another dimension that your pals have been painting as the most dangerous thing since Takata airbags, but won't lift a finger against some scrawny, willowy bastard that dresses like a Jehovah's Witness or a German industrial metal fanatic.
Yeah yeah yeah, Evil Overlord and whatnot. Ba'al will eat your children, rape your puppy, burn down your house, salt the earth, download a car, murder a policeman, take his helmet, take a dump in the helmet, deliver it to the policeman's grieving widow, steal it again, blah blah blah.
The thing is he's going to do that anyway. And everybody knows it.
I just don't buy it, Lilith. Call me an overly optimistic Pollyanna with a pair of G cups lactating the milk of human kindness, but I just don't think you can legitimately be as big of a fucking idiot as you're pretending to be.
There's two stories going on here, and I recognize both of them. I'm here to kick ass, not kiss it. I'm not going to play this political faction, family dynasty, Shadow Cartel bullshit. And if I were anybody else, they'd take me out.
Hell, they fucking tried. Anybody else took the beating I took, and their brain would be a mushy grey paste smeared across the inside of their skull.
But me being me, physical damage just ain't going to get the job done.
So they started trying to fuck with my reputation, trying to spin the narrative. I'm no more or less dangerous than any other professional wrestler out there. You press anybody's buttons the right way, you'll get a reaction of extreme violence. I just happen to have a bigger potential body count than most.
You want to know how to tell that I'm not a deranged, violent maniac chomping at the bit to cripple and maim everybody in her path? All you have to do is look at the fact that I can fucking breathe fire.
Now, how many people have I lit on fire with said fire breath over a career entering it's third year?
Why, precisely the same amount as Champion the Wonder Horse! Zero!
In comparison how many times have I myself been lit on fire by other people? TWO TIMES! I've been set on fire TWICE!
Stop the presses, this is one of those man bites dog stories right here.
So, Lilith, Ba'al, Jessica, Dante, Manny, Moe, Jack, I know exactly what you'd doing here, and I'm not going to fall for it.
You butt into my matches, you attack me, you make sure that Lilith takes the fall in the World Title contendership tournament so that I'm nice and pissed off. You offer up the Sinistry's sickest, weakest little lamb on a silver platter and just wait for me to rip and shred into the soft, tender meat.
You want me to confirm the narrative of a dangerous, uncontrollable animal because that's what I am to you. I'm a powerful creature capable of extreme violence that you cannot manipulate. You can't lure me to your side because I know an Evil Overlord when I see one and I know exactly what sort of unpleasant bullshit I can expect there.
I even have terms for pretty much all of it.
You can't keep me away with fear, because you've got nothing to threaten me with. I love to brawl with a bunch of smaller, weaker opponents at once. That's actually what I have the most experience in. Whereas other wrestlers would have the threat of injury and the loss of their livelihood hanging over their heads, the usual gang warfare shenanigans are basically freebie fun times for me.
And because Evil tends to be banal and uncreative, you've never bothered to put an option C to the whole "Join me or die!" thing. Thus we end up with a feeble attempt at a smear campaign.
Again.
It kind of worked the first time and Toots Van der Poot did his best to make my life an obnoxious, living hell.
In four shows with the UWA I've thus far been in two title contendership matches. Which interestingly enough is exactly the same as I had in my ULW career.
I like the UWA. And while management might eventually prove to be bent over flatulating into a wine glass and sniffing their own farts, thus far it hasn't displayed the sheer head-up-their-own-ass-itude of my previous places of pro wrestling employment.
So here we are, almost exactly a year later trying the same shit on a different day.
But this time? This time the universe isn't playing along, and neither am I.
I'm not going to stand here and threaten to rip the Sinistry limb from limb. That isn't going to get me anywhere.
What's be sent after me is a bunch of replaceable minions, interchangeable parts.
If I injure one of them, they're just going to be replaced by someone else.
No, what I'm going to do is make it an absolutely fucking misery for the Sinistry to conduct business as usual.
I'm going to be there to spoil every run in, I'm going to be there to even the odds in any fight, and above all else I'm going to be doing one thing: proving my superiority by defeating each and every one of them in the ring one on one.
Start from the bottom, work my way up to the top until I've vanquished all the members of the Quirky Miniboss Squad.
I'm not going to play your game, Lilith.
I'm here to flip the fucking table.
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