I don't get visitors to my apartment often. My social contacts are primarily comprised of two groups: the pro wrestling group and the supernatural group.
The former being Desolation, Hellkat, SPIDER, Bobs of all sorts, and other assorted loons, while the later being the occasional visit from Leeland Gaunt, Silence, and Legion.
Claudia was more of a housemate than a visitor, and Mr. Hush was practically part of the furniture.
The masked man had been assigned by my summoner to document my life, and my use of powers. Anything that could potentially aid him in getting a better understanding of magic, and thus being able to help me find a way home.
With my puddleportation ability it was usually easier for me to go and see someone, rather than have someone come to see me.
And most visits involved me cooking, which usually meant the pizza oven, which meant using the garden on the roof.
The homeowner's association had gone white as a sheet when I mentioned I wanted to put an oven that'll hit 1000 degrees in my apartment and do some major renovations to have it vented properly. However generously donating it to use in the community space on the roof was perfectly fine.
After a few gold coins changed hands, of course.
I looked around the place, from the collection of weapons and armor I had mounted on the walls, to the massive dragon skull that I'd made into a coffee table/ottoman/shelving unit, to the embarrassingly large amount of pizza chain memorabilia I had scattered around the place.
What can I say? I like pizza. Pizza is my favorite thing. It's fun to make, it's fun to eat, it's fun to say. Stuff that had been in pizza parlors just seemed to radiate a the pleasure of a full belly, thus I had a lot of stained glass lamps, pizza pans, menu boards, a handful of neon signs, and then shelves upon shelves of mascots.
Oh and that massively loud clown horn they break out at restaurants descended from the Shakey's Pizza line. Happy birthday to you! HONK! Happy birthday to you! HONK! Happy birthday dear customer, HOOOOOOOOOOOONK! happy birthday to you! HONKHONKHONKHONKHONK!
I love that thing.
I'm sitting here worrying about how my decor looks because I've got the head of the Noid mounted right next to a couple of swords that would make Cloud Strife go "Jesus Christ, dude, you're obviously compensating for SOMETHING."
It's not like my apartment is dirty or anything either. Spark doesn't actually need to sleep, so I tend to let him loose around the place when the Sandman has beaten me into unconsciousness with his Singapore Cane of Slumbering +5.
Without anyone awake to listen to his banter, Spark gets bored and his computer-like need for everything to be all nicely aligned and organized and whatnot gets the better of him and he starts cleaning.
And it's not like I'm even capable of leaving garbage around for more than a few minutes. Pretty much anything I put down that's going to go into the waste bin ends up as a Dragon Kitty chew toy, and when it's in pieces it becomes a Dragon Kitty snack.
Dragons are capable of eating just about anything, and while I've occasionally delved into the odd non-organic thing to eat (usually it involves copper BB's as an ice cream topper), I tend to keep my diet mostly on the normal side of things.
Well, aside from the majority of it being orange. For some reason I just love eating orange colored foods.
I don't like eating traffic cones, though. They're too chewy. They're like even worse circus peanuts.
But Kitty? I have to keep him on a short leash or else he'll go out chasing cars.
He weighs at least 300 pounds and is the size of a pony. He can actually CATCH cars, start tearing chunks off with his jaws and claws and start eating them.
He likes car batteries the best, calls them the heart of the kill.
Suffice to say I don't let him outside much.
And there's the doorbell (Blue Oyster Cult's "After Dark," because I think the words sound like "At the door") and my company's arrived.
I shouldn't be this nervous. It's not like after putting up with my unique personality for the better part of several months Selena Frost is going to run away screaming because I have weird paintings of Little Caesar and Chuck E. Cheese done up in the styles of several great artists.
Okay, that one I have of the Noid in the style of serial killer, clown, and painter John Wayne Gacy might legitimately make people run away screaming if they knew what it was. But that one was actually a gift from SPIDER. Thankfully I know that Gacy's been dead for over 20 years, so he couldn't POSSIBLY have painted it. Otherwise it might actually make ME run screaming.
I honestly shouldn't have hung it in the guest bedroom.
ANYWAY! DOOR!
I'm up from my chair and across the apartment like a shot. I open the door slowly, as I've had people absentmindedly continue knocking and hit me in the face before, and that sort of embarrassment isn't a good way to start an evening of getting to know one another.
"Oooo! Air conditioning!" says an almost melting Selena. It damned near hit 90 today, and the Alaskan native is probably missing her igloo. Or the massive body of salt water that acts as a normalizer for temperature if we want to be less stereotypical.
"Do come in to my humble abode. It's not a cave in a mountainside filled with gold, but it's home. And also yeah, the folks in charge of the building are cheap as hell and don't run the AC."
"Just wait until there's a streak of 90 degree days, and then a rainstorm. It's like a goddess-damned sauna out there."
My tag team partner steps into my apartment, spies an air vent on the wall, and promptly begins hugging the bit of wall that separates my kitchen and dining room, while also concealing the unsightly ductwork. She's just about got her face crammed into the vent and her near-white hair is billowing in the breeze.
"Should I leave you alone with the air vent for awhile? Put a sock on the door knob and come back in half an hour?"
"No. I'll be fine in a moment. Just the misfortune of a cab with poorly functioning AC, followed by your building's lobby, elevator, and hallway."
"S'why I tend to skip all that and come in through the bathtub."
Selena turns, looking confused.
"How do you come in through the bathtub?"
"The whole being a magical dragon who can use innate sorceries to connect any two bodies of water thing?" I say flatly.
Selena looks a titch embarrassed. "I forgot you can do that."
I shrug. "No worries, everyone seems to forget I can do that. They also seem to forget that I'm a dragon half the time."
Now that she's stopped being two seconds away from french-kissing the HVAC Selena actually has the chance to look over my apartment and its strange decor. She clasps her hands together and laughs.
"This is about the last thing I was expecting!" she says with a chuckle. "The weapons display is something you would think every adventurer would have, but all the pizza memorabilia? Never in a thousand years would I have guessed that the lair of a draconic warrior would be filled with novelty kitsch from myriad pizza chains."
"What can I say? I like pizza. It's one of the things that's actually better here than back home. We just don't have the raw population, ease of transportation, and the industrial capacity to get chain restaurants off the ground. I was actually in the process of setting up a pair of Sapphire Shell branches in two other cities with my capacity for teleportation, but I kind of got yanked here before I could get them off the ground."
"Sapphire Shell?"
"Tavern/inn turned partial pizza parlor when I inherited it from my grandmother. There used to be a big blue egg on the central mantelpiece and the place was called the Sapphire Egg."
"What happened?"
"I hatched from it." I pull up my shirt, showing my smooth belly, "And yes, that means I don't have a belly button."
Selena raises a brow. "I didn't ask."
"Almost everybody does, though. So, what do you want on your pizza?"
"Ooooh! You're cooking me dinner? You don't have to do that!"
"I'm making dinner for me anyway, it'd be rude of me to just sit here and cram slices into my face hole while you sit around with nothing but the potpourri to chew on."
I gesture to the bowl on the little table pressed up against the half height wall between my kitchen and living room. The bowl has a metal screen over it and has been attached to the table with metal chains and several padlocks.
Selena's brow hasn't had a chance to go down, and instead twitches at the top.
"It's orange peel based. If I don't have it on lockdown Kitty eats it."
"Your cat eats your potpourri?"
"My cat eats everything that's not nailed down, and it being nailed down only slows him momentarily because he has to work the nails out before he eats them. Though he's not really a cat. Kitty's bloodline can be traced back to a black dragon, who had babies with a wolf, who had babies with that black dragon again. Then a wolf, then the black dragon again. Wolf, dragon, dragon, wolf, alligator, black dragon, tiger, rhinoceros, then grandma black dragon again."
I scratch my head and look away in embarrassment.
"Little Kalinda opened a giftbox from Grandma, found a cute brown bundle of fur with triangular ears that went "Purr, purr, purr" and said with astonishment "It's a dragon kitty!" Not realizing that some species of dragon also purr. And the dumb as a brick thing went and decided that was his name before I figured out that he was actually a doggie."
Selena giggles. "That is so cute! Can I meet the little scamp?"
"Sorry, you're a few decades too late for that. Kitty reached a state where he no longer could be considered little somewhere around three months of age. Scamp is dead on, though." I let out a loud whistle, which is actually a cover for my empathic prodding of the big lump in the living room.
Kitty perks up, sticking his head out from the "nest" he made out of a mostly ruined sofa (that wasn't mostly ruined when I got it), a few memory foam mattress toppers, and a Kevlar tarp that I'd looted from an tech bunker, a pretty rare find as far as lootable locations go back on Tatheon.
The beastie's nearly beachball sized head swivels towards the two of us, and Kitty comes barreling over, his huge, almost mole-like claws skittering on the tile. I manage to grab his tail in time to bring him to a complete stop before he sends Selena flying like a bowling pin.
Kitty places his nose beneath Selena's hand, demanding pets and scratches.
"Hello new person!" Kitty says happily, "Household tradition demands that all newcomers are to pet my head and scratch my ears for no less than one hour, spread out in fifteen minute intervals. You are allowed a five minute break between petting sessions."
Selena's eyes go wide. "He talks!" she manages, obediently delivering the requested ear scratchings.
"I talk and I am also capable of doing your taxes as well!"
Selena gives me a weird look.
"Yes, he is actually capable of doing your taxes. He did mine this year and last year once I gave him a laptop with a link to the tax code on it, rather than a print copy."
"I kept eating it. Knowledge is power and power is delicious." Kitty says pleasantly, his heavy draconic tail wagging and thudding noisily on the floor. I'd not only had to put down special tile to prevent it from being shredded by dragon claws, I'd also had to install a hell of a lot of sound proofing so my downstairs neighbor didn't end up driven mad from the incessant thumping of Kitty's tail.
Kitty has always been a very happy dragon-wolf-thing.
"I never did get an answer about pizza toppings."
"Oh! Uh, pepperoni and sausage is fine. Chicken would be nice if you have it."
I nod and slip into the kitchen, getting out a skillet to brown the meat in order to make sure it got thoroughly cooked beforehand.
Because the last thing I wanted was to be down one tag team partner due to Salmonella. I had the dough raising in the fridge, and the sauce already simmering on the stove.
We'd talked a bit, found a few common interests in board and video games, and spent a great deal of time expressing our dislike of various coworkers.
But we'd never really sat down and chatted about casual things. Most of the time our meetings over the last few months had been in passing when Selena would be heading down to the ring and I'd be standing guard over her wife.
And the days that weren't wrestling shows were training sessions.
We both recognized that becoming more familiar with one another's' capacities in the ring would benefit us greatly, as we'd been plotting a possible tag team run even before our sudden contendership had been announced. We'd even worked on a few tandem moves that were pretty nasty.
"So where's the missus? Downstairs puking her guts out after a cab ride? Flying not good for the baby?"
Selena froze and went white as a sheet, stopping her scratching of kitty entirely, a look of momentary horror and sorrow on her face before she managed to get control of her emotions and put up a cheery facade.
"Oh she's ah… at home. Doing things. Perfectly nice and safe."
I nod knowingly. "Ahh. Kidnapped, eh? That tends to happen." I say as if discussing the weather while browning the sausage.
Selena just about has a brain overload and her mouth stops working properly and only makes sputtering noises for a few moments.
"How can you POSSIBLY know that?"
"Because I've seen the two of you together. You've got some Disney Princess type lovey-dovey bullshit going on, so your relationship isn't on the rocks."
"You're horrified and upset, but you're making excuses and trying to present everything as being okay. Which means that something bad has happened, but you want to truck on like everything is perfectly normal in order to not rouse suspicion."
"You also flew in on the cheapest flight possible and took a cab over instead of renting a car, so you've recently spent some money and are trying to make up for spending it by spending less."
"Plus everybody in the Triad draws drama like a magnet. Put it all together and it spells kidnapping."
She's silent.
"Want some help?"
"What could you possibly do?"
I grin, "Let me find you a video tape of my recent exploits, kemosabe, and we can have dinner and a movie and I can show you EXACTLY what I'm capable of with the limiters removed."
If there is one thing that I've learned to hate in my time spent on this goofy little billiard ball of a world it's ignorance. Ignorance and arrogance.
The two things that I've come to hate in my time on the silly magic-starved backwater planet are ignorance, arrogance, and pride.
Amongst the attributes that I have come to take an extreme loathing for are such distinct elements as ignorance, arrogance pride, taking one's self way too serious, an almost fanatic devotion to the pope, and snappy red…
I'll come in again.
No, but seriously, I really don't like how ninety plus percent of the professional wrestling world are basically straight out of a South Park episode. So full of smug, proud, arrogant ignorance that they've begun sniffing their own farts as if they were a grand perfume, and some are well on their way to having the spines curl into hideous, malformed positions, driving their heads literally up their own asses.
A lot of people that I work with are so consumed with themselves, their accomplishments, their deeds, and their pasts that they essentially refuse to acknowledge anything and everything around them that's out of the ordinary, the least bit unusual.
They think that they're masters of the world, that in all their twenty-some years on the planet that they have achieved peak knowledge and wisdom and that they'd like no more of that thar book learnin' please, mah brains is full.
If it weren't so bloody obnoxious it might be kind of cute.
You've lived somewhere between one third and one fourth of your typical mortal lifespan, presuming that you don't get hit by a bus, get cancer, or succumb to the good ol wrestler death cocktail of drugs and alcohol and die in your forties.
You think that nine months of partnership with one another gives you an unbeatable edge in experience over a pair of likeable goofballs who hang out together because "Hey! We're basically the only two people in the fed who DON'T have attitudes like they have cases of raging hemorrhoids and are too polite to scratch in public."
You think that gives you an advantage.
It doesn't.
Do you know what I've been doing the vast majority of my life?
Murdering things.
Oh sure, usually it's gussied up with fancy and pleasant terms and mostly it's called adventuring, but for the most part it's wandering the countryside, being attacked by random shit, and killing it stone cold dead.
And when you're not doing that you're seeking out the critters in their lairs and bringing them to a bleeding, bashy, slashy, stabby, burny end because they've been doing naughty things to nearby towns.
One of the last things I did before I got yanked here involved myself, a cybernetic catgirl, a suit-wearing spellcaster, and a guy that can spiritually invade computers having to tromp through an old fallout shelter under some dude's mansion and killing the shit out of about four dozen ravenous zombies.
And not the easy, slow, plodding arms in front, stagger-y kind of zombies. Oh no. These were the gods damned fast ones.
Turns out his Lordship brought back a nasty little magical contagion, spread it to his staff, and only a doctor-mage retained sentience. He had been using his lordship's money to have people discretely murdered, and then carved up to feed to the lot. Himself included.
The son of a bitch went and hired a personal chef to prepare fancy five star cannibal meals that would give Hannibal Lector a mighty gourmand erection.
Paid him off to get his Lordship's magical vote recording thing to break a parliamentary stalemate on what exactly was going to be torn down to make way for an expansion to the city's canal system, as well as the route said system would take.
Got the vote thingy, put in the vote, giggled at the sight of his Lordship in his funny robes and sheepskin wig chained to his desk, and then got the entire compound sicked on us because our buddy the late Dr. Braxton, MD, decided that he wanted our money, our gear, and our tasty, tasty flesh.
Fifty to four. Fifty rampaging, predatory ghouls. Each and every one of them a remorseless, unthinking hunter, every one of them a killer, each of them wanting nothing more to rend us limb from limb, feast on our entrails, and wash it all down with our precious bodily fluids.
We made it out without a scratch.
Why?
Because I'm smart enough to strategize.
Office at the end of a hallway in a stone hidey hole meant to survive magical armageddon? The other three take care of the half dozen or so zombos in the office, murder anything that comes down the hallway.
Me?
My job was to wade out into that sea of undead cannibalistic humanity and annihilate them with what the gods gave me.
When you're seven bloody feet tall and living in a world sized for people of whom the vast majority hovers around 5'6" and 6'0" you learn that in cramped conditions weapons are liabilities. They hard to carry, hard to swing effectively, and unless you pay a goodly chunk of your income to get enchanted, tend to break because you swing them too hard.
Fists. Tail. Teeth. Fire breath.
In the span of twenty minutes I put down forty ravenous, rabid, undead ex-humans.
And that's just the most recent event.
I've spent the majority of my life, Marie, Sophie, taking on vast numbers of opponents who are much smaller than I am, most of them trying to do things far more sinister that put my shapely blue shoulders on the floor for a count of three.
It's bloody difficult for me, trying to figure out how to fight people much smaller than me without, you know, just picking y'all up two at a time, one in each hand, and squeezing until your heads pop off.
It's interesting. It's different. It's a challenge.
It's why I'm still here in professional wrestling even though the vast majority of my coworkers are complete and utter know-it-all assholes that think just because they've gotten a win over the seven foot tall Executioner, and honestly who hasn't at this point, that they're prepped for all big scary nasty people that come down the road.
And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, pumpkin, but tag team wrestling's been kind of treated as the redheaded stepchild of most professional wrestling federations.
It's not hard to hold tag team titles for over a year when you, say, have defended them in a proper tag team match once, maybe twice, like how things worked in ULW. And that was Willow and Gracie, who didn't even like one another.
Well, Willow didn't like Gracie, Gracie likes everybody. Like some sort of mentally defective puppy given human form.
But yeah, they were the tag team champs in the fed I was in for most of my career. The only tag team champs. So I don't really have much to compare to.
And if it were me, I'd be driven crazy doing that. Just holding titles like some sort of pretty decoration, never really defending them, not actively defending my title because people want all the glory for themselves these days and don't want to strut around in matching tights.
Though it's not like tag team wrestling is some sort of special, arcane, sacrosanct thing where title matches are concerned. I've probably had more tag matches in my career than I've had singles matches.
The thing I want the most is a nice, decent, straight up dragon to man (or woman, robot, hermaphroditic plant, or sixteen gendered space alien) brawl where we can freely hit one another with whatever objects happen to be lying around where the fight stays just between the two of us.
I want a nice, intimate, personal knock down, drag out, hardcore brawl between two consenting adults who just want to beat the living fuck out of one another.
But the powers that be don't seem to let me get in on that sort of thing.
I get put in multi-man matches a lot, and those are fun. Random mayhem where I get to pound on a lot of people in a short span of time. Mostly these are the refuge of the lazy booker who after putting together things that will fan the flames between clashing personalities just dumps the leftovers into one big pile and tells 'em "Have at it!"
And when it's not multi-man matches, it's always tag teams. Usually of the "You two have a beef, and you two have a beef, let's put all four beef-havers into the same ring so that we can give you a taste of what it's like to lay your hands on the guy/gal/ent that's pissing you off, but not so much that you're actually satisfied with the outcome" and "You two have beef, we're teaming you up and making you fight as a team to see if you can coexist. It's okay if you don't, it's hilarious when you lose because you can't get along" flavors.
Though there's the occasional "Let's pair the big huge dragoness that can shrug off things that would put normal people in the hospital with whatever wrestler we can scrape from the bottom of the barrel" going on. I'm still trying to figure out why that comes up so goddess-damned often.
So in short, gals, I've got loads of experience fighting outnumbered, I've got loads of experience fighting with somebody watching my back, and I've got loads of experience competing in tag team matches.
The only thing I've been lacking is what I've always lacked; a reliable partner who is actually a halfway competent wrestler and not a complete and utter fuckwit.
And I've got one of those.
She even comes with spiffy accessories, like a big pink belt that signifies that she's amongst the best wrestlers are here who are in possession of two X chromosomes.
Then again our roster is like 80 percent female and literally all our champions are in possession of a set of lady parts. Well, supposedly in possession of lady parts. I'm sure we all remember the rampant speculation around Robin Brooks ages and ages ago. And um… the uh… that one lady who was born a dude who has hair and eyes as brilliantly colorful and weird colored as mine. Domino Rouge, I think?
Hung around with that one guy whose name I can never remember, Axel Evermore, maybe? You know the one, he'd stop by when I was training with Desolation and the Dark Man would joke that he had to have somebody follow the dude around the gym to make sure he wasn't off in the archives jacking it while looking at Deso's collection of title belts.
Damn that dude loves title belts.
I think he designed the IWC and ULW's belts. Dunno if the UWA went with him.
Anyway, I actually have a competent tag team partner for once. And it's not like this tagging thing is hard.
You hold onto an eighteen inch rope, keep both feet planted on the ring apron, and so long as some part of your body comes into contact with your tag team partner's hand, you become the legal woman.
See, here you are cackling with glee and looking down your snoot at me going "You two have no tag teaming experience with one another, however can you possibly fight a camaraderie that's been together for a whole nine months, long enough to fully gestate and pop up looking like a diminutive Winston Churchill" and you don't realize the things that can happen due to the fact that you're doing tag team wrestling against a bloody dragoness.
Oh the front office hates when I do this. They're all "No, you need to show and not tell! It's boring if you just stand there and talk into the camera and go "Rawr! I ish a dragon!" all the time."
But in this case it's true and relevant.
Y'all are like five and a half feet tall. I'm a whole foot and a half taller. I've got an eighty-six inch reach, a good nineteen inches worth of it more than you do, presuming averages. Well, that is if you haven't been blessed or cursed with monkey or T-Rex arms.
That definitely gives me an advantage in a whole lot of ways, like grabbing you by the cranium and holding you at length while you flail ineffectual and comedically at the air with your tiny, comparatively, short, weak, willowy, Trump-ian forelimbs.
But in a tag team match what this means is that you short-fingered vulgarians have to deal with me having a an extra seven or so inches of extensible arm that I can use to tag in and tag out.
Oh, and then there's the white elephant in the room, or rather the blue dragon. Specifically my tail. I've got ten feet of additional limb positioned just over my butt.
I'm probably going to have to get a ruling on if I can actually make tags with the thing. Receive tags, hell yeah. Standard tag rules state that all that's required to make a legal tag is for my partner to touch some portion of my anatomy.
Foot and a half of tag rope, call it three feet of torso, two and a half of arm over the head, ten of tail, lop one off for the angles involved just in case…
That's 16 feet.
Both feet planted on the ring apron and hand on the tag rope, perfectly rules legal, I can literally receive a perfectly legal tag from either of the neutral corners.
That's something you've never had to deal with before, is it?
Usually the tag team strategy is to isolate one member of the opposing team, keeping them out of their own corner, prevent them from tagging, and keep piling on the damage.
Only that's not something you're going to be able to do in this case, because those neutral corners don't function as neutral anymore. So long as Selena manages to get to any corner or any side of the ring connected directly to our corner, she's going to be able to tag out.
And that's the strategy you're going to have to use because exchanging blows with somebody three times your size is pretty much going to end up being a losing proposition.
Sure, you can take advantage of quick, repeated tags to essentially have the both of you legal at once to double team me constantly, but that's just going to end up with you two wearing yourselves out on me, me flinging the both of you into the second row after a jolt of adrenaline, a fully rested and fresh Selena hitting the ring and giving me time to recuperate.
I've had my head sandwiched between two steel chairs, which would be a concussion, a hospital stay, and mandatory time off for anyone else. I wasn't even knocked out, was pissed off enough to glare, and in under five minutes was up, about, and stomping around like a shorter, stroppier Godzilla.
Oh and there's the time someone tried to run me over with a car. That can kill people, but all it did to me was to make me very, very upset.
Or how about the time where I had my face set on fire and still went on to win the match?
I've been pinned in a fair fight exactly once, and the dude had to have his feet on the ropes in order to do it.
I've never submitted.
Every tag team loss I've ever taken has been from my partner getting pinned or there being some outside interference taking place.
And everything that two of you have accomplished as a tag team? I've got something to match.
You won the titles from Chris Davids and Cassius DeLight, one of whom retired at Olympus and one of whom was making noises about retiring from the ring somewhat recently. Cool, you beat a pair of veterans bordering on legends.
I was stalked for weeks by certified hall of famer Lethal motherfucking Weapon, wrestled him at the biggest show of the year, had my face set on fire, and put the old bastard down for a count of three after he insisted that by my being big, blue, and a woman that I was disrespecting the business.
You battled the Sinistry, I spent the better part of a year in ULW trying to prevent Cindy Todd and the Island of Misfit Toys from drowning the fed in a deluge of cranky demon-possessed PMS period blood and then went on to make a hobby out of pounding the fuck out of the Sinistry B Team here in the UWA.
You took on the Dogs of War, I ended up having to fight Angel Kash and a never-ending army of henchmen for two or three months. I've got Spark making tiny medals of honor for all my brain cells that died during that period after having to listen to Kash's repetitive, one topic, robotic, programmed femme-bot drivel.
BLEEP BLOOP KALINDA IS UGLY, SHE IS NOT MARKETABLE, SHE DRIVES DOWN THE RATINGS AND MAKES SMALL CHILDREN CRY WITH HER HIDEOUS FACIAL FEATURES, BLORPA BORP.
You've fought Flawless Goodness, I had to spend weeks dealing with Lenore Price-Mason sticking her nouveau riche snoot into each and every match I had for three months while she was trying to make a name for herself.
You've fought legends, I've fought legends.
You've fought annoyances, I've fought annoyances.
You've fought egomaniacal dipshits who thinks the world revolves around them, and I was in ULW. That was pretty much everybody I wrestled.
But here's the thing, ladies.
You haven't fought me.
Seven footers are pretty hard to find, there's less than 3000 of them in the world. A lot of 'em are this big due to disease, and aren't in pretty good condition medically. Let's cut that in half, call it 1500.
And in order to come across one of these rare specimens, they have to be within your general sphere of influence. Let's call it Europe and North America, so that's about 20 percent of the world population. We're down to 300 seven footers.
And let's be honest, not everybody is athletic enough to be a professional athlete, knock it down to about 100.
Pro wrestling isn't as popular as it used to be, and the NBA pays a hell of a lot more for a hell of a lot less work.
So let's call it fifty.
Fifty seven foot tall professional wrestlers in the world. One for each state of the union.
You pretty much need a moderate amount of jackassery, egomania, and self-importance to get work as a professional wrestler, and actually wrestling is where the money is.
I'd be willing to bet that I could count the number of seven foot tall pro wrestlers willing to be someone's sparring partner on one hand.
So learning how to fight somebody as big as me is something you have to learn in the ring, and in female-dominated federations, I don't think you're going to end up fighting all that many seven footers.
Yeah, sure, when you're five and a half feet tall you spend the majority of your career wrestling folks bigger than you, but not this much bigger than you.
But the thing is that pretty much all the seven footers in this business are men and they also tend to be ripped and bulky as hell. They're not fast, they're not agile, and they tend towards being not very bright.
I'm strong, I'm fast, I'm agile, I'm smart. There are things that I can do that I can guarantee you'll never see from someone else my size. There are things I can do that you'll never see done from someone a third my size. Hell, there are things I can do that you'll never see from someone else, period.
You can't prepare for me.
You can't train for me.
You can watch all the tape you want and you can make educated guesses, but there's no real way to train for what you're going to experience fighting me besides fighting me.
There's no bloody way on earth that the two of you can possibly be prepared to wrestle me. I mean how do you cope with somebody who can literally RUN, not walk, RUN, across the top rope?
But you two are the tag team champions, after all. You do have experience in the tag division, working as a team, and taking on bigger opponents.
Which is why in a fair fight I'd give you even odds of beating me. Fifty-fifty. A toss up. A coin flip.
Of beating me.
By myself.
But I'm not by myself, now am I?
I have a partner. A partner who is also a damned good professional wrestler. A partner who has experience with tag team wrestling and has won tag team titles.
Selena's going to be far better than I am about telling you about her accomplishments and why she's going to be a tough fight for you.
Marie, Sophie, If it were just Selena and another darn good wrestler you might be right to feel confidant about this whole thing.
But the thing is, I'm just just another good wrestler.
Like I said before, your options are to have me in the ring, where you wear yourselves out on a hard target that's going to he hitting you a heck of a lot harder than you're hitting her, or to leave me on the ring apron and focus entirely on the member of the team that isn't a big blue brick wall.
But that's the problem. As scary as I am in the ring, you leave me on the apron and I become gods-damned terrifying.
I've got the size and the athleticism to basically break up a pin or submission anywhere in the ring via springboard dropkick, or clothesline, or tail whip, or senton, or whatever.
I've got the smarts to know when I've got you conditioned to look for the dragon swooping down on you out of the skies to change strategies and start sticking my tail into the ring, wrapping it around your ankle, and unceremoniously deposit you on the arena floor.
And then when the tag from Selena finally comes, and it's going to come, since there's no way you can keep Selena two and a half feet away from basically the middle half of the ring at all times.
Now I know Sophie's something of a party girl and that her favorite Teletubby is Drinky-Winky, so she might be a titch sloshed and might not quite be comprehending things. So I went and had Spark make up this pretty, rainbow colored diagram with explanatory text, helpful arrows to provide direction, and it even has happy, nice, bright eye-catching colors so that even if the information isn't understood, at least there's something pleasant to look at.
So for purposes of this example I have positioned the team of Selena and myself in the upper left corner of the ring, opposite the hard camera. Interestingly enough which corner of the ring is assigned to which team is actually something that the UWA controls and assigns.
The folks at home might not have ever noticed, but that particular corner will almost always go to the "good guy" team in a match, and if both teams are actually tolerable people or complete assholes, that spot will usually go to whomever the more "exciting" team is. Be they the more popular team, or in cases like this whichever team is likely to have the more exciting "hot tag" moment.
It's so the camera can pick up on the facial expressions of both members of the team in blue corner, while the team in red corner has their backs symbolically turned towards the viewers, fostering signs of distrust.
So as a result the blue team is subconsciously seen as more sympathetic, whereas the red team is positioned to engender subtle feelings of antagonism towards the audience.
So in this rainbow hued diagram I have a visual representation of my previous points on how I'm a scary competitor to have standing on the apron.
As you can plainly see, the area where I am capable of tagging in is clearly marked in red and orange, red where I'm standing at the normal tag position, and orange where I'm stretched to the limit of my tag rope.
Look at my proud and elongated reach! See how far I can majestically reach out and touch someone with my powerful, big, mightily thewed arms!
And opposing that in purple and a slightly different shade of purple that I presume is meant to represent indigo and failing miserably, is the reach my opponents have with their tiny, T-rex-ian, noodly appendages, an 22 percent reduction in reach resulting in my having a 62% larger area in which I am capable of tagging before we even take into account the beautiful, awe-inspiring appendage that is my tail.
That's right there in the yellow where I've got about a third of the ring covered just standing there politely in the corner, and then there's the green where my tail reaches acrooooooooooss the ring and drinks your milkshake. Er… no. It's capable of receiving a tag.
Which means that in order to be made unable to tag Selena has to be kept entirely out of that nice icy blue zone, because if one of her shoulders is in that blue zone, that means she's capable of making a tag to me.
Meaning you'll have to keep her entirely in the blue, not-indigo, and purple zones in order to prevent her from tagging, and honestly, when's the last time THAT'S happened in a match?
And also I just now realize that my diagram looks like a morbidly obese red haired woman with a Donald Trump spray on tan, pearl earrings, a multicolored top, and a jean skirt, getting a lap dance from the bootylicious sister of the motherfuckin' Grimace.
ANYWAY! Suffice to say, Señor Jones (and Sophie), the numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for you at Sackerfice... er… Outbreak.
...yes I've been waiting to drop that line the entire promo, can you tell?
Kalinda flexes and kisses her bicep before ending her promo the usual way by blowing icy fog at the camera transitioning into a fade to white.
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