For perhaps the first time since being forcibly dragged from my home world to this bland, boring backwater of an uninspired orb-shaped realm (whose creator being is obsessed with beetles), I was actually feeling like I was back home.
Unfortunately it wasn't the "being happily left alone without having to adventure, left to run my tavern/inn/pizza parlor in peace" sort of home-y feeling, but rather the "being dragged to big social gatherings put on by the rich and powerful and competing for silly prizes in any of a thousand various ridiculous dog and pony show events" sort of home-y feeling.
Much to my sorrow the day's festivities lacked my favorite event. I was just as loud and vocal about my displeasures back home as I was when given a microphone and an international television audience, so I had a tendency to piss people off. But alas, no one had challenged me to an honor duel or attempted to kill me.
The closest thing had been some practical joker who had decided to mix a bag of M&M's into the big bowl of Skittles that I'd taken a handful of, closely followed by the sons of bitches at Mars and Wrigley for replacing Lime with Green Apple. First they came for the Lifesavers, and now they'd claimed my beloved Skittles. It was increasingly hard to find a mixed fruit flavored candy without the Twin Emerald Heralds of Dread: Green Apple and Watermelon.
I was perfectly fine with watermelon flavored things, but watermelons were nowhere near the top of my list of iconic candy fruit flavors. Cherry, Grape, the Triumvirate of Citrus-y goodness comprised of Orange, Lime, and Grape, Strawberry, Raspberry, and Pineapple.
Apple flavored candy was an abomination. Apples belonged in pies. Apples belonged paired with cinnamon. As the proverbial bane of doctors, putting them in tooth-rotting candy was a slap to the face of all that the proud and mighty Apple stood for.
I'd settled for purging the taste from my mouth by wandering over to the competitive eating competition and purging the heretical forces of intermingled chocolate, chewy fruit, and flavored apple with a few bowls full of spicy hot wings.
I'd taken part in the event proper, and had taken second place. But the apple apostate still remained, so I'd parked my tail at the table with a bottle of hot sauce, while I'd send my minions to deal with some rather pressing matters.
"Kalinda Kriegsdottir. I have been hoping to run into you." said a rather busty Japanese woman in a lavender suit coat and a microphone, accompanied by a camera crew.
Her bosoms were at an acceptable level for employment as a serving wench in my tavern, but she was way, way, way too skinny. I needed my wait staff to be able to carry entire kegs to tables when I had dwarven patrons. Kegs, plural. It got even worse when a dwarf decided he wanted to be a social drinker and came with a friend.
"Rina Ibuka." I replied, giving her a nod. One of the designated interviewers for my most recent employer, Deathtrip Wrestling, whose founder was the owner of the massive, ostentatious yacht I was sitting on, and the rich bastard that had put together this little carnival of madness and had invited me.
"Yes. I would like to ask you a few questions, so that the fans of Deathtrip Wrestling may come to get to know you better." she said, all puppy dog eyes and sweetness.
"Go for it. But the first time you mention lizards, crocodiles, or Gojira, I'm picking up you, him, and him..." pointing at Rina, her cameraman, and her boom mic operator, "...marching over to the side of the boat, and dropping you all in the drink."
"That will ah… not be necessary. You may be confusing me with my male counterpart Masa Inaba." she says, surgically tweaked eyes going wide and collagen injected lips giving a little pout.
I gave her a grunt of acknowledgement around a mouthful of delicious fried chicken and hot sauce. A shame you couldn't get proper hot sauce around here. Dragon chilis from back home were the size of my forearm and were capable of literally setting your mouth on fire involving an thaumaturgic reaction when crystallized Fire mana came into contact with its elemental opposite in the water present in saliva. I had a few jars filled with the dried dragon pepper flakes that I liked to put on my pizza stuffed into my Coat of Holding, but I only used them sparingly, as I had no way of getting more.
I'd had a few seeds, but my experiments with trying to plant them in a low-magic environment just led to them exploding violently when they were about halfway to harvest.
"Just looking at you one can tell that you are ah… different than most people. And having watched you compete in several events throughout the day I can tell that you are something out of the ordinary."
"Oh, that reminds me, who was that skinny Japanese guy that was giving Kitty and me the stink eye during the chicken wing eating competition? The one who just shook his head and refused to eat a bite after that, seemingly out of disgust?"
"Ah! That would be Takeru Kobayashi, regarded as one of the world's best competitive eaters. You… uh… you're not supposed to..."
She shakes her head and I noisily crack the bones on another chicken wing, swallowing it whole.
"That is to say score is kept by counting the discarded bones of chicken wings." she says, blushing a bit.
I stare at her, incredulous "But the bones are the best part! The marrow is the most flavorful part of the chicken! You don't made chicken stock by just tossing the skins and flesh into a pot!"
The only reason I'd taken second place is because I just so happened to have brought my Mighty Steed along. Kitty is… well, he's not a kitty. Mostly he's a mix of wolf and black dragon who, like most pet breeds, suffers from being severely inbred. Well, suffers isn't the right term. He's a derp and he enjoys it.
He's a somewhat compact brown furred dog-cat thing with dragon bits tacked on and huge mole claws, who is about the size of a large pony. He surpassed me in the "weird eating" department by also consuming the bowls that the chicken wings were presented in.
He'd probably still be hanging around, helping to dispose of leftover wings and leftover everything else, if some asshole hadn't taken advantage of my momentary distraction standing on the winner's podium to swipe the backpack carrying my gear.
I should've just brought all the stuff crammed into the pockets of my combat coat, which was armor plated, made of dragonhide with dragon scales sewn underneath, and also had at least a warehouse's worth of space between its many pockets.
I hadn't wanted to bring it because people tend to look at you weird if you're wearing a long leather coat on a yacht in a tropical climate. Even more than they would if you were a seven foot tall, neon blue skinned woman with a twelve foot tail growing out of the base of her spine.
"Speaking of the eating competition, it looks like you ran afoul of our resident pervert, Psycho Stalker at the award ceremony. Do not worry, he steals articles of clothing from any and every woman even tangentially related to professional wrestling. I presume he sniffs them while touching himself."
"Well, at least he's not carving pieces off of wrestlers to make himself a joshi women suit to wear while he dances around to "Goodbye Horses."" I stick out my tongue in all of it's purple, forked majesty and foot-long length and blow a raspberry.
My interviewer stops and stares at me. I'm not sure if she's more stunned at the fact that I know what they call lady wrestlers in Japan, or the fact that my lingual appendage puts that of Gene Simmons to shame.
I curl it around another chicken wing and pull it into my mouth with no hands.
"You are a yokai." she says with a gasp.
I nod and grin, "I do believe that I'm classed as a kaiju, though not a dai-kaiju. Yet."
"What do you mean, "yet"?"
"I'm a dragonblood. The thing with dragons is that it just takes the tiniest fraction of draconic heritage to start you down the path to true dragondom. Long, sinuous neck, muzzle full of sharp teeth, wings, breathing fire, quadrupedal gait, growing to the size of a 747, that sort of thing."
"Of course the smaller amount of dragon you start out with, the longer it'll take for the metamorphosis into a full blooded dragon to complete. I'm still growing, slowly, at the rate of an inch or so every year or two. I'm two inches taller now than when I started wrestling. Provided I don't do anything the massively kicks me up the power scale, I'll hit around ten feet in height in about seventy years, and will likely top out in the mid teens with typical humanoid anatomy somewhere around my 1000th birthday. That around when I'll start shifting over to a more proper dragon-like body layout. By the time I'm 1500 I'll probably be able to swallow something human sized the way I do chicken wings now."
I punctuate this with biting down hard enough on the chicken wing to make the bones give a nice, fearsome sound.
"Not that there isn't anything to look forward to before then. I should be getting my horns and wings within the next two decades, and should start growing in armor plated scales before the end of my first century."
"And the fire breathing?"
"Oh I can do that now. Aside from coloration and a handful of dragon bits attached to a member of the other parent species, that's the first thing to develop. A dragon's breath weapon is connected to their status as a proper dragon, and not merely a smarter than average lizard with delusions of grandeur."
"A dragon is basically a walking ley line. A river of magical energy, and at the core of this is the draconis fundamentum, which is an organ system that attaches to the standard set of organs at a few places. It's basically an elemental furnace with an outlet just above the lungs, connects to the stomach, and also connects near the end of the digestive system."
"A dragon is always protected from their own element at least to the degree that they can contain their own elemental energies. You can't make a dragon explode by stabbing it, but you can bathe yourself in a deluge of fire or acid or lightning or whatever by piercing the fundamentum and giving it a much easier outlet to get into the world."
"For example, I'm a water elemental dragon on the Maladictine side of the elemental spectrum, meaning Ice. Cold doesn't hurt me, period. To the point where I can theoretically function perfectly well at absolute zero. Which according to the laws of physics shouldn't be possible, but back on my world the laws of physics get the shit kicked out of them, their lunch money taken, and stuffed into their locker by magic and sorcery and divine intervention and whatnot."
"Though magic tends to at least try and keep things normal most of the time. But I've got a bit of the reality-defying lunacy of Void magic in me. So while I do breathe fire, it acts weird. It's like the exact opposite of fire. Behaves just like fire, but instead of heat it throws off cold."
"I think that violates the laws of thermodynamics."
I shrug. "Magic. Physics. Lunch Money. Locker." I say with a chuckle, holding a chicken wing up in the air. I tilt my head back and let loose with my breath weapon, tapping into the eternal font of raw coldness at the core of my being, spewing forth a cone of chilly blue flames a good 30 or 40 feet in the air. I like Rina get a good look at it's frost covered surface before I drop the frozen wing on the ground, where it half-shatters half-crumbles into dust.
The interviewer looks at me with a healthy mix of awe and terror, "And you do THAT in the ring?!"
"Nah," I shake my head, "Not exactly that. For one I could hit the referee, the announcers, the camera crew, or the fans with that much fame. For two, it's not very sporting and anything more than a momentary blast is going to send someone to the hospital for frostbite, even if I don't set them on fire. I usually just give a gout of flame."
I demonstrate with a momentary burst of cerulean fire.
"So basically I just use it to mimic the fireball that professional wrestlers have been since way back in the early 60's with the original Sheik. Mine just so happens to be blue and cold instead of orange and warm. Though I don't have to do fire. I can do fog, frost, sleet, snow, and I've even started practicing a little mix of 'em for my own to serve as a variation of the classic dokugiri, or poison mist as it's known in the states."
And just when I was having a nice, pleasant conversation involving pro wrestling for once, I find the OTHER primary DTW interviewer, Masa Inaba, comes strutting up with a martini glass and a member of the wait staff following close behind him with two bottles and a tumbler on a silver platter.
"You! Just the lizard I wanted to see! Having witnessed that temper tantrum you threw on your last night in the company with the UWA..."
Well, it's not an honor duel, but a character assassination attempt is still an assassination attempt. I unleash a snarl as I draw in a deep breath, and absolutely smother the obnoxious, drunken interloper with my newly developed Frozen Mist.
While the little bastard is screaming something in Japanese, probably about how badly it stings, I grab him with one hand on his belt, the other on the back of his neck, and pitch him into the nearby pool.
"Now, as I was saying, I'm developing moves based on classic hardcore wrestling spots to pay tribute to the..."
"Got him! Incoming, boss lady!" says the voice of my dearest minion in my head.
With a moment of concentration I can pinpoint her locations and see through her senses. Her prey is currently eluding her by being able to shimmy much quicker underneath the long banquet table that was set up for the chicken wing eating competition.
Presumably he crawls on all fours a heck of a lot more often than Claudia.
"Sorry about this, but we've got another pest incoming in 3… 2… 1!" I say, counting down before I reach down under the table and pull out none other than DTW's own panty raiding jackass, Psycho Stalker.
The masked Japanese fellow wriggles and writhes as I have him dangling in the air by the ankle. He unleashes a storm of profanity in both Japanese and English.
"Thanks for holding onto my backpack for me. I wouldn't want to lose it." I say, shifting my grip so that he turns around the other way.
His incessant wiggling makes it rather difficult to access my backpack, so I bounce his head off the yacht's deck a few times.
That seems to get the message across, allowing me to open the zipper on my pack and remove my swim trunks.
"Thanks. You can keep the empty backpack." I say, dropping him right onto his noggin.
I shake out my trunks and give them a look over to make sure they haven't been tampered with.
"SWIM TRUNKS?!" Psycho Stalker wails, part outraged and part distraught.
"What fuck I do with SWIM TRUNKS? I no can fap to this!"
Just then the welcoming committee catches up to Psycho Stalker, as Claudia jumps into the air and lands with both feet in the middle of my would be underwear thief's ribcage.
She is shortly followed by a quarter ton plus behemoth of a furbeast doing a senton straight into his groin.
"CANNONBALL!" roars Kitty, who after making a mess of past pounce victims has learned that he has to attack with blunt body parts unless I give him the okay.
The trauma to Stalker's gonads has rendered him unconscious. Claudia grabs an arm and starts to drag him off.
"I'm going to tie this one to a chair and give him a stern talking to when he wakes up."
"Keep the blood loss to a minimum, and don't break any body parts too badly!" I call after her.
I turn back to Rina, who is just looking on with a look of shock.
"What? You act as if you've never seen a monstrous undead clown-dragon in a full Victorian dress and bustle and a giant wolf-dragon fuzzbeastie on the hunt before."
She just throws her hands up in the air and shakes her head.
"I believe I shall go lie down. My head hurts."
"Yeah, that's my reaction to them most of the time too."
"Just one more question. I am curious; earlier today you presented Goro-sama with a pair of cellular phones and said something I didn't catch that made him laugh uproariously. Can you explain this to me, please?"
"Hate to miss out on the joke, eh?" I say with a chuckle.
"It's simple. There's a great big grotesquely fat rich guy with his own yacht who has a collection of scantily clad ladies accompanying him everywhere, who is carried around on some sort of barge."
She doesn't get what I'm referencing.
"How could I NOT present the human equivalent of Jabba the Hutt with two Droids?"
Rina throws up her hands and makes a sound of disgust as she storms off.
Hehehehe. Mission accomplished.
You know, this is all I ever wanted to do.
Back when I started wrestling I knew I was going to be rubbish. I was going to be sloppy. I'd had maybe six months worth of training, and most of that was focused on getting me comfortable with the fact that I WASN'T fighting for my life. To fight to wear somebody down, rather than outright kill them. To get me comfortable with using kicks and punches, rather than claw and fang.
On air I think I've bitten through kendo sticks, aluminium baseball bats, ring ropes, handcuffs, steel chairs, and concrete rebar. Literally going for the jugular used to pretty much be my go to thing.
Smaller than me? Once I get hold of 'em, it's over.
Bigger than me? What can you really do? You don't want to be close to me, since that'll make you point blank for my coldfire breath, but you can't stay at range because that makes you end up looking like a chicken shit in front of your evil minions and/or fellow henchmen.
But you can't do that in the ring. Especially when your opponents are teeny stick stick people with spindly little limbs that won't even take two bites to get through. Which is the other thing I used to do, when my foes weren't the sort where bleeding doesn't work, or doesn't bother them.
Couple of bites to get to the bone, another one or two to break the bone, and then I could literally tear somebody's arm off and beat them to death with it. Of course that doesn't usually make for a very effective melee weapon and is more of a morale killer. But it makes them less effective no matter who they are, warrior or spellcaster.
I hold up my armored left arm for all to see.
Of course biting the limbs off of your undead foes is how you get bound to ancient artifacts of evil that bond to a new host when they're taken from the corpse of the previous user. When said previous user is undead they already count as a corpse, and it's just a matter of removing the gauntlet from their arm.
And the stupid thing is sentient and capable of changing its form, so now it's armored up the entire arm to the shoulder, because it's a heck of a lot harder to remove an arm at the shoulder than it is the elbow.
So yeah, I didn't have too terribly much in the way of learning how to do nice, crisp, pleasant looking offense, figuring out the ways to do the moves with the minimum amount of effort. And there's only so much that throwing around a weighted bag is going to do. It doesn't move like a human being does.
So I went into professional wrestling knowing that I was going to look sloppy as hell. So what I attempted to do was make up for that by basically being a stereotypical deathmatch garbage wrestler. That way people didn't have too high of expectations for me. "Of course she's not going to do a bridging German suplex correctly, she's basically one step up from some mental defective backyard wrestler doing shit on a trampoline."
That way when I would do something impressive, like running at full speed across the top of the ring ropes, or the ring barricade, or do a friggin' Frankensteiner with my tail, it would not only be something totally unexpected because of my size, it would also be totally unexpected because of my wrestling style.
I'd stuff a garbage can full of crap that I thought would be fun to hit people with. I can count on one hand the number of times I actually got to use the damned thing. Mostly the IWC and ULW would have one of the production staff, the dudes in black that are trying to stay out of sight around ringside, whisk it off to the back when I wasn't looking.
Eventually I just stopped bringing it out, right around the time I started having my henchwoman, Claudia, start singing "Come Little Children" for my entry theme.
God, just listening to the songs I've chosen to come out to tells you basically fucking everything about the direction my career has gone.
I started out with Ayreon's "Ride the Comet" which is a hopeful, upbeat symphonic rock number with great synth work that had powerful, hopeful vocals. Listening to it, it made me emotional for a bunch of microbes in a way that I'd never been before.
Just an all around positive, beautiful, happy piece.
Then over to Kamelot's "The Spell", synth work again that I really liked, but with a beat that was more militaristic. Lyrics about how the world had lost its sense of magic and wonder, crushed under the heels of the weak spirits that flock to the banner of those who offer promises of fame and fortune.
This started when I got shunted into IWC's "Midgets, Dragons, and Mental Defectives" division. Because I wouldn't plant my lips to the ass of either Kirian Frost or Silas Mason, I got saddled with three goofballs, a diagnosed autistic fella, and a midget.
That pissed me off. Non-wrestlers involved with the Sinistry and Silas World were getting more support from the company then I was, so I went to ULW.
So when Silas Mason actually showed up to have his sister-cousin-wife Lenore piss on each and every match I had for three months, and Willow Wilkes brought in an entire faction headed by Kirian Frost's distaff counterpart Cindy Todd to run interference for her to win matches, I was quite pissed off.
Tristania's "Lethean River" is not happy. It is not upbeat. It is a sorrowful, bleak tune about the river in the Greek underworld whose waters induced forgetfulness, and eventually oblivion.
That was back when I thought that the way things were going on were just incompetence.
Nope, turns out that there was actual malice going on.
There's been a sort of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" effect in professional wrestling. Because egomaniacal dipshits, like your your Willow Wilkses, scream "CONSPIRACY!" at the drop of the hat, when somebody is actually being conspired against, the other wrestler's don't care. They've heard that song a dance a million times before.
Being made to wrestle a one on one match in a cage, after two waves of run ins have been foiled, is not unfair. It is not bias. It is not discrimination.
Being banned from even entering the building where fan meet and greet is taking place, though? That is.
Especially when people within the company are using racial slurs to refer to you on Twitter, on air, and in official company documentation.
Divided We Fall's rendition of "Come Little Children", using the lyrics by Kate Covington, originally from the film Hocus Pocus, is what I use to this day.
It is dark as fuck, and my entrance literally involves the a visual representation of the past two companies I've worked for symbolically slitting the throats of the future so they can have all the goodies in one single picnic basket for themselves.
All you need is a functional pair of eyes to look at me and see that I'm something different, something unique, something special. Out of the 3.84 billion women on planet Earth right now, I'm probably in the top 20, height wise. At this very moment, I'm 7'1", one inch shorter than the tallest woman ever to play in the WNBA, and two inches shorter than the current tallest woman alive.
Now based on height alone you'd think folks would be tripping over themselves to associate me with their brand of professional wrestling, to promote me as a must see attraction based on my uniqueness.
"Here is an absolutely huge lady who is taller than Andre the Giant, and can wrestle a heck of a lot better."
Folks made millions carting Andre Roussimoff around the world and parading him to millions of professional wrestling fans up until the point where he was barely capable of holding himself upright using the ring ropes.
Billionaire Ted and Vincent K. McManpackage decided to throw a diabetic Argentinian with knee issues into a ring, just because of how goddamn big he was. True he wore an awful tinfoil headband and an exceptionally unfortunate airbrushed bodysuit, but folks still talk about Giant Gonzales to this day.
I am a huge, massive, physically powerful woman. I am in possession of two traits that wrestling promoters have drooled over since time immemorial.
I am tall.
I have boobs.
This should be a no brainer, based on those two attributes alone.
Now add in the fact that I am bright blue, I have a tail, and that I can breathe fire.
It shouldn't matter if I'm the worst wrestler in the world, embodying all the suck of each and every over-promoted boss's kid in the history of the business. Being as bad as David Flair, Erik Watts, and Greg Gange combined shouldn't be able to offset the uniqueness I bring to the table.
And the thing is that I'm nowhere near that bad. In fact I've been an extremely entertaining wrestler from the very beginning, and after two years of continuous competition, I'm actually a pretty damned good wrestler.
Oh sure, the wrestling purists would take a look at what I do and wail and gnash their teeth because I don't have anything remotely resembling a pure and coherent style of wrestling. But I do a little bit of everything, it works, and it's amazing to watch.
At least it would be if people would let me fucking use it.
In the name of "fan safety" I was banned from running on top of the ring ropes and barricades, because if I took a spill I could end up with all 400 pounds of me in the crowd and the company'd have a lawsuit on their hands.
I couldn't use my tail because they don't teach folks how to minimize damage of being swatted with a bloody eleven foot long slab of bone and muscle down at Killer Kowalski's, and the UWA thought that I'd break somebody's neck doing the Drakkensteiner, which is a Frankensteiner with my tail, by the way.
The world's gotten to see me do it live on pro wrestling television precisely once, when I did it to Ethan von Aaron on my last night in the company with IWC, and even then his ugly ass was between me and the camera for the majority of it.
That's what really rankled me. Being told I couldn't wrestle the way I wanted out of fear that I might "accidentally" hurt someone.
Two years and well over one hundred matches, I've never sent somebody to the hospital accidentally.
Every time I've done it, it's been on purpose, and each and every person I've put there has deserved it. It's not like I wander around and just cripple random people for the fun of it, like a number of my co-workers in the various feds I've been in have.
All I want, all I have ever wanted, is a nice, fun, fair fight.
And no one ever wants to fucking give me one.
First person that you can definitely point to and say "Kalinda, you've crippled that man for life," is Lenore Price-Mason's bodyguard, Mr. Joshua.
Ms. Mason had been interfering in each and every match I'd had for months on end, and I told her that as such she'd declared war on me, and that each and every member of her entourage that she brought to ringside would be treated as an enemy combatant.
So when her bodyguard was not guarding her body, but instead decided to interfere in our match by laying his hands on me, well, I made sure that he would be a non-issue in the rest of that match, and probably for the rest of his life.
People have called it crucifixion, and that's wrong. There wasn't a cross involved. I impaled his hands and left him stuck to some portion of the ring barricade. There was no cross involved, and the lucky bastard got to sit his ass down on a nice, comfy concrete floor, rather than worry about supporting his weight through the wounds in his hands unlike a certain Jewish beard enthusiast I could mention.
Folks called it barbaric, which is also wrong. Crucifixion was the Roman Empire's favored form of execution. Barbarians, by default, were folks that were NOT part of the Roman Empire. Get your fucking history straight.
Also supposedly I ended Adam's career, but Willow and Cindy's tepid, uninteresting little man-bitch was well enough to walk out and accompany them later in the night and meddle in some match he wasn't a part of after I'd gotten done with him.
If I'd have crippled his ass, you'd expect that the son of a bitch would've gone to the hospital immediately after I Prismplexed his ass.
Adam was awful in the ring, awful on the mic, and as the latest in a series of Sinistry/New Eden goons that were basically Dixie cups was easily replaceable. And by Dixie cups I mean purchased in large numbers, cheap, and disposable after they've served their use.
I fought Adam and WIllow Wilkes in the highest rated television segment in the history of the revived ULW, two on one, which even with the odds on their side, they cheated to win, of course.
And then they attempted to end my own career by sandwiching my head between two steel chairs.
On anybody else that might've been it.
On me? It hurt enough to put me down for a few minutes and piss me off.
I was on all fours and snarling at them by the time the show went off the air two minutes later. I was one my feet after three minutes, and I walked to the back under my own power at five.
Anybody else would have had their brains scrambled, concussed, and wheeled out of their with their head and neck immobilized and on a stretcher.
You'd think that after that, and after all the carnage Cindy Todd had inflicted during in her long and storied career, that even if I DID put an end to Adam's career, that it would be justified. Though I think Riddick is more qualified to explain Cindy Todd's shit than I am.
My only experience with her is as a meddling, black-eyed, demon-possessed bitch of a non-wrestler that likes to interfere in matches and wrestle all of once per year, magically getting a well-promoted, high profile match on the biggest PPV of the year while I have to fucking beg for table scraps, or damned near get left off the show entirely.
In two years I did every single thing that the company asked of me, and they shat on me for it.
ULW's management literally paid a bunch of cultists and their unwashed hillbilly leader to take me out. Raymond der Vaart put a bounty on my head to whomever could take me out of ULW.
It took five people to beat me down hard enough to lock me in a casket and set it on fire.
I was literally burned and baked alive, and would've been back in about two months had ULW not gone under, thus negating my contract with them.
As it was, I participated in the IWC's annual Rumble Bash less than four months after being locked in a casket that was subsequently set on fire, and eliminated a record four individuals.
I also got to choke out Donald Trump and fling his orange, toupee-wearing ass over the top rope, which, you know, almost makes up for the shit that IWC's spin-off promotion UWA pulled with me.
As bad as ULW was, as hostile a workplace as you can imagine, where your boss literally pays a hit squad to make sure you stop coming into work, what the UWA did with me was worse. It was pretty much nothing.
I got a bunch of meaningless matches, won a title contendership, had the contendership ignored for months, made a friend, got springboarded into a tag team title match with said friend, and had the company piss and moan about how horrible we were for accepting the tag team title shots they'd given us, and how unworthy that made us.
And the shot wasn't legitimate. We were put together as a team and thrown at the tag team champions to basically lure another tag team to come back to work and actually do their jobs.
Oh, and after six months one of those tag team members was finally made to defend her title for the first time, against me who had been number one contender for three or four of those six months.
Because I was so fucking bored, I let her pound on me for five minutes, like I'd been doing with everybody, and with that handicap, the bitch managed to pin me.
But you listen to the commentary for that match, it's all about how skilled she was. How I was being dominated like I'd never been dominated before.
Which was bullshit, because I'd been letting people hit me for months, and each and every time the announcers would go "Kalinda's never had such a hard fight in her life, look at how she's being dominated by her opponent!"
Even if that opponent was Lilith fucking Evans, who has won the same number of worthwhile professional wrestling matches as Champion the motherfucking Wonder Horse.
Which for the benefit of my upcoming opponent, I will outright state is zero. She's insane, she's senile, she's brain damaged, whatever the fuck she is I don't think she's capable of parsing something that subtle.
That same night my friend and tag team partner had been made to defend her Queen of the Ring championship in a match against an opponent who had just been awarded the shot. Just like we had, given by the federation's commissioner without any qualifications for it.
Did commentary talk about how unworthy she was? No.
Was her match engineered in a way to assure that win or lose, she keep the title? Also no.
The hypocrisy brought me 99% of the way to parting ways with the UWA. What pushed me over the edge was after main eventing and after having a title match with an opponent who showed that she was actually a worthy foe, I got stuck jerking the curtain with Percival Clarence fucking Whitman III.
Being one sixth of the aforementioned Midgets, Dragons, and Mental Defectives division in IWC, Mr. Whitman is pretty much a joke, taken further in the UWA because he refuses to actually wrestle women.
So I went from a worthy for to someone who wouldn't even defend himself.
I decided fuck it, I'd go out in a blaze of glory. I'd do everything I'd want to do in one night. I'd say what I wanted to say, wrestle how I want to wrestle, beat the fuck out of all the shitheels I don't like, and just generally make a pest of myself any and every way I could.
And of course they fired me for it.
After revealing that half of the roster refused to face me in the ring.
Turns out they'd just signed me to make sure that I wouldn't go to their arch rivals, SCW, and that everything they did was designed to lower my value as a professional wrestler to other companies.
I'd sworn off professional wrestling entirely. Between the IWC, ULW, and UWA I was three for three in festering cesspools of shit, corruption, bad attitudes, and miserable whining, moping, egocentric bitches everywhere.
You know, I spent months standing against the New Eden/Sinistry coalition in the UWA, after more than a year of doing so in ULW.
And what happens?
I got locked in a basement so that Kirian Frost's ex-wife could be paraded out by Silas fucking Mason to be the big conquering hero against the Nudistry.
I decided that was it. I was fucking done with anywhere and everywhere that those two cockwombles could stick their grubby fingers. ULW and IWC were dead, UWA had fucked me over, and considering there was just as many people in SCW with ties to Herr Doktor Batshit Dungeon Fuckery and Captain CEO of the Bimbo Factory as there were in the other feds, I sure as fuck wasn't going to sign with them.
I was done. Done with professional wrestling. Done with all the egos, done with the political bullshit, done with having my career pumped full of bullets by corporate assholes shooting themselves in the foot over and over and over again.
You'd think they'd want to make me look the best they could, promote the spectacle of me, use me to make money.
But no.
Each and every one of them had their pet projects, their ties to people with big pocket books.
I mean I'm only a seven foot tall fire breathing dragoness who was trained to wrestle by a guy who's right up there in the running for the title of best technical wrestler to have ever lived. The guy that was voted by his peers as the best wrestler to ever set foot in the old IWC and ULW federations.
They can pass on me, they've got wrestlers that someone with the last name Chase, Frost, or Mason says have to go to the tippy top of the pro wrestling industry.
It makes me sick.
So I'm publically fired on international television, and a few days later I've got another one of my mentors, the legendary Hardcore Messiah himself, SPIDER, telling me that some fat fuck from Japan is basically putting together a menagerie of really fucked up people, and he wants us to beat each other damned near to death for the amusement of himself and a bunch of pro wrestling fans.
Oh, and all the problems I had with professional wrestling aren't problems anymore.
I get to wrestle however the fuck I want.
Delicate, anorexic little dipshit supermodels don't get to unilaterally decided that they'll never, ever wrestle a particular person.
I get to hit people with weapons.
I get to say whatever the fuck I want on Twitter without regard to certain overly sensitive egomaniacs and their pwecious widdle feewings.
And there's nobody with ties to any of the factions that have fucked with my life since the day I set foot into a wrestling ring for the first time to try and play bullshit backstage political games to try and cut my career off at the knees.
And if they do show up, I'm allowed to beat the complete and utter living fuck out of them, cut out their entrails, and leave them as a feast for the crows, strung up as an example to the rest of the world that I am not one to be fucked with.
Okay, maybe I didn't get that last one in writing, but I'm not going to stand for it. Sitting back and doing what I'm told got me precisely fuck all. So I'm not playing nice anymore.
You fuck with me, I'm going to fuck you right back.
So, anyway, for those of you that don't know, that's basically where I came from as a professional wrestler.
Before that? That's a whole nother ball of wax that I'll save for another time. Now I want to talk about my very first opponent in Deathtrip Wrestling.
I'm actually pretty honored, as my opponent might actually be the most widely known individual that I've ever wrestled, aside from the approximate forty five seconds earlier this year when I was beating the crap out of Donald Trump, who after stating that he had the best wrestling holds, the greatest wrestling moves, and that his doctor had written a note declaring him the best professional wrestler ever, entered the Last Stand Rumble, and was eliminated in short order.
In the interests of fairness, I would like to state that I would've done the same thing had Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Ted Cruz showed up to compete in the battle royal as well. And I DID work supernatural security at the Republican National Convention earlier.
Anyway, I'm absolutely delighted that I get to wrestle my very first cartoon character. Even though she wasn't ever really a main character, Ms. Crabtree was quite the memorable character on South Park.
Just her general unwashed dirtiness, her rat's nest of hair that was so nasty that there was a bird outright nesting in it, the fact that she had no volume control, screaming at small children at the top of her lungs, and just being utterly batshit in general.
South Park at its peak in the second season where Ms. Crabtree's most prominent role in the series, "City on the Edge of Forever," was drawing in over 6 million households. Netting 6.2 million at its peak.
The best I've done? Highest rated match and segment in the revived ULW, drew in 6.2 million viewers. So with an average of 2.58 people per US household, she got an audience of 2.58 times the eyeballs during her prime.
Wow. And I get to wrestle a whole entire match with her! So amazing! So inspiring!
No, actually, my opponent is NOT Ms. Veronica Crabtree from South Park, even if she does share a large number of traits and mannerisms. She's actually a rather unfortunate old lady who was abused by her yardtard son. Who in a fit of rage for receiving the gene for early male pattern baldness, which is passed down via the X chromosome, he powerbombed his mother after being mocked at school for having to desperately apply Rogaine to his rapidly expanding scalp in the hope of warding of Chromedome-dom.
Of course that brain damage doesn't really seem to have hindered her, and has in fact lead her to winning several pro wrestling titles of what I presume to be at least some amount of prestige.
I've got better fucking things to do with my life than try to find blurry as fuck YouTube and Dailymotion videos that have been missed by the automatic takedown notification bots to see if a wrestling promotion is actually worthwhile, or is taking part in a motherfucking McDonalds' ball pit in front of a crowd of five paid for a championship belt that's made of foil wrapped chocolate hot glued to cardboard.
I'll give her the benefit of a doubt and just take this time to soundly condemn whoever the fuck it is that's leading her around on a leash while he hoovers up a few bucks from exploiting a senior citizen breast cancer survivor who obviously has dementia.
Dude, seriously, for shame.
I'm going to kick the complete and utter shit out of her because she's getting in the ring with me, but seriously dude. For fucking shame.
And to be perfectly honest I'm not too thrilled with what's-his-name's logic. Whatever the fuck he's called, Eric O'Flatulence.
"Oooo, you need to be careful! She may be an old, fragile, osteoporosis suffering geritol swigger who is singlehandedly keeping the Depends corporation rolling in filthy lucre, but you can't possibly know what's going on in her head. She's CAH-RAZY and you can't fight that! You have no experience with that! No experience with old, insane, escaped mental patients looking three steps away from occupying a plot in the boneyard."
To which I reply as follows:
Motherfucker I have dealt with older, I have dealt with crazier, and I have dealt with far, FAR scarier people who are missing body parts.
It happens at around the 10,000 year mark in dragons that have spent a goodly portion of their adult lives without a proper lair, instead flitting about from place to play, far away from their native element, usually by the command of some grand power of supreme Good or Evil.
You think Grandma leaving a pot of the stove, wandering out the front door into traffic, and looking for her daughter who's been dead for 40 years is bad, just imagine what Granny can do if she breathes fire, is clad in scales that make depleted uranium tank shells feel like a slight tickle, and can use the Pontiac Silverdome as her motherfucking rocking chair, alright?
Because that is some shit that I've had to deal with in my time as an adventurer. Trying to corral a senile grandma red dragon the size of the goddess-damned Exxon-Valdez somewhere where she is much less a danger to others and to herself.
I've had to do that.
Old? Old is no problem. 64? Fuck, I don't think high elves are even out of diapers by that age. Thankfully the forces of darkness kind of killed 90 percent of the fuckers off centuries before I came into the world where I could have the misfortune of living next to one with a kid going through the Terrible Two Score and spending forty years waking my big blue ass up in the middle of the night wailing his or her pointy-eared ass off on the other side of a goddamned paper thin wall.
You want old and crazy?
I hold up my left arm again. I really hope this isn't going to become a habit. It makes me look like Kevin Nash during the dark days of the pro wrestling business where everybody had to have a second career going on the side. I don't want to look like I'm tugging on a truck horn. Toot tooooot!
You see this thing? Yeah, this was forged by the God of Maledictine Magic himself, Arimus. Second born of Tatheon. Fourth thing to come into existence in my universe. Dude is basically Lucifer, Satan, Hades, Hel, Apep, and the Grim Reaper rolled into one with a hint of Charles Manson.
Well, actually more than a little bit of Charles Manson, since the God of Death, Demons, Devils, the Undead, and Black Magic also includes in his portfolio "stringed instruments," so the bastard fancies himself a bit of a musician.
So yeah, I've had to deal with people who are only about 100 or so years younger than the whole of my fucking universe. Sixty fucking four might as well be shitting her pants because she hasn't been potty trained yet, as opposed to shitting her pants because she's gotten her brains scrambled by an asshole son powerbomb and three hundred and ninety seven unconfirmed concussions from being dragged around by what I presume is an endless series shitty managers.
So how'd you end up with the old bint, Eric? Trade her for a few gift certificates and a autograph from the motherfucking Grimace?
Not Ronald. Not the Hamburglar. Not Mayor McCheese. Oh no.
The motherfucking Grimace.
Now, I don't expect you to know about things like adventuring, fighting goblins, giant rats, hordes of the undead, dragons, the malevolent spawn of the great old ones from a place beyond space and time, heroes, villains, angels, demons, and Mormon plural wife hydras, but let me put things into perspective for you.
The amount of money it takes to buy your basic, entry level magical sword where I'm from? If you ported it over currency to currency, it'd be about $1.3 million dollars based on the ridiculously inflated price of gold y'all have got going on on this world.
In a more practical term, let's compare the working poor. Let's call one day's work for a dumb laborer one tenth of a gold piece, and make that equivalent to your entry level worker at a fast food joint. A salary I'm sure you're well familiar with.
Let's take the dude the Burger King looks in the eye with his cold, dead eyes and goes "I'd like to pay you less, but the government won't let me." He'd have to work from 9-5 every weekday, every week, never missing a day, never taking a day off, no holidays, no vacations for forty-two years to make enough to buy the absolutely cheapest magical sword on the market out there.
If he knew a guy that could put one together from scratch and do it wholesale, if he put away every single penny he earned from the day Bill Clinton got re-elected he'd finally have enough money to get it done in time to wear it out on Election Day and vote against his wife.
Because seriously, if you're the kind of open carry asshole who is going to cart around a sword to the voting booth, you're either too young to vote, wearing a trenchcoat, and LARPing in a Denny's somewhere, or you're voting for Trump.
So I never could really afford the enchanted items that you really need to make it big in the adventurer trade. But like the strapping young lad carrying his family's sword into battle passed down through the ages, I did get something passed down the family tree to help with things.
I haven't a clue who my parents were, what they were, or where they came from. I hatched from an egg that could've been laid 30 minutes or 30 years before my adoptive grandma found it.
I didn't get a fancy title, or a magic sword, or a fairy godmother. I got the blood of a motherfucking dragon flowing through my veins.
And do you know what that means?
It means that I'm a walking, talking, living, breathing ley line. I'm the cap on the firehose that is keeping a never-ending torrent of pure, utter absolute cold from bursting forth into your world and bringing about a brand new fucking ice age.
I'm magic, and that makes everything I so much as pick up magic.
So, Eric, I want you to play pretend. I'm sure you're quite familiar with imagining things, considering you think your client has a snowball's chance in hell against me. Pretend you're a nice, sharp sword, hammered from the finest steel in the world by a pretty damned good blacksmith.
Do you think you'd enjoy being picked up and having some random dragoness imbue you with the power of absolute, searing cold? How long do you think you'd last being dropped a staggering amount of the way into the negative numbers on the thermometer?
You're from Minnesota, Eric. With your life history and the crap wages you'd made, I've got a feeling that in the deepest, darkest depths of winter you've had the handle on your car door snap off in your grip. And the coldest it's ever been THERE was -31, or -63 if you want to be a little bitch about it and include the windchill.
So the shit I had to wield for most of my career? Good for three, maybe for hits if I'm lucky. Expect the damned thing to shatter into pieces after smacking something once.
Even owning a small business, a tavern/inn/pizza parlor, I wasn't pulling in enough bank to keep myself supplied with legitimate weaponry that I was going to get two smacks with before they shattered into a bajillion pieces.
I bought cheap shit I could hit people with, stuffed it into my Coat of Holding, and when I didn't have access to that I hit people with anything that wasn't nailed down, and shit that was nailed down that I ripped up with a goodly chunk of the floorboards along with it.
You're client's been fighting with hardcore wrestling rules to hurt people and win matches.
Me? I've spent just about my entire adulthood fighting for my life with the only thing between a meeting between me and the Grim Reaper (who wants to show me this kick ass tune he wrote on his scythe-guitar made of bones) has been whatever I've found lying around that I can use for a weapon.
I don't care how batshits insane your client is, Eric. I don't care about how old she is, how nuts she is, how bad she smells, or when her last bath was.
Because I've fought older.
I've fought crazier.
I've fought stinkier.
One of the last things I did before I was dragged to this rural, mage-dead little suckhole of a world was face down several dozen feral ghouls. Flesh eating, mindless, undead abominations. They won't eat meat until it's got a bit of rot on it, they don't have the mental capacity to figure out how to bathe even if they wanted to.
Stinking, reeking, biting, clawing insane humanoids.
Just like your client, Eric.
Just like Psychnuts.
Except that rather than beat me up, put me in a cage, and make me their pet they were trying to murder me and several of my dearest friends.
I've fought worse than Psychnuts, and I fought them en masse.
When everything was said and done there were over four dozen ghouls that would never take another bite of human flesh.
And me?
There wasn't a scratch on me.
I don't care who I fight, man, woman, or child. I will wrestle anyone and everyone they put in the ring across from me, and I will do so with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.
And this week that song just so happens to be "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer."
I'm out of fucks to give for this industry and all the people in it.
I'm all out of pity, out of remorse, and out of compassion for my fellow man.
You put a fucking paralyzed Make a Wish Foundation kid in the ring with me, I'll rip out his catheter, beat him with his own colostomy bag, and Ganso Bomb the son of a bitch.
One daft old bint means precisely fuck all compared to that.
Bring the bitch on.
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