So there I was; seated at the kiddie table in the middle of Castle Exterra, resplendent in my full on bone armor and having temporarily cursed myself with with what was probably a good four decades or so of extra age so that I had my full-on dragon thing going.
Because to be perfectly honest people don't take you seriously as a dragon until you've got proper horns and wings, and they will persist with this delusion until you use your magic fire breath and set their gonads ablaze.
But after having Maleficent duty pinned on me by bitch queen faerie numero uno Rosie the Rapist I had to do my best to look the part. If I was going to have to suffer through this, so was everybody else.
Well, everybody above the age of majority. I may be a trolling asshole that just so happens to be an unwilling agent of the God of Evil Overlords, but I'm not going to cement myself as the sort of mustache-twirling, puppy-kicking Saturday morning cartoon villain that get their jollies by being a dick to children.
So after earning the scorn of the King with a very farty ketchup bottle I had managed to win a small battle in the war of hearts and minds by animating the roast pigeons, having them take up forks and knives as weapons, and work together to bring down the titanic spit-roasted boar.
I'd also taken advantage of the attention-drawing spectacle by having a few skeletal rats that I've smuggled into the castle in the pockets of my Coat of Holding.
I was going to assure that even after I was gone I would be causing the people of Exterra abject misery.
My rats were slipping tasty, fruit-flavored energy drinks into the pockets and purses of all the children.
All in all the dinner was quite nice and I'd surreptitiously slipped an entire bowl of dinner rolls and one of the boar's back legs into my pockets for later.
I'd let the meal pass without further mischief, though a few of the servers had given me glares.
Hey, I wasn't being paid for this gig so I was going to milk it for any loot I could scrape out of it.
I had a grin on my face as the event proceeded to the opening of gifts. Everybody had brought the traditional three, though we spellcasters brought two physical and then a blessing for the child.
I'd selected my gifts with a combination of cunning forethought and absolute malice. Princess Whatsername would absolutely adore everything I'd decided on gifting her.
Her parents, on the other hand, would definitely not be anywhere near as thrilled.
I'd pondered an Endless Chalice of Caffeinated Beverages, but I didn't want to risk stunting the kid's growth. Or having her start glowing in strange colors from the weird isotopes they put in the energy drinks I was familiar with.
That's what happens when significant portions of your world have been cribbed from worlds where the cultural tropes of the 1950's remaining in effect for centuries.
I'm just glad I didn't spend my childhood eating off of plates and drinking out of cups that were uranium-glazed.
I probably would have eaten them. That particular shade of red-orange is so pretty and would fit in perfectly with other aspects of my orange-centric diet. What can I say? I love the color orange, and I love the flavor orange even more.
Most of the gifts were the usual things for a girl child. Baby clothes, dolls, tack and harness for a horse with tacky gold and gemstones, magic sword, that kind of thing.
And then the queen opened my first gift, which I had placed in a black wooden box with a bone white ribbon.
She untied the ribbon and opened the box revealing a beautiful black bell decorated with elegant mithril filigree. I'd had an adamantine dagger I'd absentmindedly slipped into my pockets some years before melted down to make it just to assure that King and Queen Exterra couldn't go "Whoops, sorry dear, the bell fell off of a shelf and got dented and ruined forever."
You needed a prohibitively expensive magical or technological furnace to get hot enough to melt adamantine.
"What vile sorceries are contained in this?" the Queen asked.
I grinned "The Bell of Simple Amusements. Turn the handle in one direction and it generates confetti with every ring. Turn it in the other direction and it produces glitter."
"And what if you leave the handle in the middle?"
A wider grin "Rose petals and pink wisps that sing songs on demand."
Both the King and Queen pale a little bit.
I am absolutely pure evil incarnate.
But the worst was yet to come.
I kinda zoned out for a bit. Baby gifts were so boring. Oh look, clothes that she's going to outgrow in the blink of an eye. Something she's going to use for a few weeks in her life that she's not even going to remember.
Lame-ass gift givers, all of them.
At least the representative from the Dwarven Underkingdom gave a cool gift; a certificate entitling the princess to come and select an armor drake from the Underking's herds. Basically what happens when you mix lizard, woodlouse, and drop in a pinch of dragon.
Six-legged, armor-plated riding lizard.
Bad ass.
The King hefted my second gift up onto the dining room table, a stunning silver-plated box with an inset rotating handle in the top and a small level on one side.
He opened the door and peered inside.
Out onto the table tumbled a small, black, translucent furball that wagged its tiny tail.
"Wh-what is this?" the King stammered, seeming aghast at the small, ghostly canine.
"New Avalon Cathedral's church grim had her litter of puppies a few weeks ago." I chuckled.
Every kid needs a pet growing up and you couldn't sneakily send an immortal spectral hound "off to the farm" where they can run and run.
Cause for one they're not quite dead and not quite alive to begin with, and for two they can run right through walls and walk on air so they have room to run everywhere.
If I thought the gift opening was bad the proper naming ceremony and the blessings were worse.
Everybody, their mother, and their little talking dog wanted to have a big grandiose speech about various virtues and protections.
I took the opportunity to produce a few pieces of wedding cake, a plate, and a fork from my pockets, which got me some dirty looks.
Hey, it's not my fault that Their Royal Highnesses didn't set up a dessert bar.
I was about to doze off when the Three Wise Asses got up from their table and headed up to the royal cradle.
Unfortunately, Mr. Big Stupid Golden Gear With A Big Stupid Golden Crown hadn't suffocated on his own ridiculous, untrimmed beard. Nor had he choked on the main course as I'd hoped.
The devotees of the Gods of Life, Light, and White Magic all shot scowls my way.
I just smiled pleasantly, yawned, stretched, and prepared to walk my own way up there.
The evil fae always gets her blessing in second to last.
Golden Gear was flapping his gums and being quite full of himself, rambling on and on about how the princess would stand fast against the force of darkness, wielding the power of righteousness, and being a staunch foe of demons, devils, and the undead.
Which, ya know, are the top three of Arimus' list of favorite beings, so my "boss" wouldn't be happy.
I wanted to smite him then and there for his long-windedness, but mostly for his ridiculous beard.
I can't help it, I'm a dwarf by cultural assimilation and adoption. A good beard is like a good rosebush, you take the time and effort to trim and shape it and make it look elegant. You don't just let the damned thing grow wild and stick out every which way it wants.
It seemed that I wasn't the only one fed up with His Divine Hammishness, as the Priestess of Rarryk stepped up.
"The princess will be a font of purity and justice in the world!" she stated, glaring directly at me.
"She will not stand for bribery and corruption in her own lands and government!"
Well darn. There goes one of the favored methods of wickedness.
I nodded to each of the three in turn as I approached the cradle, looking in upon the infant princess for the first time.
I could spout about how she was beautiful and radiant with a head of flaxen hair, but I'd be lying.
Her hair stuck out in a way that made her look like a toilet brush, and at that age all babies look like motherfucking Winston Churchill.
I let her grab a taloned finger of the Hand of Arimus, my gauntlet sporting blunted claws so the little lass wouldn't hurt herself.
"Awesome," I said with a grin, "Really nice blessings, you guys. Makes it kind of hard to drop in something nasty and wicked."
I think the whole room was giving me the ol' death glare.
I hadn't even done anything yet. It wasn't like I'd cursed the princess to finger her prick on a spinning wheel on her eighteenth birthday or anything like that.
"So taking that love of fair play, justice, being a beacon of light that'll burn out all wickedness and corruption..."
I invoked the blessing of my dark god as lightning flashed and thunder shook the room.
"...as my blessing I grant unto the princess a deep-seated love of equality, charity, and democratic republics."
I swear you could hear a pin drop.
Or you could if it weren't for the thunder and my mad cackling as I walked out.
"Well shit," muttered the Priestess of Laila, Goddess of Nature "there's nothing I can do about THAT. I had a whole bunch of things prepared for proper, nasty curses but that… that's just… it's not EVIL evil, but it's absolutely evil, you know?"
She sighed, "Fuck. I give the blessing of beauty and perfect, wonderful hair. I dunno."
Good for her. At least the young lass would be Princess Toilet Brush Head no longer.
The Kingdom of Exterra was going to be a rather interesting place about two decades down the line.
-o-
You know, I thought that the professional wrestling business was all out of surprises to give me.
I thought that I was all out of fucks to give.
Behold the field in which I grow them, and see that it is barren.
But a month ago one of my esteemed opponents asked a question, and I think he deserves an answer.
Dick Devereaux spent so much time talking about himself, about his accomplishments, about how he's not the same man that got all the craps kicked out of him one year ago in the inaugural Death Trip Wrestling World Championship match.
He talked about how he ditched the minimovies, about how he took up boxing, how he bettered himself, how he went out there and fought in other deathmatch promotions.
And I smiled. Because good for him, because for fuck's sake at least the son of a bitch is trying. At least there's one person in the fucked up world of pro wrestling that doesn't think he's the be all and fucking end-all of being paid to wrestle oiled up musclemen in their underpants and boobily breasting anorexic emo bikini models.
Human beings are such short-lived, fragile things. Granted perhaps a dozen years to be in the prime of your life, your physical peak, before you begin the inevitable spiral into decrepitude and senescence.
So many wrestlers waste the prime years of their life believing that they're already the best. That they are the pinnacle of perfection. That they have already achieved mastery over the grappling arts.
Or in the cases of certain nameless promotions, mastery of standing around with most of their clothes off and having some goon with a DSLR take black and white photos. Because if it's in black and white it becomes high art and not shamelessly pandering to the demographic of young men in the devastating thrall of puberty who haven't figured out how to hide internet porn from their parents and disgusting, old, rich, misogynistic perverts who will gleefully throw stacks of cash at Titties McCameltoe because by golly one time somebody in New York hired a former fitness model and she turned out pretty damned great.
And then all of a sudden my smile went away, falling off of my face, hitting the floor and shattering into a million unrecoverable pieces.
Because after telling the world all about how he had bettered himself, Dick Devereaux took his accomplishments, his becoming more practiced, more skilled, more devastating as a fighter, acquiring an undefeated streak, attaining championship gold, and then turned the spotlight onto me.
"What did YOU do?"
Four words. Four empty, harmless words. Four little words that piss me the hell off.
Because he's insinuating that because during the year DTW was on hiatus that because I didn't go find myself another wrestling promotion to fight in that I'm somehow lazy, deficient, inferior.
"Oh look at Kalinda, the big blue beast was more of a big blue blob, sitting on her big blue butt eating big blue bonbons and watching Bear in the Big Blue House for twelve months. Look at how much she sucks because she wasn't wrestling!"
Do you want to know the reason why I didn't compete at all in the time that DTW was on break? Hmm? Do you?
It's because no one asked me.
Not one single wrestling promotion on this boring, backwater blue orb of a shithole billiard ball planet bothered to pick up the phone, mail me a letter, shoot me an email, send up some smoke signals, or even so much as sent me a poorly spelled drunken text and a dick pic.
Well, I did get a lot of the latter, but they weren't from people in charge of wrestling promotions.
They were from Riddick.
Who also said something last month that for once wasn't racist, sexist, or unfathomably stupid.
That if it wasn't for him that I'd basically be one of those poor abused animals on the ASPCA commercials, all sad and pathetic with kids crying over me because of the horrendous abuses that I'd suffered.
Devereaux, you signed on a few shows into DTW, after I'd vented my spleen from the endless torrent of never-ending bullshit that was my career in a trio of feds that shall remain nameless. So I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, I'm going to chalk it up to you not knowing, of you not having traveled in the same circle of feds that Riddick and I did.
Well, either that or you're a tremendous Grade A buttweasel. But you being an anus-dwelling mustelid doesn't give me much material that I can beat you over the head with.
Most professional wrestlers start their careers as knobbly little nobodies who are scarcely a danger to anyone.
Most of them are incredibly non-threatening when you come right down to it.
Because who is going to be scared of Little Stevie Suburbia, who maintained a solid B- average through high school, had his parents pay for a liberal arts degree at some named college, and coughed up the three thousand bucks for one of professional wrestling's hundreds of washed up never-wases to train them how to do the pro graps?
They come in droves, muscle-y boys and pretty girls, all of whom know only the basics of hand to hand combat and only have the capacity to terrify retail workers with their sense of entitlement and unreasonable demands.
They know exactly how intimidating they aren't, so they exaggerate, they lie, they do whatever they can to make themselves seem fearsome and intimidating.
Mom and dad wouldn't buy her a convertible for her sweet sixteenth? Obviously, she comes from a poor, broken home with unloving parents.
Had to go talk to a doctor once a month in order to keep the ADHD meds flowing? Definitely spent time in an asylum for their propensity to commit murders.
Smoked a doobie and sent to juvenile detention? Certainly, a hardened criminal who spent their teen years living on the streets and in a gang.
Some of us start out as athletes, but most of us? Most of us start out as charlatans. Middle-class kids looking for fame and fortune.
You don't see the working class kids with stars in their eyes who have been living on peanut butter and ramen, socking away a few bucks every paycheck until they can afford to pursue their dream of becoming a professional wrestler as much anymore.
Because to the soulless empty suits seeking to put on a bland, homogenized 100% all natural artificial real organic wrestling product these people are not interesting.
Where's the interest? Where's the drama? Where's the tragic backstory that they can rub out their disgusting misery boner to?
"Neophyte wrestling youth chases dream," where the fuck are the dollars to be made there, eh?
Most wrestlers are lying, egomaniacal twits that have all threat and menace of a wet sponge. They're all about presentation, about pomp and circumstance, all about appearances and words, not actions.
In the promotions that don't coddle these newbie wrestlers, they have to spend their time sharpening their edges, learning how to fight, how to become more dangerous.
And in turn, they also find out how to present themselves in a way that draws attention to them, to draw interest.
To be a bald, angry white dude with a beard standing amidst a dozen other bald, angry white dudes and shouting "I am unique! I am significant! I am a special snowflake! PAY ATTENTION TO ME GODDAMMIT!"
The way you came to be where you are, Dick Devereaux, is a journey where you have had to learn how to hurt people, how to be fierce, how to train your killer instinct and stand out in a crowd.
I'm a fucking seven foot tall, bright blue dragoness.
I'm two inches shorter than the tallest living woman in the world.
If you lined the female population of 3.75 billion people up side by side according to height, I'd probably be in the top ten, the top twenty-five at worst.
I look like one of the cat things from James Cameron's Avatar fucked a Velociraptor from Jurassic Park.
I breathe fire and have a functional, prehensile tail that weighs about as much as the average human being on Planet Earth.
Me being unique and standing out in a crowd was never going to be an issue.
Even if I wasn't a seven foot tall goddamned Puff the Magic Dragon I'd stand out from a significant portion of the women in professional wrestling, simply because I was something more than a faux-lesbian version of the bitch from Twilight.
Because Bella Swan is an uninteresting, boring, soulless bint with no personality that's innately about as interesting as a blank piece of paper.
She's only made interesting through being romanced by a sparkleyboi. Because those fucking things are not vampires.
Oh boy, a significant minority of old, crotchety, religious mostly white people find two girls kissing absolutely terrifying. How shocking, how scandalous! Look upon my tragic backstory and forbidden love and despair!
Most folks that get into the wrestling business, they're here because they want one of two things. They want money or they want attention.
Despite what a lot of us say, we don't hang around because we like hurting people.
Sure, there are a few poop-eating outliers here and there, but most of us realize that if we go prancing around breaking bones and handing out concussions like Roy Moore handing out his phone number at the local middle school playground we're going to end up shipped off to the glue factory.
Because wrestling promotions don't like it when you start breaking your peers into itty bitty pieces that spend months sitting on their butts healing and cashing their downside paychecks, decidedly not out there making money for the promotion.
I spent three years being nice, three years being polite, three years busting my ass trying to help the wrestling federations I was employed by.
For three years the people who signed my paychecks spat in my face.
One federation had me wrestling midgets and the mentally handicapped.
One federation literally segregated me from the other wrestlers and put out a bounty on me.
One federation signed me with the intent of taking me off the market and making me look like a fool.
I'm not going to go crawling on my hands and knees to any other wrestling federation, hat in hand, looking for a job like some pathetic, Oliver Twist-like waif going "Please sir, can I have some more?"
I figure that way I weed out the assholes.
If the feds come to me, that shows me that they're less likely to be absolute scumlords who want to endlessly dryfuck me and use me entirely as a springboard to have their own personal crop of pet projects look more popular.
You see, if they put in the effort to actually reach out to me, to entice me to come work for them it's only natural that they'd want a return on the money and effort they put in that'd be required to actually sign me in the first place.
But that's not happened.
And I've got one guess as to the reason why.
Well, several reasons why.
And they all share a set of a limited handful of last names.
I had the audacity to be better than their sons, their daughters, their designated chosen ones.
And so they've spread lies and exaggerations about me, effectively blackballing me from a goodly chunk of the industry and poisoning the well on a goodly chunk more.
It's a bit upsetting, but I'm not losing sleep over it. Honestly, if all my enemies back home were like this I'd send them fucking Christmas cards.
Well, any one of a dozen different winter solstice-based holidays, technically. We don't have a holiday celebrating the birth of one of our gods several months after what was probably his actual birth, filled with co-opted pagan traditions that has it pretty much on the map entirely for purposes of marketing one of several branches of devotion to this particular triune deity.
If you knocked off chunks of World of Warcraft with a hammer and then filled the bits with plaster from ground up pieces of the Fallout series, you basically have the world I came from. Complete with all the usual tropes and cliches.
Mine is a world where the wildlife will gleefully set upon you and eat you because it's been sleeping too close to some glowy shit. Could be magic rocks, could be lost technology, could be toxic waste.
You know how in like every role-playing game ever the first thing you do is go down into the sewers and murder a bunch of giant rats to death?
Yeah, that was the job I had growing up. Go into the sewers and thin out the population of murderous monsters.
'Round here you're ushered into adulthood by getting a job or going off to college.
Me? My childhood ceased to be when my best friend's aunt attempted to have her assassinated.
My college graduation was basically tanking an eight-foot tall vampyric wereleopard with magic and a lightning sword until she manages to break the magic barrier around the top floor of her Tower of Doom so that the aforementioned best friend could put a .50 caliber silver bullet in her hateful, undead heart.
And of course once you off one malevolent, undead, therianthropic member of the nobility you've got people beating down your door. You'll never hear the end of it with people wanting you to put a stake in some walking corpse's heart, commit wholesale aristocide, or put down the Shiba Inu shapeshifter that has been currently elected leader of Venice.
That would be a Doge Doge, by the by.
But you get the picture. I kept getting dragged into adventures that ended up with me facing unfathomably strong warriors and wizards as well as absolutely titanic and terrible monsters.
There are two things that I do well; fight and make pizza.
There were two career options the sorcerer that ended up taking on the burden of my summoning from the jackass that decided "Hey, I'm going to try and summon the Handmaiden of the Smoking Scythe from this tome of magic from another dimension that I just so happened to have. All of my usual succubi are occupied, so I'll call on the favored servant of the motherfucking God of Death for a booty call." put on the table.
I could fight monsters, or I could fight rather shitty human beings.
If only I'd known that I would end up fighting a literal man covered in his own shit, I may very well have gone "Fiendish, otherworldly horrors that can chew on your very soul? Sign me the hell up! Just keep the endless tides of bitches who think lying about having been raped makes them tragic and edgy the fuck away from me."
So I chose to beat the crap out of a bunch of loathsome bitches and bastards with delusions of grandeur and an overinflated sense of self-worth.
Being essentially indestructible and having spent my teen years as a dark elf princess's combat training dummy, my pro wrestling training didn't really need to include learning how to fall.
And since I'd spent my entire life to that point murdering things in the face, training me how to fight wasn't an issue either.
So unlike the rest of the pro wrestling world what I had drilled into me was not new and inventive ways to throw people and drop them on their heads in order to make myself dangerous.
Oh no.
It was getting me used to not fighting for my life at the expense of whomever I was fighting. Because when your life's on the line you gouge out eyes, crush throats, pop testicles, and learn the secret dwarven striking technique to rip out every single hair from one nostril at the same time.
Instead of spending the better part of a year toughening myself up and learning how to do suplexes I spent it acclimating myself to be comfortable with not trying to get as much blood as possible from the inside to the outside.
It's not really like I had a choice. What with mixed martial arts being heavily regulated and subject to divisions with strict weight classes and gender segregation.
C'mon, I weigh as much as any three of the UFC's Women's Champions put together.
So unlike pretty much everybody else in this business I'm not doing this because I want money or fame or exposure or my inability to reach climax if I haven't given somebody a wound so large it requires stitches in the past 24 hours.
I fight because it's what I do.
I wrestle simply for the sake of wrestling.
I like the order, the structure, the flow of it.
My opponents have both murdered co-workers during the course of their employment with DTW.
They think this makes them strong.
They think that this gives them an advantage.
It isn't.
Being so cavalier and eager to inflict death doesn't make you strong; it makes you lazy.
Because when you kill somebody that's it. Their life is over. You've ended them, but you've also freed them. Freed them from stress, freed them from responsibility, freed them from pain, freed them from suffering, freed them from the emotional turmoil that festers within their souls.
You think that because I won't murder you just to win something so simple as a match that it gives you an edge over me.
You think that I'm some emotionally stunted, bleeding heart pansy that has some sort of code of justice and honor that prevents me from offing you bearded, bald shits because it's immoral or wrong or something like that.
Oh no, it's nothing of the sort.
I've got a body count that could probably fill any wrestling arena you'd care to name.
So it'd be kind of hypocritical to go "Stop right there, Dr. Murder! You've murdered your very last!"
"Hahaha, that's what you think foolish hero! Dr. Murder always commits murders!"
But the thing is that the both of you are really, really awful human beings and simply removing you from the mortal plane of existence isn't going to be enough.
Between the Tangerine-in-Chief and the people in Alabama going "You know what? I hate the blacks and the gays so much that I think I ought to vote for the child-fucker." I'm pretty sure that the Gates of Hell are hanging wide open and all the damned, wicked souls have come wandering back.
And they want you to support their tax cuts for the richest 10% of US citizens.
I want you to suffer. I want you to experience pain. I want you to feel miserable. I want you to be unable to look at parts of your body without shuddering in remembrance of the things that I've done to you.
You see, if I do something so simple as killing you, that all stops.
You don't have to live with my torment, with aching twinges and numb scars that I've inflicted upon you if you're dead.
Killing somebody only makes them hurt for a moment.
I want you both to hurt for a lifetime.
I want you to spend the next century waking up every morning, screaming from the nightmares you have from what I've done to you.
I want you to be limping and staggering around with the accumulated damage of dozens of matches that I spent beating the shit out of you.
Ending a life is so simple, so easy, so lazy.
You have to put in the effort to drag somebody down to the dark depths of absolute sheer misery.
That's why I don't kill, gentlemen, because I think that you're such awful people that I don't think the fires of Hell that await you are punishment enough.
Which is why for the first time in my professional wrestling career I will be bringing out a few things from my personal collection of amusingly enchanted tools and trinkets.
Welcome to the next phase of the game, boys, where the objective is to make you as anguished as possible.
And of course, I've already begun with this.
I know you both so well.
I know exactly how to make you suffer.
Dick, I just have to sit here and rant because you're obligated to sit and listen to me verbally run you into the ground, even though you absolutely hate the fact that I will vent my spleen and rail against you for hours.
And Riddick? You creepy little edgelord fuck, all you want is attention. So nothing is going to piss you off more than ignoring you almost completely and instead dedicating 90% of my invective to dear old DeeDee.
The game's afoot, little toys.
Which means that I'm going to break it off in your asses.
No comments:
Post a Comment