Twas the night before Blood Bowl, and all through the arena, not a creature was stirring, not even Antonio Pena (who was probably looking for masked wrestlers to haunt, steal their clothes, and hand them off to somebody else). Well, okay, actually there were at least two creatures stirring.
My minion had snuck out of the hotel and had wandered off in search of mischief, and I was pretty sure I knew what kind.
Which was why I was headed towards some other, smaller creatures that were potentially stirring in the arena, though I wasn't sure.
I hadn't looked to see if the spiders, snakes, and scorpions that had been secured for one of the team tournament match semi-finals were nocturnal or not.
But I was probably going to find out as a side effect, because that was precisely where I was headed, along with my trusty cameraman.
Because as long as Claudia's on camera she can't do her horror movie monster teleport thing when I blink.
I manage to arrive just in time, or more likely Claudia has stalled for the purposes of drama and narrative convenience. I reach out and grab the haft of her mallet before she can smash open a terrarium that houses a few tarantulas.
"Can't let you do that, Star Fox." I intone.
"Oh, hiya boss!" Claudia says cheerfully.
I take the mallet and banish it to a pocket of my Coat of Holding. It's not like that's going to do me any good, as she can just pull the thing out again because that would be funny, but it's the symbolism of the thing, dammit.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Rescuing the poor critters before we're made to smoosh them tomorrow. Because whoever decided to put us in the bracket that fought the Fuzz PETA..."
"Fuck PETA." I correct.
"Yeah, they're horrible! But anyway, we're in the bracket with the Fuzz PETA deathmatch, but the only deaths that will be matched will be those of these poor, unfortunate beasties."
I give her the side eye, "You're not going to break into song, are you?"
"Nah, nothing rhymes with beasties, even if I wanted to get my inner drag queen-esque sea witch on. But ANYWAAAAY, once we advance to the semi-finals because we totes are going to advance to the semi-finals, all the critter bites and stings aren't going to really work on us."
Claudia gestures to me, "You because you're pretty much invulnerable to non-magical forms of attack, which includes pointy critter bits, and me because I don't have the proper biological processes to disrupt."
"That and I'm pretty sure that if something bites you it's going to die."
"Yup! I do believe that I am in fact poisonous!" she states proudly, "Spectacularly lethal on attempted consumption, that's me!"
She sighs and looks over the tanks and boxes and formally empty butter spread containers now each housing a single spider or scorpion (because man, a lot of those things are cannibalistic).
"All the poor critters here are actively being mistreated, or are going to be mistreated. Because the venomous ones don't bite unless they're hunting, or really really scared and the feesh will bite when they're hungry. "
"So the poor dears are going hungry and tomorrow are going to be crowded into tanks where they're going to murder one another, then have big, scary bodies hurled through the air at them.
"Kind of an apt metaphor for the whole of professional wrestling. If the piranhas ate peanut butter, and the snakes lived in a car it would be dead on."
I put my hand on Claudia's shoulder, surreptitiously wiping my hand off on her abbreviated top, because I'm pretty sure she doesn't actually wield things like hammers or giant candy canes, but rather otherworldly horrors that mortal senses perceive as simple, harmless, silly things in order to preserve sanity.
So I'm pretty sure that I just grabbed a living extra-dimensional creature that's basically slimy tentacle attached to a skull with giant eyeballs vaguely in the shape of a hammer, and thus am wiping the Cthulhu-snot onto Claudia.
"You're not going to be able to save these critters, Claudia. Their natural habitat is not a pro wrestling arena, and I don't think you want to be stuck looking up what species each and every spider is so we can put them in a place where they occur naturally."
"Because I really don't think Japan would appreciate all this wildlife in the middle of a city. Because it's dropping below freezing at nights here, so all the critters will either freeze or be looking to get into somebody's house, where they're probably going to get smushed anyway."
"Can we make them into an undead army of darkness?" Claudia offers.
"If you feed them, take them for walks, and only have them swarm and devour those deserving of the fate we can reanimate and fix the smushed ones after the match."
Claudia cheers, "Thanks boss lady, you're the best!" she says, hugging me and transferring the Cthulhu snot from her shoulder to my chest.
Dammit.
"So, we've got the camera here that I brought to assure you wouldn't scamper off. Wanna do the promo thing here and now, impassioned by the plight of the poor, defenseless creepy crawlies that are going to get crammed into too-small tanks and made to instinctually devour one another so that a certain subset of viewers can have the jibblies at the very idea of all the chitinous little legs and scaly, fanged maws being on the skin of people they admire?"
"Or tolerate."
"Or loathe. Depending on what team from the other match gets to face us."
"Well, who do you want to face from the choice of Badd Breed, Red and Black, and Netflix and Kill?"
"Red and Black. Just for the nerd-off with Stanton and the perverse curiosity to discover if Zombie Black is an actual zombie unearthed from the 1980's. Because my goddess, if you could distill the crack-fueled 80's wrestling promo down to its prototypical form, it would be very, very close to that."
"I agree. They seem like fun peoples who would be fun to have a match with. You need to have fun matches with people. It can't be could for your mental health to have people threatening to shit on you and illicitly utilize your naughty bits for weeks and months on end."
"I'm actually kind of numb to it. Because everybody knows that they actually lack the capacity to carry it out without me freezing their dick off, snapping it off, crushing it into dust, and making them snort the dust."
"It's the epitome of lazy, low effort threats. Rapey Dwarf threatened to piss on me and jerk off using my tail during his drunken Twitter escapades the other day. I replied by saying if he did so I was going to send him to the moon, where he would promptly asphyxiate, have all the water in his body boil away, his flesh turned into dust via a repeated heat and thaw cycle as the moon shifts between freezing and boiling in the presence or lack of sunlight, and his bleached bones in a moon crater being something for future space explorers to ponder and try and solve."
Claudia looks at me with wide eyes and a lovey-dovey grin that shows a bit too much arousal for my taste.
I pull a fire extinguisher out of my Coat of Holding and promptly hose her down.
"No! Bad clown! No lewd thoughts about your evil overlord's capacity for theoretical violence, murder, and mayhem!"
"Ack!" Claudia cries.
"So yeah. Pop culture spewing goober teamed with a pale, painted potential member of the undead. How can I NOT root for them?"
"Especially considering the other teams."
"Yes, ESPECIALLY considering the other teams. Netflix and Kill is going to drive me right up the wall. I'm getting flashbacks to the Whorehouse with the aura of bitchy entitlement and delusions of grandeur surrounding Eliza Lovecraft, WHO DOESN'T EVEN HAVE THE DECENCY TO LOOK EVEN SLIGHTLY LOVECRAFTIAN I MIGHT ADD!"
Claudia looks offended, "I know, right? How can you have a name like Lovecraft and not even be sporting the merest token of the trademark Innsmouth look? No fangs, no fins, no flippers, no gills, no weird eyes, no scaly patches of skin."
"No claws, no malformed limbs, and nary a tentacle or supernumerary eyeball to be seen!"
"But then again it's not like any self-respecting eldritch abomination would accept corporate sponsorship, therefore reducing themselves to being the lesser evil."
"It'd be like trying to build a palace of bones with towers topped in the skulls of the titanic monsters you've slain (and picked up at garage sales)."
I give her another blaster with the fire extinguisher. "Bad clown! No insinuating I pick up titanic monsters at garage sales!"
"Ack! I wasn't insinuating that!"
"You're talking about my love life far more than you ought to be, missy!"
"I can't help it! Three conventionally attractive ladies of differing alignments and their conventionally attractive lady manager, all brought together under the banner of working together and putting their differences aside to possibly get to know each other better and become friends?"
She sticks out her tongue and blows a raspberry. "You just know that eventually we're going to have to get a jackhammer because the sexual tension is going to get so thick that even a knife isn't going to do the job."
I shake my head, "Dammit. And we've been so good about managing to keep the lesbian pollen to a minimum in DTW."
"It's only going to be made worse with Eric Holland being a thirsty biscuit. Sooo thirsty. He wants your world title all over his face, and in his mouth, and down his thr…. ACK!"
I give her a sustained blast with the fire extinguisher.
"Seriously thinking about taking you to the vet and getting you spayed, Claudia."
"But I NEED my demon-infested womb!"
"For what? You're undead, which thankfully has you bereft of a menstrual cycle."
Claudia hops up on an invisible motorbike and makes vroom vroom noises.
"Otherwise you'd be expelling a football-sized egg from your junk every month or so."
Claudia makes a face, looks down at her groin, and makes a circle with her fingers approximating the diameter of a football.
"Don't be such a baby. It's not going to hurt. Because unlike certain stupidly designed sentient species I could mention, dragonbloods have a pelvis arranged in a way that ensures we don't just about break our own bones expelling our offspring."
My minion has a thoughtful look on her face.
"But your tummy is flat and I've never heard of you laying an egg."
"Instead of being poofed into a dragon, I have to take the long way. I've got another eight or so years of having elven ovaries before they shut down and spend the next fifteen years slowly converting into the draconic analog."
"So fifteen years with no ovulation whatsoever?"
"Yup."
"I think we should put that down on the list of benefits to offer should you ever want to put out..."
I raise the fire extinguisher.
"...a call for more dragonspawn minions!" Claudia finishes rapidly.
"I'm sure that some gals will sign on by the truckload to not have to worry about getting preggers and "that time of the month" for a decade and a half."
"Dragonspawn process is the "poof, you're a dragon" one, Claudia. A slow series of changes based off of my own dragonblood progression would require a series of several-hour long rituals every month. And I'm far, far too lazy to do that for a congregation of devoted thralls. No matter how devoted."
"Right, right! Just dip 'em and get it done quick."
"And on the bright side due to elemental power being able to revitalize cells and superior uterine design the whole bleeding and shedding the lining thing doesn't take place. And instead of feeling horrible, the increased flow of elemental energy means that you actually feel good."
"Boss lady, why aren't we marketing this? I'm sure you'd have thousands upon thousands of takers."
"They won't fit in the apartment, and the only place I can find that would let me build a Palace of Bones are either rural as all hell, or in a Homeowner's Association. And as we mentioned, when you're some sort of eldritch horror or evil overlord you don't want to be the lesser evil in the relationship, be it business or personal."
"But if you MURDERED the HOA board and reanimated them..."
I give my henchwoman a glare.
"Are you seriously suggesting that I grant the petty tyrants of an HOA eternal life?"
"Oh. Yeah. No. Now that I think about it that would be bad. Because once they have a taste of greater power they will never be satisfied, and will probably seek to overthrow you. And ban garden gnomes forever."
"So, Eric Holland, Thirsty Bitch."
"I'm sure he's got his redeeming qualities. Like not wanking and shitting on everything. But applying a little bit of the Googles, well… he's either not particularly bright, has vision problems, or is color blind."
Claudia pulls out a cell phone from nowhere and shows me an image.
"My god. It's like Donald Trump's spray tan combined with one of those Troll dolls by way of Jersey Shore and then was wrapped up in a singlet covered in skid marks."
"Maybe it's anti-Teiji camouflage? If Teiji thinks he's already shat on you, maybe he won't do it again?"
"That would make some sort of sense. But I don't see the purpose behind the Hulk Hogan Nuclear Orange Tanning Regimen."
"Gotta draw in that coveted carrot people demographic somehow, boss."
"ANYWAY! Holland wants a shot at you he's probably going to do his best to get out there and have one of those "Oh my God! Insert Name Here has pinned the reigning champion in a non-title match, they have a claim to contendership!" moments that a certain northern promotion milks until the udder starts shooting blood.
"Bloody Udder. Put that name down for if we ever need to pretend to be a hillbilly-punk band."
"Eric's going to be all up in your grill trying to pin you and whatnot so even if he borks up at Rail Rumble he can prance around in his poo-stained singlet..."
"I don't think he wears the poo-stained singlet anymore."
"..prance around without his poo-stained singlet and go "I have a pinfall over the champion! Reward me for my efforts and potentially those of three other people piled on top of me!" Because it's going to be a pinfall, because you um..."
"Can't actually have my bits damaged by yanking on them and have neck anatomy that makes it pretty much impossible to choke me into unconsciousness."
"That and you can probably connect the blood flow below the blockage to the blood flow above the blockage."
I pause, I'd never thought of that before. That might work. A distant look passes on my face as I actually try it out.
"Huh. Yeah. That works. Neat. Something I'll have to keep in mind for the next time somebody comes after me with a magic noose, lasso, or garotte."
Claudia stares at me.
"Really? That's happened… often?"
"About a dozen times so far."
"Huh. Tatheon must be really rough."
"Not as much as you'd think. Because most of the time if somebody is being a heinous ass you can simply challenge them to a duel and kill them. You'd be surprised at how many problems being able to murder the things that annoy you will solve."
"And how polite everybody must be."
"Not so much considering that just like here, people can buy their way into positions of power and influence and can even buy their way out of being dead in advance. Killing them in the face just tends to make them go on roaring rampage of revenge."
"Which means that you can kill the annoying person again, and again, and again!"
"Yup! I get the catharsis of being able to violently slaughter somebody whom I dislike, and they get to suffer the process of dying but not actually be dead. Win-win situation, I feel."
"How common is that?"
"Well, anybody can do it so long as they basically give up 90 percent of their mana generation capacity and a small chunk of their physical and mental potential."
"How does that work?"
"Basically you're tied to a certain geographic area. You can't die by violence. But you'll never be able to cast more than one or two spells in a row and you're about 10% weaker and dumber than you would otherwise be. So you never have the potential to become an adventurer."
"So what if Little Billy wants to become an adventurer, but Mom and Dad are hands-off parents that think it's cool to play in traffic and have Little Billy sacrifice his spells and smarts to be safe?"
"You can break it off every five years or so, which also will allow people to move and such. It takes five years to fully restore your original potential, but the mana drain stops immediately."
"So what happens if a nobleman makes their entire army respawnable and tries to take over their neighbor?"
"The other side hires adventurers and the army is generally spellcasted and martial techniqued to death. Large quantities of mundane dudes are only decent at fighting other large quantities of mundane dudes. I mean if you did a flyby with a breath weapon strafe how maybe people in formation would you hit, assuming 1 person is a 5-foot square?"
"Umm… I think I can fire the breath weapon for maybe 20 seconds tops? Which if I'm flying at top speed would cover… maybe 1500 feet? So… fuzz, that'd be a good 1800 people."
"Yup. And you are one not particularly large, not particular fast dragon."
"Geez."
"Yup. Supernatural strafing runs are scary."
"Speaking of scary, specifically the complete antithesis of, have you heard Nate Narwin talk?"
"Yes, my goddess, he's like Babby's First Heel. He's like the epitome of what a sixth grader would think the ultimate bad guy would be like. Complete with his collection of middle school insults."
"He's an effective advocate against bigotry, racism, sexism, and homophobia, though."
"He's what?"
"Because I wanna fill the world with peace, love, and tolerance so that this unrepentant knob goblin completely finds his insults defanged."
""Bro, you and your tag team partner are totally dick sucking homos!" Why yes, we've been known to smoke a penis or two, what of it? "You mother takes five dudes in the ass every Tuesday night!" Mother does enjoy her polyamorous lifestyle, yes. "Your father lies on the lawn in a gimp suit and jacks off while the beaner groundskeeper sticks a rake in his ass!" Of course he does, it's a family tradition going back generations, but please don't refer to Miguel in such shocking terms."
"It's nice that Riddick has managed to find a soul mate. Maybe he'll mellow out now that he's found somebody he can rub weenies and glue pubes to things with."
"We're on a strictly don't refer to the bald wankstain by name on air policy so as not to fuel his narcissism."
"Right, right. So we'll just ignore the Ultraviolence Union. Umm… who does that leave?"
"The Osaka Rebels..."
"That's a horrible name for our beloved mascots! They are Team Small and Cute going up against Team Dumb and Ugly and Team Washed Up and Unwashed. I think Teiji is going to be so distracted by trying to get the Dirty Wizard to be horrified at the fact that he's covered in bodily waste, that Team Small and Cute will manage to pick up pinfalls on Big, Black, and Buttkissing and Jersey Jim."
"Deveraux/Lobo the Clown for the Odd Squad."
"Devereaux isn't odd. He's just a douchecanoe and Tigger too. I'm all for more clown representation and them putting down Lord Voldemort and the Meathook the Playground Bully."
"One set of our opponents Izzy van Doren and Rob Sharpe."
"It's written in the rules, never, ever tag with anybody named Izzy. People named Izzy are notoriously unstable, unreliable, unlikeable, and all sorts of other things starting with Un. She doesn't even have her shit together enough to send over an official bio to DTW."
"Though I, for one, am happy to see Rob escape the clutches of his perennial loser father "Iron" Mike Sharpe and strike out on a wrestling career of his own, trying to redeem the family name after daddy being the guy that newbies blow through in three minutes."
"I don't think he's actually Iron Mike's kid."
"If he didn't want us to fill in the blanks, I'm sure he'd have made sure to give us some material so that we could playfully insult him in a truthful way, Claudia."
"And the Filth?"
"What can you say about people that think so lowly of themselves as to literally refer to themselves as subhuman filth? And also yet another guy capitalizing on Charles Manson's good name. Why I ought to..."
Exactly what I ought to is lost forever to the sands of time as I'm knocked over by a multicolored explosion and hear the sound of a voice that mixes features of Irish, Russian, and Thai into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
"Ah ha! I am finally finding you, you obnoxious azure toadbeast!" growls a rather angry female voice.
Well, shit.
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