[We open to a shot of Kalinda kneeling on the floor before a big picture window, beyond which a heavy snowfall billows and blows and cascades down, covering the world in a frozen white blanket.]
[Before her, seemingly drawn in blood, is a series of sigils and geometric shapes; a summoning circle. We've seen her do this on camera once before. This is Kalinda summoning the consciousness of the Manyfold Matriarch into being so that she may hold a proper conversation with her divine patron.]
[But instead of five different colored candles, this time the ritual is sporting five of the same sickly green candles, which begin hissing and sparking and billowing thick green smoke into the air as Kalinda speaks, completing the ritual to call the dragoness into ethereal being. We're missing out on the audio, and thus a goodly portion of the summoning ritual.]
Kalinda: Aspect of the Great Matriarch, Devourer of Pain, your servant calls to you! Come forth!
[The candles seems to almost explode, filling the air with a toxic level of smoke. Or it would, if the smoke were going anywhere. Instead it all flows inward, writhing around itself to from a long, serpentine neck and a draconic face. The Matriarch's green head sports a massive yellow-green frill, looking rather like a mohawk that continues down her long and elegant neck. The top of her head is adorned with numerous tiny, conical, spiky horns and a single set of massive, spiraling ram-like horns as well.]
Manyfold Matriarch: Mmm, interesting. You never summoned me in only one of my facets before. May I ask the occasion?
Kalinda: I wanted carnage. I wanted destruction. I wanted pain and agony unimaginable brought down upon my foes. But your prime aspect is more concerned about matters of pride and draconic superiority than carnage.
Victory is her goal, and she craves triumph and domination above all else, in this case to the exclusion of the sadistic assault that I had asked her aid in helping me to deliver.
Manyfold Matriarch: I see, and you are correct. By taking pieces of the gods that were and splicing them into myself I have indeed greatly altered the thought process and personalities of each of my aspects. Dividing myself into compartments to better contain and control the divinities that were not originally mine, but were instead earned by cunning plans and raw violence.
Kalinda: Which you are quite familiar with.
Manyfold Matriarch: Oh yes. I was the first to absorb the power of a slain sibling of our pantheon. It matters little to be a master of dark alchemy, poison, assassination, and mutual combat when your foe is many times your size, has far more mouths for biting, and has teleported right about your sleeping form.
Kalinda: Not setting up wards? They probably had it coming.
Manyfold Matriarch: In our various godly realms, the only thing we had to worry about attacking us were other gods. And aside from a few battles at the beginning, none of us had ever come into face to face physical battle with one another for centuries.
Warding our homes would require a debt to one of our siblings, the mage. It would give her power over the rest of us. Each lair that she would shield would leave the others at a disadvantage, thus extracting a higher price from each successive supplicant seeking shelter.
No one wanted to be the last one to be warded and owe our sister such a huge boon, diminishing our power in exchange for a little bit of perceived safety. So we all agreed that it would be better to simply go without.
After all, even if we WERE attacked, we were functionally immortal. Death of our forms was a momentary inconvenience, and we hadn't been killed in any fashion for quite some time.
My siblings were unprepared, complacent, lazy, and arrogant in their superiority. It was knowledge gained from mortal races that allowed me the spells needed to consume and replace my siblings' places in our pantheon. My victory, thus, is due not to draconic superiority, but from adopting good ideas and methods, regardless of their source.
Kalinda: So how was it?
Manyfold Matriarch: Excruciating. Ripping open parts of your mind and your soul so that you will have places to attach the chunks ripped from your victims.
The first time was the worst, not knowing what to expect. The struggle to subdue and suppress the soon to be grafted soul. Were I not born with five minds and one soul, I would have been devoured utterly by my victim. But in time I overcame her and she became merely another part of me.
With nearly all of my sister's alchemical knowledge and skill at sneakery, I was able to subdue and consume most of the others without issue. Each new essence I added to myself empowering the combined whole. Each new mind that fell to us merely enhanced our mental might until even the strongest willed of us, our eldest brother, the noble leader of our pantheon could not hold out but for a few minutes against the mental assault of nine minds working in tandem.
[The Matriarch chuckles.]
Manyfold Matriarch: The gods of Assassination, Laughter, Sorcery, Wealth, and all of Dragonkind fell to me, the goddess of Treachery, and so to did their powers and domains.
Kalinda: Wait, you actually PLANNED to consume your pantheon's court jester?
[In the background, outside in the billowing snow, the Matriarch's red aspect appears, still wearing the tie Kalinda offered to her in her previous summoning, having been stolen from Billy Mayne. She presses against the glass and makes ridiculous faces. The green aspect rolls her eyes, not even looking.]
Manyfold Matriarch: Indeed! He was my second target. A second strike signified that something serious was going on, that the attacks were not going to stop and that everyone was in danger.
How better to take advantage and seize destiny by the throat by not only destroying the representative of levity, mirth, and hope, but by becoming him? Every idea, every notion, every plot and idea that my siblings could escape their fates merely made me more powerful.
[There's a few moments of awkward silence, as Kalinda isn't quite so sure how she ought to respond to that. The Matriarch takes this time to admire Kalinda's offering; a pack of cigarettes and a bag of fresh peaches.]
Manyfold Matriarch: So what is this meant to be, hmm? You always come up with such wonderful symbology in your offerrings.
Kalinda: The smokes belong to Priest, who is an actual priest. Ostensibly he serves this realm's deity of ultimate evil. So not only are they a battle trophy, as I stole them from him, but they're also something I know you just adore; poison.
There are something like 400 toxic compounds in cigarettes, and 43 cancer-causing chemicals.
Manyfold Matriarch: Oooh! Fun!
And the fruit? You're not on a health food kick, are you?
Kalinda: Good lord no! I just thought you might like them as a food offering because I think they're yummy and the pits contain potential amounts of cyanide to be worrying to your typical human being.
Manyfold Matriarch: Also fun!
And what precisely did you want for your little offering?
Kalinda: Mostly to get your attention. What I want mostly is covered by our other bargain; access to my mind and body during combat with my foes, using your knowledge, wisdom, and superior intellect to propel me to expertise in fighting styles that would otherwise take me years to learn and master on my own.
Manyfold Matriarch: And as you said, channelling my primary aspect is not quite what you need?
Kalinda: Not in this situation, no. If I simply want to win, using that bit of you works very, very wel. But I don't just want to win, my lady. I want to send a message.
Human beings have this strange notion that is something is polite, comical, and amusing that it is thus something unworthy of respect and fear. They think that because I make jokes on Twitter that this somehow counters the fact that I'm a seven foot tall, fire-breathing dragoness who really enjoys hitting people with weapons.
Manyfold Matriarch: Laughter can be an effective weapon, for you and against you.
Kalinda: I'm used to being laughed at, Matriarch. I just feel that the laughter is unwarranted. It's a denial of what ought to be an indisputable fact. I am a force to be reckoned with. I have your power by my side. I am of a bloodline that ensures 99.9 percent of what is done to me during the course of professional wrestling is unable to cause any lasting harm beyond a bit of soreness.
Manyfold Matriarch: Yes, the priest who unimaginatively calls himself Priest. He insists that his failings are not his own, and that your victories are ascribable to mere luck.
Kalinda: Words have failed to show him the error of his ways. Actions have been unable to pierce the black bubble of denial in which he has parked his carcass. So I think that I'm going to need to quite simply and methodically pick him apart until he's walking wounded. And do so in a match where we're supposed to be allies against two men of limited ability.
Manyfold Matriarch: So you basically want to repeat your previous fight, but replacing one set of secondary buffoons with the other?
Kalinda: Yes. And I want you in your capacity as Goddess of Assassination, of Violence, of Murder, to aid me in this battle, rather than your aspect of Supremecy.
I know I'm better than them. They know I'm better than them. Their egos just refuse to let them acknowledge my superiority. So I am required to demonstrate my point, not merely through victory, but through victory in a manner that leaves them no doubt as to my prowess.
Drawing out their sufferring for as long as possible, breaking their dreams of victory right before their eyes, crushing the tattered remains of hope in their hearts that they are in fact the grand, wonderful thing they believe themselves to be.
I want them to hurt, Matriarch. I want them to hurt for a long, long time. I want them agonized and aching for months, but not smited so terribly that they can no longer compete. I want to hamstring a predator and turn it into prey for its peers. I want everyone Priest faces in the future to know that there are gaps in his armor, and that they have been placed there for others to exploit.
Manyfold Matriarch: You want to beat your foe and do so in a way that assures that he will be beaten several additional times from the trauma.
Oh yes, that is definitely in my particular area of expertise, my dear.
It's nice to see you growing up and having grown-up thoughts, ideas, desires, and sadistic urges. You seem to be growing out of your… what is it? Sweet Polly Oliver phase?
Kalinda: That's a woman pretending to be a man, Matriarch. You're thinking of a Pollyanna.
Manyfold Matriarch: Bah. Human media. It would be much less confusing in Draconic, especially once the ancestral lineage names are use.
Kalinda: Good luck getting that going. You need like a good three feet worth of neck to do proper Draconic. You get the giggles every time I try to speak it.
Manyfold Matriarch: But it's so cute, dear! It like listening to a squeaky little mouse.
Kalinda: I don't have the neck length or the lung power to get the fearsome rumbles going. The best I can do is speak from the diaphragm and do my radio announcer voice.
Manyfold Matriarch: That's fine, dear. We can converse in these silly baby languages until you get a few centuries of draconic growth under your belt and can talk like a grown up instead of a hatchling.
[Not liking the direction the conversation is heading Kalinda purposefully mars the summoning circle, causing the draconic apparition to fade.]
Kalinda: Thank you for coming, Matriarch. Hopefully our plans will be achieved to my satisfaction.
Manyfold Matriarch: If they don't, we can always poison somebody's pumpkin spice latte and get our giggles that way!
[Kalinda sticks out her tongue and makes a disgusted face.]
Kalinda: Pumpkin spice latte is disgusting and I'm convinced that it contains some sort of addictive, mind-altering compound that makes women in their 20's dress like Han Solo.
[And on that combination slam of Starbucks and Ugg boots we fade to black.]
Oh Priest, Priest, Priest. Poor dense, mentally deficient, ignorant, egomaniacal Priest.
The reason I don't think you're capable of leading a company is because I think you're as dumb as a box of rocks. I think you're a puffed up mook with delusions of grandeur. You're a follower, Priest, you're a minion that thinks because he had a squad of his own minions at his beck and call that he's been promoted beyond his minion status.
Nope. No. Uh uh. Sorry, Priesty-poos, but as long as you worshipfully kiss the ass of Raymond "Rump Buttcheese" der Vaart and act as his carpal-tunnel afflicted right hand moron, you're still a subordinate. A thrall. A flunky. A toady.
For all your talk about how lucky I am, about how so very wonderfully permissible you're being for no apparent reason, you didn't seem to be in particularly much of a hurry to get back into that ring once I sent you spiralling ass-over-teakettle to the floor, now did you?
All your talk about how big and bad and mean you are, about how you're in league with the local ineffectual forces of darkness and so on and so forth, you sure as hell seem to be one laid back fucker when your gums aren't flapping.
Allowing all these people to beat you, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory time and time again. Silly dragon girls winning matches against you and a pair of supposed tag team specialists. Slaking your lusts on a body pillow instead of inflicting the rancid Crisco stench of your greasy hair and beard upon another human being.
For all my luck, for all the scrubs and knock-offs and suckmeisters and needle-dicked benchwarmers that aren't even fit to sniff the majestic stench of your wrestling boots or whatever, I just so happen to be one of four ULW superstars sitting atop a perfect undefeated record.
Which I share with none other than Jason King, who isn't actually royalty because his wife isn't called Jessica Queen, and Willow Wilkes, who likes to spout supposedly dark and insightful angst drizzle on Twitter and scar the rest of the fed for life by nonchalantly flashing her meat curtains at us.
Oh.
Wait.
Hold on.
There's actually a fifth ULW superstar with a perfect record.
And guess what?
It's you, Priesty-poos! You're the only member on the roster with a perfect LOSING record. You've gotten your ass handed to you on a silver platter each and every time you've gone out to compete.
And last week you suffered your biggest failure to date. In fact you proved your status as nothing more than a random encounter trash mob by having a three on one advantage and STILL being unable to get the job done.
I mean you guys didn't even have a period of sustained offense long enough to get the crowd behind me. It took three of you people to put in about as much offense on me as a normal person would.
And even after all that, even after beating three men, you still think I'm lucky.
No, Priest, what I am is unlucky.
I had the misfortune to think that by consorting with dark powers that I'd be able to use to the power boost provided by the vile cannibal dragon goddess I unwillingly serve to piece the thickness of your skull and actually make an idea reach your handful of functional braincells.
Only she decided that she didn't want to follow the game plan. Rather than leave three men lying in pools of their own blood, left little more than twisted wrecks of humanity, my goddess decided that simple victory would be enough. That simply showing the superiority of dragon-kind would be enough for you to recognize the error of your ways.
But no, here you are, Priest. Here you are once again thinking that I'm lucky. That just because I'm not a snarly, growly, world-eating bitch queen 24/7 that I'm not dangerous. That just because I'm pleasant and have a sense of humor most of the time, that I'm not someone worthy of respect, possibly even fear.
But I'm starting to think that even that might not be enough. That leaving you in the ring picked apart, nothing broken, nothing torn, nothing requiring surgery, maybe not even worthy of a trip to the hospital, alongside two other men won't be enough to get through to you. To prove to you that I'm more than lucky, that I am a force to be reckoned with.
Because I said outright that I'm not letting random chance decide. I'm not going to bet all my chips on hoping that fate dictates you and I tying up in the second round. I'm not treating this as a tag team match, Priest. I'm treating this as a Shut Priest's Whore Mouth Match where I will occasionally be distracted by having to bludgeon Kjorn Battlestar and Piddle into behaving while I pound the snot out of my designated tag team partner.
And somehow, probably snogging with his prepubescent anime boy dakimakura while watching my promo, Priest somehow missed that. Or decided to ignore it.
Well, I'm not ignoring it.
I'm going to do it.
Oh sure it's not sportsmanlike in the slightest, beating the peas out of your tag team partner in what is ostensibly a tag team match. But good sportsmanship isn't going to accomplish the aforementioned task of Shutting Priest's Whore Mouth.
This is where we differ, Priest. This is something I can point to without a doubt to say that I'm better than you.
Because for all your talk, for all your bluster, for all your impotent threats, at the end of the day you don't have the confidence in yourself to be able to overcome a couple of scrubs like Piddle and Kjorn on your own.
This is why you're a minion, Priest. Because you are willing to let random chance decide your destiny. You want to throw down with me, but you don't want to risk losing to a pair of goobers when left on your own. You don't want to get in to a knock-down, drag out rock 'n roll party in the street in the very first round and risk blowing what may be your only chance at some shiny championship gold by being a complete and total wreck in the rounds that follow.
It's cute to see you trying to play the honorable teammate, though. After all, you left End Effect high and dry when everything was on the line for them, condemning them to the terrible fate of dark matches against Piddle and Plop until the end of time.
Then you got yourself clotheslined over the top rope and decided to chill on the outside of the ring rather than intricate yourself into the feeding frenzy I had going on with the Rising Tide. You knew, Priest, you KNEW, that you couldn't win the match. So you sure as hell made sure that it wasn't YOU with your shoulders on the mat.
Is it any wonder, Priest, with all your past misdeeds against your supposed allies just in the last fortnight that I'm not even going to bother with any polite pretenses and just punch you in the face from the very beginning?
I'm going to say it one last time, Priest. You're not a leader. You're a follower. You're a minion. You're a mook. You're a gods damned robot with a pre-programmed set of cliches and talking points and every time that something comes up that your limited responses cannot address you just throw up error message after error message and try to drag the conversation back into the box.
I don't give a damn about titles.
I don't give a fuck about fame.
I couldn't care less about the increasingly intricate bits of toilet paper you call money.
I'm here because I need SOMETHING to occupy me while people with more experience in the magical arts than me can figure out a way to get me home that doesn't involve massive sentient sacrifice to empower the aforementioned cannibalistic dragon goddess that I am attempting to keep on a leash by being her single existing devotee.
I like combat. I like fighting. I like beating the fuck out of morons that run their mouths and express more of their ignorance and inability to grasp concepts with each empty word that slips through their tobacco-stained teeth.
That's why I'm here. That's why I'm fighting. Because dealing with diaper babies like you, putting them in their place, and jamming so many facts into their skulls that they end up looking like Pinhead the Cenobite before one of them finally connects with their itty bitty pea brain and realization sets in that they are well and truly fucked.
I'm not going to end your career, Chuckles, because it wouldn't advance my agenda. I want to show the world what a cliched, mealy-mouthed fucktard you are, and I can't point at an empty space and go "Look at this moron right here!" with your ass in a sling, your ribs in a cast, and you pooping into a colostomy bag.
I want you right here competing in agony each and every week. I want you hurting bad enough that each time you get knocked on your back, each time someone kicks you in the knee, you wince just a little bit harder and remember that the blow you just took hurts more than it should because you ran your mouth and insisted that Kalinda Kriegsdottir is just "lucky," and that you're going to end her career.
I've been nice about this, I've been polite. I've tried hinting at it, I've tried frantically pointing to it, I've had Spark go over it for fifteen minutes with him rambling at you in obnoxious tutorial beast fashion.
YOU. CAN'T. FUCKING. HURT. ME.
You can't bruise me. You can't make me bleed. You can't break my bones. You can't tear my tendons. Dropping me directly on my head isn't going to snap my neck like a twig, it's going to make my neck feel sore for a little bit and likely piss me off and make me go batshit nuts like those Japanese wrestlers do when you drop them on their heads. It just enrages their fighting spirit.
You simply cannot get the job done in a wrestling ring with your flabby little monkey arms. You can't get the job done with a chair, or some steel steps, or a motherfucking shotgun. YOU NEED SOME MAJOR MAGICAL MOJO TO BREAK THE SKIN OF A FORGEBLOODED, AND YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH ON THIS STUPID LITTLE BALL TO FIRE OFF A PROPER HEALING SPELL LET ALONE ENCHANT A MYSTIC BLADE ON FUCKING DEMAND!
You can't just go down to the wizard store in your local mall and say "I would like to purchase an enchanted hammer for the purposes of slaying one very mouthy blue dragoness, please." Because shitheels like you don't ever say please.
I don't care about winning titles, Priest. Because what's a shiny scrap of leather and gold mean to somebody who's got enough gold coins in her pockets to make Glenn Beck cream his jeans before he realizes that what I'm carrying could destabilize the precious metals market.
A title belt for me would be like a gold star sticker for a grade school student. It signifies that I did a good job, it's pretty and pleasing to look at, it sparkles, and I can stick out my forked tongue at people like you and go "I've got one and you don't, nyah nyah nyah nyah!"
But do you know what? There's so much more that I can do that with already.
I've got a functional brain and you don't, nyah nyah nyah nyah!
I've got a spiritual patron who can do shit and you don't, nyah nyah nyah nyah!
I've got a chance in hell of advancing beyond the second round in this tournament, nyah nyah nyah nyah!
Because not only are you going to go precisely nowhere with the usual lack of skill you've shown in lumbering around the ring, you're going to go into round 2 having had a beating inflicted upon you by your own gods-damned tag team partner because you can't possibly imagine that a seven foot tall blue dragoness with all of a handful of months of experience in this business is capable of not only beating you, but dominating and destroying you out there in that ring.
And do you know what? I hope to your ineffectual gods that we get paired up again in Round 2, just so I get the satisfaction of not only messing you up yet AGAIN, but offsetting the one single win you'll ever have in this federation because you just so happened to be the albatross around my neck in a particular tag team match.
You get to break your perfect losing record, Priest. Because of me. Because I want to fight. Because I want to go on to kick the pampered, arrogant, manicured asses of all the primped and proper prissy little prima donnas that think they're professional wrestlers.
I want to stick more needles of reality into the heads of the delusional sons and daughters of bitches that think they're the gods' gift to professional wrestling and that their peers ought to worship the gods damned ground they walk on.
Reason, politeness, and intelligence don't seem to be working.
So what I'm going to do is serve up a big ol heaping helping of Thanksgiving week violence on each and every sorry soul with the misfortune to be paired against me. Or in your case, Priesty-poos, paired alongside me.
I don't care about the anguish of Jason King and his wife's mysterious medical condition: spoilers it's an inoperable tumor festering on her anus brought about by rampant cocaine addiction.
I don't give a damn about Willow Wilkes, who is a horrible exhibitionist and in insistent on us viewing her meat curtains. Did you see that doctored up scene of her being all creative? Legs spread to all fucking hell, as wide as possible, so as to give optimal aeration to her massive meat curtains.
I don't care about the Black Donnellys and their never-ending quest to capture a certain cereal mascot to acquire a never ending supply of sugary deliciousness. AND NO, IT'S LUCKY THE FUCKING LUCKY CHARMS LEPRECHAUN! BECAUSE THAT'S RACIST AS FUCK AND YOU OUGHT TO BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES FOR EVEN THINKING IT! They're plotting to kidnap Wendell the Baker and discover exactly WHY kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch. SPOILERS: IT'S BECAUSE THEY'RE CRACK MIXED IN WITH THE CINNAMON SPARKLES!
I don't give a damn about Cam-Cam the Cabbage Patch Man and his eternal struggle to put down the gnomes that sneak in and make his hair look like delicious curly fries every so often.
I don't give a damn about Silencer and his eternal struggle against overcoming both the social stigma of chasing after older women and putting down the mnooses that sneak in and make his eyebrows look like burnt curly fries every so often.
I don't give a damn about Serenity, because I have access to several seasons archived in untold video formats, preserved perfectly as media from a bygone age from a world where Fox didn't treat their shows like shit, and where their slogan of Fair and Balanced news was actually fair and balanced.
Yes, that's right, I've got eleven seasons of Firefly that you people will never see and because they're stuck in Spark's noggin and he can't inhabit any of your electrical devices, that is exactly where they're going to motherfucking STAY until we can get the issue solved. Which will accelerate the timetable for me getting home quite a bit if Spark can work his magic and access the sum total of human knowledge at the speed of light. Or… well… the speed of fucking Comcast if you people decide to shit all over net neutrality.
What I do give a damn about, Priesty-poos, is breaking through to you. To shatter the veil of ignorance. To punch through that thick-ass skull of yours and let the light of reality shine on in.
And failing that?
Well, I'll just settle for scuttling any hopes and dreams you may ever have about achieving ULW title gold. Not because I want it for myself, I can just go out and buy myself some gold star stickers on Amazon and get the same effect.
Damned near anything will shatter like fine china if you get it cold enough, Priest, if you get it brittle enough.
And nobody, Priest, nobody is capable of piling on the cold like I can.
I'll see you in the ring.
Kisses, Priesty-poos!
[Once again Kalinda calls her promo to a close, planting a kiss upon her hands, crossed in front of her lips. She blows a kiss in the form of a tide of icy fog directly at the camera.]
[Fade to white.]
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