I hate demons, they're just about the worst thing you can face as an adventurer. Other than the fucking Kender, kleptomaniacal little shits from another dimension, blending in with the native Gnomish population and making off with your shit while being all cutesy and naive and innocent about it.
But seriously, fuck demons. Demons are what you get when you take mortal souls, give 'em on a silver platter to a bunch of pissed off fallen angels, and when said souls develop Stockholm Syndrome. Well, that's how the first demons came about.
These days you're more likely to keel over dead and have your immortal soul snatched up by someone that was in your exact position a few hundred years ago. A vicious cycle of pure and utter evil.
Devils are predictable, devils adhere to rules and regulations, devils will stick to the letter of the law, they weren't made to be free thinkers, they're not creative.
Demons are the far worse between the two. Picture the worst, more painful, torturous thing possible that a living being can endure without dying. Now imagine that you're going to be getting the shit kicked out of you by a bunch of assholes every day for the rest of forever. I don't care if you're Gandhi or the public perception of Mother Teresa (who was a complete and total asscork who got off on other people's pain, by the by), after a few years of that you're either going to be a pliable husk with no will of your own, or a psychotic son of a bitch with a grudge against all of existence.
In order to stop the gangs from getting at you,. you basically have to form or join a gang of your own. you carve out territory, you fight other demons, you try and bring new lost souls under your thrall by sweetness or violence or whatever.
In time you rise in the ranks, in time you get resources, in time you have the power to do things that mortal men and women can only dream of. You can do whatever you want, including taking that horrible fucked up with you imagined a minute ago and make it a reality.
It's called Abyssal Rot, and it's literally a fungal infection from hell. It eats damn near everything. Where the spores hit, it begins to devour. It doesn't matter what it hits, flesh, rock, dirt, drywall, wood, whatever.
It sucks the life out of it, breaks down the substance. But it doesn't actually feed off of anything physical. It'll eat and eat and eat, but it'll never grow. It instead thrives on despair, anger, rage, hate, and all the deadly sins.
But it doesn't destroy what it consumes. It's got a kind of consciousness, a mind of its own. It'll break things down to the point just before they begin to massively decline in function. It's not going to bring down a building, but it's going to make the place a disgusting hellhole in which to live. It's not going to kill you, it's just going to make your life a living hell.
You've probably seen it in pictures on the internet. Places that just look wrong and make you recoil in horror even though you're not there and it's just lights on a screen. You may have felt it once or twice. It loves abandoned hospitals, sanitariums, asylums and shit. It thrives in the slums and where human beings get stuffed when they're no longer wanted by other human beings.
Thankfully the stuff is as tenacious as it is. It latches on to the first thing it comes into contact with and absolutely refuses to let go. If you want to weaponize it, you have to cultivate it very carefully and very patiently over a span of years.
Or you let it run its course in a living body being driven by somebody else.
It is not pretty what it does to a human being. Think undead. Think zombie. Think mummy. Think leathery, dehydrated, desiccated husk with bits falling off, with bones poking out, with skin sloughing off, but still alive. Still bleeding, still thinking, still moving around after being brought to the very edge of life and death but never being able to step over the line to the other side, to peace and relief from the agony of every single nerve ending feeling the pain of your rotten body.
It's perfect for the demons, since they can put everything back to normal, make it better than normal. Take you from zombified husk to being better than you were before, stronger, faster, tougher. But only so long as they're in there with you. The moment they hop out of the car it's back to shuffling, shambling, and muttering "brains." It's back to enduring unimaginable pain.
And even then you're going to die some day. The mortal body on its own does not have the capacity to sustain the soul forever. So eventually you're going to go drifting off into the afterlife and your life-long demon buddy (if you're lucky) or the horrible thing that hijacked your body and stuffed you in the trunk, well, there's no distractions and no obstacles keeping them out of the driver's seat.
Of course the moment they leave the body goes back to its putrid state, plus whatever the ravages of time ought to have had on it.
You give Abyssal Rot a good fifty years in a body bereft of its proper soul, but still kept functional, and what you have is basically spores and dust compacted into the general shape of a human being over brittle bones. It makes for an effective defense; your enemy damages your body, they get sick as all hell and you can either kill them at your leisure or get them to accept a demonic passenger in exchange for making the agony go away.
I've encountered it before, but I've never really had to worry about it. It's not a problem where I come from, where there's a bastion of divine power on every street corner that can banish the unholy sickness with a quick prayer to their god and a spurt of holy power in exchange for a few coins.
And while the Manyfold Matriarch seems infinity more active and able to influence the world than virtually all of this world's popular deities, having all of two followers doesn't really give her much of a capacity for gathering and storing divine energies. Especially when she blew her load letting her newest disciple deliver a strike of holy energy to defeat a demonic attack.
Claudia, whom I ripped out of the collective memory of the world, is taking the news and the explanation like a trooper. Not from me, I've been going through my collection of looted, pilfered, and gathered treasures for anything I might use to get rid of the Rot and save her from a life as a screaming, agonized husk of hate. The usual assortment of voices in my head are doing the heavy lifting of informing her about the miniature demonic mushrooms colonizing her material form.
I don't have anything on hand to deal with diseases and poisons. Never really needed it. My bloodline's link to Metsuki Tahari, the legendary smith, and its immunity to weapons extends to biological weapons as well. Which would put a complete and utter halt on any attempts to get drunk if my draconic digestive system and metabolism didn't already make that impossible.
Claudia's taking the news of her possibly agonized near-demise rather well because at the moment she's too busy freaking out about other things. For one I couldn't really do anything else, once the spores hit body fat she started screaming. She's got a rather annoying scream and some pretty damned good lung capacity. So I put her into a coma with the power of the Hand of Arimus.
That wouldn't be a problem, except that I kind of need her input on the few methods I have at my disposal that can actually cure her current condition. So in order to be awake and communicative and lucid and totally not scream-y, I also temporarily removed her soul from her body.
And the other problem is that literally all the things I can think of that will fix her also technically kill her.
"God, you've done enough. You've made the whole world forget about me, you've got me attacked by demons, you've got a slithery goddess-dragon-thing whispering inside my head, and now you've ripped me out of my body and are just matter-of-factly discussing my pending demise!"
I sigh, it's really hard to be polite when you're being shrieked at hysterically. "It's not DEAD dead, though. Totally dead and moving around. The Hand's got blood samples from dozens of different kinds of vampires, and since you're basically being desiccated by the Abyssal Rot anyway, it's no problem to just pour enough blood down your throat to turn you."
"I do not, however, have the capacity to empower you with the blood of those ridiculous sparkling vampires that seem to have infested the pop culture zeitgeist. They are utterly moronic, and my previous wielder made a decree that any such creature discovered to be infested with the inferior bloodline be annihilated utterly." says the Grim Reaper-esque shade hanging around with us, the physical manifestation of the Hand's innate intellect.
I think he's trying to make a joke to make Claudia feel better about accepting vampirehood. I do not think it's helping.
At all.
"I don't want to be a vampire! I don't want to be forced to drink human blood!"
"I've got at least one variety that feeds on spinal fluid, several that are plasmavores instead of haemovores, and I do believe that there's one that is sustained by ingesting fecal matter."
If Claudia weren't presently a pale, waxen, translucent shade of her normal self, I'm sure she'd be turning rather green at the prospect.
"I don't want to eat people. Or poop."
"The majority of strains do not require human products, obtaining sustenance from live animals is frequently a viable, though less tasty, option."
"No, just, no! No devouring living things!"
The shade seems to brighten.
"And presumably she means no killing things and then devouring them afterwards."
"Ugh, you're no fun. I haven't been able to experiment with cross breeding strains of cannibalistic undead in ages. I can even assure that you're not going to scorch your feet off becoming a Wendigo, nor while you positively reek like a Ghoul. Though these days that can be covered up with an application of Axe body spray of about quarter strength found on your typical pick up artist."
"No cannibalism!"
"Well you certainly don't have the magical capacity to assure reanimation with full mental faculties of the vast majority of Lich rituals."
"This would be so much easier if you didn't stubbornly insist on maintaining a fully intact and corporeal physical form. The varieties of incorporeal undead alone are staggering and they offer an incredible number of potential advantages."
"I don't want to die, dammit!"
"No one ever wants to, and yet they all end up doing so eventually."
And that, of course, sucks all the fun right out of the room.
"I may have a solution that satisfies all our requirements, my faithful." the Matriarch purrs. She's been quiet during the whole ordeal, though she's been looking quite pleased with herself the whole time. I think it's because she managed to actually influence something that wasn't me with her power for once.
"What is it?"
"Oh, you may not like it, but I think you will find it far superior to having to die so that you may live." she's smirking, that's never a good sign. Dragons in general, let alone cannibal dragon goddesses, are never to be trusted when they are smirking.
"It's a rather interesting ritual that requires an altar of power."
"We're not going to find one of those in this mage-dead backwater."
"You don't have to find one, my child, merely make one. It's not something objectionable at all, at least not for you. You have a tendency to take trophies from your prestigious kills anyway."
Claudia looks moderately grossed out.
"It's like hunting! People have animal heads and skulls and antlers and furs all over their walls."
"The ritual altar was moderately difficult to construct, as it required trophy skulls from ten different draconic species, and my world only had the ten. My counterpart and I eliminated the others, even though we disagreed on virtually everything else."
"So what's the ritual?"
And now she's smiling, that's even worse than smirking.
"Nothing too terribly dire, merely creating a potion that when ingested fuses the genetic material of the one who drinks it with that of the dragon that supplied the blood component for the potion."
"And the best part is that it's crafted in bulk. You get several barrels full from just enacting the ritual once! But the important part is that the transition to a more acceptable draconic form will not only full restore a living body to its full potential, but the transformation is to a state approximating a full dragon, complete with ley line. The raw elemental energies will overwhelm and destroy any Abyssal Rot spores attempting to consume the restored body."
"Eleanor," I've started calling the Matriarch Eleanor, after the Beatles' song "Eleanor Rigby," as she died in a church and was buried along with her name, "You're not making an army of me."
"Don't be ridiculous, child, your strange bloodline and stranger menagerie of powers are not something that lends itself to mass production. I'm sure our Thanatopic comrade has tasted the blood of many dragons that we could use for such a ritual."
Silence reigns.
"It means relating to dea..."
"I know what it means." I look to Claudia, "It's the best chance you've got at the moment. Even if I used one of my strongest healing potions, at best it'll just restore your body and then the Rot will start eating it again. They're for restoring damage, fixing wounds, that sort of thing. They'll fix corrupted flesh, turn tumors back into normal tissue, but they can't cure infections"
"So my choices are die, become some horrible undead monster, or be like you?"
"Probably not exactly like me. Physically I'm pretty low on the totem pole of draconic development. So you'll probably have horns and scales, maybe even wings."
She actually perks up a little.
"Do they work?"
"The wings? If the dragon type has them, then yeah. Eventually even the lowest dragonblood gets the wings of their draconic progenitor and their flight capacity. Though some kinds of dragons don't use their wings for flying. Bioelemental dragons tend to have great big stabby spikes on the "fingers" of their wings. They can't fly, but they can impale a semi truck, pick it up, and throw it."
Silence once again as Claudia contemplates her fate.
"There is one more option." the Hand offers cheerfully.
Claudia's eyes widen and fill with hope.
"Of course! You can simply live in crippling, mind-numbing agony, the Abyssal Rot sustaining you on the very edge of death for the remainder of your mortal lifetime until you perish of old age."
"Oh! Or you could invite a demon or devil to take residence inside you and restore your physical form. Of course being quite familiar with Eidolons of the Maledictine bent, I don't think you'd like that option."
"Because I'd stop being me and start being a monster."
"Exactly."
"So all the realistic… god, becoming a vampire, a demon's host, or a dragon as realistic options. They all involve me becoming some sort of monster."
"It doesn't HAVE to be a vampire. I think you would make for a rather excellent wraith, or a red jester."
"Still feeding off the living, and I think being permanently some sort of unliving, joy-devouring clown would be worse than being a vampire."
"Eww. No. No clowns. Clowns are scary."
"And demons and vampires aren't?"
"Not in the same way clowns are scary! No clowns!"
I give Claudia a few moments to think things over.
"So. dragondom?"
She bites her lip and nods.
"It's the least worst of all my options." she's not happy about it. But it beats being kicked out of your body, becoming a bloodsucking fiend, or sharing makeup tips with Silencer.
"So can I at least pick what kind of dragon I get to be?"
"I have tasted the blood of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dragons and dragonbloods over the span of my existence. If you have criteria that you desire from the creatures I can certainly give you options."
"Ok, first requirement: no bright colors. Kalinda looks as much like a poison dart frog as she does a dragon."
Well, she's starting to feel somewhat at ease with the whole situation if she can take the time to crack jokes at my expense. "You know I can just bury your body somewhere and you can hang around as a disembodied soul for the rest of forever."
"No need to be rude, child." the Matriarch chides, "Now, little one, I have several suggestions for..."
"No."
"But..."
"No. Let Claudia and the Hand get things worked out. You're damned near giggling with glee over the fact that you get yourself a second draconic worshipper as well as a way to make more, should we ever need them. I'd say you've gotten far more out of this than I'm comfortable with. I get the feeling you're plotting something."
"Always, child, I am always plotting."
"Yeah, that's why you're having no part in the selection of draconic species thing. Now about this skulls and this altar thing..."
(To be continued...)
I'm not sure what to think, I'm not sure what to say, I'm not sure what to believe.
Because what I have here are two sides of a coin that are both unpleasant, each option with a myriad of associated bits that piss me off for completely different reasons.
And this coin? It's not a coin, it's Willow Wilkes.
Because after the things that have been said after Ascendancy, there are basically two ways that you can view the Wilkes situation, and I don't know which one is worse. Neither of them are flattering, like at all.
On one hand we can believe that Willow is completely and utterly sincere when she thinks that forcing her to fight fair is a supreme injustice. That not catering to her every whim and desire, that in not letting everything go off according to her design is somehow exceptionally unfair.
In this case making the fight for the World Heavyweight Championship fair somehow makes it unfair. I took Adam out of the equation when he was shaping up to hippity hop his little black-eyed bunny butt into the cage and turn things into a two on one situation. Dante did his sneak out with the lights out slash supremely embarrassing teleport thing, and then Silencer did the same exact thing and kept Dante the fuck out of the match.
I get the feeling that there's a whole lot about Dante he doesn't want the world to see. Like his unspeakably dire teeth that are so terribly, horribly misaligned he has to wear the biggest piece of corrective headgear I've ever seen.
And unlike certain cerulean dragonesses I could mention, he can only teleport with the lights out. Does he not teleport in with his pants, and they arrive a few seconds later? Is he not using magical means and is instead using a teleportation capsule that due to the esoteric ways of time and space requires it to be shaped precisely like a giant cock and balls?
So this option means that Willow Wilkes is a spoiled, whiny, overly entitled bitch. A bitch that I might add seems COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY INCAPABLE of getting the job done on her own.
Magically the moment she has to fight somebody fair, without any interference, she can't win the match! She can't pin me, she can't pin Jason, she can't make Jackson Adams submit with the Meat Curtain Meat Grinder, but she can sure as hell send Dante scampering up a ladder to grab a belt on her behalf.
And not only is Willow a spoiled, entitled, bottle-fed bitch who is having her hand held by a bunch of demon-possessed, crook-toothed frankenhooker ASSHOLES, but she might be up there neck and neck vying with Taylor Chase-Cruze for the title of the Dumbest Woman in All of Professional Wrestling.
Because honestly, if you're going to throw that crap out there and think people are going to believe it then you have to have your head crammed so far up your own ass that you lost vision decades ago and are fumbling around like some kind of blind cave fish.
And the other option? The other option is that Willow Wilkes is literally Hitler. Well, not LITERALLY literally Hitler, though if she has to shave every morning to hide the Chaplin mustache and spends her time goose stepping everywhere because the wide stance makes it so that her over-large, over-sensitive, chronically be-sanded lady parts don't rub together when she walks it wouldn't surprise me.
No, what I mean is the methodology of her bullshit, the propaganda tactic known as the Big Lie. You say something so insane, so unbelievable, so purely batshit insane and out there that it HAS to be true. Because otherwise you look like a gods-damned moron saying it.
And it is, it's gods-damned ridiculous. Willow Wilkes is spitting mad that Jason King won the World title back from her in a way very similar to how she won it. Lights go off, dude appears, dude does one move, match ends.
Dante had to hold Sallow Sandcrotch's prwcious widdle hand and lead her up the ladder to the World Title after chokeslamming Jason King through a ring. Silencer kicked Dante into the cage door, wish mashed poor Willow's bloated, ego-swollen melon.
And you know what? It's not Jason King that she ought to be blaming for her loss. Well, actually we all know that she ought to be blaming herself for all her losses, but her ego will never EEEEEEVER let her do that. And it's not Silencer or me that she should blame either.
It's Dante.
I mean if she gets into a feral, hateful, throat-tearing rage over a 90 pound slip of a woman STANDING ON THE RING APRON, MY GOD SUCH A DIRE TRAVESTY. A big huge fella standing about outside the cage, positioned in a perfect place for a miniature Rube Goldberg machine to take place ought to make the blood vessel in her eyes spontaneously combust.
If Dante wasn't there to be kicked into the door things would've gone differently. Hell, if Dante hadn't magically appeared in his flying, teleporting Dongcraft Silencer might not have had to be driven out under the cover of darkness by Max teh Fayt in the Caleb Hart Mobile. Because teleporting vehicles are required to be shaped like a gentleman's sausage.
Gee, Willow, if only you and your ever-growing team of dungeon fucks had decided to play fair you might actually have kept the world title! It's so cute, really! You're like Dick Dastardly, (would that make Adam Muttley?) who might've won the race had he not stopped to cheat.
And already we're headed right back to the massive, disgusting stable bloat that turned IWC into a complete and total shithole. New Eden not getting their way? Not winning enough matches? Not meeting the quota of der Vaart tonguing your buttholes? Why bring in more people, of course.
Oh no, you can't possibly win matches the normal way. You can't possibly wrestle like real people, oh no. You seem to be pathologically incapable of wrestling your own gods-damned matches, Willow.
And I can guess why.
Here you are, all big and bad, the protege of some big bad scary lady who makes lesser wrestlers wet themselves. You've got a big heap of crazy, you've got the tragic past, the lesbian relationship for the ratings, you've got the wrestling pedigree of Cindy Todd…
And you lose to fucking Jackson Adams. You lose to the Doctor of Drugged Up Pizza himself.
And then you can't get over the hump of Jason King, some random MMA nobody tag team wrestler that shouldn't be anything, and yet he beats you.
Then the kicker, a big cotton candy blue beast from another world who hasn't even been wrestling for a year pins your ass in the middle of the ring. One, two, three. You know it. I know it. The whole world saw me pin your weepy ass. The whole world saw that even with someone helping you out you couldn't come close to taking me down.
Is that why you ran away, Willow? Is that why you tried to crawl over the crowd barricade like a coward in our match, hmm? Running away from someone that you KNEW you couldn't beat on your own?
Because you didn't. You haven't. And you had the opportunity. But there you were, so smashed out of your gourd that you couldn't even climb a ladder on your own. You've had to be carried every step of the way by Dante, by New Eden, by Raymond der Vaart.
Left on your own two feet, Willow, you crumble like the wet tissue that you begin to sob into with only the slightest provocation. You're like a fucking child, Willow, and one only needs to look at the ever-growing pile of dead babies to know that ULW is no place for children, physically, mentally, or emotionally.
Bring New Eden, Willow. Bring Adam, bring Dante, bring Cindy Lou Who, bring your blow up doll, bring your personal trainer, bring the guy that you buy coffee from in the mornings. Because the moment I get my hands on you, the moment I get you all to myself without any bullshit, the moment I get you alone with no one to come to your aid, no one to back you up, no one to hold your hand…
Willow…
I'm going to fucking tear you apart.
And do you know what? I think you know that this is what you need.
You need to be torn apart, Willow. You need to be battered, you need to be broken. Because there's something wrong with you.
You're put together wrong, Willow, put together wrong in the head.
And we all can see it, and we all laugh about it. About the way you cry, about the way you whine, about how when things didn't go your way you went sobbing to Mommy Cindy to make things all better.
I am going to take everything that you rely on Willow, and I am going to destroy it right in front of your very eyes. Everyone that you need to win matches, everyone that fills your head with soft, comforting lies.
I'm going to destroy New Eden just like I'm going to destroy Silas World.
The carnage began two weeks ago at Ascendancy, and I am not going to stop until I rip the diseased growth of the Shadow Cartel out of ULW for good.
And that's nothing new for you, is it Willow?
It's always what happens with you. You just can't help it.
Even though you rely on New Eden, even though you crave their attentions, their acceptance, you know you're going to turn on them some day. Or that some day they're going to turn on you.
Every relationship you've ever had has turned to bitter ashes in time, Willow.
And it's just a matter of time before it happens again.
And I'm going to be there. I'm going to do everything in my power to make it happen.
Once I cut a wide enough swath of destruction through the world of professional wrestling, a trail of broken bodies, broken minds, and broken hearts, maybe you people will finally get it. Maybe you people will finally leave me in peace.
You wouldn't let me be happy, Willow.
You and the powers that have you acting on their behalf.
And I'm not going to stop, Willow.
I'm not going to stop until each and every one of you has drowned in your own tears and choked to death on your own blood.
Your own cold blood.
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