So it looks like Operation: Hungry Hungry Hippos is not going to be a thing. Despite it being one of those most out there and interesting ideas in the history of professional wrestling
My guess is that Clay Colton isn't feeling up to snuff with his pachyderm gobbling skills and that after spending two weeks not bathing and apparently squatting in some shit-filled warren in the greater New Jersey area, Cameron MacNichol is liable to confuse the marbles for candy and stuff them into his mouth, choking and turning almost as blue as I am in the middle of the ring.
And y'all have to admit it's a good idea. Because I'm not stupid. He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it and all that. I've seen enough pro wrestling to read between the lines and see where this is going to end up.
Willow Wilkes isn't wrestling. Cindy Todd isn't wrestling. Mogui never fucking wrestles in the first place. New Eden's got the World Title back in their possession but they were made to look like fools after they got run off from Paranoia.
So the image the folks at home got to wrap up the show, the freshest thing in their minds coming out of Paranoia, was New Eden running like a bunch of scalded doges. So fear. Such terrify. Very frighten. Much coward. Wow.
And this match wasn't what was first booked, oh no. Originally I was supposed to face Little Miss Meat Curtains, Colton was supposed to get King, and Cameron was supposed to have a knock down drag-out, no holds barred match with his own personal hygiene. Well, no, actually he wasn't, but I don't remember what his match was, so I'm filling the gap with something funny.
ANYWAY! Something happened and the new champ Willow and the ex-champ Jason, aka El Hijo de Señor Cristal, got pulled from the show. First I get Colton dumped on me, then I get Cameron dumped on me, and then we all get lumped together and tossed into a random three way main event with zero rhyme, zero reason, and zero build.
As I mentioned last week, yet again the Shadow Cartel, the dark and dank organization of elder houses of professional wrestling and their deep pockets, bimbo factories, and the occasional demonologist, tried once again to take me out of professional wrestling and failed miserably.
My reputation has managed to survive an endless assault of the three eternally repeated lines that Angel Kash is capable of mouthing, having every match for a few months feature a Lenore Price-Mason run in, a shameless racist attempt to paint me as an uncontrollable beast who does horribly violent things unprovoked on undeserving peoples, and most recently an honest-to-goddess actual assassin coming after me and shooting a gun in my face in the middle of the ring.
And for the first time somebody's actually made a mark on me. Sure my face looks like someone's splashed a cup of bleach on one of Jason King's endless array of ULW provided Fruity Pebbles t-shirts crossed with a My Little Pony due to this fucking blonde streak, but that's more than anyone else has managed to accomplish in the year or so I've been an active competitor in professional wrestling.
The Shadow Cartel is backing New Eden, and they want to see me taken down. I've been wounded for the first time and they want to capitalize. Plus New Eden needs to do something to look good again after being driven away from juicy targets Jackson Adams and Jason King at Paranoia.
So what better place than here, and what better time then now? They don't have to wrestle. They can skip down to the ring tra la la fresh as motherfucking daisies twenty five minutes into a grueling three way main event, and with the in ring trio having long since tapped into their energy reserves, we're going to be comparatively easy prey.
Three fresh fighters against a trio that's been going for damned near half an hour. That's going to be a heinous mismatch of epic proportions. Cameron's going to go down, Clay's going to go down, and then it's going to be everybody pile on the dragon time, which is the only way New Eden's ever managed to get something done against me.
They're going to be armed, they're going to try and hang one of you guys with Cindy Todd's own personal auto-erotic asphyxiation device, because y'all can bleed and I can't, and they're going to storm the ring intent on putting the hurt on three of the most solid, reliable performers that ULW's got.
They get to stand tall, all happy and smiles, hoisting their weapons of mayhem and destruction into the air, pretending that they're all big and bad and dangerous because they can run out and butt into a match in progress and smack the competitors with weapons as they near the end of a grueling bout. As if it were something to be proud of. As if it meant something. As if it were nothing more that a cowardly sneak attack because that's how New Eden does things.
Through fear. Through violence. Through threats. Through intimidation.
I've said it before and I will say it again, gentlemen. The people that have the power in ULW hate our fucking guts. They have seen fit to make each of our lives a complete and utter misery when we come in to work. We all know that somebody has it in for us, be they named Mason, der Vaart, or an unknown plotting sinister plots from his deep, dark, dank dungeon of petulance.
Think about it for a second. I don't think Cameron and I have crossed paths before, ever. I think we tangled at the Tournament of Opportunity and that was it. We're not the sorts of people who grate upon each other and lead it huge, explosive, incendiary rivalries, so we've never had any real reason to face one another.
Of course Clay and I do have a reason to face one another. We're tied for second the the League of Superstars rankings. A win for one of us breaks that tie and sends one of us to tie for first with Jason King. That explains why he's here.
But what doesn't make sense is Cameron's presence in this match. It'd take him three wins in a row with Clay or I losing three in a row in order to hop up a rank on the LoS.
There are basically two reasons why he'd be in this match, the first being that he's the only other available ULW veteran on the show this week. From one to ten on the LoS it's us three, Mya Denton, and Brandon Vow. Literally half the field is missing. So rather than stick Cameron with some dude or dudette who's only been here a few months, he's tossed in with the other two ULW veterans just because.
The other option? While Cam Cam may not be the greatest guy in the world, compared to the fuckheads he's been pitted against, Cassandra Mason and Priest, he comes out smelling of roses in comparison. Well, not LITERALLY smelling of roses. Seriously guy, take a bath or two, or three. And while you're in their washing up, get Brandow Vow some Head and Shoulders or Pert Plus of something to fix that scruffy, dirty, greasy, gross looking beard and nasty ass dandruff.
Really, dude. Despite subscribing to the Skinner school of personal hygiene, you've got some L'oreal looking hair on you. Give Vow some fuckin' pointers on managing that pubic thatch he calls facial hair, for serious, okay?
ANYWAY! Because of the rest of everybody kind of being a bunch of asshats, Cameron is one of the top four guys the crowd can really rally behind. Not because he's such an awesome paragon of virtue, but because Raymond der Vaart just keeps signing the dregs of humanity to big time contracts.
Either way you look at it, we're three people that the administration does not't like. People that have been through some pretty fucked up situations in our time in ULW. But we haven't run off, we haven't quit, we haven't bawled our eyes out and demanded a release from our contracts over these setbacks. Let alone a few tweets on Twitter like SOME PEOPLE I could mention.
We're still here with the fans behind us, even if the management is not.
And that's why we're here, gentlemen. Because we're amongst the handful of people that are actually fuckin' tolerable in this place. We're what counts for heroes amongst this sea of shitty attitudes. The stinky guy, the egomaniac, and the pissy blue dragoness.
And that's exactly what they're counting on. For us to be more interested in scrambling over the others to reach just a few inches closer for the brass ring we know they're just going to yank out of our grasp anyway.
Literally the only drawn out promotion ULW's ever done for the World title is King and Wilkes. Even when it was King and Adams vying for it, the focus was on Willow being bitchy to both of 'em because Jason won a title tournament, and because Adams gave Willow her first loss EVARS or something ridiculous like that because a 90 pound woman stood on the apron and blasted her with an invisible death ray.
I got two title matches in the span of two weeks, one of which was dropped into my lap with zero notice, and the other one was half about the title and half about Jessica King's stolen medical records.
That's what we're SUPPOSED to be thinking about. About being the next wrestler to ride the World title gravy train pulled along by ULW's advertising juggernaut. We're supposed to all be looking ahead to our bright and shiny futures, our eyes blinded by the brilliance so that we don't see the great big shiny knife they're going to fucking stick in our backs.
Because honestly, after all the shit they've pulled with us, are we really going to believe that just because we've worked hard, just because we've been there busting our asses off each and every week out there, just because we've got the fans behind us, that they're going to treat us any better just because we top the League of Superstars or win the tournament?
This isn't for our benefit, gentlemen.
We're not wrestling to put a decisive check in our boxes for the LoS rankings.
We're here to be targets. We're here to be assaulted. We're here to be fed to New Eden, chewed up, and spit out.
Because that's how ULW works. That's how ULW has always worked. It's why der Vaart keeps cozying up to the people with the worst kinds of personality defects that are humanly possible. We've had I don't know how many people with multiple personalities, various aspects of darkness, someone who claims they talk to God, a paranoid schizophrenic witch who thinks TEH BLAH PEOPLES are coming after her guns and looking to corrupt her precious bodily fluids, an endless parade of demonically possessed chucklefucks, egomaniacs, narcissists, evil mimes, and MOTHERFUCKING ANGEL KASH.
ULW isn't here to be happy family entertainment. It's here to be a festering pustule full of hatred and misery right on the asshole of the pro wrestling world. It's always been that way. ULW is where hopes and dreams come to die and get chopped up into a fine salad and topped with the endless array of dead baby croutons.
ULW thrives on hate, it thrives on sorrow, it thrives on angst, and it thrives on misery. All you have to do is look at me at the start of ULW and then look at me now. I didn't USED to be this angry, foul-mouthed bitter misanthrope. I used to be a rather pleasant, happy, bouncy, buoyant well-adjusted dragoness who came into work with a smile on her face and a song in her heart. Well, I still have a song in my heart, but I'm pretty sure that at this point it's been reduced to endless repeats of Dope's "Die, Motherfucker, Die."
We need to stand together, each and every one of us. The few people in ULW who aren't just walking piles of cliches and personality disorders. The people who are actually capable of rational thoughts and acting like legitimate fucking human beings, alright?
Because ULW has shown that it has no problem fucking with us on an individual basis. But if we band together, if we unite as a singular force we are more than capable of standing up to anything and everything ULW, New Eden, Silas World, Masoncorp, or the Shadow Cartel can fucking throw at us.
All we have to do is let a bit of air out of our egos, put on our big boy pants, and work together towards the goal of making this federation a better place for everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say. We need to not try and scramble over one another trying to snag each and every little bit of individual glory that we can grab with our hot little hands.
Jason King and I set our egos aside and agreed to work together. To watch each other's backs. And for Jason King that's paid out in dividends. New Eden were looking to end his career and put Jackson Adams in the hospital if I hadn't intervened.
I've got somebody to watch my back, a couple somebodies, actually.
New Eden's going to be coming after us, gentlemen. Every sign points to it. Or Dante interfering in yet another main event because that's damned near all her ever fucking does. Or both.
They'll take everything that we work for in that match and steal it for themselves. To take the fans' enjoyment of our match and turn it into loathing and hatred for them. To turn the joy and awe of watching a grand match and turn it into something else. Something vile. To feed the bloated monster lurking in the heart and soul of this company.
Are you going to let them do that? Are you going to slap away my outstretched hand and offer of alliance just for a few tiny pieces of glory that are going to be ripped away from you by invaders a few minutes later?
I'm not going to give you an ultimatum. I'm not going to say that you can either stand beside me tonight or stand on your own until the end of time.
That's what New Eden would do. That's what der Vaart would do.
I want both of you to know that all you need to do is ask and I will be there for you. I will watch your backs. I will not let this company sacrifice you on the altar of Cindy Todd's delusions of motherfucking grandeur.
But you have to ask.
You have to suck it up, kick aside those stupid societal norms that say a manly man has to go it alone, that asking for help is a sign of weakness.
Because what good are a pair of great big balls, gents, if you can't feel anything below your neck because some black eyed bint's wrapped a fucking noose around your neck and hung you over the top rope.
Oh.
Oh dear.
I do believe that makes New Eden a lynch mob, doesn't it?
But oh no, there isn't anything racial going on here. Nope! Nosiree!
Just another big fat turd to add onto the pile of ULW bullshit.
And they're going to keep coming, Clay, Cameron.
I'm offering a hand to pull you up onto the boat. But it's your choice if you want to sail in a direction that isn't exactly the one you want to go, or swim off in search of Treasure Island in the sea of shit that just wants to drag you down into its filthy deeps and keep you from ever reaching the surface again.
That's what ULW is, that's what it does.
It corrupts people.
It breaks people.
So I'm going to ask you one more time.
Clay Colton.
Cameron MacNichol.
Do you want to become broken?
Or do you want to be the ones doing the breaking?
I've made my choice.
Now it's time for you to make yours.
Two and a half months ago…
I bite off the top of a water bottle, not even bothering to open it. I simply shear off the top with a quick chomp and rip, wash it down with a gulp or two from the bottle, and then spike the rest onto the floor, making a rather large puddle.
I am not in a particularly good mood. I have not been in a particularly good mode for quite awhile. My co-workers have decided to make my time in ULW a chore, and have ground down my once happy and chipper attitude to something angry and hateful.
And right now all my hate is centered around a robot pretending to be a human named Angel Kash. All she does is repeat the same empty, soulless, uncreative insults against me time and time again. She refuses to wrestle her own matches, refuses to compete in the ring, and shirks her duties in ULW to fuck around in a smaller federation where the competition isn't anywhere near as stiff.
She calls me ugly, hideous, horrible to behold. It's not even remotely true, but it pisses me off. It infuriates me that a woman who has basically had every bit of herself nipped, tucked, trimmed, sucked, siphon, shaped, botoxed, rebuilt, filed down, or replaced with implants can call anyone's looks into question.
We don't all have millions of dollars to throw in the lap of the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills.
But her words get me thinking about the possibilities, of what I could do to her that would hurt her. Because tacking on yet another loss on her record won't phase her, and her masters in the Shadow Cartel won't let me give her the complete and utter annihilation she deserves. The last time I tried they sicked another one of their dogs on me before I could tear Angel's hateful tongue from her head.
They won't let me inflict dire violence upon her, but I think I can do something even worse. I don't have to get hold of her in order to ruin her cherished good looks. I have at my disposal something that will take a goodly portion of the features she loathes in me, and transfer them to just about any other sort of sentient humanoid, of which I'm pretty sure Angel counts as only on a technicality.
But the project isn't entirely about Angel, it's actually centered on someone else, for much purer reasons.
Her name is Claudia, and she's spent the last two months as a disembodied spirit. Not a ghost, a spirit, since her body is still alive. Barely.
She just so happened to be an innocent bystander when the Shadow Cartel's dislike of me managed to get out to this world's supernatural community (THE SUPERNATURAL COMMUNITY?!) that certain persons (and demons) in positions of power would like me taken out.
I managed to almost effortlessly take out the gang of possessed corpses sent after me, but Claudia had decided to confront me about her own little personal problem around the same time.
She was also sent by the Shadow Cartel to come after me, a psychologist or psychiatrist or psychopath or something to test my mental fitness to compete. After all, everyone knows dragons aren't real. Even if they see a seven foot tall blue one in person that can breathe fire and teleports on international television at least once a week. I got pissed at her for calling me fake and showed her just how unfortunately real me and all my magic could be.
We went on a merry hop across the globe. I took her from the nice, normal gym in New York to several feet beneath the Arctic Ocean, to the coldest place on Earth in Antarctica; a place where no humans had ever set foot before.
I patiently explained that if I were delusional that she had absolutely nothing to worry about, but if I were in fact exactly what I said I was, she was going to freeze to death most unpleasantly. It scarcely took any time at all before she screamed her belief, shortly thereafter followed by threats.
I did not take kindly to her tone, so I used a little trinket from home on her. Memory Ripper. It isn't anywhere near as much of a weapon as it appears, because it's good for all of one shot. Then it has to charge up again for a year and a day. But what a shot it is.
It rips whatever it hits from the memory of the universe. It is as if they never were. Her husband and children didn't recognize her, her rather prestigious wrestling family thinks she's some psychotic loon, not even Raymond der Vaart who sent her to evaluate my mental state had even the slightest speck of remembrance for the woman who was once Claudia O'Rourke, maiden name no longer of any importance.
She vanished from their minds, their hearts, and their souls. Vanished from all images, video, and audio that had ever existed of her. The only remembrance of her existence belonging to those who were within the area when she was struck with my dire blade.
Meaning me, Spark, my cameraman/biography Mr. Hush, and the film contained within Mr. Hush's enchanted Cameraviathan.
Compounding her misery was getting blasted with a demonic fungus, and I don't mean Cameron MacNichol's athlete's foot. It's called Abyssal Rot, and I'm pretty sure it's where pop culture got the idea of your classic zombies from.
It consumes everything, flesh, bone, wood, metal, drywall. It will eat just about anything. But it doesn't destroy it. No, it leaves it just barely functional, at a fraction of its original strength. Thankfully it's a pain in the ass to cultivate and get to spread. But once it does, it's a hellishly effective weapon.
You go from a healthy person to a desiccated husk, unable to do much more than slowly shamble, to clumsily reach out with fingers twisted into claws by an almost utter lack of muscle and skin that's turned to leather.
You walk in absolute agony as your skin rips and tears from being too tight, exposing raw muscle and nerve to the ravages of the world. You slowly bleed thick, black sludge, your wounds become infected and they start to rot.
But you don't die, oh no. Abyssal Rot keeps you alive, keeps you functional, keeps you just on the very edge of death, each moment of your existence filled with incredible, unbearable pain. And there's no cure. Just treatment.
That is if you consider someone putting you out of your misery a treatment. Your only other option is to take on a demonic passenger, play host to the kind of sick fiendish fuck that turned you into a shuffling, groaning corpse in the first place.
Of course that's because this world is stuck up it's own ass and has the spellcasting capability of a box of rocks. But me? I don't have that limitation. I'm a dragon, I'm basically a walking wellspring of magic fueled by my own ley line running right through the Draconis Fundamentum, nestled between my lungs and stomach.
My own spellcasting is complete and utter suck, though. I can breathe cold fire whose sheer negative temperatures cause near immediate frostbite and I can also link bits of water together which allows for teleportation. But fling a magic missile, turn yourself invisible, turn an obnoxious door to door salvation salesmen into a frog? Forget it.
I'm pretty good at ritual magic, though. It's basically hacking the source code of the universe in order to achieve a goal. And in order to fix Dr. Claw's little mushroom issue, I'm going to be pulling off the biggest ritual I've ever attempted. Of course I haven't quite done it alone. The voices in my head have been guiding me the whole way.
Eleanor Rigby, the multi-headed dragon goddess who consumed her own species for knowledge and power and like the Beatles song says, died in a church and was buried along with her name.
The Hand of Arimus, a dark necromantic artifact of immense power, crafted by my worlds god of death. The stupid thing is basically grafted to my left arm and is the whole reason I'm here in this backwater world in the first place.
I stumbled across both of them through complete and utter accident, saying a wide open prayer to any god that could answer me when I got into trouble in Eleanor's temple and biting off the arm of the previous holder of the Hand of Arimus. Since she was a vampire and thus dead to begin with, having hold of the gauntlet made me its next owner.
Oops.
Neither of them are particularly nice, pleasant individuals. They both have their own plots and plans in mind, as well as agendas for me that I have no interest in carrying out. They both involve cackling mad supervillainy and while I'm positive I couldn't do any worse running Earth than its current world leaders, I don't want to have to deal with all the paperwork that comes with it.
All my healing magic is of the necromantic variety, draining life force from one target and putting it into another. But all that does is give the Abyssal Rot more stuff to nom. It'd make Claudia functional for a day or two before she rapidly goes back to being a snarling zombie again.
I've got nothing for curing diseases. Got a fuckton of stuff that causes them, which is of exactly zero use. Unfortunately no magical plagues that feast off of other magical plagues.
Got some stuff that allows manipulation and control of demons and their summoning. Theoretically I could try and pull the Rot out of her. But that'd be a ritual for each and every little speck, so that's not feasible.
In the end it was the Manyfold Matriarch that came up with the possibility; the dragonspawn ritual. Originally meant for a great dragon to impart loyalty and power to lesser creatures to create a loyal army of thralls enhanced with draconic power, the surge of elemental energy would completely burn out the Rot, assure Claudia was immune to reinfection, and the draconic transformation would restore her withered body.
Not that she was in much of a hurry to hop back in the thing. I'd used one of the Hand's necromantic spells to yank her soul from her body, making her function as a still-living ghost for the most part.
She's taken the whole thing rather well. It turns out that it's rather difficult to sustain a goodly portion of negative human emotions when you're not hooked up to your glands throwing all sorts of hormones into your bloodstream.
So as a result she's gone from being a spiky, unpleasant, egomaniacal, self-centered asshole to a relatively pleasant and friendly person. Unfortunately I think putting my co-workers into apparent comas to give them a reprieve from their glandular issues would be something my boss, Raymond der Vaart, would severely frown upon. He's accusing me of being a horrible violent, murderous beastie that belongs in a zoo. I don't need to give him any more fuel for that fire.
The Hand of Arimus does almost entirely all of the casting work. It knows the spells, it knows the motions to make, and it knows all sorts of nasty ways to use them. For the most part I ignore the damn thing, as if I started listening to the stupid skull and abusing its power I'd be well on my way to cackling wizard-hood in no time. I'd start saying things like "This cannot be, I am INVINCIBLE!" or "Soon I shall have ULTIMATE POWER!" or "This world and all life within it shall belong to ME!"
All the ritual needed to complete was to fill up the ritual decanter with blood, give it a jolt of magic, and throw back my head and howl with maniacal laughter and scream "They all laughed at me! The thought me mad, MAD! But I shall show them! I'LL SHOW THEM ALL!"
Of course in this case the decanter is a big ol bajillion gallon vat that I'm pretty used to be used in the chocolate making process. I scrubbed the damned thing seven or eight times and I swear I can still smell Whoppers around it. There's no way I can actually fill the thing up with my own blood by opening a vein. That's where the first bit of spellcasting of the evening comes in.
I've referred to the Hand in the past as Dracula's soda fountain, and that's basically the case. It can reproduce in pretty hefty quantities the blood of any creature that it has previously tasted, typically by being slashed with the taloned fingertips of the gauntlet. Thus allowing a vampire an unlimited source of blood to feed herself and her minions.
Filling up the thing with the mixed blood from myself and a few other sorts of dragons (because if I'm going to have a minion, dammit, I'm going to optimize draconic diversity and cover more bases than my weird water element) gives me a few ideas. I can probably fire a pressurized blast of blood as an offensive weapon. Potentially I can also re-enact the wave of blood elevator scene from the Shining on some poor, unsuspecting asshole.
I'm thinking der Vaart.
It takes a few minutes to fill, since I don't want to splatter blood everywhere. Just a little bit of a jolt and I'll have enough dragon juice to make myself an entire army of darkness. Of course I don't actually plan on making myself a draconic army, but it's always nice to have the option there, just in case.
Now all I need to do is trigger the ritual, call Claudia's shade back to her body and…
Oh bother.
"Uh, guys?" I say with a wince, "Am I supposed to have her drink it, inject it, pour it, or fuckin' dunk her in it."
The voices are silent.
That cannot be good.
(To be continued…)
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