And then when you complete the unpleasant task of battling nearly a dozen creatures that are like NFL lineman with an extra two or three feet of height and two hundred pounds of blubber packed on, you've got to remove the buttocks from the corpses, which is a stinky, unpleasant task as ogres are culturally opposed to bathing. Much like Rayne Young they don't think that scrubbing under the folds is gangsta, yo.
With all that unpleasant business behind you, you haul in your burlap sack of severed buttocks, plop it at the guy's feet, and get rewarded with whatever coinage he found in the couch cushions and some article of clothing or weaponry from the back of his basement closet.
Hard work for shit pay is fine when you're fighting magical beasts, since they have a tendency to drop shiny magic rocks and be filled with expensive alchemical ingredients used in everything from healing potions, to floor cleaner, to unnatural male enhancement.
It's also fine when fighting humanoids, because you can supplement your income by taking their stuff, hosing it off, and either using it yourself or selling it to someone with the retail space to throw it out there on the sales floor until it sells for a decent price.
But things seldom stay that simple. There's always a wrench thrown into the gears, as somewhere along the line you're going to have to start dealing with politics. Before you know it you find yourself stuck between a cackling madman out to end the world and a moron in bright shiny armor crusading on behalf of the light and seeking to purge the world of all monsterkind.
I like monsters. Monsters are cool. Most of my friends would be classed as monsters rather than men. I can't tell you how many times I've derailed a classic battle of good versus evil because some asshat of a paladin's attempted to smite my pet dragon-cat, or attempted to slay my familiar due to his dabbling in bewitching sorceries.
Well, technically it's a lot more than dabbling.
But anyway I usually end up killing some special needs hero (and taking their stuff) and then having to put some mustache-twirling douchecanoe in the ground because he's offering up virgins to dragons and staging sacrifices to dark gods at the witching hour, and that really brings down property values.
Especially when your nextdoor neighbor is an ancient dragoness that can be measured nose to tail in city blocks.
They're usually staked up in the middle of my lawn, and those divots don't fill themselves back in.
She doesn't actually eat the offered virgins, usually she brings them in for tea and biscuits and then introduces the lovely lad or lass to one of her grandchildren. It's actually relatively easy, magically speaking, to rejigger somebody's plumbing so that they'll give you full blooded dragon babies if they've never properly done the dirty deed before.
And here I was, just before the witching hour, setting up to take on a…
"Spark, what's the collective noun for demons?"
"A legion. Unless they're succubi, then it's an opulence."
"Thanks."
Setting up to take on a legion of demons intent on making a blood sacrifice with nothing more than my bare hands and my as of yet untested in proper combat hench-creature Claudia. I wasn't expecting too much trouble, as the lack of ambient magic on this crummy world meant that things didn't grow too terribly powerful here.
Where I was classed as jack of all stats type solidly in the middle of the pack power wise, here I was more of a lightning bruiser that pound for pound might be the most magical thing on the planet.
The only other thing I'd seen that came close was a Frankenstein's Monsters of supernatural souls that had been literally forged like an iron billet into a blade, layered, hammered, and then layered again.
I'd briefly allowed it to possess me to suck up the Flame elemental power that I'd soaked up after having been set on fire, and we hadn't meshed very well. We pretty much had drawn a line down the middle of my mind and stayed on our own particular sides.
I didn't want to get my soul sucked out and devoured by a demon-devil-angel-monster-thing, and it didn't want anything to do with the weakened deity that had pretty much already claimed said soul as her own property.
Said goddess also had a hobby of devouring souls and making them a part of herself. I'm surprised they didn't spend the entire time I was wearing the gauntlet comparing their favorite flavor of souls and how to keep the suffering and misery just right to make them nice, juicy, and flavorful.
To be honest it felt on par with the Hand of Arimus, the OTHER destructive spirit inhabiting an armored glove that was a part of my life. I'd have to start keeping watch for enchanted, possessed footwear so that I could have a whole set.
But both wicked, magical gauntlets and the powers within also seemed to be doing their best to keep the true extent of their powers revealed, so I had no idea the proper power level of either one. But both of them being wielded by me? At full power I'd peg the combination as "Potentially apocalyptic, could probably obliterate an entire state, or a smallish country."
Given the choice I'd probably go for Texas, or to the horror of the entire South, put Mississippi out of it's misery. Without the four-eyed abomination bottoming out the list of basically everything important several states would find themselves in the uncomfortable position of being dead last. Like unemployment, poverty, education, and life expectancy.
Honestly, I could probably raise an army of the undead, conquer the place, instill myself as Evil Overlord, Potentate Supreme, and Dictator for Life and no one would so much bat an eyebrow.
Well, at least until Lich King Dick Cheney caught wind of someone horning in on his schtick.
I'd spent about an hour scouting out the demonic hideout, which was of course a spooky abandoned former mental hospital smack in the middle of a tangle of long neglected greenery.
There was even a cemetery nearby filled with the remains of former patients, as well as an uncomfortably large amount of unmarked graves. I knew this because the Hand was reminding me the whole while that I had the means to make a massive mess of minions at hand, and all I had to do was call upon the dark power contained within and blah blah blah and so on and so forth, wouldn't it make Spark just so happy to be able to get in an Altered Beast reference and say "wise fwom youw gwave."
The evil artefact was right about that. Whenever I reanimated a corpse back home, Spark would delightedly belt out that tired old chestnut, or quote a Frankenstein movie, or sing that goddess-forsaken Dr. Reanimator earworm.
But no, I didn't need an entire undead horde to fight a handful of demons. Hell, I didn't even need Claudia to help out with this, but without anything to beat the crap out of, maul, or devour she was getting pretty antsy and a little exercise would do her good.
"So, how many do we have in there?" I asked nobody in particular.
"About two dozen rotters, thirteen dead eyes, three drivers, a corpsetaker, and a knight." reported Claudia from behind me. I'd felt her stifling a case of the giggles over our spiritual connection, and the most frequent cause of that was having snuck up on me without my noticing.
It was slightly more demons than I'd be expecting, but not too many.
Rotters were pretty much zombies, held forever on the brink of life and death by a hell-spawned fungus called Abyssal Rot. It didn't take long before a hunger that couldn't be sated and the combined agony of having your skin slough off and your tissues turn into beef jerky drove you insane.
Dead eyes were demonic possessions who had passed away while under the thrall of a demon. The soul had left the body and a demon was in control. The moment you removed the demon, the forces sustaining the form vanished, and you were left with a corpse in a state of decay that matched the death of the original host. They were incapable of maintaining a full disguise, their eyes were always inhuman and had to be hidden through mundane means. So the next time you see some sunglasses at night wearing asshole, or some fucker in creepy contacts, you might be looking at one of these fuckers.
Drivers were willing conspirators who had willingly signed themselves over to the forces of Hell. With a living body to work with, the supernatural augmentations of a possessing demon made for a terrifyingly powerful and quick foe.
That is if you were a normal mortal being. I don't have that problem.
A corpsetaker didn't need a living soul to provide a bridge to enter a body. They were supreme pains in the ass to put down since destroying their worldly vessel didn't send them back to the lake of fire like lesser demons.
They also tended to harbor nasty surprises by leaving boobytraps for when they were forced to vacate a body. I'd seen a belly full of poisonous gas, a rigged hand grenade, and a carefully cultivated crop of Abyssal Rot.
That last one was how I'd managed to pick up Claudia as a minion. Empowering her with the sheer elemental force that comes with being a dragonblood was pretty much the only means at my disposal I had for getting rid of the damned hell fungus.
Well, that and making her a member of the living dead. But she wasn't a fan of that.
And a knight? Knights were really scary. Demons of such power that they didn't need a worldly vessel. They could manifest themselves directly into the world. They tended towards having one form that resembled who they'd been in life, warped by their own self image, and the monstrous form they'd have had to adopt to be able to survive in Hell.
Hell is precisely as hellish as one can imagine. It's a place of wild, untamed elemental power, constantly changing. The nice solid ground beneath your feet could turn into a burning pond of pitch at any moment, or the air around you could suddenly decide it needed to be a massive chunk of granite.
There were island of stability, but they tended to be few and far between. They also tended to be populated by fallen angels who had been cast down and the damned souls that they'd taken to using to vent their frustrations, who in turn went on to take out their frustrations on the newcomers.
In Hell mind, body, and soul were one. You were only as powerful as you could imagine yourself being, and could only maintain such a thing through sheer force of will.
Eventually a damned soul learned how to alter itself to survive the elemental onslaught, but not after being murdered by the elements hundreds or thousands of times. Each momentary "death" stripping away a little bit of their humanity.
At least that's the way things worked back home. Hell could be a French restaraunt with the slowest, shittiest service imaginable around here.
Either way a demon would leap at any chance it got to get out of Hell.
"Presuming the usual thirteen victims locked up in there somewhere?" I asked, and Claudia gave me a nod in response. I'd gone over the numbers with my minion about how well draining humans dry of their life force worked for raw spell power awhile back; it wasn't very efficient.
But it WAS good for personal empowerment. Your typical human being has 1 Mal worth of energy in 'em that's being used to make everything work, you know have 'em walking around, talking, thinking, that sort of thing. That's pretty much what you can take from somebody on a regular basis without really damaging them.
But if you sucked all the life out of somebody, they'd give you 10 Mals worth of power. An Eidolon, a creature of spirit like say a demon (or a dragon), can graft that stolen life force onto their own.
Crappy demons, like the dead eyes, had a normal operating strength of about 3 Mals, with a capacity of 30. It doesn't translate directly to being, say, three times stronger or faster than a normal human being, but a 3 Mal demon would be on par with a pretty good athlete. At around 5 they'd be on par with professional athletes, and at 10 would be about the peak of human perfection.
But they add that to what their borrowed bodies already had, so you could easily have a situation where a six year old with a decently strong demon could break Olympic records in pretty much everything.
The better the ritual, the more life force gets preserved, but even with a dozen amateurish rituals under their belts, a dead eye could level himself up from 3 Mals to 10, gaining new powers and abilities all the while.
With a Knight supervising things, who can actually be fully present on both the ethereal and material planes at the same time, the thirteen newbies could make the jump with just one kill.
And worse.
A properly done ritual can taint the soul of the sacrificial victim. Put enough stink of the abyss on 'em that no angel will dare let 'em past the pearly gates.
On the bright side the ritual sends them to one of the stable spaces in hell, saving them from centuries of agony from the chaotic environment.
Unfortunately they get dumped right into the slave pens of whatever demonic faction conducted the ritual, earning them servants in Hell that can easily be molded and shaped into whatever they desire.
A decent soulshaper can have you sporting horns, hooves, fangs, wings, and tail in about the same amount of time it takes for a tattoo artist of comparable skill to do a bicep-sized tribal tat.
And because mind, body, and soul are the same thing down there altering the body also makes drastic changes in the other two. In less than a day you can go from a terrified victim of human sacrifice to an eagerly fucking and sucking succubus.
And you'll enjoy it.
"You're grinding your teeth in that way you do when you're exceptionally pissed off and want to sink 'em into somebody, boss lady." Claudia pointed out.
I nodded, "Let's go slaughter some demons, oh devoted servant of mine."
Whoop dee shit. New Eden and the Sinistry are one big, happy family again, able to get the big group discount while LARPing in Denny's and being able to really buy in bulk on eyeliner, leather, and latex.
Does this change anything for me?
Nope. Not in the least.
All this has done is confirm some longstanding suspicions that I've had, and that the entire faction is full of shit.
"Oh no! Dante is merely a rogue agent! The fact that he just so happens to interfere on our behalf for SIX FUCKING MONTHS IN A ROW is merest happenstance! We're not aligned in the slightest."
Well now that Sinistry and New Eden are one great big gimp masked, sadomasochistic family that pretty much puts THAT old lie to rest.
All it does is move two groups of targets that I had before closer together.
And now that Silas Mason's slithered out from under a rock and is re-igniting the Silas World/Sinistry cancer that turned the IWC into a reeking shitheap, that pretty much means that if I'm really, really lucky I can get pretty much 70-80 percent of everybody that I've personally interacted with that I believe is a pox on the professional wrestling industry in the same immediate vicinity at the same time.
Which means that given five minutes and a container full of weapons that I can basically take out all the frustrations I've ever had in this sport out on the people who have caused them at once.
Oh not the people that carried out the dastardly deeds, of course not. But I'm not stupid, I know who's been pulling the strings. If I bludgeon Ba'al, Cindy Todd, and Silas Mason's heads into chunk grey and red salsa, the world will be a much improved place, and the Shadow Cartel, at least so far as it pertains to me, ends.
I've brought them up before, I'll bring them up again. Loose alliance of professional wrestling families, despises anybody that comes into the scene outside their control, conspires to keep as much control as possible inside their little clique, even though they don't quite agree on the exact balance of power.
Isn't it amazing how the moment any two of Ba'al, Cindy Todd, and Silas Mason show up somewhere, that it immediately turns into a repulsive shitshow, isn't it? The way IWC was made to line up in two camps supporting either Ba'al or Taylor Chase, or being told to fuck off.
The way the moment I started to come after Willow Wilkes' pwecious widdle feewings and the World Title I got Silas Mason's sister-cousin-wife Lenore dropped in my fucking lap.
And on the night where Silas decides to haul out Aiken's ex to play the big conquering hero to oppose the Sinistry, guess who gets locked in the arena basement, eh?
Me. The gal who has been up in the Sinistry and New Eden's business since for fucking ever. A seven foot tall wild woman who would have been perfectly happy to go out in the middle of that ring, numbers be damned, with the intent of laying in as much hurt on the combined faction as I can before I'm overwhelmed.
And then coming out to do it again the next week.
And again.
And again.
And again until I wear the lot of them down into dust.
Who's been brawling with the Sinistry's goons at every turn?
Me.
Who stated to the world that she's going to oppose the shitty gang warfare tactics en masse in the UWA no matter who carried them out, New Eden, Sinistry, or otherwise?
Me.
Who went out there with her given goal being to beat the complete and utter crap out of each and every member of the Sinistry, one by one, week by week, to show that I'm the greatest warrior in the UWA today, to show that no one is capable of beating me in a knock down, drag out brawl?
Me.
Who's actually been making inroads and actually managed to get moderately friendly with another ice-themed, dragon-themed lady wrestler who just so happens to related somehow to Mr. Lords of the Flies?
Me.
So once again when I'm having some success of my own, in comes Silas Mason once again, riding on his palanquin carried aloft by a half dozen generic bimbos all with stupid, infantilizing nicknames involving the word "Baby," here to steal all my thunder.
I mean Taylor Cruze fought the Sinistry and all she managed to do was look like the Dumbest Woman in Professional Wrestling for listening to Silas fucking Mason.
My god, there's a woman coming up the ranks in professional wrestling who isn't sucking the cock of somebody named Mason, Frost, or Todd to get to the top of the sport. It just so happens that Cindy's straps on and is made of rubber.
And cue the manufactured Silas Mason outrage on Twitter about what a horrible slime I am and how I'm so intolerant of lesbians and blah blah blah and so on and so forth.
Silas Mason can go fuck himself, and he probably does so frequently that he's had to get surgery for carpal fucking tunnel.
And fuck Rachel Tatum Lee too.
I don't fucking trust anybody who deals with soothsayers, oracles, seers, psychics, and prophets as much as that girl does.
The one time we tangled she went off on a rainbow-themed rant about shit I hadn't even done fucking months down the line.
It's just one more flavor of vaguely supernatural bullshit that I'm going to have to deal with.
But hey, it's business as usual.
And you know what? UWA managed to go ahead and sign Percival motherfucking Clarence Whitman the Third so we can have a Dragons, Midgets, Retards, and Social Incompetents division like IWC did.
All the old nightmares come back to haunt my giant blue ass.
So, Abby, congratulations. You get to be the one that I beat the complete and utter fuck out of. Because you and I both know that Gavin Taylor is a motherfucking afterthought in this.
I mean Lilith fucking Evans outlasted the son of a bitch in the four way match not to long ago.
The smug sack of shit hasn't won a match on the UWA roster since, let me check my notes here… oh that's right, EVER!
He's there because the New Sinistry, the Ed-istry, Sinister Eden, the Nudistry, knows for a fact that you can't fucking beat me under your own power, Abby. No one can. So somebody pulls the same shit that forced me to wrestle Selena Frost last week, and shoehorns Gaven in there so he can collect a paycheck while doing precisely fuck all but giving me another warm body that I need to bludgeon down in order to win my match.
Because he sure isn't going to be cutting promos for this thing. Are we sure that it's actually Gavin Taylor and not a mime pretending to be Gavin Taylor? We need to get a metal detector out here to make sure that it's not a Gavin Taylor look-alike robot, driven by an alliance of the gerbils that escaped being wrapped in duct taped and shoved up Aiken Frost's ass and the small woodland creatures that got out of their cage before Cindy Todd made one of her hench-bitches step on them whilst wearing high heeled boots so that she could achieve orgasm.
Okay, seriously, I need to ask this. What the fuck, exactly, is wrong with y'all's personalities that "my queen" seems to be the most popular form of address around here? Cindy Todd, Jessica Wilde, I mean seriously. The lot of you ACT like you could be from a dynasty of carefully inbred nobles, but I don't think Dumbfuckistan has a royal family.
And Silas Mason is now on Twitter railing me about how dare I impugn the dignity of countries ending in -istan and that because of it that I'm a militant islamophobe, when he probably spent fifteen minutes last week shouting at some poor Sikh man in a Target about ISIS, terrorism, and to go back to Syria.
What am I talking about? Silas Mason doesn't shop at Target. It's too high class. That motherfucker buys his suits off the rack at WalMart, maybe even Sam's Club if he wants to get two or three at a time.
And now Silas Mason is on Twitter foaming at the mouth about how I loathe the poor, the colorblind, folks with the fashion sense of a concussed paper wasp, and fat people on Rascal scooters.
Hey Silas? Suck MY dick. It'll make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside tonight when I snuggle under the covers, while you're in bed trying to imagine just how a dragon's dick looks, and how horrifying it'd be to be fucked with one when it's the size of your leg.
I'll tell you that there are bits involved that are similar to those of dogs, cats, horses, turtles, armadillos, and crocodiles.
What bits and where precisely they are I leave up to your imagination.
Remember to turn on Incognito mode before you google all that. Unless you want banner ads of dog-cock dildos showing up while you fumble your way around the good ol series of tubes.
So anyway, fuck Gavin Taylor. Fuck him with a gryphon's spiny dick. Gavin Taylor isn't important. There's no reason for him to be involved in this match, just like there was no reason for him to be involved in my match two shows ago.
He's just there to soak up excess dragon aggro and give me a second target to beat the shit out of so I don't turn Serenity into a domino-masked smear of blood across the ring apron.
Seriously, what the fuck do you think you are in that getup? A superhero?
Nah, you know you're not a superhero. You're Cindy fucking Todd's primary bootlicker these days.
A supervillain? Captain PMS riding her fearsome blood red Menstrual Cycle down to the ring.
Nah, you know you're not a supervillain either.
You know you're a fucking henchman. A minion. A thrall. An inferior subordinate that's always receiving orders, and never giving them.
You're not the hero, you're not the villain, you're just fodder, Abby.
You're just a warm body that exists to be thrown between whomever you currently serve and whoever seeks to face them.
You're a time waster.
You're a distraction.
We're two weeks out from Olympus, and we've got all of two matches signed. With the way people kiss Alana Starr's ass, do you think that they're going to just toss the two of us out there with zero promotion and build up so I can have the title shot I randomly won a month ago?
Fuck no. Unless UWA management wants to make Raymond der Vaart look like a goddess-damned marketing genius, they're going to milk this for everything they've got.
We're two months away from Alana having a two year reign on that belt. The smart thing is going to be to build to that and as close to August 14 as possible, have her face a challenge unlike anything else she's ever faced before.
So what does that leave me for Olympus? Another random member of the Nudistry?
Nah. I think the UWA's smart about all this. They know that I fucking loathe your compadre in the whole mask and sex dungeon thing, though your mask is smaller and you're the one tied up with embarrassing object stuffed in your holes instead of the one doing the stuffing like Dante is.
They know that I've wanted to get my hands on that asshole and his thermonuclear halitosis since he decided to ruin my one PPV World Title match.
Of course they're not going to fucking tell me about it. I'm not the one with ties to Buzzy Beet'al and his brother Captain Colon Fulla Rodents. I can't throw a hissy fit in the middle of a show, threaten to take my ball and go home, and leverage that into whatever I fucking want.
So of course Dante fucking knows already, and the masked bastard's been ducking me ever since he poked his leather-covered nose in the door here in the UWA.
Like I said, Abby, you're an obstacle. You're a distraction. You're a warm body thrown between me and my target.
You and Gavin are there to act as an energy sink, for me to get a bit winded until Dante decides to fiddle with the circuit breakers and teleport into the ring with whatever combination of the Sinistry B-Team and Cindy Todd's S&M Slut Scouts the Nudistry deems necessary to accompany him this particular week.
There's an overwhelming numbers game, we battle back and forth, it looks like I succumb to the superior numbers for a moment before rallying back and dispatching the quirky miniboss squad, and then Dante comes running in with a weapon of some sort and clocks me from behind.
And then to ostensibly prevent outside interference, Dante and I are made to wrestle in a cage if the UWA decides to try and make things fair, or in a No DQ match if they decide they want to ride Kirian and Aiken Frost's gerbil scented cocks some more.
And you know what, Abby?
I don't care.
I'm just as willing to simultaneously fight every member of the Sinistry and New Eden, the Nudistry, now as I was last week.
I want it to happen.
Every time people like you have to resort to superior numbers it shows just how filled with self-doubt you are, that not a single one of you can get the job done on their own, that not one of your is capable of standing with me toe to toe and providing a decent challenge.
That's fine.
I accept that.
But me? All I want to do, Abby, is to figure out just how many of you darkity dark batshit fucks I can take down in one brawl.
And then I want to try and beat that record.
It's annoying, I hate it, I wish UWA management would do something about it.
But until Drew Bryant and David Helms take the Nudistry's collective balls out of their mouths, I'm perfectly content to amuse myself with your collective misery until then.
Look forward to beating the piss out of you and all your little friend, Abby!
Maybe Cindy Todd will give you your S&M Slut Scout Official Distraction merit badge for this.
Or maybe Ba'al and Cin-Cin will break out all their favorite asphyxiation methods and you'll die trying to suck air through some Saran Wrap while you've got a belt wrapped in barbed wire around your neck.
Who knows?
And honestly, Abby, who cares?
You willingly serve an Evil Overlord, chicky-poo. One day you're going to fail her for the last time, and it's going to be your funeral.
Well, no. You won't have a funeral. You'll have a shallow grave in the middle of the woods somewhere.
But on the bright side you're going to probably end up feeding some really cute foxes with big fluffy tails.
So you've at least got that to look forward to.
Toodles!
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