I have a mission to complete. A top secret mission. A super duper ultra black top secret mission to carry out on behalf of my cute, cuddly, ice-cold not-quite-so-evil overlord Kalinda.
So secret, in fact, that she doesn't know about it.
She probably wouldn't approve of it, and it would make her depressed to think about, so I'm not going to tell her about it.
As a right and proper minion it is my duty to serve my mistress and do my best to make her happy and contented. Sometimes just being my usually silly clowny self is enough, but sometimes it's not.
The boss lady's got a big thing coming up, some kind of one night random tournament-y thing in DTW that she's kind of honked off about.
She doesn't like tournaments, she doesn't like random matches, and she doesn't like being thrust into tag team matches with supposedly random partners.
She's ended up in kind of a bad position in pro wrestling, where a couple of companies took their turns widdling on her and telling her it was raining. And well, if DTW decides it wants to start off by shaking a few drops in her general direction, I need to be there to hold the umbrella.
Technically I'm in the tournament too, but I've never really wrestled before. It's all been easy peasy (and in DTW it's all been Japanesse-y to boot) opponents that haven't put up much challenge.
Not that I'm not capable of wrestling, it's just that I've never really wrestled a serious match before.
And if I have my way I never will. I will do my utmost to make each and every match I wrestle completely and utterly ridiculous, and a total farce.
So I'm entering the tourney in the hopes that in the rumored tag team stage I can be there for Kalinda and be her partner and be able to watch her back throughout the whole thing.
Because each and every one of these things she's taken part in, somebody's put a knife in her back during it and made her lose.
It's pretty sucky. In a proper wrestling match, there's no way that some knobbly nobody with a big bloated balloon for an ego could beat her. But nobody seems to ever want to give her a proper wrestling match.
She'll totally kick bottom in a fair fight, but soooo many people over the years have done their best to make sure that she's never actually in one.
And that has made my mistress a very sad dragoness indeed, and so I'm going to do my best to make sure she gets through this whole thing nice and cheerful.
So when Masatake Kawamata closes his locker, I'm leaning against the very next one with my best and brightest smile on my face.
It's the one that shows off aaaaaall of my pearly whites. Which, I admit, are a titch sharper, longer, and more shark like than most people are used to.
"Hi!" I say, giving a little wave. Masatake involuntarily jumps back and kind of goes halfway into a fighting stance before realizing that I'm not a threat.
Well… not an immediate threat anyway.
Immediate threats do not greet you by saying hi in a saccharine sweet voice. Usually they sneak up behind you when you're not looking and chew apart your spinal column.
"Don't sneak up on me like that!" he says, exasperated.
"Whyyyyy?"
He looks baffled by that and can't seem to come up with a satisfactory answer that doesn't make him look like a goober, "Just… just don't, okay?"
He takes a deep breath, trying to calm himself.
"You're Claudia, right? The other dragon? Kalinda's..." he struggles to find a polite term.
"Lackey, minion, henchcritter, thrall, servant, squire, understudy, court jester, and comic relief all work."
"Yes. Those. Uh… what do you want?"
"I want to talk to you about the tournament and about Kalinda. Specifically matches involving her."
His gaze narrows, "Are you here to ask me to… take a dive?"
Wait what? Boy, he's a bit of a paranoid biscuit. "No, no, no! Just… the boss lady's been in a couple of these things over the years, and two times out of three some newbie wrestler with either no ties to the fed, or a recent signing who's having his first match with the company decides to show up and make a name for him or herself by popping into Kalinda's match with somebody else and ruining the whole thing for her."
"I don't know what you want."
"I want you not to do that, that's what I want. I mean yeah, it's a shining, golden opportunity for you. Newly signed wrestler and all. Smaller hometown boy taking on the massive amazonian foreigner. Maybe try to get some payback for all the big bully gaijins that have rampaged all over puroresu over the years."
"I don't like threats."
"That's awesome. I'm not making one. Though the two of your couldn't look more different, in some ways you're a lot alike. All about honor, respect, and fighting spirit."
A look of pride spreads across Masatake's face. "I am."
"Thing is, a lot of folks aren't. And a lot of folks present one face to the world, which turns out to be a mask hiding something horrible underneath." I produce my dragon skull mask seemingly from thin air and have it spin on the tip of my finger with almost gyroscopic precision.
"I think you're a stand up dude, but I'm just a silly clown, so what do I know? And I could be terribly, terribly, horribly wrong and you could be this horrible, monstrous man deep down inside."
"I'm not."
"But that's what everybody says, buckaroo. Nobody ever admits they're a monster. Well, except me." I grin my sharp toothed grin again.
"I just want you to know that if you make Kalinda sad, it's not going to be fun times for you."
"Yes, I would imagine she would hurt me." he says with a small smile.
"Oh yeah. But that's not a problem for guys like you. You silly biscuits do things like wrestle in barbed wire and stop up the wounds with superglue so you get great big scars. You get punched in the face by a big scary gaijin and go "Thank you very much, sir!" and treasure your broken nose forever."
I stop smiling. I'm almost always smiling, and even though my big smiles can be scary sometimes they're never as scary as no smiles at all. Because the smiles always reach my eyes. And when there's no smile in my eyes, you can see right deep down into where my soul used to be. He recoils just a little bit.
"Hurting you isn't going to be something that would make you have second thoughts about being a naughty biscuit and making my boss lady sad."
"I'm not going to do anything like that. I don't have much of anything in the way of proper pro wrestling training. It would be foolish. She's been treated horribly in the past. I don't want to add to that."
I smile, no teeth this time.
"Awesome. Great. Glad we had this talk. Don't be mad. I'm just trying to look out for the most important woman in my life."
"I can understand that."
"Good," I saw with a nod, looking to the photograph of his girlfriend, Hanako Takeuchi, that I'd plucked from his locker when he wasn't looking. "Because I believe in an eye for an eye. Because mine can grow back. If you hurt the woman I love, Maserati Kowabunga, I'm going to return the favor."
I flick the photo at his chest, and he looks down for a moment as he grabs it, then back up with his face in a complete and utter rage.
But he's taken his eyes off of me, which means I'm free to leave any time I want. And the amount of time I want to leave in is an absolutely miniscule one.
I'm gone by the time he looks up, slipped into a crack between worlds and on my way to pick up the ice cream and cookies I'd told the boss lady I'd stepped out to get.
She'd be upset if she knew I had this little chat with the newbie.
But he's the only one that I know I can keep from misbehaving with words.
The other ones I'm probably going to have to take more drastic measures with.
-o-
Hello ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages! Now I'm sure you've seen me on DTW in the past, but not as a wrestler or anything, oh no.
Usually you just find me singing the boss lady's haunting, beautiful, sad entry theme. But I'm not just a singer and a symbolic child-killer dressed up in the colors of past wrestling federations that my not-so-evil overlord has had the misfortune to be employed by in the past, using the power of metaphor to convey these companies slitting the throat of the future for the meager contents of a single pic-a-nic basket.
Oh no! I'm a wrestler in my own right. And I've had the occasional match here and there. Nothing major. But Kalinda and I are a team, even if there aren't really any other proper tag teams signed to DTW at the moment.
So I'm going into this whole Dirty's Darts thing so I can watch my boss lady's back. You can just tune into what she said not too long ago about the whole thing, and thinking about those past events have made her sad.
And do you know what, boys and girls? I don't know about you, but I don't like it when the people that I care for the most are sad. Especially when they're sad about things other people have done.
Now, I don't have the way with words Miss Kalinda does, and I can't really do the big snarly, grouchy, angry thing. And I don't have her big grumpy potty mouth either. I'm a cute clown without a malicious bone in my body. So I'm not going to be able to come out here and do the big rambly rant thing like she does.
Heck, I'm so nice I don't think I can muster a bad word to say about anybody. Well, except maybe that Mr. Shintaro. You are very gross, sir, and poo belongs in the loo. Not in a wrestling ring. You should be ashamed of yourself. Your own mess isn't a toy, and it's certainly not something that you put in your mouth!
But for everybody else, well, I wish you all good luck. But not quuuuuite as much luck as Kalinda. Because I'm going to do my best to make sure that by the end of the night, my big blue snugglemuffin has the biggest, happiest grin on her face.
And I'm going to make her smile by any means necessary, even if that means doing naughty, horrible, hideous things to each and every one of you, boys and girls.
But that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
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