There's always a bigger fish, no matter how big you are.
No matter how powerful you are there's always something more powerful.
Something that makes you feel weak, that makes you feel helpless.
Even when you're a mage.
Even when you're a dragon.
Even when you're probably in the top ten most powerful supernatural forces on the gods-damned planet.
Because there are natural forces compared to which you're little more than an oversized, bright blue bug.
Like the bullshit in the Caribbean, where it's basically The Neverending Story: Tropicane Hurristorm Edition.
A truck, seriously? You can drive a mother fuzzing truck into a wrestling match and have it be considered a legitimate weapon?
After all the trouble I went through to have my clowns construct a nice arsenal of amusingly horrific hardcore weaponry and packaging it up in a nice display, all arranged in a very aesthetically pleasing fashion, some wankwomble drives his Compensationmobile onto the field and not only eliminates me, but outright kills beloved mascot Mitsubishi Kowabunga.
Oh I'm sure someone would say that it was a mercy killing, what with Kawamata being a crispy critter from that flamethrower. But third degree burns don't really hurt. All the bits that are capable of going "Oi, brain! Something's really gone wrong down here!" are as fried as a bucket of the Colonel's finest.
Though honestly the thing I was the most upset about was the fact that somebody ELSE had went and offed somebody on the Deathmatch Demolition football pitch aside from me.
Consider it a look into the crystal ball of America's future. A guy who was just out there trying to make things better for himself and his girl is angrily run down by some tiny-dicked jackwagon in a gas-guzzling, oversized truck that is probably equipped to roll coal on every Prius and Smart Car that has the misfortune to get stuck behind it. Something that American lawmakers are attempting to make a legal reality. Protester in you way? Perfectly legal to run them the fuzz over.
Doom and gloom. A spiral of inevitable decay. A fall from grace. A degradation of humanity from one generation to the next, that sons and daughters will inevitably be lesser than their fathers and mothers. The end times are a comin', the apocalypse draws near! The end is nigh! Repent of your sins, o wayward sheep, and follow me, your shepherd to salvation and enlightenment! Look upon me as I spread my arms wide, simultaneously inviting embrace and deifying myself by taking a pose associated with a god made flesh.
Fill my pockets, ye lost lambs, for in these darkest of days, in these end times there shall soon be no need for worldly goods of the coarsest nature. Armageddon draws near, and as the human race begins its inevitable circling of the drain, money, gold, silver, and jewels will serve you no good.
Coins will not fill your bellies with sustenance and you will be hard pressed to drink dollar bills and stock certificates. I am the way, the truth, and the light. Surrender your worldly goods to a greater good, ascend to a grander glory, and embrace your drawing demise. The darkest days of the world are ahead, days wherein the survivors will be the unfortunate souls and the dead will be envied for their places of rest. Free of pain, free of strife, free of sickness, and free of disease.
Believe in me, follow me, heed my words and I will lead you to salvation. I will lead you to a bigger, better tomorrow. A tomorrow that looks suspiciously like yesterday. A world of wonder and grace that our forefathers had created and that their children and children's children ruined with their wickedness.
Turn away from the present and embrace the past. Reject the false god of change and adaptation. Salvation lies not in turning the eye towards the light of a hopeful future, but instead looking over the shoulder towards the past looked upon through rose colored glasses.
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.
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.
For once I'm rather pleased with the way things have gone on a ULW show. My opponent bludgeoned into submission, a member of her entourage badly mauled once again, and justice served in the main event where Jason King triumphed once the odds were evened.
Funny how that works.
From top to bottom the whole show was a catharsis for me. I got to beat the peas out of that obnoxious little thorn in my side, Lenore Price-Mason. I got to suplex her brother-cousin-husband Silas, and I got to absolutely maim a member of her overpopulated entourage.
My one regret is that I didn't get that chance to punt that little kid into the gods damned Jumbotron. that would've made my year.
But no, I'll settle for literally giving Mr. Joshua the spear. On the bright side that guy is going to have an absolute amazing Jesus halloween costume for decades to come. And while he may not be able to have a wank now, and will have to hope for Silas to splurge of some of New Eden's demonic frankenhookers, Ol' Josh'll have a pair of Fleshlights wherever he goes from now on! He can even use his hands as a whistle!
*Twee!*
*Twee!*
Just like that!
In order to most efficiently beat the absolute FUCK out of somebody you have to know three things. You have to know yourself, you have to know your enemy, and you have to know the world you two are living in.
Now for most people that first one is easy, 'cause there really has to be something wrong with you in order for you to be lying to yourself so damned bad that you're a goddamn stranger to your own sorry ass self. And I don't me lying on your left arm til it goes numb and using it to jerk off.
Knowing your enemy? That can be easy or it can be hard. But with video tape… well motherfucking DVD's and the interbutts these days, it's pretty easy to get to know the person you're aiming to skullfuck into sausage meat if they're a pro wrestler. They invite you into a jam session in their skulls twice a week and then you get to see 'em fight.
Now knowing the world? That's the motherfucking kicker. There's a bunch of shit that goes down that most people don't know about, 'cause they can't fucking see it. I'm not just talking about angels and demons and ghosts and devils and shit (well, maybe not shit. You can see shit. Though sometimes you don't, you step in it, and you track filth all over the fucking place.)
That's simple stuff, that's shit you can see by turning the dial every so slightly so that you get a bid of a bleedover between channels. Spooky shit you can understand, because it does stuff. It wants stuff. The creeps fucking do things, ya know?
Not the Eyes, man. Not the motherfucking Eyes. They might not be there all the time, but they're there for import things, and they're watching, man. They're fuckin' watching."
-SPIDER
There are times when you just want to be alone, to just sit by yourself along with your own thoughts and hash them out. Or in my case get them all in order so you can sit down and write an article about how exactly you managed to go from your native high-magic, rather interesting world with a plethora of sentient species to a magically barren crudball of a world with only one species of person that can carry a conversation.
The universe hates those times and will move heaven and earth to do whatever it can to fuck with them. Case in point, I'd plopped myself down with my laptop and a big orange mug of hot chocolate that was approximately one third marshmallow by volume when somebody started pounding on my door like it owed them money.
"Here you are, my dear, adamant in admitting that you want to go home. Incensed that you were being denied the opportunity. Drowning your sorrows in drink when the powers that be when you see you path home blocked from your footsteps. And yet… and yet you somehow managed to fail in achieving that which you most desired in all the world."
The life of a professional wrestler is fraught with its ups and downs, its triumphs and tragedies, and they're only made worse when you have a cannibalistic dragon goddess living inside your cranium.
Like the bitter, racist great aunt nobody wants but someone ends up having to take care of out of familial obligation. Only in this case it just so happens that I ended up with big scaly bitch queen numero uno, who literally ate herself out of house, home, and worshippers, by offering a rather non-specific prayer in the right place at the wrong time.
So as her sole draconic worshipper, as a technicality, I'm kind of stuck with her. Spark and I have been calling her Miss Hissy, as to reveal her true name to millions of people would be a rather poor idea. Douchebag Old Testament Jehovah's got nothing on her, and it wouldn't be good for anybody if she were allowed to take roots and get a foothold of the faithful on a backwater, near magic-less world.
That racist old grandma in this case is an unabashed dragon supremacist. It'd be like some tribe in deepest, darkest Africa that's never interacted with any other members of humanity dumped into the care of the Grand Wizard of the KKK. I'm not going to inflict her on anybody.
But last week my trainer, mentor, and friend Desolation pulled a Spark and applied a little bit of pop culture to the situation. She'd probably prefer the new name to the old, but I'm not going to call her either Miss Hissy or Eleanor Rigby to her face. Even though she did indeed die in a church and was buried along with her name.
My life is strange. I'm a seven foot tall blue dragoness, my best friend in the multiverse is an elf with a big floofy tail, I'm trapped on a world where the creator being is obsessed with balls (and also beetles), I have a zombie for a lawyer, a vampire for a doctor, and a fat, skulleted Euro-pop loving Dutchman for an arch nemesis.
It is, however, not so strange that a fellow in a hockey mask, camouflage pants, suit coat, red silken tie, and one of those metal band t-shirts with the band's name beaten into nonrecognition with the ugly stick doesn't cause at least a brow raise.
Of course there's pretty much exactly one person in my life who dresses like that, as if army surplus pantaloons and one of a thousand different black t's with a skull on the front are a uniform as mandatory as the red coat and huge fuzzy hat for the dudes that stand outside Buckingham palace.
So when he tosses a briefcase up on a crate nearby that contains some bit of production gear and whips off the hockey mask, revealing none other than the Patron Saint of Professional Wrestling, Desolation.
The man's amongst the best at what he does. He's had a storied career in ULW and its sister promotion the IWC, and a just as grand career curb stomping the crap out of the indy circuit. He also trained me in the art of professional wrestling.
He pulls off the suit coat and holds it between two fingers, as if it has a bad smell to it, then wads it up and tosses it into a corner. He then proceeds to theatrically brush himself off, as if he had been somehow befouled by the presence of the garment. With that done, then and only then does he grin and greet me.
[We open to a shot of Kalinda kneeling on the floor before a big picture window, beyond which a heavy snowfall billows and blows and cascades down, covering the world in a frozen white blanket.]
[Before her, seemingly drawn in blood, is a series of sigils and geometric shapes; a summoning circle. We've seen her do this on camera once before. This is Kalinda summoning the consciousness of the Manyfold Matriarch into being so that she may hold a proper conversation with her divine patron.]
[But instead of five different colored candles, this time the ritual is sporting five of the same sickly green candles, which begin hissing and sparking and billowing thick green smoke into the air as Kalinda speaks, completing the ritual to call the dragoness into ethereal being. We're missing out on the audio, and thus a goodly portion of the summoning ritual.]
Kalinda: Aspect of the Great Matriarch, Devourer of Pain, your servant calls to you! Come forth!
[The candles seems to almost explode, filling the air with a toxic level of smoke. Or it would, if the smoke were going anywhere. Instead it all flows inward, writhing around itself to from a long, serpentine neck and a draconic face. The Matriarch's green head sports a massive yellow-green frill, looking rather like a mohawk that continues down her long and elegant neck. The top of her head is adorned with numerous tiny, conical, spiky horns and a single set of massive, spiraling ram-like horns as well.]
Manyfold Matriarch: Mmm, interesting. You never summoned me in only one of my facets before. May I ask the occasion?
Kalinda: I wanted carnage. I wanted destruction. I wanted pain and agony unimaginable brought down upon my foes. But your prime aspect is more concerned about matters of pride and draconic superiority than carnage.
Victory is her goal, and she craves triumph and domination above all else, in this case to the exclusion of the sadistic assault that I had asked her aid in helping me to deliver.
Kalinda:So Priesty-poos went and opened his big stupid mouth, exhaled some vile smelling air over his nicotine stained teeth, threw up the horns, shouted HAIL SATAN, and then while trying to be intimidating managed to accomplished the rare verbal equivalent of straining to give yourself a big mean snarling look, and managing to shit your pants in the process.
This is why I have him pegged squarely in the category of "dumb muscle." He went into the whole talk at the camera thing with a set of bullet points in his head, some ideas, some goals, maybe a few choice phrases that he wanted to say because they sounded totally and utterly badass in that swollen, yet empty melon of his.
Somehow I don't think "Make my opponent giggle like a giddy schoolgirl," "Give Kalinda eye strain with the sheer amount of rolling that her eyeballs have to do," and "Displayed beyond a shadow of a doubt proof of both minotaur heritage, being sired by Ben Stein, and irritable bowel syndrome by letting loose with the most utterly boring, clichéd, stream of bullshit my designated foe has seen thus far in her professional wrestling career," were the points that Priesty-poos wanted to get across.
The problem is that as the supposed avatar of a maleficent being of unimaginable evil he's stuck with an evil as comically inadept as whatever backwoods, retarded, hillbilly god put this place together in the first place.
