I sit in the darkness, illuminated by the cone of light provided by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The scarred and tattered table before me has born witness to creation and destruction both. The creation of wondrous devices, prosthetics, and effects for use in film and television, as well as the destruction of dozens, perhaps even hundreds of individuals.
This is where the magic happens. This is where the Dark Man himself, Desolation, verbally devastated a stunning amount of people during his career. Today it's not covered with special effects debris, photographs of foes, or piles of title belts. It is not a place for the trophies of my mentor, but rather my own.
Spread out before me are the remnants of those who have fallen before me. Swords, knives, maces, staves, spears; the enchanted arms and armor of dozens of men and woman. I give the bulb a tap with my fingers setting it swaying from side to side as the camera zooms out.
There isn't just one table. There are several. And they are not alone in their contents. The floor holds a vast array of treasure and trophies alike. Precious metals in the form of coins, of bars, of crafted works like cups, statues, ceremonial attire and weapons, and other decorative objects.
Tradition is what Lethal Weapon drives him, motivates him, what has set him on a path against me.
Not the tradition of professional wrestling, but rather the tradition of everyone that seems to oppose me having their head crammed way up their own ass.
Because if you want a traditional professional wrestler you don't have to look much further than me.
This sport has always been about size and spectacle. About larger than life physical specimens with equally large and vibrant personalities. People come to wrestling shows to be awed, to be entertained, to stare in wonder at feats of athleticism that the average man on the street is utterly incapable of performing.
They come to watch other human beings doing flips, twists, and rotations as they soar through the air. They come to watch masterminds sizing up their foes and picking them apart, reducing them to a physical wreck as they destroy a single body part. They come to watch behemoths trade blows that would fell a normal human being.
I am a sight to behold, a wondrous creature from another realm of existence. I am a powerful, agile, beautiful titan. I tower over the vast majority of humanity. There are less than a hundred men in the US that are taller than I am. The tallest living woman in the world has a scant four inches of height on me.
-CD-
You never realize how much you miss something until it's gone, until a thing that has been a part of your life for as long as you can remember vanishes into thin air. Gone in an instant. Sometimes it's a relief, sometimes it's a pain, and sometimes it's something so dire you wonder how you're ever going to get along without it.
So when a constant companion unexpectedly slipped back into my life I was overwhelmed with emotion, relief, joy. I'd lost something that had been alongside me every step of the way since having fled a dark elf insurrection years upon years ago up until I found myself stolen away from my home and dropped into an unfamiliar world.
I could ruminate on my feelings and plumb the depths of emotion (and no doubt my incestuous fascination with an absent mother figure according to Freud) later. For the moment I had business to attend to.
You hear various figures about exactly how much of the human body is made of water, sixty, seventy, eighty, some batshit insane google results somewhere up in the 90's and probably some Steiner match clocking it in at 141 ⅔ percent water. Whatever the truth is, there's enough water there for my innate ties to the element of water to get a pretty good fix on people.
Some people would say that the ULW is rotting, that it's decaying, that a sickening tumor has metastasized and the prognosis is grim. Me, on the other hand, I just think that ULW is just inching further and further up its own ass week in and week out.
For some reason ULW thinks it's a caterpillar, the ropy coils of intestines of its own anus are its cocoon, and that once it gets all the way up there it will emerge as a pretty, IWC-colored butterfly.
Because not only has ULW decided to court, embrace, and get a mouthful of love trickling down their chin from the two biggest boils on the backside of professional wrestling…
Not only has ULW decided the let non-wrestlers rampage all over its television product…
Not only has ULW decided that having some people defend their title belts every is what the cool kids are doing these days…
But now ULW is getting to the point where I'm worried that it's going to murder the IWC, skin it, and wear the tanned hide around with its penis tucked back singing songs about putting the lotion in the basket.
Take in a deep breath with me. Draw in a big whiff of the world through your nose, and then let it out slow.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
What do you smell?
Air, right? Just plain ol normal air.
But that's not normal air, that's not healthy air, that's just what you're used to. It's filled with filth, filled with pollution, filled with extraneous CO2 that really shouldn't be there. Maybe you can smell the mold and mildew from cheap drywall. Maybe there's that faint burnt plastic stench that you can never quite clear out of your household appliances. Maybe there's that 10 percent floral, 90 percent nose-rape scent of an air freshener that's twice as strong as it needs to be.
Take a deep breath and you'll smell all the ways that corporations are fucking you. Fucking you right in the nasal passages. That mold and mildew? That wouldn't be there if your house wasn't built by the lowest bidder, using the cheapest materials, with the minimally skilled labor possible, all assembled to the barest of standards and codes.
They didn't pour the concrete right, letting the water seep in through your basement. They didn't put the vapor barrier in the right place, and now the insides of your walls are a greenhouse. They used the wrong kind of insulation, and now the walls of your home are a breeding ground for pestilence.
That plastic stench? That's the scent of the best labor twenty cents a day can buy in some overseas slum, pieced together with parts put together in some third world country. But it's made in the USA, because somebody spends five minutes screwing in the pieces that make up your toaster oven.
And that's all you can afford, the cheapest of electronics in the cheapest of houses. Why? Because corporations want to be free. Free of restrictions. Free of limitations. Free of pesky little things like human rights, of outside oversight, and of government regulation.
ULW runs sick with corruption, its halls filled with the toxic reek of destructive forces, injecting poisonous personalities into the arena week after week after week. To what end? What purpose can all of this possibly serve? Why is our general manager, overseer, and Windex spokesmodel Raymond der Vaart so keen on courting elements that are bad for business?
I've worked my ass off for this company. As stands I am the only individual on the ULW roster who has competed to their fullest extent on every single show that has made it to the air. Across eight Fuck'd Up Fridays and two Pay Per Views I've wrestled a record 12 matches, more than anybody.
I've never taken a show off.
I've never shown up to the arena in a state so poor that I am not fit to perform, and had my performance suffer as a result.
Not only do I not indulge in the vices of drugs and drink, but my body works so very differently from your typical human being that even if I were given these substances, that they would simply be broken down into harmless components by my metabolism and elemental digestive system.
Members of New Eden have come to the arena physically and mentally devastated, unable to perform their jobs to the fullest extent. They've blown off their duties to the company to help build and promote our shows, and to deliver the best product possibly on TV.
Willow Wilkes, Cassidy Haze, Adam, Serenity. Each and every one of them has failed this company on one occasion or another simply through their arrogance and callous disregard for standards.
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.
