Post by Non Compos Mentis on May 22, 2017 18:09:39 GMT -5
June 4th 2016, Greenville, South Carolina.
”They lied to you, Ezra. They used you. I'm going to take care of you now.” Through eyes barely strong enough to open by themselves, I looked up at Sean from the place The Order had left me. Malnourished and on the edge of the void I stared up at the hooded man and expected... hoped for the end.
”Kill me...” It was the only relief I could hope for when simply breathing was an excruciating effort. I laid where Altman’s shadows had left me, unable to move and hoping someone would honour his last words to me; that someone would be there soon, I just needed to hold on.
”I'm going to keep you safe. I promise.” The hooded man uttered, and I trusted him in that moment.
I didn’t know what was to come. I might have asked for death's cold mercy again if I did.
May 9th 2017, Greenville, South Carolina.
”Oh Sweetie, mind if I make this a little threesome?” The Pure Class Arena had fallen dormant once the thousands upon thousands of Faithful had abandoned it to the night. A cast of sickeningly crude characters still inhabited the husk though. Sean had called that one Pike and I watched as his gangly scruffy form sidled up to a full garbage can and gorged his eye. Half a solo cup of South Carolina's cheapest beer and a hot dog minus two bites stared back. With lecherous fingers, Pike grabbed the dog. ”Come to daddy, Hotstuff.”
As Pike filled his mouth with second-hand weiner, all around him the other members of what the PCW Faithful named the Hobo Horde stripped the bins of all their not-so-valuable contents.
One remained noticeably still, though. Huddled on his own, my Seeker-that-was cut a mourning figure. Sean, Non Compos Mentis, licked his physical and mental wounds alone. Despite bringing every helper he could, even his sickly lover, and throwing all his grizzly might into the battle, he couldn't beat the zealot Gabriel.
”You lied to them, Sean.” I shuffled my ungodly weak frame to his side, my voice carrying more than intended in the barren parking structure of the arena. Heads turned, with curiosity more than animosity as the echoes disrupted their filthy plundering.
”Now isn't the time, Ezra.” Sat with his back to a pillar, Non Compos Mentis' head hadn't moved from between his legs. The warped facepaint that cast such a demonic image hours earlier had shifted into a Rorschach test of misery, frustration and disappointment.
”You used them.” It was the promise of their messiah, that they could hit back at the bourgeois, sanctimonious elite. But Gabriel was no elitist prick with a vendetta against the poor. He'd needed an army to counter that of Gabriel and Seromine, and that they had done, but the man himself had failed.
”Ezra... stop.” The voice rebounded off the ground where it was directed. Still he wouldn't be moved and I prodded his dangerous psyche with as pointy a stick as I could muster. His own words from the safe house rang in my ears, and I'd make them ring in his.
”You said you'd take care of them but you used them.” I verbally jabbed at the infernal beast in waiting.
His chest began to heave, his body pulsed with frustration that was contained for now. His head slowly lifted from the sullen grey ground and his faded mask met my stare with bloodshot eyes. ”Is that meant to be helping?”
”Hey look! I'm Gabriel!” A crash of aluminium on concrete startled every hobo in the area and their collective eyes turned to a goofy man-child, his pin-prick irises and bugged out eyes seemingly staring in all directions at once. It was the immature spawn of Satan that had crushed a rat and cuddled its corpse in front of me just days earlier, his flabby body now covered in a soiled Gabriel t-shirt that had been discarded in the trash. ”I bless you! I bless you! And I bless yo....Arrgh!”
”Shut your hole, retard!” Pike screamed as the drags of his treasured beer bounced off the empty skull of his moronic underling, shutting him up immediately. As the idiot moped in a haze of booze-mist, the unruly Pike suddenly turned modest in the face of his master. ”I'm sorry, Sir. I'd say Dell's simple but, truthfully, he's just a fuckin' idiot.”
I may have recognised him as their demented guru, but to command the respect and loyalty of that disgruntled mob was beyond admiration; he was their commander. ”Sir? Are you kidding me? What is he, your general?”
Pike's eyes immediately narrowed and his rangy frame tightened, his wild hair seemingly standing on end in an instant. He regarded me with all the intensity of a man who had just seen his newborn baby punted like a football. ”'Scuse me?”
The bushy eyebrows of Non Compos Mentis' right hand man closed on me in seconds as Pike squared up to me. With very little effort he could have overpowered me, I was a starved and broken specimen and he was a scrappy survivor who had done who-knows-what to stay alive in his time.
He was right on me when a shredded hand blocked his path and pushed the lieutenant backwards. ”Ezra, it's been a tiring night. Stand down and leave him be.” It was Sean, NCM, and rather than reprimand his aggressive follower his distraught eyes met my own.
”Are you seriously going to keep lying to them? You're not a general, you're not their leader, you're just dragging them into oblivion with you on some self-destructive revenge mission.” I unloaded my own hate on Sean, trying to force him to snap out of his delusion. Ever since Alexa Black had put him in hospital, sending him out of PCW and onto this path of insanity, Sean had harboured the need to put the company as a whole to the sword.
”EZRA! Enough!” Mentis snapped and the hand that was bracing Pike whipped around and lashed me across the face. The blow was strong enough to send me stumbling backwards, so much that I would have fallen if I hadn't struck a wall of stinking humanity that had gathered to watch on. I struggled to regain my balance, so shaken I was by the slap. ”You are not a Guardian anymore! Look at yourself, you're barely human. You're weak. You're pathetic.”
I looked down at myself, my tattered clothes miles too big for the withered skeleton that lay beneath; unable to fight like I'd been trained for my entire life, unable to love like I had devoted myself to the moment I met him. But I was still better than what I had been stolen into becoming, wasn't I? ”I'm still stronger that any of these gullible morons who follow you! So desperate they'll ride the coat tails of any David Koresh wannabe with an axe to grind!”
Sean raked his hand down over his face, tearing away layers of paint to reveal the real monster than lay underneath. The red and black gloss was not the devil, it was whatever inhabited his mind that needed to be driven out. With his blackened hands, Mentis walked up to me and I backed into the wall of vagrants that prevented my escape.
”Each and every one of these people has had their life ripped away from them by those more fortunate. They've lost everything you have and more. And they're still here, not whining like a bitch and being a useless bag of bones.” Enveloping my face in his wretched hands I felt the oily paint coat my skin and was powerless to stop it. I tried, good lord I did, to push him away but my arms weren't given the strength. Had I even wanted him to back away, or like always had I simply longed for his touch that desperately that I couldn't deny it? ”I had to drag you here because you were so weak you begged me to let you die! You spent your entire life following a cult that lied to and abused you! And you call them weak?”
NCM continued, his mania in full flow and his flock surrounding him like starving sheep waiting for feed. His eyes, once full with the sorrow of losing to Gabriel, now flooded with the light of exquisite manipulation. ”I'm not asking them to give up their lives, Ezra. I never asked them to follow me. I offered them the chance to extract a pound of flesh they've been owed since society turned its back on them. I'm not David Koresh, Ezra... I'm Che Guevara, giving the oppressed the opportunity to take something back.”
He was manipulating those around him, but I couldn't tell how much his addled mind actually believed. Every sunken, drunken, broken face around him hung on his word as if it were their last remaining link to life. They nodded in and murmured in devoted agreement, their revolutionary leader standing taller and prouder than before. His lieutenant approached again, head bowed and humbled by his master.
”We couldn't take it from Gabriel. We lost that chance, but we're ready for the next.” In two weeks the Last Chance Battle Royal would be held and NCM's name was entered automatically. It was he last chance to win the tournament, one that many others would have their last hopes tied to also. ”So many of them, all gifted the life we never had. Even one just like... you. Ain't that just funny?”
Pike's angered gaze pointed my way as he recalled what he'd been told of my past. A Guardian of The Order, born and raised to fight, devoted to the life of the one chosen for me by fate. There was only ever supposed to be one Seeker at a time, but Sean had almost defied that most sanctified of rulings. Had I ever been ready for the task that was thrust upon me, to stand at his side through it all? Maybe not, not like Eira.
Mentis grinned through the paint, the teeth shining through like lightening bolts in the night. I felt a tinge of resentment, of jealousy that I had never been the Guardian that Eira had been to Murdoc. ”In spite of his attitude Ezra isn't an enemy, Pike. His family turned their backs on him just like yours did, they used him until he was spent and then discarded him like a rotting banana peel. But Eira, she's defied the Order too and they still hold her close, trusting her with their dirty work. You must want to get release some anger at her, yes?”
He peered into my soul and found what he needed, that smallest kernel of hate for what my life had been. It was all he had been looking for and he knew it would grown. He turned to his disciples, his unwashed masses. Eira would be in the battle royal, fighting for her opportunity as fiercely as anyone, but by no means was she the only target in the match. ”A cheating drunk who deserves to be locked away in a black hole of a jail cell for his past crimes in that ring, who spat on every title he won with every ill-gotten win on his record. Some of us had to fight and claw for years to get what he treated like dirt!”
Mentis serenaded his followers with the sins of Whitey Ford, courting a righteous and seething reaction from the hobos before reeling off another name. ”Sideshow freaks like Hiroshi Yukio who prance around with their lofty ideas of moral codes and respect. What a fucking privilege it is to have a code to live by, when some of us had to sell every moral we had just so we could eat!”
”Ezra, you think I make these hobos, vagrants, hoodlums and street rats come here against their will? This IS their will! Every Whitey Ford is the violent drunk who pissed on us because he thought it was funny. Every Hiroshi Yukio is the privileged guy who turned away because we disgusted him and he'd rather be charitable to the sweet grandma instead.” He took my head in his hands once more and gripped so hard I thought my skull would pop under the pressure. ”Every Eira is the ignorant bitch who did exactly what we did and got treated like a million bucks while we got stabbed in the back!”
Thankfully he released and I gasped for air as he lifted his arms to the giant colossus around him; the monument that NCM himself had helped to build with years of blood used to set the foundations. It was a monument to sacrifice, and bodies would need to fall again before his mission would be complete.
”You want to believe this place is a sacrificial burial mound for all these people, I know you do. You think I'm leading them all on some merry chase until they're no use anymore. But this isn't a sacrificial altar, it's a court. Every last one of the men and women in the Last Chance Battle Royal is on trial and we are the judge, jury and executioner.”
His rhetoric descended further and further into lunacy. The justification for dragging these people into a war zone, the idea that they were somebody putting the entire world on trial for the sins inflicted on them, it was pure madness. I tried to find words but the only words that made sense were the truly obvious. ”You're insane...”
Mentis cackled in laughter, his transformation complete from depressive failure to risen messiah in a matter of minutes. Any attempt to make him look weak in front of his army had been forgotten in a wave of propaganda and delirium. ”Take a look around, Ezra, this isn't a world for sane people anymore. We gave every Grimm, Rick Majors and Loki a chance and look where it got us? Now it's our turn.”
”They lied to you, Ezra. They used you. I'm going to take care of you now.” Through eyes barely strong enough to open by themselves, I looked up at Sean from the place The Order had left me. Malnourished and on the edge of the void I stared up at the hooded man and expected... hoped for the end.
”Kill me...” It was the only relief I could hope for when simply breathing was an excruciating effort. I laid where Altman’s shadows had left me, unable to move and hoping someone would honour his last words to me; that someone would be there soon, I just needed to hold on.
”I'm going to keep you safe. I promise.” The hooded man uttered, and I trusted him in that moment.
I didn’t know what was to come. I might have asked for death's cold mercy again if I did.
May 9th 2017, Greenville, South Carolina.
”Oh Sweetie, mind if I make this a little threesome?” The Pure Class Arena had fallen dormant once the thousands upon thousands of Faithful had abandoned it to the night. A cast of sickeningly crude characters still inhabited the husk though. Sean had called that one Pike and I watched as his gangly scruffy form sidled up to a full garbage can and gorged his eye. Half a solo cup of South Carolina's cheapest beer and a hot dog minus two bites stared back. With lecherous fingers, Pike grabbed the dog. ”Come to daddy, Hotstuff.”
As Pike filled his mouth with second-hand weiner, all around him the other members of what the PCW Faithful named the Hobo Horde stripped the bins of all their not-so-valuable contents.
One remained noticeably still, though. Huddled on his own, my Seeker-that-was cut a mourning figure. Sean, Non Compos Mentis, licked his physical and mental wounds alone. Despite bringing every helper he could, even his sickly lover, and throwing all his grizzly might into the battle, he couldn't beat the zealot Gabriel.
”You lied to them, Sean.” I shuffled my ungodly weak frame to his side, my voice carrying more than intended in the barren parking structure of the arena. Heads turned, with curiosity more than animosity as the echoes disrupted their filthy plundering.
”Now isn't the time, Ezra.” Sat with his back to a pillar, Non Compos Mentis' head hadn't moved from between his legs. The warped facepaint that cast such a demonic image hours earlier had shifted into a Rorschach test of misery, frustration and disappointment.
”You used them.” It was the promise of their messiah, that they could hit back at the bourgeois, sanctimonious elite. But Gabriel was no elitist prick with a vendetta against the poor. He'd needed an army to counter that of Gabriel and Seromine, and that they had done, but the man himself had failed.
”Ezra... stop.” The voice rebounded off the ground where it was directed. Still he wouldn't be moved and I prodded his dangerous psyche with as pointy a stick as I could muster. His own words from the safe house rang in my ears, and I'd make them ring in his.
”You said you'd take care of them but you used them.” I verbally jabbed at the infernal beast in waiting.
His chest began to heave, his body pulsed with frustration that was contained for now. His head slowly lifted from the sullen grey ground and his faded mask met my stare with bloodshot eyes. ”Is that meant to be helping?”
”Hey look! I'm Gabriel!” A crash of aluminium on concrete startled every hobo in the area and their collective eyes turned to a goofy man-child, his pin-prick irises and bugged out eyes seemingly staring in all directions at once. It was the immature spawn of Satan that had crushed a rat and cuddled its corpse in front of me just days earlier, his flabby body now covered in a soiled Gabriel t-shirt that had been discarded in the trash. ”I bless you! I bless you! And I bless yo....Arrgh!”
”Shut your hole, retard!” Pike screamed as the drags of his treasured beer bounced off the empty skull of his moronic underling, shutting him up immediately. As the idiot moped in a haze of booze-mist, the unruly Pike suddenly turned modest in the face of his master. ”I'm sorry, Sir. I'd say Dell's simple but, truthfully, he's just a fuckin' idiot.”
I may have recognised him as their demented guru, but to command the respect and loyalty of that disgruntled mob was beyond admiration; he was their commander. ”Sir? Are you kidding me? What is he, your general?”
Pike's eyes immediately narrowed and his rangy frame tightened, his wild hair seemingly standing on end in an instant. He regarded me with all the intensity of a man who had just seen his newborn baby punted like a football. ”'Scuse me?”
The bushy eyebrows of Non Compos Mentis' right hand man closed on me in seconds as Pike squared up to me. With very little effort he could have overpowered me, I was a starved and broken specimen and he was a scrappy survivor who had done who-knows-what to stay alive in his time.
He was right on me when a shredded hand blocked his path and pushed the lieutenant backwards. ”Ezra, it's been a tiring night. Stand down and leave him be.” It was Sean, NCM, and rather than reprimand his aggressive follower his distraught eyes met my own.
”Are you seriously going to keep lying to them? You're not a general, you're not their leader, you're just dragging them into oblivion with you on some self-destructive revenge mission.” I unloaded my own hate on Sean, trying to force him to snap out of his delusion. Ever since Alexa Black had put him in hospital, sending him out of PCW and onto this path of insanity, Sean had harboured the need to put the company as a whole to the sword.
”EZRA! Enough!” Mentis snapped and the hand that was bracing Pike whipped around and lashed me across the face. The blow was strong enough to send me stumbling backwards, so much that I would have fallen if I hadn't struck a wall of stinking humanity that had gathered to watch on. I struggled to regain my balance, so shaken I was by the slap. ”You are not a Guardian anymore! Look at yourself, you're barely human. You're weak. You're pathetic.”
I looked down at myself, my tattered clothes miles too big for the withered skeleton that lay beneath; unable to fight like I'd been trained for my entire life, unable to love like I had devoted myself to the moment I met him. But I was still better than what I had been stolen into becoming, wasn't I? ”I'm still stronger that any of these gullible morons who follow you! So desperate they'll ride the coat tails of any David Koresh wannabe with an axe to grind!”
Sean raked his hand down over his face, tearing away layers of paint to reveal the real monster than lay underneath. The red and black gloss was not the devil, it was whatever inhabited his mind that needed to be driven out. With his blackened hands, Mentis walked up to me and I backed into the wall of vagrants that prevented my escape.
”Each and every one of these people has had their life ripped away from them by those more fortunate. They've lost everything you have and more. And they're still here, not whining like a bitch and being a useless bag of bones.” Enveloping my face in his wretched hands I felt the oily paint coat my skin and was powerless to stop it. I tried, good lord I did, to push him away but my arms weren't given the strength. Had I even wanted him to back away, or like always had I simply longed for his touch that desperately that I couldn't deny it? ”I had to drag you here because you were so weak you begged me to let you die! You spent your entire life following a cult that lied to and abused you! And you call them weak?”
NCM continued, his mania in full flow and his flock surrounding him like starving sheep waiting for feed. His eyes, once full with the sorrow of losing to Gabriel, now flooded with the light of exquisite manipulation. ”I'm not asking them to give up their lives, Ezra. I never asked them to follow me. I offered them the chance to extract a pound of flesh they've been owed since society turned its back on them. I'm not David Koresh, Ezra... I'm Che Guevara, giving the oppressed the opportunity to take something back.”
He was manipulating those around him, but I couldn't tell how much his addled mind actually believed. Every sunken, drunken, broken face around him hung on his word as if it were their last remaining link to life. They nodded in and murmured in devoted agreement, their revolutionary leader standing taller and prouder than before. His lieutenant approached again, head bowed and humbled by his master.
”We couldn't take it from Gabriel. We lost that chance, but we're ready for the next.” In two weeks the Last Chance Battle Royal would be held and NCM's name was entered automatically. It was he last chance to win the tournament, one that many others would have their last hopes tied to also. ”So many of them, all gifted the life we never had. Even one just like... you. Ain't that just funny?”
Pike's angered gaze pointed my way as he recalled what he'd been told of my past. A Guardian of The Order, born and raised to fight, devoted to the life of the one chosen for me by fate. There was only ever supposed to be one Seeker at a time, but Sean had almost defied that most sanctified of rulings. Had I ever been ready for the task that was thrust upon me, to stand at his side through it all? Maybe not, not like Eira.
Mentis grinned through the paint, the teeth shining through like lightening bolts in the night. I felt a tinge of resentment, of jealousy that I had never been the Guardian that Eira had been to Murdoc. ”In spite of his attitude Ezra isn't an enemy, Pike. His family turned their backs on him just like yours did, they used him until he was spent and then discarded him like a rotting banana peel. But Eira, she's defied the Order too and they still hold her close, trusting her with their dirty work. You must want to get release some anger at her, yes?”
He peered into my soul and found what he needed, that smallest kernel of hate for what my life had been. It was all he had been looking for and he knew it would grown. He turned to his disciples, his unwashed masses. Eira would be in the battle royal, fighting for her opportunity as fiercely as anyone, but by no means was she the only target in the match. ”A cheating drunk who deserves to be locked away in a black hole of a jail cell for his past crimes in that ring, who spat on every title he won with every ill-gotten win on his record. Some of us had to fight and claw for years to get what he treated like dirt!”
Mentis serenaded his followers with the sins of Whitey Ford, courting a righteous and seething reaction from the hobos before reeling off another name. ”Sideshow freaks like Hiroshi Yukio who prance around with their lofty ideas of moral codes and respect. What a fucking privilege it is to have a code to live by, when some of us had to sell every moral we had just so we could eat!”
”Ezra, you think I make these hobos, vagrants, hoodlums and street rats come here against their will? This IS their will! Every Whitey Ford is the violent drunk who pissed on us because he thought it was funny. Every Hiroshi Yukio is the privileged guy who turned away because we disgusted him and he'd rather be charitable to the sweet grandma instead.” He took my head in his hands once more and gripped so hard I thought my skull would pop under the pressure. ”Every Eira is the ignorant bitch who did exactly what we did and got treated like a million bucks while we got stabbed in the back!”
Thankfully he released and I gasped for air as he lifted his arms to the giant colossus around him; the monument that NCM himself had helped to build with years of blood used to set the foundations. It was a monument to sacrifice, and bodies would need to fall again before his mission would be complete.
”You want to believe this place is a sacrificial burial mound for all these people, I know you do. You think I'm leading them all on some merry chase until they're no use anymore. But this isn't a sacrificial altar, it's a court. Every last one of the men and women in the Last Chance Battle Royal is on trial and we are the judge, jury and executioner.”
His rhetoric descended further and further into lunacy. The justification for dragging these people into a war zone, the idea that they were somebody putting the entire world on trial for the sins inflicted on them, it was pure madness. I tried to find words but the only words that made sense were the truly obvious. ”You're insane...”
Mentis cackled in laughter, his transformation complete from depressive failure to risen messiah in a matter of minutes. Any attempt to make him look weak in front of his army had been forgotten in a wave of propaganda and delirium. ”Take a look around, Ezra, this isn't a world for sane people anymore. We gave every Grimm, Rick Majors and Loki a chance and look where it got us? Now it's our turn.”
