Post by Non Compos Mentis on Jul 5, 2017 17:10:16 GMT -5
Thursday June 22nd, 2017
“You told him?” I waited for a response in the mild twilight air of the Tar Heel State.
The night seemed more peaceful than it had in so very long. Sure there had been failure at Trauma 213; another loss to the unrelenting, undeniable... underwhelmingly dispassionate Grimm. But gold, new gold no less, sat around my waist once more.
“Exactly as you said, Sir.” Pike's eager-to-please redneck tones attacked through the payphone receiver, and with them a burst of background noise that rendered my lieutenant almost inaudible.
“And?” I turned my head as another crackle of background noise fizzed through the phone line, just in time to see an SUV speed by with a Pure Class Wrestling banner flying from a rear window. I gave silent thanks that I'd raised my hood out of hard-earned instinct, and less silent chastisement of the fans who had mercilessly booed as I'd walked away from T213 with as the Underground King.
After years of being a Pure Class Wrestling legend and giving the fans their hero and villain, I watched them cheer a punk with a superiority complex as if he were a true king. Those same faithful fans who had cheered the irascible egotism of the God of Game, it was their hypocrisy that spurred me on to take that title away from their false idol.
And with that gold hanging over my shoulder, I used it to send a message all the way back home to St Jude's Shelter and the slowly fading light of one Ezra Colne.
“Oh he's still screaming.” Pike spoke with a strange mixture of mirth and depression that could only be found in the voice of a man who'd been broken and reassembled several times over until the remains ceased to fit together properly anymore. “I'd punch him but it'd be like hitting a really pissed off newborn baby... it's really pathetic, Sir.”
The background noise broke through again and now it was clear. The pathetic screech had sounded like static before, but now the noise was all too clear. The hate-filled scream, muffled by an industrial cooler door, must have been quickly exhausting what little energy Ezra had left.
In the dying light by the side of a North Carolina street, I grinned down the receiver. “I'm sorry, Pike, but you'll have to put up with it. Let him mewl and whine as much as he wants, when he realises that nobody listening it'll push him even further toward the edge.”
“You got it, Boss. I'll just take it out on Dell, he's due a good beating by now.” And just like that all concern was gone from Pike's voice. There was never a concern for the safety of the weakling ghoul held captive in his cool, only the driving need to please his king. A purer follower I would never find. “Drive safe, Sir!”
Friday June 23rd, 2017
“Ezra...” I had to push through a crowd to get to the door. A single scream wouldn't flutter an eyelid, but a solid day of wailing with only pause to take oxygen would cause a commotion in even the most unusual of communities.
Ezra, confronted with the gold-bolstered fact that his tormentor had proven his relevance and dominance once again, had bawled from the moment Pike had told him of my victory at the Battle Bowl to the moment I walked in the door. I heard him, I left him and I gave him several more hours of hoarse hollering before even bothering to find his door.
“Ezra...?” I asked again through the never-ending torrent of hatred that spewed forth.
He didn't respond, not with real words at least. A rise in his voice, a will to show me his disdain, perhaps, not no words.
It made no difference.
My whole life people had tried to prove me wrong, tell me that I was nothing and nobody. Even my own mind pitted my own thoughts against me. The vile, seething hate that my own brain fed itself would drive a normal man to death... but not me.
After decades of feeling time's twisted arrow wrap itself around my neck, it had become nothing but background noise. And so Ezra had become.
“Scream all you like, you'll never scream loud enough to take this away. You'll never scream loud enough to rise above the screams I hear every single day. You're just another instrument in the harmony of suffering, and I am the conductor.”
Monday June 26th, 2017
“Two days of silence and now...” Pike, his brow furrowed, paced back and forth across my room. Small by common standards, it was the largest of the bedrooms the shelter offered. Even then Pike made it barely a couple of steps before anxiously doubling back on himself.
“Now what?” I muttered back from reading the latest news on Trauma 214. The God of Mischief wasted no time in putting my title to work and my first defence was set; a rematch of sorts from the Icemann Invitational against Alexandra Tamora.
“Well... he's praying.” I lifted my gaze from the computer screen... even we barbaric heathens have our mod-cons, at least the important ones do anyway. Pike's eyes stopped darting around the room for a moment to realise I was staring a hole through his equally furry and balding head. “At least that's what I think he's doing. I'm not a man of God, Sir... I know it's hard to believe.”
As Pike cracked a nervous smile, I did on the inside. It actually made a funny kind of sense; I'd already repaid Kyle Shane for his part in the Icemann Invitational Final and taken from him a measure of recompense, so perhaps it was just right to do the same with the overly hoppy time-bunny herself.
Tamora made her life seem like an awful nineties sci-fi show; bouncing around time like a plastic bag in the wind until she found herself in the middle of Pure Class Wrestling, talking to voices in her head and mustering feats of strength unseen for someone of her stature. It was nonsense... but a nonsense I knew.
The touch of insanity is a cruel one, taking away parts of a person's identity until nothing is left to recognise. Perhaps she's lost someone, or something unspeakable had happened to her once upon a time, and she'd distanced herself the only way her tattered mind could cobble together.
Whatever had happened to her, Alexandra Tamora was not a being from another space and time. She was not the flotsam and jetsam of some timey-wimey wormhole that suddenly snapped shut in our now. She was a broken young woman who had found her way into a very dangerous place.
“It's all he has left. The first teachings of The Order, the base morality of all his life. The righteous light fighting against the immoral shadows.” As Ezra shed himself of the burdens of his memories and experiences, so Alexandra would she herself of these crazy delusions. Hearing voices? Being dislodged from her home reality? Not understanding her own body? How long would it take for her to see her delusions and come to terms with her own mind as I had done?
“So when he stops... we've won?” Pike grinned as if he'd cracked the code, the way to make Ezra see what I was trying to accomplish.
But he was wrong. “No, Pike. When he stops praying, the last of his memories are gone. He'll learn what happens when he can't remember who he is, but he hasn't learned what it takes to survive when you've lost all knowledge of what you are.”
Saturday 1st July, 2017
Eventually the realisation will fall on each and every person; it doesn't matter how many false idols they replace me with, how many gods and time-travellers they worship in my place, there is only one constant in Pure Class Wrestling.
One too many times they forgot about me, they buried me in a mire of obscurity and from it I rose to take gold and the rightful title of King. Kyle Shane had written me off and out of the ignominy of that insult I had proven the God of Game wrong. The same would happen when Alexandra Tamora brought her fake-futures and blithe fairytales to the ring with her. They would be no defence.
“Just do it.” The voice came from the floor, and with it a skeletal hand reached out and clutched the toe of my boot. Should I have wanted to, I could have crushed every bone with a single step. With no energy left to drag itself further, the ghoul whispered on. “Kill me.”
“No, Ezra.” And I opened the door wide in an offer of freedom, an offer only a king can make to his subject. Before his king, Ezra's time-withered body was laid bare and broken, an empty vessel save for the last dying embers of life. ”Now we're just starting to get somewhere.”
“You told him?” I waited for a response in the mild twilight air of the Tar Heel State.
The night seemed more peaceful than it had in so very long. Sure there had been failure at Trauma 213; another loss to the unrelenting, undeniable... underwhelmingly dispassionate Grimm. But gold, new gold no less, sat around my waist once more.
“Exactly as you said, Sir.” Pike's eager-to-please redneck tones attacked through the payphone receiver, and with them a burst of background noise that rendered my lieutenant almost inaudible.
“And?” I turned my head as another crackle of background noise fizzed through the phone line, just in time to see an SUV speed by with a Pure Class Wrestling banner flying from a rear window. I gave silent thanks that I'd raised my hood out of hard-earned instinct, and less silent chastisement of the fans who had mercilessly booed as I'd walked away from T213 with as the Underground King.
After years of being a Pure Class Wrestling legend and giving the fans their hero and villain, I watched them cheer a punk with a superiority complex as if he were a true king. Those same faithful fans who had cheered the irascible egotism of the God of Game, it was their hypocrisy that spurred me on to take that title away from their false idol.
And with that gold hanging over my shoulder, I used it to send a message all the way back home to St Jude's Shelter and the slowly fading light of one Ezra Colne.
“Oh he's still screaming.” Pike spoke with a strange mixture of mirth and depression that could only be found in the voice of a man who'd been broken and reassembled several times over until the remains ceased to fit together properly anymore. “I'd punch him but it'd be like hitting a really pissed off newborn baby... it's really pathetic, Sir.”
The background noise broke through again and now it was clear. The pathetic screech had sounded like static before, but now the noise was all too clear. The hate-filled scream, muffled by an industrial cooler door, must have been quickly exhausting what little energy Ezra had left.
In the dying light by the side of a North Carolina street, I grinned down the receiver. “I'm sorry, Pike, but you'll have to put up with it. Let him mewl and whine as much as he wants, when he realises that nobody listening it'll push him even further toward the edge.”
“You got it, Boss. I'll just take it out on Dell, he's due a good beating by now.” And just like that all concern was gone from Pike's voice. There was never a concern for the safety of the weakling ghoul held captive in his cool, only the driving need to please his king. A purer follower I would never find. “Drive safe, Sir!”
Friday June 23rd, 2017
“Ezra...” I had to push through a crowd to get to the door. A single scream wouldn't flutter an eyelid, but a solid day of wailing with only pause to take oxygen would cause a commotion in even the most unusual of communities.
Ezra, confronted with the gold-bolstered fact that his tormentor had proven his relevance and dominance once again, had bawled from the moment Pike had told him of my victory at the Battle Bowl to the moment I walked in the door. I heard him, I left him and I gave him several more hours of hoarse hollering before even bothering to find his door.
“Ezra...?” I asked again through the never-ending torrent of hatred that spewed forth.
He didn't respond, not with real words at least. A rise in his voice, a will to show me his disdain, perhaps, not no words.
It made no difference.
My whole life people had tried to prove me wrong, tell me that I was nothing and nobody. Even my own mind pitted my own thoughts against me. The vile, seething hate that my own brain fed itself would drive a normal man to death... but not me.
After decades of feeling time's twisted arrow wrap itself around my neck, it had become nothing but background noise. And so Ezra had become.
“Scream all you like, you'll never scream loud enough to take this away. You'll never scream loud enough to rise above the screams I hear every single day. You're just another instrument in the harmony of suffering, and I am the conductor.”
Monday June 26th, 2017
“Two days of silence and now...” Pike, his brow furrowed, paced back and forth across my room. Small by common standards, it was the largest of the bedrooms the shelter offered. Even then Pike made it barely a couple of steps before anxiously doubling back on himself.
“Now what?” I muttered back from reading the latest news on Trauma 214. The God of Mischief wasted no time in putting my title to work and my first defence was set; a rematch of sorts from the Icemann Invitational against Alexandra Tamora.
“Well... he's praying.” I lifted my gaze from the computer screen... even we barbaric heathens have our mod-cons, at least the important ones do anyway. Pike's eyes stopped darting around the room for a moment to realise I was staring a hole through his equally furry and balding head. “At least that's what I think he's doing. I'm not a man of God, Sir... I know it's hard to believe.”
As Pike cracked a nervous smile, I did on the inside. It actually made a funny kind of sense; I'd already repaid Kyle Shane for his part in the Icemann Invitational Final and taken from him a measure of recompense, so perhaps it was just right to do the same with the overly hoppy time-bunny herself.
Tamora made her life seem like an awful nineties sci-fi show; bouncing around time like a plastic bag in the wind until she found herself in the middle of Pure Class Wrestling, talking to voices in her head and mustering feats of strength unseen for someone of her stature. It was nonsense... but a nonsense I knew.
The touch of insanity is a cruel one, taking away parts of a person's identity until nothing is left to recognise. Perhaps she's lost someone, or something unspeakable had happened to her once upon a time, and she'd distanced herself the only way her tattered mind could cobble together.
Whatever had happened to her, Alexandra Tamora was not a being from another space and time. She was not the flotsam and jetsam of some timey-wimey wormhole that suddenly snapped shut in our now. She was a broken young woman who had found her way into a very dangerous place.
“It's all he has left. The first teachings of The Order, the base morality of all his life. The righteous light fighting against the immoral shadows.” As Ezra shed himself of the burdens of his memories and experiences, so Alexandra would she herself of these crazy delusions. Hearing voices? Being dislodged from her home reality? Not understanding her own body? How long would it take for her to see her delusions and come to terms with her own mind as I had done?
“So when he stops... we've won?” Pike grinned as if he'd cracked the code, the way to make Ezra see what I was trying to accomplish.
But he was wrong. “No, Pike. When he stops praying, the last of his memories are gone. He'll learn what happens when he can't remember who he is, but he hasn't learned what it takes to survive when you've lost all knowledge of what you are.”
Saturday 1st July, 2017
Eventually the realisation will fall on each and every person; it doesn't matter how many false idols they replace me with, how many gods and time-travellers they worship in my place, there is only one constant in Pure Class Wrestling.
One too many times they forgot about me, they buried me in a mire of obscurity and from it I rose to take gold and the rightful title of King. Kyle Shane had written me off and out of the ignominy of that insult I had proven the God of Game wrong. The same would happen when Alexandra Tamora brought her fake-futures and blithe fairytales to the ring with her. They would be no defence.
“Just do it.” The voice came from the floor, and with it a skeletal hand reached out and clutched the toe of my boot. Should I have wanted to, I could have crushed every bone with a single step. With no energy left to drag itself further, the ghoul whispered on. “Kill me.”
“No, Ezra.” And I opened the door wide in an offer of freedom, an offer only a king can make to his subject. Before his king, Ezra's time-withered body was laid bare and broken, an empty vessel save for the last dying embers of life. ”Now we're just starting to get somewhere.”
