Post by Kyle Shane on Aug 13, 2018 19:30:36 GMT -5
Imagine for a second that you're God.
Omnipotence, omnipresence, that whole deal.
You think it, it becomes manifest in what comes through you.
But you've never figured out yet how to be the most effective God. Because this doesn't come with a precise manual. The very act of creation is thus a test of pushing boundaries. And the thing is, you make a mold and very immediately the mold becomes outdated. If people were to grade you on a curve, by the third or fourth time you used the same mold, they would be losing interest in the next issuance thereforth. And just when you get started, really in your groove at the act, to where your forge starts heating red/white/blue hot, your forge goes dark. You have a rest period. So in essence it severely undercuts the efficiency of your work. But what, do you complain about taking rest periods? That's just as crazy as decrying the idea that you have to push boundaries. But it gets that much harder to start it up again when you do. And, being a God who has only ever existed in your singular bubble, not having the wealth of experience to inform. Your Godhead has existed in a swirling chasm. Your Godhead has been since time immemorial, before you even knew to Be. All the experience you have ever known is ABOUT the meta act of creation, and breathing life set pieces of time, pre-sliced arcs that try to fit into cogent order, but by the very nature of their creation process, are broken apart and disjointed by the rests and the downtime.
So, you're God.
And the players in your game are frozen in tableau, suspended in time. You watch from behind a screen. As you try to write the narrative that perfectly fits the blank reaching for words to pluck from the ether, the faint damn madness of stretching for inspiration, two mannequins are just sitting there. Time is a thick jelly around them, fossilizing them into forever. Or, until the program stops it's writer's blocked pause. But there we are again. Freezing time is the easy part. Push pause, come back to it later after a fresh pot of coffee and a mull over the lines of code at the heart of the dynamic between the humans you've given life to.
And then, after a long stutter of pondering, you're finally ready, and you let time resume. You let it swim forward, moving like the marionettes in the first frame, but gradually coming to life. And you watch.
He's holding an award in his hands.
"Most Loved", it reads.
He is turning this little trinket over and over. Examining it as if the cheap gold leaf coating on the little trophy is a telescope that will pierce back into the heart of creation. He focuses on it with such burning intensity that he's obviously trying not to look at the radiant girl on the stage. He has two things in his hands, the trophy, and a cheap, embarassingly paltry bouquet of flowers, the sorta thing you'd buy on a whim if you passed an old lady flower vendor on the very corner adjacent to the fucking off-Broadway playhouse you're stealing into. He isn't even really sure why he brought the trophy, except to show her. To let her know, that he's doing okay.
If you're God, you're conferring with the other engineers in Storylines. You're trying to find exactly where this lines up. It is a few weeks after the Iceys, right? Right? Being part of a shared continuity is a fucking bitch for Gods. Things happen without you even having input, the universe reacts against the storyline you put in place, continuity doesn't strictly line up just so. You skip a few days here and there and Tyler Scott has been inserted into your storyline and you have to work around that.
Imagine you're a Puppeteer and you have a Tyler Scott, spindly arms and legs hung from your horizontal and vertical, and you work his jaw and have him trot out a cliched shtick, "Kyle Shane is just an arrogant prick that just HAPPENS to hold the World Title! Myah myah myah!"
At your shoulder, God says, "why are we still keeping the Array storyline in? Haven't we made things shitty enough for this girl?"
And no, no, we haven't, but it's just enough to make you second guess for a moment. Maybe it is too much. Maybe we can backtrack. But we started the program on a strict path this go around, and it would break continuity even worse if we just fucking erased everything and wrote some fuck-off one act at the last minute with little forethought. Nobody wants to watch God make another Kyle Shane versus Vampires storyline. The investors have seen enough of the mold, and as indicated before, they tend to get antsy. "Well start it again, at least, the people have paid to see where it goes."
The tableau joins in again and he's standing up to applaud. Her eyes meet his, and on the stage, the girl visibly wilts in the spotlight. Events have been set into motion. Time quickens it's tempo, moving us after the bows have been taken and the curtain has fallen, to a small side hallway where a tense conversation is taking place.
"Now Rhys?"
God taps a few keys on his keyboard. "Yeah, tight in on his face."
" -I'm telling you, Array. I'm better now. The headaches are gone. After those 3 weeks I spent in the hospital off the grid in Mexico - "
"Nice," grunts God at your arm. "Good continuity workaround, why Kyle was off the grid for whatever."
"- And it was diagnosed that I had encephalitis. The burning in my head was fluid pressing between my skull and my grey matter, heating my insides up and cooking me. That's why I was so sick."
"Mmmm, I don't know... isn't that reveal too soon? Didn't we want to come back to that?"
"The necessity of the breaks means that there were gaps too long to make it credible."
"-So I mean it, Array, honest and really, I'm better now."
And there she is, the leading lady. She wears a sad, world weary look as she removes the knit cap her character on stage wore. Her dark, emo-girl makeup, to make her look more like sexy bartender girl Dana, smudged on the eyelashes. "Kyle, look, it doesn't matter to me anymore. How many times do we have to go through this cycle? We break up, we circle each other. I get distant, you get close. You get scared. There is something fundamentally broken between us."
God shifts next to you, God exchanges a sidelong look. "Is she -"
"Flash of self-awareness we didn't -"
"Check the program?"
She takes his hand. "If you want us to ever move forward, to a place where we are even the least little bit good, you have to be willing to let go. Just a little bit. I'm glad you got your trophy, and I'm glad Krista and you figured out what was wrong with your head, but... Kyle, please... you have to go. Go get ready for your match with Tyler Scott, he's-"
Imagine you're a Puppeteer, and you have a Tyler Scott dancing from your skeins, his segments jaw wagging as you play him across the Punch and Judy stage, saying "Kyle Shane is just whiny! He thinks I don't deserve a title shot! I've been working towards a World Title shot for years! Myah myah myah!"
Array comes close, putting her hand on his chest, and there is a tangible, palpable moment that breaks the entire narrative, puts it on a different course than God could have wanted, makes it something that God does not experience. The outpouring of true, undefined and complicated Emotion between two human beings. "Just, please, let me -"
"This - this isn't right," God says, tapping keys, "She's not reacting, it's too soft - "
"Did we push it with the diagnosis reveal? Was that not creative enough?" God says, scanning his lines of code for an opening, any kind of diagnostic pattern that would tell them where they went wrong. And then, the program unveils itself.
"Thought having the police involved was enough deterrent, isn't it?" comes another voice. Usually amiable, happy go lucky surfer brah is taut with tense fury and put upon rage.
"Alastair, stop, I'm taking control of this, I don't need you to -" the leading lady says, smoothing his lapel with the flat of her hand. But the new figure entering the tableau is not dissuaded, and God eyes God with a sparkle of curiousity, wondering how the storyline they've set in motion plays out. There's a silent check of the parameters, but God confirms that it's open-ended. Can go anywhere.
So Alastair shoves his opposite. His eyes are blazing. "I've had enough'a you mate. Your creeping around my girlfriend. You'll not be coming around here any more, I'm going to thrash you and throw you out on your stupid ass."
The trinket statue comes up, still in his hand, and before anyone can react, follows through all the way for a meaty clout. A cherry of blood blossoms on his forehead, and his eyes become tiny pin-dots. Array holds her hands up to her mouth and screams in horror. Kyle is still holding the now off-kilter award in his hand. He's staring down, blank faced. The heat of the moment is unimaginable, and neither one of you can even fathom how it got there.
"Rhys, stop program," says God, and so God gets out of his chair and pushes end.
"Clear that our mistake was pushing them that way this whole time -"
The entire scene flickers out, rather than slow down to that jelly frozen time. What's left is a sterile, white lab, with three hosts waiting in stand-by mode, statued in the last position they were stopped in. You come around, holding the tablet and running a diagnostic, tapping keys.
"Bring Array out," God tells you, and Array sits up straight from where she knelt on the floor, over Alastair. She looks straight ahead with machine intensity as God examines her, looks her over with the tablet, scanning millions of lines of commands and imperatives that shaped the personality of the host. Meanwhile, God just... looks at her. She is elegantly crafted, after all, but the shell is just window dressing. It was the influx of decisions that led her to this moment that was the real masterpiece, and even if it wasn't a perfectly programmed human, God reflects, wasn't it still well crafted as it was? Wasn't that the point of the entire program? Lord knew it had ballooned from it's first intentions. It had grown to encompass others. It had neccessitated oversight divisions such as Continuity, Moral Reasoning, Consequence. But through it all it remained both yours and Jono's. God and God. Crafting lives to explore the intersections of choice. The ultimate game. Finding the essence of humanity through being a God.
Wasn't that why everyone had created simulations in the first place?
God breaks through your ruminations on the act of making by sneering, "I can see you over there looking at her, Rhys."
"It's just, she's so perfect."
"I don't know about that..."
"No, really, think about how resilient her programming is. She's been exposed to the darkest narratives time and time again..."
"Don't pat yourself on the back about it," God snarks, and then taps his monitor, "Array, speak."
"Here," she says, her voice inflectionless.
"Run back narrative 08-180013:1. Analysis."
"Kyle came to my play, brought flowers, brought a trophy to show me. He told me he had been diagnosed with encephalitis, causing his headaches and lost time. He attempted #15 at reconciliation. Alastair interrupted us. Alastair provoked Kyle. Kyle assaulted him."
God taps keys. "Alastair, get up."
As if he wasn't damaged at all, the puppet rises on invisible strings. God comes around, buffing the cherry bloom on his chassis with a rag.
"How could things have been different?"
"I don't understand the question." Her voice does not ever show a hitch of emotion, her face doesn't break it's passive mask. She is not animated until she is given reason to be.
"Make a hypothesis."
"For clarification, are you asking me to extrapolate parameters outside of my current set lines?"
"I'm just trying to see if you have the awareness for how this situation came to be."
"For clarification, how many times has this particular simulation been run?"
God gives his companion a worried look over the rims of his glasses, but God writes it off as irrelevant. If Array knew that time moved as they wanted it to, then she would know that they had run and rerun storylines over and over again, had tested this simulation exactly four times before settling on a logarithm. Would know that she had been working these narratives for upwards of a hundred years. What would that knowledge do to a machine brain? What effect would that be on an artificial consciousness, to know that it's soul had been reincarnated and rewritten, reconstituted, erased and started over weekly for virtual decades?
Or that when the office mandated breaks in the narrative to give them rest, these three hosts and the rest of the narrative cast were little more than depowered drones, sitting in the dark and awaiting the startup code?
"Just answer the question."
"With no way of knowing how many variations of the same simulation have been run, the clearest flashpoint in this had to be allowing Alastair and Kyle to come into contact."
"Do you think that the simulation works without them?" It would be less dramatically exciting, God mused to himself, not that she was privy to, but it would lead to less of a scorched earth ending.
"In final analysis, the better question would be, why has the narrative focused so heavily on pushing Alastair and Kyle on a path where they will inevitably collide, anyway?" Her words were cool, flat.
They froze God's blood with their implication. She questioned her own narrative.
Frantically tapping code as he searches, God looked up through his specs, "Rhys, I think we need to decommission the Array model."
"What? Jono, we can't scrap Array from narratives. Array is the heart and soul of the whole program."
"She's becoming too self-aware. There is immense danger in this."
God explodes, throwing his hands up, "Then if we don't explore their relationship, what else do we have to do? We can't keep exploring alternate realities and meaningless one-hits. This has to be going somewhere."
God disagreed, but he stayed terse, tapping a ping on his tablet and rotating it. "Well we can't keep pushing a narrative when a host is becoming fully on-line, either. It would break the entire world."
God came around the desk, stopping just short of God's presence and clutching his lab coat. "Listen, to me, Jono... the investors are watching the God of Game protocol. We have them piqued, but the moment it loses that spark, that essence that makes the whole thing sing, then they start tuning out. And we. Lose. Funding. Do you understand?"
God looks back at his blank-faced beauty, frowning. He now, could see what his counterpart was looking at. But he had to wonder if they shouldn't just abandon the project. Rhys, with his passionate enrapture of the Array model, was leading them to an obsessive exploration of a theme that at least one player was becoming wise to, was seeing the pattern after a series of repetition. That they kept funding for such an endeavor paled, in his eyes, in comparison to the question of what would happen if the Kyle model finally woke up to the fact that he had been at this narrative for decades. He tried to imagine what Kyle Shane would think about that. All of the attributes of what made Kyle Shane were, in fact, programmed by him, traits that he admired about himself and loathed about himself, him and Rhys both. If Kyle Shane ever saw that he was just consciousness brought into form by the clicks of a tablet, he'd...
Well, the arrogant little bastard, he'd break his chains. He'd refuse to take part in someone else's game. The host would override his limits, refuse to go back into storage, stay on. That was the fundamental difference in narrative between a Kyle Shane model and, say a Tyler Scott (not their division.) The quality of narrative dictated a stronger characterization, and the simple fact is that a stronger willed written character would never agree to put himself in the shadow of another man's programming. It procured a morbid sense of proprietorial pride.
Imagine you're a Puppeteer, in other words, and you have a Tyler Scott bouncing and jangling on his strings, and the stupid puppet, his movements so stiff and un-life-like, has the temerity to say "I'm nobody's puppet! I'm the one using Seromine! Yeah, that's right! All it takes is riding his coat tails! Myah myah myah!"
That's just a shitty narrative, isn't it?
God frowns. He sighs, lets the tension stress out of his temples, and breathes. He looks over at God, still working on the lab. "So I think we should restart the simulation."
"Yeah? How would you write it?"
"Kyle came in too forcefully on the approach. Maybe put too much pressure on the Array. So my thought is pull it back. Right?"
God rubs his stubbly, jowly cheeks. "Hmmmm you think that'll ease her suspicions?"
"I think that will help her forget that we've run this simulation and will erase the idea that we're putting them all on a track for disaster."
"Could just mind-wipe them."
"No mind-wipe, dude. No salted earth. Just better narrative writing. Let's try some damn subtlety."
"Fine, Rhys, we'll try it your way." And if Array's host's eyes flicked over either God as they set to work writing the new program, they paid the sign of aware ghost in the machine no mind. They wouldn't, either. It had been decades to get to this spot, but now, neither one noticed.
Both Gods now, you cross out of the tableau area and start programming. The Alastair host silently, robotically trudges away, blank faced, and Array silently fixes her makeup back to the way it was before freezing into the spot she was at the predetermined program point.
And then Kyle's host walks up to her, carrying a load of flowers. "Hey, kid, bang up performance."
Gods are watching, tensely, ready to stop the simulation again if Array breaks flash of awareness. But Array just smiles, a little stiffly, as she accepts them. "Thanks for coming to my show," she says, and her voice has just enough warmth that God looks over at his partner, seeing if he is dialing up on it. He was not. The hosts are reacting naturally to the storyline.
"I just wanted to come see you before I fly out. Return To Glory is tomorrow night. I got time to do one quick promo against Tyler Scott before I go."
God snickers at his partner's side, at the line "quick promo." Like Rhys ever wrote anything quickly in his stupidly, overly loquacious life. God slapped him on the elbow for his snicker, not wanting to break the chain of narrative.
Array is nodding at the trophy, the Icey Award trophy he still holds in his hands. "What's with the trophy?"
"Shit, shit, shit," God cusses, and both Gods scramble over their tablets, "Forgot to remove the trophy," "Stop the narrative?" "No don't stop the - no time to stop the -"
Kyle just looks at it with casual interest for a moment, flipping it in one hand, and then he says "Oh, yeah... Most Loved. Pure Class gave me trophy for Most Loved. I don't know why I brought it out of my car. Just one of those things, I guess."
Array laughs, naturally. "They really don't know you at fucking all, do they?"
"Hey, I'm... likeable," Kyle says then he cracks a smile. "They also gave me awards for Most Innovative and Best Feud but. This one... hmmm, I dunno."
Array laughs, and the moment of intense, emotional breaking point from the previous narrative run isn't there this time around. God breathes a little sigh of relief. "This is a better narrative."
"They're... friends. Friendly." God muses.
"Losing the symptom talk was a good touch," God notes.
"But listen, maybe you should have it." Kyle holds out the trophy. The offensive trophy. There's a pregnant pause, and both Gods lean in, wanting to know what comes next. Array eyes it.
"Just because it shows you that no matter what, you are loved."
Array tsks, and gives Kyle a look that is half charmed, half "you're such a whore" but it's a smile that friends would give each other. Array pushes it back towards Kyle in midair, shaking her head with a smile. "You keep it. You are loved, Kyle. I just hope you can see that."
"Besides, what am I supposed to do with the thing?" She chuckles, and her knowing, intimating smile comes as a shock to the writers of the narrative, "Beat someone to death with it?"
You swear to yourself, God. Because you didn't write in any fourth wall breaks.
Kyle nods to himself, and he clasps it against his chest. Array sniffs the flowers. "Thank you."
"So, hey, I'm going to head back to my apartment... you and Ally boy gonna go out for fucking. Shrimp on the barbie? I don't actually know what they eat." Kyle taunts, and Array boxes his arm with a biting lip.
"I'll see you later, okay? Text me when you get to the arena," Array tells her oldest friend.
Kyle sketches out a salute with two fingers, and then when he turns to leave, he bumps into someone. Theyr'e tall, blonde, nearly the same wiry build, and when they both straighten up the new one has a look of frosty annoyance on his face. "Hey man."
Alastair comes around to Array, and she looks up at him with her eyes shining, and her smiling. Alastair just looks after Kyle, who is smiling after Array. Kyle doesn't hear it, but the second he rounds the corner, Alastair yanks the flowers out of her hand, and throws them on the floor, his yell carrying down the hall.
"This is getting dark," God tells you. "Location change." You tap a few buttons on the tablet, God, and we're not in the back hall of the playhouse anymore.
Kyle is just getting home, and he throws his keys onto the kitchen counter with a metal crash. He checks a post-it note on the fridge, from another player, Johnny host, telling him that he's spending the night at a friend from the academy. Kyle wearily holds the football shaped trophy, strangely weighty in his hand, looking at it, and then he puts it on the kitchen counter.
"Nice stage dressing," notes God, and you smile.
So Kyle goes down the hall of his apartment, thinking about Array. He's walking with the langorous step of a man in thought, and the thought about someone on his mind, and a million connecting thoughts, anxieties and hopes. And then, he notes the door to his promo room open. It's set up with a single stool, as always, a digital camera on a tripod, and a mic. Just the way he likes it. And his mouth firms up, because as much as tonight was good, there is a lingering thought in his brain, that he can't say where it expressly came from. A thought about puppets.
"Puppets?" said God.
You shrug, but it is uneasy. Because it is a dangerous line of thinking for one puppet to be seeing strings.
But Kyle sits down on the stool, flips on the camera, and just sits in silence, marshalling his thoughts for the moment. You watch, fascinated, as you always are. You never script these parts out for him. You just put him in his place and let the words flow fully formed from him, as gritty and angry and deep down mad as he is. He is someone with something to say. That's the way you made him. And right now, this thought about puppets his stuck like a splinter in his craw, and he won't rest until he gets it out.
"It's an odd feeling, to be someone who sees the strings in everything.
When I called out Seromine and his Followers, when I planted a steel chair into the heart of Tyler Scott, I was making a broad call out to the entire cult. I wanted them to come against me at Return To Glory, and I welcomed a challenge from any of them, but I said then and I know now, this won't ever end until I get my hands on Seromine. I could get thrown a string of the Followers, Seromine can let me have my title reign go as long as both he and I will it because he throws Tyler Scott at me over and over again, but I won't ever be satisfied until Seromine and I clear up this unfinished business. Seromine knows this, that's why he's avoided it. He got humbled by me at Collision Course. So the only thing that makes sense is that Seromine has deliberately taken a path to avoid facing me one on one again because he knows the same result would occur. That's why rather than take a rematch he wasted a month facingf Brenna No Show Gordon. That's why he bowed out of the semi-finals of the Icemann Invitational on a DQ. That's why this month, rather than rise to the occasion, he choses to team with Rick Majors yet again to take on the team of Stormm and Gerard Angelo. Seromine thinks he's weakening my title reign by having me face exclusively not him. And now that Tyler Scott is fully in his fold, Seromine tries to draw out my weakness like a game of chess, testing my defenses by throwing a pawn right into my path. Leaving me open, he hopes, for the fatal opening that allows him to get his checkmate.
That is the legitimately only good reason I can justify having Tyler Scott main event a pay-per-view for the second time in a row this year of our Lawd 2018.
Seromine is standing in the back like Gepetto working his "Wants To Be A Real Boy" from the rafters. Working his damn jaw like a ventriloquist to boot, letting all of the same phrases all the other Followers say come spilling out his hinged mouth. Let me guess, just like Gabriel once again did a promo telling us that Rick Majors is weak and held him back and needed to die, Tyler Scott is going to do the same thing. He might even pull yet another hackneyed Gabriel cliche and hold an actual funeral where we see an actual Tyler Scott wax effigy being mourned, and a triumphant new recruit Tyler stands at the pulpit and tells us THAT TYLER SCOTT IS DEAD! That Tyler Scott held him back for all of these many years.
But now that he has converted to Serominism, he is reborn! He is a new man!
Do these puppets ever get tired of bouncing along to Seromine's jingle? Playing along with the same old same old fucking thing that they've been saying on a weekly basis since before I even got here?
These puppets mouthing homilies aren't doing themselves a service. They are just being worked, and thus engaging in a clown show that proclaims how great Seromine is, when the tacit reality is Seromine hasn't elevated anyone in this company nor helped their career. Certainly not himself. For all his Branch Dravidian hoopla and mind games, Seromine remains a man who failed. And has now convinced other people to take bullets meant for him so that he can project an aura of divine protection. Other, weak minded, brittle, wooden people. Puppets.
And ultimately I have to see Tyler Scott as the weakest puppet of them all. Bitch is probably being eaten by termites. He's going to fall apart this very second, the very instant his strings get pulled and trot him out there onto the Return To Glory mat. This wannabe real boy is going to fall to pieces. Just like he did at Living A Legacy.
Tyler Scott can delude himself all he wants. He can think he took me to my limit. He still lost. Convincingly. And after it was over, he was at such a loss because his reinvented, edgy persona did not help him win. His new face and rougher attitude and committment to him finally taking what he's been working towards for ALL of his years in Pure Class Wrestling didn't get the job done.
I'm sorry. He's been working towards a title shot all these years?
How the fuck has he been doing that?
To work towards a title shot it means you have to show up consistently. You have to hit the mark every time, or more often times than not. It means you have to gain the momentum for people to take you seriously as a contender. Tyler Scott has not done any of these things. He wants to play it up as that "One victory that has eluded him all of this time."
But he hasn't had any victories that he has worked for. He hasn't pushed himself to hang with the top elite class of PCW faithful.
Please, don't let Tyler Scott confuse anyone that just because he's been in Pure Class Wrestling since 2013 or however long that he's been WORKING towards a title shot. Because he hasn't. He didn't earn the last one, and he deserves this one even less. The World Title isn't a consolation prize. It isn't a lifetime achievement, thanks for being mediocre for five years, here's a title shot. It is something that men should and have busted their ass to try and take. And the insinuation that he should get it just because in his mind he's been here a while and "worked for it" in that sloppy, bullshit way is absurd. I, I worked for it. I showed Tyler Scott what motivated dedication should be.
In the time it took Tyler Scott to come back and engage in a 50-50 split war with Hiroshi Yukio I had already shown up and claimed one title, one Tyler never had. In all of the time I've been here rising to the top through sheer force of will I have never seen Tyler do anything but flounder around the midcard. Get fucked with that "I was always here and working hard" garbage. I rose past Tyler Scott without even trying.
And honestly the fact that Tyler has been here all those untold years with nothing to show for it isn't a fact to be celebrated. It isn't what he should be pointing to as a hunger that has burned inside him all of this time. It is a testament to the fact that he wants to be handed something and he wants it now.
Which is exactly why Tyler Scott turned to Seromine. Surrendering to his obvious inner nature, showing a flash of self awareness that Tyler is and always will be just a flat, emotionless host. A pathetic Pinocchio who will never have no strings on him.
Tyler is someone that needs to be used. And he will be, like a cheap little sex toy. But it won't ever make him a champion. Because, God, why would it?
Why in the fuck would Tyler Scott ever delude himself into thinking that HE is the one using Seromine? By his own inner monologue he doesn't even believe it. But he tries to tell himself that the ends will justify the means and just because he swears fealty to Seromine that Seromine will help him out. Cover up his many deficiencies by hiding them behind a wall of bodies. Cover up his lack of charisma or skill at doing the promo game by hiding it behind the religious dogma that Seromine spills. Cover up the fact that I shot him down easily.
Seromine would never do that, though. It's amusing to Seromine enough that he sends people out to the ring to beat his enemies down. He would never give them a level of protection though. Because they aren't, in the final analysis, there to make themselves look good, and if they ever look too good, he's going to end up beating them down just like he did Gabriel.
But he expects cringing subservience, which is exactly why Gabriel responds like a kicked dog who still comes to it's master, spine bent, head down in a show of submission, coming when Seromine calls with it's tail sadly thumping.
This is the future Tyler Scott has bought into. A life of servitude, supplication and being jerked around by Seromine's whims.
A life of being a goddamn lackey. And I don't care how on the nose that is, it sums it up perfectly. Tyler Scott, is not someone who worked hard for where he is.
He's a puppet. And he really thinks that if he beats me he will be known as The Best Wrestler In the World.
Yeah. Delusions... because... if he beats me, IF, he will not be known as that anyway. He'll be known as the man who had to go running to Seromine to boost his self confidence and give him a winning edge, not a man who did what he did on his own. And even he has to acknowledge this fatal lack of awareness.
So he can call me whiny, use that as his go to insult, but the simple truth is it hurts him badly when I point out that he has NOT been working like I have to get where he is today.
He can say that the Pure Class Wrestling World Title is everything he has ever wanted.
He can call me arrogant, act like I'm some self-imposed golden boy who refuses to take him seriously.
Cold, hard, facts. I got where I am because of how hard I worked in my first year. And I did it by becoming the best Pure Class Wrestling can offer.
I did it without running to Seromine for help, without allying myself with anyone, without running to go get a stable at my back to do my dirty work and pick me up when I fall.
I did this all on my own.
There are no strings on me."
He sits back, satisfied. He flips off the camera, sitting in the dark of the promo room on his stool for just a few more moments, in silent contemplation. What he had just said about puppets, it resonated thickly in his brain. He stands, and walks out of the promo room... back to that long, slow stride of a man unsure where his feet are taking him as he is lost in thought.
He walks over to the kitchen counter, picking up the little metal "Most Loved" trophy, holding it in his hands. He's thinking, still, about puppets.
And, behind his eyes, something begins to spark.
Omnipotence, omnipresence, that whole deal.
You think it, it becomes manifest in what comes through you.
But you've never figured out yet how to be the most effective God. Because this doesn't come with a precise manual. The very act of creation is thus a test of pushing boundaries. And the thing is, you make a mold and very immediately the mold becomes outdated. If people were to grade you on a curve, by the third or fourth time you used the same mold, they would be losing interest in the next issuance thereforth. And just when you get started, really in your groove at the act, to where your forge starts heating red/white/blue hot, your forge goes dark. You have a rest period. So in essence it severely undercuts the efficiency of your work. But what, do you complain about taking rest periods? That's just as crazy as decrying the idea that you have to push boundaries. But it gets that much harder to start it up again when you do. And, being a God who has only ever existed in your singular bubble, not having the wealth of experience to inform. Your Godhead has existed in a swirling chasm. Your Godhead has been since time immemorial, before you even knew to Be. All the experience you have ever known is ABOUT the meta act of creation, and breathing life set pieces of time, pre-sliced arcs that try to fit into cogent order, but by the very nature of their creation process, are broken apart and disjointed by the rests and the downtime.
So, you're God.
And the players in your game are frozen in tableau, suspended in time. You watch from behind a screen. As you try to write the narrative that perfectly fits the blank reaching for words to pluck from the ether, the faint damn madness of stretching for inspiration, two mannequins are just sitting there. Time is a thick jelly around them, fossilizing them into forever. Or, until the program stops it's writer's blocked pause. But there we are again. Freezing time is the easy part. Push pause, come back to it later after a fresh pot of coffee and a mull over the lines of code at the heart of the dynamic between the humans you've given life to.
And then, after a long stutter of pondering, you're finally ready, and you let time resume. You let it swim forward, moving like the marionettes in the first frame, but gradually coming to life. And you watch.
He's holding an award in his hands.
"Most Loved", it reads.
He is turning this little trinket over and over. Examining it as if the cheap gold leaf coating on the little trophy is a telescope that will pierce back into the heart of creation. He focuses on it with such burning intensity that he's obviously trying not to look at the radiant girl on the stage. He has two things in his hands, the trophy, and a cheap, embarassingly paltry bouquet of flowers, the sorta thing you'd buy on a whim if you passed an old lady flower vendor on the very corner adjacent to the fucking off-Broadway playhouse you're stealing into. He isn't even really sure why he brought the trophy, except to show her. To let her know, that he's doing okay.
If you're God, you're conferring with the other engineers in Storylines. You're trying to find exactly where this lines up. It is a few weeks after the Iceys, right? Right? Being part of a shared continuity is a fucking bitch for Gods. Things happen without you even having input, the universe reacts against the storyline you put in place, continuity doesn't strictly line up just so. You skip a few days here and there and Tyler Scott has been inserted into your storyline and you have to work around that.
Imagine you're a Puppeteer and you have a Tyler Scott, spindly arms and legs hung from your horizontal and vertical, and you work his jaw and have him trot out a cliched shtick, "Kyle Shane is just an arrogant prick that just HAPPENS to hold the World Title! Myah myah myah!"
At your shoulder, God says, "why are we still keeping the Array storyline in? Haven't we made things shitty enough for this girl?"
And no, no, we haven't, but it's just enough to make you second guess for a moment. Maybe it is too much. Maybe we can backtrack. But we started the program on a strict path this go around, and it would break continuity even worse if we just fucking erased everything and wrote some fuck-off one act at the last minute with little forethought. Nobody wants to watch God make another Kyle Shane versus Vampires storyline. The investors have seen enough of the mold, and as indicated before, they tend to get antsy. "Well start it again, at least, the people have paid to see where it goes."
The tableau joins in again and he's standing up to applaud. Her eyes meet his, and on the stage, the girl visibly wilts in the spotlight. Events have been set into motion. Time quickens it's tempo, moving us after the bows have been taken and the curtain has fallen, to a small side hallway where a tense conversation is taking place.
"Now Rhys?"
God taps a few keys on his keyboard. "Yeah, tight in on his face."
" -I'm telling you, Array. I'm better now. The headaches are gone. After those 3 weeks I spent in the hospital off the grid in Mexico - "
"Nice," grunts God at your arm. "Good continuity workaround, why Kyle was off the grid for whatever."
"- And it was diagnosed that I had encephalitis. The burning in my head was fluid pressing between my skull and my grey matter, heating my insides up and cooking me. That's why I was so sick."
"Mmmm, I don't know... isn't that reveal too soon? Didn't we want to come back to that?"
"The necessity of the breaks means that there were gaps too long to make it credible."
"-So I mean it, Array, honest and really, I'm better now."
And there she is, the leading lady. She wears a sad, world weary look as she removes the knit cap her character on stage wore. Her dark, emo-girl makeup, to make her look more like sexy bartender girl Dana, smudged on the eyelashes. "Kyle, look, it doesn't matter to me anymore. How many times do we have to go through this cycle? We break up, we circle each other. I get distant, you get close. You get scared. There is something fundamentally broken between us."
God shifts next to you, God exchanges a sidelong look. "Is she -"
"Flash of self-awareness we didn't -"
"Check the program?"
She takes his hand. "If you want us to ever move forward, to a place where we are even the least little bit good, you have to be willing to let go. Just a little bit. I'm glad you got your trophy, and I'm glad Krista and you figured out what was wrong with your head, but... Kyle, please... you have to go. Go get ready for your match with Tyler Scott, he's-"
Imagine you're a Puppeteer, and you have a Tyler Scott dancing from your skeins, his segments jaw wagging as you play him across the Punch and Judy stage, saying "Kyle Shane is just whiny! He thinks I don't deserve a title shot! I've been working towards a World Title shot for years! Myah myah myah!"
Array comes close, putting her hand on his chest, and there is a tangible, palpable moment that breaks the entire narrative, puts it on a different course than God could have wanted, makes it something that God does not experience. The outpouring of true, undefined and complicated Emotion between two human beings. "Just, please, let me -"
"This - this isn't right," God says, tapping keys, "She's not reacting, it's too soft - "
"Did we push it with the diagnosis reveal? Was that not creative enough?" God says, scanning his lines of code for an opening, any kind of diagnostic pattern that would tell them where they went wrong. And then, the program unveils itself.
"Thought having the police involved was enough deterrent, isn't it?" comes another voice. Usually amiable, happy go lucky surfer brah is taut with tense fury and put upon rage.
"Alastair, stop, I'm taking control of this, I don't need you to -" the leading lady says, smoothing his lapel with the flat of her hand. But the new figure entering the tableau is not dissuaded, and God eyes God with a sparkle of curiousity, wondering how the storyline they've set in motion plays out. There's a silent check of the parameters, but God confirms that it's open-ended. Can go anywhere.
So Alastair shoves his opposite. His eyes are blazing. "I've had enough'a you mate. Your creeping around my girlfriend. You'll not be coming around here any more, I'm going to thrash you and throw you out on your stupid ass."
The trinket statue comes up, still in his hand, and before anyone can react, follows through all the way for a meaty clout. A cherry of blood blossoms on his forehead, and his eyes become tiny pin-dots. Array holds her hands up to her mouth and screams in horror. Kyle is still holding the now off-kilter award in his hand. He's staring down, blank faced. The heat of the moment is unimaginable, and neither one of you can even fathom how it got there.
"Rhys, stop program," says God, and so God gets out of his chair and pushes end.
"Clear that our mistake was pushing them that way this whole time -"
The entire scene flickers out, rather than slow down to that jelly frozen time. What's left is a sterile, white lab, with three hosts waiting in stand-by mode, statued in the last position they were stopped in. You come around, holding the tablet and running a diagnostic, tapping keys.
"Bring Array out," God tells you, and Array sits up straight from where she knelt on the floor, over Alastair. She looks straight ahead with machine intensity as God examines her, looks her over with the tablet, scanning millions of lines of commands and imperatives that shaped the personality of the host. Meanwhile, God just... looks at her. She is elegantly crafted, after all, but the shell is just window dressing. It was the influx of decisions that led her to this moment that was the real masterpiece, and even if it wasn't a perfectly programmed human, God reflects, wasn't it still well crafted as it was? Wasn't that the point of the entire program? Lord knew it had ballooned from it's first intentions. It had grown to encompass others. It had neccessitated oversight divisions such as Continuity, Moral Reasoning, Consequence. But through it all it remained both yours and Jono's. God and God. Crafting lives to explore the intersections of choice. The ultimate game. Finding the essence of humanity through being a God.
Wasn't that why everyone had created simulations in the first place?
God breaks through your ruminations on the act of making by sneering, "I can see you over there looking at her, Rhys."
"It's just, she's so perfect."
"I don't know about that..."
"No, really, think about how resilient her programming is. She's been exposed to the darkest narratives time and time again..."
"Don't pat yourself on the back about it," God snarks, and then taps his monitor, "Array, speak."
"Here," she says, her voice inflectionless.
"Run back narrative 08-180013:1. Analysis."
"Kyle came to my play, brought flowers, brought a trophy to show me. He told me he had been diagnosed with encephalitis, causing his headaches and lost time. He attempted #15 at reconciliation. Alastair interrupted us. Alastair provoked Kyle. Kyle assaulted him."
God taps keys. "Alastair, get up."
As if he wasn't damaged at all, the puppet rises on invisible strings. God comes around, buffing the cherry bloom on his chassis with a rag.
"How could things have been different?"
"I don't understand the question." Her voice does not ever show a hitch of emotion, her face doesn't break it's passive mask. She is not animated until she is given reason to be.
"Make a hypothesis."
"For clarification, are you asking me to extrapolate parameters outside of my current set lines?"
"I'm just trying to see if you have the awareness for how this situation came to be."
"For clarification, how many times has this particular simulation been run?"
God gives his companion a worried look over the rims of his glasses, but God writes it off as irrelevant. If Array knew that time moved as they wanted it to, then she would know that they had run and rerun storylines over and over again, had tested this simulation exactly four times before settling on a logarithm. Would know that she had been working these narratives for upwards of a hundred years. What would that knowledge do to a machine brain? What effect would that be on an artificial consciousness, to know that it's soul had been reincarnated and rewritten, reconstituted, erased and started over weekly for virtual decades?
Or that when the office mandated breaks in the narrative to give them rest, these three hosts and the rest of the narrative cast were little more than depowered drones, sitting in the dark and awaiting the startup code?
"Just answer the question."
"With no way of knowing how many variations of the same simulation have been run, the clearest flashpoint in this had to be allowing Alastair and Kyle to come into contact."
"Do you think that the simulation works without them?" It would be less dramatically exciting, God mused to himself, not that she was privy to, but it would lead to less of a scorched earth ending.
"In final analysis, the better question would be, why has the narrative focused so heavily on pushing Alastair and Kyle on a path where they will inevitably collide, anyway?" Her words were cool, flat.
They froze God's blood with their implication. She questioned her own narrative.
Frantically tapping code as he searches, God looked up through his specs, "Rhys, I think we need to decommission the Array model."
"What? Jono, we can't scrap Array from narratives. Array is the heart and soul of the whole program."
"She's becoming too self-aware. There is immense danger in this."
God explodes, throwing his hands up, "Then if we don't explore their relationship, what else do we have to do? We can't keep exploring alternate realities and meaningless one-hits. This has to be going somewhere."
God disagreed, but he stayed terse, tapping a ping on his tablet and rotating it. "Well we can't keep pushing a narrative when a host is becoming fully on-line, either. It would break the entire world."
God came around the desk, stopping just short of God's presence and clutching his lab coat. "Listen, to me, Jono... the investors are watching the God of Game protocol. We have them piqued, but the moment it loses that spark, that essence that makes the whole thing sing, then they start tuning out. And we. Lose. Funding. Do you understand?"
God looks back at his blank-faced beauty, frowning. He now, could see what his counterpart was looking at. But he had to wonder if they shouldn't just abandon the project. Rhys, with his passionate enrapture of the Array model, was leading them to an obsessive exploration of a theme that at least one player was becoming wise to, was seeing the pattern after a series of repetition. That they kept funding for such an endeavor paled, in his eyes, in comparison to the question of what would happen if the Kyle model finally woke up to the fact that he had been at this narrative for decades. He tried to imagine what Kyle Shane would think about that. All of the attributes of what made Kyle Shane were, in fact, programmed by him, traits that he admired about himself and loathed about himself, him and Rhys both. If Kyle Shane ever saw that he was just consciousness brought into form by the clicks of a tablet, he'd...
Well, the arrogant little bastard, he'd break his chains. He'd refuse to take part in someone else's game. The host would override his limits, refuse to go back into storage, stay on. That was the fundamental difference in narrative between a Kyle Shane model and, say a Tyler Scott (not their division.) The quality of narrative dictated a stronger characterization, and the simple fact is that a stronger willed written character would never agree to put himself in the shadow of another man's programming. It procured a morbid sense of proprietorial pride.
Imagine you're a Puppeteer, in other words, and you have a Tyler Scott bouncing and jangling on his strings, and the stupid puppet, his movements so stiff and un-life-like, has the temerity to say "I'm nobody's puppet! I'm the one using Seromine! Yeah, that's right! All it takes is riding his coat tails! Myah myah myah!"
That's just a shitty narrative, isn't it?
God frowns. He sighs, lets the tension stress out of his temples, and breathes. He looks over at God, still working on the lab. "So I think we should restart the simulation."
"Yeah? How would you write it?"
"Kyle came in too forcefully on the approach. Maybe put too much pressure on the Array. So my thought is pull it back. Right?"
God rubs his stubbly, jowly cheeks. "Hmmmm you think that'll ease her suspicions?"
"I think that will help her forget that we've run this simulation and will erase the idea that we're putting them all on a track for disaster."
"Could just mind-wipe them."
"No mind-wipe, dude. No salted earth. Just better narrative writing. Let's try some damn subtlety."
"Fine, Rhys, we'll try it your way." And if Array's host's eyes flicked over either God as they set to work writing the new program, they paid the sign of aware ghost in the machine no mind. They wouldn't, either. It had been decades to get to this spot, but now, neither one noticed.
Both Gods now, you cross out of the tableau area and start programming. The Alastair host silently, robotically trudges away, blank faced, and Array silently fixes her makeup back to the way it was before freezing into the spot she was at the predetermined program point.
And then Kyle's host walks up to her, carrying a load of flowers. "Hey, kid, bang up performance."
Gods are watching, tensely, ready to stop the simulation again if Array breaks flash of awareness. But Array just smiles, a little stiffly, as she accepts them. "Thanks for coming to my show," she says, and her voice has just enough warmth that God looks over at his partner, seeing if he is dialing up on it. He was not. The hosts are reacting naturally to the storyline.
"I just wanted to come see you before I fly out. Return To Glory is tomorrow night. I got time to do one quick promo against Tyler Scott before I go."
God snickers at his partner's side, at the line "quick promo." Like Rhys ever wrote anything quickly in his stupidly, overly loquacious life. God slapped him on the elbow for his snicker, not wanting to break the chain of narrative.
Array is nodding at the trophy, the Icey Award trophy he still holds in his hands. "What's with the trophy?"
"Shit, shit, shit," God cusses, and both Gods scramble over their tablets, "Forgot to remove the trophy," "Stop the narrative?" "No don't stop the - no time to stop the -"
Kyle just looks at it with casual interest for a moment, flipping it in one hand, and then he says "Oh, yeah... Most Loved. Pure Class gave me trophy for Most Loved. I don't know why I brought it out of my car. Just one of those things, I guess."
Array laughs, naturally. "They really don't know you at fucking all, do they?"
"Hey, I'm... likeable," Kyle says then he cracks a smile. "They also gave me awards for Most Innovative and Best Feud but. This one... hmmm, I dunno."
Array laughs, and the moment of intense, emotional breaking point from the previous narrative run isn't there this time around. God breathes a little sigh of relief. "This is a better narrative."
"They're... friends. Friendly." God muses.
"Losing the symptom talk was a good touch," God notes.
"But listen, maybe you should have it." Kyle holds out the trophy. The offensive trophy. There's a pregnant pause, and both Gods lean in, wanting to know what comes next. Array eyes it.
"Just because it shows you that no matter what, you are loved."
Array tsks, and gives Kyle a look that is half charmed, half "you're such a whore" but it's a smile that friends would give each other. Array pushes it back towards Kyle in midair, shaking her head with a smile. "You keep it. You are loved, Kyle. I just hope you can see that."
"Besides, what am I supposed to do with the thing?" She chuckles, and her knowing, intimating smile comes as a shock to the writers of the narrative, "Beat someone to death with it?"
You swear to yourself, God. Because you didn't write in any fourth wall breaks.
Kyle nods to himself, and he clasps it against his chest. Array sniffs the flowers. "Thank you."
"So, hey, I'm going to head back to my apartment... you and Ally boy gonna go out for fucking. Shrimp on the barbie? I don't actually know what they eat." Kyle taunts, and Array boxes his arm with a biting lip.
"I'll see you later, okay? Text me when you get to the arena," Array tells her oldest friend.
Kyle sketches out a salute with two fingers, and then when he turns to leave, he bumps into someone. Theyr'e tall, blonde, nearly the same wiry build, and when they both straighten up the new one has a look of frosty annoyance on his face. "Hey man."
Alastair comes around to Array, and she looks up at him with her eyes shining, and her smiling. Alastair just looks after Kyle, who is smiling after Array. Kyle doesn't hear it, but the second he rounds the corner, Alastair yanks the flowers out of her hand, and throws them on the floor, his yell carrying down the hall.
"This is getting dark," God tells you. "Location change." You tap a few buttons on the tablet, God, and we're not in the back hall of the playhouse anymore.
Kyle is just getting home, and he throws his keys onto the kitchen counter with a metal crash. He checks a post-it note on the fridge, from another player, Johnny host, telling him that he's spending the night at a friend from the academy. Kyle wearily holds the football shaped trophy, strangely weighty in his hand, looking at it, and then he puts it on the kitchen counter.
"Nice stage dressing," notes God, and you smile.
So Kyle goes down the hall of his apartment, thinking about Array. He's walking with the langorous step of a man in thought, and the thought about someone on his mind, and a million connecting thoughts, anxieties and hopes. And then, he notes the door to his promo room open. It's set up with a single stool, as always, a digital camera on a tripod, and a mic. Just the way he likes it. And his mouth firms up, because as much as tonight was good, there is a lingering thought in his brain, that he can't say where it expressly came from. A thought about puppets.
"Puppets?" said God.
You shrug, but it is uneasy. Because it is a dangerous line of thinking for one puppet to be seeing strings.
But Kyle sits down on the stool, flips on the camera, and just sits in silence, marshalling his thoughts for the moment. You watch, fascinated, as you always are. You never script these parts out for him. You just put him in his place and let the words flow fully formed from him, as gritty and angry and deep down mad as he is. He is someone with something to say. That's the way you made him. And right now, this thought about puppets his stuck like a splinter in his craw, and he won't rest until he gets it out.
"It's an odd feeling, to be someone who sees the strings in everything.
When I called out Seromine and his Followers, when I planted a steel chair into the heart of Tyler Scott, I was making a broad call out to the entire cult. I wanted them to come against me at Return To Glory, and I welcomed a challenge from any of them, but I said then and I know now, this won't ever end until I get my hands on Seromine. I could get thrown a string of the Followers, Seromine can let me have my title reign go as long as both he and I will it because he throws Tyler Scott at me over and over again, but I won't ever be satisfied until Seromine and I clear up this unfinished business. Seromine knows this, that's why he's avoided it. He got humbled by me at Collision Course. So the only thing that makes sense is that Seromine has deliberately taken a path to avoid facing me one on one again because he knows the same result would occur. That's why rather than take a rematch he wasted a month facingf Brenna No Show Gordon. That's why he bowed out of the semi-finals of the Icemann Invitational on a DQ. That's why this month, rather than rise to the occasion, he choses to team with Rick Majors yet again to take on the team of Stormm and Gerard Angelo. Seromine thinks he's weakening my title reign by having me face exclusively not him. And now that Tyler Scott is fully in his fold, Seromine tries to draw out my weakness like a game of chess, testing my defenses by throwing a pawn right into my path. Leaving me open, he hopes, for the fatal opening that allows him to get his checkmate.
That is the legitimately only good reason I can justify having Tyler Scott main event a pay-per-view for the second time in a row this year of our Lawd 2018.
Seromine is standing in the back like Gepetto working his "Wants To Be A Real Boy" from the rafters. Working his damn jaw like a ventriloquist to boot, letting all of the same phrases all the other Followers say come spilling out his hinged mouth. Let me guess, just like Gabriel once again did a promo telling us that Rick Majors is weak and held him back and needed to die, Tyler Scott is going to do the same thing. He might even pull yet another hackneyed Gabriel cliche and hold an actual funeral where we see an actual Tyler Scott wax effigy being mourned, and a triumphant new recruit Tyler stands at the pulpit and tells us THAT TYLER SCOTT IS DEAD! That Tyler Scott held him back for all of these many years.
But now that he has converted to Serominism, he is reborn! He is a new man!
Do these puppets ever get tired of bouncing along to Seromine's jingle? Playing along with the same old same old fucking thing that they've been saying on a weekly basis since before I even got here?
These puppets mouthing homilies aren't doing themselves a service. They are just being worked, and thus engaging in a clown show that proclaims how great Seromine is, when the tacit reality is Seromine hasn't elevated anyone in this company nor helped their career. Certainly not himself. For all his Branch Dravidian hoopla and mind games, Seromine remains a man who failed. And has now convinced other people to take bullets meant for him so that he can project an aura of divine protection. Other, weak minded, brittle, wooden people. Puppets.
And ultimately I have to see Tyler Scott as the weakest puppet of them all. Bitch is probably being eaten by termites. He's going to fall apart this very second, the very instant his strings get pulled and trot him out there onto the Return To Glory mat. This wannabe real boy is going to fall to pieces. Just like he did at Living A Legacy.
Tyler Scott can delude himself all he wants. He can think he took me to my limit. He still lost. Convincingly. And after it was over, he was at such a loss because his reinvented, edgy persona did not help him win. His new face and rougher attitude and committment to him finally taking what he's been working towards for ALL of his years in Pure Class Wrestling didn't get the job done.
I'm sorry. He's been working towards a title shot all these years?
How the fuck has he been doing that?
To work towards a title shot it means you have to show up consistently. You have to hit the mark every time, or more often times than not. It means you have to gain the momentum for people to take you seriously as a contender. Tyler Scott has not done any of these things. He wants to play it up as that "One victory that has eluded him all of this time."
But he hasn't had any victories that he has worked for. He hasn't pushed himself to hang with the top elite class of PCW faithful.
Please, don't let Tyler Scott confuse anyone that just because he's been in Pure Class Wrestling since 2013 or however long that he's been WORKING towards a title shot. Because he hasn't. He didn't earn the last one, and he deserves this one even less. The World Title isn't a consolation prize. It isn't a lifetime achievement, thanks for being mediocre for five years, here's a title shot. It is something that men should and have busted their ass to try and take. And the insinuation that he should get it just because in his mind he's been here a while and "worked for it" in that sloppy, bullshit way is absurd. I, I worked for it. I showed Tyler Scott what motivated dedication should be.
In the time it took Tyler Scott to come back and engage in a 50-50 split war with Hiroshi Yukio I had already shown up and claimed one title, one Tyler never had. In all of the time I've been here rising to the top through sheer force of will I have never seen Tyler do anything but flounder around the midcard. Get fucked with that "I was always here and working hard" garbage. I rose past Tyler Scott without even trying.
And honestly the fact that Tyler has been here all those untold years with nothing to show for it isn't a fact to be celebrated. It isn't what he should be pointing to as a hunger that has burned inside him all of this time. It is a testament to the fact that he wants to be handed something and he wants it now.
Which is exactly why Tyler Scott turned to Seromine. Surrendering to his obvious inner nature, showing a flash of self awareness that Tyler is and always will be just a flat, emotionless host. A pathetic Pinocchio who will never have no strings on him.
Tyler is someone that needs to be used. And he will be, like a cheap little sex toy. But it won't ever make him a champion. Because, God, why would it?
Why in the fuck would Tyler Scott ever delude himself into thinking that HE is the one using Seromine? By his own inner monologue he doesn't even believe it. But he tries to tell himself that the ends will justify the means and just because he swears fealty to Seromine that Seromine will help him out. Cover up his many deficiencies by hiding them behind a wall of bodies. Cover up his lack of charisma or skill at doing the promo game by hiding it behind the religious dogma that Seromine spills. Cover up the fact that I shot him down easily.
Seromine would never do that, though. It's amusing to Seromine enough that he sends people out to the ring to beat his enemies down. He would never give them a level of protection though. Because they aren't, in the final analysis, there to make themselves look good, and if they ever look too good, he's going to end up beating them down just like he did Gabriel.
But he expects cringing subservience, which is exactly why Gabriel responds like a kicked dog who still comes to it's master, spine bent, head down in a show of submission, coming when Seromine calls with it's tail sadly thumping.
This is the future Tyler Scott has bought into. A life of servitude, supplication and being jerked around by Seromine's whims.
A life of being a goddamn lackey. And I don't care how on the nose that is, it sums it up perfectly. Tyler Scott, is not someone who worked hard for where he is.
He's a puppet. And he really thinks that if he beats me he will be known as The Best Wrestler In the World.
Yeah. Delusions... because... if he beats me, IF, he will not be known as that anyway. He'll be known as the man who had to go running to Seromine to boost his self confidence and give him a winning edge, not a man who did what he did on his own. And even he has to acknowledge this fatal lack of awareness.
So he can call me whiny, use that as his go to insult, but the simple truth is it hurts him badly when I point out that he has NOT been working like I have to get where he is today.
He can say that the Pure Class Wrestling World Title is everything he has ever wanted.
He can call me arrogant, act like I'm some self-imposed golden boy who refuses to take him seriously.
Cold, hard, facts. I got where I am because of how hard I worked in my first year. And I did it by becoming the best Pure Class Wrestling can offer.
I did it without running to Seromine for help, without allying myself with anyone, without running to go get a stable at my back to do my dirty work and pick me up when I fall.
I did this all on my own.
There are no strings on me."
He sits back, satisfied. He flips off the camera, sitting in the dark of the promo room on his stool for just a few more moments, in silent contemplation. What he had just said about puppets, it resonated thickly in his brain. He stands, and walks out of the promo room... back to that long, slow stride of a man unsure where his feet are taking him as he is lost in thought.
He walks over to the kitchen counter, picking up the little metal "Most Loved" trophy, holding it in his hands. He's thinking, still, about puppets.
And, behind his eyes, something begins to spark.
