Post by Her Imperial Majesty Kalinda I on Dec 18, 2020 1:27:01 GMT -5
The screen image twists and swirls in on itself and turns to static for a moment before playing a rapid staccato of images. A bunch of newborn baby mice twitching around in their nest. A bare mattress with a big stain in the middle. A rusty playground slide. A pair of graves side by side with identical tombstones, with one half the size of the other. A pool of viscous black liquid suddenly catching alight. And then a car radio, its numbers glowing an infernal red turned to the AM stations. A haunting seven-note whistle cuts through the static.
RADIO CHAINED INFERNO
"That was Corey Hart with "I Wear My Sunglasses At Night," preceded by Corey Hart's "I Wear My Sunglasses At Night," here on WHEL's Radio Chained Inferno here on Zero. Six. Six. Six. ZERO. AM. Serving Bridgeport, Connecticut, zip code Zero. Six. Six. Six. ZERO. Up next we have "I Wear My Sunglasses At Night" by Corey Hart. Welcome to W-H-E-L, remember, you're here forever, burning eternally without end. I hope you brought water."
The cheerful radio voice distorts upon each numeral, each spliced from a different recording while the zeroes are spoken in a twisted, infernal chorus. The numerals on the dashboard go out and a pair of red embers appear in the darkness, shortly followed by the illumination of a mouthful of fearsome teeth, lit from the inside.
Kalinda Kriegsdottir is revealed in full as she pokes the overhead light, turning it on. She's wearing a brilliant purple t-shirt with a sparkly three-horned skull adorned on it covered in pink glitter.
The Pint-Sized Powerhouse is also wearing a baseball cap that looks rather like the fuzzy one-eyed possum hat she wears to the ring, though the hat has a pair of black, wrap-around aviator sunglasses on it.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"So, apparently Don Tirri doesn't think I know how to cut promos, because the son of a million greasy weasels that jerked it into a cup and used that to artificially inseminate some poor woman forty-odd years ago apparently doesn't watch the gods-damned shows that he performs on."
"I mean once I can understand. I missed Logan Lewis' second match and all, but not one, but two whole promos? What do you do, Tirri? Get your tape to the truck, wrestle your match, and then spend the rest of the night out in the parking lot sucking on Joe Camel's carcinogenic cock? Too good to stand at a jaunty angle to the monitors backstage like the rest of us?"
"Or do you just not recognize the format? Is a dragon behaving like a living jack-o-lantern lit from within by her own internal glow and the hellfire eyes of an Evil Overlord just not something you recognize? Does using a crystal ball to display images instead of a bit of splicing give you seizures and make you hit the floor? Can you just not recognize a promo when it happens on the actual goddamned show that actually matters, instead of a fraction of the viewers that watch whatever hole the truck monkeys throw these tapes into?"
"Or are you just a stuck up old fart that doesn't think promos count if they're not the sort of format that a bajillion random assholes on YouTube and Twitter do where they just stare into the camera?"
Kalinda pulls the sunglasses off of her hat and puts them on.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"So here you go, Tirri, here I am cutting a promo for the thinking impaired because you don't know how to fucking recognize it any other way. I've got all the accouterments of a "proper" random dipshit talking into a camera promo."
"I've got the camera, I've got the mandatory sunglasses, and I'm sitting my ass in a car. Zero fucking production value, no drama, no showmanship, nothing but an endless series of words coming out of my mouth."
"I'm sorry, Tirri, if your drunken attention span can't fucking handle a full-scale, properly produced Kalinda promo. I dunno, maybe you had siblings that threatened to dunk you in the Bog of Eternal Stench and as a result are scarred for life and run in terror whenever somebody references Jim Henson's "Labyrinth," complete with crystalline orb sleight of hand and eldritch power."
Kalinda claps her hands.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"So here you go, fucker, no special effects, no drama, no presentation, no frills. Just another random asshole in sunglasses in a car ranting and raving into a stationary camera. I hope you're fucking grateful, because I'm bending over backward to make sure that you can actually, you know, fucking watch this thing and are capable of acknowledging it."
"Because hi! I'm Kalinda and I can spew vitriol with the best of them. Surprise! I'm not limited to 280 characters like you seem to think I am, you blind, dense anal violator of unsuspecting otters."
"I don't do this often, and you know why? Because other people fucking ruined it for everybody. I got sick and tired of carrying the show on my barndoor back, brother, dude, jack, sitting around wanting to properly banter back and forth with somebody. To make a real rival. To attain the dream and have a nice and proper nemesis that I could trade witty barbs with. And you know what I found?"
"Jack fucking shit. I found an entire industry full of sad, dismal dipshits with one collective braincell between them that couldn't banter their way out of a wet paper bag. I tried, Tirri, I tried so fucking hard to make the fans give a shit about every single one of my matches, give a shit about my opponents, give a shit about the television program that we were collectively making."
"But that never happened. Nobody wanted to do it. Nobody wanted to have an honest to gods back and forth dialog, a volley of insults, a battle of wits. Week after week, month after month, year after year of hearing nothing but the same tired old cliches and the same recycled bullshit falling out of their mouths again and again and again."
"I've spent seven and a half fucking years in an industry where people refuse to do anything but the absolute minimum required of them in order to keep their goddamned jobs, and often times not even that."
"I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to break through the bullshit, battle the corruption, and change professional wrestling for the better. Only what do I find? I find an industry where the hard workers are looked upon as suckers, and opportunity is showered upon those who lie, cheat, manipulate, backstab, and politicize from behind the scenes."
"Who gives a shit that I was trained by two of the greatest in-ring competitors the sport has ever managed to produce? I don't have a super duper special sparkly snowflake last name that marks me as part of a wrestling dynasty, so I don't ever get to have nice things!"
"You ever been hired for the sole purpose of being booked in the dumbest shit imaginable, with the intent of purposefully damaging your drawing power? Because I have. I thought I was done, and then for the first time somebody came to me and asked me to join their promotion. And I thought it would be different. I thought that being the star that carried a company through its infancy as World Champion, building up the promotion around me as its ace for two fucking years would be worth something. It wasn't worth shit. Logan, I want you to pay attention here, because this is a lesson that took me years to learn and it broke my fucking heart when I figured it out."
Kalinda sneers.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"Professional wrestling does not give a shit about you. The fans might love you, you might find friends, you might find allies, you might even find a boss that you respect."
"And they'll all stab you in the back. They'll all betray you. You can literally risk your soul delving into the depths of hell to yank a dead man from eternal suffering, stuff his ass back into his body, and then sew up that charred, bleeding wreck with rich, Corinthian leather ripped from the seats of the truck that was a part of his demise, and even then he'll turn on you."
"The moment that somebody thinks they're wrung out the last bit of usefulness out of you that they can, they will jab a knife in your back and use it as a foothold to climb over you onto bigger and better things."
"And while you're carrying an entire promotion on your back, working your tail off to try and make things better for everyone, nobody cares. Nobody will help you. Nobody will align with you if it affects their bottom line. It doesn't matter that if you unite then the endless dismal darkity dark batshit dungeon fucks have 5280 wrestlers, managers, valets, minions, side characters, and the entirety of the 82nd Airborne division running into each and every one of your matches."
"All you have to do to prevent the heroes from assembling is to dangle a shiny prize in front of them that only one can win and they turn into a bunch of ravenous lone wolves who will never, ever form a pack."
"They would rather they get their asses kicked by greater numbers week after week, month after month if it means at the end of it they and they alone get to be the one allowed to reach for a prize. One they're almost assuredly going to fail at, but make each of them think that it's going to be them that overcomes the odds and emerges triumphant."
"It's all bullshit, Logan. It's all a shell game. It's three card monty. Keep your eye on the lady and win the prize. But they'll never let you win. You just watch the cards, never allowed to pick the right one while all the while somebody keeps twisting a dagger in your heart, over and over and over and over again."
Kalinda sniffs softly and rubs her eyes with her ungauntleted hand.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"I tried. I tried so hard for so long, but it isn't enough. Your world is dead, and you just don't know it. You've never seen a world that's truly alive, filled with wonder, filled with variety, filled with magic. A world where everything happens for a reason, where the stories the gods and divinities wish to tell with our lives are as well-studied and codified as the laws of physics."
"There is no love here, no guidance, no purpose. I don't know if that's better or if it's worse that you've made this shithole on your own, without some malevolent elder being of agony tipping the scales in favor of making the world suck ass through a straw."
"But hey, if this is the best humanity has to offer, I understand why whatever creator deity you had left this place high and dry. If this world was the best I could do, and you shits were the pinnacle of creation that I made in My Divine Image, I'd plop my ass down in My Heavenly Bathtub and use the Straight Razor of the Gods to open My fucking veins and let all the ichor drain out."
"Yours is an empty world, and I do my best to fill it. I try to be kind, I try to be polite, but you fuckers have to push. You have to needle. You can't leave well enough alone. You'll never be satisfied until you drag everyone and everything around you down into the depths of misery right alongside you."
"I tried to be a hero. I tried to save you. I tried to redeem professional wrestling one step at a time, and all that it brought me was pain. And even when I found love? You motherfuckers found a way to use that to hurt me again and again and again."
"The human race did in five years what five decades of the worst villains and horrors that Tatheon had to offer failed to do. I spent so much of my life refusing to give into temptation, to rebuke the dark powers that were tripping over themselves to offer their dark blessing unto me."
"And this? This is the result. This is what's happened to me embracing all of that with open arms."
The dragoness spreads her arms wide.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"It's not different at all, is it, Steve?"
Kalinda growls a quote from a cartoon mad scientist maniacally.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"For all I have, for all that I can do, I'm still powerless. I'm still unable to change anything. So I won't. That's when I started all of this, when I decided that my time as a questing hero would come to an end. That I would be the Evil Overlord of professional wrestling, I would sit idly by in my Palace of Pain and wait for the shiny eyed little heroes to come to me, and then I would crush their hopes and their dreams."
"Though I kind of suck at it, the whole evil thing, because I'm not doing it to be cruel. I'm doing it to be kind."
Kalinda smiles sadly.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"The kindest thing I could do you for, Logan, would be to make it so that you can't wrestle anymore. Break both your legs in a way that it'll take years before you can walk again, let alone even think of wrestling. Because you'd be happier for it."
"Bound to me is the Left Hand of Arimus, a piece of armor forged by my world's God of Death."
Kalinda displays her left hand and arm, showing off the skeletal gauntlet and the skull elbow decoration.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"He is something you don't have in this world, a Death who is kind, who cares, who demands of the world that those he takes be sent onward into the afterlife for a reason. He is the bumbling fool of a demon at the crossroads, the devil losing a fiddle of gold, the reaper who plays badly at chess."
"He wants you to live your life to the fullest, to do great things. I look at you, Logan, and I see your deaths, things that may come to be. And so many of them are very much the opposite of great things."
"An accidental overdose on the Fourth of July, age 32. Asphyxiating on your own vomit, age 27. Dead on the operating table due to a drunk anesthesiologist during an otherwise routine knee surgery, age 41. Car accident after a lover stabs you in the back and abandons you for another wrestler, age 28. That one is particularly nasty, as it takes you three days to die and they don't find the car for another four months. Also, keep a watch on your lower back, typically the left side, just below the shoulder blade. Sometimes there's a break, sometimes there's a tumor, sometimes there's a knife, or a bullet, but there are strangely so many of your potential deaths that come from right there."
"There's also one weird one at 426 that involves eldritch cosmic horrors and centuries spent screaming, so I would highly advise going into doorways or portals that involve purply-green writhing tentacles."
"But so many of your deaths, they come about as the result of the professional wrestling industry. And if I was kind, Logan, if I cared, I would save you from them. But I can't."
Kalinda smirks.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"By word and by deed I have been bound, and I am to abide by the contract I signed with UPRISING. As a creature empowered by fiend and fey alike, violating such things is something that I cannot and will not do."
"Amongst the things that I've promised Jax are that I won't go about crippling members of the roster all willy-nilly, so unfortunately for you, little one, I'm going to have to do things the hard way. I'm going to have to dissuade you from continuing this folly that is your career as a professional wrestler by making the experience for you as miserable as possible, within reason."
"I'm merely an Evil Overlord, Logan, I'm not going to be a dick about it. So for now I will settle for thwarting your mad drive to see Don Tirri overcome by your own hand, crushing your hopes for advancement in the tournament, and smothering your dreams to become the inaugural UPRISING Wor… one second."
Kalinda takes out her phone and fiddles with it.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"UPRISING World Championship. Just had to make sure that there wasn't a weight class or anything in there. Since for some fucking reason promotions like to slap "heavyweight" on their world title and then have it be an openweight belt."
"So, on the topic of eldritch abominations, I heard you pissing and moaning about how I "cheated" to defeat Carnibore. Apparently, somebody hasn't been reading their match contracts very clearly."
Kalinda grins, showing a rather different configuration of teeth than she'd been sporting earlier. These looking like they'd be more at home on the Jaws of Life then in the mouth of a biological creature.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"All my television matches take place in an interdimensional void. We've got… well… what we've got is a bit too complicated to explain to anybody without 60 credit-hours of magical studies under their belt. But basically UPRISING has a TV deal with ONSET, Otherworldly Noneuclidean Spaces Entertainment Television, because I'm here."
"I'm a dragon, so that means that I'm a walking ley line, and that means that their primary demographic can actually make out what happens in the ring because the amount of ambient mana I put out lights the place up to their senses. After a few centuries their method of sight beyond sight makes it so that it's kind of hard to make out what four-dimensional beings are doing."
"So when I wrestle on TV, all my matches take place in an Interdimensional Void, which is the black, misty, foggy thing you see when I wrestle. We're still working on calibrating it properly, I think something almost pounced on Ignis and laid eggs in her ears on the first show, but I've got it filtered now so it's a bit safer and things shouldn't be sneaking in without having paid for a ticket first."
"But that means that my matches take place under the aegis of a completely different athletic commission, one that rules that innate biological abilities are classed as perfectly legal so long as they're used in a manner consistent with the rest of the rules. So no maiming."
"But a little bit of mist, a touch of firebreath, those are perfectly alright because there are perfectly normal human wrestlers who use those things in matches, and I can duplicate that under my own draconic biology, so that means..."
Kalinda is suddenly interrupted by a muffled, but still audible male voice.
MALE VOICE
"WHY IS THERE A HORRIBLE BLACK FOG IN MY DRIVEWAY?!"
Kalinda scowls and opens the car door.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"IT'S NOT A FOG, IT'S A PENUMBRA!"
The penumbra vanishes to reveal that it's a nice, sunny day and Kalinda is sitting in the interior of a red 1962 Ford Mustang. Now that she's leaning out the door, the name "MOSH" can be seen embroidered on the driver's side seat cover in red on black fabric.
CHRIS MOSH
"How the hell? WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY CAR?!"
Chris Mosh yanks Kalinda out of the car and is frantically looking it over, and he manages to topple Kalinda's camera over so it's on the side and now looking out the windshield.
CHRIS MOSH
"Did the dragon hurt you, my baby? Did she scratch you?"
Mosh is now out of the car and looking it over for paint damage. He hugs the hood.
CHRIS MOSH
"It's okay, daddy's here now."
The camera is picked up as Kalinda reaches in and grabs it.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"Um… I don't actually own a car, so I kind of had to use whatever was available. ANYWAY! It looks like my random asshole on Twitter recording commentary studio has been confiscated."
"So, Tirri, I'm going to have to address all of your fucking nonsense on Saturday! I will not stand for your unscientific bullshit regarding my tail, and I've got actual scientific diagrams to prove what a complete and utter dipshit you are, and that…""
Kalinda's tirade is interrupted by her tumbling ass over teakettle because she's too busy looking into the camera to avoid running into some obstruction.
CHRIS MOSH
"MY TRASH CANS!"
Kalinda picks up the camera from the ground and fiddles with it for a few moments to bring the recording to a close.
RADIO CHAINED INFERNO
"That was Corey Hart with "I Wear My Sunglasses At Night," preceded by Corey Hart's "I Wear My Sunglasses At Night," here on WHEL's Radio Chained Inferno here on Zero. Six. Six. Six. ZERO. AM. Serving Bridgeport, Connecticut, zip code Zero. Six. Six. Six. ZERO. Up next we have "I Wear My Sunglasses At Night" by Corey Hart. Welcome to W-H-E-L, remember, you're here forever, burning eternally without end. I hope you brought water."
The cheerful radio voice distorts upon each numeral, each spliced from a different recording while the zeroes are spoken in a twisted, infernal chorus. The numerals on the dashboard go out and a pair of red embers appear in the darkness, shortly followed by the illumination of a mouthful of fearsome teeth, lit from the inside.
Kalinda Kriegsdottir is revealed in full as she pokes the overhead light, turning it on. She's wearing a brilliant purple t-shirt with a sparkly three-horned skull adorned on it covered in pink glitter.
The Pint-Sized Powerhouse is also wearing a baseball cap that looks rather like the fuzzy one-eyed possum hat she wears to the ring, though the hat has a pair of black, wrap-around aviator sunglasses on it.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"So, apparently Don Tirri doesn't think I know how to cut promos, because the son of a million greasy weasels that jerked it into a cup and used that to artificially inseminate some poor woman forty-odd years ago apparently doesn't watch the gods-damned shows that he performs on."
"I mean once I can understand. I missed Logan Lewis' second match and all, but not one, but two whole promos? What do you do, Tirri? Get your tape to the truck, wrestle your match, and then spend the rest of the night out in the parking lot sucking on Joe Camel's carcinogenic cock? Too good to stand at a jaunty angle to the monitors backstage like the rest of us?"
"Or do you just not recognize the format? Is a dragon behaving like a living jack-o-lantern lit from within by her own internal glow and the hellfire eyes of an Evil Overlord just not something you recognize? Does using a crystal ball to display images instead of a bit of splicing give you seizures and make you hit the floor? Can you just not recognize a promo when it happens on the actual goddamned show that actually matters, instead of a fraction of the viewers that watch whatever hole the truck monkeys throw these tapes into?"
"Or are you just a stuck up old fart that doesn't think promos count if they're not the sort of format that a bajillion random assholes on YouTube and Twitter do where they just stare into the camera?"
Kalinda pulls the sunglasses off of her hat and puts them on.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"So here you go, Tirri, here I am cutting a promo for the thinking impaired because you don't know how to fucking recognize it any other way. I've got all the accouterments of a "proper" random dipshit talking into a camera promo."
"I've got the camera, I've got the mandatory sunglasses, and I'm sitting my ass in a car. Zero fucking production value, no drama, no showmanship, nothing but an endless series of words coming out of my mouth."
"I'm sorry, Tirri, if your drunken attention span can't fucking handle a full-scale, properly produced Kalinda promo. I dunno, maybe you had siblings that threatened to dunk you in the Bog of Eternal Stench and as a result are scarred for life and run in terror whenever somebody references Jim Henson's "Labyrinth," complete with crystalline orb sleight of hand and eldritch power."
Kalinda claps her hands.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"So here you go, fucker, no special effects, no drama, no presentation, no frills. Just another random asshole in sunglasses in a car ranting and raving into a stationary camera. I hope you're fucking grateful, because I'm bending over backward to make sure that you can actually, you know, fucking watch this thing and are capable of acknowledging it."
"Because hi! I'm Kalinda and I can spew vitriol with the best of them. Surprise! I'm not limited to 280 characters like you seem to think I am, you blind, dense anal violator of unsuspecting otters."
"I don't do this often, and you know why? Because other people fucking ruined it for everybody. I got sick and tired of carrying the show on my barndoor back, brother, dude, jack, sitting around wanting to properly banter back and forth with somebody. To make a real rival. To attain the dream and have a nice and proper nemesis that I could trade witty barbs with. And you know what I found?"
"Jack fucking shit. I found an entire industry full of sad, dismal dipshits with one collective braincell between them that couldn't banter their way out of a wet paper bag. I tried, Tirri, I tried so fucking hard to make the fans give a shit about every single one of my matches, give a shit about my opponents, give a shit about the television program that we were collectively making."
"But that never happened. Nobody wanted to do it. Nobody wanted to have an honest to gods back and forth dialog, a volley of insults, a battle of wits. Week after week, month after month, year after year of hearing nothing but the same tired old cliches and the same recycled bullshit falling out of their mouths again and again and again."
"I've spent seven and a half fucking years in an industry where people refuse to do anything but the absolute minimum required of them in order to keep their goddamned jobs, and often times not even that."
"I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to break through the bullshit, battle the corruption, and change professional wrestling for the better. Only what do I find? I find an industry where the hard workers are looked upon as suckers, and opportunity is showered upon those who lie, cheat, manipulate, backstab, and politicize from behind the scenes."
"Who gives a shit that I was trained by two of the greatest in-ring competitors the sport has ever managed to produce? I don't have a super duper special sparkly snowflake last name that marks me as part of a wrestling dynasty, so I don't ever get to have nice things!"
"You ever been hired for the sole purpose of being booked in the dumbest shit imaginable, with the intent of purposefully damaging your drawing power? Because I have. I thought I was done, and then for the first time somebody came to me and asked me to join their promotion. And I thought it would be different. I thought that being the star that carried a company through its infancy as World Champion, building up the promotion around me as its ace for two fucking years would be worth something. It wasn't worth shit. Logan, I want you to pay attention here, because this is a lesson that took me years to learn and it broke my fucking heart when I figured it out."
Kalinda sneers.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"Professional wrestling does not give a shit about you. The fans might love you, you might find friends, you might find allies, you might even find a boss that you respect."
"And they'll all stab you in the back. They'll all betray you. You can literally risk your soul delving into the depths of hell to yank a dead man from eternal suffering, stuff his ass back into his body, and then sew up that charred, bleeding wreck with rich, Corinthian leather ripped from the seats of the truck that was a part of his demise, and even then he'll turn on you."
"The moment that somebody thinks they're wrung out the last bit of usefulness out of you that they can, they will jab a knife in your back and use it as a foothold to climb over you onto bigger and better things."
"And while you're carrying an entire promotion on your back, working your tail off to try and make things better for everyone, nobody cares. Nobody will help you. Nobody will align with you if it affects their bottom line. It doesn't matter that if you unite then the endless dismal darkity dark batshit dungeon fucks have 5280 wrestlers, managers, valets, minions, side characters, and the entirety of the 82nd Airborne division running into each and every one of your matches."
"All you have to do to prevent the heroes from assembling is to dangle a shiny prize in front of them that only one can win and they turn into a bunch of ravenous lone wolves who will never, ever form a pack."
"They would rather they get their asses kicked by greater numbers week after week, month after month if it means at the end of it they and they alone get to be the one allowed to reach for a prize. One they're almost assuredly going to fail at, but make each of them think that it's going to be them that overcomes the odds and emerges triumphant."
"It's all bullshit, Logan. It's all a shell game. It's three card monty. Keep your eye on the lady and win the prize. But they'll never let you win. You just watch the cards, never allowed to pick the right one while all the while somebody keeps twisting a dagger in your heart, over and over and over and over again."
Kalinda sniffs softly and rubs her eyes with her ungauntleted hand.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"I tried. I tried so hard for so long, but it isn't enough. Your world is dead, and you just don't know it. You've never seen a world that's truly alive, filled with wonder, filled with variety, filled with magic. A world where everything happens for a reason, where the stories the gods and divinities wish to tell with our lives are as well-studied and codified as the laws of physics."
"There is no love here, no guidance, no purpose. I don't know if that's better or if it's worse that you've made this shithole on your own, without some malevolent elder being of agony tipping the scales in favor of making the world suck ass through a straw."
"But hey, if this is the best humanity has to offer, I understand why whatever creator deity you had left this place high and dry. If this world was the best I could do, and you shits were the pinnacle of creation that I made in My Divine Image, I'd plop my ass down in My Heavenly Bathtub and use the Straight Razor of the Gods to open My fucking veins and let all the ichor drain out."
"Yours is an empty world, and I do my best to fill it. I try to be kind, I try to be polite, but you fuckers have to push. You have to needle. You can't leave well enough alone. You'll never be satisfied until you drag everyone and everything around you down into the depths of misery right alongside you."
"I tried to be a hero. I tried to save you. I tried to redeem professional wrestling one step at a time, and all that it brought me was pain. And even when I found love? You motherfuckers found a way to use that to hurt me again and again and again."
"The human race did in five years what five decades of the worst villains and horrors that Tatheon had to offer failed to do. I spent so much of my life refusing to give into temptation, to rebuke the dark powers that were tripping over themselves to offer their dark blessing unto me."
"And this? This is the result. This is what's happened to me embracing all of that with open arms."
The dragoness spreads her arms wide.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"It's not different at all, is it, Steve?"
Kalinda growls a quote from a cartoon mad scientist maniacally.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"For all I have, for all that I can do, I'm still powerless. I'm still unable to change anything. So I won't. That's when I started all of this, when I decided that my time as a questing hero would come to an end. That I would be the Evil Overlord of professional wrestling, I would sit idly by in my Palace of Pain and wait for the shiny eyed little heroes to come to me, and then I would crush their hopes and their dreams."
"Though I kind of suck at it, the whole evil thing, because I'm not doing it to be cruel. I'm doing it to be kind."
Kalinda smiles sadly.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"The kindest thing I could do you for, Logan, would be to make it so that you can't wrestle anymore. Break both your legs in a way that it'll take years before you can walk again, let alone even think of wrestling. Because you'd be happier for it."
"Bound to me is the Left Hand of Arimus, a piece of armor forged by my world's God of Death."
Kalinda displays her left hand and arm, showing off the skeletal gauntlet and the skull elbow decoration.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"He is something you don't have in this world, a Death who is kind, who cares, who demands of the world that those he takes be sent onward into the afterlife for a reason. He is the bumbling fool of a demon at the crossroads, the devil losing a fiddle of gold, the reaper who plays badly at chess."
"He wants you to live your life to the fullest, to do great things. I look at you, Logan, and I see your deaths, things that may come to be. And so many of them are very much the opposite of great things."
"An accidental overdose on the Fourth of July, age 32. Asphyxiating on your own vomit, age 27. Dead on the operating table due to a drunk anesthesiologist during an otherwise routine knee surgery, age 41. Car accident after a lover stabs you in the back and abandons you for another wrestler, age 28. That one is particularly nasty, as it takes you three days to die and they don't find the car for another four months. Also, keep a watch on your lower back, typically the left side, just below the shoulder blade. Sometimes there's a break, sometimes there's a tumor, sometimes there's a knife, or a bullet, but there are strangely so many of your potential deaths that come from right there."
"There's also one weird one at 426 that involves eldritch cosmic horrors and centuries spent screaming, so I would highly advise going into doorways or portals that involve purply-green writhing tentacles."
"But so many of your deaths, they come about as the result of the professional wrestling industry. And if I was kind, Logan, if I cared, I would save you from them. But I can't."
Kalinda smirks.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"By word and by deed I have been bound, and I am to abide by the contract I signed with UPRISING. As a creature empowered by fiend and fey alike, violating such things is something that I cannot and will not do."
"Amongst the things that I've promised Jax are that I won't go about crippling members of the roster all willy-nilly, so unfortunately for you, little one, I'm going to have to do things the hard way. I'm going to have to dissuade you from continuing this folly that is your career as a professional wrestler by making the experience for you as miserable as possible, within reason."
"I'm merely an Evil Overlord, Logan, I'm not going to be a dick about it. So for now I will settle for thwarting your mad drive to see Don Tirri overcome by your own hand, crushing your hopes for advancement in the tournament, and smothering your dreams to become the inaugural UPRISING Wor… one second."
Kalinda takes out her phone and fiddles with it.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"UPRISING World Championship. Just had to make sure that there wasn't a weight class or anything in there. Since for some fucking reason promotions like to slap "heavyweight" on their world title and then have it be an openweight belt."
"So, on the topic of eldritch abominations, I heard you pissing and moaning about how I "cheated" to defeat Carnibore. Apparently, somebody hasn't been reading their match contracts very clearly."
Kalinda grins, showing a rather different configuration of teeth than she'd been sporting earlier. These looking like they'd be more at home on the Jaws of Life then in the mouth of a biological creature.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"All my television matches take place in an interdimensional void. We've got… well… what we've got is a bit too complicated to explain to anybody without 60 credit-hours of magical studies under their belt. But basically UPRISING has a TV deal with ONSET, Otherworldly Noneuclidean Spaces Entertainment Television, because I'm here."
"I'm a dragon, so that means that I'm a walking ley line, and that means that their primary demographic can actually make out what happens in the ring because the amount of ambient mana I put out lights the place up to their senses. After a few centuries their method of sight beyond sight makes it so that it's kind of hard to make out what four-dimensional beings are doing."
"So when I wrestle on TV, all my matches take place in an Interdimensional Void, which is the black, misty, foggy thing you see when I wrestle. We're still working on calibrating it properly, I think something almost pounced on Ignis and laid eggs in her ears on the first show, but I've got it filtered now so it's a bit safer and things shouldn't be sneaking in without having paid for a ticket first."
"But that means that my matches take place under the aegis of a completely different athletic commission, one that rules that innate biological abilities are classed as perfectly legal so long as they're used in a manner consistent with the rest of the rules. So no maiming."
"But a little bit of mist, a touch of firebreath, those are perfectly alright because there are perfectly normal human wrestlers who use those things in matches, and I can duplicate that under my own draconic biology, so that means..."
Kalinda is suddenly interrupted by a muffled, but still audible male voice.
MALE VOICE
"WHY IS THERE A HORRIBLE BLACK FOG IN MY DRIVEWAY?!"
Kalinda scowls and opens the car door.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"IT'S NOT A FOG, IT'S A PENUMBRA!"
The penumbra vanishes to reveal that it's a nice, sunny day and Kalinda is sitting in the interior of a red 1962 Ford Mustang. Now that she's leaning out the door, the name "MOSH" can be seen embroidered on the driver's side seat cover in red on black fabric.
CHRIS MOSH
"How the hell? WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY CAR?!"
Chris Mosh yanks Kalinda out of the car and is frantically looking it over, and he manages to topple Kalinda's camera over so it's on the side and now looking out the windshield.
CHRIS MOSH
"Did the dragon hurt you, my baby? Did she scratch you?"
Mosh is now out of the car and looking it over for paint damage. He hugs the hood.
CHRIS MOSH
"It's okay, daddy's here now."
The camera is picked up as Kalinda reaches in and grabs it.
KALINDA KRIEGSDOTTIR
"Um… I don't actually own a car, so I kind of had to use whatever was available. ANYWAY! It looks like my random asshole on Twitter recording commentary studio has been confiscated."
"So, Tirri, I'm going to have to address all of your fucking nonsense on Saturday! I will not stand for your unscientific bullshit regarding my tail, and I've got actual scientific diagrams to prove what a complete and utter dipshit you are, and that…""
Kalinda's tirade is interrupted by her tumbling ass over teakettle because she's too busy looking into the camera to avoid running into some obstruction.
CHRIS MOSH
"MY TRASH CANS!"
Kalinda picks up the camera from the ground and fiddles with it for a few moments to bring the recording to a close.