Post by W A L T E R on Sept 26, 2019 21:56:13 GMT -6
Thursday September 26
The Lincoln Park Conservancy
Chicago, IL
Walter ambles slowly through the lush vegetation of this enormous greenhouse, hands extended to brush the fronds he passes. These large, glass bubbles are found across the country now, turning what should be a purely scientific or environmentally conscious undertakings into your typical tourist trap, teeming with the mediocre hordes. This particular Victorian-era glass house in the Lincoln Park Conservancy is beset on all sides by the contradictions of Chicago: the most stringent gun laws in the country with one of the highest rates of gun violence. Diverse, vibrant communities of color policed and governed by some of the most bigoted, corrupt forces in the country. A place that was considered by some as the birthplace of house music that would pass an “anti-rave ordinance.” Chicago’s reach has always exceeded its grasp.
The same held so true for UCI that it would drown in its own ambition. UCI crowned undeserving kings and made champions of lesser men. UCI existed in a bubble like this one Walter walks through now, a few paces ahead of Etta. Those beings brought up inside of it could never have--and never did--survive outside of its perfectly pitched climate. Only within these walls are such sensitive souls as Kevin Bishop, Andre Holmes or Erin Fausse able to reach their full potential. A gardener's delicate hands and careful considerations are to thank for their success in UCI, inside this bubble. Walter’s hand brushes a particularly lovely flower.
He strokes it gently with the back of his hand.
Etta: Jesus fuckin’ Christ, you mongrel, ain’t this enough preamble? How long you gonna make these cameras follow you around while you think about fuckin’ a chryanthmum or whatever the shit you’re doing?
Walter smiles but keeps his gaze on the flower, caressing its stamen with his massive index finger.
Walter: Did you see what happened at Execution, dear Loretta?
Etta: Yeah, yeah everybody and their damn mother saw you choke out Kemp again, wasn’t any kind of surprise to anybody payin’ two squirts worth of attention. Kyle’s a good man. Too good of a man to beat a mongrel like you in a match like that...Shit, you put him on that stretcher again a--
Walter: Exactly, dear Loretta: I put him on a stretcher. I came close to ending poor, unfit Kyle. I was within moments of wiping him from my plane of existence, I could have placed him back into the Great Mystery and the world would have been better for it. That is what I wanted to do. That was my intention. I dug him that plot in the graveyard pragmatically, not metaphorically.
Etta: Yeah but Kemp’s a fighter a--
Walter: No, no. I mean, it’s certainly true that Kyle is a fighter but make no mistakes my dear: he survived by my...mercy…?
Walter’s voice lifted at the end of his sentence, an unusual lilt of uncertainty in his declaration.
Etta: Bullshit.
Walter: Your belief or lack thereof does not determine the truth, dear Loretta. Truth is objective and do not believe the harlots that preach otherwise. But we will discuss this more in the future. For now, I turn my mind to other objective truths.
Etta: Yeah, I’ll wait with bated damned breath for you to tell me more about your “mercy;” just don’t expect any of that forked tongue fuckery to convince me of a damn thing. So what objective truths you turnin’ to instead? The fact that you’re in a match loaded with World Champs and it’s probably the first damn time you’re the underdog? Because god’s honest, I could talk about that all damn day.
He turns his eyes to her now, the unnerving smile still plastered across his face. The AW United States Champion yanks the flower from its soil and holds it to his nose.
Walter: This is Amaryllis Zombie. It’s a lovely plant but ultimately...that’s it. It’s all surface, a purely aesthetic joy but substantially...useless. This pathetic failure of evolution does not even set its own seed, these lovely flowers are sterile.
Zombie McMorris, perhaps the most acclaimed of UCI’s over-acclaimed champions, this is your flower. Your style, your words, so intoxicating, so fulfilling to those without deeper thought or greater sense of purpose. But you have no posterity, you will have no legacy after you are gone. You need to be gently cared for and propagated as this place did for you. You are a restless, nigh eternal being whose own endlessness has mired him in a forever-repeating cycle void of growth or substance or achievement outside the glass bubble of UCI. Outside the soft, thoughtful hands of Spencer Adams lifting you up.
Spencer Adams is dead now, only KOS in his place. And though an agent of chaos you may be, Spencer has chosen a different pronunciation. And though the banner in the rafters will read UCI, that place...the place of your only World Championship...and the only place that your teammates have ever truly tasted any semblance of success...That place? Is dead. Stones have been thrown through your glass house and it has tumbled down upon your shoulders.
But the horn sounds and you all scurry to represent the UCI. To carry the banner so proudly.
Walter extends the flower to Etta who takes it with a smile. The smile, of course, falls almost immediately into a frown and she drops it to the ground, grinding it beneath her heel.
Walter: Exactly, dear Loretta. We have come to grind Zombie and his cohorts under the heel of our superiority, to smash this glass house with our violent stones and to uproot all its life in the name of evolution. In my name.
Evolution is something Erin Fausse should understand; the woman who evolved from petty criminal into professional wrestler at the behest of some higher power, allegedly to avoid some unnamed horror. So what now then, Ms. Fausse? Has that awful event come to pass since you’ve hung up your wrestling heels and re-donned the footwear of the lowly street urchin you always were?
In my casual perusing of your story, Ms. Fausse--and believe me that it was casual; never have you given wrestling a more than passing focus so neither will you be given mine--I see that you’re on a mission from God? Or a god? It’s unclear. Like your eyes. Like your mind. Like your purpose. That is your failing, Ms. Fausse. That is why you’re perhaps the best to never do it, aside from the only wrestler with a more feminine face than yours, Mr. Ethan King. You never sustained any semblance of success, not even inside this glass house seemingly built to cater to the likes of you: the deluded, the ill, the weak.
Where you, like all these others, falter I am upon the surest of feet. You flail but I am the flail threshing all of you chaff, leaving the husks to be scooped and discarded by the universe. I will do the same to you, Ms. Fausse, that every organization you’ve been a part of has done to you: I will use you, I will destroy you, and then I will utterly forget about you.
Unlike Ms. Fausse, Kevin Bishop reached the top of this mountain. As did Alex Richards and Andre Holmes. Kudos would be in order but when a place gathers the most unfit amongst us survival is a given and dominance is no boast.
UCI saw itself as an evolution of WCF, as an extension and growth thereof. But the seeds were weak, they were chosen by the hand of a man who himself had barely survived the harsh, hallowed grounds of the WCF. Mr. Adams brought no cream to rise to the top here so you saw the dregs of the WCF floundering their way to the top of the mountain here. UCI was a failed mutation that called Mr. Bishop, Mr. Richards, Mr. Holmes champion.
Mr. Bishop, as the self-crowned King of the Brotherhood you preached evolution. You preached the growth of those around you. Maybe you even tried. Maybe you truly put in some modicum of effort in watering those lovely little flowers that never quite bloomed. Or maybe--and this I feel is far more likely--maybe you used them. Maybe you stood on their shoulders, giving the false appearance of your own grandiosity. Even Kevin Bishop, WCF’s greatest main event punching bag could appear ten feet tall in the glass house of UCI when standing on the shoulders of those foolish enough to stand beside him. Those men are gone, Kevin. The UCI’s glass house is gone. Now it is left to you. You strike no fear. You are not that frightening mystery that goes bump in the night you are that which goes job every night. You have served your brief, fleeting, pathetic purpose. I will discard you.
Andre Holmes, I will waste no breath on you in the same manner you have wasted no effort inside of a ring for years. When did you realize this sport wasn’t yours? When did you realize that it was finally time for you to ‘relent?’ When did you realize that you’re an insignificant footnote in a federation that is footnote beneath a federation that is already forgotten? Or did you not? Has this still been your best effort all this time? I do so hope that’s not the case. That would simply be embarrassing. Do us all a favor, Andre, and stay home. Do not sully this match with your presence.
Do you know what WCF called these men? It called them losers. It called them failures. And when they realized their inferiority, when they realized that the rest of wrestling had evolved past their simple minds and simpler skills, they ran from the harsh trials of the WCF that called them losers and failures. And after they ran? The WCF felt no need to ever call them again.
I know that’s only part of the truth. I know that Mr. Richards managed a single World Title reign as the WCF was in its death throes. And he knows how it tasted. Bitter. Unsatisfying. Disappointing. The same feelings he currently experiences in Action Wrestling where he fails time and time again. Here he is mythologized as a UCI great. In Action Wrestling his name is not listed under “legends” but under “losers” in the main event slot. I congratulate you on your ascendance to the role of official prey to AW’s best predators. When you realize the futility of your efforts there and turn to my United States title as a consolation I will deeply enjoy culling you from that herd too. You do not confuse evolution, Mr. Richards. You confound me only in your persistence to be relevant, to even exist within my plane. You were one of the few still trying to survive on what was a dead planet known as the WCF. How embarrassing for you to reach its pinnacle then. You stood the Alpha of a landfill, the great predator of glorified boneyard. The Champion of a place already supplanted by its evolution.
Etta: Thought you said UCI wasn’t no evolution?
Walter: Oh silly Loretta. By this time, UCI was long buried and nearly forgotten. And its bastard, stillborn offspring NBW was suffocated in its infancy by the ego of its progenitor, Mr. Bishop. The only true evolution of the WCF is the AW, it is the herd I now cull.
Etta: Well I’m goddamned sorry if I can’t keep all this shit straight. Which shithole came first, which shithole was started by what shithead and which one shit the bed first…
Walter raises an eyebrow at his keeper as if to ask if she’s done.
Etta: How’n the hell do you know all this shit anyways, mongrel?
Walter: Research, my dear. Your generosity in providing me with access to the world wide web has allowed me to do more than simply peruse modern day courting websites.
Etta: Of cou--wait...Courting? You mean like dating websites? What on god’s green are you tryin’ to tell me?
Walter: It is the same thing I was attempting to tell you earlier, dear Loretta, when I spoke of my great mercy shown to Kyle. Though march of evolution is steady as ever within me...I have realized that I too am finite. Though I am inevitable, I am finite. There must be an Evolved Man after me, it’s my duty to pass on my superiority in order to continue the work I begun.
Etta: Christ on a cracker, Walter. I ain’t about to entertain one more goddamn nonsense word of that. Go back to blathering about the proper hierarchy of all these shitholes for chrissake.
Walter: If you insist, Loretta. My point is that UCI is a failed mutation of the WCF, it was Action Wrestling had it been championed by the men representing UCI in this match. It was Action Wrestling without men like me...without...evolution. UCI’s greatest contribution to the world is what? What did UCI birth? NBW? Hmph. Perhaps you can call it a still born, already-aborted fetus of a federation. But I see it as a jagged, infected kidney stone UTI passed before the both of them shriveled and died. We return to UCI now breathing life into it for only one night so that we may suffocate it anew. So that we can reassert dominance, so that we can confirm superiority. Evolution is not complete without true exctinction so that is what I am here to create in UCI: an extinction level event.
And after I do? After I wipe from the ring UCI’s greatest memories, its greatest “champions”...I turn my implacable inhumanity to my brief brothers-in-arms from the AW.
Walter strides to an exit and pushes out the door as Etta follows.
Walter: So now it will be just us, Action Wrestling. We are outside the bubble, we are in the world itself. The place that is filled to the brim with those who are able to survive, with those deemed fit, with those who need no bubble under which to thrive. Here you true champions. Champions like Dandy DiVito.
Dandy, I respect your accomplishments thus far. Your trajectory in Action Wrestling is more than respectable; I’d go so far as to call it admirable. But that is all I would call admirable about you, Dandy. You were born in america’s dumpster and to america’s dumpster you should be returned. A fake gutter punk climbing his way by virtue of having been off the screen months?. A physical representation of this generation’s needy petulance, their ignorant arrogance believing they CAN so they SHOULD. Then when the world sees you for the talentless semen sock you are, you lean into that childishness. You pretend stomping your feet and yelling are some type of personality. You take for granted that title because it was unearned. Lockhart would have lost to half of the locker room that night, he was tired and sloppy after months upon months of defenses. You were fresh off the reserve, an opportunistic roach. Even roaches must evolve, Dandy. And you haven’t evolved since your days in Jacksonville. You haven’t changed your tune for a moment but only leaned into your “fundamental” self. Your record has played well so far but I am here to scratch the needle and snap the vinyl. If you cannot evolve you do not survive. I implore you to pay attention, Dandy.
I implore your attention but I do not expect it Dandy. I expect you to have eyes over your shoulder for Ms. All-In. I expect you to be thinking about your next World Title defense. I expect you to not see Man Evolved, breathing down your neck. Ready to fire its first warning shot at what is coming for you. What is inevitable. Me.
Speaking of Ms. All-In, I suppose it would be prudent to address one Elizabeth Hope. No matter that I once swatted her away like the insignificant fly she is. No matter that her primary skill appears to be pretending to be put upon by the front office while simultaneously being dubbed the next big thing, the next one up. No matter that her beloved Royal Family has the same lasting effect as a momentary flatulence in a gale wind. No matter that she is Ms. All-In-her-own-mind. No matter that she will squander that briefcase and then be Ms. All-Out-Chances and, should we be so lucky, Ms. All Out of Action Wrestling. No matter, Elisabeth. That is what you are: absolutely no matter.
Elisabeth you should be more dangerous than you are. You should be meaner than you are. You should be BETTER than you are. Because you are talented. I have seen it. But as soon as those lights shine...as soon as there’s a glint of a title across the ring from you. In those moments when you should rise up the highest. Those moments when your self belief should be most iron clad, when you should truly BELIEVE the words you say will translate into the fight you will bring...Those are the moments that I look at you, Elisabeth, those are the moments I look at you and see it: you don’t believe. Oh you posture and pose. You lean and talk and attempt to swagger. But you are not convincing the people in the stands and you are not convincing the people in the back. You are attempting to convince Lissie Hope. And Lissie Hope is not convinced. We both know that even if large swaths of the rest of this federation do not.
And finally we have a man claiming the crown of Cruiserweight Champion.
Hmph.
The greatest kitten to ever roam the alley is surely esteemed among his peers. The housecat struts and preens with pride and arrogance. Good for the housecat. That tiny little predator. That softer, gentler, weaker cousin of the big cat predators. So what happens to the housecat if it wanders from the alley onto the african plain? What happens to that sweet kitten if the lions show up? That housecat, Derrick, suffers the same fate you will after we thrash Team UCI: it is ripped limb from limb, blood painting every surface near it and then left a lifeless pile. Discarded and forgotten, barely an afterthought.
Do not be mistaken, Derrick. This is not JUST because you are small in stature, though that is certainly a factor. It is because you are small in mind, small in ambition, small in courage and small in relevance. You hide yourself in the ranks of the rest of your diminutive peers. At least QDT had the wherewithal to step outside the warm, safe confines of that division and into a place as frightening and dangerous as the Glory US Title tournament. Of course, once he did, he was handily dispatched by the Evolved Man. And you, now stepping out of this comfort zone as you recently have, will also be handily dispatched by the Evolved Man. Do yourself a service and lay down quickly when it becomes a proper Civil War. Otherwise you might get hurt.
That is it then. That is my upcoming “Civil War.” But here we do not have brother vs brother. We do not have ideological opposites letting blood for economic or political reasons. No, here the two sides are simpler. There is Evolution...and all of you. And we all know which one will win.
Burn it down.
Salt the earth.
Evolution comes.
With that Walter turns back toward the victorian glass house and suddenly smashes both hands through the glass, shattering two large panels. The tiny shards cut his forearms, blood seeps from his skin. Walter bellows and grabs an old, iron cross bar that supports the structure. He pulls it and it moves slightly.
Etta: What in the hell…
He pulls again with another scream and this time it bends. Other glass panes pop and shatter. Another scream and he tears the iron bars from the structure and an entire side of the glass house falls down. Etta sprints away to get clear of the glass. Walter smiles as the shards rain down around him.
The Lincoln Park Conservancy
Chicago, IL
Walter ambles slowly through the lush vegetation of this enormous greenhouse, hands extended to brush the fronds he passes. These large, glass bubbles are found across the country now, turning what should be a purely scientific or environmentally conscious undertakings into your typical tourist trap, teeming with the mediocre hordes. This particular Victorian-era glass house in the Lincoln Park Conservancy is beset on all sides by the contradictions of Chicago: the most stringent gun laws in the country with one of the highest rates of gun violence. Diverse, vibrant communities of color policed and governed by some of the most bigoted, corrupt forces in the country. A place that was considered by some as the birthplace of house music that would pass an “anti-rave ordinance.” Chicago’s reach has always exceeded its grasp.
The same held so true for UCI that it would drown in its own ambition. UCI crowned undeserving kings and made champions of lesser men. UCI existed in a bubble like this one Walter walks through now, a few paces ahead of Etta. Those beings brought up inside of it could never have--and never did--survive outside of its perfectly pitched climate. Only within these walls are such sensitive souls as Kevin Bishop, Andre Holmes or Erin Fausse able to reach their full potential. A gardener's delicate hands and careful considerations are to thank for their success in UCI, inside this bubble. Walter’s hand brushes a particularly lovely flower.
He strokes it gently with the back of his hand.
Etta: Jesus fuckin’ Christ, you mongrel, ain’t this enough preamble? How long you gonna make these cameras follow you around while you think about fuckin’ a chryanthmum or whatever the shit you’re doing?
Walter smiles but keeps his gaze on the flower, caressing its stamen with his massive index finger.
Walter: Did you see what happened at Execution, dear Loretta?
Etta: Yeah, yeah everybody and their damn mother saw you choke out Kemp again, wasn’t any kind of surprise to anybody payin’ two squirts worth of attention. Kyle’s a good man. Too good of a man to beat a mongrel like you in a match like that...Shit, you put him on that stretcher again a--
Walter: Exactly, dear Loretta: I put him on a stretcher. I came close to ending poor, unfit Kyle. I was within moments of wiping him from my plane of existence, I could have placed him back into the Great Mystery and the world would have been better for it. That is what I wanted to do. That was my intention. I dug him that plot in the graveyard pragmatically, not metaphorically.
Etta: Yeah but Kemp’s a fighter a--
Walter: No, no. I mean, it’s certainly true that Kyle is a fighter but make no mistakes my dear: he survived by my...mercy…?
Walter’s voice lifted at the end of his sentence, an unusual lilt of uncertainty in his declaration.
Etta: Bullshit.
Walter: Your belief or lack thereof does not determine the truth, dear Loretta. Truth is objective and do not believe the harlots that preach otherwise. But we will discuss this more in the future. For now, I turn my mind to other objective truths.
Etta: Yeah, I’ll wait with bated damned breath for you to tell me more about your “mercy;” just don’t expect any of that forked tongue fuckery to convince me of a damn thing. So what objective truths you turnin’ to instead? The fact that you’re in a match loaded with World Champs and it’s probably the first damn time you’re the underdog? Because god’s honest, I could talk about that all damn day.
He turns his eyes to her now, the unnerving smile still plastered across his face. The AW United States Champion yanks the flower from its soil and holds it to his nose.
Walter: This is Amaryllis Zombie. It’s a lovely plant but ultimately...that’s it. It’s all surface, a purely aesthetic joy but substantially...useless. This pathetic failure of evolution does not even set its own seed, these lovely flowers are sterile.
Zombie McMorris, perhaps the most acclaimed of UCI’s over-acclaimed champions, this is your flower. Your style, your words, so intoxicating, so fulfilling to those without deeper thought or greater sense of purpose. But you have no posterity, you will have no legacy after you are gone. You need to be gently cared for and propagated as this place did for you. You are a restless, nigh eternal being whose own endlessness has mired him in a forever-repeating cycle void of growth or substance or achievement outside the glass bubble of UCI. Outside the soft, thoughtful hands of Spencer Adams lifting you up.
Spencer Adams is dead now, only KOS in his place. And though an agent of chaos you may be, Spencer has chosen a different pronunciation. And though the banner in the rafters will read UCI, that place...the place of your only World Championship...and the only place that your teammates have ever truly tasted any semblance of success...That place? Is dead. Stones have been thrown through your glass house and it has tumbled down upon your shoulders.
But the horn sounds and you all scurry to represent the UCI. To carry the banner so proudly.
Walter extends the flower to Etta who takes it with a smile. The smile, of course, falls almost immediately into a frown and she drops it to the ground, grinding it beneath her heel.
Walter: Exactly, dear Loretta. We have come to grind Zombie and his cohorts under the heel of our superiority, to smash this glass house with our violent stones and to uproot all its life in the name of evolution. In my name.
Evolution is something Erin Fausse should understand; the woman who evolved from petty criminal into professional wrestler at the behest of some higher power, allegedly to avoid some unnamed horror. So what now then, Ms. Fausse? Has that awful event come to pass since you’ve hung up your wrestling heels and re-donned the footwear of the lowly street urchin you always were?
In my casual perusing of your story, Ms. Fausse--and believe me that it was casual; never have you given wrestling a more than passing focus so neither will you be given mine--I see that you’re on a mission from God? Or a god? It’s unclear. Like your eyes. Like your mind. Like your purpose. That is your failing, Ms. Fausse. That is why you’re perhaps the best to never do it, aside from the only wrestler with a more feminine face than yours, Mr. Ethan King. You never sustained any semblance of success, not even inside this glass house seemingly built to cater to the likes of you: the deluded, the ill, the weak.
Where you, like all these others, falter I am upon the surest of feet. You flail but I am the flail threshing all of you chaff, leaving the husks to be scooped and discarded by the universe. I will do the same to you, Ms. Fausse, that every organization you’ve been a part of has done to you: I will use you, I will destroy you, and then I will utterly forget about you.
Unlike Ms. Fausse, Kevin Bishop reached the top of this mountain. As did Alex Richards and Andre Holmes. Kudos would be in order but when a place gathers the most unfit amongst us survival is a given and dominance is no boast.
UCI saw itself as an evolution of WCF, as an extension and growth thereof. But the seeds were weak, they were chosen by the hand of a man who himself had barely survived the harsh, hallowed grounds of the WCF. Mr. Adams brought no cream to rise to the top here so you saw the dregs of the WCF floundering their way to the top of the mountain here. UCI was a failed mutation that called Mr. Bishop, Mr. Richards, Mr. Holmes champion.
Mr. Bishop, as the self-crowned King of the Brotherhood you preached evolution. You preached the growth of those around you. Maybe you even tried. Maybe you truly put in some modicum of effort in watering those lovely little flowers that never quite bloomed. Or maybe--and this I feel is far more likely--maybe you used them. Maybe you stood on their shoulders, giving the false appearance of your own grandiosity. Even Kevin Bishop, WCF’s greatest main event punching bag could appear ten feet tall in the glass house of UCI when standing on the shoulders of those foolish enough to stand beside him. Those men are gone, Kevin. The UCI’s glass house is gone. Now it is left to you. You strike no fear. You are not that frightening mystery that goes bump in the night you are that which goes job every night. You have served your brief, fleeting, pathetic purpose. I will discard you.
Andre Holmes, I will waste no breath on you in the same manner you have wasted no effort inside of a ring for years. When did you realize this sport wasn’t yours? When did you realize that it was finally time for you to ‘relent?’ When did you realize that you’re an insignificant footnote in a federation that is footnote beneath a federation that is already forgotten? Or did you not? Has this still been your best effort all this time? I do so hope that’s not the case. That would simply be embarrassing. Do us all a favor, Andre, and stay home. Do not sully this match with your presence.
Do you know what WCF called these men? It called them losers. It called them failures. And when they realized their inferiority, when they realized that the rest of wrestling had evolved past their simple minds and simpler skills, they ran from the harsh trials of the WCF that called them losers and failures. And after they ran? The WCF felt no need to ever call them again.
I know that’s only part of the truth. I know that Mr. Richards managed a single World Title reign as the WCF was in its death throes. And he knows how it tasted. Bitter. Unsatisfying. Disappointing. The same feelings he currently experiences in Action Wrestling where he fails time and time again. Here he is mythologized as a UCI great. In Action Wrestling his name is not listed under “legends” but under “losers” in the main event slot. I congratulate you on your ascendance to the role of official prey to AW’s best predators. When you realize the futility of your efforts there and turn to my United States title as a consolation I will deeply enjoy culling you from that herd too. You do not confuse evolution, Mr. Richards. You confound me only in your persistence to be relevant, to even exist within my plane. You were one of the few still trying to survive on what was a dead planet known as the WCF. How embarrassing for you to reach its pinnacle then. You stood the Alpha of a landfill, the great predator of glorified boneyard. The Champion of a place already supplanted by its evolution.
Etta: Thought you said UCI wasn’t no evolution?
Walter: Oh silly Loretta. By this time, UCI was long buried and nearly forgotten. And its bastard, stillborn offspring NBW was suffocated in its infancy by the ego of its progenitor, Mr. Bishop. The only true evolution of the WCF is the AW, it is the herd I now cull.
Etta: Well I’m goddamned sorry if I can’t keep all this shit straight. Which shithole came first, which shithole was started by what shithead and which one shit the bed first…
Walter raises an eyebrow at his keeper as if to ask if she’s done.
Etta: How’n the hell do you know all this shit anyways, mongrel?
Walter: Research, my dear. Your generosity in providing me with access to the world wide web has allowed me to do more than simply peruse modern day courting websites.
Etta: Of cou--wait...Courting? You mean like dating websites? What on god’s green are you tryin’ to tell me?
Walter: It is the same thing I was attempting to tell you earlier, dear Loretta, when I spoke of my great mercy shown to Kyle. Though march of evolution is steady as ever within me...I have realized that I too am finite. Though I am inevitable, I am finite. There must be an Evolved Man after me, it’s my duty to pass on my superiority in order to continue the work I begun.
Etta: Christ on a cracker, Walter. I ain’t about to entertain one more goddamn nonsense word of that. Go back to blathering about the proper hierarchy of all these shitholes for chrissake.
Walter: If you insist, Loretta. My point is that UCI is a failed mutation of the WCF, it was Action Wrestling had it been championed by the men representing UCI in this match. It was Action Wrestling without men like me...without...evolution. UCI’s greatest contribution to the world is what? What did UCI birth? NBW? Hmph. Perhaps you can call it a still born, already-aborted fetus of a federation. But I see it as a jagged, infected kidney stone UTI passed before the both of them shriveled and died. We return to UCI now breathing life into it for only one night so that we may suffocate it anew. So that we can reassert dominance, so that we can confirm superiority. Evolution is not complete without true exctinction so that is what I am here to create in UCI: an extinction level event.
And after I do? After I wipe from the ring UCI’s greatest memories, its greatest “champions”...I turn my implacable inhumanity to my brief brothers-in-arms from the AW.
Walter strides to an exit and pushes out the door as Etta follows.
Walter: So now it will be just us, Action Wrestling. We are outside the bubble, we are in the world itself. The place that is filled to the brim with those who are able to survive, with those deemed fit, with those who need no bubble under which to thrive. Here you true champions. Champions like Dandy DiVito.
Dandy, I respect your accomplishments thus far. Your trajectory in Action Wrestling is more than respectable; I’d go so far as to call it admirable. But that is all I would call admirable about you, Dandy. You were born in america’s dumpster and to america’s dumpster you should be returned. A fake gutter punk climbing his way by virtue of having been off the screen months?. A physical representation of this generation’s needy petulance, their ignorant arrogance believing they CAN so they SHOULD. Then when the world sees you for the talentless semen sock you are, you lean into that childishness. You pretend stomping your feet and yelling are some type of personality. You take for granted that title because it was unearned. Lockhart would have lost to half of the locker room that night, he was tired and sloppy after months upon months of defenses. You were fresh off the reserve, an opportunistic roach. Even roaches must evolve, Dandy. And you haven’t evolved since your days in Jacksonville. You haven’t changed your tune for a moment but only leaned into your “fundamental” self. Your record has played well so far but I am here to scratch the needle and snap the vinyl. If you cannot evolve you do not survive. I implore you to pay attention, Dandy.
I implore your attention but I do not expect it Dandy. I expect you to have eyes over your shoulder for Ms. All-In. I expect you to be thinking about your next World Title defense. I expect you to not see Man Evolved, breathing down your neck. Ready to fire its first warning shot at what is coming for you. What is inevitable. Me.
Speaking of Ms. All-In, I suppose it would be prudent to address one Elizabeth Hope. No matter that I once swatted her away like the insignificant fly she is. No matter that her primary skill appears to be pretending to be put upon by the front office while simultaneously being dubbed the next big thing, the next one up. No matter that her beloved Royal Family has the same lasting effect as a momentary flatulence in a gale wind. No matter that she is Ms. All-In-her-own-mind. No matter that she will squander that briefcase and then be Ms. All-Out-Chances and, should we be so lucky, Ms. All Out of Action Wrestling. No matter, Elisabeth. That is what you are: absolutely no matter.
Elisabeth you should be more dangerous than you are. You should be meaner than you are. You should be BETTER than you are. Because you are talented. I have seen it. But as soon as those lights shine...as soon as there’s a glint of a title across the ring from you. In those moments when you should rise up the highest. Those moments when your self belief should be most iron clad, when you should truly BELIEVE the words you say will translate into the fight you will bring...Those are the moments that I look at you, Elisabeth, those are the moments I look at you and see it: you don’t believe. Oh you posture and pose. You lean and talk and attempt to swagger. But you are not convincing the people in the stands and you are not convincing the people in the back. You are attempting to convince Lissie Hope. And Lissie Hope is not convinced. We both know that even if large swaths of the rest of this federation do not.
And finally we have a man claiming the crown of Cruiserweight Champion.
Hmph.
The greatest kitten to ever roam the alley is surely esteemed among his peers. The housecat struts and preens with pride and arrogance. Good for the housecat. That tiny little predator. That softer, gentler, weaker cousin of the big cat predators. So what happens to the housecat if it wanders from the alley onto the african plain? What happens to that sweet kitten if the lions show up? That housecat, Derrick, suffers the same fate you will after we thrash Team UCI: it is ripped limb from limb, blood painting every surface near it and then left a lifeless pile. Discarded and forgotten, barely an afterthought.
Do not be mistaken, Derrick. This is not JUST because you are small in stature, though that is certainly a factor. It is because you are small in mind, small in ambition, small in courage and small in relevance. You hide yourself in the ranks of the rest of your diminutive peers. At least QDT had the wherewithal to step outside the warm, safe confines of that division and into a place as frightening and dangerous as the Glory US Title tournament. Of course, once he did, he was handily dispatched by the Evolved Man. And you, now stepping out of this comfort zone as you recently have, will also be handily dispatched by the Evolved Man. Do yourself a service and lay down quickly when it becomes a proper Civil War. Otherwise you might get hurt.
That is it then. That is my upcoming “Civil War.” But here we do not have brother vs brother. We do not have ideological opposites letting blood for economic or political reasons. No, here the two sides are simpler. There is Evolution...and all of you. And we all know which one will win.
Burn it down.
Salt the earth.
Evolution comes.
With that Walter turns back toward the victorian glass house and suddenly smashes both hands through the glass, shattering two large panels. The tiny shards cut his forearms, blood seeps from his skin. Walter bellows and grabs an old, iron cross bar that supports the structure. He pulls it and it moves slightly.
Etta: What in the hell…
He pulls again with another scream and this time it bends. Other glass panes pop and shatter. Another scream and he tears the iron bars from the structure and an entire side of the glass house falls down. Etta sprints away to get clear of the glass. Walter smiles as the shards rain down around him.