Post by Lisa Frankenstein on Feb 18, 2019 22:36:04 GMT -5
Lisa is distraught.
“I am distraught.”
See? I told you.
“It would be so easy to hand wave the whole Crown of the King Cobra thing away. Like sure, I wanted to win, but I had other goals this year. I want to finally grab that Evolution World Championship then tour it around my hometown in an open top bus like I just won the Champion’s League. I want to crush the competition in the Carnival of Carnage for Death Trip and then do it all over again in the Deathmatch Demolition for Iron Japan.
I want to win a tag-title here, there and everywhere else, because tag wrestling is great and we should all be doing our part to support it. I also want to do another bit in a movie to pad out my IMDB page and I’ve been meaning to get back into Nier Automata since I was really enjoying until I just stopped playing it one day. I have goals I guess is what i’m saying. This was just one of them. One more on the pile, one more throw of the dice.
I could just draw a line under the whole thing and walk it right back; and I’d love to be the sort of person who could pull that off, but this fucking mattered to me.”
She arrives in a haze of indifference; trying and failing not to sound bitter. She had a more fun idea for a promo. She was going to be sitting on a giant, comedy throne, covered in skulls and bandages and jars of organs, like she’d just murdered the mummy and broke him down for parts. There was probably a bit more to it than that, but she never got that far. Fun ideas are for winners and she didn’t get to be that today.
Instead she’s back in that church, in a huff. Hanging off the stage and hiding behind a smile, quietly willing the whole world to collapse in on herself and take her back to the last time she was here so she could try it all over again.
“I wanted this. I wanted this so bad. I wanted to take this tournament by storm and announce myself to the world. I was going to be a legend, and instead I get to spend a whole year picking through my faults and fantasizing about every possible thing I could have done better. As if I wasn’t fucking neurotic enough.
I still wake up in a cold sweat because of stupid shit I said in school.”
In the moments after her match, Lisa felt a wave of emotions pass through her. Most of them were as expected. As she sat there, peeling tape off her wrists in a mourning and bitter silence, she felt annoyed, disgusted, wretchedly disappointed. More than that though, she felt a deep sense of shame. Like she’d just let everyone down.
Lisa has never not been this conceited.
“I threw everything I had at this and left with nothing to show for it. Instead I’m stuck begging for scraps alongside the only other person in this company who gets to feel worse about this than me, while some drunk and a dirty, cheating little wizard bitch get to drag my holy grail through the fucking dirt.
It should have been us, Finn. This should have been our show, our faces on the poster our names up in lights. The returning hero against the growing threat. Your chance at redemption, my grand arrival in this company’s main event. That was the match this tournament deserved and we have both fucked it into the ground.
Yeah we both got robbed, but we got robbed by a couple of thieves, so maybe we have to shoulder some of that blame.”
She drops the thought quite casually with a shrug, while it gnaws at her inside. She was already working on a plan for next time around. She’d played it over ad infinitum.
She arrives in the ring with a chair and holds him dead in the eyes, then right off the bell she slides out past him and plasters Umi’s face across the roof. She does so while calling it tactical, eliminating the distraction and giving herself a fair fight. Apparently for it to be perfectly fair, Umi has to wake up a vegetable.
“That sort of suits him though, doesn’t it? He is a perennial fuck-up. Always near the top but never quite there. And that’s not to say he’s bad at what he does. In fact, I’d go as far as to say Finn Whelan is a deep well of blinding potential who is capable of getting a win over anyone in the world on his day. It’s just a shame that his day is a made up one in Smarch or Jelember.
Runner up for the Crown of the King Cobra. Runner up in Guerrilla Warfare. This year not even a sniff at the final. So far his proudest moment is a win over Kimitsu Zombie to unseat her as the Trench War Champion. And I won’t knock that, she was dominant. Unstoppable. Rising Star winner one year, woman of the year the next. And that’s just here. She’s got wins over some of the best wrestlers in the world.
Last season she lost all of one match and it was to Finn himself. And true to form he turned the win of a lifetime into her comeback special. Now she’s forever synonymous with that belt and he’s back scratching about in the dirt.”
She’s perked up a little now that she’s bringing someone down with her, but it’s still a little lacking. She pops up off the stage and takes a walk down the centre isle, old hunks of wood splintering beneath her feet if she walks.
Turns out karma was just biding its time.
“Finn Whelan is consistently the second best at everything he does. A constant, inglorious failure. An eternal disappointment. The never was and never ever will be. The Michael Jordan of being a fuckup. This was his chance to turn that around, to finally make something from all these opportunities, and he couldn’t even get back to the fucking final.
He has been right on the cusp of greatness for his entire career. And he always will be.”
Lisa drops her head to one side and shakes it rather sadly. It does warm her slightly. She slows in her tracks as we step through the entrance way and out into the light. It’s part symbolic, part she wasn’t paying attention to where she was going.
“I fucking hate this spot I’m in. I hate the idea that there are two guys fighting in my main event and I never want to feel this low again. Union has promised me a unique opportunity and I mean to act on it. I will turn this around. I will make a name for myself regardless, make sure I never feel this low again.
You will see me blasted across the stratosphere, ripped up, screaming and defiant, smeared in the remains of this never even got to be a has been. In that you will see me glorious and destroyed, and feel outright certain that whoever is on the other end of this opportunity is currently piecing together a photo album of their face and begging a surgeon to save as much of it as possible.
Finn Whelan is going to play his part; do what he was made for. He’s going to fight hard and throw out everything he has. Together, we’re going to make sure you get a fucking show. We’re going to let you see the match this event deserved. And then you will see me roaring triumphant as his body and soul give up on him, like always, and another once in a lifetime opportunity slips through his grasp.
That’s his legacy and I will make him a part of mine.”
She stops for a moment and looks up, a smile spreading across her face as she washes in the sunlight, cascading down upon her.
Where even is this church anyway? It seems to just be setup in an empty field. I suppose it’s best to not go picking flaws.
“The Crown of the King Cobra will be the making of me in this place. One way or another.”
She steps forward off that, turns her back to us and looks up, presumably on some worn, long suffering spire that stands obstinate and rebellious, whatever the world might send its way. Again, it’s all meant to be a bit symbolic. She’s a church, apparently. Which is an odd comparison for a woman who is continually trying to kick people to death and laughing about it.
Whatever. We’ll probably be back here for Coup De Grace.
Post by Finn Whelan on Feb 19, 2019 19:40:08 GMT -5
CREDIBILITY
“But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good." THOMAS J. WATSON
•••••
How many times was it going to take? It was like listening to Chumbawumba -- “I get knocked down, but I get up again, and you’re never gonna keep me down”. An anthem. Something to repeat over and over again, pump your fist in the air and believe you were going to be better than everyone else. One day. Maybe. But how many times was it going to happen? It was becoming impossible to believe that there was ever going to a shot at anything that I knew I was prepared for, was ready to achieve. I was right there. And then it was gone.
I had the match in the bag. I could see it in the end, the chance to move on to the final. To do it two years in a row, and maybe win twice. But if it hadn’t been for “Rumble” Reyes and his interference, perhaps then it wouldn’t have finished how it did. It wouldn’t be Mikey, who hasn’t done anything honest one day in his life, moving on to face a frickin’ giant of a wrestler and his little spokesperson.
But it turned out that way.
Cheating to win. Mikey Svarro was going to move on to the final, and here I was, sitting with no title, no shot, nothing but myself and my failure.
Perhaps it was how I was taught, how I trained, that makes me despise the outcome of this so much. Even though my mentor, the man who trained me, was a detestable human being that people shouldn’t trust, the one thing he always taught me was that you should never be anything but honorable in the ring.
It all falls down to credibility. And maybe had I sat there and actually did what I was meant to do, and follow the plans that my parents had laid out for me, I’d have a six-figure salary and I would have aced my English Composition classes and learned about the whole ethos-pathos-logos bullshit. But in the end, that’s not what I chose, and honestly, I don’t need to be told how to be credible.
The fact that I can’t fucking finish anything in this company that I set out to do makes me not credible. I hate that feeling. I hate not feeling good enough. I hate not being good enough.
Maybe that comes from growing up as I did. Nothing was ever good enough for anyone else, least of all the people who raised me. An A on a paper in fifth grade turned into the question of, “Why didn’t you get the plus?” The science fair second place turned into, “Yeah, but it could have been better.”
I could always be better. I could always do more. I could always be something that I wasn’t and that was that was searched for. Something I wasn’t, and never could be.
I could have been a better father.
I could have been a better husband.
I could have been a better brother.
I could have had my focus just a little more placed on my family rather than the career that I’d been striving for over the past year and a half. I don’t know how many times I can sit there and say my focus wasn’t on the match, it was on everything else that was going wrong in my life. But that’s a lie. Because when it comes down to it, I was focused. I was prepared. And even so, I still screwed the pooch.
There’s nothing else I can say about that.
I failed.
I’m not a person who believes in second chances. If you can’t follow through on the first time, you don’t deserve a second. And that’s why, when I see people who fail, over and over again, get a second, fourth, eighty-fifth chance, I begin to wonder why anyone sees anything in them to keep giving them that shot. Is it that they can see how people soar over time? How they get back up and drive themselves forward, no matter the cost, no matter the lack of ability at times?
I don’t want a second chance.
The Finn Whelan that you all know, the one that you love or the one you hate, doesn’t deserve any chances. How many times has he burned himself at this point? Too many to count.
But then I realized something. Sometimes, it’s in the face of adversity that the smartest thoughts that you’ll ever have come to mind.
The Finn Whelan that you all know...well...he isn’t me.
I don’t know how long I’ve been searching for a purpose. Maybe it’s from when I was a kid, or maybe it’s because I’m still sitting here trying to figure it out, but the Finn Whelan that stood in front of you two weeks ago, he didn’t deserve anything. For the past year, I’ve been fighting as this individual who has finally proven himself, that he can stand with the best, that he can fight and prevail and come out on top, but that…that isn’t me. That man has never been me. I didn’t stand at the top of a company and fight for what I believed in. I became complacent. I became the man that I can’t stand simply because a little be of gold glimmered in front of my eye.
No, at the beginning of all this, I was a man fighting for recognition. I was a man who stood at the apex of shots and because I thought myself better than I was, I failed. I failed this time, I failed last time, I failed multiple times. But it’s in the many times that you fall and that you rise that you become a better human being, if not a better wrestler.
I meant what I said. I’ve earned my right for a Championship title shot, but the Crown of the King Cobra wasn’t something I could attain. I sit and I watch at the end of this card that Flash Kassidy faces Alyssa Daniels for that title, and I can’t help but think to myself…I should have that shot.
Instead, I’m facing Lisa Seldon.
There are parallels that can be drawn between Lisa and I. We’re both devilish fighters, and we’ll go to no ends to make sure that our opponent goes down. Lisa has a penchant for blood and you can see it in the way that she went in to face Datura and completely obliterated her and her nose. She’s fleet-footed, weightless, and that’s obviously helped her over the past sixteen years she’s been around. Deathmatches seem to be the calling for both of us. Most of all, Lisa and I have one more thing in common…
We both got fucked out of this tournament. Without lube.
But that’s where the similarities stop.
Unlike Lisa, I don’t have multi-World Championships. I don’t have legions of people that seem to know me and my advancements because unlike many of the people I know, I chose not to step into any of the CWC Territories. It was a choice. I could have done it, but I chose not to. I don’t have fanfare. I don’t have people who will sing my praises until the end of time. I don’t have people who care. I stand by myself like I always have.
And no matter how much she wanted it, she didn’t want anything as much as I do now. No amount of memories being made or highlights to be gleaned can amount to the desire and the ache that has been gnawing at my bones for months, years even. I’ve been the underdog in literally every single fight I’ve ever been in -- and why shouldn’t I? After all, you call any person that has been in this company or any company I’ve been in and that’s what they’ll tell you. They won’t say I’m one of the hardest and best damn workers they’ve got, it’s that I’m the walking drug addict that falls off the bandwagon consistently.
There’s truth in the statement where you want to see it, but that doesn’t change the human being you get standing across from you in the ring.
You can’t change how much you want something, but there’s always someone that wants it more than you. A chance to stand as someone who matters. That’s what I want. The opportunity that comes at the end of this could be a thorn in the side or gold in the hand, but regardless of the outcome, what I want is the chance to succeed.
You see, Lisa Seldon works in multiple companies, she tweets a lot. She has that name, that clamor, that noise about her that says, ‘This is who we want’.
I don’t care about what you want.
And that’s the ultimate difference, isn’t it?
It’s not about what Graves wants, or what Seldon wants. Seldon wants one more time where she can feel like she’s significant. I just want the opportunity to feel like I’ve done something with my life. I stand here, the Underdog, same as I’ve always been, same as I will always ever be, with words blaring and fists raised.
I listened to too many people and their comments and made a determination of who I am based off their comments without looking in the mirror. The Finn Whelan that deserves to be out there is the one that’s going to fight for redemption, for recognition. With every breath taken, it’s a step towards demolition, towards power. It’s not for an opportunity that includes shiny gold, or a chance at it. It’s for the simple moment of being able to say: I did this. I stood on what I said.
Credibility.
Even if I don’t stand as the victor at the end of this, the only thing I want for anyone to take from this is that the Finn Whelan that stood in front of you last week, the week before…he should have never existed. I will always be the one on the bottom of the totem pole clawing for attainment, searching for glory that one day, I’ll find. If not this week, then the next, the following, ten years from now.