Post by TheNewBreed on Apr 30, 2017 23:06:56 GMT -5
Continued...
The scene opens with John seated on the stage of 'Ladies Night with Denise Essex' with Denise, mid-program.
“So, John, after the Intercontinental Tournament, win or lose, you have another match at Wrestle Wars as well! If you win the WGWF Intercontinental Title, you will then face WGWF Icon, the demon King himself... Famine of the Vile!” she states as the fans pop for the Legendary dark horse of the WGWF heydays.
“That's right... the fans know that name very well. Famine's recent return and issue with your ideas about where you sit in the business have sparked somewhat of a rivalry between you two in the last month, and all of that will finally come to a head on Monday night at Wrestle Wars Eleven. What are your thoughts about the match heading into the greatest show in the business?” she sets up the story between the two then asks, as a professional broadcaster should.
“Well, honestly, Denise, I don't have a personal problem with Famine of the Vile, so much as I won't just let anyone, even a Legend around here, talk to me like I don't belong here... and while I understand where Vile is coming from with his standpoint, he can't just come out there and threaten the Beast with an ass whipping and not expect me to make him put his money where his mouth is. He may be a leader behind the curtain, wise and respected for his years around here, and he may be a Legend out there in front of the fans, but I won't let anyone tell me where my place is, and he crossed the line. Simple as that.” John states matter-of-factly.
“Well, I know the fans are looking forward to seeing the two of you square off. We all hope to see the match for the WGWF IC Title, but whatever capacity it's in, it's sure to be one of the highlights of the night!” she says excitedly.
“Well, I hope it's for the IC Title as well...” John chuckles. “That would mean I had already won the Belt and became the new WGWF IC Champion... and was well on my way to setting all the achievements I have lined up for Monday Night! There are quite a few of them, you know?” he says slyly as the scene fades to black.
* * *
The scene opens up on the inside of the New Breed Foundation's private jet. Tristan Slater, Terry Borden, the Citizen, and John Cable are all sitting around a table playing cards in the living quarters as they make their way to Phoenix for Wrestle Wars.
“I can't believe you still have this damned plane... and that Shane Carver is STILL footing the bill for it all!” Tristan says in disbelief to John as Terry deals the next hand across the table.
“Well, when the original contract was drawn up, it was supposed to be for one year that Carver had to pay for everything... but when the contract ended, I had my lawyers draw up an extension, and one of my best-looking paralegals brought it up to him with a huge sack of potatoes in tow. He was paying so much attention to the sack of Idaho's finest that when she asked him to sign the paperwork he just did it, and waved her off. He never even read it... he just signed the damned thing! It was a permanent contract not to exceed a limit of one hundred years or the mechanical life of the plane! I hired the best mechanics money could buy that same afternoon!” he laughs with the guys over the ridiculous luck he had in procuring the plane he has had for nearly ten years now.
“So now... Carver has to pay the bill for the fuel you use and the staff for the plane, Brother?” Terry asks.
“The entire thing... including the mechanics I hired to keep this thing in tip-top shape, the best pilots money could buy, and the most world renown flight attendants I could find... not to mention an on-board chef, a very talented masseuse, and a completely state-of-the-art retrofitted gym downstairs... and of course, all of the fees incurred maintaining the plane at the different airports around the world we find ourselves at in this industry.” John explains with a rumbling chuckle.
“Man... I bet he was pissed off when he figured that one out.” the Citizen chimes in.
“Oh, yeah. It nearly caused the collapse of the XWF when he had to clean out the bank accounts for the first six months of expenses on this thing. Since then, most of the X-Dubs merchandising profits have flowed straight into this plane's operations budget portfolio.” he laughs again as the whole group chuckles about Carver's misfortune and lack of business sense.
“Well shit, boys! Here's to Shane Carver, then! May he forever be an ignorant twat-waffle!” Tristan says a toast to Carver as they all clink glasses and drink to his idiocy, and the scene fades to black.
* * *
The scene opens in the locker room of the Glorious New Breed at the University of Phoenix Stadium. Johnathan Cable sits in the room alone, straddled over a short bench packing a duffel bag with extra gear. As he packs a spare set of knee pads into the black bag, a strange chill fills the room, and John shudders as the icy feeling prickles his spine. He looks around the room cautiously, but no one is there. The room is empty and quiet.
“Help... ME...” faintly shouted a strangled voice, disembodied and wispy and raw as a wraith's scream. It was so disconcerting that Johnathan jumped to his feet, and looked around the room again, scanning for speakers, or Slater, hiding in the room somewhere.
“Hello?” John asks tentatively. “Is anyone there? Show yourself!” he demands of the phantoms hiding deep inside every shadow.
Silence greets him everywhere. No longer does the raspy ghost voice demand aid, and no one still lurks around the corner waiting to surprise him.
There is no one there.
John sits back on the bench, cautiously looking around the room as he absent-mindedly stuffs a pair of black tights back into the duffel.
“HELP... ME!!!” the voice comes again, louder this time, more urgent... the need palpable in the dimly lit room. John once again leaps to his feet, scanning the room nearly in terror at the apparitions possible presence. Men of flesh and blood were one thing. John could face an army of men who can bleed... but a ghost was another thing all together. John did not have the time or the patience to deal with an angry spirit in need of a release to the better hereafter. There were things to do, and an impromptu Peter Venkman cos-play just wasn't in the cards this weekend. As fun as it would be...
“HELP ME!!!” the raspy voice echoed through the room as the chill grew deeper, and the terror he felt drove the whimsy of a peter Venkman cos-play right from his mind.
“Who the hell are you, and where are you at???” John says back to the voice, cautiously backing towards the door with his duffel in his hand.
As John passes a large mirror near the door, the glass begins to frost over as he backs towards it, unbeknownst to him. He takes ginger steps backwards, heading in earnest towards the door to get away from the strange event happening inside his locker room. Just as he makes it to the edge of the molded frame of the mirror on the wall, a shadow coalesces on the frosted glass, and manifests as a skeleton with bones of pure ebony, cloaked in layers and layers of drab black cloth that is course to the touch and riddled with decay and the grimes of ages long past, reaching out slowly from the mirrors surface, waiting for just the right moment...
As it reaches for Cable from the mirror, the chill making John shudder as he backs towards the glass, it grabs him around the neck with it's bony arms, and John tries to spin to see his attacker, but can't, tangled in it's grasp, held firmly in place against wall.
John reaches up with his left hand, feels the ebony skull under his fingers, and immediately drives his right fist into the side of the bony mass. He holds onto the skull firmly with his left while driving blow after blow into the side of the apparitions head with his right.
After several heavy shots, the spirit in the mirror loosens it's grip just enough for John to spin inside his grasp and drive both fists into the mirror itself, a shower of glass shards exploding from the wall as the spirit screams in agony and swirls away in a black mist sucked into the hole behind the mirror.
There in the wall, where none should be, was a roughly hewn tunnel into what appeared to be a solid rock face. As far as he could see into the tunnel the walls were the same rough, dug-out and weathered, cavern wall. Cable opened the door to the hallway outside, and poked his head around the door frame to inspect the wall outside his dressing room, where the tunnel technically 'should' have been, but sure enough, the tunnel did not extend into the hallway, or even into this plane of existence. Not surprised by this, having had some very odd adventures with Nathan Saniti on more than one occasion, he looks up one side of the hallway and then the other before slowly sliding back into the dressing room and closing the door behind himself.
Once there, John looked into the tunnel with mild curiosity and more than just a mild concern.
“Fuck it. This has always ended in one hell of a story to tell around a card game. Might as well just see where it goes.” he says to himself as he reaches into his duffel and pulls out a blue towel. He wraps the towel around his neck and with a loud sigh, he climbs headfirst into the tunnel that shouldn't be where it is, and begins to crawl into the mouth of it heading for an uncertain adventure, in the least.
As he crawls through the tunnel, the walls grow closer and closer in the dark. John is forced to crawl on his stomach and force his massive shoulders past the rough hewn walls of the tunnel, scratching and scraping his skin as he wriggles forward. Suddenly, ahead of his, a faint light creeps into the dark tunnel and John can see the end, finally, of this miserable beginning to the odd adventure he finds himself in.
After what seems like an eon, Cable pulls himself through the end of the tunnel and into a dimly lit hallway floored in cracked tiles that leads away as far as the eye can see in the dim light. On either side of the hallway are evenly spaced doors, older from the look of it, and made of steel. One single dingy window faces into the rooms beyond each door, and behind each one s nightmare lurks. Somewhere in the darkened room, the remnant of some forgotten nightmare lies waiting for a mind to re-awaken it into being to satiate it's hunger for the terror that it would wreak. Here, the remains of the most horrible incarnations of fear go to die out in obscurity when the last soul forgets they ever existed.
Cable, cautiously and as quiet as a mouse, creeps down the long hallway as the dim neon lights pop, and buzz, and flicker overhead.
As he passes the doors on either side, he realizes some of them have nameplates. Most of them are unrecognizable jumbles of letters full of vowels and strings of consonants that wouldn't seem to even make words, and some of them he recognized right away.
'Zul' one read.
John did not peek in that window for sure. He rushed away, in fact, and kept moving as quietly as he could.
Cable passed many more doors as he went along the odd hallway with no end in sight. Several more doors had labels, some he could read and some he could not. Some of them even made him shudder for the memories of the names he read.
Finally, after a long time creeping down the hall of doors with no end, sliding silently along past terrors of the night unimaginable, he comes to a door with a label that makes his stop dead in his tracks.
'The Demon King' the peeling sticker reads in bold straight letters now faded from time.
John pauses in his journey before the door, and wonders to himself if he should look inside, or if he should just keep going.
“This is probably what I'm here for...” he whispers to himself as he creeps closer to the door and puts his ear up to it to see if he can hear inside.
“Help me...” comes a ghostly voice, nearly a sob in the dark beyond.
John pulls his ear away from the door, and contemplates some more whether or not he should look in...
Just then, as he huddles next the Demon King's door, the door across the hall is hit hard, shaking it in it's frame as dust falls from the edges and settles to the floor. There, in the small window, peers the glowing ember of an eye belonging to Johnathan's Beast, smoking as it flares fire and rage fuels it's with a hatred like no other as he peers at John in the hallway.
“AH!!! Morsel! You have come to embrace me once more! I knew you would be nothing without me, and come crawling down here to beg my forgiveness once more! What luck you were able to find me here among the doors with no end!” the many voices of the Beast growls in delight as the words slide from his toothy maw.
“Um... sorry to break it to you... but I didn't even know you were down here. I actually think I came to see this guy over here...” John hikes his thumb over his shoulder at the door behind him. “Sorry.” he says simply.
“What??? You didn't come here to beg me to return to you? YOU DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I WAS HERE???” the Beast screams at him through the door with the multitude of voices all aghast at the thought as the fire flares from his eye.
“Yeah... sorry about that. I just... I just didn't need you, just like I told you when I left the last time. I can handle all of this on my own. I got the Breeders out there to cheer me on, The New Breed to support me and watch my back, honestly, I think I'm in a much better situation with myself than I was the last time we talked, you know?” he says, sort of uncomfortable about the whole situation.
“But... you came down here to see THAT guy??? For what? He's a shadow of his former self, and he isn't even scary anymore! I can be WAY more scary than that guy can. Hell... I'm a demon... and he isn't my damned King! Hell... I could be the Demon King! That son of bitch can't even...” he starts to argue against the idea, but John raises his hand towards him an makes a 'shush' motion, and the Beast sputters to a halt.
“Look... he may not be the Demon King he once was, but his name carries some weight, so I'm going to give him a chance anyway. I figure, the worst thing that can happen here is I get handled by a has been, and even that isn't as bad losing to the Extinction... so I guess, I can just take my chances. Sorry, buddy. Good luck though... with... whatever you're doing now... in your... spare time... I guess...” he apologizes awkwardly as he turns back to the door with the 'Demon King' label and peeks through the window as the scene fades to black
* * *
Famine... I think in moments like this... Bill Mahaer says it best:
“This is going to be so rough it's going to need a safe word!”
See you on Monday Night... when I wreck you in front of millions and forge ahead as the New King of Wrestle Wars and overshadow the entire company with my greatness!