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Post by LR Adams on Apr 6, 2021 15:39:34 GMT
What can be said about this match? On one hand, Valencio, representing the Dymond Club, is ready to showcase his singles prowess. But on the other hand, 2 dominating forces in the industry, 2 destructive master manipulators, are looking to climb to the top once more. Fang, the Manimal, is back from hiding in obscurity, ready to sink his teeth into the competition once more. As for Diablo? The former NWR Champion is ready to wreak havoc once again.
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Post by thedymondclub on Apr 12, 2021 1:43:39 GMT
New York City...
Spring is always a beautiful transition of life in New York City. The place it sits on the globe allows for a proper change of seasons. The falling away of the cold and bitterness of winter to make room for the renewal of life. Sunshine drips from the skyscrapers like honey as the people make their way through mid-town for the lunch rush. Vincent Valencio, Dymond Club stalwart and former multi-time champion, is no exception.
As the well manicured man walks down the bustling streets the masses part as they sense his air of importance. Of course, they could also be making room for the film crew surrounding Vincent.
Vincent: The unwashed masses. Huddled in their glass houses flinging stones and expecting nothing to break. They throw stones at the Dymond Club expecting us to break. They throw stones with their tweets, and their youtube videos, and their tiktoks all exalting that the Dymond Club is OVER! They expect us to break like glass, but it's only natural that the uneducated mouth breathers don't know the difference between glass and diamonds. Easily fooled by anything shiny and mistaking for something of value. Much like the other two pieces of cubic zirconia that will be standing across from me at Up From the Ashes.
Vincent takes a cup of coffee from a stand as he walks by. Sips.
Vincent: I would say that I will show everybody that the Dymond Club is ready to rise up from the ashes but to be perfectly honest...we were the only ones that never went down in flames. Can my opponents say the same? Of course not. They come and go like the tide.
Vincent stops and thinks for a second.
Vincent: Correction. They come and go like more like...a tsunami. Quietly receding from the light of competition before returning in a fury and destroying everything in their paths. At least that's how it looks from my perspective. Do I follow them on social media? I doubt they could put together a hashtag let alone create something worth carving into the forever archive that is the internet. I don't know what they're doing. I don't care. The only thing that matters is that when the bell rings I am ready to take these two dynamic and opposing forces and channel them to each other. If I can take these two creatures and force them to destroy each other then my odds go nowhere but up.
Vincent approaches Dymond Club HQ.
Vincent: Mind. Body. Soul. This match embodies all three. Fang will attempt to destroy bodies while Diablo tries to rip apart our sould. I guess that leaves me to go after their minds to my will. Make them fight the match that I want and walk out of the show as the clear cut heir to the main event. I don't need to rise UP From the Ashes, but I will make sure that the embers of my opponents are extinguished once and for all.
Fade Out
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fang
Jobber
Posts: 7 
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Post by fang on May 9, 2021 23:01:25 GMT
STRANGE DAYS
Emmitville, Colorado
These are strange days. Life, in all of it’s facets and reflections, has seen great change of late. Events that alter countless lives occur every day but these days seem especially bizarre. Wildfires, plagues, school shootings, political unrest, social upheaval, and personal crisis of all shapes and sizes are commonplace these days. Appearances are less reliable than ever and things are not always as they seem. Take, for example, the events that unfold in the small, safe and quiet town of Emmitville.
The Old Town Theatre was a quaint little movie theatre at the edge of town. They screened only a few films a week as ticket sales saw a steep decline in the last 16 months due to the pandemic and a general lack of interest in going to the movies. They downsized to showing a couple matinees during the early afternoon.
A couple of twenty-somethings- a man and a woman, walked arm-in-arm out of the Old Town Theatre after watching a re-screening of the first Saw movie. It was just past six in the evening, and the sun still hung high on the horizon.
“Gaaah! Fresh air!” Marc rasped, ripping off his face mask.
“So that was… interesting. I’m glad I missed Saw when it first came out. That was some sick stuff.” Said Anna, Marc’s date for the evening.
“Yeah” Marc snickered. “It’s a classic. I was so stoked when I saw that they were showing it again. It sucked having to wear a mask though. I felt like that girl in the movie with her head stuck in that jaw-ripping trap.”
Anna rolled her eyes. “Whatever Marc, you barely wore it at all.”
Marc shrugged, “Who cares? There were like three other people in the whole theatre.”
Down the street a curious figure sat on the sidewalk. A hairy man in rags, clearly homeless, camped out against the brick wall of a hardware shop adjacent to the Old Town Theatre- a sight not often seen in this gentle community. Everything about him was ragged, from his long salt-and-pepper beard and hair to the dirt clinging to the lines on his weathered face, to the filthy rags he wore as clothing.
“Uh, Marc… that guy looks shady. Let’s walk on the other side of the street.” Anna said, looking fearfully at the ominous man hunched on the sidewalk.
“Why? Cuz of that bum?” Marc grinned. “Babe, you’re just paranoid and jittery from the movie. This is our town. He’s the one who doesn’t belong here. My apartment’s literally one block away.”
“Don’t call me ‘babe.’” Anna chastised but grasped Marc’s arm tighter.
As they approached the vagrant, they could read the sign he had nestled in his lap; it was a scrap of cardboard with letters scrawled in black marker. It read: HUNGRY. WILL WORK FOR FOOD. As the couple walked by, the homeless man looked up at them and said, “Spare a dollar, please?”
Anna avoided looking at the man. Marc glared down at him and spat. “Why don’t you go back where you came from, bum? Or get a damn job. This is a nice community here.”
The homeless man met Marc’s gaze. His eyes seem to gleam in the evening sun beneath his bushy eyebrows. He said nothing as he stared from behind filthy tendrils of hair.
Marc broke eye-contact and kept walking with Sarah, softly mumbling in disgust. They walked around the corner of the intersection towards Marc’s apartment complex. They both felt immediate relief from their anxiety when they could no longer see the pan-handling derelict squatting on the sidewalk.
“Jesus. Can’t anyone do something about that guy?” Marc griped.
“Well, now I feel kinda bad for him. It can’t be easy living on the street. He’s just trying to live his life.” Anna said.
“He should go live it somewhere else before more bums decide to move in.”
They entered Marc’s apartment complex. It was a place of security, certainly a refuge from the outside world. Locked safely behind magnetically sealed gates, they could breathe easy there. The path to Marc’s building was short: about 60 meters to his front door.
However, when the young couple covered a third of the distance, six young men suddenly appeared from around a corner. They eyed the couple with amused and predatory expressions. They spaced themselves evenly across the expanse of the walkway leading to Marc’s apartment. They were all Caucasian men dressed like well-off college students, so Marc and Anna were initially unalarmed. But their anxiety rose again as the young men got nearer; it became clear by their posturing and body language that they were on some sort of territorial power trip.
One of them squared off with Marc and asked, “You live here?”
“Uh… yeah. That’s my apartment over there.” Marc replied and pointed toward his door.
“Yeah, this block belongs to the BRC now.”
“What?” Marc was confused.
Suddenly, the man headbutted Marc square in the nose. Marc collapsed and screamed in shock. Anna screamed too and threw herself over Marc protectively.
“I said this block belongs to the motherfuckin’ BRC, bitch!” The guy shouted and stood tall over the cowering couple.
“What- what the fuck is the BRC?” Marc stammered, still too shocked and confused to think. He cupped his left hand over his nose. Blood seeped through his fingers.
“The Brookside Rider Crew!” his assailant shouted and kicked Marc in the ribs.
“Stop! Stop! Please! You can take my wallet! Take anything you want! Take the girl! You can have her! Just leave me alone!” Marc screamed. He threw his watch and wallet at the attackers and scrambled away as fast as his legs could take him. He was out of sight in seconds.
“MARC!” Anna cried after him.
The BRC busted out in laughter. The initial attacker stood there looking stunned for a second. He blinked. “Well, shit. I wasn’t expectin’ that. Looks like we hit the jackpot, boys.”
The other five guys were still laughing when they surrounded and grabbed Anna. “MARC, YOU BASTARD!” she screamed.
One of them flicked open a switchblade in Anna’s face. “Why don’t we go someplace where we can party?”
Anna tried to scream again but a hand over her mouth silenced her. They scuffled. Anna fought furiously but her efforts were in vain against six strong men.
Not far away, a shape suddenly vaulted over the locked security gate and sprinted towards the attackers. It was a man moving so quickly and efficiently, the BRC wouldn’t have known he was there if not for the slap of his rapidly approaching footsteps.
“Who the f—AAACCK!!” the man with the switchblade’s question was cut short as he was nearly cut in half by a vicious spear.
The intervening hero looked up at the rest of the crew. A low growl emanated from his chest. Anna recognized him- it was the homeless man from earlier.
Another one of them lunged at the vagrant with a knife. In a blur of movement, he knocked the knife out of his attackers’ hand and broke the wrist that wielded it. The other members of the crew swore and circled this new threat, now hesitating.
A click and a glint of dying sunlight off gunmetal alerted the vagrant in time to avoid the shot.
BLAM!
The vagrant seized the gunman’s arm and threw him over his hip in a Judo toss. This strange interloper now held the weapon in his hand. The BRC wasted no time in their retreat, their collective confidence instantly becoming panic as the vagrant turned their own gun on them.
The ragged man kept the gun pointed at the retreating men as he watched them flee. When the young hoodlums vanished from sight, the vagrant looked at the gun with disgust. He unloaded the pistol and tossed it in a near-by trash receptacle. He pocketed the ammunition.
He glanced briefly at Anna before turning to sprint away. Police sirens were already sounding in the distance.
“Wait!” Anna shouted after him.
The vagrant stopped and turned to her.
“Th-thank you. Who are you?”
“I am Fang.” The vagrant replied gruffly. He turned back and sprinted the way he had come, deftly using a small tree as a step to vault himself over the eight-foot-tall security gate to the street beyond.
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fang
Jobber
Posts: 7
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Post by fang on May 16, 2021 23:40:30 GMT
PURPOSE
Irving, Colorado
Fang sat on his corner across the street from Skid-Row. Dirty blankets, pillows, and clothing lined the floor of his encampment on the front lawn of a crack house. This was his corner; that was generally understood by the Police and the denizens of Skid-Row across the street.
Skid-Row was what the locals called a dirt lot that sat beneath a busy on-ramp to Interstate 20. It was an impoverished shanty town inhabited by misfits, outcasts, gutter-punks, and other derelicts of all shapes and sizes. It was just beneath rock bottom. The worst the ghetto had to offer. When someone fell from grace, Skid-Row was where they landed.
In the early months of 2020, something terrible happened in Colorado: The largest wildfire the state had ever seen had engulfed Fang’s previous home in flames. Long arms of fire stretched from horizon to horizon as hundreds of acres of forest, including protected national parkland was reduced to blackened ash under a red sky. The region Fang had affectionately called God Mountain was decimated. His pack of wolves, his adopted family, was gone- those that did not parish in the inferno had scattered into human territory. Any surviving wolves would likely have gotten picked off by hunters or starvation. All of them were now surely dead. But not Fang- he was a survivor.
To survive, Fang had to relocate to the suburbs of Boulder in the town of Irving, living on the streets as a vagabond. He kept moving until he found Skid-Row. There, he found a new territory to defend and a new pack to protect. This was his purpose, and his purpose was all he had left.
Fang was browsing an issue of Newsweek he had found in the trash. He did not look up when he heard footsteps approaching him.
“I guess one upside to being homeless is covering up with newspaper provides warmth and keeps you up-to-date on current events.” Said a familiar voice.
Fang looked up at his younger sister, Sara “Talon” Nadell, who was standing there with arms crossed and a look of disapproval. “You don’t look surprised to see me.” She said.
“I smelled you coming.” Fang replied.
“Through all the engine exhaust? That’s impressive.” She said.
“Why are you here, Talon?”
“What, no ‘hello’ for your little sister? And it’s Sara. Talon’s retired.”
“So am I.”
“No you aren’t. The Manimal doesn’t retire. Fang isn’t some gimmick for a TV show. Fang is a person, a concept and a lifestyle all rolled into one.”
Fang just leveled his gaze at her for a moment and asked again, “Why are you here, Talon?”
“To tell you about this.” She tossed a business card at his chest.
Fang picked it up at asked, “What is this?”
“It’s an opportunity. It’s a shot at redemption. The WFWF are re-opening their doors and their looking for world-class talent. They’re looking for you, Fang.”
“I told you… I’m retired. I’ve found a new home here. These people… these… lost souls… They need me. Ever since the wildfire, I’ve been wandering, rudderless, purposeless. Here, I have purpose. This is my territory now and it is under my protection.”
“This is what you’re fighting for these days? This hovel?” Sara sighed. “Fang, you’ll always be my brother and I love you. I can’t sit here and watch you rot on these streets. You’re capable of great things, man! You could have millions of people worshiping you as a wrestling God.”
“I’ve already had that. I do not need fame or wealth. I do not want it. My five senses are all I require. I’m needed here. These humans are barely tolerated by the Police as it is, if I’m not here to keep the peace, these people may lose what little they have left.”
“Fang, your purpose is not to protect some slum. Your purpose is to be a World Champion. Your purpose is to be the best.”
“How would you know what my purpose is?” Fang snapped. “This place, this slum as you call it, is filled with good people. There is truth in squalor. Most humans live their lives inside boxes designed to foster their delusions about the world. They are drugged to oblivion and are made weak, like cattle. But these destitute and lost souls are living free from the trappings of the human system. They see life as it really is. They are awake.”
Talon pointed at a group of passed-out people sleeping in a tent. “They aren’t awake.” She said.
“That’s not what I mean.” Fang grumbled.
“Alright, brother. You just let me know when you come to your senses. This isn’t your purpose, Fang. Your purpose is in the ring. It’s only a matter of time before you realize that. Up From The Ashes is coming up and I already told them you would be there. That’s how sure I am that you’ll change your mind. Don’t let me down. Don’t let Dad down.”
Talon left her brother to his squalor and his noble mission. The next move is his. Will the Manimal show-up at Up From The Ashes? Stay tuned to find out!
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