Big things have small beginnings

Saturday Impact, 20/10/12.

Quote:Neonero shouts in frustration, and returns to a corner, waiting for Flynn to reach his feet. When Flynn does so, Neonero charges at him and looks for the HEADSCISSORS SMALL PACKAGE! Neonero rotates around in the headscissors….but Flynn hangs him up on the top rope! Neonero rebounds awkwardly, and Flynn hits him with a knee to the spine, before he connects with a rolling cutter! This match has reached its LOGICAL CONCLUSION! Flynn hooks the leg!

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THRE…….KICKOUT!

Audience.

Things were close, then. Matches are won and lost in the blink of an eye. The boy Neonero managed to escape Flynn’s finisher, but it wasn’t to be enough. The next exchange led to a three count, and Neonero on his back.

These circumstances were not acceptable.

Neonero was stripped of his position, and all privileges removed. He then competed under the guise of force thanks to help from XWF owner, Shane , who was able to pull off the required puppetry.

With the coming of a new XWF, so comes our chance to repair this project. But we have little time to waste here. More pressing matters are at hand as you all know.

And so we put it to this; Neonero is to face his demon. If he is successful, the project continues. If he fails again, we will be under serious review around here. So look lively everyone.

- DU

The Boogieman

We open with a shot of the emperor Nero, or, rather, a stone bust of the emperor. He stares forwards, looking regal, with flowers around his neck, where the base of the bust ends. We pan back and to the left, and we’re viewing a familiar sight. It’s Neonero’s office, or, rather, the office he burned down months ago, after losing to Mark Flynn.

There were many questions left unanswered at that time. Neonero spoke of mysterious ‘sponsors’, and ‘backers’ who had pulled their interest following the bout, and Neonero had lost all of his money. He’d spent the next couple of months living off the money his XWF exploits had garnered him, as well as various dealings with Randall Cross, first extending his notice to participate in War games, then doing the same again to be a part of Lethal Lottery.

Which, by the way, he would have won if he wasn’t such a fucking wanker back then.

Neonero turns right as this thought enters the mind organically.

Get round here would you? We don’t have time for this pause for effect bullshit. There’s Nero, point made, get your arse round here Jose.

A muffled voice from behind the camera mutters ‘my name is Geraldo’, but Neonero just waves his comment away, considering it an utter irrelevance. The camera moves around the table, and Neonero is sat hunched forwards, hands clasped, and chin rested atop them. He smiles from the corner of his mouth, but his cyan-hued eyes are staunchly and sternly set on the camera.

Let me preface this by apologising oh so wholeheartedly to Michael James. You’ve had the misfortune of falling into the mix this week, in what should logically be the rematch of all rematches to open 2013. But since management in this place throws out title shots and shitty briefcases like candy, you’ve dropped in. My apology to you merely relates to the fact that 90% of my words will probably be for our dear resident has-been, Mark Flynn. But let’s not start there. I’m sure everyone at home has so many questions. Why did Neonero attack so many people on Madness? Why did Neonero steal the European title? By which I mean this beauty, by the way.

Neonero pulls the European title from under his desk, placing it in front of him, so that it’s rested between his elbows, as he continues to speak, hands clasped all the while.

Why does the guy who doesn’t want titles go and do a thing like stealing Mark Flynn’s belt? Is it some elaborate plot to destabilise a man whose existence is predicated purely on the possession of golden trinkets like this?

He glances down at the belt, tilting his head to the side slightly. For a moment he stares at the belt with the same kind of eyes we are accustomed to seeing from Mark Flynn. Almost glassed over, as if he has no control over the lust for what he seeks.

Look at these eyes.

Neonero stares forwards again now; his gaze piercing.

These aren’t the eyes of a man who gives a shit about the people who get in his way. These aren’t the eyes of a man who loses to the likes of Mark Flynn.

His hands slowly unclasp, until he’s holding them both out at arms length, palms stretched towards the camera as if he’s showing us the number ten; but this is not the intention.

These are not the hands of a man who loses to the likes of Mark Flynn.

He claps his hands together suddenly, sending a loud crack throughout the room, which seems to somehow amplify the resonance of the clap, then simply clasps his hands together and sits back.

You aren’t looking at the man who lost to Mark Flynn. You are looking at an entirely new specimen. Same frame, different priorities. Things have changed around here, and I am not referring to whatever nonce is or isn’t running the XWF.

Neonero’s eyes widen, as if he’s in a state of surprise, but the rest of his features do not follow. The focus of our gaze is drawn straight into the pits of his eyes, their cyan hue almost lulling us into a state of relaxation, and then he blinks.

Just one blink is all it takes to turn tranquil eyes into the center of a fucking maelstrom. These are the eyes of an assassin. Not some dickhead running around like a ninja on rooftops. Not some dolt paid off to slip poison into the drink of an unsuspecting political or Mafioso victim. Not some cunt who gets a tenner for knocking off some woman’s husband so she can fuck her lover instead.

The eyes of a man who will systematically and methodically rip you to pieces in the center of a ring.

Or, in our case, a cage.

A smirk, belying the fact that Neonero is in fact looking forwards to the carnage that a cage match will entail. The blood, the faces mashed against steel. The fucking riots going on outside the cage. The sick bumps. The smirk dissipates, and suddenly we wonder if it was even there to begin with, or whether it was pareidolia.

You see, the cunt who you beat, that ambitionless, pandering jester is gone. If I dance in the ring it will be for no reason other than to take the piss out of you when you lie crumpled at my feet. There will be no more inane bullshit. Every action will be the result of carefully crafted thought process.

He sniffs.

And that begins with making this golden trinket my own. It’s such an eyesore having ‘Mark Flynn’ on the nameplate, don't you think? But let’s hold up a sec here. Why does Neonero want your trinket?

Neonero pauses a moment, looking at the belt as if he gives a damn. We take the moment to observe the situation in more detail. Neonero seems to have all of the finery he did when he arrived in the XWF; he’s smartly suited up, and the room around him is...well, it’s posh. He sits on a plush chair with maroon padding, and the table is smooth mahogany. All around the room are photos, but in a strange way we can’t seem to focus on them to identify them. Instead we take note of the wooden panelling on the lower half of the wall that snakes around the entire circumference of the room.

First of all, because you are the boogieman. Not in the weird homo-erotic kind of dark way some folks around here like to play the boogieman. You’re the skeleton in my closet. The thing which should not be. Taking this from you will be akin to breaking your heart. It will heal the frustration of knowing I lost to you once upon a sweet time.

Neonero scratches his arse.

It is though, more importantly, a bulls eye. See this seemed to skip everyone’s attention in the past, but I am here for the competition. I’m here to tick off every name I can find. And what better way for me to get guests for the GG NORE tour than to offer them the possibility of holding a trinket?

And not only that. It will become the first in what is to become a large collection. I’m going to play Pokemon with your belts. Gotta catch ‘em all.

Neonero sighs dolefully.

Remember the Mark Flynn who would systematically watch everything his opponents did in the ring, look for weakness, and craft his victory in his mind like some grand architect? Notice how that guy is nothing more than a damp squib now?

Neonero puffs his cheeks out, exhaling slowly with deliberate exaggeration.

One of the last times we were in the same ring, I compared you to this girl.



Lizzie van Zyl. The Boer girl who was allowed to die by British forces as she suffered from typhoid fever and under nourishment. A peasant victim in an inane battle. An innocent who died suffering. Those destitute eyes stare out of the history books pleading for help that will never come.

A deep inhalation, and Neonero closes his eyes.

I was wrong to compare you to this girl.

Neonero opens his eyes.

This girl knew her fate. You don’t know your fate. This girl knew she’d die, she knew she’d never get the sustenance she required to stay alive. Even as fever inevitably came over her, even in her final moments of stupor, she knew what she was. A victim. You, Flynn, you deluded shade of a man, don’t even know you’re a victim.

You’re a victim.

You’re my victim. You’re the deer in the headlights. You’re a fly caught in a web. My web.

My fucking web.

This is my town now, and you’re the first dilapidated building I need to renovate. By the end you’ll be unrecognisable. Oh, and you wont be carrying any gold. All the gold awnings in my town will be adorning my abode. Shame.

He shakes his head, tired of the metaphor he’s created already. Some things never change.

Let’s turn our attention back to Madness a moment, literally and figuratively, if you’ll indulge me. Ursula Areano, first of all, I hear you’ve yapped to management about my actions. Are you a child? Boohoo big mean Neonero hurt people after their matches. He choked me out with his shin after I won a match, its not fair!

LIFE’S NOT FAIR YOU STUPID WHORE.

Do I give a shit that I upset you? No I don’t. Really, Ursula. Just because I challenged you one drunken night you think we are on a level? Bitch I only wanted you in the ring so I could slap those titties and grab dat a. You’re nothing more in my eyes than a piece of meat. Guess what? With a body like yours you’re going to get folks thinking with their cocks. That doesn’t mean I wont slap the taste out of your stupid mouth. Bitch if you want to do your whining come kneel in front of me and do it with my second head rubbing your tonsils.

Neonero grins a troll-like grin.

AJ Powell, you have perhaps got a modicum more sense than Ursula, since you haven’t raised your voice. However that lack of voice also belies the fact that you’re a pussy. Not even an attempt to stand up for yourself? Did you leave your balls at your mommy’s house?

He shrugs.

Ah, perhaps you’re both plotting to ‘get me back’ with a sneaky attack on Madness. Let’s just prognosticate on that one. Let’s say it’s Ursula, since she’s the one who actually has testicles out of the pair of you. You blindside me, knock me out...and then?

Neonero chuckles to himself, shaking his head.

Knock me out, have you proven a point? Have you asserted some dominance? Have you ‘made things even’? I’ll tell you what it will really achieve; it will encourage me to keep you in mind. You know what will happen if I keep you in mind? You’ll be straight in my bookmarks list for who gets fucked up next. Do you want to escalate things, do you really? I believe we had a date, a death match, before this place turned on its head. Do you want me to rebook that? Because I will at the drop of a hat, don't you worry.

Do you know why I attacked the winners and not the losers? Simply to hammer down the fact that if the winners are pussies, what the hell do the losers offer me? Duke, for example, is clearly lacking in balls of any kind. That man knows nothing of balls. Nothing at all. He would be a waste of my time, and I don't do time wasting anymore. If I were to face any of you, it’d be simply for the fun of adding numbers to the GG NORE tour.

He pauses.

Ah, the GG NORE tour. Good game, no rematch. You know what this tour is going to amount to, eventually? Imagine a funnel full of sand. Now turn it upside down. Suddenly that funnel full of sand isn’t leaking anymore. I’m climbing through the center of that funnel. When I reach the top, I’m going to have no one left to face. And then I will fuck off out the hole at the top. All your gold will know my name. All of your stars will know defeat in my name, and no one will get a rematch. I will be your fucking zenith. My name will be etched in your annals. And when its all said and done, who knows, maybe I will do it all over again. Know why? Because conquering the likes of you is what's known in the People’s Democratic Republic of Congo as a ‘piece of piss’.

And of course, in the end, I will leave you all...

Sour about your lives.

Shame.

Neonero kicks back now, folding his arms in his lap, and putting his feet on the table like a school child. Perhaps a metaphor for the history lesson about to unfold.

Back to Flynn.

Since the theme of this show is race, equality, and making things right, let’s get a little topical, shall we? Let’s listen to the half English, half Korean guy tell us a story about cowboys, Indians and Mark Flynns. Stay with it, it will all come full circle.

Neonero whirls his finger, as if fast forwarding the track. Oh yeah kids nowadays don't know what that would look like. In that case he’s mimicking a wheel in a motion to say ‘faster, pussycat, faster!’.

So we start out with this civilisation, perhaps as high as 100 million, sparsely populating what you now call north America. Just as diverse as your magical American Kingdom is now. Sorry, Queendom.

Again with the fingers.

One day, the Spanish decide to invade South America. No biggy, right? Except it was big, because with them they brought foreign plagues and illness, that swept up the continent in the most devastating plague in human history. And then Europe ‘found’ North America, and it got worse. Wave after wave of settlers took Indian land by force, pushing them out, killing them for often no more than the gold reserves on their land.

But we know all this right? Why is this minority even vaguely relevant to Mark Flynn?

I’ll tell you why.

Neonero plucks his finger in his cheek, making a small popping sound.

See, the Indians had the innate skill, inherited from their South American counterparts, of maintaining the land they lived on. They’d keep it fertile, and in the case of some, they’d even migrate to make sure they stayed in fertile pasture. Now this story can go two ways, so I will give you both metaphors.

Dum de dum head movements.

First, you have the Indians I mentioned. They knew how to keep the land, they knew when to move on before spoiling it.

And then you had the Indians who hunted the buffalo; they knew not to kill them in large numbers, and they knew to make the most of every scrap of a buffalo before leaving it for waste. From the tongue to the hide to the meat to the bones. All had a use.

He motions his hand in a pirouette motion, nodding his head as if to say ‘et voila’.

To Mark Flynn, XWF’s resident fuckwit, gold is his pasture. Gold is his buffalo. It’s his sustenance, and his reason for being. But Mark Flynn doesn’t have the intelligence of the Indian; he has squandered any and every chance he’s had to stay relevant. He is perfectly happy to let his belts become irrelevant in order to preserve his hold over them. Take for example the tag titles. After being handed the titles in the lamest fashion imaginable, Flynn followed this up by summarily defending the belts once in months; and then managed to have the belts stolen from him by Randall at the end. Not only this, but he was quite happy to have any Tom, Dick and Harry by his side during the reign, giving no intelligent discourse on the matter, and being happy just to sit on his hands and see what happened. Any prestige those belts had was being pissed away every second they were allowed to stagnate in his grasp. For that reason I salute Randall Cross for his actions. But I’ll come to you later , Randall.

One eyebrow is cocked for a millisecond. Like a glitch.

Let’s get back to this metaphor a while shall we? Flynn, your title reigns are the equivalent of a farmer reaping in a great harvest, then spending the next 3 months stomping on the pasture to a state of mud, completely removing its nutritional value and rendering it a sodden useless mess.

Not only do I refer to the value of your titles. I refer also to you yourself. You’ve fallen off in a dangerous manner. Gone is the man that terrorised the Midcard. What we have now is a guy who does nothing more than talk...and talk in such a way that you lose half the audience. You aren’t intense anymore, you’re a pastiche of what you were three months ago. You’ve lost your edge. You reached your zenith, when you won the EU title and knocked off your dragon in the process. And since then you have retracted like a fucking cock exposed to cold after a shower. Sorry Flynn, I shouldn’t mention male genitalia around you, should I? I mean, since you have clearly lost your manhood.

Neonero pouts as if he feels sad, but he’s clearly taking the piss.

The Indians would hunt buffalo by herding them towards cliffs. They would drive a few off the cliff, they’d die from the fall, and they’d use them. Life and death depended on tracking the buffalo. A unique symbiosis. I can’t even liken you to the white man slaughtering the buffalo in the thousands. You’re just a deranged Indian who doesn’t realise the folly of driving EVERY buffalo off the cliff. Only it’s not buffalo plunging off your cliff, it’s your fucking credibility. You have no energy when it comes to defending what’s ‘yours’, emphasis on the implied speech marks, you spent yourself looking for gold.

Like a child, Neonero blasts both his hands into the air, imitating a rocket. As his arms almost become fully outstretched, he fakes excitement, then the rocket falls, plummeting to the ground and blowing up in a million tiny pieces, smashing itself to smithereens. Well, at least that’s the image we’re meant to infer from it. Perhaps it’s a metaphor to show how Mark Flynn reached the top, then fell off, crashed and burned. Or perhaps he's just mucking about. Who knows.

Remember what a mess you were during Lethal Lottery? Your promos against Cyren were embarrassing. Imagine that. The wanker that I was back then. I actually felt like we had some kind of mutual respect going on. Mutual respect! What kind of bullshit was I feeding myself to think that a head case like you was worth nodding towards? You left me, who had held you in such high esteem, embarrassed. Watching you try and exchange words with Cyren was like watching an old man use a computer for the first time. Cyren? Really? That guy couldn't talk for shit even when his head was still attached.



Neonero shakes his head, and removes his feet from the table, sitting forwards again, and pinching the bridge of his nose as if he's thinking hard whilst coming to terms with something.

And yet, you’re the best in the world? Give me a fucking break. You’re no greater than a cum stain on the backseats of a cinema. Sure, for one, ecstatic moment you were the most important thing in the world...then you became effluvia, and then a stain, and ultimately nothing more than that, with a nasty smell. I’m sure you know that smell well, being the wanker that you are. Your underwear is probably like cardboard at this point with all the hardened cum stains from night after pathetic night of wanking away your reputation.

He shrugs.

Am I getting vulgar? Truth is I don’t care about such things anymore. I have seen you refer to our last real exchange as a verbal chess match, so perhaps you’ll feel I am lowering the bar a little here. But again. Don’t give a shit. I’m not here looking for mutual respect anymore. You’re all talk. And when you talk I feel no frame of reference. I could close my eyes and imagine where you are because you are so invisible. So irrelevant that you don't even show up in your own promos. Do you know how tragic that is? My fucking heart bleeds.

Neonero just looks plainly into the camera now.

You used to be interesting.

Even when you were being overcome with whatever voices it is you talk about in your head, you were interesting. You were intense. You were – well I am not going to sit here handing you compliments. But you used to be worth a damn, lets put it that way. The question that looms in my mind is this; were you overcome by the so called ‘darkness’ in your mind, or did you literally just become mediocre naturally?

He purses his lips.

Did you lose something in that desert? Or was it toppling Slater finally? Were you not supposed to ever ‘really’ capture Moby Dick? Is that why you forgot how to exist as a credible competitor? Notice I say competitor by the way; even you wouldn't have ever called yourself a credible human being. And neither would I call myself one, by the way.

Neonero tucks the European title underneath his desk neatly, giving it a little pat on the back. You’re safe now. No more being held by guys who disappear. No more being held by guys whose credibility melted the moment you fell into their grasp. You can smile again.

So you’re a Heavymetalweight jobber now. An inconsequence. A side attraction. Someone for the new kids to play with. That desperate for gold that you have to stoop to the lowest possible form of it.

And by the way. On that note, briefcase title reigns?

They mean fuck all...sweet f-a. So don’t come trumpeting that shit.

You were never XWF champion. You were a pretender. You won nothing and defended nothing.

A bit of a pattern, that?

Best in the world.

Mark Flynn.

The GG NORE tour begins, and you’re the first name on my list.

He smiles sweetly at the camera. This seems like a good moment to end the promo, but as we fade out of shot, a video clip plays, and we hear Neonero speak in the background...

Quote:How is it you've only been good for two weeks and you're already a has-been? There is nothing more humorously tragic than someone who triumphed ONE TIME and seriously has nothing else he can say that makes him look impressive.

I agree Mark, great self-analysis.

GG.

We fade