The car Ned had been driving for the past week or so slowed to a crawl in front of the small establishment labeled "Bastards of the Coast Enterprises." Ned took a big inhale as he rested his head on the steering wheel, preparing himself to finally meet with the people improperly using his likeness while being under a banner he found detestable at all levels. Darcy patted his back softly, reassuring him as best she could as they prepared to head inside. There was a tense sensation in Ned's muscles as his increasingly urgent desire to calm himself seemed to become more and more out of reach. It was a long journey to get where he was now, but certain things are worth the travel time, he figured.

"So, how do you figure this will turn out?" The question left Darcy in a truly uneasy manner. She was never apart of all of this wrestling nonsense to begin with and already it seemed incredibly convoluted to who and why people associated with one another and otherwise.

"Probably not very easy," Ned shrugged, finding some level of comfort in her presence as he considered the possibilities, "but I'll be fine. The bastards and their associates, no matter how loose, tend to be the kind to blow a ton of smoke, but if you can cut at them in the right place, they tend to fall over fairly quickly. So, it's just a matter of figuring out how best to topple them."

"So, they're like giants in the Jack & the Beanstalk sense?"

"In their heads maybe, but in reality, they're more like a Lego Death Star: one good push away from collapsing."

"Ah, I see," she replied, feigning an understanding of the point he was trying to make, though primarily getting the picture.

They stepped out of the car, walking towards the building as the sun scorched overhead, the concrete beneath them having absorbed most of the heat as it harshly reflected the light back upwards as they stepped into the office building, a clear entrance visible even in the cascade of blinding brightness. Stepping into the dim corridors of the building, the place looked rather quaint. An average nerd business run by a few hobbyists who just so happened to have the worst kind of endorsement around. Darcy's nose flared up as she took a whiff of the interior, her stomach churning slightly.

"What the hell is that?" She asked, dumbfounded as she tented the collar of her shirt over the bridge of her nose, only willing to breathe through the admittedly weak filtering of her shirt's fabric.

"It's the smell of game design. Or procrastination. One or the other," Ned shrugged as they made their way deeper in, finally finding a group of giggling employees tossing cards at each other, bongs flush on the table as bubblers and lighters sounded off, only a short moment after their entrance were Darcy and Ned truly noticed, the eponymous "Bastards of the Coast," more interested in their pot.

"Well, well, well," said the apparent head of the operation, "look who just came in, boys!"

"It's the gigantic pussy!"

"He's even more pathetic in person!"

"And he brought some fat chick with him!"

Darcy looked down, her slight hints of self-consciousness flaring up with the taunting from the various levels of stoned, smelly, greedy idiots sitting in front of them. She instinctively began to slink back, expressing a silent shock as Ned stepped forward, undeterred by a single word that had left them.

With a calm breath, Ned walked directly in front of the head Bastard, causing the HB to stand up himself, a growing uneasiness in his body language he attempted to mask in front of Ned. Ned spoke with intention, not a single stutter or hesitation with words, "You're using my image illegally. You're going to stop."

"O-oh! You care allllll about legality now, don't you?" The HB attempted to save face in front of his employees as he picked up a deck of their XWF: The Debauchery cards, wafting a single card with Ned's likeness on it as he smugly continued, "well, if you want us to stop so badly, why don't you beat us in a little game of XTD?"

The Head Bastard motioned for one of his underlings to grab him a deck as Ned responded in unexpected fashion, grabbing onto the wrist of the HB and delicately using his other hand to pluck the card from his hand, ripping it into shreds.

"No. I'm not in the mood."

"E-excuse me?! This is our turf! Our rules! Plus, you're like the game guy! Why would you pass up an opportunity like this?" The HB didn't understand, a panicked sensation settling in as Ned's gaze intensified and his hands gripped the collar of the HB's shirt tightly.

"No. I'm not the "game guy." I like games, I've even had a few weird experiences involving them, but if you think that's what I'm all about, you haven't been paying attention. I do whatever I damn well choose and I am a few choices away from beating your face in until you stop printing that crap with my face on it."

The Head Bastard's lip began to quiver, not expecting Ned's response to be so non-negotiable. Darcy gripped onto Kaye's shoulder, her voice cutting through the intensity with a soft reminder.

"Not like this, Ned. Sure, other people might end up forgiving you, but will you?"

Ned thought about it. It would be so easily to pummel this asshole's head in and take out all of his frustration on the man right then and there. None of them could stop a trained athlete such as himself in this situation and it would feel... good. But the kind of good at the bottom of bottles and at the peak of highs. A "good" in absence of moderation. A "good" that would fade quickly and be replaced by an emptiness or guilt. Of course, it was easy. If doing the right thing were hard, everyone would. Ned released the man from his clutches before stepping back.

"If we're going to put some arbitrary challenge on something that I have a legal right to demand, then it's going to be something of my choosing, understood? When we fight, we fight on my terms, not yours," Ned delivered in a stern tone.

"Fine, fine," the HB caught his breath, the fear apparent in his eyes as he attempted to recollect himself, "what's your game?"

Ned's eyes scanned across the office until he finally connected an idea in his head.

"Trashketball using crumpled up cards you printed of me. 15 feet away. First to 5," Ned declared as the opposition roared, the Head Bastard looking on smugly towards Ned and Darcy.

"You fool! Trashketball is our office game of choice! You don't stand a chance!"

Darcy looked at Ned with a bit of worry before he raised a hand to preemptively assuage her fears. He whispered to her, "it's just like ski-ball, just with a tiny bit of difference. I've got it handled."

The actual game itself was fairly quick, the Head Bastard's confidence eradicated by the sheer consistency of Ned's throws, his effortless focus outdoing the HB despite the HB somehow managing a few more shots. Ned rubbed his shoulder as the office mocked the HB viscously, all of them berating their leader for "losing to a gigantic pussy." The HB's head slunk low as he agreed to cease production on the Ned Kaye cards only for an officer to walk in through the front door, taking a large whiff of the strange air and eyeing the many inhabitants of the Bastards of the Coast HQ.

"Now, what the hell is going on here? We got a noise disturbance from one of the offices sharing this building and I'm smelling something awfully suspicious," the officer stared at all of them with a distrustful look, keeping his hand near his firearm before he recognized the face of Ned Kaye.

"Hey, I know you! You're that wrestler my son likes! Ed K, right?"

"It's Ned," replied Kaye with the best he could approximate of politeness at the time. The officer walked up to Ned and shoved a piece of paper and pen into his hands, taking advantage of the opportunity to get a gift for his son.

"You mind signing this, buddy?"

"Sure," Ned began signing his name in a rather standard fashion, keeping a close eye on the officer as he peeked around the room for illegal activity.

"Y'know, you really let my boy down when you went and became all Nebulous and such."

"Nefarious."

"Whatever. The point is that he's really happy you're one of the good guys again! And I'm sure you're not associated with this trash."

"They're certainly not my friends," Ned handed the signature back to the officer before receiving the next question, one he was ultimately unprepared for.

"Well, since you're not one of them, could you let me know if they were up to anything... unscrupulous?"

Ned thought for a moment. These bastards were willing to insult him to his face and show him no respect as well as toss a potshot at Darce for no real reason. Nothing prevented him from throwing them all under the bus. Nothing was in his way. It was technically the right thing, in fact, according to the law. It was so... easy.

"No. As much as I don't like them, they're just normally smelly, sir," Ned responded, keeping a straight face as he spoke. The officer grumbled a bit before shrugging and accepting the answer, leaving the building shortly after as the Bastards of the Coast took a huge sigh of relief, the HB walking up to Ned with a soft expression.

"Hey... that was a pretty cool thing you did. Thanks."

"Don't thank me. I'm just... trying to do the right thing again. It helps that it's a dumb law. Let's go, Darce."

Ned and Darcy stepped back outside the building, making their way back into the car before both decompressing, happy to be out of the oppressive stench of Taco Bell farts and bad investment decisions.

"See, that's progress, Ned! You did something nice to a few fellas who didn't necessarily warrant it! Keep it up and you'll be back to good-two-shoes territory in no time!" She gave his shoulder a playful shove as Ned shook off the compliment, disagreeing entirely.

"I don't know about that. I'm just glad this is all wrapped up and I can finally head back home and you can go see your sister, Darce."

She faked a cough, feeling a little unhappy to be sharing such news with him, "Actually, Ned, you got one last stop... remember?"

Ned thought for a moment until it came back to him like an express train. A badly worded express train.

"Oh son of a-!"

---

---

---

"Welcome to our final installment of Being Your Betterest Self! I'm Ned Kaye and I cannot wait to tell you all about peace of mind! In fact, I will be getting a ton of peace of mind as soon as I'm done with these seminars!"

"Now, what does peace of mind truly mean at its core and how can you achieve it? Well, peace of mind is essentially a feeling of security or complacency. It's what you can achieve when you come to terms with your situation. But for some people, that's incredibly hard! You see, as much as they'd like to pretend, they are exactly everything they say they are, they still do things that make zero sense in that narrow description of themselves! Let's say they present themselves as only caring about money? Why then would someone like this completely ignore an offer to get paid to not pin someone like, let's say, Robert Main? If it's only about cash to them, why wouldn't they take the pay day?"

"Because they're full of shit and the illusion requires appearing like they have no agenda or desire outside of being an asshole in vague ways. But, that's what you need people to believe isn't it? That's why you're trying so desperately hard to dethrone me in the first place because you want to keep up the charade. But you're not fooling me. You never did. Despite all of your attempts to look cool and ahead of things, you're even more insecure than I am. Consider the fact that you actually rank higher on our illustrious Top 50 and yet you don't have half the respect I do. You are one half of one of the greatest tag teams ever and yet you have to fight for attention with the likes of rookies like Kido. Because for all of your dirty dealings, you never got and will never achieve the respect of your peers the way I do and that just tears you apart. Put simply: I got over without a face, you struggle to get over without Bobby Bourbon."

"And as much as you want to portray as some one-trick pony, it's only because you have been incapable of doing anything outside of paying an editor to make some dipshit video for you and yapping a bunch of ad hominem nonsense out. Here's a good example of how every one of your videos appears to the world."



"You aren't some diabolic crime syndicate lord. You're an internet troll who lucked into some success because you do two things with semi-frequent quality. You could never be someone like The Chameleon because variety isn't your strong suit. The only strong suit you have is the one that holds all of Bobby's trophies. And you probably don't even get to wear it without his permission. I never even had to say your name in all of this because I knew you were so hopelessly vain, it didn't matter if anything I said actually applied to you, it was going to eat through you like acid regardless. Despite all of your success, you've fallen to the traps of all trolls: lonely, unhappy, insecure, and desperately hoping someone pays the toll. All while acting like you're some kind of "team player." You're not fooling anyone when the biggest bitchfit you've ever thrown is not being able to throw others under the bus. It gave you a second chance at life and you're still desperately hoping for something else to come around just so you can get that sweet feeling of power again. There is no peace of mind for you because you can't even share a piece of your mind without it being drenched in so many layers of irony and sarcasm that any underlying meaning is lost to time. You want to represent this company? Then lobby for your picture on the top of our webpage because the only era of the XWF you could ever represent is back when Peter Gilmour in drag was considered "progress" in this company."

"You're not a threat to me. You're not even that much of a threat to the people you betray which is why you rely on surprise and subversion to get the upper hand. You could have never taken Robert before you gave him brain damage and you're the only person in the history of the XWF to beat Main and still be viewed as largely irrelevant. Because you care too much about branding and schemes over being a wrestler. Because you can't stop your idiotic hustling. You wanna parade about how this isn't a game? Then stop fucking playing around and face the music: what infuriates you about me is that at the core of my being is someone who is willing to try to be better and I am proof that it's not the world or nature that stops you from being something else: it's just you and it always will just be you. And the sad fact of the matter is that you could try to take all these steps and you still would fall to the wayside unless you have one of your buddies hop in to distract me or pull some fuckery. It doesn't matter if you're the worst or best version of you: you're still half the man I am. And that's a fact I'm more than ready to rub your face into."

"Being X-Treme Champion is more than just a thing you wear or a willingness to get pinned everywhere. It's a mindset. And the only thing you've got your mind set on is embarrassing yourself. So, make a good show of it tomorrow, buddy. Hell, we'll even have a video of it."

"You can't run from yourself."