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X-treme Wrestling Federation »   » Archives » "Savage Saturday Night" RP Board
The Rise Of The Celt
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The Celt Offline
Registered but either hasn't added self to a roster yet or doesn't RP



XWF FanBase:
Some of everyone

(cheered; very rarely plays dirty but isn't lame either; many likable qualities)


#1
06-08-2022, 12:44 PM

Now Mr. Johns, according to your previous testimony you claim to have exited the tavern, aptly named the Drunken Sailor, at approximately eleven thirty, completely in possession of your faculties. Yet I have submitted a receipt from said establishment into the record that indicates you imbibed fourteen scotches, neat, before you stepped away from the bar. How can this jury reach any conclusion other than that you were highly intoxicated when you encountered the victims of your brutal murders?”



“Objection,” rasped the public lawyer in a dark suit at the defense table of the sweltering Louisiana courtroom, his client, against his advice, having stepped into the witness box.



“Come on, Jimbo,” the judge softly chided the prosecuting attorney. “You know better than that. We are here to decide the man’s guilt in this proceeding, so rephrase your question.”



“Alright then, Willie,” Jimbo replied with a vague nod. “Mr. Johns, were you drunk after consuming the enormous quantity of scotch you tossed back before you left the bar?”



The tall, rangy figure in the witness box, blue eyed and blonde haired, glanced toward his lawyer and then replied with an unmistakable Scottish brogue, “That was over the course of two hours, little more than a wee dram for a highlander.”



The prosecutor chuckled darkly. “I see, and why that wee dram sent your blood alcohol content to more than twice the legal limit. But let us leave the obvious, that you were drunk as a bat, and return to your testimony concerning the heinous crimes.”



For five hours, the cross examination of Patrick Johns continued through the unbearable heat of the languid, bayou afternoon, dredging up the horrific memories of the fateful night in his mind. He had noticed the couple, apparently engaged in a vehement argument, when he’d first walked through the door of the Drunken Sailor, but he gave them little heed. In the three hours he had remaining to him before his flight to Atlanta, Patrick had no interest in anything except several snorts of Glenfiddich to ease the frustration of another disappointing job interview with an outfit drilling for oil off the Louisiana coast. He'd been out of work for two months now and his meager savings were running thin, with few, well paying options available for a Scottish kid who had dropped out of school to come to America seeking his fortune.



Patrick hadn’t even noticed the couple leave, a burly man and a pretty slip of a lass, apparently to remove their row from public airing. After the last shot in the bottle went into his glass and down his gullet, Patrick thanked the keep and settled his tab, unwilling to sample any scotch not bred on his native soil. He stepped out of the tavern, breathing deeply of the humid, night air before he heard a curious sound. It was a wet, squelching splatter, as if someone were gutting fish and spilling the entrails on the ground, emanating from an alleyway beside the bar. Without consideration, he strode toward the grisly noise and rounded the corner, dimly illuminated from the light filtering through the grimy windows of the Drunken Sailor.



The macabre tableau was forever etched in his memory, beholding the burly man in the process of butchering the lass like a hog in a slaughterhouse. Yet instead of recoiling in shock and terror, Patrick was filled with a rage he had never experienced, much less understood. He charged at the man, launching himself into a flying tackle, and when both men hit the ground, Patrick heard a muffled pop, the man’s skull fracturing as it struck the stone wall of the tavern, blood spraying over Patrick’s face and arms. He pulled the wickedly serrated knife from the man’s nerveless fingers, not knowing he was dead, and hurried to the bloody pulp that was all that remained of the woman. Still, he fell to his knees beside her, desperately trying to staunch the bleeding from a score of horrible wounds, any one of which he knew were likely mortal.



So, the constables found Patrick Johns in the dismal alley beside the Drunken Sailor, with a knife beside him, accompanied by the two corpses as the only witnesses to his crimes, apparently mutilating one of the bodies. He was covered in both his victim’s blood and his fingerprints were lifted from the murder weapon. It was an open and shut case, Judge William Jackson decided. The truncated proceeding took but seven weeks between arraignment and the fall of Willie’s gavel after the jury verdict was read, happily clearing the judge’s docket for the upcoming case that had a political bearing on Willy’s career.



“Patrick Johns,” Willie began gravely, “You have been judged by a jury of your peers and found guilty on two counts of murder in the first degree. I sentence you to death, the date of your execution to be announced when your appeals have run out. Before that date, you shall be incarcerated in the maximum security prison of Angola in our great state of Louisiana until her citizens are granted the justice they richly deserve by your capital punishment. May God have mercy on your soul.”



In a daze, Patrick was led from the courtroom in his orange jumpsuit, shackles round his wrists and ankles. Distractedly, he heard the judge ask the prosecutor if they were still going fishing in the morning and stared at his own lawyer, who would not meet his eyes. Into the caged back of a van he was shoved for the long ride to his prison cell in one of the most notorious facilities in the United States. He’d lived rough from time to time, but what he next experienced made his worst accommodation seem like a five star hotel.



The malevolent, brooding edifice of Angola prison loomed before him, a gate of steel bars, electronically locked, swinging wide like the maw of a ravenous beast welcoming another sacrifice to its unquenchable hunger. Down a labyrinth of forbidding corridors he was led, hard eyes of men in concrete cells, eight foot by eight, with cold, iron bars fashioned into doors the only thing separating Patrick from the fiends that whistled and jeered , calling him Goldilocks and promising unspeakable perversions he would suffer at their merciless hands. It was almost a relief when his own cell door closed behind him, the taunts slowly diminishing when he was out of their line of sight.



“Since this is your first day in paradise, Rapunzel, let me give you a little advice,” his escorting guard offered. “See the barber and cut off those girly tresses and hit the weights. You’re a big guy but as skinny as a post. You look too much like what most of these devils haven’t seen in years, a lithe chick with hair they’d love to tangle in their fists, and that makes you a target. Not much recreation at this resort except for the yard and the library, the latter you can access by talking to Sleepy Joe, Angola’s venerated librarian, don’t mind he murdered his entire family fifteen years ago. Tell him what you want to read and he’ll bring it to you, one at a time. Any questions?”



“Is this hell?” was all Patrick could manage to ask. His reply was the guard’s mirthless chortle as he slammed the cell door, the reverberations through the doleful corridor like that of the toll of a funereal church bell.



Somehow Patrick survived nearly five years amid the demons and madmen that dwelt in Angola, perhaps by immediately taking the guard’s advice. On his first morning in the yard, he found the barber and his two foot, platinum locks were shorn to a half inch burr. Then he began weight training, with the aid of Sleepy Joe’s books on bodybuilding, and he transmogrified his six foot six, twelve stone frame into a hulking mountain of muscle a buttered biscuit short of three hundred pounds. Now he was given wide berth by all the inmates, which suited him fine, and he kept his head down as he worked on his appeal. Amazingly, at least to himself, Patrick discovered a love of reading and he devoured the library’s catalogue of ancient history and philosophy, particularly the chronicles of Athens, Sparta and Rome, and the Druidic and Stoic philosophies of an age long forgotten.



It was a fine, spring day when Patrick was led from his cell and escorted to the warden’s office, an unwelcome aside in the now familiar, monotonous routine of his life, because no good news was ever forthcoming from such a summons. Yet as he entered the opulent chamber, his manacles and leg irons were removed and the warden smiled, gesturing to a plush, leather chair across the desk from his own, offering Patrick a seat. The chair groaned in protest as he accepted the warden’s invitation, his visage a mask of bewilderment.



“Mr. Johns,” the warden began, rather nonchalantly, “It seems your guilty verdict has been overturned in the scandal that has emerged around Judge William Jackson and James Lee, the prosecuting attorney in your case, by their suppression of exculpatory evidence in your favor in their rush to clear the docket of your trial so they could proceed with a case that might have put the judge in the governor’s mansion and the lawyer in the post of Attorney General of the great state of Louisiana. I expect you were entirely unaware of these developments, though you may have noticed the daily papers have been unavailable in the library for the last month. I assure you, this was for your own safety, an yours alone.”



Patrick stared at the rotund man in the ill fitting suit, mouth agape. “I haven’t a clue of what you’re on about,” He replied after a moment.



“And that is for the best, until just now,” the warden replied with an unctuous smile. “I’ve seen two inmates die at the hands of the twisted souls that inhabit this abyss when word reached them that one of their own was to escape the damnation they suffer, simply because innocent men were to be released. Papers are on the way from the governor’s office that will make you a free man, but the next forty eight hours will be most perilous for you. Though I have done my best to keep the news from the prison population, the scandal has become too widespread and word undoubtedly will reach the lunatics whom it is my job to watch over. I advise you say nothing to anyone of this until I have the papers in hand, but have your head on a swivel at mess and in the yard.”



“You bloody idiot,” Patrick hissed. “What am I to say having been summoned into your distinguished audience without apparent reason? Put me in the hole until the papers come through or chain me to a tree outside of this hellscape for two days, I care not which.”



“That would be cruel and unusual punishment, Mr. Johns,” the warden cooly replied. “Let the warning suffice.”



The attack came the next morning in the exercise yard, eight hulking murderers armed with sharpened toothbrush handles and garrottes of copper wire stripped from electrical cords falling upon Patrick without warning. The skirmish lasted no more than two minutes, the Scot suddenly remembering the empty handed combat he and his mates had devised when he was a lad as they wrestled each other into submission, without any vehemence at all, back on the highland moors of his homeland.



When the guards deigned to intervene, there was little they need do, the eight attackers in various states of injury at Patrick’s feet. They lifted the fallen, who nursed bleeding mouths with missing teeth, noses bent and gushing blood, and obviously broken bones, joints bent at grotesque angles. Patrick watched his vanquished foes carried off the battlefield, a strange, consuming thrill racing through his veins, as if he was a victorious knight in some ancient tale. It was not until, repeated for a third time, did the man’s enquiry rouse Patrick from his reverie.



“Who was your master?” the man asked, his tone one of awe and bewilderment. “The forms you displayed are the ancient roots of what evolved into, or sprang from, the oriental martial arts, Greco Roman wrestling and the Saxon knight’s disarmed combat, all supposedly drawn from the Druidic warriors that supported their wizards millennia ago.”



“What are you on about?” Patrick replied, not bothering to look at the man in his distraction. “It was a style of roughhousing me and my childhood mates put together when I was but a lad.”



The man said nothing for a great, long while. At last, he replied, “I hear you’re a free man come sunup tomorrow. Got any prospects out in the real world?”



Patrick laughed morosely. “None at all.”



“Well, friend, I used to be known as the Centurion in XWF before my incarceration, but I still have a few contacts.” He pulled a library book out from under his arm and opened the covers to a page marked with a tattered business card. Lifting the slip from between the paper, he Handed it to Patrick and said, “If they really are going to set you loose, go see this dude and ask for an audition. Smokin’ Bob Williams will give you a look.”



Patrick accepted the card but glanced at the book and asked, “What are you reading?”



“First of a trilogy by John P. R. Hughes, called Arcana. If you like epic fantasy, in the vein of Tolkien, Martin, Moorcock and Watt-Evans, you should pick up a copy. I think you would like it.”



“I might just do that, Centurion,” Patrick said with a wry grin. “Let’s say I get a job with XWf, I got to have a persona, right?”



“Indeed you do,” the man said with a grin of his own. “And yours is obvious. You are the Celt, and I am due one half of one percent of your lifetime earnings for your moniker, paid annually, until your retirement. Fair enough?”



Patrick laughed, not unkindly, and replied, “What concern of yours be money, stuck for life in this hell hole?”



“No, lad.,” the Centurion intoned. “I find myself in here by a decision of Judge William Jackson on a trumped up charge of a murder for hire scheme that was also overturned, like yours. It will be a little longer before the wheels of justice grind along my road to liberation, but my freedom is also imminent. Just don’t tell nobody, or be my shadow for the next two months.”



“It is a noble cause, but I fear my presence past my time would only garner you further scrutiny,” the Celt gravely replied.



“Undoubtedly. So get out of here and talk to Bob. I want to behold the rise of the Celt by the burgeoning of my bank account,” the Centurion laughed. “And don’t let them put you in a triple threat match on your first go because that’s just like the gladiators in ancient Rome at the coliseum. All they’re looking for is blood.”



Patrick’s booming laugh shook the exercise yard, many eyes turning toward him. “I am the Celt and my quest begun. Look upon me and despair!”



Press Conference, May 28, 2022



The blue eyed leviathan with streaming, blonde locks tumbling to the middle of his back approached the podium, a score of microphones sprouting like mushrooms after a spring rain atop its mahogany surface, shuddering at every tread of the Celt, arrayed in black, brigandine armor with a claymore strapped across his back. He paused when he had reached the stand, staring out over the crowd, the corded muscles in his neck bunched beneath his flesh, like tensioned ropes, as his gaze swung side to side.



So many,” murmured the Celt, peering through the glare of the footlights on the stage. “I fear you have wasted your time, gentle folk, for the powers that be, have chosen as my foes a blacksnake and a kid, one untested and one already having been defeated. Should you wish to behold a slaughter, come ahead, but I would suggest you save your coin and stand beside the exits, rather than entering herein. The proof of my domination shall stream over those thresholds in crimson rivulets. It is not my desire to annihilate inferior competitors, but the coddraggers that sponsor my prize money demand I face a jester and fool before I am deemed worthy to confront a suitable adversary. Yet ever the bloodlust of the mob has demanded carnage and slaughter when there were no enemies upon their borders. When the gladiators of ancient Rome were more prized as legionnaires than bloody sport, the coliseum was empty. Yet in their absence, the blood still flowed, slaves, Christians and criminals set upon the deathly sand for the entertainment of the masters of the purse.”



The Celt slowly shook his head, the haloed light of a hundred lamps through which the reporters might capture, in the highest definition, every nuance of the Celt’s visage, revealing only resigned disappointment. “Upon ten thousand battlefields I have strove with a hundred thousand enemies, all worthy to be named warriors. This shall be the first where I cannot deem my foes more than fodder upon the path to my championship. My quest begins here and you will say you were witness to it, at the beginning. Gramercy for your attention, fair folk, and prepare to watch history unfold.”



The Celt turned away from the podium, his lumbering bulk disappearing into the shadows, and the reporters looked at one another, wondering if Patrick Johns was mildly delusional or stark, raving mad. None had made up their mind when the lights in the arena dimmed.
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