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Dolly Waters · (07-23-2022)

Independence Day, 2047

Wargames were afoot. The earth smoldered with mortar, decaying almost, like the rotted flesh of fallen comrades strewn out across an endless battlefield, lying along the oil stained shores of the former Gulf of Mexico. “If you cannot die for this cause…” Maggie Swift, a young commander of the Resistance Army, recalls a lesson from her father, while dragging a departed allies corpse near a friendly bunker. It’s topped with torched grass at the edge of the beach. “…then there was no cause worth living for.”

Maggie flops her rear down against the earthy bunker, panting from dragging the dead weight of another fallen brother. She pulls her frizzy brown locks into a bun and gazes upon his dead features. An exploded wound from a heavy caliber bullet has left him unrecognizable. Flesh and features blown away. But to Maggie, her comrades' character will have shown through long after this bloody conflict is resolved.

A stray lock of her hair tumbles back into her face, obscuring the already twisted view. Maggie’s head falls, her dusty eyes taking in the scorched shores beneath her bent knees, almost in prayer. A meek, vulnerable sounding sniffle cries from her chiseled, and hardened features. The sounds of gunfire are ringing out from an uncomfortably close distance. A cigarette finds its way from inside of her black flack jacket and up into her cracked lips, and when she lifts her head again, Maggie is taking in a photograph that she holds dear to her heart…

…a photo of her father…

…the man once known to the world as Mastermind.

Comrade Swift! a tone identical to Maggie's calls out from a near distance. Maggies raises her eyes to find her twin sister, Bernadette, or ”Bernie!”, as Maggie calls her. Bernie, the older of Mastermind’s twin daughters, moves from around the bunker with a ragtag crew of a dozen fighters. Her features are strikingly identical to her sister’s, only Bernie has her hair dyed jet black, and chopped into a wedge. She too is a commander in this, what has been dubbed as The Final Resistance Army.

As she nears her sister, Bernie notices a familiar surname tattooed on the arm of their dead comrade. ”I see we’ve lost Flynn.”

”Not a loss, sister.”
Maggie moves around the dead body on the battlefield and meets her sister with confidence. For the Swift children, the children of Mastermind, finding one another alive and well during this war, no matter how brief the intervals of separation, was always warming. It helped rekindle a fire instilled in them by their father. A man who long foresaw this seedy conflict, and used a unique opportunity twenty-five years ago to build a working example of perfecting the craft of warfare. A sacrifice he made for his children.

”This war has been nothing but a loss… Bernie’s eyes sink into the faceless skull of their fallen comrade, Flynn. Another of the voiceless generation that has been strangled out by the infected claws of a global neo-fascist rule. The Swift children were hardened, fearless warriors, but this war had taken its toll a time or two over. Now as they prepare to rally the remaining resistance allies and their resources for a final attack, out manned, out gunned, out of options, their only guiding light remains the lessons they learned from their father.

”You remember what father said?”

”…”

Bernie’s hopeless eyes rise up to meet Maggie’s, as her sisters hand embraces her on the shoulder.

”…about the dream?” Bernie’s eyes go wide, recalling exactly what her sister is alluding to,

”Nothing can ever be lost so long as the dream lives on…”

Gunfire continues to rain down all around them,

”The dream lives through Comrade Flynn’s death. The deaths of us all. We aren’t lost sister…

”…for only if the dream were to die, would no cause be worth fighting.”

”This is why he picked her… to teach us about…

The Martyr

Thimbles of sweat are standing on Dolly’s eyelids, her sclera are bleached and wide. They’re so thick and glossy, like glasses of milk holding cocktail olives, that they look like prosthetics on a corpse. But Dolly isn’t dead, not yet anyway. Her eyes hold onto the twirling ceiling fan above her without a flinch, even as a faint gasp escapes her lungs.

She doesn’t know that Corey has slid across the marble floor, frantic, kneeling beside her bed in this repurposed medical wing of his mansion. Another fluttery gasp leaves Dolly, a sound of shock almost, like she’s watching an uneasy scene unfold elsewhere. But it’s only the ceiling fan.

Bending and spinning, it’s fast. She could no longer spot the eight separate hand carved blades of the fan, all painted white. Their gaps ripping between the white ceiling paint above. A white matching the sheets of Dolly’s bed below. It’s a glowing type of white. Where only her golden hair, olive eyes, and the smudges of rotten chicken soup around her mouth juxtapose Dolly’s lifeless looking skin that blends in right along with the white.

It’s a brilliant type of white. It’s luminous, and filling the beige gaps of the painted walls, and tan marble flooring. It even begins to blot out Dolly’s hair and the green in her eyes. She watches between the blades of the fan, but it’s all become one, like a giant white orb floating just above her.

A light.

The light.

Dolly draws in nearer.

All she wanted was to see how the dream ended. She didn’t care if it was happy or sad. That was all subjective. The dream would show her what could be, or what could’ve been. She could rest with that. But she never gets that rest, all she sees is the light. It swells around her. The sounds of Corey yelling out to someone become muffled and indiscernible while he shakes Dolly’s body.

Everything goes white.

But there’s a detour to the end.

A brilliant flash, accompanied by a loud metallic sawing sound overcomes the white. It looks like a golden saber slicing through another dimension and carving out a door before Dolly.

It opens immediately upon completion.

…and from its crackling hot glow, pulsing inside the sawed frames, an arm reaches out.

”Come with me, Dolly.”

Dolly blinks hard, and jump startles herself, looking down and feeling her arms, studying her own hands even, her face bent with incredulity… almost as if she forgot who she was.

Was…

Her hands jerk over her chest and cover one another, pressing down to feel for a beat. A brief moment goes and Dolly gasps. With her eyes glued to the hand reaching through the door, she grabs down on her wrist.

”...come along now, Dolly. Every great war needs its martyr.”

There's no pulse. And almost like a zombie, her arms fall and she begins moving to the door, like she was under compulsion. She grabs the arm reaching out of the door, her eyes wide and welling, yet her face flat and dead as the light rips away. She’s vacuumed into the door, but not before she hears a little whisper.

”See you when you get back, Dol.”

[Image: 360_F_334710217_6RisNlA06Yke93m2xCb5SXzemN9CKacG.jpg]

When Dolly blinks again, her eyes pop with more life, as they’re darting around, studying a fluorescent, and slick metallic surrounding. She feels that she’s cold, but this time when she grabs at her wrist, all wide eyed and bewildered, her features relax when she feels warmth of her own touch against her skin. Then she feels the pulse, and her features collapse with relife while she sighs out

Oh, I’m not dead.

”Well, not anymore you’re not.”

Dolly had no time to properly digest what could be happening. Especially given that she was just lying in her home at Coreytopia dying from some fatal mixture of rotten chicken soup and failure. and now here she is, some crazy science lab, an old familiar voice, and a t-shirt being flung at her face. The black fabric swallows her senses as intensely as the fabled white light of death.

She pulls the shirt away, and studies it’s insignia:

We
Mastered
Your WarGames
Speedrun World Record’s Mind

She looks up and standing before her is the man behind the voice, the one that led her here from whatever death transitional purgatory she was experiencing. But maybe

It was all a dream.

Mastermind chuckles, ”No. You died, Dolly. You sacrificed yourself to keep the dream alive… just like I knew you would.

Dolly looks blankly,oooooh that’s right. I get it she begins with that jingly snide tone of hers so I died, and this is the hell where I’ve been drafted on Mastermind’s WarGames team. What? Did you dope me like Charlie did last year? Great! Suuuuuuper original.

Dolly turns curtly from Mastermind looking for …the exit, where’s the exit? but she only turned to find herself oddly in place, right in the center of the floor amongst this massive, futuristic lab. Her skin crawls and muscles quiver like she was reliving a hallucinogenic high. There’s no doors that she can see. The walls are spherical, and lined with large translucent pipes pumping a blue liquid. The piping meets at the crest of the dome ceiling and runs into the center of the room where a giant holographic projection screen wraps around into a crescent.

...what… she becomes almost trance-like again, like she was when stepping into the doorway from the white as she draws in toward the holographic screen ...what is this?
This is my life's work… It's called Tāimarus. A place where the boundaries of time do not exist. All that ever was, all that will ever be from all dimensional space is channeled here into this chamber. I used it to pinpoint the exact moment when you sacrificed your life, and I pulled you out of that moment while you were transitioning.

Dolly’s eyes are glazing as she listens to Mastermind speak while studying the complexity of the interdimensional time manipulator before her.

I… sacrificed my life?

Yes, after the Cannabis Cup.You let yourself die to stop them from killing your dreams.

Them? …Heyman? …Misty Waters? Was Dolly unable to stop their nefarious plans of killing her dreams, and instead forced to die? She doesn’t remember.

If I’m just some dead martyr, then what good am I now?

It’s not about what dies with a martyr, it’s about what their death warrants to live on… and sometimes even, like your case… what their death warrants to be reborn.

Dolly bends her brow, and presses her hands against her chest again, feeling her heartbeat in tact. Her body is still warm to the touch. Hot even. Getting hotter. Dolly’s chest is burning. She jerks her hand away from her chest and along the outline of her wrist and fingers, theres a hot blue flame dancing. Like someone has sprayed her hand with perfume and lit it with a lighter. Her body tingles her to speechlessness as the flame on her hand abruptly extinguishes.

Everything I’ve fought for has been building to this, Dolly. To draft you as a part of my WarGames team. You’re a person with true intentions. One who carries their heart into word and into action… and most importantly, into combat. A war without warriors willing to die for their dreams is no war at all… its posturing. It’s making a mockery of such a grave situation. Those with no true fire, who would soon open the doors to wickedness if it brought on a good laugh. Like our opponents in WarGames.

Dolly’s face is no less twisted with an agonizing confusion and look of awe.

...what am I?

Mastermind just laughs, empathizing with Dolly’s struggle of understanding what's happened to her.

You’re the martyr…

Violent images flash before Dolly’s eyes. Images of her bound to a steak above mounds of dry grass. The grass being lit aflame by a crowd of laughing faces. She blinks the images away.

...and soon you’ll be the martyr’s vengeance. I know it’s a lot to take in, but don’t worry… I’m going to show you, or better yet… he opens his arm, guiding Dolly closer to the giant holographic screen where the faces of their WarGames opponents have appeared. Tāimarus will show you. It will show exactly why we’re going to master WarGames.

Dolly stands face to face with a holograph of Game Girl. There’s a cold, intense moment of quiet, as Dolly digs deep into her soon-to-be enemy’s pixelated eyes. PFFT! No doubt!

She shouts with a gleeful facetiousness, turning back to Mastermind.

It’s showing me everything I need to know right here!

She points back at the screen laughing,

Game Girl?

rEaLlY?

She’s on the team that’s supposed to win WarGames and trigger some calypsoclysmic event that changes the world? That’s rich, dude. The last time Game Girl was in a wrestling ring, I snipped that cunts' AV cords and left her laying flatter than NK’s forehead. Her eyes wider than Claypso’s gap, and proved her words to be faker than Hanari’s accent.

Let’s go ahead and clear the air about good ol’ GeeGee. She knows she doesn’t have what it takes to defeat me. I could rummage back through some of the specific garbage she spewed prior to the last time we faced off at March Madness 2019, but it would do no good.

Back then, the twit was so delirious just trying to keep up with my words, that she mistook me for losing a match to Peter Gilmour… actually, hold on, “mistook” is too kind. Game Girl flat out lied, over and over, desperate to try and make anything stick to me all while telling ME that I was the big bad in her shitty RPG. Hey, psssst, Game Girl… the sequel won't be any better.

Dolly Wrecks GameGirl 2.0 coming soon to the Android and Apple APP Store!

That’s what Game Girl reminds me of, one of those advertisements for some obscure mobile game. The athsticts look amazing in the advertisements. But when you download the virus infected bitch, open it up, you find that the game is just some poorly designed, shallow knock off of Final Fantasy, and even worse it has a pay wall! That’s right folks, for just 39.99 you can power up Game Girl’s trash talk, and it still be as dull and ineffectual as the previous level.

The 6th overall pick in this year's WarGames draft hasn't been in a wrestling ring since Dolly Waters dusted her off like a filthy cartridge chip three years ago. Go ahead and let that be all of the need-to-knows on where I stand in this match, and what I’m capable of. Forget last year, forget the Carnies, because if the biggest threat to win WarGames is facing us in the first round this year- then you can lay all yer’ chips down on us mastering this stupid little speedrun.

I mean looking up and down at these bozos-

But wait! You’re forgetting something!

As she walks along the holographic images of Calypso, Hanari, NKWC and Game Girl,

Oh?

Game Girl wrestled one more time after you defeated her. She lost to Ned Kaye after playing his stupid video game

Dolly begins laughing uncontrollably,

She lost to Ned Kaye? SHEEEEEESH. See what I mean, Mastermind? These pricks are just playing games. Nobody loses to Ned Kaye otherwise.

Dolly looks over their faces again,

I must say you really did pick the perfect team to counter them. Didn’t you just defeat Hanari?

I did. He’s weak.

L-O-L, I remember when he was supposed to be a good wrestler. I beat his ass back then, and proved that he didn’t understand what carne asada was.

And Calypso? Didn’t Peter Vaughn just finish putting him back in his place among obscure wrestling talents from 2013 that no one cares about? Are we all ready to hear Calypso explain why he can lose like 70 matches in a row, and still be a good wrestler? What a joke. Makes all the sense in the world that he’d throw together a squad full of parodies and sidekicks. Their collective integrity is about as thick as Calypso’s hairline.

The majority of anything they say will be in clear jest to reality. And that’s how they’ll operate in the ring. Game Girl glitching everywhere, overcompensating with stupid visuals because nothing else about her life interesting. Comrade, wishing like hell that Flynn was around to help. Calypso looking like the most out of place wrestler in history, even alongside a video game a communist war criminal … this is gonna’ get ugly. But a team like ours? Mastermind who’s returned with fire, won the Anarchy title and defeated Hanari so easily, Peter Vaughn who’s made a healthy habbit out of making Calypso look stupid and- - -

Dolly stops and looks around,

Where is Vaughn by the way… and, ummm

She snaps her fingers trying to recall Savannah Knightley’s name,

I’m going to get them next, and finish assembling the War Masters.

I thought that was a really bad team name at first, but now it makes sense. You really are a Mastermind, huh?

Oh, what gave it away, Dolly? The fact that you’re a reincarnated version of your martyred body inside of a hyperbolic interdimensional time laboratory?

Oh, I just thought this T-shirt idea was pretty cool. But, yeah! Totally all that other stuff too!

-to be continued-

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