This Grape Flavor Aid Is Fucking Fire, Try Some
Oct 3, 2021 13:55:00 GMT -5
Trey Bouchet and Johnny Bacchus like this
Post by lethe on Oct 3, 2021 13:55:00 GMT -5
Off-Camera
“Don’t you think this is a lot, [redacted]?”
“Don’t call me that when I’ve got the mask on,” Lethe said, towering over the girl next to her even more with the added height of the Minnie Mouse mask.
“We’re literally in the middle of nowhere. Who is going to hear me say your name out here? The prairie dogs?” [redacted] asked, rolling her eyes. “You realize this is a little insane, right? Like it can’t be healthy but I’m not really--”
Lethe rolled her eyes. “You can’t get into the habit of saying my name when I’m in the mask, okay? Nobody is gonna hear you out here but you get too comfortable and next thing I know you’re saying it an AW show or somewhere else stupid. And it’s a production,” she said, “It’s an act. You need a stage for any good play. Don’t make this weird when it’s not. Don’t make me regret asking you to help me.”
They stood at the edge of the warehouse that she had bought somewhere on the very edges of the city with nothing but desert beyond that. Inside, they pass the drainage pipe that Lethe had emerged from during her last video clip. Without the lighting and the careful camera angles, it’s just a portion of scarred, graffitied concrete.
They pass the dilapidated bumper cars from the first time that she’d bitten into Niamh and refused to let go. The funhouse. Under the bright overhead fluorescent lights they don’t look nearly as ominous as they did after the careful lighting and the tightly filmed angles.
Everything that was Lethe, contained in this one building. Carefully packed away, to be unpacked when she was ready to step into the costume. To put on the mask. To get into character.
“I guess I just don’t understand why you’re going through all this,” [redacted] said, sweeping her arms out. “The mask, the sets... if I were out there on a fucking undefeated streak, I would want the whole world to know who I was. Who was beating them.”
Lethe didn’t answer her, pulling the mask off and shaking out her hair before she grabbed a ladder from somewhere along the dark wall and set it up, climbing up to replace the colored gel filters on the large stage lights mounted to the ceiling of the structure.
-------------
On-Camera
Somewhere in the distance there was the wobbly sound of a merry ground but distorted. Wrong. It shook and faded in and out at the wrong moments like a music box whose battery was dying.
Red lights smeared the looming clown’s face that emerged from out of the dark. Vines growing up over it like it had been abandoned for years. Decades. The earth was taking back the garish thing. Lethe stepped out of its mouth, a baseball bat swung over her shoulders loosely. The baseball bat. Pink and studded with rusting nails and barbed wire. Rust or blood, they were the same thing when you dug down deep enough.
“Maaaaybe,” Lethe dragged the word out, distorted it. Made it sound wrong. “Maybe. Maaaaaybe it’s possible that I need to refine my previous assessment of John Blade as the bottom of the barrel. He was and is but that’s… if that’s where you’re focusing you’re kiiiiinda missing the point, pal.” A giggle. “The bottom of the barrel, by the way, isn’t about his skill. Or Niamh’s skill. Or Josiah Howard’s skill. All the way back to what’shisfuck with the generic name.”
The pool of red light followed her, dripping off of the bat. “The bottom of the barrel isn’t a person, it’s a place. And we’re all sitting at the bottom. Some of us are clawing our fingernails down to the bone, scratching up the sides trying to get out. Trying to get somewhere. You’re always gonna have people who give up and sit down and decide that the gutter is good enough for them. I’ve heard about and I’ve seen what comes out of MacNamara gyms, Niamh… and I guess I was just… expecting more. I was expecting more when I was in the ring with you too and you didn’t deliver there either so that’s on brand, at least.”
Lethe laughed as her fingertips drummed erratically on her collarbone. “You were gooooooood in the ring, Niamh. Technically sound. But it’s not my fuckin’ job to tell you that.” She tilted her head, sing-songing her words. “When you’re in my Twitter mentions, crying about how you’re just gonna eat another loss to me and pad out my numbers… it’s not my job to kiss your feelings better. Action Wrestling is actually putting money in my hand to make you feel baaaaaad. So… it’s one of those, I promised other people I’d be on my worst behavior scenarios.”
Lethe pirouetted, surprisingly graceful even in the mask and the chunky boots she was wearing. “You know what’s more disappointing than that though? It’s the fact that I can fucking feeeeeeeel it in my bones that you’re gonna try to get these people to buy into the whole ‘but Lethe never pinned me’ bullshit. And it’s bullshit because we both know that Josiah had that three count. If I hadn’t broken it up at the last second… baaaaaaaaaaby, I’d be having this conversation with Josiah Howard and not you. Oof. Let that sink in for just a second.
But at the end of the day, I think you did your best, Niamh. I think your best wasn’t good enough because at the end of the day you just don’t want it like I do. The problem with you. With Josiah. With John Blade. The problem with all of y’all is that no one is going where I’m willing to go. Where I want to go.”
The camera barely picked up on the giggle under the mask. A little too high pitched, a little too unhinged. “You’re happy here at the bottom, I guess. Where the bar is on the floor and you still couldn’t clear it when it counted.”
Lethe tilted her head at an angle that almost looked unnatural with the way the large mask tilted. “You know what’s wild, though? And I mean, besides that all that technical skill couldn’t save you? What’s wildddddddd is that when shit gets a little ugly you crumble. What are these first few matches in a career that could span decades? Who is even gonna remember what happened now, besides us, when we stand in the ring for the last time?
What we do here is important. It’s the foundation. But no one but the builder thinks about the foundation once the house is done.”
Lethe suddenly swung her head and the bobbing Minnie Mouse mask to tilt her head like a dog to the other side. “You know what’s wiiiiiiiiiiild?” The fingers tapping at her collarbone grew more erratic. “You could have not looked stupid. You had options before you Tweeted that. Before you necro’d that tweet 24 hours later to try to save face. Shit, maybe Josiah was right. Your skin might not be delicate but your feelings sure as fuck are. Babe, that insecurity is what’s gonna get ya.
All you had to do was keep your head down, give me my due and use all those delicate feelings to make you push a little harder. Shit, if you put a tenth of that effort you put into looking hard to save face on Twitter into the ring Monday night you might have taken this.” Lethe laughed, shrill and jarring.
“If you could beat me on Monday, in a couple more weeks no one would even remember that first match but now I’m gonna make sure they remember it. I’m gonna make sure they remember this one. Because I am going to drag you to hell and back. Me and this match? We’re gonna chew you up and spit you back out, baaaaabe.
Win or lose it's not gonna matter because you can’t fight human nature, right? You can’t fight your basest, truest nature. And your basest, truest nature is that you need other people to prop you up.
“Ohhhhh shit, I know. Maybe you should join Luc Langerby’s cult! Cults are great at propping people up. Making them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Just, uhhhh, maybe avoid the Flavor Aid. Or don’t. You know, just go with your gut on that one, I guess.”
Lethe was light on her feet, twirling as she moved away from the rusted games and towards what could only be the sideshow. The canvas of the tent was weathered and worn in places but inside, under glass, was a paper cup. It looked worn, covered in faded Disney Princesses and filled up with a suspicious looking purple liquid. A weathered brass plaque attached to the glass read ‘A cup of Flavor Aid from the Jonestown Massacre, 1978’.
“I guess since the death of god, there’s been a vacancy for cult leader and Luc Langerby stepped right the fuck up. Looking like Charles Manson and Something About Mary had a bastard love child and acting like Jim Jones.”
Lethe laughed. “I guess if I were a cockier fuck I would stand here and say something about howwwwww good ol’ A Dub is feeding you losers to me. Don’t get me wrong, dollssssss, I can be a very cocky fuck. Someone stupider than I am would want you to focus on the fact that y’all are limping off of losses and I’m standing here unscathed.
Someone stupider than I am might stand up her and feed you some pretentious Ayn Rand quote talking about the question isn’t who will let me, it’s who is going to stop me. But Ayn Rand was an idiot and laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work. Laissez-Faire capitalism is a utopian fantasy. And like all utopias, it cannot actually exissssssssssst.
Being undefeated doesn’t meaaaaannnnnn anything, do you get it?” she dragged her words out with a strange cadence.
Lethe held up the bat now, where it had previously been swinging loosely between her fingers. She held it up to the camera, the focus slowly shifting to the names she’d dug into the bat’s wood. Niamh’s, of course, was already there. Next to it, a ‘x2’ and ‘Luc Langerby’ were sketched out in pencil, ready for the knife that would immortalize them next to John Blade and Josiah Howard and Chase Jackson. “Do you know what’s scary about the way primitive humans used to hunt? They just kept coming. They’d tire out their prey by just… walking. Following. Never stopping. It doesn’t matter the road I take to get there… I’m not hanging my name on some undefeated streak that will eventually end as all undefeated streaks do. That’s child’s play. What matters is that at the end of everything every last name in Action Wrestling is going to be a scar in this wood.”
Lifting the bat, she swung it at the glass encasing the cup. It shattered, the purple Flavor Aid splashing out of the cup as the pieces of glass hit it’s surface. Lethe reaches into the jagged hole left in the glass and fished out the cup.
Lifting it, she held it up like a toast. “To Jim-- err, I mean, Luc. To Luc Langerby. Did you know that Jim Jones used to keep a pet chimpanzee called Mr. Muggs in the People’s Temple? Do the Langerby’s have a chimpanzee? Because if you don’t I really feel like you’re missing a really great marketing opportunity there.”
Lethe smirked inside the mask, not that anyone could see it, and tipped the cup towards the camera. “To the unstoppable force never meeting the unmoving object.”
She lifted the cup to the Minnie Mouse mask, then realized that there was no way to drink it through the mask. Lethe shrugged and splashed the purple Flavor Aid into the face of the mask, giggling as it dripped off.
“Mmm. Grape.”
“Don’t you think this is a lot, [redacted]?”
“Don’t call me that when I’ve got the mask on,” Lethe said, towering over the girl next to her even more with the added height of the Minnie Mouse mask.
“We’re literally in the middle of nowhere. Who is going to hear me say your name out here? The prairie dogs?” [redacted] asked, rolling her eyes. “You realize this is a little insane, right? Like it can’t be healthy but I’m not really--”
Lethe rolled her eyes. “You can’t get into the habit of saying my name when I’m in the mask, okay? Nobody is gonna hear you out here but you get too comfortable and next thing I know you’re saying it an AW show or somewhere else stupid. And it’s a production,” she said, “It’s an act. You need a stage for any good play. Don’t make this weird when it’s not. Don’t make me regret asking you to help me.”
They stood at the edge of the warehouse that she had bought somewhere on the very edges of the city with nothing but desert beyond that. Inside, they pass the drainage pipe that Lethe had emerged from during her last video clip. Without the lighting and the careful camera angles, it’s just a portion of scarred, graffitied concrete.
They pass the dilapidated bumper cars from the first time that she’d bitten into Niamh and refused to let go. The funhouse. Under the bright overhead fluorescent lights they don’t look nearly as ominous as they did after the careful lighting and the tightly filmed angles.
Everything that was Lethe, contained in this one building. Carefully packed away, to be unpacked when she was ready to step into the costume. To put on the mask. To get into character.
“I guess I just don’t understand why you’re going through all this,” [redacted] said, sweeping her arms out. “The mask, the sets... if I were out there on a fucking undefeated streak, I would want the whole world to know who I was. Who was beating them.”
Lethe didn’t answer her, pulling the mask off and shaking out her hair before she grabbed a ladder from somewhere along the dark wall and set it up, climbing up to replace the colored gel filters on the large stage lights mounted to the ceiling of the structure.
-------------
On-Camera
Somewhere in the distance there was the wobbly sound of a merry ground but distorted. Wrong. It shook and faded in and out at the wrong moments like a music box whose battery was dying.
Red lights smeared the looming clown’s face that emerged from out of the dark. Vines growing up over it like it had been abandoned for years. Decades. The earth was taking back the garish thing. Lethe stepped out of its mouth, a baseball bat swung over her shoulders loosely. The baseball bat. Pink and studded with rusting nails and barbed wire. Rust or blood, they were the same thing when you dug down deep enough.
“Maaaaybe,” Lethe dragged the word out, distorted it. Made it sound wrong. “Maybe. Maaaaaybe it’s possible that I need to refine my previous assessment of John Blade as the bottom of the barrel. He was and is but that’s… if that’s where you’re focusing you’re kiiiiinda missing the point, pal.” A giggle. “The bottom of the barrel, by the way, isn’t about his skill. Or Niamh’s skill. Or Josiah Howard’s skill. All the way back to what’shisfuck with the generic name.”
The pool of red light followed her, dripping off of the bat. “The bottom of the barrel isn’t a person, it’s a place. And we’re all sitting at the bottom. Some of us are clawing our fingernails down to the bone, scratching up the sides trying to get out. Trying to get somewhere. You’re always gonna have people who give up and sit down and decide that the gutter is good enough for them. I’ve heard about and I’ve seen what comes out of MacNamara gyms, Niamh… and I guess I was just… expecting more. I was expecting more when I was in the ring with you too and you didn’t deliver there either so that’s on brand, at least.”
Lethe laughed as her fingertips drummed erratically on her collarbone. “You were gooooooood in the ring, Niamh. Technically sound. But it’s not my fuckin’ job to tell you that.” She tilted her head, sing-songing her words. “When you’re in my Twitter mentions, crying about how you’re just gonna eat another loss to me and pad out my numbers… it’s not my job to kiss your feelings better. Action Wrestling is actually putting money in my hand to make you feel baaaaaad. So… it’s one of those, I promised other people I’d be on my worst behavior scenarios.”
Lethe pirouetted, surprisingly graceful even in the mask and the chunky boots she was wearing. “You know what’s more disappointing than that though? It’s the fact that I can fucking feeeeeeeel it in my bones that you’re gonna try to get these people to buy into the whole ‘but Lethe never pinned me’ bullshit. And it’s bullshit because we both know that Josiah had that three count. If I hadn’t broken it up at the last second… baaaaaaaaaaby, I’d be having this conversation with Josiah Howard and not you. Oof. Let that sink in for just a second.
But at the end of the day, I think you did your best, Niamh. I think your best wasn’t good enough because at the end of the day you just don’t want it like I do. The problem with you. With Josiah. With John Blade. The problem with all of y’all is that no one is going where I’m willing to go. Where I want to go.”
The camera barely picked up on the giggle under the mask. A little too high pitched, a little too unhinged. “You’re happy here at the bottom, I guess. Where the bar is on the floor and you still couldn’t clear it when it counted.”
Lethe tilted her head at an angle that almost looked unnatural with the way the large mask tilted. “You know what’s wild, though? And I mean, besides that all that technical skill couldn’t save you? What’s wildddddddd is that when shit gets a little ugly you crumble. What are these first few matches in a career that could span decades? Who is even gonna remember what happened now, besides us, when we stand in the ring for the last time?
What we do here is important. It’s the foundation. But no one but the builder thinks about the foundation once the house is done.”
Lethe suddenly swung her head and the bobbing Minnie Mouse mask to tilt her head like a dog to the other side. “You know what’s wiiiiiiiiiiild?” The fingers tapping at her collarbone grew more erratic. “You could have not looked stupid. You had options before you Tweeted that. Before you necro’d that tweet 24 hours later to try to save face. Shit, maybe Josiah was right. Your skin might not be delicate but your feelings sure as fuck are. Babe, that insecurity is what’s gonna get ya.
All you had to do was keep your head down, give me my due and use all those delicate feelings to make you push a little harder. Shit, if you put a tenth of that effort you put into looking hard to save face on Twitter into the ring Monday night you might have taken this.” Lethe laughed, shrill and jarring.
“If you could beat me on Monday, in a couple more weeks no one would even remember that first match but now I’m gonna make sure they remember it. I’m gonna make sure they remember this one. Because I am going to drag you to hell and back. Me and this match? We’re gonna chew you up and spit you back out, baaaaabe.
Win or lose it's not gonna matter because you can’t fight human nature, right? You can’t fight your basest, truest nature. And your basest, truest nature is that you need other people to prop you up.
“Ohhhhh shit, I know. Maybe you should join Luc Langerby’s cult! Cults are great at propping people up. Making them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Just, uhhhh, maybe avoid the Flavor Aid. Or don’t. You know, just go with your gut on that one, I guess.”
Lethe was light on her feet, twirling as she moved away from the rusted games and towards what could only be the sideshow. The canvas of the tent was weathered and worn in places but inside, under glass, was a paper cup. It looked worn, covered in faded Disney Princesses and filled up with a suspicious looking purple liquid. A weathered brass plaque attached to the glass read ‘A cup of Flavor Aid from the Jonestown Massacre, 1978’.
“I guess since the death of god, there’s been a vacancy for cult leader and Luc Langerby stepped right the fuck up. Looking like Charles Manson and Something About Mary had a bastard love child and acting like Jim Jones.”
Lethe laughed. “I guess if I were a cockier fuck I would stand here and say something about howwwwww good ol’ A Dub is feeding you losers to me. Don’t get me wrong, dollssssss, I can be a very cocky fuck. Someone stupider than I am would want you to focus on the fact that y’all are limping off of losses and I’m standing here unscathed.
Someone stupider than I am might stand up her and feed you some pretentious Ayn Rand quote talking about the question isn’t who will let me, it’s who is going to stop me. But Ayn Rand was an idiot and laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work. Laissez-Faire capitalism is a utopian fantasy. And like all utopias, it cannot actually exissssssssssst.
Being undefeated doesn’t meaaaaannnnnn anything, do you get it?” she dragged her words out with a strange cadence.
Lethe held up the bat now, where it had previously been swinging loosely between her fingers. She held it up to the camera, the focus slowly shifting to the names she’d dug into the bat’s wood. Niamh’s, of course, was already there. Next to it, a ‘x2’ and ‘Luc Langerby’ were sketched out in pencil, ready for the knife that would immortalize them next to John Blade and Josiah Howard and Chase Jackson. “Do you know what’s scary about the way primitive humans used to hunt? They just kept coming. They’d tire out their prey by just… walking. Following. Never stopping. It doesn’t matter the road I take to get there… I’m not hanging my name on some undefeated streak that will eventually end as all undefeated streaks do. That’s child’s play. What matters is that at the end of everything every last name in Action Wrestling is going to be a scar in this wood.”
Lifting the bat, she swung it at the glass encasing the cup. It shattered, the purple Flavor Aid splashing out of the cup as the pieces of glass hit it’s surface. Lethe reaches into the jagged hole left in the glass and fished out the cup.
Lifting it, she held it up like a toast. “To Jim-- err, I mean, Luc. To Luc Langerby. Did you know that Jim Jones used to keep a pet chimpanzee called Mr. Muggs in the People’s Temple? Do the Langerby’s have a chimpanzee? Because if you don’t I really feel like you’re missing a really great marketing opportunity there.”
Lethe smirked inside the mask, not that anyone could see it, and tipped the cup towards the camera. “To the unstoppable force never meeting the unmoving object.”
She lifted the cup to the Minnie Mouse mask, then realized that there was no way to drink it through the mask. Lethe shrugged and splashed the purple Flavor Aid into the face of the mask, giggling as it dripped off.
“Mmm. Grape.”