Post by W A L T E R on Jan 5, 2020 23:29:42 GMT -5
Learn your chorus for after Clash, Odinites.
The scene is strange. Walter’s promos usually radiate from a dilapidated motel or a seedy bar or--at their most chilling--an empty shipping container. This scene, however, is stranger than all those locales; as unnerving as the promos might’ve been, it was their turn from mundanity into terror via only the presence of Walter that made them so chilling.
That’s Walter. He changes the very make up of a room he enters, the air itself seems to chill; you’re suddenly acutely aware of your own breath and your heartbeat and the nimble-standing of every hair on your neck. You’re acutely aware of all those things that make you alive because you’re suddenly and inexplicably aware of how fragile a state that is. Those are the scenes Action Wrestling has become accustomed to seeing Walter in.
This scene however...This scene is the opposite of mundane and Walter is nowhere to be found. No, this scene is fantastical, every inch of the frame filled with the busy work of entertaining the average fan. This scene belongs more in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than the Action Wrestling Universe. Though some contend the MCU is for children, this scene is somewhat different. We are looking upon Ragnarök.
This Great Battle is not played for laughs; it is chaos, destruction, death. This is not attestment via the Poetic Edda but one far more chaotic and centered on Fenrir, the enormous, ever-devouring wolf. Fenrir disposes bodies left and right, casually tossing them out of frame and out of mind, their deaths implied but bloodless (in true MCU fashion). Fenrir stops with the symphony of destruction still being played behind him. His body heaves, muscles bulging. A roar. He points directly at you.
CUT!
We pull back and see the scene we were watching on a small screen, a monitor. Facing the monitor is a director whose voice we just heard. Pulling back farther and we see the truth of the scene and it is...underwhelming. There is a large room filled with production assistants, grips, and the like. All hands on deck to create this false narrative in front of a massive green tarp that takes up the majority of the room.
In the middle of that sea of green is a man entirely out of his element and nearly out of patience. The Action Wrestling World Heavyweight Champion is not a man you want out of patience but I suppose we can be thankful that he is out of his “element"...considering what seems to happen in those elements.
The muscle-bound, world-destroying, force of effortless destruction was Walter. It is Walter. It always will be Walter. But in this particular instance, it was Walter as Fenrir. It was Walter as the end of Odin. It was Walter who had torn souls asunder left and right despite valiant and respectable efforts, leading up to this moment, to the fall of Odin. It was always Walter.
This is how The World sees Walter, the one being Odin is destined to lose to. They see Walter’s time here as building to this enormous Kaiju battle. The World has feared Odin for a long time and for good reason. Walter, of course, fears no man nor myth. And Walter would never say that his victims to this point were dispatched effortlessly; no, Walter makes clear that the path of destruction he leaves in his wake is consciously-made and his havoc mindfully wreaked. That is the difference between Odin and Walter. The World Champion is of single-purpose; he is violently myopic in his pursuit of the better for Action Wrestling and The World. Odin Balfore is Walter’s largest challenger in body and prestige. But Walter knows that evolution has escaped him for so long now. And the beast revels in his opportunity to help Odin.
Walter--with eyes thankfully fixed well past him--strides toward the director. Perhaps Walter’s apparent distraction is what filled the director with foolish bravery. Or perhaps he’s like Odin Balfore and believes his name or his role here or his past have any bearing on his interaction with Walter. Perhaps he believes it keeps him “safer” than the others. They are both wrong.
Director: Walter? Sir, we just need to grab one more angle--
The champion continues walking and pulls at the chest of the ridiculous green-screen outfit he was forced to wear.
Director: This promotional video is going to be brilliant, Watler. You’re going to love it. But we need--
Walter: What you have is sufficient.
Director: It’s truly not, Walter, I just need a bit more from y--
The green screen suit has been pulled entirely from Walter’s body now, crumpled in his hand. The champion has stopped walking and he presses the fabric into the director’s chest. He speaks slow and matter of factly, belying how thin his patience has grown fulfilling this contractual obligation.
Walter: I have this for you. If there is something else you need...Please. Come find me. But what I will have for you...You do not want.
The director is about to open his mouth again, to make a request or a demand or a plea or perhaps even a boast. He should not. Odin Balfore will make many of these same things before his time with Walter. He should not.
Before the director speaks, Nikki Venus bursts into frame, two hands on the director’s chest, escorting him gently away from danger of which he wasn’t fully aware. No one will usher you away to safety, Odin. You belong to Evolution now.
Walter: So much artifice.
The World Champion speaks directly to the camera now, still walking.
Loretta has gone and I thought myself free now. But I am tethered still. The same title that brings me you, Odin--a gift for which I am deeply grateful--brings me here--an empty facade meant to represent our coming war. I am tethered to these newfound obligations if I wish to maintain employment in Action Wrestling. And I have found purpose here, Odin. I have found a means to Evolve the many so quickly, so efficiently, a way to inflict upon the lesser the painful disappointment of their own shortcomings.
So I fulfill obligations to Action Wrestling. I fulfill them without the warmth and satisfaction provided me when I fulfill my obligations to Evolution. But fulfilling one is a means to the other. I understand that. I understand MY purpose.
Yours though, Odin? Yours I do not understand.
The camera follows Walter out of the building and into a parking lot. His pace is measured but never hurried.
Your reputation speaks for itself, Odin. I need not list your accolades here, you do that for us all every time your name appears on the card. It is strange because your name looms larger than perhaps any other to pass through the halls of Action Wrestling yet you trumpet so loud, one would assume otherwise. One would assume you’ve never been given the respect and the accolades and the title shots and the hall of fame commemorations. But you have. Over and over again. With or without earning it.
You have not been the “Seven God” here, Odin. You have not been the Nordic Tank, indestructible and unstoppable force. You’ve been, dare I say, middling? Your Tag Team efforts alongside Noble Savage somehow fizzled and failed. A team made up of former World Champions saw less success than Red White and Bruised. You hold zero title reigns here, Odin. Why is that? Simple disinterest?
Walter is someone worthy of my time and skill and not some United States Championship that I’m not all that interested in. I’m not a United States champion, I didn’t come to Action Wrestling for the united states championship.
Yes, of course, I am now worthy of your time because I am tethered to that World Title, to a material item to which you assign great import. Now I am worthy of a true effort from Odin Balfore. To a shiny piece of metal that is all artifice and pomp and myth.
Just like you, Odin.
I did not tear the old title in half on a lark. I did it to show The World how truly meaningless it was. I wanted them all to see, to feel how empty and produced and meaningless that title had become.
Just like you Odin.
But now, in my hands, its meaning is renewed. It is strong again with purpose and to hold it now imbues one with meaning. The one who would next hold this title will have slain the beast, will have done the unthinkable. It will make one's name truly mean something.
Your name has been worshiped for eternities. Germanic history lifts Odin on high. WCF lifted Odin on high. The pathetic souls in the locker room of Action Wrestling lift Odin on high. You are your own religion, camouflaged by weed-smoke and youthful vernacular instead of hymns and flowing robes. It’s for this reason your losses have not mattered. You failed at the Execution Chamber. Falling to a man you so disparaged, so denigrated that his simple act of winning should have shamed you from the main event.
But there you were, receiving a Television Title shot against Ryan Lockhart in which you’d again fail. Why that time, Odin? Was he not deemed worthy of your time? The greatest World Champion in the history of Action Wrestling couldn’t stir your ire?
When you were dispatched by me, fell by one solitary Mark of the Beast, I was so disappointed in the effort. I wanted this god about which the simpletons clamored. I wanted a force of nature, a being almighty, the Allfather. I wanted to feel the strength used to lift black holes! To curl gas planets! But it was absent. It was all a myth, just as every religion is. God is a superstition.
Just as you are.
From there you were handed a number one contendership, those in power wisely still trading on your name, likely following your lead. Your coasting seemed to turn into a skid. You dropped a match to a newcomer named Masuda Teijin. Why not, right Odin? Your title shot was already promised. No reason to stop the skid now. The myth will carry you. The artifice will serve you and you will serve the artifice.
I reject your artifice.
Walter swings a door open to a trailer somewhere on the lot that Action Wrestling was shooting in. The trailer is empty save for a large symbol on the floor, in the middle of it the AW World Heavyweight Title.
Walter walks the lines of the drawing, his back often away from the camera.
This is a symbol of “sacred geometry” that many will tell you the world is filled with. In nature you can find certain shapes and patterns and the foolish have ascribed to them divine meaning. The foolish have built temples and churches and mosques using these ratios and these shapes. These shapes are pleasing to the eye, they assign meaning and order to a meaningless world.
But their meaning, their importance, their usefulness is purely unearned. It is ascribed and assigned, not purposeful in the least. They do not create the sturdiest structures, they unlock nothing of our nature, of our survival. All their power comes from years of false belief, the same place from which yours has flowed in Action Wrestling.
Until now.
You see, Odin, I did not want to beat the man from months ago. I do not wish to kick and maim an aging great, I do not want to throw the skidding Tank off the cliff to its destruction...No, I wanted to awaken the Villain of the Story.
That is why I was forced to take some extraordinary measures. I needed to reawaken the man once properly called The BadMotherfucker. I’m sure you believed your time in a jail cell was my grand gesture. It was not. That plan was concocted and enacted by Nikki. Her games are in the mind, whereas mine are of a more...fatal nature.
But you being locked away gave me an opportunity I would’ve been a fool to waste. It gave me the opportunity to throw from this mortal coil someone long overdue. A weak, atrophied shell of a man usually protected by his powerful son. A man whose mere existence perpetuated the myth upon which Odin Balfore stands. A man who no longer deserved the air he was breathing.
Do you feel that, Odin? That growing rage? That anger? That hatred for me bubbling up out of your blood and into your very being, filling your heart with a feeling you thought long dead: PURPOSE.
You are welcome, Odin Balfore. You are welcome that I brought Evolution to your doorstep again. I’d hoped you would transform after your World Title failure. Then again after I embarrassed you. But after Teijin, I feared The Villain was dead. I feared your purpose wasn’t simply forgotten but dead. I was worried that the Allfather’s reasons for being had atrophied into non-existence.
Then I thought of your father.
I thought of him as you surely do now. Motionless, breathless, lifeless.
A smile from Walter as he stops and faces the camera. The World title is at his feet, his massive hands extended toward the camera, palms upward, almost inviting.
Embrace it, Se7en God. Feel the your hatred giving you purpose. Feel it pulling you back to the heights you once reached. Feel your heart pumping anger and vitriol and destruction again. Feel it course into your arms and legs and mind. And when you feel as strong and as powerful and as indestructible as you ever have...
Walter snaps shut his hands.
I WILL TAKE IT ALL FROM YOU.
Does it fill your soft, aged, seven-foot frame with guilt that your father’s time was ended perhaps because of your indifference? That my motivation was in fact, your lack thereof? Do you feel guilty that your sheer boredom may have cost your dear father his life?
Do not feel guilty, Odin. Evolution comes for us all, you’ll know that soon. And when I drag you to the Gallows you will not be judged for the hand you did or did not play in the death of your father. No, you will be judged on the months of indifference you have shown here. You will be judged on your truest held belief that yours wins and losses do not matter. That no matter what happens, Odin wins. That you believe yourself the “only World Champion” here.
THOSE are the sins for which you will be HUNG at the Gallows. Those are the flaws in your code that Evolution will wipe out. This is not a debate, Odin, this is a lecture. This is your mental and physical superior explaining the facts to you. Others have listened to this lecture, some have even taken notes and done their best to evolve, to put my advice into practice. But you are no such student. An ego like yours would not entertain such notions.
My ego is naught. I am a tool of evolution as I have told you and others before you. It is that humility that allows me to best my opponents. It is that knowledge that reminds me I must forever sharpen my own blade, that I must be watching all those around me at all times, growing and changing in accordance with what must be done to Cull the herd. I watch and I study and I obsess. I have been doing so for my entire time here. It is my purpose, my passion, my reason behind every beat of my heart and breath of my lungs.
But you? Only now do you match my fire, my fury. Only now--thanks to my actions--do you match the feeling of purpose. You can run a marathon without training, Odin, but you will not win. You will be outpaced by the man who eats, sleeps and breathes his purpose everyday. Even now, at your possible best, with all that purpose and rage born again inside of you, we both know that you incapable of the humility necessary to be great here. You cannot humble yourself enough to obsess and study and watch the way I do. I am a simple tool, a servant of the only true god: Evolution. I humble myself at the feet of evolution.
So that I can humble you at mine.
Walter reaches down and picks up the title belt. The gold seems to shrink when clutched by his hand. Walter dangles it at his side. Walter walks toward the camera, the lines of the symbol on the floor suddenly ablaze behind him.
The artifice in my hand brought you to me, artifice begets artifice. It brought to me the AW's Greatest Lie to its one great truth teller. And dispatching the shell of Odin Balfore, crushing it like the sacred geometry of a nautilus shell, would have been easy. But instead I have coaxed the ancient thing from its shell.
It it is my sincerest hope that I am not facing the Odin Balfore I left staring at the Bright Lights months ago. It is my sincerest hope that I am not facing the Odin Balfore who has been sleepwalking through the final stages of his career. It is my sincerest hope that the MAN, not his legacy, shows up to Clash.
Because when I choke the life from your massive frame..When I show you the Great Mystery...the same your father has recently known...When my hand is raised at the end of clash, I want everyone to know that I laid flat the best this business has to offer.
I want to feel the true Mark of Odin so that The World knows I survived it. I want Ragnarök laid at my feet so I can step through it and its great illusion can dissipate like so much smoke.
Your Ragnarök is the same artifice, the same falsehood I left on that set. You are created and propped up by a great many hands all agreeing upon the same lie. You are not the destroyer, the bringer of war; you are simply the director of that agreed-upon lie. You’ve trained the monkeys to stand in their places, hold everything just so and after collective years of hard work--your lie is maintained.
Gods are myths upheld by the power-mad and believed by the lesser minded. Gods are fairy tales.
But monsters?
Monsters are very real.
A monster, to the world, is simply someone whose motivation is disagreed with by society, whose purpose is misinterpreted in his time. You all claim I bring death. That I fight only for death. But this could not be more mistaken.
I fight for life. You have all painted me with the hood and the Scythe so that you can feel better about what I do. It pains you all to see the truth that life...true, purposeful, meaningful life cannot exist for even a MOMENT without death.
So I fight for life, for all of us. For better lives than we have now. Odin was a broken, bored shell of his true self. Death crept in on his edges...I took that death from him. Instead, it visited his father. And now, now Odin is given renewed life. He is filled again with purpose! He has evolved!
Odin had lived for so long in the stories of his own greatness, he needed my help. He needed something terrible, something personal, something most men would be unwilling to give him. But I am not most men, Odin. I am Man Evolved and I have offered you the gift of life as it can only be bought: through death.
Odin understands better now than perhaps he ever has the stakes of our real world, the one without his religious artifice. He understands now that if men with his strength and his power do not fulfill their potential then hope is lost for this specie, this planet, for life itself. I bear the burden of having shown him that.
And now I bear the burden of measuring the true limits of that strength. I bear the burden of LIFE. I fight for all of our abilities to grow, change, survive, EVOLVE.
You do know how Ragnarök ended in mythology, don’t you Odin? I mean, your death of course. We’re all aware of that. Even the thick-headed producers of that promotional video earlier is aware of that hence my masking as Fenrir, the one who devours Odin.
In the texts where you’re worshiped, it is asked:
"What will be after heaven and earth and the whole world are burned? All the gods will be dead, together with the Einherjar and the whole of mankind. Didn't you say earlier that each person will live in some world throughout all ages?”
Each person will live in some World, Odin. I am building that World after I destroy yours, after Ragnarök, after I burn it all and salt the earth, it is not the end, remember?
EVOLUTION COMES.
That is how both our stories end. But yours is a fairy tale in an ancient text and mine is being carved into bloody reality by me everyday. The evolution in your lovely myth is of the earth itself, burnt and then flooded. After Ragnarök is done, after Odin is dead, two humans repopulate the earth.
This too, I can bring to fruition. Isn’t it lovely, Odin? That the reality I am creating can dovetail so beautifully with your foretold death? That after Ragnarök has run its course, I can continue to burn it all down and to cull the herd. And the Evolved Man can be one of your two humans to repopulate this constantly-remade place?
My perfect specimen Alyssa and I have already begun, Odin. Your story has been told and its ending never changes: you die. But now at least take solace that the man whose hands fell you, the Beast who devours you whole, will be one the man to create life anew.
Your father is gone but my child comes.
Life requires death, Odin Balfore.
So now I...require yours.