Magic in a Bottle: Angelina Tarrant vs Shimmerlace Snuggleblossom II (Apex Match)

[Malkavia]

What’s infuriating is the clusters of chairs. Rows in places, except where it became a pile, a thorny thicket between her and pure iridescent color at the end of a steel-toothed wand. Fight back! Water’s running freely down the swollen nub of her eye, and grinning makes the worm there curl red in the eyebrow–a step on steel, a jump. Swing—

Miss, whiff, CLANG and a sharp pain erupting in Shimmer’s wrists as her staff tumbled end over stern in the air—and her eyes never budged from the Scarlet Terror. "You absolute—" The Feychild flit backwards, and breath hissed between her teeth, almost cut out of her by another arc of the Nutcracka.

And here's where the fairy’s mind split in two tracks. One traces the Terror’s violet claim, saw its thieving pin the staff midair. And the Feychild’s grin grew fangs whie her body went tense, pumped at the thighs, got ready to jump--to take the sky with a vertical leap. "—cunt!" Then she'd reach with her palm outstretched for the gold while her lips spread and stretched, smiling in the last neck of the race.

But other track in her mind followed Angelina Tarrant because here was the point of all this shit: Moonkick off the top-rope, flip in the air like a bird looping a cloud for play. She soars, fast, with her hair ruby in the light, just like a year past, the kind of command in the Sky that makes your own gut do a somersault, stretches your grin same time your eyes widen.

Shimmerlace never got off the ground. Angelina caught the staff, spun, and slammed the Court’s staff into the Feychild. It had been aimed, in the pirate’s mind, at a shoulder; but Shimmerlace had shifted. It hit her across her forehead, and when she landed in a heap among a pile of upended steel seats, she did not get up.

[Monsy]

It’s a rocky shelled out beach out there. The kind she found on road trips on Yesterday trips state-side. They’re an oasis out there. Count them on your hand and you might struggle to pick up one. But they were training grounds. Hop between the rocks, take a fuckin’ hike up and down the shore, end up on some long motel with the concrete pathway and red roof overhang. Dance the feet. Hup-two. Spin. Swing.

And it works. Beautifully like that. Now there’s a fuckin’ gap. The rock is at a sharp angle with some distance, but the platform on the other side is flat and near the water. So what do you do? Run. Go for it, take that jump, turn and make a bet, leap and spin, catch the air and catch your gold, then come down swinging. Right on the flat part of this metal egg shell. Angelina grinned, landing but with one leg giving out. She hit a knee, then collapsed onto her forearms and dropped her weapons, then laughed dryly after a delay. "Ya fuckin’ right I am.”

And she got up, quicker than before. The knee still hit a hitch, and she limped the first step before the adrenaline hit her stride. A mini-gun for a heart-rate and the pant of a fan turned to full speed. She took that and slunk herself over the barricade, kneeling to slink beneath the apron. The ladder is drawn, and she gets up, arching back into a half-pipe before stumbling to the barricade again, throwing it over, then collapsing with it, flopping on top. She rolled, got up again, this time slower, and puffing through chipmunk cheeks to power this huge fuckin’ ladder up the damn audience rows. She got to the point of a wall, and a good ten feet difference from Shim. The upper-bowl would become her eye level once she set it down, opened it, then climbed. Elbows and wobbly feet. One after the other. A breath for each one like she was doing an exercise rep. Her shoulder pulled on strings and there was sweat dropped for each rung made. And when she reached it, she planted her foot on the ledge. The ring became a sticky note. The audience is her ship, and she stood within the eagle’s nest of that great vessel, ready to dive and become Queen Anne’s mortar.

[Malkavia]

Clunk.

Angelina bashed Shimmerlace across the head, and for an instant she was aware of the explosion of pain just over her left eyebrow, a sense of the world shattering underneath her feet. Then every sensation went numb, like the lights flickering out during a power outage.

Her awareness came back slowly, in pieces. She had a sensation of falling, and her extremities felt heavy. Her head in particular seemed to be full of a thick liquid that stretched her brain like a bulb, far from the jerking mechanism of her jaw. Falling was an only partly correct description; the feeling was more like sinking, as if she was trapped in quicksand. As she became more awake, she wrestled against the pull of gravity, heaving to thrust back to the surface.

Only, her body didn’t want to move.

The outline of the world began to emerge from the fog of unconsciousness. She could see movement, a tower scuttering overhead—a long, narrow silhouette that finally stabilized like the pirate herself standing overhead. An insane part of Shimmerlace wanted to spit at what she imagined would be a dragon’s face.

When she realized that the tower was a ladder, and when her vision focused and she made out Angelina’s boots working their way up the rung, her heart fluttered. Even with blood running down her left eyelid and her back simmering back into painful full awareness, she could picture it: Angelina’s arc, masterful, fifteen feet up, full of light, that spins and twists until it lands as two black boots on the fairy’s splintered chest.

It was so sweet it made her sick. It made her toes curl and fingers clench. And that's all it took to get her gasping and snarling out of the quicksand, to curl to a seat and grab the ladder and shake, weak at first, then harsh with her shoulder—SHOVE—then climb to one foot and then to a stand and shake, shake, shake all the while to pull this cunt out of her sky.

[Monsy]

Nipping set in fairly quickly. Knees didn’t work so great. They were stretched out wads of gum, where too much weight made them stretch and the tendon length must’ve doubled. She ends up laying while standing, dragging her hands up the side like a fine waist, grabbing gently, then higher until her hooks sink over another ledge. The reps dialled down more to slow, drawn out death crawls. But before she knew it.

Bingo.
She had the top. How did she know?
Every time spied her hand nicking the rung above, and this time, she felt nothing. There’s a surge of good feeling as she forgot to look, but did now, smiled, pulled harder and got her elbows underneath to heave up her chest, over and swing the leg around and plant her bottom. She flipped her hair back, combed it and looked over everyone on the bottom bowl. Ant-fuckers.

She licked the tip of her shredded middle finger, with its blood and octopus tendrils of dangling skin flaps, and then gave a de-feathered bird to the crowd, not to anyone in particular. Just a fuck you for anyone seeing. Then she placed her hands between her legs, lifted her hips and jumped, landing in a crouch with both ankles together, the toes off the sides and practically sitting on her calves. Her knee hurt like a fuckin’ bitch, but she gave a push to bite through it, stand and get a rise from the crowd.

Then the ladder shook. Angelina’s arms windmilled, and she arched. Another. More violent. “Fuck--!” One foot slid off and was lucky to catch the rung below, and that she was loose off to not go stiff. Just another I-beam. Now, with another push from that lower rung, she got up, faced the upper-bowl and balanced teetering toes to heel before timing a jump on her toes, flying and catching a rail. Angelina dangled, body against the wall with a straight shot down. Huff. Huff. PULL. She wheezed and busted a whimper trying to use her knees, then boots to slip against the wall. A sock on one foot, and she swung that one out to hook over the rail and wedge herself over. She landed in an aisle, stood, then stumbled back into a chair onto someone’s lap.

“Uhhhh…”
Their hands were out. They clearly didn’t want trouble. Angelina looked up at them, just a little too spent to care, then saw the drink in their hand and immediately snatched it. The sugar and fizz told her outright. Fuckin’ pepsi. “Good boy.” And she got up, made her way to the rail and looked down, putting one arm on the rail and another to drink the over-sized cup. A few pirates and neutrals came to her wings. How many times do they get to hang with a wrestlah? On APEX. They were not missing this shit.

“Shimma Me Timbers, Shim! Were ya TRYIN’ to kill me?” She snorted, then laughed, “I’m almost impressed. Shame we’re at a bit of an impasse. This fairy got no wings, yo.” Now the crowd chimed a chuckle at the irony, but Angelina kept her eyes firmly directed at Shimmer herself. “Too afraid of fallin too. What is she gonna do when there’s no one there to catch her? Gonna call out to me? Again?”

[Malkavia]

Angelina’s feet pushed from the ladder, which set it careening off-balance. Shimmmerlace braced against the weight of a fifteen-foot steel ladder. It tilted, threatened to slip and fall, then she pushed and it teetered the other way and landed with a clang on its four feet—just as Angelina slipped into the lower bowl seating. By the time Angelina leered over the railing, Shimmerlace was already on the first rung, moving up fast, until Angelina reminded her where she was, and she froze halfway

She never liked ladders. Compared to the stability and breadth of a good climbing tree, ladders were death traps. All it takes is a clumsy passerby, an unusually strong wind, or an errant thought in the climber. She liked to fly, but ladders made the hairs on the back of her neck

So when Angelina started crooning about the wingless fairy and the pit unstable heights carved in her gut, it struck the kind of nerve that set her jaw and made her pause on the fourth rung. Probably seven feet above the ground, her fingers clung to her metal scaffold until they were as white as her face was pink. She stared Angelina in eye.

"The next time I call your name." Big breath. She pushed up the ladder. "I’ll be ripping your wings out by the root and watching your eyes while I feed ‘em to ya."

Her foot moved up another rung, fast as a piston in an engine. The next rung was fast to follow. It wouldn’t be far now—she just needed to put one foot up over the other, turn her back on the ladder, and she’d be able to leap. It would set her nerves on fire to jump with that height underneath her, pixie dust in her hair or no, but at the same time she knew she couldn’t miss. She didn’t have the option to fall—not if that meant missing out on sinking her claws into this pirate’s gut.

[Monsy]

Being up here was vintage times. Couple of climbers rally up and you all go for a free-run over the barricades and get up real high. It’s great. Then when you get to the top, you get to lean that last ledge and look down from where you came. The cherry on top was seeing who was watching. Who failed like a losah. Who chickened out. Security, a cop, anothah strangah? That last one was just it, right now with Shimmah. She was one of those strangahs acting this way. Watching her freeze and yet to dunk her foot into any real danger zone. Ain’t no stakes with tumbling this far, though it would suck.

But unlike those strangahs that were looking at the climb, simulating, stalling then capitulating to their own suck -- Shimma went for her directly. Hello.

She talks like a million bucks. Thatch knows she can. But this had more teeth than anything said in times past. Angelina got used to shutting her down in some way, and now it was the fairy’s turn, with Angelina clicking her tongue. To double on, they stopped stalling. Her brows raised. It was some sorta light switch. Just who was she dealing with?

“Man.” Angelina huffed, resigned to the idea in her head. “Ya fuckas bettah stand clear, yo. We got fairies up in this ship.” And the dorks on her wings now cleared until the two competitors had a bit of space.

“Don’t pussy out!” Angelina yelled down to Shimmer before retreating back to the first row of chairs, out of view. She rubbed her swollen knee profusely until it was less loose. Then she stood tall, fingers curling in and out on her non-shredded hand. Future pain nibbled on her. Between the shoulder-blades, down her spine, back of her legs. Her neck hairs clawed like feeble mandibles. She exhaled. And then she saw the peek of pink over the bowl, and Angelina didn’t hesitate. She ran, with four great gallops of a sprint, then went head over heels over the lower bowl railing, and into the open air amidst flashing cameras and starlight. An audible gasp gripped the crowd. She went straight for Shimmer’s shoulders and locked her legs around their head. The momentum was enough to spike one side of the ladder’s legs and begin a fall any millisecond. But. Angelina threw herself back and followed through out from Shimmer’s side, and finished the hurricanrana to send both of them whipping towards the unforgiving concrete and steel floor. Fifteen feet down.

[Malkavia]

Each heave up the next rung felt familiar, as if she'd gripped the cold grooves on the steel platforms many times already. An intense feeling of déjà vu washed over Shimmerlace—the crowd’s roar, the burn in her legs and joints, the set of her teeth all felt like elements of a dream revisited again and again.

She could feel the space between her and the ground, stretched like taffy, glittering in comet-tail residue, and beneath that, Thistledown watching, white and feathery like snow. On all sides, there was the crowd, the pinks and the grunge–except they weren't pink, or red; they were black and white, gray in a light that muted everything but itself, a shooting star that arced into her face and grabbed her throat.

Angelina’s legs wrapped around Shimmer’s throat. Slim and smooth, they tightened like a noose, knee over the windpipe while the Scarlet Terror’s body flipped whirligig overhead. It was the third time Shimmerlace had tasted Angelina’s hurricanrana, but it still made her blood run cold. Her feet pushed off the ladder, and her fists clenched as the bottom fell out of her stomach, and the lights streaked in her vision as droplets of spittle arced, and she was in free fall with no one to catch her.

She hit the ground back-first. She felt her body collapse, squeezed until she could feel the blood in her capillaries expand like balloons ready to burst. Compared to the concrete, her bones felt like rubber–and she bounced like that's really what she'd become. Rubber doll. She was too flat to breathe or blink. A beat passed and her entire back side erupted in the worst pain she had ever felt. It was searing, overwhelming, the kind of light that left her nauseated, delirious, clutching herself and struggling to remember anything – pirate or rabbit, up or down, breathing or choking – and the noise from the stands was like an ocean storm come to swallow up what little spark was left.

How many times in the past year had she imagined the violet eyes in the invisible dark somewhere, hoping against hope they were watching? Adrenaline spiked, and she writhed, and she spat, and she gasped, her attire ribbons and her name for the moment forgotten, and her eyes (as they looked ready to pop out of her skull) sparkled with the rush bursting through her chest.

[Monsy]

Being young is a gift for acting stupidly invincible.
We climb up something big and tall, like a tree, then fool around on the branches and go closer to the leaves. Then dangle and swing, jump off, do an accidental flip, land on your neck, and somehow get on with playing. Magic. Then as we get older-- we stay stupid as fuck, but wary of the outcomes. Now, you know exactly what happens if you mess around on trees. But being invincible is just too much fun, so you forget — and pay the whole price.

Smacking face-down on concrete from the sky. Sixty percent of us are water, so you sound like a pond surface taking a belly-flop, halfway towards a crunch. She couldn’t feel her skin. Her ribs squeezed and became skewering and coiling claws around her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She bounced from her front in a moment of zero gravity, onto her knees and then stalled hunched over. Her shoulders had tucked in, and they were locked. Her spine was still there, but everything on the inside was just chewed up and spat back inside, haphazardly, with her brain spelling backwards and her swelling nerves being the puppet strings that kept her muscles from falling off. They induced a high so intense that she couldn’t move or think. She fuckin’ nailed that.

She peeped a grin, full of sweat and with only a visible abrasion on her jawline to show, she giggled out a drool-y wheeze before falling back like a snake, spilling onto the ground and staring into the blank. All within a span of a few seconds. The crowd echoed, and she had nothing to think back. Nothing but the simple piece of gold: she hit the fuckin’ thing

[Malkavia]

That sorry cunt had hit the fuckin’ thing.

When Shimmerlace tried to move, her body was uncooperative. She wasn’t just gassed—it felt like the strings knitting her joints together had gotten loose, like just rolling over required her to orchestrate several different uncooperative bodies with fuzzy boundaries. The closest thing Shimmer could compare it to was being stone-cold drunk, except that left her skin numb, and just now she felt like she was aflame.

Her eyes peered overhead and focused, through the blur, on the edge of the bowl, by the railing, from which Angelina had just lept. Heads popped out over the railing and looked down—blonde kid. Or was it brown? It was hard to pick out colors in the blur. She imagined he must be grinning, though, given the sound coming from the stands.

They’d remember that shit. The Feychild rolled onto her gut, and the concrete was cold against her face. She breathed, then let it out in a hiss. It was fuckin’ perfect, the only issue being the center of focus. What would they remember? Angelina Tarrant’s sky-slicing leap—and the name lost to history who happened to take it in the face.

It would’ve been enough to make her growl, if she could get that kind of mastery over herself. All she could manage for now was a trembly kind of breathing that hitched on nausea and pain points arcing up and down her back. Her eyes careened wildly. Ring, light, crowd—it all started to slot into a steady kind of space, and then she spied Scarlet, splayed out. Although they’d come down together, Angelina had given her a toss, a solid spinning toss that had made the CRACK all the more of a blow—and it meant they were almost a full ring-length away from each other.

Shimmer’s eyes shifted from the pirate to the ring. She realized why her hip in particular blared with pain—she'd landed hip-first on a steel chair, which had collapsed into so much ruined furniture underneath her. She was still in the seats, the ropes far enough in the distance to make her throat ache.

”C’mon..."

Starting the crawl is like rolling out of bed. The first heave is the hardest, then—she finds she's crawling. One knee after the other elbow, clattering over the chair and towards the ring.

C'mon c'mon COME ON lil' shit-stain.

The boost gets her moving just a touch too fast, and her punch-drunk coordination sees her rolling into a collapsed elbow. As she went over, she caught Angelina's eye in her own—and held it. Panting on her back, she finally managed a growl, scratchy and pale. But her eyes added another message: Race ya.

[Monsy]

Gold was still gold, even when it breaks your fuckin’ back. Even if it makes you feel like snapped twigs. It felt warm. Then it got hot. The kind where you feel like you were slow-cooking on the inside. Like a hundred dull knives were trying to poke and prod inside, stir your guts until her throat was slick, grisly like moulded cheese and sent a tickle all the way down. She turned over and retched spit in mini-convulsions, feeling like she’d puke stomach acid, blood or a tissue any moment because her gut felt so swollen that it might squeeze it out.

She breathed again. But it was fast, silent and rickety at the cusp of a hurl. She turned over once more, flat belly and got onto her elbows. The slight spinal curve was wrong in every way, and it would be so good just to lay down. For a day. Two. A week. Maybe retire the whole front-flipping hurricanranas off tall shit. But. Why? This was fuckin’ apex.

She took her hand and reached down, stretching her fingers across her bare thigh, reaching and grabbing underneath, then pulling it up. Thistlebro would also be gone if she stayed here. And that was two-thirds of the joy in resting.

“Up we…” Angelina leaned on her knee, propped her elbow to get off her belly, and tugged her other leg underneath. “Go… ya little bitch…” She pushed on her non-blooded hand before reaching for a black steel chair and used it to stand on her swollen knees. It helped keep some weight off. “Of a body…”

But it teetered sideways, and Angelina embraced cold concrete. “owieeee-”

There was somethin’ even worse than the last two things. Something simple. And that was bein’ outdone. Imaginin herself bein’ the one to jump off a bowl and STILL findin a way to lose. World’s most pathetic tryhard. Hilarious on a Monday to Friday, but what had Shimma earned? Where is her fuckin’ moment? Not here, not at the penthouse and not in her Kazikura qualifier. Even still, she keeps lookin’, wantin to have another round, and just the sight of pink had Agelina steeling into phantom strength like it pulled some fuckin’ lever.

A race. A fuckin’ race.
Angelina flipped the bird with her bloodied finger. It looked like a pinecone with all the channels and itty-bitty sections sliced and peeling off. She spat on the ground, nudging her head towards the barricade: You’re on.

And so she pushed on her elbows first, scraping her knees underneath and using the steel chair as a crutch again to get up before she let it go. She tried running, but her legs didn’t catch up. It became a hobble. An awkward speed walk with bursts of jogging and the occasional stumble. Next came the barricade; her gut would do. She threw herself at it, then let her legs come over and slap together at ringside. Oh-fucking-well. The steps were right there anyway. Just needed to crawl a little more, up each one, and come to the apron, where a shot of vertigo had her wanting to throw herself off. She grabbed the middle rope, threw her body over that and then pushed until her thighs bounced off, and she somersaulted spread-eagle in the ring.

Did she win?