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

[Malkavia]

"A ussssselessss sapien!" Shimmerlace looked the bell up and down, and as she did, she grinned and ran her tongue over the tips of her canines. "Fuck, but you always did work magic with your words, my pilferous pirate pal."

Without turning her head, Shimmerlace let her eye slide over Angelina. There wasn't an inch of the fairy that didn't feel some form of pleasure seeing the pirate hung by her shoulder. Keelhauled. Her fairy fingers fidgeted, her bewitched boots bounced. Even the cuts and bruises sang, the way ragged muscle will glitter in the endorphin high of an intense workout.

"Tsk." She ran her finger over the silvered edge of the bell. "Still no name for this fella, though. He'll need to try harder."

So saying, she backed up a step, and backing became a trot. Her back came to rest against the corner opposite Angelina, and then she galloped. She sailed across the mat, finally springing towards her opponent with her full chariot's horsepower.

[Monsy]

The main thing now was to build back up. Step-by-step, muscle-by-muscle, rebuild composure, get her mouth closed and nose-breathing, then stand the fuck up. Angelina did this while feeling perpetually sick and neutral. She started zoning out into a faded, almost numb state. She didn’t fight her leg’s reflex to lift every time the toes touched canvas.

Watching the fairy taunt and look at her was more irritating inside a balloon. She went up and down throughout the fight. Her temperament was padded by gunpowder that became wet with her spilled blood. There were nails and screws in her spine as she pulled her arms to wedge herself upright. It made her groan and

“Alliterating…” Teeth clenched, she sagged into the corner and felt a buckle on her good knee.
“Acute…” And when Shimmer came running, Angelina held her breath and rolled her lips in.
“Ass-berry!” Then sprang up on her good foot and rose to become a horizontal blank; shoulders on the top turnbuckle-pad. She put both feet together, drew her knees into her chest, then shot them. A full cannon-blast from this 108-pounder gun!

[Malkavia]

Shimmerlace heard her boots against the mat, heavy thunks of rubber on wood with a hundred and fifty pounds of momentum behind them, but she felt light as silver. Sailing through polished air. In that cool, rushing space, she caught an image: Angelina huffing and puffing and chugging. Aye, she was getting creaky, our Angelina. It was like watching in slow motion. Her legs went up, a spear meant to cut through Shim's gut. Wouldn't it be a fun trick to catch that spear between your hands?

No sooner thought than done. Shimmerlace dug in her heels and blew all her momentum into the ground inches from that kick. The pump from a black leather boot and endless verticality of netted leggings sent a PUFF of air across the Seelie face, then got caught in her grip. Shimmerlace sucked in air through her teeth. Much further down the mat would've been a disaster—a Seelie shishkebab on pirate skewer. Their eyes met.

"Come oooooon, let's have it then..." She tossed Angelina's legs through the gap between the second and third rope. The second rope cradled her pale knees, while the turnbuckle gave her back somewhere to lie. In the same motion, Shimmerlace dropped the bell on the floor. It cracked against the floorboards, rung with a gong, but by then the Feychild had already put her back against the turnbuckle and grabbed a headlock. She pulled her opponent out of the corner. Angelina hung, legs on the rope, eyes to the sky, head in the fey elbow while Shimmerlace faced away from her—and then she jumped. She kicked out, her body horizontal. She closed her eyes, waiting to land on her back and to hear the sound of the Marauder's skull cracking against the bell.

"Let's have our jaunt over the moon."

[Monsy]

The kick cannon was damaged and had damp powder.
It buried into Shimmerlace’s clasp. Stretched, it pushed on, and her breath oozed out like plunging tar through a pipe. Eventually, there was nothing left. She dangled, her upper-spine bent towards the mat as her shoulders and neck folded on the top turnbuckle. Her teeth waver as her eyes sink deeper, with a faint clear puddle over the purple, and her cheeks were stricken with pale and the small pigments of tear-streaks. Her bad knee quivered, and she whimpered.

Then…
It was a toss and a grab. Her vision became drab.
She came down, skull on steel.
Stuck to it; her consciousness peeled.
Where neck meets spine, a white rabbit in a painful vine.

It DINGED her bell and sent the demon back to hell. Sprawled, without a whisper. An eye rolled back while the other was a blister. Counting the lights: one, two, four, five. A leg stayed on the ropes while the other fell off into a crooked dive. A mess of hair, red piled on by her arms. Fingers twitching like the dead cockroach that she was.

[Malkavia]

Charlotte had expected something in Shimmerlace's plan to break—for there to be a nail in the canvas when she landed, or for Angelina to start suddenly awake and somehow reverse the move. Instead, she heard the bell gong.

She found herself lying on the mat. The crowd, she realized, was cheering. She had not paid much mind to the crowd until this moment. Had they been this raucous the entire time? As her eyesight cleared and Shimmerlace sat up, she saw Angelina, curled on the ropes like a spider mashed against its web.

Hm.

Shimmerlace rose to her feet, eyes on Angelina and her fists up. But the Marauder just twitched. Shimmerlace huffed air through her nose, grabbed the Marauder by her hair, and dragged her off the ropes. The whole while, her shoulders were tense, waiting for the twenty-cannon response, blessed and powdered by our Lord Pirate Jesus himself.

"Well?" Angelina was, unbelievably, still on the mat. Shimmerlace huffed a huge breath, fanning the air towards her face. "Mmmm! Behold. I fuckin' breathe, sweetly free of your iron lung. Curious, is it not?"

Shimmerlace's voice was huge, a bellow, but beneath it, Charlotte felt strangely contained. Even trapped. As if she were a turbulent flame erupting up a channel, and all the pressure in the world pushed her to gout into the sky, but there was a ceiling locked tighter and stronger than her oomph. The roar from the crowd felt as far away as the moon.

As her hands twirled with her intake of breath, she performed one last sleight of hand for an old friend: a glass pipe manifested in her fingers. She had used this model in many a show, including her first with Miss Tarrant. She tossed it on the ground beside Angelina and stomped it under her boot's heel. It crunched. Then she took one of Angelina's shoulders and lifted it from the mat. She brushed the glass under her, shards and dust and all, then dropped her back down atop the tiny translucent knives.

She didn't wait to hear if Angelina responded. She took off towards the corner, bounded straight to the second rope, then took the third. She turned to face Angelina, looked down, and tried, desperately, to catch her eyes through the Marauder's delirium. The invisible ceiling pressed down on her shoulders, heavy as a coat soaked in the rain, but she jumped, and somersaulted, and caught the air. She aimed a shooting star press into the woman who had snatched her, dangling, from a temple rooftop.

[Monsy]

Angelina became a falling plant seed.

From the tree, she spiralled, flew from another’s force, then was still once she found her fertile ground. It was transient. She didn’t process anything about herself, but this bitter and creeping sensation, growing so disgusting that she cringed while waking up. But that was just the shards underneath her back. She laid on them. Her frame accustomed and folded over to blanket every crystal, flesh poked and teased by infinite ends of glass both microscopic, termite-size, medium, large and even a semi-circle of the original cylinder sitting between her shoulder blades.

There was no flexing her back on that. Her back was nibbling on the glass with involuntarily twitching, shoving them underneath the top slips of skin. This was her bed of acid. Then...

Shimmer, from above, cast a shadow on the pirate. Angelina peeked, bleakly, seeing a glimpse, a flash of pink and white that twists and finds an arc above the industrial sky with a flash and tail of awe-ing cheers, holding breath and…

Thunder. Angelina crunched flat. Her spine stretched, guts squashed and ribs compressed. Her legs went stiff an inch off the canvas. The reaction was delayed but her face was frozen in this wide-eyed and simple frown. It twitched. A gust of wind sighed free. Her heart-rate slowed down. She couldn’t breathe.

Shimmerlace’s weight coming off changed very little about that. There was sucking in, but no out.
But when she forced herself to exhale, she mouse-squeaked; teeth tight. Then it all came out. Gentle crying. She started shivering as if she were feverish. And when she turned on her glass-filled hip, the crowd went from roaring to raging sadistic excitement mixed with thrill and gross.

Porcupine. Her back was the frame for a shattered mirror. So many cuts. The larger ones stuck out of her back, buried, but as chunks, and slivers jammed towards her shoulders, spine and rib bones. They became one with the tissue and blood trickling out from so many small sources that Angelina didn’t know which one to hold and where to pluck.

She just wanted her collar. And her lap. It was a hard feeling to describe above the intensity of others. But it moved her while racked by chills and seeming unable to really muster a face, looking straight down. She was beyond tired, and only had a single card to play. It involved crawling… drip, drip… as Shimmerlace was standing up. Angelina reached with one hand, touched Shimmerlace’s knee, then froze…

“I’m….” Her voice, hush. She broke down more, loosening red snot out her broken nose.
Then she put her arm around it, crawled some more, then embraced Shimmer’s leg. She squeezed it. Her cheek was against the feychild’s thigh while the knee was between her tits, and the toes became the seat for which Angelina sat on. Then, she broke down more, and loosened steady cries

“I-I’m done…”

[Malkavia]

The Feychild hit, bounced, and rolled. She kept turning with the momentum of her front-flip and somersaulted past Angelina, into a kneel. She was trembling. That'd be the aches again—the back on fire, the thumb throbbing, the head ballooning—none of which were much helped by plowing her bodyweight plus seven feet of gravitational potential into the Marauder.

But that wasn't all it was. It was also silver glittering butterflies catching on fire and doing loop-de-loops in her chest. That gas expanded up to the bounds of her ribcage, got too big to stay put, poured up her throat, and came out in a manic giggle. She giggled, then cackled, then shouted a WHOOP.

"WHOOOOOO boy Angie, my dearest. Wwwwwet-powdered squib of a cannon, I—"

As she forced herself to stand, however, she looked down and froze.

"—Uh."

The thing was like one of those masks—the Greek or Italian ones with features that looked like they had been carved in melting wax. Except it was animated. It sniveled and whined, and red glops of fluid poured from its snout and down its maw, dripping from its chin to the mat. When it crawled up and laid its hands on Shimmer's leg, the palms were slimy with blood, cold in a way that made her take a sharp, quick suck of breath

"I-I...I'm sorry...Christ..." She tried to back away, to tug her leg free from the thing curled around her ankle, but its grip on her was tight. Every hair on Shimmerlace's body stood as straight as a catfur on the wrong end of a taser. "Stop it." She gave a more violent yank on her leg, as if she were trying to free her leg from being sucked into the soft muck of a swamp. All she managed to do was drag the thing across the mat, leaving a red, streaked trail.

"Stop it!" Disgust, fear, anger, and exhaustion all wrestled inside her throat, and her face twisted into a gargoyle's grimace. "You miserable fuckin' pigshit. I have not spent the last year tearin' after your sorry tail for you to piss yourself when we start finally really—" Her fists clenched. She drew her free knee back like a piston and fired it full-chug at the thing's melted snout. "Get off!"

[Monsy]

The one card Angelina had was listening.
This crumb of herself, which she frankly used so selectively unless it pertained to herself. She felt busted. And it wasn’t the broken nose, or even entirely because her now a graveyard, with glass tombstones spilling out a corpse-porridge of red gunk and filthy bits of overdue life. Her muscles; seized. That kind of numb where you start to lose a bit of feeling. Just this burn.

Oh how she…
Wanted them to think of her…
To go back to that rooftop. No, the vehicle. Shimmer’s van. How she drove that away and into a quiet neighbourhood. Called, and wished her dead. Shimmer would’ve wanted that taken back. And her rabbit. And whatever else. Her win. Apex. Openweight contendership. When it came to it. Angelina just didn’t match a fairchild. She was a grounded pirate, and Shimmer had wings. Ones she wanted to hold against her face.

So Angelina bit her lip. She smeared her face blood into Shimmer’s thigh, to mark her safe space. Her throat dry, breath stuttering to put together two words as she was told ‘stop it’ ---... “Sorry.” Then held tighter, unable to sniffle.

Being dragged smeared her red on the mat. She could be sorry for that too… So she said again, in a squeak. “S-Sorry! S-Shim…” And that was chastised. Angelina hugged her leg tighter. Her arms burned. For what Shimmer had gone through, this seemed.. Well… She didn’t know. Figuring that out would be exhausting. She just knew what she wanted, and was willing to eat the lecture…

Taking away what you want hurts. “S-Shim, I’m sorry! T-Take the rabbit. Thistledown… Please take him.”

And that usually, in her world, came with a lot of pain after. Which — BAM.

Her nose took. The throbbing exploded, but her nose was gummy to hit. Almost like a heavy bag. A small leak drizzled out her nostrils and Angelina’s head snapped back and bobbled three-times as her arms turned off momentarily. She fell forward towards her front and caught with her one good remaining hand. The unshredded one.

She reached out with her bad one, with all the skin tags and dried red to behold. Her head dipped down. Hair a curtain. Dripping red sweat. “S-Shimmah I-I’m done… Can I go?…” Deep breath, with all the disgust in her gut… “I can't do t-this anymore.”

[Malkavia]

The rabbit's name hit Shimmerlace like a sudden gust from a whirlwind—the kind that rips roofs off buildings and plucks children from strollers. She winced, and the tears that had been building at the corners of her eyes spilled over and ran down her cheeks. They burned every inch of the way down, as she felt the thing watch them, felt it see her chin tremble and belly clench.

"Thistledoooown, is it now? Ooohohoh. Thistle down, hmhmhm. Hah. Haha. Fuck you."

Anger pumped through Shimmerlace like flame from a bellows. Now she was thinking about him, again. The whitest, the fluffiest, the hay-chewingest member of their audience. A glance told her that sure enough, he was still sitting there at the ringside table—watching her ma in red get a glasswork mosaic stitched into her back. Shimmerlace whirled away from her opponent, stalking towards the opposite end of the ring.

"...Nah. You, friend, were right about Thistlebro." She bent her knees, squatting by the ropes at the aluminum steps. Her voice was low—pitched on a pirate-only frequency, below the crowd's buzz. She looked over her shoulder at Angelina. "He's got your voice, sweetie. He's drenched in your smell. I know that sweet little cuntfusser better than the shape of my insides, and Lord's truth? If I slipped within five feet of my old...confidant. I think he'd up and hide." Shimmerlace turned her face away from Angie to hide the fresh stream flowing freely down her cheeks to collect like dew on her chin. "That's what you've done to him, Angie. Congratu-fuckin'-lations."

When Shimmerlace stood up, Nutcracka was swinging at her side. She tossed him up, and he did one rotation over her head, then landed back in her palm. She pointed its razor-toothed tip at the thing begging on the mat, advancing.

"...Now you'd best pull your heart out of whatever hole you lost it in." The Feychild was careful not to look at the Scarlet Terror's legs. She could feel them—pure gold with the pirate stamp. They were the pirate sails and Marauder engine, the one bit of beauty left to this struggling pile. Was it still on its hands and knees? Curled up like a baby? Or was it finally showing some balls and shambling to its feet? Either way, Shimmerlace would find the purple eyes and try to burn them up with her own.

"I didn't lose my Thistle to slime apologizing for its existence. I lost 'em to a woman riding a comet. You're gonna grip that magic by its throat real quick here, or I'm gonna take something in Thistle's place you can't afford to lose."

By now Shimmerlace was standing over Angelina. She'd given her tormentor ample time to collect her spirits. And in spite of the ache she felt, and the fear slithering under her skin, Shimmer's face was stony when she took Nutcracka and hefted its weight through the air, aimed to hack into the slimy creature's calf like an axe into a rotten log

[Monsy]

She needed them to know she deserved to be cursed. Then Shimmer retreated. And on those fleeting footsteps was an invisible twine, pulling her wrist that was supporting her weight. She made a crawl, more of a drag. Hand forward, press, then lean and scoot the good knee. She looked, mouth dry, lower-lip curled into her mouth.

Then froze.
And listened.
Shimmerlace was still leaving and Angelina resented it. Not until she could give Shimmer something. So she scooted again, but her knee caught her inside wrist and she toppled like jenga. On her stomach, the bell’s bruise gave her a simmering burn. And her fluid-drenched consciousness sloshed around in its bone-basin, feeling light and sleepy. She didn’t want to get up.

So she observed the canvas, head down, black, drowning in schrodinger’s shame as Shimmerlace came back and stood over her. Angelina turned to her side, legs stacked on top, bringing up her knees and peeped up, hands to her own chest. “That’s fine… It's not mine anyways.”

Oh but on the contrary…
That shadow said otherwise. Her eyes gaped at once. Her hand went up. “No-” And Angelina’s head lurched as her body exploded with sensation. Her legs clapped and jumped off the mat about three inches. Suddenly, her shoulders were bucking and bouncing involuntarily. Angelina’s mouth, ajar, heaved in and out with shaky throat convulsions.

She squealed, bit her lips with new silent tears and had veins bulging on her neck. She felt. Tight, with gasoline blood. Her erratic pace came with Angelina clawing against the canvas, then dragging herself by her bad knee, bad hand and good hand. She made semi-frequent gasps choking from the inner stabbing. Her leg had blemished and something seemed… off about it.

Angelina put her back to the ropes, with something brass to her backside, sitting and staring at Shimmer. She reached up, grabbed the ropes and scaled them one by one until she was standing on one leg. She leaned on the struck one, gently, and huffed so hard that blood-snot sprayed the mat and her hiss was an engine turning over. The ankle was stiff. Below the knee was swelling.

“Shimmah…” Angelina looked at her, grinning ear-to-ear so hard that it hurt, “WHAT THE FUCK??!” She screamed through her teeth. Her hand rested on the thigh. Finally, she glowered, and her face looking like it was about to go red. “WHAT THE FUCK DID YA DO?!”