Eleanor Gray and The Problem Student

[Malkavia]

Wailing fish-beard’s ass but that smell had bite. Shimmerlace hissed as she heaved away from the bottle of what smelled like the most concentrated detergent she’d ever encountered. Her eyes watered, and the hacking coughs as she sputtered back into heart-racing consciousness kept hacking until her face was purple.

Still, the ammonia got her kicking again, and her mind was quick to pick back up on the thread, which was a lecture on the lines of ring sense and other training buzzwords. Having caught the thread, Shimmer dropped it again, and, like a puppy drying itself after a dip in the tub, Shimmerlace shook her head violently, slapped her cheeks, and glared straight ahead until the blur and mirror-images condensed into a square reality. All the while, she was holding on white-knuckled and long-clawed onto what she’d just seen.

“Nng…Ring sense. Yeah yeah, great Ellie, great. But. Sorry, but shush. SHUSH. Just…Hold the fuckin’ phone a tick. What was that? No, I mean, really, I gotta—Fuck. That’s fuckin’ rapid is what that was…That’s—God…” the Feychild squeezed her eyes shut so hard it hurt—or hurt more than the brow-splitter of a headache already did. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her thoughts. That conk on her head hadn’t done wonders for her memory, but she could see the still images captured, emblazoned on the back of her eyes.

”Start’s the cheeky lil ear-pop, right? Yeah. POP.” Shimmer clapped her own hands for emphasis, nodding as the tale weaved itself back together in her mind. ”So that sends me off..ringing and clutching and such, yeah? Cool, so then you…up the ropes, yeah… And then. You called it out, right? SAINT. VALENTINE’S. MASSACRE, aye. That’s it. Which is…”

Which was a vertical flip straight through the air, more than a full somersault forward, into a poisonrana of a face-splatter. The only expression Shimmer could find for it was the big, dopey eye-drooped grin she sent Eleanor as her eyes slit back open.

”That—” She pointed her finger at Eleanor like she was relishing spearing a particularly juicy bit of steak. ”—is glory and blazes and starlight pulsing fire, you absolute beastly shithead—er.” Shimmerlace blanched, then shrunk, sheepish. “...Ma’am.”

[FreestylePoet]

"Ma'am," Ellie agreed. After all, she was the boss here. Disrespect to the Don couldn't be tolerated. To Gunner Ellie least of all. She raised a scolding eyebrow and frowned a tick, peering down the frames of her glasses. The motion held -- for a second, two -- then wavered. That staredown brought Ellie's lower lip curling beneath her teeth, and the corners of her mouth curled up.

Finally, she snorted. "Pfft. Yeah, it was pretty cool, wasn't it? 'Saint Valentine's Day Massacre...'" It started as a couple jots in Ellie's notebook. Stick figures and curly arrows. Half-tensed muscles at quarter-speed, leaning off her bed to simulate a leap. A spot on Ellie's nose tingled from past faceplants on a Sharpied-up canvas. And when she'd finally pulled it out? Lifted it from a 500 square foot apartment to a 5000-seat arena? Shimmerlace everywhere she went. The pacing, the recounting, the gawking. Awe and disbelief.

It brought her back.

Eleanor hummed. Maybe that was the lynchpin of all this. "Now that we've established that I'm not boring..." She shook her hair out to tousle it behind both ears, then took a step towards the corner. "You're welcome to try it. The Massacre, I mean." A cheekbone lifted again, this time without the shade of a black fedora. "Unless you've already got it down pat. Not just the motions, either. Where to slide me after the flashbang, how to time yourself in the air."

"Just like watching a magic tutorial on YouTube, right? One view, then another at half-speed. Maybe a few reps, and..." Eleanor shrugged, then slapped her hands on her hips. "You're ready to go."

[Malkavia]

Ma'am. On paper, it might had sounded like a line from the clasroom — a teacher reasserts her position before the blackboard. But the steel look Shimmer caught through Ellie's spectacles smelled to her less of chalk and more of bourbon in high-class drawing rooms, cigar smoke thick in the air, the shoulder-slung tommy-gun never far from the don's fingertips. It made the fairy's skin tingle as her teeth clicked together. While Eleanor went ahead and snorted and let the tension slough off her like so much hair grease, Shimmerlace cocked her head, appraising. At any given moment, just how far away was our Gunner?

Shimmerlace clicked her tongue and looked to the top rope from which Eleanor had just sprung her massacre. Try it. God, she wanted it. It ached like a shard of glass in her sternum, made her palms sweat and jaw set. She stood up, and for all the gunpowder dust she still felt in the air, she managed a moment of pixie-dust spark in her own smirk. “I didn't learn more than a week's worth from any internet fuckin' tutorial with two thousand views type shit. The bulk of it, I just watched the pros, took what they weren't teaching anyone. Made it mine." The middle rope swayed under Shimmer's weight as she sighed and leaned against it, enjoying the bounce and the pendulum energy growing in her hips. "Which...yeah. Meant a lot of dropped decks of cards in the old apartment.”

The seconds ticked by without even the suggestion of gang violence. Where to slide, how to time. It wasn't fair asking questions like that. How the fuck was she supposed to know, when she hadn't faceplanted the attempt even once?

“Alright, so." Shimmerlace crossed her legs and sat on the middle rope, looking skyward as she tried to hold all the lovely moving pieces in her mind's eye. “I...of course...don't know none of that, which, mind you ma'am, is no problem. But. I also don't have any of that unspeakable kinda answer, the answer what rests in the blood and bone, right? I don't feel it in the old Seelie winds. Which, to me says..." Her palms went up and she flashed the same wide, almost grin she'd shot her debut audience. “I got some faceplanting to do. Some splats and roleypoley mess until we beat the answers out of the fuckin' woodwork. But. Eh." A long sigh and an upward curl of the lips took Shimmer as she leaned back closed her eyes. “Something tells me you've got some fundamentals type drills that can make that come faster, right? To which I say....Well, shit. If it can get me doing that faster, I'll let you shove rocket fuel up my bum."

[FreestylePoet]

"Whoa, let's cool it on the rocket fuel enema for a sec." Her hands shot up to pump the brakes. "You know I was just sent here to evaluate you, right?" Eleanor had seen more than enough. She could step out right now. Leave Shimmerlace Snuggleblossom with a heads-up so she wasn't blindsided, scribble some notes in a Word document, then erase the meanest parts of it to puff up her chances. Eleanor could almost taste the jasmine tea and soba.

Then she looked at the clock. Eleanor was a professional wrestler for one of the biggest promotions on the planet. Her only responsibilities were to train, sexfight, and head to the occasional fan event. That made her enough money to make those conjured corruption allegations look like penny-pinching. Besides, even if Eleanor wasn't quite old enough to be a wizened mentor, she still had some things to pass on. Call it from one 500-foot apartment strewn with legal readings to another, this floor the aftermath of 52-card pickup.

Jasmine tea? Or peeling a pink splatter off the canvas?

Eleanor hummed. She shook her head with a scoff, then turned back to the Young Lioness. A smile creeped onto her face, despite herself. "Buuuut it looks like I've got some spare time. C'mon, I'll show you some drills that you can do on your own. If you spend some time thinking about 'em, you'll start to put the pieces together. That'll get you out of faceplanting, maybe put some..." She thought past her days as a Teflon Don, right back to Don Francisco. That one screenwriting class, back when everyone thought an over-registered 100-level would push them 6 hours south to the Walk of Fame. "Seelie wind in your sky-sails, yeah?"

"Like this one." Eleanor hurdled the ropes, picking up a hair-tie she'd discarded earlier. She tossed it in the center of the ring, marking Shimmer's target. "You'll wanna do this on a tarp or old canvas, so you can Sharpie it up. Now, the canvas isn't like solid ground. Learning how to jump off of it, control the distance, then land -- that'll help you land that dropkick from earlier." She was really about to do this, wasn't she? Not how she expected the day to go.

"So, start from the edge of the ring..."

[Malkavia]

I'm just here to evaluate you.

Shimmerlace cringed, then hated herself for it. A blush ran up her throat and made her cheeks prickle and nose buzz. All of a sudden, the gym had grown extremely quiet. The feelings Shimmerlace felt — the sudden uprush of pressure in her chest, the way her guts seemed to twist around themselves, the way the world span as her face went cold — reminded her of high school. Le Bal. Prom. And a fuckin' cunt of a violinist.

Eh, Yeah. Right then. I get that. Sure. Shimmerlace was almost mumbling out the words when Eleanor finished her thought. Christ. The relief was absurd. Ridiculous. So your girl had been a little presumptuous, what was shameful about that? But sensible or no, by the time Eleanor was picking up Seelie Wind and tossing it at Shimmer like Dad with a baseball, she'd collapsed into the ropes, grinning as her heart settled down to something in the ballpark of a sustainable rate. The fuck was wrong with her?

Still. The Feychild had no intention of staying melted up in a Gloaming Goo puddle. The moment Eleanor started putting targets on the ground, she sprung out of her corner. ”Yeah! Right-o, ma'am. Eh..." Like a magician's assistant planning a trick a month before the show, she found her mark and waited her cue. ”Is...Here good?"

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

.

There were drills. Lots of drills. A fuckin' artillerist's array of drills such that could distribute an entire arsenal of sweat-sticky work across a week's worth of repetition—and boy did Eleanor have her crank out repeat after repeat. Less magician, more director on set, calling the scene over and over. Too high, too low, too slow. From the top. Again, take seventy three with the dropkick. This time make sure to land on your butt.

What helped saturate the Gray in more rainbow hue, however, was a Specter, one that Eleanor lifted from the deep for every drill—the faded transparency of the stage. The spotlight. The Ring. Shimmerlace wanted to fill the ring with color, right, bring the seats into high relief and plant a pink explosion in the center of it? Well then, she'd best develop a sense of range, reliable leg strength, and the ability to fall without breaking her elk-cursed fucker of a hip. And guess what skills a dropkick exercises, ey, bucko? Eleanor, of course, did not say bucko, but it was a word Shimmerlace tended to mentally substitute every time Miss Gray lifted an eyebrow in her direction. What helped most of all, however, was that the ring Eleanor plucked from her experience seemed to include Shimmerlace, and Seelie Winds, and the roseate light of a springtime court.

Finally, the clock read 10:00, and Shimmerlace — panting on her back in the middle of the ring — could sense a pause. It was a welcome respite to her legs, which ached like her bones were scalding hot, but. It still made her gut quiver. Not quite fold up on itself but. Ballpark.

”...So!" Shimmerlace looked at her boots. She rolled her ankles left. Pointed into the Seelie wild. Rolled them right. Arched her toes towards the Gloaming depths. Did not think about first chair cunts. ”Eh. Been an absolute gas, Eleanor. That is, it's been — you've been exquisitely helpful."

Her mouth felt dry. Frustratingly dry. She licked her lips, grabbed the water bottle at ringside, and took a swig. But her tongue was still sticky cotton against her hard palette. Fuck. As she caught her breath, though she was staring at the ceiling, she could feel the clock turned over to 10:01.

”...Thanks."

[FreestylePoet]

"There's perfect." Eleanor breathed in. She stretched her arms, palms out with interlaced fingers. Then she huffed out a smile. "Now, let's see what you got. Hop out and land on the hair tie." Shimmer nodded, then one-two-leapt to the grounded fabric. They continued like that for a while. Shimmer's landings varied. Sometimes closer, sometimes farther, but that was fine.

After all, perfection was the enemy. Practice was the best way to beat it. At some point, the desire to repeat the formula would give way to understanding. The canvas. The Ropes. Even the apron. Shimmer had to know them to get to where she wanted to be. Hence the drills: Leap here. Hang the rope. Sprint, sprint, turn, sprint, then drop and give me ten. As for Eleanor? Demonstrate, watch, then correct. Gentle. Then firm. Then with a huff and a pinch of her nose.

A chime, far from the ring by way of respect for Eleanor's charge, pierced the veil of teacher and student. "Alright, kiddo, take five. You know cooldown stretches, right? Run some of those." As soon as her muscles dropped their tension, Eleanor's limbs became that post-workout spaghetti. She slunk out of the ring, then wobbled her way towards the far wall. It was her phone, specifically a reminder: Water, trim, and rotate that little bonsai plant by her bed. "Guess the clock's struck ten already, huh...?"

Eleanor turned on her heel, only to see Shimmerlace kicking hers back and forth. Funny, that. Somehow, a thank-you was the last thing she'd expected from the Fairy Queen currently decorating the Young Lioness gym. She snorted. "...Right. Of course." Eleanor cracked a grin. Dry from mouthy gulps of air, crooked as her sweat-fogged glasses. A far cry from those days of suits and ties, wasn't it?

Eleanor ran her hands through the hair, turning the salty drip-drip-drip into a veritable spray. "Anyway," she sighed, "Good work today. Keep doing stuff like that, and you'll be hittin' the Massacre in no time." Phone, water bottle, gym bag, and that little folder with a blank scouting report in it. She had everything she needed to head out. "...Think you'll get a good grade, by the way. In case you were wondering."

[Malkavia]

She had not been wondering—in fact, she had forgotten about the evaluation completely. Again. In spite of that, Shimmerlace felt a bit broken up when Eleanor mentioned it...a tightening of her throat, a sting behind the eyes. Fuckin' fuck. Her workout high had blown emotional regulation all to bits, it seemed. She bit her lip and shoved the whole load of whatever the fuck that was straight down her gut.

”Mmmhm..." Shimmerlace was deep into a child's pose, nose to mat, enjoying the pinch of the stretch on her back. The toughest bit about the entire workout had been the bumps. Each jump was its own meteor rattling the joints and battering the site of impact. It felt delicious to flesh her muscles after all that. The mat itself smelled lightly of disinfectant, which was pleasant in its own right and on account of what it said about the gym's sanitary standards. All and all—a good post-workout feel.

Still, there was a lump at the bottom of her gut, something hard and round that sat uneasily, constantly shuffling and rolling. No matter how pleasant she might have felt cool air against her skin or the taste of her sweat on her lips, it was there in the background, looming. The more she heard Eleanor shuffling things into her bag, the bigger the lump became. She could ignore it or attack it, and both options made her stomach uneasy.

”Ey, eh. Eleanor. Ma'am." Shimmerlace spoke without raising her face from the mat. ”I don't suppose you'd have any interest in, eh..." She bit her lip. In gracing me with an even larger helping of your private time for neither pay nor recognition? Well, but it wasn't a totally unreasonable question, right? She was a teacher of sorts, that's why they sent her along. At least, that's what Shimmer assumed. She hadn't really read up on how the whole Young Lioness training thing worked. Maybe—

Well don't think a hole through it cunt. Shimmerlace cleared her throat. ”Well, I'd like to do this again. If we can. Sooner rather 'n later if that's on the table. Is that um...I mean can I sign up for anything? You run any classes or..."

She had been in this mouth-to-canvas stretch for the better part of a minute, and her hips were starting to ache. She got up, slow, though without quite looking at Eleanor. She wiped her hands over her face, sloughing off sweat, then dug her palms into her eyes. The ocular pressure that created cast bursts of grey pink nothings into her vision, which she had always found vaguely hypnotic and which distracted from the nerves strangling her gut.

Finally, she shrugged, opened her eyes, and cast a sheepish half-smile at Eleanor. ”...I'unno. Anything?"

[FreestylePoet]

There lay Shimmerlace, drenched in sweat and five feet away from any marker they'd laid down tonight. The spitting image of Big LAW's hopes for the Young Lioness program, though Eleanor hoped she'd made it out to to be less of a polished iron cage and more of a row of checkered flags. Or leaves or ivies, or whatever fairies used to mark traffic amidst the clouds. Somewhere for Shimmer to learn to fly... well, at least a sky canoe, if anything.

Eleanor flipped through the folder. The evaluation wrote itself. Just take this image and superimpose it in every field. Page 1 was already filled out. Name, background, short bio. Information on the evaluating wrestler, with some White-Out where it said "Age." Page 2 was where the splatters would start. Strengths, Weaknesses, Wrestling Style, Developmental Prospects... All answered with the same pile of sweat. Then there, at the back of the pack...

"Young Lioness Mentorship Form... Thought I told the bastards not to bother...?"

Shimmer popped her question at the same moment it entered Eleanor's mind. Mistakes had a way of being serendipitous like that, didn't they? She cocked a hand to her hip and peered over the glasses she'd just put back on. "Shimmerlace Snuggleblossom." It was hard to say those words with a straight face, but Californian politics put all types across her desk. "You wouldn't happen to be asking for help, would you?"

Then she shrugged. "Sorry, kiddo. I haven't taught a class since the last time I guest lectured. Kinda turned me off of the classroom. Turns out, a former pro sexfighter isn't the most effective teacher for a couple hundred college freshmen. Even if she knows more about American Electoral Politics than anyone else within a hundred miles." That was worth a wry smile. She slipped a sheet out of her folder. "But if you think a stuffy old beanpole might do the trick for a buckwild Fairy Queen... There's this form. Says I can kick your ass until you figure out how to do it to everyone else. Also says I'm responsible for making sure you graduate from this program to earn LAW a lot of money."

Eleanor clicked the pen and held it out with a snort. "Pretty bad deal for us both, huh?"

[Malkavia]

Snuggleblossom. If Shimmerlace had been professionally managed talent, that choice would have been plucked and murdered a long time ago—maybe for good reason. There were plenty of odd looks in the seats when it went out over the loudspeaker system. She'd seen eyes roll, shoulders sag, eyes turn from the ring to phones. None of which had ever stopped Shimmerlace being proud of it.

But when Eleanor said her unabridged name, she found her eyes drawn to the mat. Her hands tightened behind her back.

You wouldn't happen be asking for help now, would you?

In through the nose, then, and—well, no actually. Shimmerlace wasn't breathing much just now, so much as just waiting.

Sorry kiddo.

Damn. Damn damn damn.

The words — which hit her sternum first, then spread over her chest, over her shoulders, down her neck — were a lead blanket. Shimmerlace tapped her boot on the canvas, tap tap, and licked her lips. Shimmerlace...whose flushed face felt like it could fry an egg...forced a thin smile and nodded as Eleanor kept talking. Something about her college days. White noise. She considered making a dash for the door.

She was so preoccupied planning her escape that the form caught her by surprise. She blinked, took the papers between thumb and forefinger, and squinted.

Her eyes flit over the page, top, bottom, then rapidly over the middle. She bit her lip, and her throat heaved as she swallowed. As she stood there, pretending her eyes weren't starting to turn misty, she sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

"You—" Her eyes peered over the top of the page, and it struck her. That smirk on Eleanor's face... "Rotten...you then. That was a false barbell and a half wasn't it? Fuck." She wasn't sure when she'd started grinning, and her heartrate was still a wild pack of stallions charging downhill. But her insides glittered and soared.

She dabbed her eyes with her palm, left first, then right, as she turned towards the nearest turnbuckle. It was awkward, stretching the white, twice-folded forms over the rounded form of the leather, and at first the pen didn't want to write, but soon enough — as her brow furrowed and jaw tightened — her name graced the dotted line.

The papers were folded, slightly, where she had been gripping the papers just a bit too tightly. What to say, though? Thanks, obviously. Part of her wanted to lean sardonic and above it all. Fairy glide and invincible as the sky. But...

"Ma'am, I, eh, want you to know..." She offered the signed papers with both hands, eyes on the dotted line rather than Eleanor. "I'm not much used to getting help, so I'm liable to be no great shakes at it. But, eh, I'll give it my damnedest yeah? Not to let you down. Be a feather in your cap and all."

[FreestylePoet]

That sniffle put a crack in her impishly flat grin. Eleanor was a few years removed from the dating game, but it had to still be bad form to make a woman cry. Just when the tug at her heartstrings was about to turn into a comforting step forward, though, Shimmerlace started to laugh. Eleanor stammered, hands halfway to Shimmer's shoulders, then broke into a laughing fit herself. Not just at the relief of not making LAW's newest Young Lioness cry out the door, but also at how they got here. Eleanor Gray had only played a teacher on camera, with a meter stick in hand and Coke-bottle glasses and a too-tight dress shirt tied off at the midriff. And now here she was. A wrestling tutor.

"Eesh," she sighed. "Make a woman feel like an ass, why don't ya? Really, though, I didn't mean to worry you. Sorry about that. Pop a squat while I make us official?"

Eleanor dropped to a knee, draping the papers over the one still up. Hopefully they wouldn't get too wrinkly. There was a line there: "APPLYING MENTOR," it said, in the sort of scary bold that some bureaucrat out there turned into an identity. She signed it with the swooping E of WrestleCons past, then the presentably bombastic G that had sprouted from so many gold-tipped commemorative pens. An election certificate this was not, after all. A legal document, maybe, but since when did wrestling care about formalities? Eleanor's pen danced across the page in wide sweeps until the task was done.

Just long enough for her to play Shimmer's last words over and over in her head. With a thin-lipped smile, Eleanor showed her new ward the John Hancock that put them both in King DeFranco's sights. "There we are." Then she shuffled the pen and paper back into the folder. "I was telling the truth, you know," she said softly. "I'm a little rusty at giving help myself. Especially like this. Teaching, I mean. Showing the way." In truth, why Shimmerlace trusted Eleanor with her career after a two-hour crash course... it was beyond her. Already, something welled up right behind her Adam's apple -- the sort of thing that made it tough to sigh or swallow or do anything other than choke it down. Not regret, she thought, and not buyer's remorse. Reflecting past that would have to wait for her journal. For now, she had a Seelie royal to set towards the throne.

"But..." She flicked Shimmer on the forehead, then slumped back, ass to canvas. "I do know how to beat the crap outta someone in a wrestling ring, and you just signed over full license for me to do exactly that. So... What say we put that license to use? Over and over again, 'til you can do the Massacre in your sleep -- and a hundred other ways to kick ass, too? Maybe starting this time next week?"