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

[Malkavia]

Movement was everything. Every time Shimmerlace stopped moving and let her body settle and her heart rest, it ached to get it moving again, each laceration and bruise red and angry all over again. But if she could just keep going, from one hook to the next—that wasn't so bad. Lucky for Shimmerlace, Angelina liked to make sounds when she crumpled. Groans. Moans. And half-uttered curses that were beautifully harmonized pitch-perfect move-your-arse fuel.

Shimmerlace smirked, then spat on the mat. "Don't look at your fuckin' knee, Angelina." The Feychild lumbered up to a squat, then took a wild tackle with her arms outstretched at the Marauder. Her shoulder slammed into the back of the knee, a chop-block. Angelina went down. Shimmerlace bent down, grabbed Angelina's ankle, and lifted it off the mat.

Her fingers clasped over the Marauder's covered toes, while her other arm locked around her ankle. She blinked. Her eyes scanned the leg attached to that captured foot. Her eyes glittered. "You, thief, spent a year feeding, grooming, mooching love off my dear Thistledown." With a thrust of her shoulder, she twisted the ankle lock like a screw-on bottle opener. Torque strained on ankle, knee, and hip, and the harder Angelina's body tried to resist the twist, the harder Shimmerlace pushed in with her upper body. "Thinkin I'd be too little, too incompetent to ever come collectin for that."

She was grinning. Her face was throbbing, numb with strain and adrenaline, and she wasn't sure exactly when she'd started grinning, but she could feel the strain on her cheeks. It wasn't exactly a grin so much as what happened when she strained all the muscles in her mouth as hard and tight as they'd go. Her teeth gleamed in the light. She twisted the ankle, and when that didn't adequately express her loathing for this leg or her desire to see its joints come unlaced and muscles snap like ribbon, then she brought her boot down on Angelina's neck and leaned all her weight into it. Her voice became ragged with exertion.

[Monsy]

Just had to fuckin’ do that… You just had to pop.
At this time..
Fuck you.
Fuck you, fuck you thrice. Stupid, retched, feeble cunt leg.
I hate havin' nerves attached to you, concernin' for you and fuckin’ feelin' every ounce of your bullshit…

But thinking that wasn’t a damn solution. In-fact, she made backwards progress. She couldn’t really set that foot down beyond a little pitiful squat on her tired, but functional leg. The toes touched. But no weight. Her bottom lip rolled in and her patience and attention for Shimmah reduced to embers. Then, from behind, “-a-AA-H!” First from fright, then from a blunt bodyweight hammer. She cracked a scream. Stronger than a full force bat swing and with such authority that she tilted and smacked the canvas on her neck and shoulder blades, leaving her lungs empty. She made a scratchy gasping noise, then teetered over to lay on her stomach.

Her ankle was next and that was sharp, making her other leg tremble. All those tiny little bones, wrapped together, like a ball of many fragments of different shapes, tied and woven together by strings and regionally connected groups. They then squeezed and twisted into each other; muscle and nerve along with edges of her tiny bones digging into everything, causing sharp spasms of hot, stabbing nerve sickness. Her elbows tucked right up against her chest and she held her breath, trapped in her throat. The crowd lapped up her periled face with cheers. A curve shaped into her back and sharper at the lower end, with her skirt rolling up near the buttocks and her other leg spread, toes still touching the ground. Like a mid-step stance, but flat.

“g-gEK!!” Her neck wasn’t particularly big or strong, so it ate and felt everything. It's dull, but there's a tightness in her closing windpipe that pinches and feels like there’s a ball stuck in there. She couldn’t swallow. It was right under her chin on the right side, but grew. Everything else is numb, to a degree that feels more severe sore muscle inside her nape while her trachea fights and wants to pop like a balloon.

She gagged and began to scratch the canvas with both hands for some ground. On one side, a blood handprint slapped and dragged down as Angelina fought, leaving behind small tags of flesh from the lacerations now being aggravated against wood and padding. With one cheek face-down, her eyes looked up of dwindling reserve while her smile grew. She made a short scratchy laugh that bobbed her shoulders, then growled out with one breath. “SO. WHAT?”

[Malkavia]

"So what? Soooo what? Oh, my dear. Diddle. Fiddly dee, so what indeed."

The referee leaped into position, mic to Angelina's face.

"DO YOU—"

Shimmerlace's face curled into a scowl. "OFF," she grunted, then kicked at the ref until he scurried. She shook her head, disgusted.

Anyway—she'd decided the wrong boot was on the Marauder's head. She stepped off Angelina, then squatted down to grab Angelina's free leg. As she did, a smile flickered across her face. She glanced at the audience, and...nodded at them.

The next bit involved some fancy handiwork: Take an ankle—the one attached to the bad knee. Well. The worse knee. The whiner knee that put such lovely scowls on the pirate's face. Take that ankle, and wrap the other knee around it, so that the knee-pit of the leg on top squeezes the ankle of the leg on the bottom. Call the leg on the outside pincher, as it will pinch the other leg. And the pinched leg can be called fucked, because of the torque about tear every ligament in the joint ragged. The ankle on Pincher then becomes an anchor to push down, which bends Angelina's entire body over like a C. A reverse Cloverleaf.

Spoiler

As the C curled over, and Shimmerlace tugged down on that ankle, her glance fanned over the crowd. It had been a tick and a half since she'd pulled a solid rabbit from a hat, and as her look flit from eye to eye, she felt a familiar glitter. She gestured to ref with her head. She wanted the mic—and like most of the weak-kneed people LAW deigned to hire, he was pliable enough, and even held the mic for her. Soon her voice boomed. "Oi! Ye cunts of the stands. We are confronted by a question, a query, a mystery of the age! It asks—SO. WHAT?"

The question left a pause—which Shimmerlace filled by playing a game: Could she press the rubber of Angelina's boot onto Angelina's red hair? Then, that pause would find new filling, an answer clawed from deep within our Pirate's gullet. And after Shimmerlace ran out of steam and needed to breathe, she popped a grin.

"Decent enough answer. But I'm left wondering. Let's try again. So—" she raised eyebrows and nodded at the cunts. Come on then. And some of them caught the signal. "WHAT?" rang from a chunk of the crowd.

This time, Angelina's toes made it past the horns. And was her knee actually creaking?

"SO... WHAT?"

Sweat dripped from the Feychild's nose down to Angelina's face. Shimmer was gasping from the exertion of the hold and all the creaks and aches it exacerbated, but she did get those rubber toes to graze that scarlet head in her bloody-minded search for her answer.

[Monsy]

She liked to imagine her brain was separate from her body. That she can say no regardless. And executive decision can shoot herself in the foot regardless of self-preservation. Go fuck yourself, said brain to body.

Shimmerlace didn’t give her the chance for that. And whether Angelina could’ve enunciated anything beyond a garbled wet mucus blob was something else. Her neck was crushed and she was suffocating, slowly but totally. Her eyes big, purple, much like her face will be in sixty seconds.

Then she gasped. Her lungs drowned in oxygen and she hacked; face stained in a blush. Both hands grabbed her throat. The front. That hurt the most and gave her a sucking rasp on her next inhales. She coughed again, then finally whined, high-pitch.

One and two, then through and fold. A knot from middle school with a lever and a crank. The force was hydraulic; her knee was a simple pistachio. Squeals were immediate. In-fact, they weren’t loud, but voice cracks. Every few inches, another crack. Her mouth opened and she oozed it, starting to tear and have her lips twist, scowl and quiver.

"Oi! Ye cunts of the stands. We are confronted by a question, a query, a mystery of the age! It asks—SO. WHAT?"

Extension. Her belly stretched. Pulled thin so the naval was a line. The shallow, faint muscle seen clearly on the front. Tiny folds of fat on the side. At some point, her ribs didn’t bend and were outlined quite vividly, and you can see her diaphragm and stomach pump rapidly with air, full of sweat.

WHAT!

The breaking point was when it touched a horn. She screamed, scratchy, as if ripped from her throat and loud as a moon howl. Her throat visibly contracted from it, but she had another. It devolved into coughing where Angelina nearly vomited more than once. She switched faces from trying to laugh to nearly full-blown sobbing. Then clawed again to get nowhere, and lost another one percent of her hand, and five percent of her knee ligament in the cloverleaf.

SO… WHAT!
SO. WHAT!

Her own boots stepped on her own head rather firmly. The crowd awed, and the chant continued. One side went SO and the other side: WHAT. Like a game of racket. Back and forth. Meanwhile, Angelina felt her eyes sink into her head. She faded a couple times, going limp and snug like you could roll her MORE, if Shimmer wanted to. Then, with the same fading face, she switched to her elbows and forearms, then tried shooting herself a couple inches.

SO. WHAT!
SO. WHAT!

Forward. Again, limp. Again.
Push and push, crawl and crawl, until she saw those ropes like a finish line, grabbed them and tried to pull herself through and throw herself to ring-side.

[Malkavia]

So what. It was a giggle and a half. Shimmerlace had to assume that half the dimwits chanting hadn't the slightest clue why they were chanting. God help her if something this idiotic should get attached to her as some kind of bumpersticker phrase.

Still, say what you might, the rhythm helped. Every WHAT was another squeeze, like the arena had become one giant ventricle and the chant made it contract. She expelled her breath and felt it rush from the pit of her chest, up her esophagus, and out through her craggy grin. Her muscles tightened like springs. Her aches glowed like coals. Her blood sizzled under the skin, and Angelina howled. Then it all went loose and started again.

The audience saw a marathon crawl, Angelina tearing herself across the mat like a canoe paddled over dry land. Each inch was a struggle, every foot a hard-won victory. Shimmerlace didn't seem to notice their progress towards the ropes. Her eyes stuck to the back of Angelina's head, lost in a kind of heaving, sweat-soaked, grin and grit trance. The ropes didn't appear in her mind, nor after a point did the crowd. What she felt was the Marauder's body against hers, the rhythmic strain and lax of the hold, the imperative to keep bending it further until something snapped.

When Angelina's grabbed the ropes, Shimmerlace blinked in a way that made her whole body start. Her mouth dropped a fraction of an inch. The sensation was like getting tossed out of an intense dream, yanked from the abyssal depths of REM sleep into a screaming good-morning light. For all that, one instinct held: She did not let go of her grip of those hateful legs.

And that worked out.

Angelina dropped like a lead weight through the other side of the ring. Her weight pulled Shimmerlace like an anchor eating rope off the ship. The Feychild's cloverlead grip slipped through the gap, and her chin slammed into the top rope while her gut folded around the tight, steel middle chord. Angelina swung towards freedom, stretched horizontal, went tight—then fell. She bounced off the ring and hung by her knee in a rope-hung cloverleaf over the apron.

It strained Shimmerlace's shoulders, like the joints were big balls of rubber bands stretched to be closer to ovals. Her eyes flashed with humor, but she didn't have the breath for words or laughter. She sucked it in, stuck out out her chest, and without missing a beat, she began to swing Angelina like a pendulum. Arc her left! Then arc her right! Then smash her against the ringpost and finally let her fall, in a pile beside the ring.

As soon as she let Angelina go, it tossed her off balance. She took a step back, stumbled, took another, and then caught herself. Her breath was tight in a chest wavering like a balloon at the end of a string, and every second was a moment wasted. She took one, two, three more big gallops backwards, then—charged the ropes herself. The top rope took focus in her vision, and she grabbed it, felt the soles of her boots touch down, and jumped. She aimed to slam her rump into Angelina's ribs—a suicide senton.

[Monsy]

SO. WHAT — Normally a staple of Angelina’s passionate defiance.
Now, Shimmerlace hijacked that shit and made it her own. That pink FUCK. The crowd tagged too and left a gamey taste. She wouldn’t say she couldn’t do anything about it, because she was right here, crawling and claiming her inches of ground until she clutched the ropes with a death grip. Then when she pulled her beaten body through, escape becoming tangible, she sighed. Her tiredness doubled.

But she’d dangle — and have memories of being seven years old. Placed in a soccer net around the top bar, legs through the squares and then coiled and awkwardly tangled, eyes facing the ground with blood rushing to her head and mocking bystanders.

SO. WHAT.
I’ll snap your shins with my fuckin’ cleats, SO WHAT.
SO. WHAT.

The noise got so fuckin’ irritating. She almost welcomed her ribs cracking off the post and the subsequent fall onto her front. It knocked her wind into reverse, where every subconscious command to inhale, she exhaled, and vice versa. She needed to slow herself down and consciously puff and hold her ribs. Her features tightened, but weakly.

“Sss…sshit.”

Worse off, the crowd drowned out the rumbling from Shimmer’s movements. What normally could be heard from thundering boards were silent and she could only see a shadow, then glance up and feel hollow. But her survival instinct was stronger, causing her to roll and allow Shimmer to splat against padded concrete. Angelina laid out, cheek face-down and crumpled like some wet towel.

The crowd’s WHAT died off soon after, traded for an Oooo and a collective cringe, enthused, unsettled and empathetic at once. And whether Shimmer was to rise immediately or stay down forever, Angelina began to move. One hand down, then the next. Her torso curved up, then her knee followed and she clawed at the ring apron to desperately pull herself up. It would let her walk. Well, more like limp, around the far side over the steel steps in search of her beloved Nutcracka.

[Malkavia]

Before she felt pain, she saw Angelina roll. Her chest seized, and hot flashed through her cheeks. Her pupils contracted, mouth clenched. Her vision narrowed, and her body felt like a long string of taffy stretched from toe to head.

Then her backside collided with the concrete ground.

Airborne wrestling is a long climb for a short flight. Even when successful, in training with Eleanor or alone with a net, time soaring was a fraction of a second—a flash, a flutter in the heart. What lasts much longer and fills in the gaps is the space after. On a good day, there would be the endorphin rush, a grin that starts in the gut and shines all the way to the fingertips. On a bad day...

"Fuuuuuck..."

It was like waking up in the emergency room. Her conscious, thinking brain finally caught up to the instinct and training that had been rushing ahead like a gleeful mindless bull, and what she found was a feeling like glass shards lodged in her bones. Her tailbone throbbed. She was on her side, hacking wet coughs onto the concrete, and she could feel her back leaking, the slither of blood between the cuts. Her thumb was a dull red drone in the background, and when she tried to right herself, she only succeeded in rolling from her side to her shoulder, cheek to the concrete.

Her head buzzed. Her fighting instinct clawed at the back of her brain.

Where is she? She needed to turn around and get her claws up before Angelina landed on top of her.

But Angelina wasn't there.

Shimmerlace's eyes veered wildly around the arena. Lights and crowd and ring all angled and warped, but the horns—the horns were nowhere to be found.

She breathed.

Alrighty then.

Aaaaalrighty. Then. Hm.

She licked her lips, rolled herself onto her knees, then, with a groan, up to a three point kneel. Her breathing steadied, hackles lowering. She looked to the crowd, and from there, the inference to the Marauder's location at the opposite end of the ring was quick and clean. Just follow the cunts' eyes. The aches along Shimmerlace's back made it hard not to guess at the razor-entwined destination our Pirate Chief had in mind.

Very well then. Shimmerlace would just have to arm herself as well. And she saw just the target: A gleaming bronze bell at the timekeepers' table. She lumbered to the table, yanked it off the top, and half stumbled, half galloped by the ring. She kept her head down, and when she got to the ring, she crawled to the steel steps at its corner. Had Angelina seen her move?

She huddled beside the steps on the left-hand side, squishing herself into the smallest ball she could manage without splitting her back further. There, she bit her lip, controlled her breathing, and stared at the crowd. Some stared back at her. She put a finger to lips and motioned with her head where she imagined—hoped the Marauder was still scrounging for her weapon.

[Monsy]

The ground was a rocky beach.
The rocks crank on your ankle, turning it unexpected ways for annoying sudden pains and the odd balance jerk that tripped her. It was all inside the limb. The exact pin-points of displeasure were clearly mapped in her consciousness — then tested in stepping techniques. All of them applied too much weight for too long. No good. Except one, but it looked stupid. It was one long lunge, then a lean forward, lift the bad knee slightly, plant on the toes, lean on it and bring the serviceable leg forward, fast. Repeat.

Easy.
Peasy.
Pirate.
Queasy.

She went over to the barricade on the far adjacent from the steel steps, where a steel-chair splattered pathway opened up from their bowl dive from a now tipped ladder. A blood-print was on the ground from Shimmer’s sliced back. That was also a tell. And near that, in a pile of crumpled chairs about four feet left, was her pink beloved, wrapped in shiny silver and red fairy ichor.

Go go gadget noodle arms.

It came undone after three lift attempts, with the connecting bar free from the neighbouring slot. She moved it aside. Afterwards, it was just a stumble and a bit of bumble, a one-legged squat that made Lee Everett proud, then a hurried limp back around where she came from. “Shim-mah!” Angelina shouted, “Get ovah here so I can make ya blood into pirate wine!”

Shimmerlace was nowhere to be seen. Angelina expected it must’ve been her bitch-ass height. Or that she went under the ring. Tired, she leaned against the ring with her rib, then slunk her weight over the steel step’s top platform. Her legs kicked until she creeped up. She groaned loudly, getting on all floors, and the moment she saw over the steps — every limb turned off, and her tiny body spilled all over the steps, head hanging over, eyes still peeking and jaw slack.

Everything became black and dead quiet.

[Malkavia]

Pop goes the weasel.

For once, the onlookers were worth more than cash in their pockets. Shimmerlace had to hold herself almost flat to the ground to keep herself hidden beside the stairs. Her back, flush against the concrete, stung, and even the baseline murmur of the crowd covered up Angelina's footsteps.

Still, she watched their eyes, and when they were Right. There. On the other side of her makeshift hidey-hole, she lept straight up, bell held two-handed over her head. On impact, the force transferred through the metal buzzed through Shimmerlace's palms.

And Angelina collapsed.

For the first time since the bell had rung, the Feychild's instinct stopped rushing ahead, as if her engine were a wild, furred animal that had finally tuckered itself out and needed to stop and pant. She looked down at Angelina, head cocked to one side. She squinted, and something almost akin to confusion wrinkled her nose. The sound Angelina had made while falling was not that of an almighty meteor crashed to earth, nor even the mundane THUNK you might expect from any mortal's body. Instead, it was more like the sound a silk dress might make as it collapsed. Swish. Barely a sound at all.

But—she blinked, then grabbed Angelina by the horns. Dragging Angelina up one step, then—TUG and lift—up the next, they hit many a snag and speed bump. After the third step, Shimmerlace popped a squat and changed her grip to catch our Marauder in her armpits so she could drag her backwards through the ropes. After some fussing and rolling, she got her into the ring corner.

The Feychild was out of breath, but that didn't stop her from flipping her hair over one shoulder and popping a grin. Finally, she set Angelina up, arms over the top rope, all hung up and lovely. Shimmerlace pointed the bell at her face.

"Any tool, trick, or weapon however humble that gets stained with blood on my account—well. That weapon I gotta honor with a name. Seems only fair, aye?" When she swung the bell, back like a pendulum, its heft was heavy in the swing. Usually, bells were made of a tin-copper alloy, literally bell metal, and this one likely as was well. But it felt as ponderous as cold iron in her grip. "And, Angie? This fine fellow here? I believe he's itching for his own nomenclature."

With that, the Feychild took a step backwards in time with the backswing of the bell, then brought it forward and smashed it against Angelina's bare, pale belly.

[Monsy]

Bwegh.

Angelina’s brain fell off the Merry-Go-Round.
Once it slammed into her cranium, she slept, dreaming of her Rabbit. A tall white rabbit at a dimly-lit granite bar, fancily dressed and cleansing a clear cup with a sky-blue cloth. He had the eyes of a normal bunny, off to the sides. But his head-size and body was boney and moved like a human.

Thistledown spoke, but the sounds were just a bell dinging.
Angelina voiced with no dream volume: What the fuck…

And then she woke up. The crowd was loud and her body was slack. It couldn’t move and was being puppeteered on fairy strings. Her knee scraped the steel steps, horns caught on the rope before correcting, bugging her neck. Her feet slapped the canvas in one-two fashion as they slipped off the bottom rope, then stood on as sandbag pillars. Angelina was just a torso and a head, arms over the top, belly bare.

Her eyelids flickered, slowly like a cat. “Mmgh..”
And.
SMASH.
“..k-kkuk!”
That woke her up. The blood shot to both poles, feet and face, turning the latter red. It rippled from navel to back. Angelina folded and was pushed between the middle and top turnbuckle pads, hunched over. Spittle didn’t come out in a jet, but a messy gob that tainted her chin. She couldn’t feel her midsection, but at the same time, there was just so much throbbing and increasing swelling.

Angelina folded her arms to the top ropes and her knees gave out. She slacked, looking down, breathing in with a deep wheeze then coughing multiple times. Her entire body trembled with mounting exhaustion and visible limitation. A switch between a smile and her inner urge to cry. She looked up at Shimmer, an eye closed and gritting her teeth, lips uneasy. “You’re a f-fuckin… useless-sapien. H-How’s that…?”