Post by scott on May 22, 2022 21:52:19 GMT -5
“Technically I’m still a double champion,” said Catalina. She usually wasn’t awake in time for breakfast, though sleeping until noon didn’t stop her from starting each day with an overflowing bowl of Cookie Crisp and the newly debuted red watermelon Monster. After the closure of Carnage Wrestling in May of 2021, she spent two more months in Baltimore, Twitch streaming and surviving off DoorDash. The decision to move back to Pasadena to live with her parents was not an easy one, but their refusal to continue paying her rent helped to nudge Cat into relocating back home. It was much easier to hide her post-Carnage depression from them in Baltimore, where she had an entire continent between them. But after spending ten months back in Pasadena, with less DoorDashing, more Twitch streaming and even more sleeping - her situation had yet to improve.
Her dad’s turkey sausages kept rolling back and forth on his plate, nimbly evading the fork he was eager to impale them with. It wasn’t quite 7am, and weather apps prophesied the May sun would be clouded out for most of the day. The early hour and overcast sky made the Cortes house even more ominous than usual. Javier thought about the skull of his grandfather, sitting in the back of his closet, still wearing the Santo Diablo Mask. “Yep,” said Javier, finally skewering a sausage.
Cat crunched into her cerealized cookies, undaunted at the idea of talking with her mouth full. “So what if I haven’t defended them in a year? They’re literally in my room right now. In the background of every Twitch stream. Catalina Cortes -,” She painted a main event marquee in the air with her spoon. “Chaos Champion, final Carnage World Champion. The champion who killed the company.” Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she plunged the spoon back into the bowl, fruitlessly stirring.
“Lots of champions kill companies, kiddo,” said Javier, who cursed to himself right after saying it. “What I mean is, wrestling companies go out of business all the time. Like fruit flies. Half of them shut the doors within a month. El Dorado Wrestling went under with me and your uncle as the tag champs. Not our fault.”
Her uncle visited weeks earlier, as he did every year on April 23rd to wish her father a happy birthday. They would engage in ritualistic combat, and Javier Cortes would always lose. That didn’t seem to curb his optimism, as Javi insisted he was due for a win next year. Cat couldn’t decide if that was admirable or sad. Perhaps sadmirable. “Was that before he did his whole walk-the-earth-honing-his-body-into-a-living-weapon thing?”
“Yes,” said Javier. “That was when he decided to give up all notions of mortal glory and renamed himself Xipe Totec after the flayed Aztec god. Some death and rebirth thing. Personally, I think it was a midlife crisis."
“Death and rebirth, huh?” crunched Cat. “Like a phoenix.”
Her dad shrugged. “Less fire, a lot more getting punched. But basically.”
Cat took a slurp of Monster. “I see the appeal.”
“Welcome back to Super Smash Cat,” said Catalina to the Twitch-verse. “Still Cat, still smashing, only middlingly super but I suppose I’ll get there. Wake up, Crono, you lazy bitch.”
Crono did awaken at the behest of his mother, crawling fully clothed from a 16-bit bed to face the day, the Millennial Fair, and an adventure spanning 65-million years.
“Yes, I stuck with Crono because people who change the default names in RPGs should be in jail.”
“What about Zelda?” asked the chat.
Cat groaned into her headset. “Zelda games are different because you may need to differentiate your save from someone else’s. Like your brother, who can’t get all the heart pieces in Skyward Sword and blames motion controls.”
The chat argued as to whether or not Skyward Sword was a subpar Zelda. Cat pressed on, leading Crono to the fair, a fated encounter with a rebellious princess and a time machine gone haywire. “This is actually my second playthrough, because I burned through the first using fast-forward and save states for the sake of grinding. There is - however - an appropriate reason.”
“Because you suck,” said one chatter. A rebellion was brewing.
“New game plus,” said Cat. “Your experience and equipment carryover and now you’re ready to steamroll the entire boss roster and get the best ending. Chrono Trigger’s the origin point of the name, although the concept dates back to at least the first Zelda. You only think you killed Ganon and saved Hyrule, but eat shit, because he shuffled the dungeons and re-stole the Triforce while you were sharing chaste kisses with Zelda and trying to hide your boner; be it a guy boner, lady boner, or nonbinary boner."
Crono traipsed through the timestream to 600AD while Cat traipsed through a stream of her own. “For the people hopping on board since my Level-Up signing or my appearance in the PWV Triad Rumble, howdy and hello. This might shock you, but I was actually a wrestler first, then a wrestle-streamer, then just a streamer, and now I’ve become a streamer-wrestler, I guess. Oh, how time shuffles our own personal dungeons, not unlike a Triforce of Power-wielding pig wizard. You may or may not be familiar with Carnage Wrestling. If you’re not, Google is a thing that exists.”
The chat rebellion collapsed in on itself, now given to infighting about whether Carnage Wrestling was good, bad, or even ever existed at all.
Cat and Crono traipsed on. “Carnage had a long and storied history before ya girl showed up. Catalina Cortes -” she paused.
CATALINA CORTES flashed on the screen.
She continued. “Was only around for the last year and change, my distinctions being a stellar record of only two whole losses, a lengthy tag title reign alongside Christopher Marlowe as the Kit-Kat Connection… And finally, my run as the top champion in the company, Catalina Cortes -“
Again CATALINA CORTES flashed on the screen. Some of the chatters caught on, spamming the channel with her name and making any sort of pleasant conversation impossible.
“Carnage World Champion. The final one, in fact, when Carnage closed last year. The company you’re the champion of going out of business is not a great feeling, and having been through an emotional hellscape before and after winning the title, I did the only reasonable thing. I slept twelve hours every day and ate shitloads of pizza until my parents forced me to move back home for my own mental wellbeing.”
The chat quieted, with the occasional LOL and LMAO to break the tension. “TOO REAL?!?!?!” flashed across the screen.
“Okay, but seriously. My one successful defense was against Ragdoll, in the final Carnage show. It’s probably on YouTube, except for the part where she brought a gun. But if you ever find yourself thinking about how you would be a legend if the crazy clown lady shot you dead in the ring, you’re probably not in the best headspace. Out with a bang, then haunting a warehouse for the rest of eternity. And that brings me to a very important point.”
Again, the screen flashed, letters crowding the Twitch feed from top to bottom.
“Shit, I missed that typo,” said Cat, leading Crono in pursuit of the rebellious princess, who surprisingly enough looked exactly like her ancestor from 600 AD in a stunning display of narrative convenience. “But you guys are smart. You get it. It’s bad if a clown lady shoots you and it's worse if you rationalize that possibility as a good thing, because you’re all in your hopeless, fatalistic feelings and don’t want to do the thing you love doing anymore.”
“Eating pizza?” asked the chat.
Cat no-sold the pizza comment. “Naturally there’s the worry that I’m out of practice, because that rumble didn’t go like I hoped. Ring rust is real, folks. But the Catalina Cortes redemption arc continues at EXP 25 against Nocturne - the first of however many minibosses between me and either a spectacular comeback or disappearing back into the Twitch-verse from whence I came. “
“You’re currently in the Twitch-verse,” the chat pointed out.
Again, Cat no-sold like any decent wrestling monster. “But considering my endpoint at Carnage, even though the mountain collapsed under me, I was still at the top of it. The too-long; didn’t read explanation is that I’m sad it ended and glad it happened. My first professional wrestling job and I became their top champion. My first time playing, and I beat the fucking game.”
Crono’s gadgeteer best friend lectured him on the dangers of changing history. “But like I was saying,” Cat continued. “That’s the Cat’s notes version. Roll credits, back to the title screen. Would you like to start a new game?”
“Of course I would.”
“Almond butter,” said Catalina, firing a front kick at the heavy bag now crowded into the Cortes breakfast nook. One of the four chairs was completely blocked off, though she doubted her mom would be visiting anytime soon. Javi busied himself in the kitchen, overlooking their opulent cereal selection in favor of something more health-conscious. “With sliced bananas, please,” Cat added, punctuating the sentence with another kick. Her dad fed two slices of wheat bread to the toaster and went to work carving up a pair of bananas.
Cat’s cavalcade of kicks continued. From back kicks to roundhouses, hooks and side kicks, even the occasional knee. An oval was drawn on the bag's white vinyl in black sharpie - a space stretching from 66 inches down to 54 labeled ‘Possibly Nocturne’s head.’
“So that’s possibly her head you’re hitting?” asked Javier. “Seems kind of oblong for a head.”
Her foot bounced off one side of the circle. Cat took a breather. “I was on Reddit.”
Javier sighed sadly, stabbing his butter knife into a banana. “Goddammit, did you get radicalized?”
“No,” said Cat. “But this is still a little conspiracy theory-y. So there are multiple Nocturnes. But even if they know the secret's out, suppose there's only one Nocturne, but that Nocturne wants people to think there are multiple Nocturnes, unless there actually are multiple Nocturnes. Could be either a bluff or a double-bluff.”
“That's a classic bit,” said Javier. “Los Cerberos were pulling that one for decades, before officials made them get numbers printed on their masks. Can’t believe they’re up to nine already. I always loved Seis, but man, Cinco’s a real prick.”
Cat patted her knee, preparing to aim a Kinshasa at the circle, the approximate spot where one or more Nocturnes' face(s) might be. Then the toast popped up. “I got it,” said her dad. “Keep practicing kneeing people in the fucking face. You need to be prepared for Crisis on Infinite Nocturnes.”
“For what?” asked Cat, firing a knee at the bag. She groaned when it hit too low. “You mean Multiverse of Nocturnes?” She took a step back and launched another knee, this one hitting closer to the epicenter of where a standard Nocturne’s face might be.
The bananas sliced, Javier went to work slathering the toast in almond butter. “Did our talk do any good?” he asked, not interrupting Cat when she was mid-knee strike.
“A little,” Cat admitted, drawn to the kitchen counter by the sound of a full plate being pushed toward her. Her teeth rent toast, banner and almond butter alike.
“What about the toast?” Javier asked, biting into his own piece.
Cat nodded. “Food usually helps a lot. Know what helps the most though?”
“What’s that?” Javier asked.
“Paxil.”
“Alas, poor Nocturne. Or Nocturnes. I knew them not very well.”
Cat stood with her back to the screen, illuminated by a wall of tall black candelabras, wicks burning white wax down to the metal. She held a skull covered in a luchador mask - the black and red of Santo Diablo, his halo decorated with devil horns. She spoke to it, like Hamlet speaking to his long-lost friend Yorick.
“Doom aside, most of what I have to go on is YouTube videos and conspiratorial Reddit threads, but Mom always said that if you really want to get to know someone, see what they do after you punch them in the face. Kicks and knees are more my style, but you get it. After nearly a year off wrestling and all the rust that comes with it, the first great obstacle to the Catalina Cortes career soft reboot is you, Nocturne. Whichever one of you, you is.”
She held the skull up, facing the camera, and let the jaw hang open.
“Even though mask swapping is a handy trick and Santo Diablo tried every dirty deed in the book at one time or another, he had a particular aversion toward sharing his identity with other people. Showing that kind of commitment to being the most reviled heel in Mexico was kind of a weird flex, but the man took a ton of professional pride in being the best at what he did, even if it meant having to feed someone their own eyeball. Mask or not, Santo Diablo wanted everyone in Mexico to know there were no substitutes. Dude committed so hard that it took three generations for a Cortes to get out of his shadow. And that Cortes…”
A flashlight shined from Cat’s other hand, illuminating her face from underneath, the classic campfire ghost story trick.
“IS ME.”
She flipped the flashlight off.
“Okay, you get what I’m going for. Point is, I know a thing or two about being handcuffed to someone else’s legacy. The upside of connections and instant notoriety with the downside that no matter how hard you bust your ass, some people won’t ever be convinced that you earned your success. I get the respect aspect of two(or more) gals, one mask. But I can’t lie, y’all give me some hive mind heebie-jeebies and when I’m creeped out my strategy is generally to kick whatever’s in sight until nothing and no one is left standing. I’m only expecting one Nocturne in the ring, and thanks to the adjustable nature of my knee-to-the-face, I’m optimistic that I can crack whichever one I get right across the jaw.”
The flashlight spun in Cat’s hand, shining on her face and the Santo Diablo skull in her hand. She closed its mouth.
“I was gonna demonstrate on this skull, but assuming it actually is my great-grandfather’s, that would be kinda tasteless. And really, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not giving his EXP 25 opponent close-up footage of his finisher so that they could better prepare.”
“And the worst thing I ever did was quit wrestling for a year. But unless I’m horribly, tragically, woefully mistaken - I don’t think I’ve missed a beat on the way back. But don’t take my word for it, Nocturne.”
“Prove me wrong.”
Her dad’s turkey sausages kept rolling back and forth on his plate, nimbly evading the fork he was eager to impale them with. It wasn’t quite 7am, and weather apps prophesied the May sun would be clouded out for most of the day. The early hour and overcast sky made the Cortes house even more ominous than usual. Javier thought about the skull of his grandfather, sitting in the back of his closet, still wearing the Santo Diablo Mask. “Yep,” said Javier, finally skewering a sausage.
Cat crunched into her cerealized cookies, undaunted at the idea of talking with her mouth full. “So what if I haven’t defended them in a year? They’re literally in my room right now. In the background of every Twitch stream. Catalina Cortes -,” She painted a main event marquee in the air with her spoon. “Chaos Champion, final Carnage World Champion. The champion who killed the company.” Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she plunged the spoon back into the bowl, fruitlessly stirring.
“Lots of champions kill companies, kiddo,” said Javier, who cursed to himself right after saying it. “What I mean is, wrestling companies go out of business all the time. Like fruit flies. Half of them shut the doors within a month. El Dorado Wrestling went under with me and your uncle as the tag champs. Not our fault.”
Her uncle visited weeks earlier, as he did every year on April 23rd to wish her father a happy birthday. They would engage in ritualistic combat, and Javier Cortes would always lose. That didn’t seem to curb his optimism, as Javi insisted he was due for a win next year. Cat couldn’t decide if that was admirable or sad. Perhaps sadmirable. “Was that before he did his whole walk-the-earth-honing-his-body-into-a-living-weapon thing?”
“Yes,” said Javier. “That was when he decided to give up all notions of mortal glory and renamed himself Xipe Totec after the flayed Aztec god. Some death and rebirth thing. Personally, I think it was a midlife crisis."
“Death and rebirth, huh?” crunched Cat. “Like a phoenix.”
Her dad shrugged. “Less fire, a lot more getting punched. But basically.”
Cat took a slurp of Monster. “I see the appeal.”
***
“Welcome back to Super Smash Cat,” said Catalina to the Twitch-verse. “Still Cat, still smashing, only middlingly super but I suppose I’ll get there. Wake up, Crono, you lazy bitch.”
Crono did awaken at the behest of his mother, crawling fully clothed from a 16-bit bed to face the day, the Millennial Fair, and an adventure spanning 65-million years.
“Yes, I stuck with Crono because people who change the default names in RPGs should be in jail.”
“What about Zelda?” asked the chat.
Cat groaned into her headset. “Zelda games are different because you may need to differentiate your save from someone else’s. Like your brother, who can’t get all the heart pieces in Skyward Sword and blames motion controls.”
The chat argued as to whether or not Skyward Sword was a subpar Zelda. Cat pressed on, leading Crono to the fair, a fated encounter with a rebellious princess and a time machine gone haywire. “This is actually my second playthrough, because I burned through the first using fast-forward and save states for the sake of grinding. There is - however - an appropriate reason.”
“Because you suck,” said one chatter. A rebellion was brewing.
“New game plus,” said Cat. “Your experience and equipment carryover and now you’re ready to steamroll the entire boss roster and get the best ending. Chrono Trigger’s the origin point of the name, although the concept dates back to at least the first Zelda. You only think you killed Ganon and saved Hyrule, but eat shit, because he shuffled the dungeons and re-stole the Triforce while you were sharing chaste kisses with Zelda and trying to hide your boner; be it a guy boner, lady boner, or nonbinary boner."
Crono traipsed through the timestream to 600AD while Cat traipsed through a stream of her own. “For the people hopping on board since my Level-Up signing or my appearance in the PWV Triad Rumble, howdy and hello. This might shock you, but I was actually a wrestler first, then a wrestle-streamer, then just a streamer, and now I’ve become a streamer-wrestler, I guess. Oh, how time shuffles our own personal dungeons, not unlike a Triforce of Power-wielding pig wizard. You may or may not be familiar with Carnage Wrestling. If you’re not, Google is a thing that exists.”
The chat rebellion collapsed in on itself, now given to infighting about whether Carnage Wrestling was good, bad, or even ever existed at all.
Cat and Crono traipsed on. “Carnage had a long and storied history before ya girl showed up. Catalina Cortes -” she paused.
CATALINA CORTES flashed on the screen.
She continued. “Was only around for the last year and change, my distinctions being a stellar record of only two whole losses, a lengthy tag title reign alongside Christopher Marlowe as the Kit-Kat Connection… And finally, my run as the top champion in the company, Catalina Cortes -“
Again CATALINA CORTES flashed on the screen. Some of the chatters caught on, spamming the channel with her name and making any sort of pleasant conversation impossible.
“Carnage World Champion. The final one, in fact, when Carnage closed last year. The company you’re the champion of going out of business is not a great feeling, and having been through an emotional hellscape before and after winning the title, I did the only reasonable thing. I slept twelve hours every day and ate shitloads of pizza until my parents forced me to move back home for my own mental wellbeing.”
The chat quieted, with the occasional LOL and LMAO to break the tension. “TOO REAL?!?!?!” flashed across the screen.
“Okay, but seriously. My one successful defense was against Ragdoll, in the final Carnage show. It’s probably on YouTube, except for the part where she brought a gun. But if you ever find yourself thinking about how you would be a legend if the crazy clown lady shot you dead in the ring, you’re probably not in the best headspace. Out with a bang, then haunting a warehouse for the rest of eternity. And that brings me to a very important point.”
Again, the screen flashed, letters crowding the Twitch feed from top to bottom.
TAKE CARE OF YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
MAINTAIN A SUPPORT SYSTEM
MAYBE TAKE MEDICATION
TRY TO EXERCISE INSTEAD OF PIZZA
SOME PIZZA IS OKAY OBVIOUSYL
“Shit, I missed that typo,” said Cat, leading Crono in pursuit of the rebellious princess, who surprisingly enough looked exactly like her ancestor from 600 AD in a stunning display of narrative convenience. “But you guys are smart. You get it. It’s bad if a clown lady shoots you and it's worse if you rationalize that possibility as a good thing, because you’re all in your hopeless, fatalistic feelings and don’t want to do the thing you love doing anymore.”
“Eating pizza?” asked the chat.
Cat no-sold the pizza comment. “Naturally there’s the worry that I’m out of practice, because that rumble didn’t go like I hoped. Ring rust is real, folks. But the Catalina Cortes redemption arc continues at EXP 25 against Nocturne - the first of however many minibosses between me and either a spectacular comeback or disappearing back into the Twitch-verse from whence I came. “
“You’re currently in the Twitch-verse,” the chat pointed out.
Again, Cat no-sold like any decent wrestling monster. “But considering my endpoint at Carnage, even though the mountain collapsed under me, I was still at the top of it. The too-long; didn’t read explanation is that I’m sad it ended and glad it happened. My first professional wrestling job and I became their top champion. My first time playing, and I beat the fucking game.”
Crono’s gadgeteer best friend lectured him on the dangers of changing history. “But like I was saying,” Cat continued. “That’s the Cat’s notes version. Roll credits, back to the title screen. Would you like to start a new game?”
“Of course I would.”
***
“Almond butter,” said Catalina, firing a front kick at the heavy bag now crowded into the Cortes breakfast nook. One of the four chairs was completely blocked off, though she doubted her mom would be visiting anytime soon. Javi busied himself in the kitchen, overlooking their opulent cereal selection in favor of something more health-conscious. “With sliced bananas, please,” Cat added, punctuating the sentence with another kick. Her dad fed two slices of wheat bread to the toaster and went to work carving up a pair of bananas.
Cat’s cavalcade of kicks continued. From back kicks to roundhouses, hooks and side kicks, even the occasional knee. An oval was drawn on the bag's white vinyl in black sharpie - a space stretching from 66 inches down to 54 labeled ‘Possibly Nocturne’s head.’
“So that’s possibly her head you’re hitting?” asked Javier. “Seems kind of oblong for a head.”
Her foot bounced off one side of the circle. Cat took a breather. “I was on Reddit.”
Javier sighed sadly, stabbing his butter knife into a banana. “Goddammit, did you get radicalized?”
“No,” said Cat. “But this is still a little conspiracy theory-y. So there are multiple Nocturnes. But even if they know the secret's out, suppose there's only one Nocturne, but that Nocturne wants people to think there are multiple Nocturnes, unless there actually are multiple Nocturnes. Could be either a bluff or a double-bluff.”
“That's a classic bit,” said Javier. “Los Cerberos were pulling that one for decades, before officials made them get numbers printed on their masks. Can’t believe they’re up to nine already. I always loved Seis, but man, Cinco’s a real prick.”
Cat patted her knee, preparing to aim a Kinshasa at the circle, the approximate spot where one or more Nocturnes' face(s) might be. Then the toast popped up. “I got it,” said her dad. “Keep practicing kneeing people in the fucking face. You need to be prepared for Crisis on Infinite Nocturnes.”
“For what?” asked Cat, firing a knee at the bag. She groaned when it hit too low. “You mean Multiverse of Nocturnes?” She took a step back and launched another knee, this one hitting closer to the epicenter of where a standard Nocturne’s face might be.
The bananas sliced, Javier went to work slathering the toast in almond butter. “Did our talk do any good?” he asked, not interrupting Cat when she was mid-knee strike.
“A little,” Cat admitted, drawn to the kitchen counter by the sound of a full plate being pushed toward her. Her teeth rent toast, banner and almond butter alike.
“What about the toast?” Javier asked, biting into his own piece.
Cat nodded. “Food usually helps a lot. Know what helps the most though?”
“What’s that?” Javier asked.
“Paxil.”
***
“Alas, poor Nocturne. Or Nocturnes. I knew them not very well.”
Cat stood with her back to the screen, illuminated by a wall of tall black candelabras, wicks burning white wax down to the metal. She held a skull covered in a luchador mask - the black and red of Santo Diablo, his halo decorated with devil horns. She spoke to it, like Hamlet speaking to his long-lost friend Yorick.
“Doom aside, most of what I have to go on is YouTube videos and conspiratorial Reddit threads, but Mom always said that if you really want to get to know someone, see what they do after you punch them in the face. Kicks and knees are more my style, but you get it. After nearly a year off wrestling and all the rust that comes with it, the first great obstacle to the Catalina Cortes career soft reboot is you, Nocturne. Whichever one of you, you is.”
She held the skull up, facing the camera, and let the jaw hang open.
“Even though mask swapping is a handy trick and Santo Diablo tried every dirty deed in the book at one time or another, he had a particular aversion toward sharing his identity with other people. Showing that kind of commitment to being the most reviled heel in Mexico was kind of a weird flex, but the man took a ton of professional pride in being the best at what he did, even if it meant having to feed someone their own eyeball. Mask or not, Santo Diablo wanted everyone in Mexico to know there were no substitutes. Dude committed so hard that it took three generations for a Cortes to get out of his shadow. And that Cortes…”
A flashlight shined from Cat’s other hand, illuminating her face from underneath, the classic campfire ghost story trick.
“IS ME.”
She flipped the flashlight off.
“Okay, you get what I’m going for. Point is, I know a thing or two about being handcuffed to someone else’s legacy. The upside of connections and instant notoriety with the downside that no matter how hard you bust your ass, some people won’t ever be convinced that you earned your success. I get the respect aspect of two(or more) gals, one mask. But I can’t lie, y’all give me some hive mind heebie-jeebies and when I’m creeped out my strategy is generally to kick whatever’s in sight until nothing and no one is left standing. I’m only expecting one Nocturne in the ring, and thanks to the adjustable nature of my knee-to-the-face, I’m optimistic that I can crack whichever one I get right across the jaw.”
The flashlight spun in Cat’s hand, shining on her face and the Santo Diablo skull in her hand. She closed its mouth.
“I was gonna demonstrate on this skull, but assuming it actually is my great-grandfather’s, that would be kinda tasteless. And really, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not giving his EXP 25 opponent close-up footage of his finisher so that they could better prepare.”
“And the worst thing I ever did was quit wrestling for a year. But unless I’m horribly, tragically, woefully mistaken - I don’t think I’ve missed a beat on the way back. But don’t take my word for it, Nocturne.”
“Prove me wrong.”