Title: Getting some air
Featuring: Tom Sawyer
Date: Before Untouchable
Location: Highway 91
The cowboy hat sat on the one table in the hotel room. It was a cheap hotel room, but clean. The décor was straight outta 1987, all earth tones and cheap plastic. The walls had a nonassuming beige-on-white floral print, something to just be there and not offend anyone. A few pictures lined the walls, all of them of landscapes so standard and rote that the eye skipped right over them. In short, without the TV being set on, there was nothing in the room that captured the attention aside from the bright orange cowboy hat. The one with the yellow lightning design on it. It was stomped on, and quite broken. Part of the end of the scuffle with... Well, everyone on the roster who was opposed to Tommy and the Good Fight, it felt like.
In as many weeks, Tom had taken a beating that could kill a man at the hands of three people, been thrown around(Including through a windshield), and generally had the hell beaten out of him. Mostly at the hands of Heidi Christenson. Who seemed to glory in his pain.
His jaw hurt from more than one of the kicks he had taken. A few teeth felt loose, and breathing was definitely heavier. Harder. He had lost the Coin, and with it, the powers of the Macho Ranger were beyond his grasp. The boosted strength, speed, endurance, resistance to injury, healing factor... All those were things granted by the power of the intergalactic ultraconsciousness. And now they were gone. He was left with the few things that nature had granted to him, which currently felt like a body that had sat in an active rock tumbler for a few days.
And the little Flipcam that he held between his hands, aiming at his face. It got a damnfine view of the bruising mottling his face.
“I lost to The Mike Sloan Party Posse last week. More than Eugene and Sam, that loss was entirely my fault. How can I, someone who supposedly is this big tag team icon, leave my teammates to twist in the wind?”
Tom looked down and away, gritting his teeth.
“I also lost to Heidi Christenson and the Untouchables last week. And once again, it showed that I'm just not ready to fight against someone like Heidi by myself.”
The raw hamburger that was his face attested to that.
“And I lost my coin. My Macho Coin. My... talisman, you could say.”
Tom swallowed heavily, licking his lips and looking away from everything.
“Nah. Not gonna be all thoughtful here. C'mon.”
The camera clicked off, but when it began to roll again... The Rider rode again. The yellow-and-black of the leather bodysuit, the full-coverage helmet with the visor down. And the camera was now mounted to the handlebars of the motorcycle.
The Rider goosed the throttle and the bike raced off, cutting through the overcast afternoon. The camera was set in such a way that it got the Rider's helmeted head, the scenery to the left and the right, and a bit of sky. The motor ran a few long moments before the bike had to coast to a stop.
“Some might say... enough is enough. Heidi, I'm tired of waking up pissing blood.”
The motor revved, the cycle standing in place thanks to the hardlocked brake. Once, twice. A few quick jerks of the wrist to make that motor sing in preparation. As the unseen car moved out of the way... The Rider stepped off and cranked the gas, zooming around the corner.
“Enough is enough, Heidi. But the issue isn't that I need to step back.”
The bike zipped through an overgrown, interconnected tree-filled view of the sky.
“I've been going about all this wrong.”
The yellow-helmeted Rider-slash-Ranger glanced down the side-road, then hammered on that accelerator, shooting the bike forward. The scenery crashing by continued to blur at the corners of the vision-field, blooming trees dotted with green shoots and bushes just starting to come back around.
“I've been playing to your strengths. You own the facility, you own the security force, you have the upper hand in bare-knuckle fights to the death.”
The long winter seemed to finally have ended, despite a bit of a cool crispness to the air. Mechanicville was finally thawing out.
Or whereever Tom was.
“But at some point, you won't be strong, Heidi. At some point, you won't have the whole deck stacked against me. If this is my story, then the hero's gonna get the villain on an even ground at SOME point.”
The motorcycle didn't slow, but the sides of the road seemed to open up a little more. Now on some sort of highway, the Rider put the hammer down, throttle opening wide. The motor sang its beautiful song of internal combustion engine, and the Rider went roaring down the road.
“Enough is enough indeed, Heidi!”
The motor was poled, the speedometer going as high as it can go and then some, wrapping around into the blank area beyond the zippy motorcycle's top speed.
“It's time for Tom Sawyer to stop being the punching bag... And time for you to have something go wrong for you.”
The Rider would have pumped a fist, were it not for the speed. As it were, he simply let out a long, slow breath that the in-helmet microphone got, loud and clear.
“I'll see you at Untouchable, Heidi. Jeff. Everybody.”
LATEST PROPAGANDA
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