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12th September, 2016. Philips Arena. Atlanta, Georgia, approx. 6:00pm
Seth Rollins stood in what appeared to be a corridor somewhere in the arena looking smarmy as ever, the Intercontinental Championship over one shoulder and an EBWF tag team title on the other. He was looking downward slightly, smiling and slightly nodding his head. The camera pulled back to reveal a much shorter person facing Seth, arms folded across her body. Her eyebrows were perked slightly.
Blue Pants: Okay.
Seth Rollins proudly looked at the championships that draped over each his shoulders, before looking back at Blue Pants.
Seth: Just okay? C’mon, I know you can do better than that.
Blue Pants: Better about what?
Seth: About these two beautiful championships over my shoulder? You have to admit they’re pretty cool.
Blue Pants shook her head in disagreement.
Blue Pants: I am the founder of the COOL School, Seth. And let me tell you… Nothing is cool about big belts. If anything that could mean you’re morbidly obese. Super fat. Excessively eating--
Seth: OR it could mean you’re a champion, you wouldn’t know too much about that, though, huh? Seriously, I’m used to seeing the horse mask, what happened to it?
Blue Pants seemed unfazed by Rollins’ remark.
Blue Pants: I don’t know. Maybe you ate it trying to feed your big fat ego. Or maybe you snorted it up through that monster schnozz of yours. I GUESS WE’LL NEVER KNOW, WILL WE?
Blue Pants realized how mean she was being and sighed, letting her hands fall to her hips.
Blue Pants: I’m sorry. I lost it at the airport. It was a “security hazard” so it was confiscated.
Seth takes a deep breath.
Seth: We got off on the wrong foot, here, Blue Pants. I know you had a bit of a nasty run-in with Jimmy last week, I know he can be a handful, I hope he didn’t upset you too much?
Blue Pants: I’m cool as a cucumber. If I were you, I’d be worried about how upset HE is. Did I leave a bruise? Please tell me I did and it was BLUE.
Seth: I wouldn’t know, I don’t check Jimmy for bruises regularly. It seemed like a pretty intense situation, last week, I wanna make sure you know Jimmy had no ill will towards you.
Blue Pants: See I know Jimmy called me an idiot, but that doesn’t make me one. I know exactly why you’re here, flashing your titles, your name, your… EVERYTHING! And I don’t buy it. It’s totally inappropriate. Why don’t you just come out and say it already.
Seth sighed at the mention of flashing everything, and took the championships from his shoulders, setting them down in a crate near him.
Seth: Listen, I know I’m abrasive. Honestly, it’s part of what makes me into me. But I don’t want you to think I’m here on some sort of mission or to flaunt those championships. I’m here to check on you because losing a friend like Bayley could be a big disappointment. I’ve lost some friends on the way here, and it’s never good.
Blue Pants put her hands up to halt Seth, nodding in understanding.
Blue Pants: You don’t have to say anymore. You need a companion. You think having one will be good for you. But see, I don’t need one. I’ve embraced the solidarity over here. Any pictures you take of yourself, just keep to yourself. I can Google them if I want them.
Seth: I’m not talking about that, Blue Pants. I have Jimmy, and Baron’s also there, sometimes. You’ve been hiding your solitude beneath that horse mask, and the only reason you’re out of it, is because it mysteriously vanished. You don’t have to be alone, Blue Pants. You can have a friend in me.
Blue Pants looked as if she was considering Seth’s offer, smiling and nodding much like he was at the start of the encounter.
Blue Pants: Nah.
Seth: I know I’m not exactly Bayley, but I know, and you know that deep down, there’s another side to you that would get along just fine with people like myself and Jimmy. You know that other side of you is just waiting to burst out. Where is that other side of you?
Blue Pants: Probably dead because you sucked the life out of it with that boring monologue. Why are you here? Still talking? DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS I AM SAYING? N-O. Leave me alone. Now it’s you and Jimmy being a bunch of weirdos. I don’t associate with weirdos. I’m not weird…
Seth: DAMN IT! Enough of this bullcrap.You can’t keep leaving Leva at home. Do you know what they say about you? They say you’re a joke, a punchline, and the Leva that Jimmy told me about would never take that crap from anyone. You want a new mask, Jimmy has one that suits you perfectly.
Blue Pants: And YOU can’t keep walking in here, trying to persuade me to be your “friend”, to listen to complete psychopaths, to just… BE someone I don’t want to be. I know who I am. Not you, not anyone else. I never took crap back then, and I won’t now. The only punchline people will be talking about in about three seconds will be when my fist hits your face. Or your NOSE. Because that’s a target hard to miss.
Blue Pants demeanor had completely changed at this point. The way she was speaking was almost unrecognizable. Her usual, quirky attitude was out of sight. Seth smiled.
Seth: That’s the attitude I was looking for. You know that violence is what you’re really about, there’s no point hiding it. Let your true colours show. You like Star Wars, right. Leva, let the hate flow through you.
Blue Pants shook her head in frustration.
Blue Pants: WHATEVER. Out of my way.
After kicking over the crate Seth’s titles rested upon, Blue Pants pushed her way past Seth.Rollins grabbed his titles and draped them over his shoulder, letting out his trademark nasal laugh, proud of what he had done.
A pair of sweaty hands were shown in a sink, being covered in water before being brought up to a face. After washing that very face, those hands reached back down to shut the water off. It was revealed that we were looking at Seth Rollins, who was in his workout gear, a light blue sleeveless top and black shorts. He took a deep breath and looked himself in the mirror, staring back at him, a brief image of himself with blood leaking from his eyes flashed, before going back to the previous reflection. He shook his head, and picked his phone up, which he had previously set down on the sink.
“Jimmy? Where are you? Could you do me a solid? Get a guinea pig, bring them to the address I’ll text you in a bit. There’s a few things I need to get off my chest. Thanks, see you.”
Seth ended the phone call quickly, and looked around to check if anyone had overheard him. He kept holding the phone in his hand, as he walked out of the bathroom, and into the gym. He quickly grabbed his belongings, and left the gym, as he texted the address he had promised Jimmy. He walked the street trying to avoid eye contact with anyone who walked past him, on his way to the agreed upon destination. A storage unit, somewhere in Atlanta was Rollins’ target. Once he arrived there he opened his storage unit, to reveal that the only things there were a black leather recliner, with a single light over it and a cloth covering a table beside it, the floor was all covered in a deep purple carpet. One hour passes before Jimmy Havoc arrives with a suspiciously large luggage bag. Seth, who was standing outside the closed unit welcomed Jimmy, who seemed to be in a bit of a rush.
“Alright, I found this fucker leaving the airport, here you go. There’s also some shit in there he was carrying I couldn’t be arsed going through, I just stuffed it in there, make sure you burn it, though.”
Seth shook Havoc’s hand, and thanked him, before letting Havoc go on his way. He looked at the luggage bag, and patted it twice.
“I hope you like my setup. It’s new, and I made it myself.”
He opened up the storage unit door, carried the luggage bag in, and closed the door behind him. Once inside, he turned the light on, it was very dim, only barely enough to make out the color of the carpet. Seth slowly opened the luggage bag. In that bag, as promised, was a lifeless body, which was folded up like an accordion. Seth reached in the bag, picked the body up and sat it down on the recliner. It was the body of an average height, and average weight man, with little to no really distinguishable traits. Seth let out a chuckle as he looked back at the bag, and removed a badge from inside it, which read “Airport Security”.
“I hope that chair is to your liking, I picked out myself, you know? Blackcraft Furniture made this one just for me. But I’m not here to advertise. I’m here because I need something. Something you can provide. I need to relieve my stress, to vent my woes.”
As Seth rambles, he walks over to the table beside the chair and removes the cloth that covered it. Underneath the cloth, all that was set on the table was a black box, which Seth opened to reveal his golden knife. Seth smirked at it, and glared back at the man on the chair.
“See, here’s the thing about me. I like my slaughterhouse to be as comfortable to my guests as it possibly can be. Granted, comfort doesn’t do you much good right now, but it’s a nice gesture, you know?”
Seth pressed a lever under the chair that reclined it all the way back, almost to a completely horizontal base. Once the chair had reclined as far as it could, Seth, still wielding his knife, made a straight cut from along the right forearm of his victim.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking… Or would be, if you could think. There’s a lot of questioning going on. If you could, you’d probably have a lot of “why’s” in your head. You’d be thinking why you had to be sacrificed. You’d be thinking why Havoc gathered you, rather than me, if this was the entire point, and you’d be thinking why this entire thing happened. Don’t worry, I’ll soothe all your doubts. The reason why you had to be sacrificed is simple, I needed a guinea pig, a scapegoat, a vessel. Something to get rid of all the stress that’s building up. That vessel, if you haven’t figured it out already, lifeless moron, is you.”
Seth bent down to take a closer look at the blood that poured out from the cut that Seth had made a few seconds earlier. As the forearm of the man on the chair became covered in red, the chair itself started getting blood on it.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t expect the chair to be black that long either. As I was saying, though, you probably would wonder by now why was Havoc the one to take you, if I was the interested party in this whole deal. Well, I sort of just answered it for you, didn’t I? It’s sort of a deal, Havoc arranges the business side of it. I would ask him how he gets these guinea pigs so fast, but a magician never reveals his tricks.”
As the man’s body started slumping, Seth grabbed him, and straightened him out, and, with a piece of rope that was in the luggage bag, tied the man’s torso to the chair.
“You just can’t keep yourself up, can you, pal? I understand. I’ve met many others like you. People who can’t stay on the right path for too long. They trip, and fall from grace eventually, all of them. People like Dolph Ziggler, who went from a World Champion to someone who is suspended indefinitely, because he couldn’t handle not having a neat little spot under the spotlight. People like Kevin Owens, who vanishes after a defeat that seemed to be excruciatingly hard to swallow, and returned to get defeated… Maybe he shouldn’t have ever left his buddy, Sami Zayn’s side.”
Seth switched to the man’s left side, and began recreating the cuts he had made in his right forearm.
“Sami’s a whole different beast, right? That’s what he tries to sell you every time you see him, but I’ve never been one to trust a salesman, and I see right through him. He’s a big part of everything that is wrong and needs to be fixed in EBWF. If only we could make him see the error of his ways, he could be a valued soldier for our cause, but if he can’t be a soldier, he will have to be made an example. He’s been at the top of his game for a while, and reaching for the top of EBWF for even longer, but I’ve seen cracks in his abilities. He’s not that different from you, pal.”
As he said that, Rollins backed away from the body and looked at it for a while, like he was trying to figure it out.
“It’s actually uncanny how much you two are alike. In fact, I don’t think I know your name, so, let me rectify that. I hereby name you Sami, and I’ll explain why. What I see standing before me is a bag of flesh, a beaten up and broken down useless shell of a man… But, I am willing to bet that, when you wore that pretty little badge of yours, you felt like you were more. You thought you were unbeatable, didn’t you, pal? You thought you were the ultimate authority in your pathetic world, but there’s something that trumps any authority. That’s death, which was your own fall from grace.”
Seth started carving into the man’s chest
“I like doing artwork on my guinea pigs, gives me a sense of artistic fulfilment. By now, you’d probably wonder, if you could, what sort of a parallel I’ve drawn between you and Sami. See, Jimmy, didn’t realize this when he picked you up, but he picked up a perfect Sami Zayn clone. Like you, he is slowly wasting away into nothing more than a pointless mass of flesh, just waiting for that next match, a broken down, and beaten up carcass. Like your badge, he also had something that made him think he was better than what he really is. He was World Champion, he had reached the pinnacle, the top of the mountain… But, fate is inevitable, and the hero, Sami Zayn, the underdog from the Underground, fell. If only that was the end of the story. See, the reason why I know Sami Zayn’s flaws so well is because, as he was falling, he found a ledge. I call that ledge the Tag Team Classic, and halfway through our journey up the mountain, Jimmy Havoc and myself were on that ledge. We ran into Sami, and we saw there was a line of people trying to climb the mountain past him, but right behind him, also climbing up was Baron Corbin. Now, Baron, being the naïve soul that he is, was holding Sami, trying to help him past the Tag Team Classic ledge. But Jimmy and I knew what needed to happen, and helped Sami Zayn let go, making Baron’s path a bit easier.”
Seth started walking around the chair, caught up in his own story, as the man’s torso was shown to have been carved with “Die Zayn Die”.
“That wasn’t enough, though. Jimmy and I met him again, this time, we had passed the ledge. Miraculously, Sami Zayn had been helped back up the mountain, and cut the line once more. We ran into him, right at the top, with Chris Jericho by his side. He tried to cling on to his position at the top by riding Jericho’s coattails, but Havoc, Jericho and I, once again, knew what needed to happen. We knew Zayn was a curse on EBWF’s side, and we knew he didn’t belong where he was. So, all three of us kicked him back down, and now he wants to cut the line and main event Warfare at my expense.”
Seth let out a chuckle, not his usual chuckle, but a more sinister one, as he played with his blood covered golden knife.
“You want to know the best thing about your namesake, pal? I know what he will do. He will get someone to interview him, so he can get his two cents in on me. He’ll say everything he’s always said, he’ll kiss up to me, maybe the rest of The Broken, and claim despite all that, he’ll bounce back from his disappointing loss at Summerslam, by defeating me. That’s his biggest mistake, you know. He thinks he’s just in a bit of a funk, but the reality is that it’s not just a disappointing funk, it’s only the initial steps in a long, long downfall that will lead him all the way down, past the mountain and back into the underground.”
Seth let out his trademark nasal laugh as the scene panned back to reveal that as he was walking, he was gathering the man’s belongings in a trash can, suddenly stopping as he grabbed a very familiar horse mask. He continued to speak, while holding it and staring at it.
“… And just when you think you’re at the bottom, when there’s no further down that you can fall, I will be there to burn you, burn everything you stand for until all there is left is ash. At Warfare, I know you will try to find your ways again, but all you will find is me rising further up the mountain, past the dying ember that is your career. At Warfare, I know you will try to prove me wrong, but you can never and will NEVER break The Broken.”
As he finished his sentence, Seth threw a lit match in the trash can, continuing to dispose of most of the evidence, except the horse mask he found, as the scene faded to black.