in the smallest hours of a foggy night it began anew
Nov 22, 2022 11:22:51 GMT -5
Marcus Welsh likes this
Post by the wraith on Nov 22, 2022 11:22:51 GMT -5
ACT I: THE WRAITH IN THE GRAVEYARD
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The wraith moves unseen through fog and tombstones, a blacker shadow against black night. The chill breeze settles for a moment, whereupon a whiff of something putrid lingers in the air, telling of graves unsealed. The moon above is but a sharp and hazy sliver when ‘ere it dares to peek from behind clouds streaking jagged purple rows across the black sky like claw marks.
The wraith plans his path carefully, staying always in the darkest hollows of the cemetery, the shadows of shadows—he is a shadow himself. That is the shape of a man under that vast hooded cloak, but if our wraith truly is a man, then never has there been so ghastly an existence. A hulking beast of a shape, tall and broad and entirely too real, yet somehow ethereal, intangible: like a nagging idea, an irrepressible urge, or the unshakable premonition of a terror yet to come.
Three holes the wraith has dug this night, and others on nights before. He can make three more before sunrise if needed—but hopes the next will be his last.
He stops before a leaning gravestone beneath a gnarled, leafless oak and begins to dig his fourth. He wields neither pick nor spade. The earth gives way easily beneath his fingers, which are filthy and gnarled as the oak’s roots from this dread work.
With astonishing efficiency, he uncovers his fourth box of the evening. He cracks the seal with a kick, rips the coffin lid open.
A woman, or what’s left of one. Young when she died in 1919. She is of no significance to the wraith, though she wears pearls and an expensive looking ring. The wraith leaves them. It is the wrong box. Again. Damn his addled memory. The jewelry catches his eye but he tells himself he is no graverobber. Not anymore.
He is, however… very hungry.
He snaps the skull from the dusty corpse and begins to eat it cold. It is old and musty, but there is still good calcium to be had in there. Nutrients. A snack will power him through digging the next hole—and the next, and the next, should it come to that. He whispers a prayer in the ancient language of a forgotten jungle tribe, thanking the long dead caveman wizard mentor who once taught him how to survive on human skulls and fouler things.
He is gnawing the jawbone when he realizes he has been discovered. He senses this without seeing the other man approaching. An experimental brain surgery in Nicaragua has given him special powers: the neurological receptors that activate when you eat acid and those that activate when you do meth—for the wraith, those are both cranked wide open at all times, thanks to the ingenuity of a brave Latin American doctor and $1600 cash. He has never regretted the choice.
“Come on out of there,” says a gruff voice.
The wraith chuckles, but there is no mirth in it. “Our understanding is becoming expensive, friend.”
“You’re a clever enough crab, crawl on up the side of that pot before I needs boil you.”
This man ought to sound horrified at what he’s witnessing. Or else say nothing, flee silently or screaming wordlessly. Instead, he speaks with the exhausted tenor of a mother asking her four year old to brush his teeth.
The wraith curses himself. He has been uncareful. The loud rubbing of teeth upon teeth, the natural cycle of the hungry feeding ‘pon the dead, has called the gravekeeper to him once again.
“Don’t worry, old man, I’m coming up,” he grumbles. “Keep the damn light off me.”
There is no sense hiding in a stranger’s grave, not from a man whose trade is these same holes, these same headstones. The wraith tosses what is left of the skull back into the box, shoves the lid more or less back in place, then slithers out of his hole leveraging his significant upper body strength.
He stands before the gravekeeper and brushes dirt and chips of bone from his cloak. From somewhere within the same, he produces a satchel.
The gravekeeper watches him, shaking his head. Wary… but greedy, too, the wraith thinks. He depends on it. The old man takes his job seriously. But not so seriously that he doesn’t have his price.
“Three nights in a row,” grumbles the gravekeeper. “How long you mean to keep this up?”
The wraith empties the satchel in his palm: five percocet 30s, a thick wad of United States currency, and a USB drive with seventeen exclusive Jackoff Monkeyz Premium NFTs. The wraith hands them all over to the gravekeeper and says, “I pray with each hole I dig that I’ll need never dig another.”
The gravekeeper snorts like he finds that funny. He flicks the USB drive into the desecrated grave and pockets the rest. “And what do you pray to?”
The wraith does not answer, for his answer cannot be named in human speech. Even if it could, it would mean nothing to this man for whom the limits of possibility were a father, a son, and a nameless ghost, steeped as he was in his world of holy motifs, all carved in stone as if infallible, inflexible, closed to interpretation. The wraith knows better.
The gravekeeper grunts into the silence. “Don’t know what your fuckin’ deal is, but I understand THIS well enough.” He pats the breast pocket of his dirt smeared work shirt wherein he has hidden away the wraith’s bribe. “Hope not to catch you around anymore, graverobber. But you know the fee if I do.”
He wants to protest—he is no graverobber, just a hungry shadow with a mission—but the old man has already vanished into the dark, more than a bit shadowy and wraith-like himself.
Before long, the wraith has found a suitable gravesite on which to attempt the night’s fifth hole. He commits to the task at hand, begins to dig again, mindlessly, automatically, letting his arms do the work for him as he has done so many times before.
The digging is never the problem. It’s what comes next. He has almost lost faith completely by the time he reaches his fifth coffin of the evening. The disappointment and failure have become their own ritual.
So it is with great surprise that he opens the lid to find… exactly what he’s looking for.
He has located the correct coffin at last.
Inside, resting on a bed of plush velvet… is nobody.
There is a single object laid to rest: a pristine DVD copy of Shrek 2.
The wraith clutches the disc to his chest and flings back his black hood to cackle and roar at the fog-blurred sliver of moon overhead. Like a madman. Like a wolf.
With the hood removed, a ragged nest of platinum blonde hair and several dubious face tattoos can be seen. Folk from another place and time might now recognize our wraith as (retired?) professional wrestler Scott Syren. Another argument might be made, perhaps a more compelling one, that even his own mother would not recognize this thing. But what base creature could have mothered such an abomination? It defies imagining.
ACT II: I’VE SEEN FOOTAGE
It is on the third viewing of Shrek 2 that mysteries begin to reveal themselves.
Scott Syren sits shirtless on a linoleum floor. The only light is from an ancient combination TV/DVD player, so old you couldn’t pay Goodwill to take it. It is the room’s only furnishing. The empty walls are either gray or dirty.
Onscreen, a grainy CRT rendition of beloved talking animal sidekick Donkey is telling his new rival, Puss-in-Boots, “I'm sorry, the position of annoying talking animal has already been taken.”
Scott Syren pauses and rewinds, stroking his goatee thoughtfully.
“I'm sorry, the position of annoying talking animal has already been taken,” Eddie Murphy as Donkey says once again.
“There can be only one,” Syren whispers as he rewinds again.
“I'm sorry, the position of annoying talking animal has already been taken,” Donkey tells the swashbuckling kitten before being paused and rewound yet again. “I'm sorry, the position…”
“A position of honor...” Syren mumbles as he scribbles in a notebook with green crayon, “is to be TAKEN… not given…”
Syren scans the DVD forward. Now Donkey says to Puss-in-Boots, “If we ever need an expert on licking ourselves, we'll give you a call.”
“Mmm,” Syren says, nodding at this wisdom. “Mm, yes.”
“If we ever need an expert on licking ourselves…”
“Licking...” Syren mumbles. “Archaic definition… to lick… to beat… to defeat in a fight…”
“… we'll give you a call.”
“YES,” agrees Syren feverishly. “The only one who can ‘lick ourselves’ is… ourselves. Our inner Puss. The only foe capable of besting me…” He taps his tattooed head with a forefinger.
A cell phone rings. The ringtone is Smashmouth’s All-Star, but remixed at 50% speed and auto-tuned into an eerie minor key so that it sounds like the song is being covered by a symphony of devils in hell.
“SSSOOOOOME-baaaahdy once tooolllld meeee…”
Syren answers. “Yeah…. yeah… yeah, no… no, yeah, of course I’m taking it seriously… no! Actually I’m studying film for the fight right now, asshole, so I don’t appreciate—no… no… yeah, no, I told you no media… what do you mean contractually obligated? Does the wolf honor the mindless braying of sheep? Does the bear make truce to uphold the salmon’s whims? Does the viper sign a charter with the rat?! No… no… absolutely not. Okay, fine, I’ll go.”
He ends the call, visibly stressed.
A blonde sex robot bleep-bloops into the room just as Donkey is saying “Look out, princess. Here comes the new me!” She is a used, budget conscious model but is holding up okay other than the cosmetic panels torn away from one side of her face so that the metal workings of her jaw and silicone mouth-parts can be seen through the ruination.
“mAsTeR sYReN,” the robot greets its master in her janky robot voice. “CALenDar uPdAtE: HaPPeniNg Now: OCw PrEsS coNFeReNcE fOr the sPoRtS MeDiA. WouLD yOu LiKe ASSistance geTtiNg tHeRe?”
“Yes, please, sex robot.”
“aS yOu wiSH, mAsTeR.”
The sex robot transformers itself into a spider-like creature of spindly metal arms and flailing wire. It flings itself across the room, latching to Syren’s abdomen. Just as we fear it might crush our hero to death, it reconfigures itself as a sick-ass jet pack on Syren’s back.
“pRePArE foR dEPArTuRe tO tHe BRoNx,” says the sexy janky robot jetpack.
Syren does not reply, only sticks his fist in the air and jumps. The jets roar to life, smashing him up the through the ceiling and into the atmosphere.
ACT III: MEET & GREET
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Scott Syren knows he is considered past his prime by the room in which they’ve set up his press conference. It’s small and cramped, the sort of room business-normies use for pointless meetings when the more important normies have the better meeting room booked for more important pointless meetings.
A few bored reporters are present, mostly young sportswriters trying to climb their way to the top of a cutthroat industry by slogging through this unwanted assignment. The reporters are outnumbered by wrestling fans who have come to support their favorite athlete—or perhaps to gawk at the husk of a myth.
Syren approaches the podium. The cheap microphone squeals into the cheap P.A. system. Syren swats the microphone over with his hand to make the feedback worse, then slowly rights it.
He makes his next decision on a whim, as ever: “I will only be taking questions from fans today. I’ll do your press conference, but I’ll not speak to the likes of…” He pauses and shudders with a genuine disgust he has not felt since first seeing LilJungleMan eat a human skull all those years ago, or since watching Tommy Flamer immolate himself in the middle of a wrestling ring, sacrificing his worthless life to the flames just to 0wn his haters. “… junior sportswriters.”
The media kids look offended at that. One jumps up and shouts, “So what? We’re ‘fake news’ now, is that it? What are you saying? Have you come back as a Donald Trump supporter or something?”
Scott Syren has little use for the embarrassing political theater of mortal men, the vapid squabbles which seem to define this timeline he has been trapped in. He blinks. “Who is Darneld Tromp?”
He turns to the fans and gestures, inviting the first question.
A man approaches wearing a well-faded t-shirt. It features an image of Scott Syren holding up the OCW championship belt. Syren grins sheepishly at the ever-bizarre experience of seeing his younger self emblazoned across a stranger’s torso.
“That’s a rare shirt,” he tells the man. “Didn’t print them for very long.”
The man is starstruck and manages only to say, “It’s my favorite shirt.”
“You shouldn’t even be wearing it. I think that one goes for $50 or $60 on eBay these days.”
“I’d never sell it! I’m going to wear it again this weekend when you win. You’re the best, Mister Syren.”
“I am the best, aren’t I? But it was never about belts, my friend. This is performance art.”
“What is? Wrestling?”
Syren leans close to the man’s ear. “All of this.”
The man stumbles away in awe, his perspective—and his whole meaningless life—changed forever by the encounter.
The next fan is a beautiful woman. She also wears a vintage Syren t-shirt, but hers is customized with a scandalously low cut neck. The shirt is too small besides, and her voluptuous breasts are voluptuous and breastlike.
Syren looks her in the eye and greets her as an equal human being. What a deserving champion.
“Will you sign my tits?” the lady asks.
“Of course I will,” says Syren, and then does so without ever breaking eye contact. The woman is a walking time bomb; a human nip-slip in tortuously slow motion. Even now a dark crescent emerging at the neckline tells of a nipple struggling to break free. Syren ends the encounter with a firm handshake. “Thank you for your support, and I want you to know that I respect you, and women in general.”
“OH FUCK YEAH, BROTHER,” says the lady, instantly cumming.
Scott Syren hangs out bullshitting with his fans long after the disgruntled reporters have walked out of the “media event”. Syren then takes his fans to Applebees for appetizers and seasonal cocktail specials.
“Hey guys,” Syren says to his disciples as they walk out on the $522.59 bill. “Should we call it a night or maybe go on a whiskey and crack bender through Thanksgiving?”
“Hip, Hip, Hooray!” all of his fans yell in unison at the latter suggestion, and so they go smoke crack behind Applebee’s to prepare for Scott Syren’s next victory, which had been foretold in the patterns of the stars long before any of this took place.
The wraith plans his path carefully, staying always in the darkest hollows of the cemetery, the shadows of shadows—he is a shadow himself. That is the shape of a man under that vast hooded cloak, but if our wraith truly is a man, then never has there been so ghastly an existence. A hulking beast of a shape, tall and broad and entirely too real, yet somehow ethereal, intangible: like a nagging idea, an irrepressible urge, or the unshakable premonition of a terror yet to come.
Three holes the wraith has dug this night, and others on nights before. He can make three more before sunrise if needed—but hopes the next will be his last.
He stops before a leaning gravestone beneath a gnarled, leafless oak and begins to dig his fourth. He wields neither pick nor spade. The earth gives way easily beneath his fingers, which are filthy and gnarled as the oak’s roots from this dread work.
With astonishing efficiency, he uncovers his fourth box of the evening. He cracks the seal with a kick, rips the coffin lid open.
A woman, or what’s left of one. Young when she died in 1919. She is of no significance to the wraith, though she wears pearls and an expensive looking ring. The wraith leaves them. It is the wrong box. Again. Damn his addled memory. The jewelry catches his eye but he tells himself he is no graverobber. Not anymore.
He is, however… very hungry.
He snaps the skull from the dusty corpse and begins to eat it cold. It is old and musty, but there is still good calcium to be had in there. Nutrients. A snack will power him through digging the next hole—and the next, and the next, should it come to that. He whispers a prayer in the ancient language of a forgotten jungle tribe, thanking the long dead caveman wizard mentor who once taught him how to survive on human skulls and fouler things.
He is gnawing the jawbone when he realizes he has been discovered. He senses this without seeing the other man approaching. An experimental brain surgery in Nicaragua has given him special powers: the neurological receptors that activate when you eat acid and those that activate when you do meth—for the wraith, those are both cranked wide open at all times, thanks to the ingenuity of a brave Latin American doctor and $1600 cash. He has never regretted the choice.
“Come on out of there,” says a gruff voice.
The wraith chuckles, but there is no mirth in it. “Our understanding is becoming expensive, friend.”
“You’re a clever enough crab, crawl on up the side of that pot before I needs boil you.”
This man ought to sound horrified at what he’s witnessing. Or else say nothing, flee silently or screaming wordlessly. Instead, he speaks with the exhausted tenor of a mother asking her four year old to brush his teeth.
The wraith curses himself. He has been uncareful. The loud rubbing of teeth upon teeth, the natural cycle of the hungry feeding ‘pon the dead, has called the gravekeeper to him once again.
“Don’t worry, old man, I’m coming up,” he grumbles. “Keep the damn light off me.”
There is no sense hiding in a stranger’s grave, not from a man whose trade is these same holes, these same headstones. The wraith tosses what is left of the skull back into the box, shoves the lid more or less back in place, then slithers out of his hole leveraging his significant upper body strength.
He stands before the gravekeeper and brushes dirt and chips of bone from his cloak. From somewhere within the same, he produces a satchel.
The gravekeeper watches him, shaking his head. Wary… but greedy, too, the wraith thinks. He depends on it. The old man takes his job seriously. But not so seriously that he doesn’t have his price.
“Three nights in a row,” grumbles the gravekeeper. “How long you mean to keep this up?”
The wraith empties the satchel in his palm: five percocet 30s, a thick wad of United States currency, and a USB drive with seventeen exclusive Jackoff Monkeyz Premium NFTs. The wraith hands them all over to the gravekeeper and says, “I pray with each hole I dig that I’ll need never dig another.”
The gravekeeper snorts like he finds that funny. He flicks the USB drive into the desecrated grave and pockets the rest. “And what do you pray to?”
The wraith does not answer, for his answer cannot be named in human speech. Even if it could, it would mean nothing to this man for whom the limits of possibility were a father, a son, and a nameless ghost, steeped as he was in his world of holy motifs, all carved in stone as if infallible, inflexible, closed to interpretation. The wraith knows better.
The gravekeeper grunts into the silence. “Don’t know what your fuckin’ deal is, but I understand THIS well enough.” He pats the breast pocket of his dirt smeared work shirt wherein he has hidden away the wraith’s bribe. “Hope not to catch you around anymore, graverobber. But you know the fee if I do.”
He wants to protest—he is no graverobber, just a hungry shadow with a mission—but the old man has already vanished into the dark, more than a bit shadowy and wraith-like himself.
Before long, the wraith has found a suitable gravesite on which to attempt the night’s fifth hole. He commits to the task at hand, begins to dig again, mindlessly, automatically, letting his arms do the work for him as he has done so many times before.
The digging is never the problem. It’s what comes next. He has almost lost faith completely by the time he reaches his fifth coffin of the evening. The disappointment and failure have become their own ritual.
So it is with great surprise that he opens the lid to find… exactly what he’s looking for.
He has located the correct coffin at last.
Inside, resting on a bed of plush velvet… is nobody.
There is a single object laid to rest: a pristine DVD copy of Shrek 2.
The wraith clutches the disc to his chest and flings back his black hood to cackle and roar at the fog-blurred sliver of moon overhead. Like a madman. Like a wolf.
With the hood removed, a ragged nest of platinum blonde hair and several dubious face tattoos can be seen. Folk from another place and time might now recognize our wraith as (retired?) professional wrestler Scott Syren. Another argument might be made, perhaps a more compelling one, that even his own mother would not recognize this thing. But what base creature could have mothered such an abomination? It defies imagining.
Syren disappears into the night with his copy of Shrek 2, pissing on graves with excitement and disdain as he skips along, suddenly more giddy child than skulking shadowraith.
ACT II: I’VE SEEN FOOTAGE
Scott Syren sits shirtless on a linoleum floor. The only light is from an ancient combination TV/DVD player, so old you couldn’t pay Goodwill to take it. It is the room’s only furnishing. The empty walls are either gray or dirty.
Onscreen, a grainy CRT rendition of beloved talking animal sidekick Donkey is telling his new rival, Puss-in-Boots, “I'm sorry, the position of annoying talking animal has already been taken.”
Scott Syren pauses and rewinds, stroking his goatee thoughtfully.
“I'm sorry, the position of annoying talking animal has already been taken,” Eddie Murphy as Donkey says once again.
“There can be only one,” Syren whispers as he rewinds again.
“I'm sorry, the position of annoying talking animal has already been taken,” Donkey tells the swashbuckling kitten before being paused and rewound yet again. “I'm sorry, the position…”
“A position of honor...” Syren mumbles as he scribbles in a notebook with green crayon, “is to be TAKEN… not given…”
Syren scans the DVD forward. Now Donkey says to Puss-in-Boots, “If we ever need an expert on licking ourselves, we'll give you a call.”
“Mmm,” Syren says, nodding at this wisdom. “Mm, yes.”
“If we ever need an expert on licking ourselves…”
“Licking...” Syren mumbles. “Archaic definition… to lick… to beat… to defeat in a fight…”
“… we'll give you a call.”
“YES,” agrees Syren feverishly. “The only one who can ‘lick ourselves’ is… ourselves. Our inner Puss. The only foe capable of besting me…” He taps his tattooed head with a forefinger.
A cell phone rings. The ringtone is Smashmouth’s All-Star, but remixed at 50% speed and auto-tuned into an eerie minor key so that it sounds like the song is being covered by a symphony of devils in hell.
“SSSOOOOOME-baaaahdy once tooolllld meeee…”
Syren answers. “Yeah…. yeah… yeah, no… no, yeah, of course I’m taking it seriously… no! Actually I’m studying film for the fight right now, asshole, so I don’t appreciate—no… no… yeah, no, I told you no media… what do you mean contractually obligated? Does the wolf honor the mindless braying of sheep? Does the bear make truce to uphold the salmon’s whims? Does the viper sign a charter with the rat?! No… no… absolutely not. Okay, fine, I’ll go.”
He ends the call, visibly stressed.
A blonde sex robot bleep-bloops into the room just as Donkey is saying “Look out, princess. Here comes the new me!” She is a used, budget conscious model but is holding up okay other than the cosmetic panels torn away from one side of her face so that the metal workings of her jaw and silicone mouth-parts can be seen through the ruination.
“mAsTeR sYReN,” the robot greets its master in her janky robot voice. “CALenDar uPdAtE: HaPPeniNg Now: OCw PrEsS coNFeReNcE fOr the sPoRtS MeDiA. WouLD yOu LiKe ASSistance geTtiNg tHeRe?”
“Yes, please, sex robot.”
“aS yOu wiSH, mAsTeR.”
The sex robot transformers itself into a spider-like creature of spindly metal arms and flailing wire. It flings itself across the room, latching to Syren’s abdomen. Just as we fear it might crush our hero to death, it reconfigures itself as a sick-ass jet pack on Syren’s back.
“pRePArE foR dEPArTuRe tO tHe BRoNx,” says the sexy janky robot jetpack.
Syren does not reply, only sticks his fist in the air and jumps. The jets roar to life, smashing him up the through the ceiling and into the atmosphere.
“Look out, pricness,” Eddie Murphy shouts from the TV as he flies off. “Here comes the new me.”
ACT III: MEET & GREET
A few bored reporters are present, mostly young sportswriters trying to climb their way to the top of a cutthroat industry by slogging through this unwanted assignment. The reporters are outnumbered by wrestling fans who have come to support their favorite athlete—or perhaps to gawk at the husk of a myth.
Syren approaches the podium. The cheap microphone squeals into the cheap P.A. system. Syren swats the microphone over with his hand to make the feedback worse, then slowly rights it.
He makes his next decision on a whim, as ever: “I will only be taking questions from fans today. I’ll do your press conference, but I’ll not speak to the likes of…” He pauses and shudders with a genuine disgust he has not felt since first seeing LilJungleMan eat a human skull all those years ago, or since watching Tommy Flamer immolate himself in the middle of a wrestling ring, sacrificing his worthless life to the flames just to 0wn his haters. “… junior sportswriters.”
The media kids look offended at that. One jumps up and shouts, “So what? We’re ‘fake news’ now, is that it? What are you saying? Have you come back as a Donald Trump supporter or something?”
Scott Syren has little use for the embarrassing political theater of mortal men, the vapid squabbles which seem to define this timeline he has been trapped in. He blinks. “Who is Darneld Tromp?”
He turns to the fans and gestures, inviting the first question.
A man approaches wearing a well-faded t-shirt. It features an image of Scott Syren holding up the OCW championship belt. Syren grins sheepishly at the ever-bizarre experience of seeing his younger self emblazoned across a stranger’s torso.
“That’s a rare shirt,” he tells the man. “Didn’t print them for very long.”
The man is starstruck and manages only to say, “It’s my favorite shirt.”
“You shouldn’t even be wearing it. I think that one goes for $50 or $60 on eBay these days.”
“I’d never sell it! I’m going to wear it again this weekend when you win. You’re the best, Mister Syren.”
“I am the best, aren’t I? But it was never about belts, my friend. This is performance art.”
“What is? Wrestling?”
Syren leans close to the man’s ear. “All of this.”
The man stumbles away in awe, his perspective—and his whole meaningless life—changed forever by the encounter.
The next fan is a beautiful woman. She also wears a vintage Syren t-shirt, but hers is customized with a scandalously low cut neck. The shirt is too small besides, and her voluptuous breasts are voluptuous and breastlike.
Syren looks her in the eye and greets her as an equal human being. What a deserving champion.
“Will you sign my tits?” the lady asks.
“Of course I will,” says Syren, and then does so without ever breaking eye contact. The woman is a walking time bomb; a human nip-slip in tortuously slow motion. Even now a dark crescent emerging at the neckline tells of a nipple struggling to break free. Syren ends the encounter with a firm handshake. “Thank you for your support, and I want you to know that I respect you, and women in general.”
“OH FUCK YEAH, BROTHER,” says the lady, instantly cumming.
Scott Syren hangs out bullshitting with his fans long after the disgruntled reporters have walked out of the “media event”. Syren then takes his fans to Applebees for appetizers and seasonal cocktail specials.
“Hey guys,” Syren says to his disciples as they walk out on the $522.59 bill. “Should we call it a night or maybe go on a whiskey and crack bender through Thanksgiving?”
“Hip, Hip, Hooray!” all of his fans yell in unison at the latter suggestion, and so they go smoke crack behind Applebee’s to prepare for Scott Syren’s next victory, which had been foretold in the patterns of the stars long before any of this took place.