Post by Zack Fantana on Sept 20, 2019 1:54:40 GMT -5
“You sure about this?”
“Of course, man,” Zack Fantana assured Benny Stevens as they took their seats at the table, but he wasn’t sure at all. Though Brad had always had his back, he had grown more erratic by the day, heading up a death cult and reconstructing his face to look just like Zachariah Krahe, all in the name of Fantanasy. Zack couldn’t possibly imagine what Brad had in store for them at their ‘team meeting’ prior to Blitz 22.
“So what’s this all about?” Zack asked Brad as Benny thumbed through the Outback Steakhouse menu.
Brad stood at the head of the table.
“Well, Zack, I’ve been thinking. You and Benny here had a great showing at Flipping the Script Episode 4 and Blitz 21, it’s true, but this union is brand new and you have a long way to go.”
Zack was surprised to find reason in Brad’s words. He wasn’t wrong. For all the good that Benny and Zack’s respective triple threat wins in Toronto, or ‘sweeps week’ as Zack liked to refer to it, did to massage their egos, it had done little to change the narrative that they weren’t yet a cohesive unit. In fact, it may have only justified that belief in the eyes of the opposition that they didn’t have the chemistry to make good on their potential as a tag team.
“The only way you two can hope to match the tag team chemistry of that of a Zombie Vice Squad or an NSFW is for you, Benny, to accept Fantanasy into your heart.”
Benny smiled a toothy grin.
"That's a good one, Brad."
Brad bristled at the notion of Benny finding humor in his words.
“Well, rules are rules, and you simply cannot compete under the banner of Fantanasy without taking part in the Holy Zackcrament.”
Fantana and Stevens shared a puzzled glance.
“He isn’t.”
“I may have pulled some strings with the front office,” Brad said with an indefensible hubris. “But that means he has to earn his keep.”
Stokes turned to Stevens to address him specifically.
“Let’s not forget Zack Fantana sacrificed his singles career so that your tag team might have everlasting contendership.”
Benny did his best to stifle his laughter, though his best was not quite enough.
“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Fantanasy and drink His blood, you have no fight in you.”
“The crowd says WHAT.”
Benny looked around the room to see everyone taking this all in stride and shook his head.
“Shall we begin?”
"I can't really hear you from down here,” one of the unnamed disciples yelled across the length of the table.
Zack had found it curious that Brad requested a table for 26 despite the fact that there were only 13 of them, but chalked it up to Brad saving room for appeteasers, but now the reality had begun to sink in.
“I SAID, SHALL WE BEGIN?”
The disciples gathered around the table to partake in the communion.
“Take and eat; this is His body.”
Stokes ripped the Bloomin’ Onion to shreds and dispersed it amongst Fantana’s followers. Many partook while Brad began to rummage through his bag.
“Brendan, where is the blood?”
“The what?”
“The blood of Fantana. Did you forget to bring the blood?”
Brendan sheepishly looked at the contents of his grape Fanta can, shrugged, and poured the remaining fluid into the communion cups.
“A bit on the nose, but sure, ham it up, Brendan.”
Brendan only shrugged, stating, “I guess I didn’t realize that subtlety played a part in this.”
“More than you know,” Brad said, opening up a leather bound book entitled “The Fanthology”. “Zack, would you do the honors?”
Brad gestured towards the tray of communion cups. Zack, who was still picking at the Bloomin’ Onion, stirred in his chair uncomfortably.
“Uh, sure.”
Fantana stood up from his chair and picked up the tray of communion cups.
“This is a can of Fantana. Drink from it, all of you.”
Zack downed a cup as the disciples collected their own.
“Oh, that’s very flat.”
“Not unlike our faith before we found Fantana.”
Brad did his best to salvage the message, but he’d lost the room. The disciples voiced their displeasure as they returned their cups to the tray while Benny Stevens 'poured one out for Bobby Franchise'.
"One will betray him before sunset," Brad whispered with his eyes trained on Stevens.
"What's that, Brad?"
“I said, 'Set them back on the tray.’"
Brad began to collect his things off the table.
“Flat soda. Great. Just great, Brendan. I think there’s a Gelson’s down the street. I’ll fix this. I’ll fix it!”
With that, Stokes dashed out the door, leaving his book behind.
“Did he just commune and dash?”
“We need to talk about Brad.”
“You’re damn right we do.”
Brendan nodded at Stevens.
“I did not know that we were going Dutch on this.”
Benny motioned at the waiter to call off his order.
“I’m beginning to think that he may be dangerous.”
“Because he attempted to Jonestown you.”
“No.” The man was briefly taken aback by Zack’s statement. “No, it wasn’t that at all.”
Brendan’s voice lowered to a hush.
“I have evidence that suggests that he may even be your Judas.”
He paused, allowing the moment to breathe.
“You think I’m crazy, right? Brad’s your apostle! Your biggest supporter! I’m not saying he isn’t. He clearly cares about this a lot, maybe too much, and that, you see, is why he failed you. See, in Brad’s haste to honor one mandate of Fantanasy, he abdicated another.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Brendan. Brad wrote the book of Fanthology.”
“And yet…” Brendan collected Brad's Fanthology from the table. “It says here, in Fanteuteronomy 4:23: Be careful that you do not forget the covenant of the Fantanasy that He made with you,” Brendan recited as the other followers chimed in. “Do not make an idol for yourselves in the form of anything He has lost a championship to. For Zack Fantana your Fantanasy is a consuming fire, a jealous god.”
“Clearly that was an oversight. I mean, ‘Fanteuteronomy’; it doesn’t even rhyme,” Zack said with a laugh, perhaps protesting too much.
“If it’s as you say, that Brad wrote the book, then what a curious oversight that would be, in that he not only forsook his own dictum by reconstructing his face to look like that of an old rival, but also someone much more conventionally attractive than you. That’s the dagger.”
“Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say ‘more’,” Fantana said in a dismissive tone.
“Oh, but he is.”
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
Brendan rebuked Zack’s argument with a head shake. Fantana looked around the room in search of support but found none as each of his supposed disciples eluded any eye contact.
“Benny?”
“Gotta give it to Krahe. Man’s got a very strong jawline.”
“Very strong.”
Many of the remaining disciples agreed, emboldened by Benny’s straightforwardness.
“So what exactly are you proposing?" Zack said, moving through the hurt. "That we oust Brad from our denomination?”
“‘Everyone has redeeming qualities.’ Isn’t that what you told me going into Toronto, Siberia? It was a simple concept preceded by anything but: ‘Do not look for your friends in the gutter,’ you said, for ‘they will drag you down with them.’”
As the camera traced Zack’s steps along with him, his face was alit by the street lights in the twilight. In his right hand, he carried Brad’s book and, in his left, a doggy bag full of Bloomin’ Onion.
“A harrowing notion, to be sure, and one I’ve thought long and hard about, to the point where I’m just exhausted. I mean, the mental gymnastics you’ve put yourself through in order to justify your continued loyalty to Kowloon and then deride my association with a Brad Stokes or a Benny Stevens in the very same breath… Well, it all renders your definition of redemption is a bit narrow, don’t you think?”
Zack stopped to take a look around, shouting Brad’s name into the distance, taking care not to look in the actual gutter near his feet, for the sake of optics. Lacking any response, he moved forward down the sidewalk.
“Personally, I believe redemption exists for each of us to claim. If it didn’t, Kowloon would yet be peddling drugs and you’d probably still be getting paid in singles.
But you’re not. Despite the fact that you debase yourselves in new ways every week in the name of survival, you’re not. You’re actually privileged, because you presently own what Benny and I do not - a legitimate path to the Chimera Championships. As Kowloon would tell it, they are yours to claim, and you’ve both certainly made it clear in the days since Honor Bound that you want nothing more than to have them back.
After Benny and I re-emerged on the scene in a Chimera Championship match, Kowloon did his best to mask his indignation, but you are so much more candid, Siberia. You said that Aokigahara sent for us because we took your spot, did you not? Well, you may as well keep the old boy on call, because I promise you that we will be taking the next opportunity as well.
Maybe you’ll take us out after the bell. Maybe I’m being naive and you’ll take us out before the match even begins, but trust that it won’t be enough to deter us. Aokigahara’s methodology exists only a means to an end, and it’s an end that you’ll never be satisfied with.
Yeah, that pair of triple threat wins may not have earned us a Chimera Championship match alone, but I think they opened some otherwise languid eyes. Those victories will be downplayed for the same reason that Zombie Vice Squad and NSFW each have sought to divide us. They dread what happens the day that we do click.”
Fantana slowed his pace to briefly peer into a convenience store window.
“Right now, it’s easier than ever to say that Benny and I don’t have the chemistry. We don’t have the experience. By God, we don’t even have an official name. We aren’t a team; we’re just two bored assholes looking for a new hobby.
That’s an effortless narrative to push, and one that I’m sure Bishop Church will lean on heavily during his enthralling play-by-play commentary - if any of it is picked up amidst Mike McGuire’s contribution to the broadcast, which I can only assume will be a series of rhythmic bleeps, lest VPW lose Thunder Lizards as a sponsor. And I'm sure the Zombies won't let that narrative go unspoken either. It's the same story they've been telling all along, and it'll be the same story they'll continue to tell until we write them a new script.
They think they can divide us so easily, forgetting it was Benny Stevens that refocused me. They thought they could kill Fantanasy, but Brad Stokes was alive to keep the faith.”
Zack lifted Brad’s hefty Fanthology book in his hand.
“I believe now, more than ever, a new chapter is ready to be told. The past is the past and if Zombies Great Outdoors was my death sentence, Blitz 21 was my appeal to your conviction. Brad may be a zealot on a flight of fantasy but he had one thing right, and that is that Zack Fantana is all too stubborn to die.”
Just as Zack was about to give up his search, he caught Brad in his periphery inside a nearby liquor store. Zack rushed inside to find him almost frozen still, staring at the selection on the wine rack.
“Gelson’s wasn’t open,” Brad said defeatedly, rubbing his six month sobriety token in between his fingers almost as if it were a nervous tic.
“You did good, man.”
Zack placed his hand on Brad’s shoulder.
“Let’s go home.”
“Of course, man,” Zack Fantana assured Benny Stevens as they took their seats at the table, but he wasn’t sure at all. Though Brad had always had his back, he had grown more erratic by the day, heading up a death cult and reconstructing his face to look just like Zachariah Krahe, all in the name of Fantanasy. Zack couldn’t possibly imagine what Brad had in store for them at their ‘team meeting’ prior to Blitz 22.
“So what’s this all about?” Zack asked Brad as Benny thumbed through the Outback Steakhouse menu.
Brad stood at the head of the table.
“Well, Zack, I’ve been thinking. You and Benny here had a great showing at Flipping the Script Episode 4 and Blitz 21, it’s true, but this union is brand new and you have a long way to go.”
Zack was surprised to find reason in Brad’s words. He wasn’t wrong. For all the good that Benny and Zack’s respective triple threat wins in Toronto, or ‘sweeps week’ as Zack liked to refer to it, did to massage their egos, it had done little to change the narrative that they weren’t yet a cohesive unit. In fact, it may have only justified that belief in the eyes of the opposition that they didn’t have the chemistry to make good on their potential as a tag team.
“The only way you two can hope to match the tag team chemistry of that of a Zombie Vice Squad or an NSFW is for you, Benny, to accept Fantanasy into your heart.”
Benny smiled a toothy grin.
"That's a good one, Brad."
Brad bristled at the notion of Benny finding humor in his words.
“Well, rules are rules, and you simply cannot compete under the banner of Fantanasy without taking part in the Holy Zackcrament.”
Fantana and Stevens shared a puzzled glance.
“He isn’t.”
“I may have pulled some strings with the front office,” Brad said with an indefensible hubris. “But that means he has to earn his keep.”
Stokes turned to Stevens to address him specifically.
“Let’s not forget Zack Fantana sacrificed his singles career so that your tag team might have everlasting contendership.”
Benny did his best to stifle his laughter, though his best was not quite enough.
“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Fantanasy and drink His blood, you have no fight in you.”
“The crowd says WHAT.”
Benny looked around the room to see everyone taking this all in stride and shook his head.
“Shall we begin?”
"I can't really hear you from down here,” one of the unnamed disciples yelled across the length of the table.
Zack had found it curious that Brad requested a table for 26 despite the fact that there were only 13 of them, but chalked it up to Brad saving room for appeteasers, but now the reality had begun to sink in.
“I SAID, SHALL WE BEGIN?”
The disciples gathered around the table to partake in the communion.
“Take and eat; this is His body.”
Stokes ripped the Bloomin’ Onion to shreds and dispersed it amongst Fantana’s followers. Many partook while Brad began to rummage through his bag.
“Brendan, where is the blood?”
“The what?”
“The blood of Fantana. Did you forget to bring the blood?”
Brendan sheepishly looked at the contents of his grape Fanta can, shrugged, and poured the remaining fluid into the communion cups.
“A bit on the nose, but sure, ham it up, Brendan.”
Brendan only shrugged, stating, “I guess I didn’t realize that subtlety played a part in this.”
“More than you know,” Brad said, opening up a leather bound book entitled “The Fanthology”. “Zack, would you do the honors?”
Brad gestured towards the tray of communion cups. Zack, who was still picking at the Bloomin’ Onion, stirred in his chair uncomfortably.
“Uh, sure.”
Fantana stood up from his chair and picked up the tray of communion cups.
“This is a can of Fantana. Drink from it, all of you.”
Zack downed a cup as the disciples collected their own.
“Oh, that’s very flat.”
“Not unlike our faith before we found Fantana.”
Brad did his best to salvage the message, but he’d lost the room. The disciples voiced their displeasure as they returned their cups to the tray while Benny Stevens 'poured one out for Bobby Franchise'.
"One will betray him before sunset," Brad whispered with his eyes trained on Stevens.
"What's that, Brad?"
“I said, 'Set them back on the tray.’"
Brad began to collect his things off the table.
“Flat soda. Great. Just great, Brendan. I think there’s a Gelson’s down the street. I’ll fix this. I’ll fix it!”
With that, Stokes dashed out the door, leaving his book behind.
“Did he just commune and dash?”
“We need to talk about Brad.”
“You’re damn right we do.”
Brendan nodded at Stevens.
“I did not know that we were going Dutch on this.”
Benny motioned at the waiter to call off his order.
“I’m beginning to think that he may be dangerous.”
“Because he attempted to Jonestown you.”
“No.” The man was briefly taken aback by Zack’s statement. “No, it wasn’t that at all.”
Brendan’s voice lowered to a hush.
“I have evidence that suggests that he may even be your Judas.”
He paused, allowing the moment to breathe.
“You think I’m crazy, right? Brad’s your apostle! Your biggest supporter! I’m not saying he isn’t. He clearly cares about this a lot, maybe too much, and that, you see, is why he failed you. See, in Brad’s haste to honor one mandate of Fantanasy, he abdicated another.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Brendan. Brad wrote the book of Fanthology.”
“And yet…” Brendan collected Brad's Fanthology from the table. “It says here, in Fanteuteronomy 4:23: Be careful that you do not forget the covenant of the Fantanasy that He made with you,” Brendan recited as the other followers chimed in. “Do not make an idol for yourselves in the form of anything He has lost a championship to. For Zack Fantana your Fantanasy is a consuming fire, a jealous god.”
“Clearly that was an oversight. I mean, ‘Fanteuteronomy’; it doesn’t even rhyme,” Zack said with a laugh, perhaps protesting too much.
“If it’s as you say, that Brad wrote the book, then what a curious oversight that would be, in that he not only forsook his own dictum by reconstructing his face to look like that of an old rival, but also someone much more conventionally attractive than you. That’s the dagger.”
“Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say ‘more’,” Fantana said in a dismissive tone.
“Oh, but he is.”
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
Brendan rebuked Zack’s argument with a head shake. Fantana looked around the room in search of support but found none as each of his supposed disciples eluded any eye contact.
“Benny?”
“Gotta give it to Krahe. Man’s got a very strong jawline.”
“Very strong.”
Many of the remaining disciples agreed, emboldened by Benny’s straightforwardness.
“So what exactly are you proposing?" Zack said, moving through the hurt. "That we oust Brad from our denomination?”
“‘Everyone has redeeming qualities.’ Isn’t that what you told me going into Toronto, Siberia? It was a simple concept preceded by anything but: ‘Do not look for your friends in the gutter,’ you said, for ‘they will drag you down with them.’”
As the camera traced Zack’s steps along with him, his face was alit by the street lights in the twilight. In his right hand, he carried Brad’s book and, in his left, a doggy bag full of Bloomin’ Onion.
“A harrowing notion, to be sure, and one I’ve thought long and hard about, to the point where I’m just exhausted. I mean, the mental gymnastics you’ve put yourself through in order to justify your continued loyalty to Kowloon and then deride my association with a Brad Stokes or a Benny Stevens in the very same breath… Well, it all renders your definition of redemption is a bit narrow, don’t you think?”
Zack stopped to take a look around, shouting Brad’s name into the distance, taking care not to look in the actual gutter near his feet, for the sake of optics. Lacking any response, he moved forward down the sidewalk.
“Personally, I believe redemption exists for each of us to claim. If it didn’t, Kowloon would yet be peddling drugs and you’d probably still be getting paid in singles.
But you’re not. Despite the fact that you debase yourselves in new ways every week in the name of survival, you’re not. You’re actually privileged, because you presently own what Benny and I do not - a legitimate path to the Chimera Championships. As Kowloon would tell it, they are yours to claim, and you’ve both certainly made it clear in the days since Honor Bound that you want nothing more than to have them back.
After Benny and I re-emerged on the scene in a Chimera Championship match, Kowloon did his best to mask his indignation, but you are so much more candid, Siberia. You said that Aokigahara sent for us because we took your spot, did you not? Well, you may as well keep the old boy on call, because I promise you that we will be taking the next opportunity as well.
Maybe you’ll take us out after the bell. Maybe I’m being naive and you’ll take us out before the match even begins, but trust that it won’t be enough to deter us. Aokigahara’s methodology exists only a means to an end, and it’s an end that you’ll never be satisfied with.
Yeah, that pair of triple threat wins may not have earned us a Chimera Championship match alone, but I think they opened some otherwise languid eyes. Those victories will be downplayed for the same reason that Zombie Vice Squad and NSFW each have sought to divide us. They dread what happens the day that we do click.”
Fantana slowed his pace to briefly peer into a convenience store window.
“Right now, it’s easier than ever to say that Benny and I don’t have the chemistry. We don’t have the experience. By God, we don’t even have an official name. We aren’t a team; we’re just two bored assholes looking for a new hobby.
That’s an effortless narrative to push, and one that I’m sure Bishop Church will lean on heavily during his enthralling play-by-play commentary - if any of it is picked up amidst Mike McGuire’s contribution to the broadcast, which I can only assume will be a series of rhythmic bleeps, lest VPW lose Thunder Lizards as a sponsor. And I'm sure the Zombies won't let that narrative go unspoken either. It's the same story they've been telling all along, and it'll be the same story they'll continue to tell until we write them a new script.
They think they can divide us so easily, forgetting it was Benny Stevens that refocused me. They thought they could kill Fantanasy, but Brad Stokes was alive to keep the faith.”
Zack lifted Brad’s hefty Fanthology book in his hand.
“I believe now, more than ever, a new chapter is ready to be told. The past is the past and if Zombies Great Outdoors was my death sentence, Blitz 21 was my appeal to your conviction. Brad may be a zealot on a flight of fantasy but he had one thing right, and that is that Zack Fantana is all too stubborn to die.”
Just as Zack was about to give up his search, he caught Brad in his periphery inside a nearby liquor store. Zack rushed inside to find him almost frozen still, staring at the selection on the wine rack.
“Gelson’s wasn’t open,” Brad said defeatedly, rubbing his six month sobriety token in between his fingers almost as if it were a nervous tic.
“You did good, man.”
Zack placed his hand on Brad’s shoulder.
“Let’s go home.”