Find Your Way

[Shione "SURGE" Ōshima]

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My pages are empty. The ink in my pen remains where I have left it, prepared for use and yet unused. I read my opened book and find only empty questions begging to be answered in whatever way they might.

It's in the nature of a blank page to not care what fills it. But I do care. I care more than I could ever put into words, even in my native tongue; let alone in the language I still strive to grasp. I certainly care too much to begin opening the growing stack of envelopes carried from my home in the United States to my transient existence here, in Europe...

Is it fear I feel, or anticipation? I'm stalked by shadows, beset by monsters seemingly borne from them.

What is it they say about he who fights monsters? It doesn't matter to me. They say everything about he, and nothing about she; besides, I have no intention to stare into that abyss. One can gaze too long upon their intentions without ever choosing to act. It's too easy to become disinclined from any and all action, to wait and linger lest the worst occur.

If you want to avoid the worst, you just have to be the best.

What's 'best', you ask? Sometimes it's the worst wearing a pretty mask, spinning honeyed words beyond an upstanding veil. Sometimes there's not even a disguise; you're an ugly, hideous monster acting with the finest and most noble of motivations. Men don't fight monsters. Men are monsters. The sooner one admits this to oneself, the sooner one becomes a creature capable of mounting a change for the better. For the best. Does it matter what is moral, what is legal, or what so many others deem just? No. What matters is what's right. Make that judgement yourself, or stand idle. Sit lazy.

The truth I choose: that the sooner darkness is embraced, the sooner light comes clean. Why else would I elect to plunge into the nether regions of this world, to seek the worst that I might be absolved?

Anticipation, then. After every step I hunger for the next. After every hill, for a valley. After every valley, a hill.


~Thursday, 6th September, 11:49pm
Rue du Pas de la Mule, Paris~

The street is dark and, perhaps, full of terrors; but is there any line to be fairly drawn between one man's fear and another's delight? For every scuffle in a gloomy alley, there's a ripple of laughter pealing through the corona around a splinter-strewn door. Shione passes through this dreamworld as one inured, the smile calm upon lips unpainted. The faint hollowing about her hazel eyes is a sign of physical weariness, that hours before she poured heart and soul into defeating a man she respects and admires. There's no dull emotional echo in the brightness of that gaze, however; she's here with reason and purpose. Without trepidation. Without fear.

She reaches a door, nondescript, all but indiscernable from the others, if not for the faint stencilling etched beside the rusted number plate. Shione lifts a hand, tracing it as she recalls words offered over the phone an hour before. The path to this portal has been at once long, arduous, and near-immediate. The location, a single call to ascertain...

A lifetime in the requiring. Has this always been her path? She breathes a muted laugh, and raps upon the door.

?: Ça va?

A breath answers her in turn, awash with smoky cognac.

Shione: <I'm looking for an angel.>

The door opens a crack further, spilling smoke and light onto the street. It's raining; she hadn't even noticed until now, lifting a hand to push back damp hair, tipping her gaze to try and catch a glimpse beyond the threshold.

?: You will find only demons here, madame.

Shione: <What's a demon, but an angel too honest for heaven?>

A chuckle greets her response, tweaking a smile upon her lips as the doorway begins to open. The figure beyond is still framed in shadow, but she sees a dusty suit about a slender frame, and the silhouette of an expected mask above. Damien, he's called, sometimes Damien the Greek... most infamously, Damien le Singe.

Damien: What, indeed. Come in from the rain; this night is too foul for the business we have.

She enters, and immediately has to recover her breath. The air is thick, the cloying scent of pipe-smoke and burning cloves mingling with the heady liquor enjoyed by those within. From the entrance, a stairwell winds down, the tendrils of candle flames visible beneath her feet – where the trail continues beneath the street. Beneath the civilized world.

Shione: <I thought our business was foul enough. You're making this too easy.>

Le Singe merely smiles behind his grotesque masque.

Damien: You've already passed the gates. You know the path you're on. Do you realize it's the only path?

His gesture leads her to descend almost against her will – "no," she has to remind herself, "I have chosen this, this is the way I must go" – and it's with another intake of dizzying breath that she regains her composure.

Shione: <There's only ever one path. I always move forward, even in retreat. I depart to come again. Harder. Stronger.>

Damien: Ah, oui. You are the 'Crashing Wave', madame.

He follows behind her, and yet somehow the flamboyant gesturing of his skinny arms sends them past her; it's as if he wraps his slim frame about her in the near-dark of his abode. How much of what she knows is true, she wonders, and how many rumours surrounding this mysterious figure are a fabrication... how much is theatre?

Shione: <I am Shione.>

Damien: But to others you are Miss Ōshima. A signature on a page. A name upon a contract.

He pauses, savouring the lull as the air falls silent but for their descent. Soon they stand before a door, but before Shione can reach for it, the lithe and seductive figure of her 'host' slips past her flank, his arm pushing hers aside. His eyes, beady in the shadows from behind that monkey mask, remain fixated upon her.

Damien: 'Shione' is a thing waiting to die.

The door creaks open, halting upon hinges half-rusted, the noise winding through the mockery within his words. Is it mock, or threat? She's as unsure as she is of what lies beyond; even as she sees the first of two dozen figures, clad much like Damien himself, arranged in two neat, silent rows along the dank walls of the chamber that greets her.

Rolling her shoulders, Shione takes one step – then another – until she finds herself in the midst of these nightmare sentinels, willing them away with the very courage of her soul. She turns to face le Singe, finding him already upon her. He's taller than she is, angling her chin and nose upward to match his stare.

Shione: <She will not die, as she has no shame for what she is. I've had this conversation before. Let's get to the point.>

Damien: All things in time. Do you realize, madame, you are speaking in Japanese?

The revelation pulls her up short, hazel eyes blinking – twice, in rapid succession – as the curiously flat features of the primate ease toward her, flanked on both sides by a staggered plane of identical faces. She's immediately defensive, and immediately lost as to the truth of the last few minutes. It's all she can do to blame the writhing, musky fog about them, grasping for the one straw like to save her; that she's being misled. That she must be right.

Shione: <Why wouldn't I be?>

Damien: Because I am not. I do not, in fact. How, then, do I keep responding?

She can see those slender arms gesturing openly, expressing an honest query to which she can only shake her head.

Shione: <You're trying to confuse me. It won't work.>

Damien: You are already confused. This is our reality. You have left behind any rules, madame, but those we make.

He smiles, that twisted apparition, and somehow it's with a primate's lips. Twin rows of faces join him in an horrific mirroring of that action, mask-mouths bending organically upward. Shione swears she can hear laughter, the subdued tittering of an audience eager to maintain politas in spite of their shared amusement. She resists a near-inescapable urge to reach for her temporal artery, as it begins to pulse rapidly.

Shione: <You can't fool me into believing your tricks are anything but what they are.>

Like some twisted puppet, le Singe throws back his head in a silent mockery oflaughter. The gesture hides a backstep, his figure retreating into the gloom betwixt his identical peers. From here he peers at her, limbs hanging curiously loose at his side, slender figure slumping within the dusty folds of his formal garb.

Damien: Perhaps you are the one losing your grip, madame, losing sight of the line between fantasy and reality... you are in the business of falsehood, oui? An actor in a play, and nothing more. But the stage on which you play... it is ours. You face the darkness without a light to see by; and yet you think to control us?

Shione: <I think to control my own destiny, and I will. You'll give me the information I need, and I'll be on my way.>

Her voice is strained now, a fact of which Shione is too keenly aware.

Damien: Perhaps. First, we play our game. Let the bones decide, madame.

Le Singe speaks as he always has; in so calm a tone he almost seems unreal. The situation is absurb and maddening. He sounds so collected, so sane that she begins to doubt her own sanity anew, even as she follows his invitation to turn. Before her, at the end of the smiling rows of monkey-faced men, there lies an altar of sorts. An antique table upon which sits a shallow bowl, numbers etched upon its inner surface, and a set of dice – made, she knows, from human knucklebones – sprawled in readiness beside a delicate silver rolling box.

She's about to reply when her neck-hairs bristle. Le Singe is suddenly there at the table, gesturing with a languid, silk-gloved hand toward the apparatus. He's no longer smiling; a fact that re-ignites her resolve.

Shione: <No. I already told you, I don't want your games.>

She finds herself at the table with him, hands pressing to either side of that bowl, hazel eyes aflame and boring into his own; dully, inhumanly gray. Le Singe doesn't so much as flinch. Shione no longer cares.

Shione: <I found my way here, and I've the power to keep forging that way by force. You know this as well as I do. Resistance is no stumbling block – at best you slow me down, at worst you just make me stronger and more determined. Make this easy. Tell me what I need to know and stand aside; I'll resolve this with those whose business it is.>

There's a pause, in which those characterless eyes slowly shutter and re-open. The monkey's lips twitch.

Damien: You wouldn't prefer to phone a friend?

Ōshima releases a sharp breath through her nose, a warning snort, pressing her hands to the table until it begins to creak beneath her weight. At the fringes of her vision she glimpses motion as every figure in le Singe's line-up shifts to set their lifeless stare upon her. He merely waves one hand in a dismissive, shooing gesture.

Damien: Trials lie before you, and you seek to sweep them aside, oui? I meet you in the middle, madame. A wager – to the victor the spoils he, or she, seeks. We roll the bones but once. We take what we earn, and we part ways.

He indicates the table below invitingly. Shione doesn't spare it a second glance.

Shione: <Fine. But I've already won. You're afraid.>

Le Singe looks down and lets out another chuckle, one hand tracing idly across the tabletop as the other reaches to nudge the knucklebone-dice into their container.

Damien: I am not afraid, madame...

Ōshima straightens and leans back into her heels. Fifty expressionless gray eyes follow her, remaining still as the ivories dance a clacking foxtrot against smooth silver. The smoke in the air seems to press more tightly around the little gaming table, but as Shione folds her arms she becomes as immovable and unbreakable as granite.

Shione: You should be. Roll your bones... monsieur.

~Friday, 7th September, 2:13am
Room K+K Hotel Cayré, Boulevard Raspail, Paris~

Shione picks up her pen, and she writes...

"Pure as emptiness
Burning hazel, the devil
Falls before the tide.

My pages are no longer empty."

=============================
APW Presents: Shione "SURGE" Ōshima
Find Your Way
=============================

The scene opens in a large, elliptical chamber carved from sandstone. A slow-whirling spiral of the camera lens indicates the intricate artwork upon the walls, all hewn from the smoothed rock; scenes from Greek myth are most apparent, but cast in the same torchlight are other, more surprising depictions. A beautiful woman holding a rose, resplendent upon a distinctly British theatre stage... A man of many faces and costumes – including a nice tuxedo – each flowing into the other... A cowboy locked in bitter embrace with a leering, dark-skinned Spartan... A nude, toothless man interrupting a classical wrestling match between one bald, and one masked...

Suddenly the camera pans sharply downward, still rotating as it centres within bird's eye view a single figure crouched on the floor. We fall to earth, that figure now much larger than it appeared, and familiar to the fans and workers of APW. It's A.C. Smith, cast in stone; stripped of his ring gear, manhood only artfully concealed by the placement of kneeling limbs, with a fist pressed to his forehead. A crown perches atop his head, gleaming silver beset by sapphires and amethysts.

"Last week, I gave thanks to my opponent – to the Big Apple Man..."

Shione's voice interrupts the scene, an upward nudge of the viewfinder revealing her stood in an alcove above and behind 'Smith' , hands upon her hips and that grin in place. The ornate alcove is lit by candles carefully placed to create a corona at its head, setting flame to the dyed streaks in Shione's hair.

"And I meant it."

There's a flicker of motion, and only a blurred outline of the woman is left behind. She unfolds now from a position directly behind Smith; from kneeling like he was, to standing behind and then beside him as she takes a swaying sidestep, hands back upon her hips amd grin diminished to a smile. She tips her head in a nod-cum-bow to the Xtreme champion.

"I also meant what I said about his title; it was never about that. It is... not my colour."

Grinning anew, she turns to the camera as the light catches those gemstones just-so. Blues and purples indeed clash with what she's wearing; an archaic tribute to her ring-garb, bronze armour plates hung with plaited straw and saffron-dyed strips of cloth. In place of a crown, she wears a simple strip of matching bronze across her brow.

"But in defeating a man I idolize; one of the many who attracted me to this place, where I compete with the strongest men and women in the entire world, I found exactly what I needed. What I always wanted. I have proven myself to you all, shown the strength of my arm and the power within my spirit. Shown, by my sweat and my blood, exactly what the Crashing Wave is capable of. From hard-fought defeat I came again, unrelenting, only stronger for my trials. It was a moment of triumph, and for it I thank not only the Big Apple Man; but all of you. My fans, and otherwise, you were all there to witness and to cheer. You make my life worthwhile. You make it a thing of wealth and beauty."

She bows her head again, this time to camera, before her expression takes a twist for the distasteful.

"But someone had to ruin that, to steal a perfect moment and make it his. Make it ugly and sinful. Nobody knows this man better than A.C. Smith; nobody has beaten him back so many times, defeated him like the whelp he is..."

She gestures to the statue beside her, still frowning, and then the camera zooms to highlight Shione alone against the landscape of torch-lit carvings lining Smith's chamber. A patch of darkness is visible just off her left shoulder.

"So it is down to me to bar his way. Leon the Virus. Leon the Sick. You see me here, at the centre of this labyrinth, because every man and woman knows that you are not good enough for the challenge you seek. But it is no secret, is it? That you are 'not good'? That you worship the Devil and do terrible things to the injured and the weak..."

Trailing off, Shione draws and releases a breath, then begins to walk toward the darkness, swiftly revealed to be a passage of more rough-hewn stone, lit only sporadically by flickering flame.

"Perhaps it is still a secret only to you, Sickly Lion, that you are the weak one. Not just 'not good', but unskilled. Untalented. That is why this place exists; to teach you the lesson you must learn, if you are ever to become better."

As she speaks, Shione moves through the winding corridor until she reaches another entrance. Carved pillars flank the way into the next chamber, and between them – above her head as she enters – hangs a frieze depicting a winged woman with an outflung wreath in her left hand. A legend reads, in Greek: Νίκη.

"Here are those you have defeated, Leon Roberts, because do not mistake me..."

She turns just inside the entrance, baring her teeth in a half-grin as one hand finds a hip and the other gestures to each side of her armour-clad body. Two statues stand beyond the pillared entryway. On Shione's right, a chiselled man of prideful poise, and to her left one with bulkier torso and dreadlocked hair. APW stalwarts should be able to recognize both "Coldblood" Dirk and "The Welsh Dragon" Dan White as they eternally posture at one another.

"You have a list of conquests that stands, for now, longer than my own. These two? Forgotten by most. Defeated by many. Two steps along your path to this coming night, two steps on your way to the Crashing Wave. Both these men doubtless said things much like I do; that they are better, that they can and will defeat you. Perhaps even that they deserve that crown you so crave... and there is the difference, Sickly Lion. Unlike them; unlike you..."

Shione takes a few slow steps backward, raising her arms and coming to a standstill as the hallway widens out.

"I do not believe I am entitled. I do not deserve. I earn. But you still have accomplishments, don't you?"

The tilt of her head is rather condescending, tempered by the glint of mischief in hazel eyes as the Crashing Wave turns and walks into the wider area. Smoothly the camera pans to show each side. First, in a brightly lit alcove, a white marble figure stands statuesque and smiling; a perfect rendition of Amy Zing. Immediately opposing her, an artistically twisted Niobe Martin in black marble – though she's less immediately recognizable, her face cruelly scratched and ripped into crumbling, visceral flakes. Shione stands between them with expression sobered and gaze downcast.

"Two women who could not overcome you. Respected for their skills. Each powerful, in their way."

Her eyes lift, meeting the lens as she seems to harden, becoming more resolved – the edge of steel overcoming sobriety. And then she breaks out that irrepressible grin... somehow only seeming more confident for it.

"You have fought them, Leon Roberts, and you won – but you have not fought me! How many people have you faced and beaten? Enough, maybe. But how many of those have beaten A.C. Smith? How many have done what you cannot?"

Shrugging her shoulders, Shione turns upon her heel and strides briskly to the end of the hall, passing several other statues along the way – their features masked by the rapidity of the movement – until she closes upon a sharp corner. Something can be glimpsed stretching out from the wall, and as she gets closer it's clear there's another alcove there, from which two stony hands are frantically grasping. A shift in angle reveals the occupant as Robina Hood, the stone visage of the Iron Maiden locked in a furious scream, her contorting limbs only held back by the form of chains about her wrists, her ankles and her neck. Shione spares her a grin and a wave before turning back to the camera.

"Have you even beaten her? Could you? I bet you'd like to..."

She leans in close, her lips coming together in a demure pout, the usually-electric tomboy forming the picture of a fragile young innocent tracing the line of her bronze bustier with a fingertip. Closer she comes, easing against the viewer...

And then igniting the flame in those hazel eyes once more, lips turning upward and teeth baring.

"I bet you'd love to. But!"

Suddenly she's spinning and striding away from Robina's scrabbling claws, off down the sandstone passage, armour gleaming in the flickering torchlight as the camera follows her as best it can, the voice of the Crashing Wave echoing back as she makes her way through the remains of this very personal labyrinth.

"The powers that be have decided, instead, you face the woman whose moment you ruined, whose opponent you insulted when you treated him like another to be taken lightly – to be beaten down and sacrificed to your childish cause. At every step, you expect your path to end. After every victory, you expect the crown to be placed on your head. You are a strong and powerful man, Leon Roberts, and this just makes you all the weaker. It makes you careless. It makes you stupid."

After one final loop, the corridor of carved sandstone widens to admit the light of day. The brightness is stunning compared to the torchlight of the cavern, the viewfinder taking a moment to adjust. When it does, it reveals Shione now standing upon an outcrop of stone, a narrow set of steps winding up the cliffside above – and before her, the glistening swell of the ocean. Waves crash at her feet, and the wind stirs her flame-struck hair as she stares askance.

"If you have yet to figure it out, this journey I have walked is not my own; it is yours. My battle against A.C. Smith was my story – as this one, this week, is yours. The tragedy is that you will never know it. You will see me as something you can crush, then move along, another stepping stone to something beyond you. Today, I have shown you the echoes of your beginning, and the ending you will never chance to reach. Now, I will show you why."

As she speaks, the roar of the ocean heightens beneath her voice. At the culmination it explodes into a deafening collision of wave on rock, the descending wave only visible at the last – as it comes crashing down upon Shione, whose head lifts and eyes close, arms opening in the last instant as though to embrace this titanic display of nature's power.

When it washes away, leaving the stone platform slick with angry foam, Shione stands soaked and smiling.

"In this labyrinth, I am the minotaur. And you are no hero."

The smile doesn't disappear, but she turns and steps forward, leaning in close to whisper her next four words:

"You are a sacrifice. So do what you can to prepare. Roll the bones, cast a die, search for ripples in your teacup, or murder a goat for Satan... in the end, it does not matter. You are playing my game, by my rules. The Crashing Wave always finds her mark, Sickly Lion; and this Thursday, in the birthplace of civilization, you are what I hunt."

She grins, and the vision fades to black as another wave comes crashing down...