PRELUDE
A small sphere hovers in space around an unsuspecting blue planet.
Assessment complete. Planet and it’s occupants designated next participants and inclusion into War World. Integration begins-- transformation and transport pylons launched.
PROLOGUE – BLOOD BROTHERS
A beat up SUV ambled down a dirt covered road in the beginnings of dusk falling over the ever green state of Washington. Two men in their early twenties travel back home near the small tourist stop of Diablo, where city people filter in to get overpriced snacks before hiking to Diablo Lake, two hours outside of Seattle; Diablo, ominous yet accurate word play considering what would happen next. The image is frozen in time for a narration event.
Let me tell you about the ending of the world, or at least some background info to set up the fall, particularly our history, my Brother and I's, though it must be said, we are not blood brothers but like our fathers before us, closer then if we were. Let’s set up the story if you will.
My name is Dominique Daniels though in the ACS (Armored Combat Sports) arena they call me The Mongoose though we will get to that in a bit. Next to me in the SUV is my aforementioned brother, Mason Drake, called The Crow in the ACS. This story though starts a couple decades before and it really should be known before we move on with the whole, you know, ending of the world bit.
It begins with our fathers. Their lives ran a lot of the same parallels, even before they met, which may indicate why they connected so well when they finally did so, both, only children, who were loners by nature. They joined the U.S. Army right out of high school, both doing three tours before retiring from service and by that time they were brothers if not by blood then by spirit. Though we are jumping spaces I think, getting to the bone without the meat. They didn’t actually lay eyes on each other until the beginning of their second tour when both were invited into the illustrious Rangers, one of the most recognized and premiere special forces units in the world.
From the moment they met during training they hit it off and that only went deeper and wider the further they went, having each other’s back every step of the way. They both met their future wives on a blind double date and both got married together, a double wedding. They became fathers six months apart, I being the first born, Mason following six months later. When we were only a few years old they decided family was more important then army life and both turned down a fourth tour.
That’s when tragedy struck; only two weeks after retirement my parents decided to go celebrate their new life and plans, left me with Mason’s parents and went out on the town. They were both killed on the way to pick me up by a drunk driver who had been celebrating a bit too much. I was four at the time. To this day I still have trouble remembering them beyond vagaries and pop up out of focus flash backs to a moment or eyes, soft words. I was immediately adopted by Mason’s parents Jason and Marcy Drake, who then became my parents or at least the only ones I’ve ever really known and grew up calling them mom and pops and Mason my brother.
You would think after all that hardcore sorrow I had traumatized my way through at that point, the rest would be live happily ever after koom by ya moments in abundance, and a general sense of joy filtered in through fate, but life, I have learned the hard way, is rarely gentle.
If I was being honest though, there were a lot of beautiful moments, memories, the best being Mason and I were as close as our fathers ever were. We had inherited their loner personas though unlike them we found kindred spirits in each other from the get go. We both loved all the same things, video games, RPGS, MMOS and from an early age Pops got us into his and according to him, my real father’s biggest passion which was the collecting and use of old school weapons, from flanged maces to broadswords, spears, the list goes on and on. The barn of the ranch Pops bought and moved us to in the State of Washington was converted into a weapons display and training area. Till the day he died he hunted down and collected every type of middle age weapon you could find or paid to have them hand crafted for him and from the day we could walk and talk he put them in our hands and trained us in them though of course Mason and I had our preferences and they were in no way similar.
Looking back at it now one would think he was prescient but in reality it was something him and my father had a shared interest in and it was his way of honoring my Father’s memory. You probably think I kind of ran over the comment about “till the day he died”, skipped past it with little reverence, but it is most likely cause it still hurts thinking about it, even a decade later.
When I hit twelve and Mason was eleven, Pops died from cancer. The last year leading up to it was a downward spiral of his health and chemo. It was a hard year for us all followed by a harder one after his passing. Mom made the best of it, even though anyone with eyes could see the haggard and bruised spirit in her flesh, yet still she was a pillar of stone and strength, which was status quo for her, as tough as tough spells itself, even though at our age we didn’t appreciate it, only took it for granted. We would regret that soon enough but we are talking about the past not what’s coming up. We will get to that swan jig, song, some last two step before the last lilt of music dies.
So back to Mom again, she refused to let us sulk, let us spiral, so that’s when she mentioned LARP (Live Action Role Playing), and I jumped at it, dragging the rest of us. It was an avenue with which to let us deal with our pain, and believe it or not, it worked.
We fell hard into it, deep end, out of the gate, showing up as beginning teens in our custom fit armor, courtesy of Pops, and our blunted training weapons to every event Seattle put on, which was a lot as LARP had become a major pastime for many. Mom drove us to everyone of them, dressing herself as a middle ages matron of harmony, with snacks for us and every other kid she ran into. I think it helped her heal as much as us.
The days passed and we grew and LARP held our attention for a couple years before we became restless and wanting something more, something heavier, something to give our burgeoning intensity focus in.
We had developed a reputation even among the nerds and dreamers as a bit too into the role play, meaning we hurt a few kids in our mock fights. Time to move on and LARP ended up being the gateway and the road to those dreams finding concrete, introduced us to yea, you guessed it, ACS, The Mongoose and The Crow.
ACS had started catching on less then a decade before, comparable to when the UFC first started, low level events that struggled to get televised on small independent cable channels but like the UFC did before, it swiftly blew up. People really enjoyed watching people bang on each other with swords and hammers. It turned into an industry.
It had grown so much so that they started a junior division and a woman’s professional league though that had only just started when Mason and I flew into the junior division, and I’m not kidding when I say we flew into it.
We won the junior championships the first year we were in it which covered ages 14 to 18, and Mom was there to cheer us on every step of the way. Years earlier she had sold off a lot of the land Pops had purchased to a government preservationist committee who wanted to keep it all natural or at least until some different politician deemed otherwise. They had paid far above market value, enough so that she could cover our life expenses plus fly us out to different competitions around the country, though in coach, nothing fancy. The purses you could win in juniors was very small, a few hundred dollars, not even enough to cover the cost of food, hotels and flights but Mom said not a word and kept inspiring and motivating us as only she could, fixing our armor and replacing weapons when we outgrew or broke them.
And winning and winning was what we did, so our travel was constant, and our growing notoriety, even more so. Imagine two 14 yr olds taking out multiple groups of 17 and 18 yr olds over and over again.
I should mention they had different modes of competitions, single combat, group combat that consisted of seven people to each side and then duos. I’m pretty sure you can guess the only ones we even thought to compete in, duos.
Mason and I either fought back to back or not at all, like our fathers before us. In fact, it was in the second year of us competing, both now at the age of fifteen, we won our second championship in a row and had taken on our monikers, The Mongoose and The Crow.
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One might ask how it was that we were called such, well it had to do with our fighting styles and a boy who was eighteen named Felix who gave it to us after we beat him and his partner Jake in the finals.
How do I describe our fighting styles, hmm….There was an endless amount of different ones in competition though most tended towards some version of heavy armor, plate and such or some thick chainmail or ringmail.
There were a myriad of rules and safety regulations in the sport but a lot of room to wiggle as far as styles. All vital areas needed to be covered in some kind of armor. Full headgear was mandatory. Even so you could find a rainbow’s worth of weapons being wielded, lot of sword and shield or spear and shield, a few two handed weapons, polearms, the list was long.
You couldn’t use bows of any type, too difficult to keep someone from getting hurt but they did allow throwing weapons though very few ever chose to do so, except us.
My brother and I had decided to go a different direction from the word jump, no shock there, we had always moved to our very own jazz drummer. Speed, ferocity and skill were our fandango, our dance of dragons.
Within a couple years of Pops training us we gravitated towards what fit our fighting style and personalities, with his oversight of course.
He was brilliant in assessing strengths and weaknesses and helping us grow, not to mention he could use pretty much every damn weapon he owned. I still miss him.
We fine tuned it even more as we started competing. Mason used a custom, shortened version of a glaive, with the staff only being about 5 feet long, instead of the normal 6 or 7, topped by a 15 inch blade, edged curve on one side, for slashing, narrowing into a spear point, the other ended in a metal cap that would normally be a spike if it was a real weapon and a real fight.
The shortened length allowed him to add more acrobatic moves into his attacks and boy did he. My brother was bottled lightning, fast as a serpent with that thing. Some might think he should of then been named Viper or something but the thing is he was known for flanking people after I had their attention, hitting them in their blind spots and so the name Crow stuck, picking over the battlefield like a scavenger, a very tricky scavenger.
He also used javelins, always had three of them in a specially designed quiver on his back that kept them locked in place as he flitted across the battlefield.
We both wore only leather for armor with me adding in some steel plates here and there and metal bracers to deflect blows as I was a front liner.
I am not quite as fast as my brother but I am still pretty damn quick and offset the speed difference with being bigger and stronger then he was, and where he is hitting at angles I am rushing straight up the middle. I keep them occupied while my brother finds weaknesses.
To match my style Pops had talked me into using his favorite weapons of all time, the Viking one handed axe and seax.
He showed me how to use the axe to hook shields, hook feet, hell, even hook heads and throw my enemies off balance and ripe for a throat cut or various other hits with the seax, which to those that don’t know, is basically a short sword, edged on one side tapering to a thrusting point. I also carried four small throwing axes in double loops across my chest.
I fought with my axe in my right hand and seax in the left in a reverse grip laying against my forearm with the edge out. I was called a mongoose cause I was usually taking on heavily armored opponents with no fear and no restraint and no mercy.
So there is the nickname origin story out of the way, now where was I, oh yes, our history leading to the aforementioned ending of everything.
We won every championship but one leading up to us turning 19 and qualifying for the professional league. The one we lost was when Mason had his arm broken in the semi’s, which we still won, and he was game to go but I rejected the idea, his health far more important, and when he argued, Mom weighed in and that was the end of that.
Still, what we had been able to accomplish in the Juniors and the insane growth and popularity of the ACS, which saw the Women’s league flourish and the men’s start bringing in major television sponsors, kicked off the beginning of agents and journalists tracking us down in a deluge of messages.
Mom was already our manager and she was judicious in who she allowed to interview us. Regardless of caution, our names were more and more showing up in teen gossip columns and even some back pages of major news outlets. ACS was starting to rise up to the big time, though nowhere near the UFC, yet.
Mom decided, and we agreed, to take a year off before entering the professional leagues much to the chagrin of almost everyone involved in the ACS.
They already had promos of our lives and climbing through juniors with video cuts from our championship fights running on their websites along with a bevy of articles and analysts throwing editorials all over the internet on our meteoric rise and potential in the pros.
We held to our guns against the immense pressure of the ACS attempting to coerce us into starting our professional careers and were glad to do so, we needed a break.
We spent the year enjoying ourselves as a family, BBQ’s, celebrating Pops, my brother and I training like we had never trained before. We wanted to be ready when we went against the big boys.
Mom kept us grounded and feeling loved. She always had. After Pops passing Mom had made us her life and her heart, helping us fulfill our dreams. She was our Mom, our best friend, our supporter and a fount of unconditional love. And of course I found Bulldozer, haha, good old Bulldozer.
I had been wanting a pot belly pig since I was a kid and saw one at a LARP event, so cute, and yes, a man can still be manly and say something is so cute, it’s in the manual, addendum 1023452, statute of manliness, trust me, it’s there.
Mom kept saying they were too busy to take care of one but during our sabbatical I finally wormed my way into her softie side, and she said yes. In retrospect I should of probably not bought him from some strange guy off the internet who met me in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer but what can I say, I was 20 at the time and really really wanted a pot belly pig.
We ended up naming him Bulldozer right off the bat.
He was super affectionate and super sweet but holy hell if he saw food nothing got in his way, least of all us. He would clamber, jump, or, as his name suggests, bulldoze his way through any obstacle to get to food.
He was only 16.5 lbs at the time and yet his sheer stubbornness won him to his goal every single damn time. Mom, my brother and I even turned it into a game putting a myriad of objects and deterrents in his way, even ourselves, and nothing, and I mean nothing, would slow him down.
Anyone ever try to hold back a squirming pig trying to get somewhere, no fun at all. He fit right in with our off the wall family and everyone loved him, though he rarely left my side when I was home, and slept with me in bed, cuddling up to my back.
I’ve talked about how connected and similar my brother and I are but not about our differences. I touched about our physical differences but let me elaborate. We were both about 6’2” give or take a half an inch which was a constant argument since we were kids as to who was taller. It involved a lot of us bothering Mom to measure while we took turns wearing different shoes to cheat. Mom always neutrally said we were the same height and her Switzerland stance never set well with either one of us.
The main difference was body type. I was a bigger build, wider shoulders, broader chest and bigger legs, short, blonde/sandy hair. I came in at about 220 while Mason was a slender build, though long limbed, and only hit about 185, with longer dark hair.
Anyone that thought my brother was weak though would find out quickly his slender frame was all taut muscle, and as I mentioned before, quick as a snake.
Now on to the bigger divides, the differences in our personalities. Don’t get me wrong, we share a lot in common, hence why we are and have always been so close; a natural loner mentality, an insatiable curiosity and love of delving deep into things, comics, games, rpgs, and of course our intense passion for ACS and combat instilled in us by Pops and the memory of my Father.
Our differences in personalities though did have some major variance. I was much more social and verbose, had a much easier time meeting new people and navigating crowds.
My brother spoke only rarely and with a quiet intensity that would sometimes spook people and didn’t do well in gatherings at all outside of our Mom and us.
He had a dry sarcastic humor while I could roar with laughter. The most you got out of him was a smirk which is when I knew he found something hilarious.
Our Mom was into astrology and said it was cause I was a Leo and he was an Aquarius, fixed fire to fixed air or something. My eyes took on a vague quality when she started in with her, stars are the road map to souls, spiel, just nodding my head and walking away.
Alright, now to the real meat, our long awaited, much hyped, debut. It was disappointing to say the least. We struggled, hard, won a lot of the different tournaments but also lost quite a bit as well, not the easy cake walk everyone had projected after our storm through juniors.
The problem was we now faced grown men, many of whom were ex-military.
The first year we made it to the championship tournament but only to the quarter finals before we were destroyed by the pair that went on to win the whole thing.
It was made up of a team of two ex marines, one of whom also won the singles title and had won both the year before, Jimmy Long. They called him The Wall, full plate, a heavy shield and longsword, and his partner, Scott Silva, heavy chain and a lucern hammer, who well, they called the hammer, both of them in their early thirties who had been competing for 3 years after two tours in the marines.
The Wall and The Hammer, our new adversaries. They were both assholes on top of it, full of themselves, and talked down to everyone they got near. Not one person had good things to say about them.
The ACS like any good corporation spun them as the unbeatable, ruthless villains.
During the season they had put three different people into the hospital in serious condition, though had only been red flagged once for excessive violence on downed opponents.
Everyone knew they fought dirty and the ACS didn’t seem to care. They were rating whores and these guys made the ratings go through the roof, and for a company that was still trying to rise to match the international success that the UFC enjoyed, they were a gold mine.
Another year went by and we found our feet against the competition, winning far more then we lost, even made it the finals, and lost, again, to the same guys. My brother and I vowed it would be the last time.
We trained harder then we ever had before from sun up to sun down. Mom and Bulldozer, our support group, cheered us on as we went --Bulldozer, now there’s a story.
We were in the finals again and the national championships were in Seattle this year, and our local fan support was insane. We had become celebrities, at least in the Pacific Northwest. Tomorrow we would be facing The Wall and The Hammer and it would be different then it had been. We would teach those assholes some respect.
We were on our way back home to rest for the big match the next day and here we are, back to the moment, back to the ending of the world after a long and utter over indulgent spewing of what led us here. Narration event ends, time resumes.