Post by Roberto Verona on Aug 28, 2016 13:13:22 GMT
So here we are, the inevitable clash of two titans which has been brewing ever since Metamorphosis way back at the turn of the year. The concluding chapter in a long history which will tell the tale of the scorned friend, betrayed by his brother, and the evil opportunist who spurned his companion for his own ends.
It’s a classic story, one as old as time, but as usual the passage of time has eroded the foundations of this myth, obscuring many of the truths which would ultimately alter our comprehension of its true nature.
Leaving only those who lived it to expose the truth behind the legends.
Face reality, Jake, despite your best efforts in recent months you’re nothing more than a hypocrite.
I am a product of your own moral code, the culmination of your sins. To denounce me is to embrace the flaws of your own ego, to accept that everything you are, everything you’ve built your career on to this point is constructed upon a false premise. You cannot stand there after years of pronouncing the virtues of doing anything it takes to emerge victorious and then complain when somebody embraces your ideology more effectively then you are capable of doing.
You were slain, not by a monster whose cruelty befell the Imperial Wrestling Federation out of pure and simple bad luck, you were laid low by a monster of your own creation.
Now you have the audacity to try and distance yourself from that responsibility, to complain about the consequences of your own complicity? All because it backfired on you and deprived you of your hopes and dreams?
Cut the shit, Jake, in life you cannot have your cake and eat it.
You’ve built up this deluded little fantasy world where, for whatever reason, you feel as though you have been deprived of something you’re owed, that everything you did, everything you worked hard to achieve was culminating in this one moment of glory. The moment you could finally stand atop the world and declare yourself the best of the best, to finally prove you are the equal to those who came before you. This was going to be the moment you could stand hand in hand with your greatest love in one hand and the object of your career long desire in the other.
Yet, reality is rarely as comfortable as the facile delusions we all comfort ourselves with.
You’re not owed a God damn thing, I don’t care how hard you’ve worked for this, I don’t care how much the strength of your matrimonial bond has elevated your belief in yourself to conquer any height and I sure as hell don’t care about your sense of entitlement corrupting you into believing that you walked out of Night of the Immortals without something that was divinely ordained to yourself based on a toxic cocktail of self-importance, arrogance and broken dreams.
You and I, and even Mike, stood in that ring under one very simple understanding.
We would all do whatever it took to walk out of there as the Imperial champion, no matter the consequences to ourselves, to our competitors or to any bonds of friendship. None of us were under any sort of illusion, we all knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into yet apparently only one of us walked out with buyer’s remorse.
Because that’s all this is, Jake. You’re happy to play by a certain set of rules, but God forbid they backfire on you and deprive you of your self-appointed “destiny”. You’re nothing more than a sore loser, happy to bend the rules to your own benefit but suddenly you don the cloak of the company’s moral arbiter when your own principles result in failure.
I don’t know what is more pathetic, the fact you can’t accept that I out smarted you or the fact that you’d immediately allow your wife to play the victim card in a board room for you.
You, and the honey that was no doubt poured into your ear from the usual suspect, constructed this image of glory in such fine detail in your mind that you couldn’t possibly entertain the idea of defeat, to the extent that you’re now quite willing to play the victim and construct this deluded façade around you of the noble hero who was vanquished by the dastardly villain, wallowing in the false platitudes and sympathies of an audience who would have never entertained you with pity previously.
You’re not a hero.
You’re just a weathered old crook who got scammed by a fellow criminal. Everything you’ve spewed since Night of the Immortals has been nothing short of the old crime lord demanding sympathy from his victims because he lost his turf to a younger sleaze ball. The fact you got beaten by me, somebody the audience loves to despise, doesn’t absolve you of your sins and it sure and hell doesn’t entitle you to an ounce of sympathy.
At Night of the Immortals all your chickens came home to roost, you experienced the pain each and every one of your myriad of victims over the years have felt when they’ve tasted the sting of your dishonesty, scheming and mind games. You stared into the abyss and the reality of your own behaviour finally dawned on you and after all those years of pontificating about the survival of the fittest, of benefitting at the expense of others, you decided it was all wrong.
You finally realised you couldn’t stand to look at what was staring back at you in the mirror.
You’ve always prided yourself on being a role model for your children, yet you’ve always played the role of the knave. Perhaps it was because they were too young to really understand, perhaps it was the relics of a time before you chose to bring life into this world and fell head over heels in love. Regardless, you’ve always been two sides of a coin, on the one hand you’re the loving husband and father who wasn’t to do right by his family, whilst on the other you’re a dirty, lying, cheating warrior willing to do anything to win, regardless of the consequences for other people.
It’s time you decided what you want to be.
If you want to be the father they deserve, the noble paragon of virtue they can look up to, then embrace that role, Jake, but don’t you fucking dare walk down to that ring declaring that you’re prepared to do anything only to cry like a little bitch when I am just prepared to go further than you are.
I don’t want to hear the patronising whines of your wife in the ears of her superiors, I don’t want to see you moping in the middle of my ring and I sure as hell don’t want to hear your empty protestations about falling victim to your own hubris.
Heroes don’t make excuses.
You want to be a role model? You want to be somebody your own children, and others, can look up to? You want to earn the right to call yourself a champion?
Then it’s time to start acting like one. No more relying on Kathy to fight your battles in a corporate minefield. No more demands for sympathy for the consequences of your own actions. No more living by the sword and then complaining when you die upon it.
Walk down that ramp and be the hero they deserve, not the fraud you’ve been selling to the masses for weeks.
Because the simple fact is that the longer you wanted to toe the line and refuse to embrace one side of you are over the other you’ll always been trapped at a crossroads whilst those of us with a truer sense of purpose forge further and further ahead. You’ll never surpass your equals, you’ll never join us at the table we so justifiably eat at, you’ll simply always be on the outside looking in.
Pick a side, Jake, and commit.
You owe it to yourself and those you care about to be more than a bitter old man who refused to accept the consequences of his own actions and instead chose to apportion blame upon everybody else, never truly achieving what you’re capable of.
The question is, are you man enough to finally embrace your destiny?
Or will you be back peddling more excuses when I force you to get on your knees and grovel to me like the unbridled hypocrite you’ve become?
Time may be eternal Jake, but yours is up.
Choose.
It’s a classic story, one as old as time, but as usual the passage of time has eroded the foundations of this myth, obscuring many of the truths which would ultimately alter our comprehension of its true nature.
Leaving only those who lived it to expose the truth behind the legends.
Face reality, Jake, despite your best efforts in recent months you’re nothing more than a hypocrite.
I am a product of your own moral code, the culmination of your sins. To denounce me is to embrace the flaws of your own ego, to accept that everything you are, everything you’ve built your career on to this point is constructed upon a false premise. You cannot stand there after years of pronouncing the virtues of doing anything it takes to emerge victorious and then complain when somebody embraces your ideology more effectively then you are capable of doing.
You were slain, not by a monster whose cruelty befell the Imperial Wrestling Federation out of pure and simple bad luck, you were laid low by a monster of your own creation.
Now you have the audacity to try and distance yourself from that responsibility, to complain about the consequences of your own complicity? All because it backfired on you and deprived you of your hopes and dreams?
Cut the shit, Jake, in life you cannot have your cake and eat it.
You’ve built up this deluded little fantasy world where, for whatever reason, you feel as though you have been deprived of something you’re owed, that everything you did, everything you worked hard to achieve was culminating in this one moment of glory. The moment you could finally stand atop the world and declare yourself the best of the best, to finally prove you are the equal to those who came before you. This was going to be the moment you could stand hand in hand with your greatest love in one hand and the object of your career long desire in the other.
Yet, reality is rarely as comfortable as the facile delusions we all comfort ourselves with.
You’re not owed a God damn thing, I don’t care how hard you’ve worked for this, I don’t care how much the strength of your matrimonial bond has elevated your belief in yourself to conquer any height and I sure as hell don’t care about your sense of entitlement corrupting you into believing that you walked out of Night of the Immortals without something that was divinely ordained to yourself based on a toxic cocktail of self-importance, arrogance and broken dreams.
You and I, and even Mike, stood in that ring under one very simple understanding.
We would all do whatever it took to walk out of there as the Imperial champion, no matter the consequences to ourselves, to our competitors or to any bonds of friendship. None of us were under any sort of illusion, we all knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into yet apparently only one of us walked out with buyer’s remorse.
Because that’s all this is, Jake. You’re happy to play by a certain set of rules, but God forbid they backfire on you and deprive you of your self-appointed “destiny”. You’re nothing more than a sore loser, happy to bend the rules to your own benefit but suddenly you don the cloak of the company’s moral arbiter when your own principles result in failure.
I don’t know what is more pathetic, the fact you can’t accept that I out smarted you or the fact that you’d immediately allow your wife to play the victim card in a board room for you.
You, and the honey that was no doubt poured into your ear from the usual suspect, constructed this image of glory in such fine detail in your mind that you couldn’t possibly entertain the idea of defeat, to the extent that you’re now quite willing to play the victim and construct this deluded façade around you of the noble hero who was vanquished by the dastardly villain, wallowing in the false platitudes and sympathies of an audience who would have never entertained you with pity previously.
You’re not a hero.
You’re just a weathered old crook who got scammed by a fellow criminal. Everything you’ve spewed since Night of the Immortals has been nothing short of the old crime lord demanding sympathy from his victims because he lost his turf to a younger sleaze ball. The fact you got beaten by me, somebody the audience loves to despise, doesn’t absolve you of your sins and it sure and hell doesn’t entitle you to an ounce of sympathy.
At Night of the Immortals all your chickens came home to roost, you experienced the pain each and every one of your myriad of victims over the years have felt when they’ve tasted the sting of your dishonesty, scheming and mind games. You stared into the abyss and the reality of your own behaviour finally dawned on you and after all those years of pontificating about the survival of the fittest, of benefitting at the expense of others, you decided it was all wrong.
You finally realised you couldn’t stand to look at what was staring back at you in the mirror.
You’ve always prided yourself on being a role model for your children, yet you’ve always played the role of the knave. Perhaps it was because they were too young to really understand, perhaps it was the relics of a time before you chose to bring life into this world and fell head over heels in love. Regardless, you’ve always been two sides of a coin, on the one hand you’re the loving husband and father who wasn’t to do right by his family, whilst on the other you’re a dirty, lying, cheating warrior willing to do anything to win, regardless of the consequences for other people.
It’s time you decided what you want to be.
If you want to be the father they deserve, the noble paragon of virtue they can look up to, then embrace that role, Jake, but don’t you fucking dare walk down to that ring declaring that you’re prepared to do anything only to cry like a little bitch when I am just prepared to go further than you are.
I don’t want to hear the patronising whines of your wife in the ears of her superiors, I don’t want to see you moping in the middle of my ring and I sure as hell don’t want to hear your empty protestations about falling victim to your own hubris.
Heroes don’t make excuses.
You want to be a role model? You want to be somebody your own children, and others, can look up to? You want to earn the right to call yourself a champion?
Then it’s time to start acting like one. No more relying on Kathy to fight your battles in a corporate minefield. No more demands for sympathy for the consequences of your own actions. No more living by the sword and then complaining when you die upon it.
Walk down that ramp and be the hero they deserve, not the fraud you’ve been selling to the masses for weeks.
Because the simple fact is that the longer you wanted to toe the line and refuse to embrace one side of you are over the other you’ll always been trapped at a crossroads whilst those of us with a truer sense of purpose forge further and further ahead. You’ll never surpass your equals, you’ll never join us at the table we so justifiably eat at, you’ll simply always be on the outside looking in.
Pick a side, Jake, and commit.
You owe it to yourself and those you care about to be more than a bitter old man who refused to accept the consequences of his own actions and instead chose to apportion blame upon everybody else, never truly achieving what you’re capable of.
The question is, are you man enough to finally embrace your destiny?
Or will you be back peddling more excuses when I force you to get on your knees and grovel to me like the unbridled hypocrite you’ve become?
Time may be eternal Jake, but yours is up.
Choose.
{ Our scene opens in the dimly lit abode of Roberto Verona, a large fire filling the room with an orange glow which melts into the darkness of the night. Hannah and Verona sit side by side, glasses of wine in their hand on an ornate sofa, as the noise of the fire crackling and the television blur into a mass of unintelligible jargon. Verona takes a sip as Hannah places her glass down, turn to look up at Roberto. }
Hannah Reed: So, you’re really going to go ahead with this?
{ Verona turns to look at her. }
Roberto Verona: Go ahead with what?
Hannah Reed: This weekend.
Roberto Verona: Absolutely.
Hannah Reed: I still don’t understand why this is necessary, to go to this extent…
Roberto Verona: It’s the only way. This would never truly end without the shackles being firmly removed, it’d simply continue in perpetuity and I think we can both agree that neither of us wants to be locked in a blood feud with the Conways for the rest of our careers. Say whatever you want about them but, they can both hold a grudge, without a definitive conclusion, regardless of the result, they’d never let this lie. Even if one did, the other would cling to their hatred and we’d be inevitably stood right where we are now again in the future.
{ Hannah sighs. }
Hannah Reed: I’m just… tired. Tired of fighting with our friends. We don’t socialise any more, we don’t spend any time with one another, it’s just bitter stares when we’re forced to interact. We’re hardly in the privileged position of being able to dispense with real friends, even if we wade through many false ones.
Roberto Verona: Do you honestly think I don’t mourn what we all had?
Hannah Reed: That wasn’t quite what I was implying just…
Roberto Verona: What?
Hannah Reed: I don’t see what all of this is ultimately going to accomplish, is there really a bigger picture beyond Jake’s pride and your stubbornness?
Roberto Verona: Of course there is, you of all people should know that.
Hannah Reed: Then please enlighten me. I’ve always understood that you act in certain ways to accomplish noble ends, but I can’t wrap my head around jeopardising our friendships like this. I always assumed that even for you there were simply some things that were not worth sacrificing.
Roberto Verona: And there aren’t, which is why I have to do this. I’m not willing to sacrifice my friend’s future for a mere moment in the sun.
Hannah Reed: What do you mean?
Roberto Verona: Underneath everything, all Jake truly wants to be is somebody his children can be proud of. Yet, he never has been. He’s lied, he’s cheated, all under the false illusion that what he was doing was to provide for his family. He’s taken money to do the dirty work nobody else would do, always fooling himself into believing that it was justifiable because in the end it kept his family in the lifestyle they have become accustomed to.
{ Verona pauses, taking a sip of his wine. }
Roberto Verona: To truly be the man he wants to be for them, for Kathy, he needs to break the habits of a lifetime. He needs to embrace his own ability divorced from the nefarious elements of our business, he needs to risk jeopardising their immediate future for their long term. He has fooled himself into believing the only way to truly provide for them is to always be the hired hand, but the reality is he’s always been capable enough of being their hero and giving them everything in life he never had. Somebody simply needed to make him realise it.
Hannah Reed: So this is all some twisted act of altruism?
Roberto Verona: I had to cut of his supply, to make him desperate. After everything we’ve both done, nobody else in IWF was ever going to touch him, I knew that. I’m not going to pretend what I did at Night of the Immortals was all part of some sort of grand plan, but based on his reaction everything since certainly has been. The only way Jake was ever going to change was if he was desperate… angry. Ever since I screwed him, he burned his bridges and now he has no choice but to actively do something about it. He can’t fall back into his old habits any more, the only way to allow him to be everything he truly wants to be was to create the one monster he could never defeat using the tactics he has built his career upon.
{ Verona looks at Hannah. }
Roberto Verona: He was never going to win a dirty war against me, he simply lacks the resources regardless of any individual victories he may accomplish… but by becoming a symbol… by becoming the hero his children really deserve, he could make a statement, regardless of the outcome this week. Something no amount of money could really silence, something they could be proud of, something that people would remember. He could finally see that he can achieve everything he desires by believing in himself, rather than relying on the deep pockets of others.
{ Hannah looks at Verona, pausing as she mulls things over in her mind. }
Hannah Reed: But what if…
Roberto Verona: What if what?
Hannah Reed: What if he doesn’t embrace this new role you’ve tried so hard to push him towards? What if you win?
Roberto Verona: Then I will have to appeal to his pride. Why do you think I chose the stipulation I did? It’s an insurance policy. There’s not a hope in hell that Jake Conway is going to get on his knees and grovel in that ring, if force doesn’t work, then humiliation will have to suffice.
Hannah Reed: You understand that this means he’s going to hurt you this weekend… if this is the sort of fire you’re trying to light in him, he’s going to go any length to…
{ Hannah stops as tears begin to well in her eyes. }
Roberto Verona: It’s a sacrifice I’ve always been willing to make. I’m not afraid of pain, I’m not afraid to put my body on the line as collateral to truly help a friend. To everybody else I’m just a monster, the root of all evil and you and I may understand it’s always been a pantomime act but the truth is… if I just sat back and watched my friend never be the man he wants to be, if I just let him continue to be a mercenary… then I’d really be a monster.
{ Roberto Verona leans down and kisses Hannah on the forehead affectionately, holding her close to him. }
Roberto Verona: And that is something I will never allow myself to be.
Well howdy there pardner.