Rex Evans vs Aidan Collins

[Alex Smiley]

Reminder:

- Word limit for Group Stage matches is 1500.
- 1 RP per wrestler per match.
- Deadline: January 13, 2019, at 11:59PM Pacific.

[Tritch]

January 7th, 2019 - NYC, New York - St. Regis New York, My Hotel Room

Since I stepped foot into this business, my least favorite part has been the idea that trash talk is a necessary part of it. I've never understood why making fun of someone's ventures outside the industry or picking on someone for something they did a few weeks prior had become such an integral part of the sport. It's not for me, never has been, never will be. That's the first way in which we differ, Collins.

You've been referred to as a king of trash talk. I've been referred to as an avatar of brutality. I'm not taking anything away from your abilities in the ring, but I think it's telling that throughout your career you've been praised for what you can do on the microphone, while I've been praised for what I'm willing and able to do to a person in the middle of that ring.

I'm not proud of it, but I've ended people's careers. I've made young men bleed through the rips in their masks and disappear from the public eye for years. I've made men be forced into walking with a cane for the rest of their lives. I've beaten, battered and bruised everyone who has stepped into my purview. Even the ones who walk away with their hand risen, they remember what I did to them, and what they had to overcome to get their victory.

Yet you, you take pride in the lyrical words that come out of your mouth on camera. You take pride in your ability to rip someone apart with words, to make them feel less than just by opening your mouth. You take pride in that. Why? How did it help you win all of those championships you've got in your trophy case? What's the point? Was it to get people talking about you? Was it to help people remember you? To make sure they remember you long after you're gone? What I do and have done in the ring do all of those things for me. So, like I said, I've never seen much point to "talking trash."

Anyways. I said that was only the first way in which we differ, because there's one other philosophical difference between you and I, Collins. New York City. It makes me happy to see how much pride you have for your home, for your family. You say the Collins name has been built here for generations, and you're proud of every single one. New York City is in your blood, and you've never lost here.

New York City isn't in my blood, and it's no secret that I've taken plenty of losses here. But that doesn't make the Big Apple any less important to me than it is to you. You see, Collins, I don't have a family that I'm proud of. I don't have a hometown that I would defend with pride and honor. I never looked into my lineage, because my father was a piece of shit and my mother defended him. My family? The Evans Family? It starts with me and my little brother. There is no before us. We're the first generation.

And New York City? It's important to us. It's the city where I was born. Not in the literal sense, but the philosophical sense. In Wisconsin, I was just a burnout. A criminal. A kid with a dream that he was never going to accomplish. But Talon Wilkinson found me in a jail cell and he brought me here, to New York City, and he gave me a new life. I'm glad that you have a lot of honor and respect for your family. It's good. I wish everyone could have it. I wish I would've had that. But we're not all so lucky. Some of us have to build our own legacy. Brick by brick. And that's exactly what I've done.

You're an impressive man, Collins. I remember watching you while I was growing up. You never made the same impact as some of my idols, but you made a lot of great accomplishments. You made something of yourself. Yet I can tell, you feel like you need this tournament to really cement your legacy.

For that, I'm sorry. Sorry that everything you've accomplished in your illustrious career doesn't seem like enough. Sorry that you're going to be stuck with that feeling when I pick you apart with my hands and shoulders this weekend. Sorry that you're going to have to go back home knowing that some punk without any real New York City lineage handed you your first hometown loss with the same move you've been perfecting for over a decade.

I look forward to hearing what sort of trash talk you come up with for me ahead of our match. I just hope you're looking forward to learning first hand what it means to step into the ring with the Avatar of Brutality.

Good luck, Collins.

- Rex Evans.

The room is dimly lit, only by a small desk lamp above where Evans finishes signing his name. He sets the pencil down almost gingerly, before picking up the parchment and reading it over one last time. Satisfied, he folds it into thirds and stuffs it into an envelope that had been sitting nearby. It was addressed to The Experts' Web Development Team. After licking the envelope and sealing it shut, he wrote a small note on the starter cap, explaining that it was to be posted on the website's blog att: Aidan Collins.

With a satisfied huff, the man formerly known as the Code Red Con leaned back in his chair and stared across the dark room. It was clear that he was staring at something, but it was clouded by darkness. As he began to stand up, intent on moving towards it, there was a knock on the door that pulled his attention. A quiet sigh, Rex walked towards the door and carefully opened it, just enough to peek outside.

"What the-" he muttered, before swinging it all the way open to reveal former member of the Experts' Board of Directors and uncle to his child, Talon Wilkinson. "What are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here?" Talon repeats with a bit of sarcasm. "What are you doing here for an entire month without giving me a call?"

The man who gave Rex his first contract barges into the hotel room, flipping on a lightswitch as he does. Rex sighs, head down just inside the door, still holding it open a moment before finally letting it fall closed.

"You know me. Know how... I can be, before matches like these. I thought I'd save you the trouble," Rex mutters, moving to cover up whatever he had been moving towards earlier.

"Didn't think that was you anymore, brother. Thought we got you past all that," Talon states, turning towards Rex as he falls to a seated position at the foot of the bed. There was a pregnant pause after the statement, the two men staring at each other, one awaiting an answer the other awaiting him to figure it out on his own, before Rex finally gave in.

"It's..." another pause. "Benevolence."

"Exactly," Talon states as if he knew the reason the whole time, nodding his head. "That's exactly why you should be doing things differently." Rex tensed the muscles in his cheeks, gritting his teeth as he turned away from his former boss. "No, no. Don't do that cheek and teeth thing to me. You know that shit doesn't work on me, brother."

As Talon climbs to his feet to move closer to Rex, something catches his eyes. Something being roughly covered by a jacket. The something Rex had tried to hide. Talon's brow furrows and he moves instead toward it, pulling off the jacket before Rex can object, revealing the images that had been hanging in Rex's makeshift cell, now pinned to a bulletin board.

"Jesus, Rex," Talon sighed. "You're not in prison anymore. Stop acting like it. You have everything you need to beat Jack in a single shoulder," he moves toward Rex and slaps him twice on the left shoulder as he speaks. "The same goes for Aidan Collins this weekend. But you're not going to beat either of them if you don't crawl out of the cell inside your head."

Talon shakes his head as he turns away, noticing the envelope on the desk. He moves forward and grabs it, turning towards the Brute and holding it up. "I'll drop this off with the mail on my way down. When you're ready to prepare the way you should be preparing, come find me at the ICE BOX."

The former owner of Code Red Wrestling taps the envelope on Rex's spearing shoulder once before walking out the door.

[Aidan Collins]

"I could have been someone"
Well, so could anyone

The Pogues – "Fairytale of New York"

- - -

The camera opens up to the inside of nondescript bar that looks taken from Scorsese's Mean Streets. Aidan Collins sits alone as a bartender pours him Hudson Baby Bourbon over a circular sphere of ice. Aidan nods in approval, slipping the bartender a ten-dollar bill. After taking a small sip of the liquor, Aidan turns to speak to the camera.

"At a high school not too far away from here, a teacher once said something that has stuck with me to this day..." Aidan coughs to clear his voice and then speaks with a nasally, high-pitched Brooklyn accent to resemble his former instructor. "You're not whatcha think yuh are, you're not what others think yuh are, you're whatcha think others think yuh are."

Aidan smiles, reminiscing about his time as a student in an inner-city school.

"I've come to learn that Mrs. Pepito stole that quote from Charles Cooley, but the concept is interesting. With this perspective, you're defined by how you view yourself in the world...and it even suggests a slight hint of a self-fulfilling prophecy: you are in this world who you let yourself be.

"My question for Rex Evans is a simple one... How do you think you're perceived?"

Aidan takes a breath and stirs his drink with its straw, so that the ice inside spins on an axis like a globe. Seemingly bored with his drink, he pushes it slightly away from himself.

"Rex and I have never met in active competition, but I think it's fair to say that he's worked hard to build a pretty specific reputation. He's the guy who did hard time, the former inmate. I mean shit, he reminds us of that every single opportunity he gets," Aidan says with his eyebrows raised mockingly. "I think it's very clear who Rex Evans wants us to believe that he's a specific type of person. Just look at the man's nicknames: The Brute, The Loose Cannon...The Avatar of Brutality!"

Aidan smirks.

"Now, I won't ever hate on someone for having a ton of nicknames—we all know that I have a buttload of nicknames myself. Blizzard, The Rebel, Mr. 100, ECWF's Devil, King Infinity... These names all represent the different places I've been in my career. They're diverse and have different meanings to different people in different places.

"With Rex's nicknames, it's clear that he wants world to know that he's one dangerous dude."

Aidan sits up in his seat and runs his hand through his hair.

"The thing is... what you show to the world can be deceiving."

The camera begins to pan out, as Aidan gets up from his stool. As he walks with the camera following, it becomes clear that we are actually not in a bar. Rather, we're on a movie set. Behind Aidan, the film crew begins to dissemble the area, since they no longer need to sustain the charade of this being an actual bar.

"Even though the looking-glass perspective I posited in this beginning of this promo is interesting, I have to say that I see the world in a different way. I don't think we're defined by the way we think others perceive us. That's just a social construct that means nothing. I espouse a more concrete interpretation of identity. I believe that a person's character is defined by what they've done. This is what I would call an evidence based approach."

Aidan stops walking. We can now see that the set was built outside overlooking Manhattan from across the East River. With the bright lights of the NYC skyline shining behind him in the night sky, Aidan continues.

"The fact of the matter is that I don't give a fuck who Rex wants us to think he is. He can talk about his time in prison all he wants, sharing tales about how he and Andy Dufresne used to dunk on skinheads out in the courtyard during pickup basketball games. Who knows, maybe he even stabbed a rapist whittled-down toothbrush and then brought him back to life using John Coffey's powers from The Green Mile.

"The reality is that we're not playing by prison rules when it comes to the Experts tournament and I'm sure as fuck not scared by a guy who willingly calls himself the Avatar of Brutality. As far as I'm concerned, he should have left that name in Cell Block 99."

Aidan slightly pulls on the collar of his leather jacket.

"If Rex was such a bad ass, he wouldn't need to spend so much time trying to convince us that he is one. Instead, he'd just describe the history of his career and it'd be self-evident. If he was truly someone to be feared, wouldn't need to call himself Petey Powder Keg or Dr. Homicide or whatever goofy shit he has planned for his next name.

"Though, that's not really an option, because there's nothing left of the places where Rex Evans had success in professional wrestling. Marketing brutality to other tryhards is all this fucking guy has these days!"

Aidan's eyes light up, as they normally do when he goes for an opponent's jugular.

"I'm being serious here...Rex loves to peddle rip-off Tapout shirts with his BRUTAL APPAREL band. He produces shitty metalcore albums on UNSTOPPABLE RECORDS... and I'm sure it won't be long before he pitches a tattoo shop called INSENSITIVE INK to Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. He's Elon Musk if Elon Musk listened to Five Finger Death Punch, bathed in AXE body spray, and knew nothing about engineering."

Aidan bites down on his bottom lip and speaks superciliously.

"You see, this tormented soul is not to be messed with. You piss him off and he'll ban you from the webstore where he sells his horrible merch!" Aidan proclaims enthusiastically.

"If Rex Evans wants to run Brutal Enterprises and make some money exploiting children who shop at Hot Topic, that's fine with me. Run your racket, brother...but let me remind you who the fuck I am and then you can decide who the real person to be feared here is..."

Aidan postures up. He's always loved listing his credentials.

"While Rex Evans is a Hall of Famer in CRW, a dead federation, I'm a Hall of Famer in the XWF, which has been in operation for 20 years. I've held World Titles in WGWF, WWH, and ECWF... all federations that are still currently operated. I'm still on my grind in OCW as well, so while Rex is selling wallets with chains, I'm putting asses in seats all across the nation and maintaining a career as an active competitor.

"So, really. Who should be feared here? Is it the guy who is leveraging this tournament to sell t-shirts? Or is it the guy who's been styling on this industry for sixteen years and is still at the top of his game today?"

Aidan opens his arms, as though he's expecting a response from the viewing audience.

"I'm going to go ahead and guess that you didn't say it's the guy who got bitch-smacked by Mark Mania in his first match of this tournament..."

With that line, Aidan seems prepared to take this promo home. He takes a second to compose himself, before speaking earnestly.

"I'm in the fortunate position of sitting two points clear of everyone else in the New York group of Super 6, but I'm not about to ease up. I will be defending my home turf in this match and I will be defending my reputation. I see the light at the end of the Holland Tunnel, and I see that it points toward the Elimination Chamber in Hayward..."

Aidan looks over his shoulder to take in one last view of the city, before addressing the camera for a final time.

"I'm not overlooking Rex Evans. I just see through him... It's time to punch my ticket and put a bow on Group New York."

"Truth Until Death."

The lights on the set flip off to give one last clear look at the New York City skyline, before the camera fades to black.