Sheep Now In The Cryo

“This really isn’t necessary, you guys.”

A lot of words were often said about Bandit behavior, and those six in particular exquisitely summed up the Bandit experience for Coral Avalon.

So, imagine you’re on a boat. To be specific, we’re talking about that boat. “The USS Octane”. Let’s not spend a lot of time talking about the logistics of this inexplicable decommissioned aircraft carrier, we’ve been over it. You’re on this boat, no getting off it now.

This boat had been under the stewardship of its “Captain”, Coral Avalon, since February. In that time, while the “Captain’s” fortunes have risen… the same couldn’t really be said for the Bandits themselves. Jiles still hadn’t put himself back in contention for the Universal championship and main event he so coveted. Bobby’s hot streak was more of a simmer now. Gamble got a blast from the past in Morty’s return.

Most importantly, they’d lost WarGames.

Even though Bobby was the one who took the fall, the Bandits knew exactly who to blame for this failure to eGGsecute their plan. The Bandits knew that they could not change the result of WarGames. So instead of reflecting on themselves, they blamed the Captain.

It happened suddenly.

Coral didn’t even know what he was doing in the captain’s quarters or why he was doing it, but all of a sudden, he was on the deck of the Octane and everybody had cutlasses for some reason. Well, okay, Doozer carried a pool noodle. Don’t worry about it. He probably showed up last when they were handing out cutlasses. At least he showed up at all.

Coral studied all of the eGG Bandits that held cutlasses at him. The whole gang was here. Lunchbox Linus got super extra and carried three cutlasses, one in each hand and one in his teeth. A cutlass was taped to a stump where Cardboard Dan’s arms should’ve been, and he leaned to one side as he was unable to actually carry that weight. Chickentenders held a rapier, just to be contrarian. Bobby’s cutlass curiously looked like a curved baguette and he was salivating at the sight of it. Tony Gamble’s cutlasses looked as though they’d been made from his designer phone books, which boggled Coral’s mind. Even Jiles had a cutlass, its guard in the shape of the T-Shades. Together, they all marched Coral out onto a plank that extended out into the vast, blue ocean.

“Like, super not necessary,” Coral said, and then added as an afterthought, “At all.”

If he sounded calm, it’s only because his brain hadn’t quite grasped the terror of the situation. His brain was having to do a lot of work right now to process even a smidgen of what was going on. There were cutlasses, after all, and those really did a lot of work in cutting through the situation if you catch our meaning.

The blue seas roiled in tumult underneath him, with only a thin plank of wood separating him from a plunge into the deep. One slip, one wrong movement, a little disruption in his footing… and off he’d go into that sea. A fatal fall if ever there was one. Even if the fall didn’t kill him, what lurked underneath those waves certainly will. He’d never resurface.

“You are being charged with crimes against Banditry!” declared Lunchbox Lithuania, as he pointed all three of his cutlasses in Coral’s direction. Coral had no idea how he was even that articulate with one of those cutlasses in his teeth, and suspected that ventriloquism might have been involved.

“Okay, do you know how ridiculous that sounds? Banditry in of itself implies that crimes are being committed all of the time around here.” Coral said.

Lunchbox Lenox gestured threateningly with the cutlasses, bellowing a loud “Sh-shut up!” at Coral.

The other Bandits look around at each other, nodding that Coral had a point. Lunchbox Leysdown-on-Sea can only stammer and stomp on the ground in frustration, because he clearly wanted to look cool in this situation and it wasn’t happening.

If Coral thought that this would diffuse the situation, though, he thought wrong. Bobby stepped forward, baguette sword in hand. “Look, buddy, we all trusted you to bring us victory! I gave up my spot as Captain! I even smiled happily as I did it, knowing that you snubbed me! And you couldn’t get the job done!”

Coral was incredulous at Bobby’s statement. “Hey, what do you mean by ‘snubbed you’? I went to bat for you behind closed doors! You were in WarGames! You even—”

Coral stopped himself before he could ask what exactly Bobby did in WarGames, because he didn’t have the heart to actually call him out for being the one to actually lose WarGames for everyone.

Bobby stared at him like he couldn’t comprehend the notion. Perhaps Coral was getting through to the Bandits that WarGames was not his fault. Perhaps he could convince them that this whole “walking the plank” thing was funny, but not really worth exploring furt—

“Ha.”

In a situation like this, that sound was the brown note. It’s a sound Coral heard plenty of times, both in the presence of Jiles and even when he’s thinking to himself. He hated that sound, especially now. He felt a chill going down his spine and heat in the pit of his stomach as Cancer Jiles moved to block Coral’s path from getting off of the plank.

“Once a Bandit, always a Bandit,” Jiles said, pointing his T-spectacled cutlass at Coral, “But if you’re going to be a Bandit, then fuckin’ act like one.”

Coral stared at him, uncomprehending. Had he not done his part? He was the Golden Bandit, wasn’t he?

“Making your team without consulting us, refusing our help and refusing to help. You belong in the gallows for all of that.”

“Wait, don’t you mean the bri—“

“THE GALLOWS!” emphasized Jiles, who raised his cutlass in the air. The other Bandits followed suit, shouting the same thing. It’s the loudest Coral had ever heard Jiles’ voice. And with a sudden movement, the Superkick of Damocles finally fell, and Coral was launched off of the plank in a full pirouette.

The fall only took seconds, but for Coral Avalon, it was slow motion.

He alternatively saw the sky and the sea as he spun in the air, hurling towards certain doom. He saw the clouds move in strange ways, then spun and saw the deep blue ocean rapidly approaching him.

Wait.

Those aren’t clouds. They’re shee—

SPLASH.

*.*

Annabelle paced, her mind flooded with hatred for where she was and why she was there. Especially since pacing was all she could do.

Everything about the Octane made her uncomfortable. It’d done so since the day she first boarded it with her husband and daughter. It’s why she insisted on staying in hotels or with friends while they were in Europe instead of this boring boat filled with assholes and dipshits.

Yet nothing made her more uncomfortable and anxious than the abomination located deep within its heart.

The cryogenics facility.

The only sounds emanating in this room were the sounds of the facilities themselves and her own heels as she paced. It was a room as frigid as you’d expect, but her arms weren’t bundled up underneath her otherwise unseasonable poncho because of it. It was all so she didn’t die from the anxiety.

After all, they flash froze her husband and there he sat, inert, in a cold metal tube.

How could she not be terrified seeing this?

*.*

Everything was blue. He couldn’t avoid the color no matter which way he looked.

Above him, bright light but still blue. Below him, fathomless dark blue. He could make out shapes beneath him, but the darkness and the blueness swallowed up those shapes like a sheet covering a corpse. The Octane floated above him, but was already shuffling off to their next destination without its former(?) Captain.

A distant pain washed over his body, the kind that he could usually ignore since pain was simply a hard truth of being a professional wrestler. Instead, he marveled at the wonders of the bright blue ocean. There were reefs of his namesake strewn about in great towers that extended far below Coral’s ability to see that far down. Schools of sheep fish swam by, doing sheep fish things like swimming and blubbing and baaing and sweet sheep fish tricks. Most of all, he marveled at the fact that despite being this deep under the water, he wasn’t drowning.

Large patches of bioluminescent light burned in the distance below him. Not enough to pierce the darkness, but enough to catch the eye.

It’s because something passed in front of the light that Coral caught sight of something approaching him. Not a school of fish, nor their sweet sheep fish tricks, but a small contingent of humanoid beings swimming up to him. To Coral’s shock, they were mermen. To Coral’s additional shock, possibly disgust, they were the reverse kind. Fish top, human bottom. Maybe some of that disgust came from the fact that they didn’t wear pants.

Hanging dong, as God intended.

There were seven of them, and they made a V formation in front of Coral. The leader of the group wore a fancy hat, which Coral assumed made him the leader of the bunch.

“Hail and well met, traveler of the surface! The nation of Bandlantis has need of your aid! Long have we sought the aid of an outsider to help save our dying undersea nation! What say you?” the leader asked.

Coral opened his mouth to respond with a declaration that of course he would lend a hand to these wayward mermen in order to save their dying nation, because that’s what a good person would do.

“Blub.”

Oh. Right. He’s deep in the ocean. People didn’t usually talk in the ocean, they usually just gurgled and drowned.

Nevertheless, the mermen took Coral and guided him down to their underwater metropolis. A bustling city, deep under the waves, where mortal men dared not to tread (mostly because of the water pressure). The coral towers that he’d seen earlier were like skyscrapers. Mermen bustled through those coral skyscrapers like salarymen, talking on their clam cellphones to their wives about how bad the grind’s been lately and how the economy is the fucking worst. Big Mollusk had really been hitting people’s pocketbooks lately.

As Coral descended through the city, passing by families of fish traveling by carpools, he marveled at the beauty of it all. The coral-lined streets were illuminated by the bioluminescence he’d seen earlier like street lamps shining in utter darkness. He swore he heard the melodious singing of Samuel E. Wright as he descended further down, but wrote that off as being too on the nose. At the end of his descent, Coral found himself in an auditorium built out of an impossibly huge oyster shell. At its center was a throne carved out of an enormous pearl at its center, and sat upon that was a merman with an oversized crown on his head.

The sea king naturally carried a trident, and had a long flowing white beard like sheep’s wool underneath his floppy fish mouth, which really took the Posiedon-ness out of his appearance.

He spoke in a voice like silk, “I am the Bandlantian King! An army of deadly Mortmen is about to descend upon my kingdom from across the border! You seem like you know your way around a battle, will you aid us in this time of need?”

Coral knew the answer to this, too, familiar as he was with this enemy.

“Blub? Blub-blub-blub, blub!”

Translation: Mortmen? I gotta deck ‘em in the schnozz, buddy!

The Bandlantian King was either excited about this prospect, or confused about Coral’s colorful language. One of the two.

“We shall gather the finest steed in all of Bandlantia for you to meet this foe!”

Later in his life, perhaps to his beloved daughter when she’d be coming of age, Coral would explain how he rode a shark into battle while in a cryogenically induced slumber.

It was going to go great.

*.*

It was going poorly.

The army of Mortmen, with their hideous black foreheads and eyes like blue bat wings, had proven more challenging for Coral to handle than he’d expected. These tall, scaly horrors from the deep were exceedingly dangerous, wearing seaweed armor that somehow looked like a pile of green dicks. They spoke exclusively in coarse, misused language that Coral could barely understand.

Despite this, Coral valiantly swung around a spear while riding on the back of a swift, powerful shark which only communicated by actually saying the word “shark”.

“Blub!”

Oh. Yeah. Still haven’t fixed that aspect of Coral’s experience down here, either.

Coral would be the first to admit that he was out of his element. He belonged in the ring, not swinging a massive spear at all of these dickweed bastard gremlins. Riding into battle on a shark mount wasn’t something he’d dreamed of before, but was certainly dreaming of right now. The battle continued, though, even as the Mortmen were starting to pick off Coral’s escorts.

It was then that Coral was blindsided by the Mortmen’s secret weapon – a missile. A missile that was tipped by a familiar masked face, shouting “FUUUUUUUCK” as it grew closer to Coral and the shark until it made contact at the shark’s side. The shark wailed “SHAAAAAAARK” as it exploded, throwing Coral off of its mount and sending him screaming down into the dark abyss below.

He lost consciousness, unable to remember what happened immediately after the explosion.

*.*

Coral had always told Annabelle about this facility like it was some sort of magical place like Phil Coulson talked about Tahiti. It weirded her out when he came back from that terrible night in Chicago as good as new. No constantly sore forearm from the Homicycle, no cracked rib from the defense against Sage, not even the more recent injuries given to him by those that Annabelle colorfully called “that motherfucker Farthington and his gang of sticky reprobates”.

But the truth of it terrified her. What if something went wrong?

No, wait, fuck that. 

Something has already gone horribly wrong considering where she was and why she was there! Fuck! God dammit!

THUD.

She left an indent in something metal and unimportant when she kicked it in frustration.

Bobby was so taken by surprise that he bobbled the sandwich in his hands the moment she did this, and he was out of breath enough after all of that bobbling that his demand came out as a wheeze, “Don’t… touch… anything!”

Annabelle gestured at the metal and unimportant thing she kicked, and said, “Not even that?”

Bobby sat there with the concern of a man who worried that he’d be out of fine cuisine in the next few minutes than he was about a man – ostensibly a friend and a colleague – freezing to death. He was out of breath from managing to save his sandwich, such that he could only wheeze his indignation, “Anything!”

Annabelle gestured at the piece of metal, speaking through clenched teeth, “It’s not even connected to anything.”

Bobby opened his mouth to argue further, but decided that the sandwich was more interesting.

Then Coral started screaming from inside the pod, and Bobby knew from the furious tone in Belle 2’s voice that his day wasn’t going to get any better.

“MOTHERFUCKER!”

*.*

When he came around, Coral was surrounded by darkness.

A place so dark that he couldn’t see his own hands in front of him or his feet below him. In all directions, he couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t hear anything. Nothing but void here, a starvation for the senses. A chill in the air that he wasn’t sure was merely the cryogenics chambers he half-knew he was supposed to be in before he started dreaming of sheep again.

A long time ago, he felt like he’d seen something exactly like this. So long ago that he’d almost forgotten the feeling. Perhaps he was one of the few people on the planet uniquely familiar with this feeling: that of being on the border.

It dawned on him after a few moments that he’d been here once before after a terrible January night long ago, the most pyrrhic of all victories in his career. He wanted to curse, if only words could escape his non-existent lips.

“Don’t.”

The word tugged at him, pulled him in a direction. He didn’t know whether it pulled him up or down, left or right. But he saw something that stood out in the absolute darkness. A pinprick of light. While it was as small as a dot, its presence burned, expanded, and retracted as it responded to Coral’s confusion.

He’d been at this border before. Had he died again?

“You haven’t.”

The pinprick pulsed as the words met Coral’s disembodied presence. It seemed to grow larger with every pulse. He wondered if he was still dreaming.

“No. The sheep aren’t aware.”

Larger still. If Coral had a face to express with, he might’ve gawked in confusion at the statement. What did that mean?

“You’ll wake soon. But tell me, Coral, are you keeping your promise?”

The question gave Coral pause. Promises?

The growing pinprick began to coalesce into a shape like a silhouette of a person, something feminine. Coral could make out no details of this silhouette, and yet there was something he found familiar about it. It was on the tip of his non-existent tongue.

As the light began to overtake his vision, it hit him. He’d made two important promises in his life. The most recent was his promise to his wife that he’d retire from PRIME at the end of the year, one made by a silly “pinky promise”. The other promise, one that a kid made to his sister long ago, had yet to be fulfilled.

“Emelia?”

*.*

“Who? What?”

Coral was freezing cold when he came to, and he found himself shivering. Just a typical few moments after cryostasis, really. He barely recognized his surroundings, and it took him a few moments before he recognized it as the medical bay of the Octane. His wife stood angrily at one side, biting her lip, wanting so desperately to start yelling at Coral for this latest stunt but having no energy to do so.

Bobby had been the one asking the question, and it took him a few moments before he came to an obvious conclusion, “Wow! Another girl’s name! I didn’t think you’d be cheating on your wife!”

Coral immediately wanted to respond to Bobby’s statement, but his throat was dry and the words didn’t want to come out. But Annabelle reacted to it as calmly and as rationally as she was able to in this situation, which was why she only threw the bedpan just inches from Bobby’s head instead of directly at it. Bobby shrieked and fled as fast as his waddling body would take him from Coral’s wife, because dealing with her wasn’t in his job description.

Coral turned to look at Annabelle, and he wished he hadn’t.

The last time he’d seen that expression on her face, he’d been freshly piledriven by Terrence Kingsley in Vegas and it wasn’t entirely clear in the moments after it happened if Coral would walk again after that. There’s anger and sadness in that expression.

Annabelle closed her eyes, a vain attempt at hiding the tears, and placed her hand on his freezing shoulder, “The wrestling is one thing. I’ve… accepted that you’re an idiot who loves a sport that doesn’t love him back. But... I’m begging you, sweetie, don’t go in that thing again. Please.”

“O-okay…” he managed to croak.

Coral noted later that the cryostasis chamber was working as intended.

Annabelle was not amused.

*.*

Cancer Jiles was minding his own business for a change.

It won’t last, of course. It’s Jiles. It’s his business to be in someone else’s.

For now, though, he’s a very COOL man in the Octane’s mess hall. Being the perpetual motion COOLYMPIAN that he was, any rumors that Cancer Jiles actually needed to eat like every other plebeian on this planet were usually unfounded. He had the eggs, of course.

“Hey.”

Jiles barely even acknowledged that Coral was standing there even as Coral greeted him. Instead, he stared through his T-shades, his fork slowly rising to his mouth as though in slow motion.

It was only when Coral pulled out a set of keys and dangled them in Jiles’ line of sight that the fork stopped moving entirely, and he sat as still as a statue. They weren’t just any old keys, after all. Apart from the egg-shaped decoration on it, the word “CAPTIAN” was crudely scrawled on one of the keys.

Yes, spelled exactly like that.

“We should talk about these before I go cave Morty’s skull in.”