The $300,000 Fight-A-Thon! [Round Two: Toyetic!]

"No."

T.J., his vocabulary evidently too limited to express his displeasure, attempted to emote by scrunching his face up comically, every line of his face contorting into a thousand gibbering frowns. The Coach stared him down, waiting for one of his more predictable protegés to cycle back into the Bargaining phase.

"But my other character didn't even die right! You took him away! It's not fair!"

The first-time grandmaster sighed. The little guy had a point, and he wasn't willing to disclose his real reasons for denying him--he was worried. With his burgeoning audience exposure and certain disreputable organizations watching him, breaking the format seemed and unconscionable act of arrogance. He satisfied himself with the rationalization that the greater good would be to deny T.J. now and reward him with all the battlers he wanted once the orphanage reopened.

Instead he said, "How am I supposed to know that you aren't just going to throw this one away, too? Or that everyone else won't start killing their own contestants and bringing in their own, hmm?"

"Because I promise. Anyway, no one's going to come up with a battler better than Hashtag-One, so they won't even try?" A little upturn at the end of that last sentence betrayed T.J.'s insincerity and sent him spiralling out of Bargaining into rote Depression.

"I don't want to hear any more about this," snapped the Coach. "What does 'No' mean?"

"'No' is meaningless to our kind," recited T.J., brightening up a bit. "Ultimate power is the final alchemy, the quicksilver that turns 'no' into 'yes.'"

"'No' means 'no,'" countered the Coach, inviolably, the force of the assertion shaking saints out of the sky and sinners out of the earth. Several clusters of intrauniversal chaos-stuff, culled by the introduction of "no" into local physics, surrendered their cosmic inscrutability and formed universes. T.J. sulked and stormed out.

* * * * *

Linc intercepted him on the sidewalk, still dabbing surreptitiously at his remaining tears. "How's it feel?" he asked.

T.J. leaned in towards Linc's ear. After double-checking to make sure nobody was around, he whispered, "Crappy." Linc shuddered at the profanity.

"Why should we care what he says?" spat Linc. "He isn't even our teacher anymore. This battle was our idea in the first place."

T.J. shrugged weakly. Linc hadn't heard the Coach's tone back there; he had. "I guess," he offered.

"Why don't you just put the new guy in before Coach notices? He's basically a toy anyway, he'll fit right in to the new place."

T.J. glanced over his shoulder and beyond infinite infinities to the city of Toyetic. "I don't think I could take him that far," he admitted. Semi-ultimate power was just a dumb rock.

"How's this?" asked Linc, cheering up. He pulled out his skateboard. "I give us a ride over there, and we share the character."

T.J. growled. He wasn't a fan of the S-word. Still, it wasn't like he had a skateboard.

The F-word weighed on the orphan's tongue for a good half minute before he forced it out his lips. "Ffffffffffffffiiiiiiiiiiiiine."

* * * * *

Having heard the stories of what happened when battle hosts got careless, they decided not to restore Brawler to consciousness at all before taking off. Instead they left a note.

HER ARE THE PEPLE POEPLE YOU HAVE TO KIL

SCIINCE DRAGON GIRL

IRONJAW (SMELL)

TINAS CHETING LADY WITH ARMUR

CA CAT

EVIL CLOK

THANKS

YOUR COOL

When Cockfighter Brawlmite came to, this note was taped to his head.

Show Content

SpoilerUsername: SRA

Name: Cockfighter Brawlmite
(Acceptable nicknames include: Mite; Brawler; Fighter; #1; 1; One; the First)

Pronoun: He
(It reminds most people of a male. It probably won’t breed with anything, though.)

Race: genetically-engineered Cock-Fighter

Text color: [COLOR="#800080"]His light green would be hard to read… how about poisonous purple[/COLOR]

Appearance: Cockfighter Brawlmite stands at roughly two feet tall, with an extra few inches added by his antennae, though they are bent downward near the top. His facial features are very frog-like, though his eyes are a solid bright green. His skin is yellow, and shines a bit in a way that could suggest a layer of slime. His limbs are nearly-perfect tubes, with no definable joints: they just bend in a direction similar to human arms and legs. Atop his head and a ways down his back are oily black spots of various sizes, and he has something of an undeveloped stump where you might expect a tail. His feet are just circular pads, a bit like suction cups, and his hands are rather more human-like—albeit with no nails and some slight padding between fingers. He seems to be slightly potbellied, and those antennae I mentioned are black and segmented, as well as somewhat prehensile. Basically, they bend on joints which are much more clearly-defined than those in his limbs and they have a general tendency to just flick up and down obnoxiously. The inside of his mouth, as well as his tongue, is bright pink.

Personality: Brawler is sentient, capable of learning and processing information as well as developing his own opinions and forming strategies and/or goals. His grasp of the future has developed a good bit since his birth—he should probably understand the rules and ramifications of this contest pretty well. He was genetically designed to enjoy fighting and have no real trouble with killing or dying (it wouldn’t be intentional, but accidents happen). What sets him apart from most of his brethren, whose programming is basically the same, is that he’s actually “grown out of it” in a sense. After seeing too many of his lab-produced friends and rivals and relations get put down because they lost their commercial appeal or grew past their prime or suffered an injury, Mite has become uncomfortable with the concept of death—seeing the eyes of his companions lose their shine has been quite chilling in the past. These two fears he’s developed in spite of his programming—killing and dying—are constantly forcing to find a middle ground in his course of action. On one hand, fear of death has created a fierce determination to make sure every fight just made him more popular: if fair-weather fans were common, he’ll pick opponents he’s sure he can win against, train hard, and try harder. When everyone wants to root for an underdog, he’ll dodge a fight or ten before choosing a monster of an opponent to battle and training to the fullest to beat it—though just barely, if he can. Understanding what crowds want has allowed him to survive much longer than he should have—he’s managed to stay alive even when ‘cute creatures with combination-animal traits’ were frowned upon, and people preferred eldritch monstrosities or killer robots or political satire. He’s gotten a bit sloppy recently knowing that he’s amassed a cult of adoring fans who would throw a fit if he was ever put down—some more because he’s “The Original” more than anything else. Whatever their reason is, he doesn’t exactly care, of course, since it is what keeps him alive.
His slightly newer fear of killing is something he tries quite hard to suppress, going so far as covering it up with a colder demeanor towards his fellow fighters. He spends more time in secluded preparation rooms and cages or on the shoulders of humans than he does interacting with his fellows. After all—he wouldn’t want to make the mistake of refusing to kill while killing and ruthlessness was in. Sometimes, though, he lets it slip through: those rare moments when he’ll be about to deal a finishing blow and see the fear in his opponent’s eyes and the bloodlust of the audience and the memories of lethal injections in his head and he would think, thin is wrong. He would falter, and no matter how hard he tried, he always feared that those moments would be noticed, despite the lack of announcers calling attention to it.
Overall, Brawler is a survivor with a bit of an ego and more than enough fear to cancel it out. This ego only shows when he tries extra-ruthlessly to avoid being cloned or further manipulated. He’s seen it happen to others, and though none of them seemed to hate it quite so much, Mite simply can’t accept the idea of there being more than one of him. He’s willing to do really anything to stay who he is: he once killed his agent and almost succeeded in making it seem as though he died of a natural cause. I’ll emphasize almost though, because after that his agents have been pretty wary, and the cloning of him is done in secret, non-consensually, and all gene-alteration has been minor to the point of going unnoticed by Brawler when he wakes up slightly different. In private, Brawler regrets the murder thoroughly.
It should be noted that if Brawler acts kind, helpful, altruistic, or selfless, it’s really just because he believes that looks better for the audience: a hero is always cheered before a villain. Even in private, he’s paranoid that there are people watching him, though he’s usually right about that.

Weapons: Brawler very rarely uses weapons at all, and when he does it’s usually because armed combat is the latest fad. It usually doesn’t last long. Either way, he has wielded a good few resized bones, resized shovels, resized swords, resized boxing gloves, and other items that he is very unlikely to find in these arenas. He is currently carrying nothing on his person.

Abilities: Well he isn’t very strong, and his speed is mediocre, but he does possess a limited ability to adhere to surfaces and he can jump pretty high. His tongue is pretty extendable, and though he’s used it as a whip in the past, he doubts he’ll ever do it again—as in, ever. He could probably use it to grab on to ledges, though it would never support the weight of somebody else grabbing on to him. He’s pretty small and light. This, however, does provide the advantage of being able to fit into small spaces when they’re available. In the arenas they usually weren’t, though, so it might not occur to him quickly. But it’s become pretty clear that he’s a clever little bastard, so there’s that. Despite having done it before, he’d probably be averse to killing a human, though most of the contestants here are mutant enough for that to probably prove a non-issue. Some of his opponents looked as damn close to human as you can get without really being human. He understands English, though he cannot speak it, and communicates with various croaks and facial expressions which are surprisingly easy to understand. Originally, he had the power to curl up into a ball and roll around (look, people think it’s cute when their monsters can do that)—but he absolutely hated it. He didn’t get dizzy or anything, he just found it pretty disorienting and uncontrollable, and it impeded his ability to move. For a few years he did it every so often as a fan service, but he was glad when people stopped asking for it. At some point, some genetic engineers probably took that ability away from him… and if he knew about that, he probably wouldn’t mind if he wasn’t so paranoid.
Other than that, he’s very bouncy: he and the first few generations were supposed to provide kid-friendly entertainment, so they couldn’t just let him get all bloody and broken when somebody punched his lights out. As a result, he’s much more durable to force, though he’d have a very different reaction to stabbing. See, his creators realized he needed organs, and they needed to make sure that they wouldn’t spill all over the ground if Brawler was cut open. The solution has to do with a very special chemical within him called OGA (stands for Our Greatest Accident, and we’ll get to why later). When a deep enough gash has been cut into his torso-area, OGA kicks in and his innards melt into a clear fluid that was deemed less likely to give people nightmares. This actually makes it more likely for such cuts to prove fatal. He also is designed to be able to remain pretty lucid while in pain, which might aid him in surviving a bit longer. Also, if the gash is really deep, his vitals are probably going to either combust or explode. Both outcomes would kill him; the only difference is that the explosion might hurt his opponent as well.
Unintentionally, this also left Brawlmite with the ability to spit out explosive globs of OGA, which glows green as it travels through the air, or to envelop his hands in it for flaming punched. No, he is not immune to fire when it isn’t fueled by OGA. Also, he doesn’t really age.

Bio: Well, you can probably infer that he’s a pet monster who fights other pet monsters for public entertainment and money, and that he was the first one created, which launched generations of monster fights and all that, blah, blah, blah. It might be worthwhile to note that monster battles are the basis for this world’s economy, or that the business-like fashion of it means that very few ten-year-olds get to train and battle the monsters. Fact is, the trainers don’t have much control over what a monster does after it enters the ring. But yeah that’s all trivia. I suppose you can also tell basically how Brawlmite has developed; it’s in the personality section.[/QUOTE]