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There was nothing else besides hunger on Charlene’s mind right now. After a couple of days, Charlene was typically famished. And now, with a week having passed since her last meal, she was ravenous and desperate. It had been a little while since she’d worked, and any money she’d been carrying was gone, beaten out of her by opportunistic wrestling marauders.

She would have to work to earn her keep, regardless of the decimated state of her fanbase.

For the price to cover a couple of coming meals, Charlene would have an easy time of it. At the edges of the city, there were mooks aplenty but never any heavy hitters like if she’d gone to the city core. She wouldn’t have to do any killing there either. For the audiences out here, it was all fun and games.

And if for some reason trouble found her, she could always call up that one friend of hers, and...

Charlene had no pockets, and kept her thumbs jammed in the waist of her iridescent bloomer shorts. She was convinced that this was an extremely cool, jaunty look that fit within the plucky, indomitable image she was trying to project to others. This was incorrect, but Charlene was not actually all that great when it came to developing an image for herself. This was, incidentally, the primary thing that had kept her from acquiring anything resembling a broad, committed fanbase. The fact was that The Sawblade Prince was something of an acquired taste for wrestling fans. It had once been much worse, in fact. Before Eunice had come to love her work, Charlene had been hacking it out in the ring while wearing olive cargo pants and a mustard-yellow t-shirt several sizes too large which had a tepid joke printed in a fake handwriting font on the front of it. Also flip-flops.

Charlene did not think that this mattered. Charlene was good at one thing. Well, no, it was actually two things. It was ass kicking, and not dying. Still, the prevailing tastes and attitudes of audiences did not cater to her idealistic vision of pure “wrestling for wrestling’s sake”, and her unkempt appearance proved a liability. In this state, even her most fraught or decisive victories came off as dull or forgettable. Even seasoned announcers, creative visionaries in their field, could not help but yawn when introducing “Debbie Dregs, the Drab Diva” to the ring. And then everything changed. She met Eunice. Eunice always smiled when she looked her up and down, even when she was in baggy athletic shorts and a slate-colored hoodie. Eunice told her certain things, like you are not Debbie Dregs you are The Sawblade Prince, and like hey try these on, and like oh my god those look so good on you. Through Eunice’s sartorial interventions, Charlene had gone from repelling fans through her impenetrable unremarkability, to being a proud pariah for her looks, gratefully reviled by most bodies of organized wrestling for looking gay and being too outrageously gay.

The Sawblade Prince, after all, had blue-purple to lime-green horizontally gradiented hair, and various rainbow puffy shorts and rainbow knickerbockers, and several pairs of immaculate white stockings and blouses, and all manner of rainbow vests and coats and a rainbow bow and a rainbow bow tie and a rainbow bolo tie and a rainbow bolero and a rainbow beret to mix and match. Plus as many rainbow pointy elf shoes and mary janes and platforms as you can tolerate imagining. All this in a time when wrestling was had spent a couple thousand years in a continuing “edgy” era, featuring a lot of washed-out palettes and austere outfit concepts free of ornament or elegance. The preferred performance moods were bitter, brooding and brutal, and there was little room for frivolity, whimsy or being gay.

Even being goth, once a proper and respected genre of wrestling attire, was considered in this grim era to be too gay. This was because there was an inherent joyfulness and optimism in making beauty out of bleakness and ruin, and the prevailing mood absolutely insisted that even such a beauty was too sentimental and pathetic. It was not fun. It did not make for good wrestling. The norm was, and I am being 100% serious here, even worse than just putting on some baggy garbage casual looks and duking it out like that.

But people currently liked it, and they currently hated that gay shit, so Eunice had not only been Charlene’s biggest fan but like, had also been almost her only fan.

Thumbs dorkily thrust in her bespoke shortpants, Charlene approached a large, plain aluminum construction and strayed close to its alcove of entry. As expected, there was a big bulletin board, with sporadically updated flyers indicating open wrestling events. Normally, she would scan the board with avid interest, get a feel for the area, see if she’d meet anyone she recognized, but hunger and exhaustion were powerfully exerting themselves onto Charlene’s psyche, and looking at a flyer advertising a nearby and immediate engagement was all the concentration she could muster. There was an informal paying engagement located at a gym just down the street. Good enough, who cares who’s in it or who would be viewing it. She was already hustling in the direction of her next meal.

Down at the end of the dusty trail, there was a big cornfield, a handful of windmills, and an unbelievably crude earthen dais, without so much as a single ropen square to delineate its boundaries. About forty people were assembled, most of them planted on rocks rolled up to the ringside, a handful of them standing on two unmarked points of entry to the ring. Most of them were dudes, arms folded, with almost arbitrarily placed straps and scraps of spandex covering them. But there was also a woman with black lips, and she had on a cloak that was covered in crow feathers, with a crow face on top of her hood. She looked like a big crow wearing it. Charlene aptly concluded that this wrestler was probably a cut above the others gathered here, and that she was themed in some way after crows. This didn’t matter to her. She was not going to let a large, cool-looking crow snatch her next meal out of her salivating mouth.

Now, The Sawblade Prince was not a heel. Charlene would gladly forfeit a win if it meant following what rules there were to follow, and set a good example for the near-zero number of people who looked up to her as an idol. But hunger had reduced her patience for even the meager decorum of waiting in line or waiting for the ref to show up and start the event. The ref was still toddling through the cornstalks toward the event when Charlene shoved her way into the ring, grabbing the closest wrestler by the straps and throwing him in. The audience emitted noises of disgust and spat. Charlene made an apologetic face to the frightened wrestler in front of her. He had a big elaborate mustache on and hair plastered to his scalp with gel. His weapon appeared to be a chair leg, but his chair leg was several feet away and therefore proved to be of little use in preventing Charlene from doing what she did subsequent to apologizing by facial expression. The Sawblade Prince did what she normally did in these nonlethal, semiformal paid matches in the boondocks, which was artlessly smacking the shit out of her opponent in the face with the flat sides of her rectangular, dual-edged sawblade polearm. The audience groaned. Had they really all paid just to come here and see another blowout match stolen by an out-of-towner?