Paulette & Chaffin: The Death of Sun Tzu, Part 1 (of 3)

Avatar image for cbishop
cbishop

21161

Forum Posts

393968

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 92

User Lists: 1268

Edited By cbishop

RANKED 1st BY VOTERS IN CHARACTER CREATION CONTEST #74!

DatePaulette & Chaffin:ViewRead the...
06/26/18The Death of Sun Tzu, Part 1 (of 3)(Blog) (Forum)Disclaimer
RatingRating Explanation
TMurder. Mild cursing. Nothing gory.

The stadium was all but empty now, but an hour before, it had been chaos. The glorious, fan-filled chaos of the Planet of Wrestling- POW to its fans. Now however, it was the scene of a homicide. Officers had cordoned off the area around the ring, and cleared out any stragglers. CSI was attending to the scene around their victim, and coroners were standing by for the okay to take the body. Ringside, two detectives were just arriving to talk to POW president “Dowdy” Dotty Viper, dressed in her trademark plaid suit with checkered blouse.

“Ms. Viper, I’m Detective Paulette. This is my partner Detective Chaffin."

“Ms. Viper, I’m Detective Paulette. This is my partner Detective Chaffin. Can you tell us what happened to...” she hesitated as she looked at her pad.

“Sun Tzu,” Ms. Viper finished for her.

Paulette raised her eyebrows as she looked up from her pad.

“You know... ‘The Artist of War?’ He’s been our biggest hit since last season.” She looked at the detective with confusion; baffled that she hadn’t heard of the star.

“Uh, Mary,” said Chaffin. “Sun Tzu came on the scene last year. He spent the entire season systematically dismantling every wrestler the POW had. There wasn’t a single signature move he couldn’t counter.”

Dotty smiled. “Oh. You’re a fan, Detective Chaffin?”

Mary looked at her partner dubiously.

"He was the world heavyweight champ.”

Chaffin shrugged. “It passes the time. Anyway, it drove fans nuts- some loved it, some hated it- but he took it all the way to the title. He was the world heavyweight champ.”

“Was?” asked Mary.

“Well, the former champ, ‘Bone Cold’ Cleve Fraustin, didn’t like the change,” Dotty sighed. “He signed a contract just like everyone else though,” she added hurriedly. “The signature moves were getting stale with the fans,” she said. “Sun Tzu was scripted to beat them all so that we could come up with something else for this season. Bone Cold and The Doc beat us to it though.”

“The Doc?” prodded Mary.

“My,” said Dotty with real dismay. “You’re really not a fan, are you Ms. Paulette?”

Detective Paulette,” Mary corrected, “and no. Do you know how many bar fights I’ve had to break up over Rebel ‘Restler wannabes?”

“Ah. The Rebel ‘Restler. That takes me back.”

Dotty closed her eyes and smiled. “Ah. The Rebel ‘Restler. That takes me back,” she said wistfully.

“The Doc?” Mary said again.

“It was great,” chuckled Chaffin.

“Gragg,” snapped Mary. Chaffin looked at her questioningly, and she said, “Do you mind letting Ms. Viper tell it?”

“Oh, please. Call me Dotty,” she said with a wave. “Cleve waited until the Monday Live Lockdown, and went off script. He came down to the ring unannounced, and challenged Sun Tzu to a Battle for the Belt. We were live, so we had to roll with it. Bone Cold was relentless. He fought like he had never fought before, and he was more than holding his own. The Doc ran out from backstage though, jumped in the ring, and they brutalized Sun Tzu- nearly put him in the hospital.” She nodded at her story to emphasize the severity of it.

“Take TWO, and calllll me in the morninnnn’!

“Yeah, The Doc finished it off with a double-haymaker,” said Chaffin. “Then he grabbed a mic, stood over Sun Tzu, and waving a fist in the air, yelled,” imitating the wrestler, “Take TWO, and calllll me in the morninnnn’!

Dotty smiled at the detective’s passable impression. Mary silenced her partner with a look, turned back to Dotty, and waited.

“They used all new moves,” she shrugged, “and that’s what we were going for this season, so we let it slide.” Mary looked incredulous, but Dotty assured her, “It’s in their contracts, sweetheart. Adrenaline gets going, you can never be sure of anything, so these guys have to waive their rights to sue POW or their fellow wrestlers. That’s why grudges get settled in the ring so often.

“Anyway, the Sun Tzu story was always meant to be a two-season rise-and-fall. He comes out of nowhere the first year, dominates the ring, defeating all the moves, and wins the belt at the end of the season. This season, he comes back, and gets a bunch of comeback bouts.”

Mary rolled her eyes. “Just to clarify- ‘comeback bouts?’“ she asked.

“Sun Tzu looks like he’s winning the first half of the match..."

“Sun Tzu looks like he’s winning the first half of the match. Same reason as always- he knows their moves. The second half, his opponent throws a move of another wrestler. Sun’s not expecting that, falters, and they fight a little more. Then they unveil new moves. Sun doesn’t know what to do with it, and they wipe the mat with him.” When Mary said nothing, Dotty added nervously, “The fans have really been eating it up. The new moves were just what we needed to put some life back into the POW.”

Looking back to the body of the wrestler, Mary said, “Well, not for everyone.”

“Yeah,” said Dotty, disheartened. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this.” She shook her head as she bit on a long fingernail.

Turning back to the Planet’s president, Mary said, “What is Sun Tzu’s real name?”

“Oh. Kung Pao,” said Dotty.

Mary took a deep breath, and twisted her neck to one side until it popped.

“Uh, Ms. Viper,” started Chaffin.

“Dotty.”

“Dotty,” he repeated with a strained smile. “We need his real name.”

“Since ‘P.O.W.’ is also known as ‘Pow,’ Kung Pao as the rising star played very well with them.”

“That is his real name,” she said assuredly. “He had to change it legally as part of his contract. He thought it would be funny if this ‘master of war’ was a ‘chicken’ in his ‘real’ life. I tried to convince him to go with General Tso- more in keeping with the war theme- but he thought Kung Pao was funnier. We were paying him a lot of money to be a two-season throwaway, so I figured I’d give him that. It was a good move too,” she said, nodding. “Since ‘P.O.W.’ is also known as ‘Pow,’ Kung Pao as the rising star played very well with them.” She smiled, clearly pleased at the unintentional boon to the company. “And an Asian champ?” she asked. “Just the shot of diversity we needed in these times.” She nodded again.

Mary blinked at her a few times, and then turned her neck in the other direction until it popped again.

“Ms... Dotty,” said Chaffin. “Here’s my card. Call us if you think of anything else. We may be in touch with you again.”

“I can go?” Dotty asked.

“Don’t leave the arena,” said Mary, “but we have to tend to some other things here at the moment.”

“Oh. Okay,” Dotty said agreeably. “Thank you, detectives. I’ll have my assistant bring you one of my cards,” she added, and walked towards the backstage area to go to her office.

They were just about to turn towards the body when a man stood up a couple of rows back from the ring. “Excuse me, detectives,” he said leaning over the row in front of him, holding out a card. Mary leaned over the front row to take it from him. “I’m Dayton Thyme, the assistant Dotty just went to look for. Here’s her card in case you need to reach her.”

Mary nodded.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ve really got to go catch her. She’s more upset than she’s letting on.” He smiled politely, then hurried down the row and to the aisle, rushing after his boss.

“You really don’t like wrestling, do you?”

Both watching him hurry away, Gragg said, “You really don’t like wrestling, do you?”

“It’s not that,” she said, jutting her jaw a little bit.

“Then what is it?” he asked.

Pointing a finger in the direction Dotty had gone in, she groused, “She called me ’sweetheart.’“

Gragg couldn’t completely stifle his chuckle. Mary punched him in the arm, and stuffed the business card in his shirt pocket.

Next Issue: The Death of Sun Tzu, Part 2.-
Please let me know what you think, and thanks! -cbOriginally Presented In: CCC #74.

Story and characters owned by Chris Bishop, copyright 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.

Avatar image for cbishop
cbishop

21161

Forum Posts

393968

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 92

User Lists: 1268

#1  Edited By cbishop
OC Names:
CharactersConceptsTeams
  • Chaffin, Detective Gragg
  • Fraustin, Cleve (Bone Cold)
  • Doc, The
  • Paulette, Detective Mary
  • Pao, Kung (Sun Tzu: The Artist of War)
  • Rebel 'Restler, The
  • Thyme, Dayton
  • Viper, Dotty (Dowdy)
  • unnamed coroners
  • unnamed CSI
  • unnamed officers working crime scene
  • unnamed stragglers
  • Battle for the Belt
  • .Monday Live Lockdown.
  • Planet of Wrestling (POW)
.Fic-O-Pedia: cbishop. (My library of fics)Fic #213

Thanks for stopping in! :^D

Avatar image for cbishop
cbishop

21161

Forum Posts

393968

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 92

User Lists: 1268

#2  Edited By cbishop

The Origins Behind the Origins (or how some of these characters got their names):

Detectives Mary Paulette & Gragg Chaffin

Mary is my aunt, and Gragg (pronounced basically the same as Greg) is my cousin, both deceased. Both were detectives, but in different cities. Mary was officially a detective for a year before she retired in the early 2010's, but may have been doing the job before she was officially promoted. She was very proud of her detective status, and when a D.A. tried to get her demoted during an election year, Mary chose retirement so she'd retire as a detective. Before her detective rank, Mary was the first officer named Master Patrol Officer, and the first female president of the Richmond, VA Fraternal Order of Police. That's a pretty big deal. She wanted to retire from police work, and go into law, but she failed the bar exam multiple times. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of the law, but unfortunately was just a bad test taker. She passed from breast cancer within two years of her retirement.

Gragg was a detective in the 1970's. I had to call my dad to confirm that, and just heard this story today: apparently, Gragg slapped an African-American man while on duty, and it wound up on the national news. I don't know the context, so I honestly can't tell you whether it was justified or not. The news tried to make it a race issue though, and it escalated to the point that Gragg had to sue the city over it. He won his case which paid for most of his college, so I'm thinking the context probably wasn't as severe as the media made it out to be.

"Dowdy" Dotty Viper, Wayne "The Doc" Ronson, & "Bone Cold" Cleve Fraustin

Pretty straightforward, these were just twists on WWE wrestler names: "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. The characterizations are not modeled after the wrestlers.

Kung Pao, aka Sun Tzu: The Artist of War

I hadn't named the character before this story, but the idea of him is something I've had since the 1990's. My idea was exactly what I described in the story- a two-season throwaway character meant just to shake up the stale signature moves I was seeing in the WWE at the time. He'd wreck everyone the first season, and they'd come back in the second season with new moves, and destroy him.

For a guy good enough to dismantle every wrestler in the ring, what better name than Sun Tzu? His moniker of The Artist of War is of course because the real life Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War.

Honestly, Kung Pao was just on the fly as I was writing. I needed an Asian-ish name, and I prefer a play-on-words, and couldn't think of anything. All I could think of was Chinese food dishes. So I picked Kung Pao, and gave the silly explanation that you see in the story. What can I say? They're not all deep and meaningful.

Dayton Thyme and The Rebel 'Restler

Dayton Thyme is wordplay for "date an' time."

The Rebel 'Restler comes from a name that has been on my character list for several years. Back when DC Comics still had message boards, someone started up a mock respect thread for a non-existant superhero named LEW. The rules of the thread were that whatever was said about LEW was canon- future posters had to go with whatever was said, or find a way to counter it/ work around it.

In the course of the thread, it was established that LEW stood for Law Enforcement Wonder, and a really fun history for him was outlined in the thread, spanning from the Golden Age to the then-present day of about 2009 or so. There was a core group of posters that threw out all kinds of pastiche characters that LEW had interacted with, and even named titles that he had been in. I copied most of the thread to keep track of all the character names I threw out there.

It was eventually established that some of the LEW characters had their roots in newspaper comic strips, and even Western comics that predated the superhero comics. In one of those Western comics was a character named The Renegade Rustler that inspired a later character named The Wrenegade Wrestler. Rustler and Wrestler were created by someone else.

Somewhere along the way, I started coming up with replacement names for the characters I didn't create, and that's turned into The Rebel Rustler and Rebel 'Restler. I just threw it in as a nod back to a really fun thread.

Thanks for reading. :^)

Avatar image for cbishop
cbishop

21161

Forum Posts

393968

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 92

User Lists: 1268

editing bump - trying to see if activity will clear a problem.