The Champion, My Friends
TONIGHT ON GALAXY OF SPORTS
Good day, viewers!
I'm your host, Aqua Star...
And I'm your co-host Cacao Ghee...
And tonight there's amazing news!
Well folks, she's done it! Arin Kiryu Firenze, also known as AK-47, has won the Paragon Games! The psyjock catgirl made an astonishing play demonstrating the mental fortitude and flexibility to overcome her final opponent, Guyhorn Lacidae, and the cait sith human decided to celebrate her win in a unique way, isn't that right, Cacao?
Indeed it is, Aqua. Right after her stunning victory, AK-47 decided that a little nap was in order. Here are some scenes from the arena where humanity's next champion put the cat into being the top-dog...
One could say she didn't pussy-foot around with the press, eh?
Ugh, who wrote this script-?
*
Arin woke up in the locker room.
With a sense of balance born of her heritage, she stretched perpendicularly to the bench she found herself on as she let out a satisfied yawn, before leveraging off of her hip to sit.
"Gyuah!" she cried out as she saw who was sitting across from her, covering her eyes.
Muscles-Glasses was there with nothing but a beach towel covering his junk, and even then there was enough of a hole to make staring into the darkness a terrible proposition for Arin.
"Good match," the man said in a deep voice. "You were pretty great out there, Arin."
"Thanks," Arin said. "Could you stand or something? I don't want to see your little human if we're going to be talking like this."
"Oh! I am terribly sorry," the man stood. "I didn't realize I might expose myself. Having this much mass is inconvenient at times."
"Thanks," Arin said as she uncovered her eyes. "What was your name again?"
"It's Tom. Lieutenant Tom Daniels, ESPAF. We actually met during the Luna Preliminaries..."
"Nice to meet you, Daniels. You sound way smarter than in the arena." ESPAF meant Earth Sentients Polity Armed Forces. While they were ostensibly a military, in reality they were more of a police force and engineering corps for big projects. Obviously the number of inhabited planets in the system were more than just Earth, but tradition was tradition...
Arin was just a humble human from High Jupiter, the New Palestine platform. She'd never served. She'd wanted to stay away from Warsport because of her past, but now it was her whole life. Her entire rise to becoming the 8th Paragon started because of a stupid bet...
She offered a hand, her claws extending with the gesture. While she had claws, she kept them trimmed since a human hand with cat claws wasn't exactly the best combination. Too much risk of overleveraging and ripping a claw out. Sure, as a Paragon she could now afford get augmentations for both safety and effectiveness, but until then it was only polite not to cut everyone you met.
"Indeed. I mostly do the grunting thing to seem tough, but I can't wait to just go home and read now that I'll have more time on my hands."
"Reading anything fun?"
"Oh, just an old book. Isekai genre, The Demon Lord Is An Angel, ever heard of it?"
"Nope. Sounds like a mouthful," Arin stood and stretched. "How long was I out?"
"About an hour now. The medics brought you in when you didn't wake up. There's still a crowd waiting for you outside the locker room. And of course your promoter."
Arin flinched. "Oh. Uh... She wasn't mad... was she?"
*
"I'm absolutely livid!" Cherry Noceda shouted, making Arin's ears flinch backward in shame. Her producer was taller than Arin by a head, and wore her red hair in a tight bun.
"Sorry Cherry..."
"You know how many opportunities we missed because you fell asleep? You're lucky I ran interference and got all the business taps because right now the frontrunner for putting you in commercials is Sleep Space Nocturnal Solutions!"
"Ugh..." Arin slouched a bit as she looked away. They were having their meeting inside a nonbinary bathroom because outside the arena halls were still infested with press, paparazzi, and bloggers; including one that Arin had recognized as a specialist in sneaking into places she shouldn't be.
As Cherry went on and on about sponsors and Arin's image and coordinating with the rest of the promotion staff, all Arin thought about was getting a nice glass of chocolate milk and a well-made burger with onions and crinkly little fries...
"Are you even listening to me?"
Arin sighed. "No. I'm hungry."
"Good, because I just said we need to get to the Polity Tower for the afterparty. You'll be expected to shake hands with all of your former opponents since you missed doing so for your little nap."
"Now you're just making my nap sound even more amazing!" Arin chuckled, giving Cherry the same sideways cat eyes that won her over before Arin's rise to Paragon-hood.
"Don't make me put you to sleep!" Cherry threatened, pumping her bicep and grabbing it, a reference to her old days as a luchadora when that was her favorite pose.
Her signature move was a sleeper hold, which she applied judiciously based on how catty Arin was being. If Arin wasn't a psion, she might have feared brain damage from all the times Cherry had put her to sleep. How ironic, now, that she was angry at her for sleeping.
"Yeah yeah. Let me get some proper clothes on."
"Oh! I almost forgot. Here's your new uniform." Cherry reached into her bag and pulled out a capsule the size of a pen.
"It's a bit small for me..."
"It's nanowear, silly! You can make it look like whatever you want, but the default is a galactic-standard Paragon outfit."
"Who gave you that?" Arin asked as she poked around the capsule with a claw, inspecting it.
"I think his said his name was Thrisk? He's Earth's proctor for Warsport."
"Doesn't sound like a human name."
"It's not. He's Wys'larian I believe. We shouldn't have met him until later, but it seemed he was in the neighborhood."
"Huh. Okay then." Arin popped the capsule in half and a little black swarm of slightly-goopy nanites flowed out, eating away the capsule before attaching itself to her hand. "What the- Hey, I like this shirt!" The swarm had started eating her clothes. "Cherry!"
Her promoter was already stepping out the door. "I'll just leave you to get changed!"
"This feels weird!"
*
Half an hour later, Arin plucked at the nano-clothes she was wearing with a pair of claws as she stood in a dining lounge filled with people, watching as the slightly plasticky material smoothed itself over her skin.
The "galactic standard paragon outfit" was a skin-tight black battlesuit with light-up highlights. Currently, hers was glowing a cyan blue, indicating an "undamaged" status. As the interface told her on the car ride over, purple would indicate she was engaged in an overload activity - be it biological, psychic, or mechanical - like what Waterboy had used to knock Muscles... to knock Tom out of the arena.
I need to get better with names out there or I'm not going to know which opponent is which...
Anything "below" blue in the color spectrum meant the suit would multiply the force of impacts and throws by her enemies until it sent her flying at Stage White - white being a rather universal color for death out in the galaxy at large.
It was both a safety measure and a handicap imposed on Paragons to keep things non-fatal. After all, in the past some species had gone to war over the death of a Paragon, only to wind up losing all sovereignty as the thousands of galactic nations ganged up on them and dismantled their governments, societies, and even genetics in order to ensure compliance with the status quo.
And it worked because the top hundred species - whom humanity sarcastically called the Hekatoncheries, or Heks for short - were so advanced and powerful that they kept the rest of the galaxy in line.
This had been good for humanity's fledgling steps after discovering FTL - faster than light - travel, but terrible after discovering that, upon founding their tenth colony and reaching one trillion humans, they were now eligible for Warsport wagers. And one alien empire after another had seen fit to challenge humanity for entire systems.
Nine losses in a row later, humanity was on the brink of losing the Sol system, and with it any right to self-govern. The only choice after that would be compliance, a forever-doom to remain a minor species on the galactic stage, taken advantage of and mocked... Or war, and the risk of losing everything that made humanity human.
A server passed by with a tray full of fruity little martinis in metal cups and Arin grabbed two, floating them magnetically until she had one in each hand. She was standing near the center of the room and alone after all the press questions. Perhaps something about the alien suit told people that she was now on the galactic stage and they should handle her with care.
She had just finished tossing back the first when she was approached by a human - just human - person wearing professional garb and a pair of glasses for seeing, as opposed to sunglasses. The latter was ridiculous. No one had needed glasses for centuries, except nowadays as sunglasses or accessories to work with lots of light-pollution or exposure to the sun.
Her nametag, secured on a laniard from the arena, read "Purloin Stoeff, Interplanetary Bad Girl". She was the slogger - sphere logger - she'd recognized earlier.
"AK!" she called out, using Arin's nickname.
"Hello Miss Summers," Arin said, her ears cocking a little from humor
"Who's Ms. Summers?" the slogger smiled a tad nervously. "My nametag clearly says I'm Purloin Stoeff." She said the fake last name like the word 'stuff.' Tall and pink-haired, today at least, the woman had a body type that Arin admired. Just the right amount of hour-glass figure, chocolate skin, and short hair in a pixie-cut bob.
"I'm logging into your slog right now," Arin said. A few mental flicks later, she was in the feed watching herself. Comments flew across the screen in a burst of surprise. "The comments are going nuts."
Autumn Summers - AKA Sneak-In Summers, AKA Purloin Stoeff - pouted. "It's no fun when people know who I am."
The comments started to laugh in a hundred different languages and emojis.
"I'm having fun," Arin shrugged, giving her a wink. "And don't worry, I won't give you up or anything."
"Oh... Well, can I ask one thing, for my friends who want to meet humanity's new Paragon?"
"Go for it," Arin downed her second glass. The alcohol burned just a little, it was that smooth, but being from Jupiter and having a high body density, she wouldn't get drunk without a barrel of the stuff... or a healthy dose of ethanol.
"Do you like scratchies?"