Seattle Daily Spectacle
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| SEATTLE, CASCADIA | FRIDAY, 21 FEBRUARY, 2194 | CAS¥ 300/$CAL 12.50 |
THE UNOFFICIAL SPORTS PAGE
FIGHT REPORT: COOBER PEDY CAVE CLASH 100
Sports Correspondent (Unofficial) Sofia Haugen
The outback above the Royal Opal Colosseum, Coober Pedy's third-largest kaiju arena.
Long-time readers1 of my column will know that this is not my first time visiting Australia. Their underground racing scene was real hot back in the day, some real Mad Max shit,2 engines built from scavenged kaiju parts and decommissioned military cybernetics, drivers with rocket launchers mainlining illegal combat stimulants, sex and violence and cars going very, very fast. Ooh. Gets me a little wet just thinking about it. But that was ages ago. The cars are rusting in impound lots and junkyards, the drivers are wasting away in nursing homes or rotting in the ground, and I, unaging and eternal,3 have returned Down Under to report on a newer, fresher, even more violent sport: the no-holds-barred kaiju cave matches of a little town called Coober Pedy.
Coober Pedy was founded sometime in the early 20th century, probably long before we knew anything about kaiju. I don't know, I'm not a historian.4 The name probably comes from the phrase kupa-piti, meaning "white man's holes" in the local Kokatha language, an appropriate name for a mining town: the land beneath Coober Pedy was rich in opals, and the town produced by itself more than half the world's supply of those pretty, pretty gemstones. By the 2090s, those veins had all but dried up, and Coober Pedy was in danger of becoming nothing more than another tiny little outback truck stop, with nothing to recommend it except a few big holes in the ground and decaying sets from hundred-year-old movies that only film buffs and people whose dads were teenagers in the 1980s remember.5 But one day, a local businessman came back from a vacation in Macau with a big idea: what if we dug that hole a little deeper? What if we put some big ol' monsters in that hole? What if we made them fight for our amusement, and charged out-of-towners big bucks for the privilege of watching it? That man's name was Bruce Kelly, and within two years, he was bought out for $3 billion by a consortium of Australian and Chinese entertainment companies. He retired to a suburb of Melbourne, and we will not be hearing from him again.
Coober Pedy's tourism industry exploded after the buyout, as foreign capital was poured into the formerly-sleepy little mining town. The cave-arenas were expanded and reinforced, hotels and casinos were dug into the bedrock around them, a new airport and train station were built, and over the years, the Coober Pedy Cave Clash went from a regional hit to one of the world's most popular kaiju fighting circuits. Coober Pedy has also hosted three International Disaster Deathmatch League tournaments, most recently in 2180; the ruins of that year's arena-city, untouched by human hands since the championship match,6 are one of the better sightseeing opportunities if you're tired of sitting underground playing the slots and waiting for the next battle to start.
Anyway. It's been a hundred years since that very first Cave Clash, and I promise you, this year's tournament was a special one. History lesson over. Let's get into the fucking action.7
This is Brenda.8 Ain't she a beaut?
I flew into Melbourne on a scorching January afternoon, right in the dead heat of Australian summer. Their seasons are backwards down there, it's fucked up. I was met at the airport by an old friend named Brenda, a semi-sapient biomechanical Subaru whose creator, Three-Thong,9 once smoked me out so good I couldn't walk for a week; old TT gave Brenda to a Buddhist monastery in his will, and it was one of the monks who drove her down to pick me up. Her name was Sheila Satori, she had gorgeous brown eyes and cheekbones that would not quit, and she informed me as soon as I got into the passenger seat that she was strictly celibate and that I should not waste my time.10 She did not, thankfully, abstain from that sweet devil's lettuce,11 and I once again got blasted off my tits in Brenda's backseat while that faithful little sport ute took us down the long desert highway to Coober Pedy.
The approach to Coober Pedy is not particularly impressive. On the surface, all you see are a few trees, a cluster of short, squat buildings, and the endless heaps of rubble from the many, many holes in the ground. As you get closer to town, the highway dips, sinking slowly into the earth until you enter a tunnel; then it curves, slightly, to the left, and spirals downward just once, taking you all the way down to the real Coober Pedy, the city beneath the city. The first thing you notice is the temperature: it's pleasantly cool underground, a welcome relief from the burning heat above. Then you hear the sounds echoing up through the tunnel, people shouting, music playing, and every so often the roars and crashes of kaiju, battling it out in their arena-caves. And then you turn that last corner, into the Hub, and the sights blow you away.
A massive cavern, cut deep into the bedrock below town, the walls carved with hotels and casinos, bars and restaurants, strip clubs and sex clubs and establishments whose purpose is impossible to determine from the outside. Three massive pillars hold up the roof: around one, a double-helix of roller coasters spirals up and down; another is covered in massive screens showing kaiju fights from all over the globe, liberally interrupted with advertisements for Warner Brothers and its subsidiaries; the third is blank because of a thirty-year-old dispute over the real estate, and a shantytown clings to its base, home to many of the poorly-paid foreign workers who make all this decadence possible. It's a subterranean Atlantic City, the Monaco of the caves… Maybe some sort of under-Vegas, if we're hyphenating. And I'm always hyphenating.
The sight of the Hub in all its glory came at just the right time: about fifteen hours into the sixteen-hour drive, I decided to convert to Buddhism, and was halfway through shaving my head in preparation for joining Sheila's monastery12 when we made that last turn and I was awoken from my weed-induced religious fugue. My haircut may never recover. Brenda dropped me off at my hotel, the Hole Inn The Wall,13 without incident, and we said our goodbyes. I had successfully resisted the seductive allure of vegetarian pacifism; now, it was time for me to watch some violence.
The Rupert Murdoch Memorial Arena, illuminated during post-match maintenance. Workers for scale, circled (poorly) in red.
The Cave Clash lasts a month, starting the first Friday of the New Year and ending four weeks later. With eight main arenas (and two more under construction), they can fit in at least two fights a day; near the end of the month, when the semifinalists are recuperating, they run exhibition matches and an unofficial losers' bracket, so there's always something to watch. Coober Pedy has a few rules those of us used to other leagues might find a little odd: there's a maximum kaiju size, since they gotta fit 'em down in the caves; no more than 10% of a kaiju's body can be cybernetic, a rule made to counteract Bandai-Nissan's dominance of the international kaiju fight circuit in the late 21st century; and all the fights happen in total darkness.
One unwritten rule? You gotta get weird with it. They do things a little different down under, and if your kaiju isn't sufficiently freaky they might not let you in. Some examples, from the preliminary rounds: Road Train, a twelve-legged hog with the horns of a ram and the armor of an armadillo, wasn't agile enough for the tight confines of the cave-arena, and got tipped and disemboweled by the creatively named Very Large Rat. The Rat, unfortunately, was only minimally corrosion-resistant, and got its whole fucking head dissolved by Tuna Melt, a giant fish with dog legs and a massive acid bladder. Bruce the Bunyip,14 the standard big humanoid lizard type we all know and love, used his fire-breath to incinerate Baoba'al, one of Monsanto-Samael's latest experimental plant kaiju out of Madagascar, and was beheaded in turn by the appropriately named Decapitatrix, also a humanoid lizard but with a really big sword, and scaly lizard tits, and long eyelashes, and a pink bow on its head, for some fucking reason.15
If you want play-by-plays of the early rounds, you can find them on my blog, which is accessible only to those who have completed a certain chain of quests in World of Starcraft.16 We don't have room in the Spectacle for such trivialities. No, we're skipping straight to the grand final, because that's what you're actually here for, right? Right. The main event was held in the Grand Outback Thunderdome, Coober Pedy's largest cave-arena; I managed to wheedle my way into the press box by bribing the Amazon Presents: The Washington Post Prime correspondent with half a pastrami-on-rye and several hundred dollars in unmarked nonconsecutive small bills.17 Third-best seats in the house. Didn't even forget my night-vision goggles this time.
Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Moloch the devourer! Moloch crowned in thorns!18
The cave echoed as the announcer's voice boomed from a hundred hidden speakers:
"Entering first, from the Monsanto-Samael biolabs of Madagascar, weighing in at eighty-nine metric tons, the Devil of the Deeps, the Horned Horror, the King of Carnage, your reigning, defending, undefeated three-time Cave Clash champion: MOLOCH!"
As the announcer spoke its name, Moloch roared and stomped out of its stable. Its design was based on the Horned Devil, the seventh-ugliest lizard in Australia, but the biotechnicians who cooked its genetic stew clearly took some notes from the rhinoceros, the tortoise, and the M1 Abrams main battle tank. Moloch is a hulking, low-slung mass of muscle and bone, its pebble-scaled skin covered in wickedly sharp thorns, its tail swinging back and forth with enough force to crack granite. It is a demon, and this is its hell; but it was not alone down here.19 The announcer spoke again.
"And the challenger, a hometown hero, a Relic of the outback, found deep in the bush by Bruce Kelly himself,20 rejuvenated and revamped just for Cave Clash One Hundred with a proprietary Proctor & Johnson & Gamble & Johnson gene therapy treatment, weighing in at one hundred and seven metric tons, the Teleporting Terror, the Mad Marsupial, the Killer Koala: DROP BEAR!"
There was a flash of blue light, temporarily illuminating the pitch-dark cave and blinding the audience in our night-vision goggles, and the Drop Bear appeared. Teleportation. They haven't figured out how it works yet, and it's been a hundred years since Drop Bear waddled out of the deep eucalyptus forests of the Blue Mountains and into the hearts of a nation, one of the last Relics discovered in the hidden places of the Earth. The cartoons and the plushies and the cereal boxes don't do him justice; in person, looming in the distance, he's more breathtaking than adorable, any of the cuddliness of the koalas he resembles replaced with scar tissue and bulging muscle. Of course, real koalas don't have six arms, or claws that can cut through tungsten steel, or a bone-spiked ass-plate for crushing their prey beneath their mighty posteriors. The Drop Bear does.
Here are some regular koalas. Aren't they cute?21
The bell rang and Drop Bear vanished, instantaneously appearing on the ceiling above Moloch. He fell, plate-first, directly onto the lizard's head, but Moloch was ready for it and tucked its head down under its torso, leaving only an impenetrable dome of spines. Drop Bear blinked away again before impact, reappearing at an angle, his teleportation-conserved momentum sending him diagonally into the floor, spraying rock shards at Moloch's hide. Moloch tanked the hit, and before its opponent could recover, it pounced, jaws snapping at Drop Bear's exposed stomach. Drop Bear fended it off with his lowest pair of arms, but they were not quite up to the task, and the demon's mighty maw got closer to its fuzzy target… And then there was another flash of blue light, and suddenly Drop Bear was swinging a kaiju-scale folding chair.
There are three things I think you should know. First, Coober Pedy's rules about cybernetics, mentioned above, are very precise; no more than 10% of a kaiju's body, at weigh-in, can be cybernetic. Drop Bear is fully organic; and so, his sponsors mused, he had a solid 10 tons or so of artificial mass he could take into the arena. Second, kaiju weaponry, though far from common, is not unheard of. Decapitatrix is one of the more infamous examples in this year's Cave Clash, with her hot pink zweihander, and there was a whole fad in Phoenix in the '40s for big ol' classic American guns. And third?
Australians fucking love professional wrestling.
The chair came down, crashing into Moloch's skull. Spines flew everywhere as they shattered on the hardened steel, and Moloch reeled back, stunned by the blow. Another chair shot to the head. Another. Another. Until the chair was nothing but so much scrap metal in Drop Bear's paws, and he threw it to the side. The fight was all but over. Moloch made a valiant attempt to come back, managing to rip off one of Drop Bear's bottom arms, but his spiked armor had been shattered, and Drop Bear methodically dismantled him over the next few minutes. The bell rang, and the announcer's voice boomed one last time:
"The winner of the match! And your new! Cave Clash! Champion! DROP BEAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!"
The Drop Bear roared and beat his chest, standing atop the broken body of his foe. It would be taken back to Madagascar, most likely, its parts reprocessed as genetic material and nutrient slurry for the generations to come. Or, if Monsanto-Samael didn't find that cost-effective, it would be dumped, somewhere in the deserts of the outback, carrion for the dingoes and the scavenger gangs, its genes spawning a dozen half-baked copyright infringements over the next few decades. A mighty champion becoming just a pile of meat. It's the fate that awaits us all, in the end. Well, it awaits you deathcucked losers, I'm fucking immortal babyyyyy!!! Sofia OUT.