by Billy Wong
#
That night, Lincoln saw on the news Freya had issued a press release stating she had agreed to mutual combat with him, and would not be pressing charges. The release had also been clear that she had not lost the fight, but in fact kicked the unidentified black male's ass. She'd kept her word, even though Lincoln had yet to prove he would keep his.
Monday morning, Lincoln drove to Freya's band's studio on the outskirts of town, located inside an empty warehouse they used for most of their concerts. Freya no longer had the Band-Aids on her face, but several scabbed over cuts were noticeable. There, by the stage in a corner of the large dark main room, she introduced him to the other members of her band Helbound.
"Lincoln, this is Gunner, our lead guitarist—Gunner, Lincoln."
A goateed man in his mid twenties with close-cropped hair, Gunner had a lanky frame a couple inches taller than Lincoln's own six feet, but packed enough muscle onto it that it wouldn't be a surprise if he had used some medical enhancement himself. "Freya tells me you're a boxer," he sneered in a likely unconsciously threatening manner. "Work with me on my hands and I'll teach you some ground game in return."
"Maybe later."
Freya motioned towards a hugely overweight, bearded college age kid half lying down in an armchair—wait, a small couch—by the stage. Though fat, one could also tell he was very tall, probably over six and a half feet. "This is Sloth. He does bass."
"Hey man, heard you stunned our girl Freya a little bit. Good job."
Lincoln wasn't sure if he was being serious or not. Before he could reply Freya continued. "Loki, our keyboardist. He also sings a little."
An average built kid of nineteen or twenty with long curly hair, Loki didn't look as imposing as his male bandmates. He stuck his hand out towards Lincoln. "Nice to meet you, guy."
"Loki? So are you her son or something?"
"Uh, no, Freya's not even a year older than me..."
"Kidding, son. I don't think Loki even is Freya's son in the myths... is he?"
"No," Freya said. "Anyway, our drummer, Annabeth."
For a moment, Lincoln didn't know who she spoke of. A tiny, unmoving girl completely covered in black in a dark room could be hard to see. Then he spotted her, sitting at the table in front of the stage closer to him than where Sloth was.
"Those other guys look more like drummers," Lincoln said.
"Hi," Annabeth replied simply.
"Hey," Loki asked Lincoln, "think you could use a stage name?"
"I'm not a band member. I don't have musical talent. Why would I need a stage name? Besides, Annabeth isn't much of a stage name."
Lincoln continued to make small talk with the band members, except for Freya who went to set up some equipment. Annabeth and Loki had known her since junior high and high school respectively, while Sloth had met them at a summer concert and Gunner, recruited after a brutal fight much like Lincoln had been. Gunner talked about his MMA bouts, and how he was about to challenge for a regional title. Lincoln considered that maybe he could give MMA a try too. The cage might not have the same effect on him as a ring, after all.
Sloth talked about video games, food, comic books and interesting enough, golf. Though he didn't play himself, he watched professional golf avidly and believed it utilized similar skills to those required to use thrown weapons effectively in first person shooters. Loki talked about charities and how he wanted to start a foundation for teaching the arts to disabled children. Annabeth didn't say much at all, and nobody tried particularly hard to make her do otherwise.
"Yeah, chick's stupid tough huh?" Gunner said after Lincoln shared his fight against Freya. "I had her mounted after breaking a bottle over her head and was punching her in the face, and she just smiled at me. Then she gouged my eyes and whooped my ass!"
"Girl really loves that move, huh?"
"She doesn't need it to win fights." Gunner looked down. "She beat me without it when I asked for a rematch. I think she does it in public to feel more like a girl."
"She does it to feel like a predator," Annabeth whispered, "so she doesn't fear being hunted by what's in the dark."
Before Lincoln could ask what the hell she meant, Freya came back over. "Okay, it's 9 am and no work has gotten done. Since I've been moving heavy sound equipment around alone for the last hour, maybe we should get started?"
"What's on the schedule for today?" Lincoln asked.
"We were going to shoot some scenes for a music video today, and I was going to use makeup to make it look I was coming from a previous battle. But since you bruised and battered my face for real... I guess I won't need special makeup."
Her bandmates, however, did go to put on some demonic looking makeup. The first scene shot was Freya standing in front of a blue screen, playing around with a gigantic prop sword on wrestling mats she had set up while the others operated the cameras. Knowing she could kick a lot of ass in real life made Lincoln find it slightly less laughable, but her attempts to find a balance between sexy and "fierce" poses still looked ridiculous. But things did get more interesting after that. She called Sloth forward first.
"You better fucking jump when I suplex you this time!" she barked. "Remember last time I almost broke your neck."
"Time for the fake fight scenes," Loki said. "Freya versus the demon knights."
While the fights which followed were not real, they served well to demonstrate the band members' physical ability. Freya against Sloth in a wrestling type bout came first, and Lincoln was surprised anew by how easily she lifted, carried, and tossed around the near four hundred pounder. No wonder she had held her own so well against him. The girl had the strength of a gorilla. Eventually she "defeated" him with what started out like a suplex, only for him not to jump high enough so that he ended up being held sideways in the air in front of her while she struggled. Somehow, she managed to power him over her head and flip him to the padded ground.
Rolling to her knees, she slapped the mat in annoyance. "Dammit!"
"Don't worry, that looked good," Loki said. "Showed your legit strength."
"I don't care. He's getting fatter."
"Okay," Sloth whined. "We can discuss this later."
Gunner went next, twirling and swinging chains with plastic hooks on the end that Freya dodged and danced among like they were real. Lincoln had thought he might've been able to take her had he been sober enough to use defense in their brawl, but now he wasn't sure. It seemed she hadn't shown her full deck of cards either.
Loki fought her next. "Remember to slide your hand down your axe when you swing it!" Freya reminded him, and he did. She dispatched him rather quickly. Lincoln supposed that as he wasn't a real fighter nor huge, he couldn't make for as interesting an opponent.
Annabeth stepped forth. Gunner jumped up and cheered. "Hell yeah! Girl on girl action!"
"Hey be careful okay," Annabeth whispered. "You're like five times as strong as me."
Freya smiled. "Don't worry, I'm not expecting you to be super physical. We're gonna use acting and special effects to make you look superhuman."
Annabeth flailed her fake daggers wildly at Freya, who dodged desperately to make the swings seem faster. She let the daggers touch her several times, and pretended to be wounded when they did so. Eventually she fell to her knees, dropping her sword. Annabeth stopped to gloat. Freya snatched up her sword and impaled her through the chest—or rather, stuck the sword under her armpit. She then came to her feet, lifting Annabeth "impaled" into the air.
It looked good. It was a well planned scene up until the point Annabeth's "grip" on the sword between her arm and side failed and she slipped off and fell to the ground. Though she landed on padding, it was a fair ways down, and she rolled over clutching her elbow.
"Oh no!" Freya cried. "Annabeth, are you alright?"
"Just sprained my arm, I think. Sorry I'm not strong enough."
"It's okay. Go put some ice on that
."
Annabel left for the refrigerator in the office upstairs, and Lincoln walked over to Freya. "So, uh, she ever do stunts?"
"First time, but she wanted to. Say, our script calls for four demon knights. Since I don't want to change it or take time out to shoot on another day, why don't you give it a shot?"
Lincoln blinked. "Me fight in the video?"
"We've got some extra weapons in the closet. Why don't you take a look and see if you like anything?"
Though inclined to be skeptical, Lincoln couldn't help thinking this could be fun. He found a pair of metal-plated gauntlets and put them on. Doing so made him feel like a kid again, and he smiled.
"Those aren't weapons," Loki said. "That's just armor."
"Well, I'm a boxer. A boxer's punch would hurt somebody with these on, don't you think? So they are weapons."
He and Freya fought, gauntleted fists against prop sword, and found that the clash of said weapons produced a quite admirable impact and sound. They also exchanged some other strikes and holds. At one point, Lincoln accidentally grabbed Freya's boob. She gave him a real knee to the lower belly and nearly made him puke. He later nailed her with a real uppercut that sent blood flying upwards from her mouth and knocked her on her ass.
"See, bitch! I can keep score too."
Sitting down with blood splattered across her face, she laughed. She's such a cool girl, Lincoln thought.
After a lot of mostly fake fighting, everyone ate lunch. Afterwards Annabeth went to work editing videos while Gunner and Loki practiced their music. Freya took Lincoln aside to acclimate him more to his job description. "So when we're working in private like this you can just hang out and help with what you can, but when we actually perform, you'll be be keeping an eye on the crowd, and hopefully stop any trouble brewing before it starts. And if it does start, you can try your best to stop that t-"
She stopped. Lincoln followed her gaze to see that she'd noticed Sloth trying to sneak his way up the walkway that went along the wall and led to the office which housed the refrigerator.
"Oh no he doesn't," Freya muttered. Instead of following him up the stairs like a normal person, she strolled over to under the middle of the walkway, which Sloth hadn't reached yet. She jumped, grabbing hold of the edge which hung five feet overhead with one hand, and pulled herself up effortlessly like an orangutan. She slid under the lowest bar of the guardrail onto the walkway and stood in front of him.
"Sloth you weigh three hundred eighty pounds. You're not gaining any more weight."
He made as if to try and dodge past her, but realized the walkway was too narrow for that. "Oh come on Freya I'm hungry! My health app says I only had three thousand calories so far, that's less than my lunch yesterday!"
Her voice took on a hard edge. "If you keep getting fatter you're going to die before you're thirty. And I don't want you to."
"Just for today, please! I want my sausage roll."
"You say that every day. Not. On. My. Watch. Fatass."
Sloth tried to walk forward anyway. Freya met him, grabbed him around his huge legs, and lifted him onto her shoulder. She carried him back the way he'd came, down the steps, and set him down. She looked up, way up into his eyes, defying him to challenge her.
He looked away. "Freya, you're mean. You can't stop me. Maybe you can when you're around. But when you're not watching me, I can eat whatever I want."
She grabbed his chin and turned his head back around to look at her. "Oh yeah? If I notice you gain one more ounce of weight, I am going to punch a hole through your favorite guitar."
"That's my dad's guitar!"
"And if you don't stop going down this road, sooner than later you're going to be buried next to your dad. Think about it." Freya released him and he slunk away, back slumped and face glum.
"Well, that was intense," Lincoln said.
"His dad died at age forty of a heart attack at five hundred pounds. He won't." She rolled the shoulder on which she had carried the giant boy. "Now I'm hungry." She headed for the walkway. "Want something?"
"Some soda, maybe."
Freya came back a while later with a bottle of soda and a whole sausage roll she had apparently microwaved. She sat on the couch Sloth had occupied and took big bites right out of it, not appearing to think about sharing with anybody else.
"Nice role modeling, big momma," Lincoln mused, and sat next to her.
She looked at him. "Big momma?"
"You're like their momma bear, aren't you? All stern and tough and trying to look out for them."
"...maybe, I guess. But why am I being a bad role model? Do I look like I'm going to be four hundred pounds?"
"No, and?"
"That means I get enough exercise to burn it off. I can expend more energy faster than most people, you know. So I need fuel."
Lincoln wondered if that could be considered an explanation for her seemingly superhuman strength. It didn't explain her indestructible chin, though. "One other question. If you're always so physical, how do you manage to not break or rip off those long ass nails?"
She stretched out her fingers, examined said eye ripping talons a bit and frowned. "Do you think lions regularly lose their claws? I doubt it. So I guess these are my claws."
Lincoln punched her in the arm. She grabbed him and put him in a headlock. He broke free, scrambled into a defensive crouch on the couch; and they broke out laughing.
