Prologue

Well yes, a brutal title, and bearing a vague resemblance to the MTV claymated series (Celebrity Deathmatch) from the late 1990s, which did partly inspire this. However, that is where the resemblance ends. This is far more serious, although narrated with touches of humour and compassion, I hope you will find. The backstory to this is that a mysterious power called the Overseers have announced the end of the world as we know it, but has strangely spared me – flawed character that I am – and allowed me to select 128 females known to me from all of my life to date, so that they can fight it out in a knockout tournament for the right to be a surviving 16 who can colonize a new world with me on a distant planet in our galaxy. That is narrated in my separate annals, ‘Battle Royale for New Olympus’.

That’s a lot to take in. For now, I invite you to understand this: I enthuse over cinema and actresses, and for this reason the Overseers have generously allowed me to include up to 4 celebrity actresses from a ‘qualifying tournament’ featuring 64 of them. The champion will automatically go to New Olympus, making it 17 who ultimately make it there. The other 3 emerging from here, however, will be entered into the main draw and have to fight it out among the 128 of Battle Royale. Whilst this seems tough, I am reminded that it would be unfair on those ‘ordinary’ women/girls if there are too many beautiful, talented and larger-than-life actresses in with them.

As in Royale, I assign each competitor a ‘rating’; this is basically a measure of how sexy I find her. I like to think there is a bit more depth to me than that, though, and of course it depends on how you personally measure ‘sexiness’. In the case of the celebrity actresses, the three criteria I am using are 1) how much sexual allure she has in my eyes, regardless of who she is 2) how big and successful her career was 3) any other striking qualities about her character. I weighed these things up and then assigned the rating, which ranges from 1 to 4 (1 being highest), with a ‘+’ sometimes appended if I feel she is ‘in between’. A higher rating has a higher likelihood of winning the contest than a lower rating, so a ‘1’ against a ‘4’ is therefore the biggest probability of victory:

The outcomes of the contests, let alone the ultimate champion, is therefore far from under my control (nor under the Overseers for that matter), and all the characters have a randomized life of their own, predictable only to a certain extent. This serves two purposes for me: excitement in not knowing who I will end up with, and a way of having impossible decisions made for me. It would seem that God, or somebody, does indeed play dice with the universe.

So, how is the tournament actually staged?

The sport, to begin with at least, is going to be FENCING, rather like the Olympic version but with a more ‘medieval’ form of epee duelling with looser rules. Other types of contest may be brought in as we go along. Every competitor is endowed with basic sword-fighting skills (even if they did not have these in normal life) and the only thing that differentiates their skill levels are the ratings I assigned to them.

In a metaphysical way, which we do not need to understand, it is actually their attributes and personalities (as assessed by me for their given rating) which are channelled and transposed into their fencing techniques and abilities. It is therefore these qualities which they are drawing upon to defeat their opponents. They are simply being manifested by the sweep and (deadly) tip of a sword.

Um, yes, make no mistake; it is to the death. It is best of 5 sets, and each set is given a game score (like tennis) which reflects how close things were. For sets one and two, all blows landed (whether injurious of ‘lethal’) are artificial as in professional fencing. From then on, though, a lethal blow is literally lethal – ‘the safety is off’, so to speak – to whichever player can afford to lose no more sets. In the fifth and deciding set, if there is one, it would be lethal to both players.