It seemed to be an all-too-easy gig for Wicklow. The villain known as Upsurge would be getting paid by some police officer with apparent combat experience to have a wrestling match; simply to showcase the client’s talents in front of a crowd of citizens at some public event. All that he’d have to do is show up on time and get some satisfying growth in beforehand to match the size of his larger opponent. For working at the event, he’d get a payday and a place to sell merchandise to the gathered crowd. He likely would have to lose on purpose to make this client look tough, but it’ll be quick money and there would be no vigilantes trying to interfere. Wick was very skilled at such things, often making shows out of genuine fights with heroes trying to take him down. This will be no problem!

That’s not quite how things worked out. Gina turned out to be much more talented than expected, the large Arcanine effortlessly caught the monster off-guard on several occasions; easily throwing him around as if he were an amateur when he failed to take the officer seriously at first, and many times more while he tried to figure out where it all went wrong. Gina was elated by how well she was doing; the audience was cheering loudly and she felt fantastic pulling off manoeuvre after manoeuvre with such power and grace.

Wick will claim he was just making Gina look good, but he’d know that that wasn’t the case, and that fact would hurt more than any scrapes and grazes he picked up in the exhibition. Gina however, not falling for such excuses, got confirmation of her skills to go with a successful show; leaving as one very satisfied client.

This is a commission for VDO.
Gina is a character of VDO.

A follow-up comic can be found here: Growing Desperate