The night sky outside of the arena opens the scene, the camera panning down to the parking lot, illuminated in a fair amount of artificial light.

Production trucks form the walls of temporary alley ways, funneling the foot traffic further out into the parking lot where smaller vehicles remain.

The One Man Revolution, Pride Champion and member of the Inception Alliance, Bobby Minio, is walking through the middle of production trucks backed up to the arena loading dock, in his civilian clothing with a duffle bag slung over his right shoulder, the Pride Championship hanging over the bag’s strap and across Minio’s chest.

As he reaches into his pocket for his key fob, something catches on his hand, and he pulls his hand from his pocket, examining it.

Bobby Minio: Son of a bitch.

The camera can see a raw divot on his fingers, blistered from hours and hours of continuous pen work over the last few weeks.

Minio is used to pain of blunt damage, of bones breaking, burns, punctures, but this, this aches on some cosmic level, both physically and mentally, on par with a papercut rubbed with salt and brimstone.

He squeezes his left hand into a fist and in a moment of deep frustration, he bites down hard onto his knuckle, doing what he can to replace this silly ache with a more familiar pain.

He steps forward and continues back into his stride towards the cars when something catches his eye, a yellow and orange flickering reflecting on the lenses of his blacked out wayfarers.

He stops dead in his tracks, his left hand slowly raising up to eye level, dropping his shades further down the bridge of his nose. His brow lowers, his eyes narrowing. He walks around the camera man, who pans around to see a fire in a metal barrel near the side of the building.

Minio is jogging toward the barrel fire with the camera trotting behind. As they get closer, more of the scene comes into focus, a pile of familiar rubber bins haphazardly thrown off to the side.

Charred t-shirts hang over the side of the barrel, and pieces of paper, no, glossy photos, are strewn about on the ground around the barrel, some half burned, still smouldering.

Bobby Minio: No way. No F****ING WAY.

Minio is now standing next to the barrel of flames, reaching nearby to retrieve one of the partially burned t-shirts. His fears are made real, as he confirms the feeling he had in the lowest pit of his gut when the fire had first caught his eye.

These are the “limited edition” Pride Champion Bobby Minio t-shirts, the 8x10 glossy photos as well. The assignment, the busy work, it was just that. A complete waste of money, simply to keep Minio occupied, inconvenienced and silent in his “work”.

He reaches up, readjusting his shades over his eyes, his face resetting again to the resigned blank expression. Something feels different to the viewer however, maybe it’s the reflection of the flames flickering in the mirrored image of the Wayfarer’s lenses, maybe it is the context but it’s not a look of resignation, it’s a look of unmoved determination. His head shifts, looking dead into the center of the camera.

Bobby Minio: Mark my words right this moment. This will not happen again.

Minio walks forward, shoulder checking the camera man who bobbles and spins to catch the backside of Minio as he storms back into the heart of the parking lot.

His footsteps booming off of the asphalt before gradually fading into the overall din of the outside world. The camera pans back down to the ground, the shot framing on an 8x10 glossy image of Minio, clutching the Pride Championship in the seconds after pinning Cort Marshall at the Clash, frozen in the moment of joy.

The image is slowly burning as a smouldering wall along the margin of the photo eats away at the sheet centimeter by centimeter. Minio’s signature slowly burns away into ash as the scene fades.