Sometime in the late nineties, just after snowboarding became an Olympic sport, officials stripped a Canadian gold medallist of his medal for testing positive for performance enhancing drugs.
There was serious outcry over this, as medical opinions both at the time and after all agreed that marijuana was in no way performance enhancing.
Humbolt Building - Karin City - Gorean Occupied Karin
OCCUPATION: Day One Hundred Seventy Three
*AGAIN*
Edward puffed on his reefer, rolling the smoke around in his mouth as he blew a broad smoke ring outwards and away from him, smiling a stupid grin as he dangled his feet over the edge of the building staring at the snow drifting down from the dark clouds above him.
He was so sick of that sky, sick of the city, sick of repeating every action again and again ad nauseam. There had to be a way to win, but he was close to just giving up. Sal-zÿr could out-fly him, out muscle him, out-manoeuvre him; brute strength was getting him nowhere. But it wasn't as if he had any other option open to him. Just asking a Gorean if he would be so kind as to get his big blue butt off of Karin wasn't exactly likely to work.
Trying to figure out what Darien would do wouldn't exactly help him either. Darien would have been dead a long time ago, unless of course the golden coated horse shoe he had stuffed up his backside.. - though exactly where he hid it Edward had no idea, he'd looked many times trying to find it - would save him.
Edward had accumulated more than enough mental scars in his attempts to fight off Sal-zÿr to decide, quite rightly, that fighting a Gorean sucked royally. It wasn't like battling a battalion of Amsus troopers, or going toe-to-toe with Rikard, an option that was rapidly becoming preferable to his current flip-flop-cluster-fuck.
He watched Sal-zÿr scaling the smokestack across the city, looking for the Princling to do what he had done hundreds of times before without being aware of it. Edward blew another lazy smoke ring, his Dragoon jacket open and the chest protector discarded. He was left wearing a simple blue-grey tee-shirt on which the words 'world's laziest ninja' were printed in bold letters. He wasn't even making an effort this loop. He needed the down time, a chance to collect his thoughts and think about what he was doing wrong.
Not that he was doing much right. Since discovering Sal-zÿr's weakness to cordite, Edward had tried ambushes, traps, strategic as well as tactical bombardment, and even a nuclear suitcase bomb borrowed from the Excalibur's arsenal. The latter had resulted in a catastrophic decimation of the city, resulting in Sal-zÿr's death and given Edward a major headache for the next five loops, a kind of bone headed act of desperation he wasn't about to try again. Killing everything resulted in the same kind of GAME OVER that rebooted the loop each time he died.
Continually dying was giving Edward a whole new perspective on life, though. It would make a great book if ever he got around to actually having the patience to sit down and put it into words. Life and Death, the Matt Elias story... a morbidly erotic tale of an immortal pursuit of Darien's tail...
Edward snorted a laugh as smoke escaped from his nose. He could almost picture Darien's apoplexy at the book signings as rabid fans clamoured to buy the in-depth tell-all of their greatest living hero's sordid sex life, down to his secret fetish for dirty socks.
Next loop, sunshine and flowers. Edward vowed to himself, eyeing Sal-zÿr as he leapt off of the smoke stack to begin an aerial search of the city. It wouldn't take him long, and Edward offered a low grumble as he forced himself to stand upright, swaying a little as he fumbled for the crate he had brought with him for attempt: I don't give a f- I gave up counting yonks ago.
Finding what he wanted, he hefted the Amsus issue surface to air missile launcher to his shoulder, adjusting the sights, the spliff hanging out of the corner of his mouth as he adjusted the tactical scope to try to zero in on the Gorean's aerial circuit. Frustratingly it didn't seem to want to work.
Puffing a few extra times to be certain he adjusted his grip on the weapon, fumbling for the oddly placed trigger.
The missile exploded from the launcher, roaring outward as Edward lurched. Behind him, the HVAC cluster on the Humbolt building exploded. The missile had fired in the wrong direction.
Edward offered a frustrated curse as he dropped the launcher, turning to look at the devastation he'd wrought by holding the weapon the wrong way round. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and sighed.
"So much for this loop." He turned back to face the Gorean sweeping down upon him, puffing his spliff again with calm indifference as he watched the gaping jaws open. "Hurry up already and get it over with!"
BEFORE THE BEGINNING OF THE END