The video begins in the front of a car as we get a view out of the windshield at what seems to be a river in front of us. It’s dark outside though, just as it’s dark inside the car as the camera begins to record. Then it spins around and we see a tired looking Syren behind the drivers seat. She turns the light on in the car and puts the camera down on the dashboard, positioning it so that she’s in the frame before taking a deep breath and letting out a sigh. Her eyes are a little red underneath them as though she’s been crying. “I don’t even know why I’m filming this right now,” she says to the camera before sighing again. “I think I just need to talk to someone, and I’m not sure who I can really talk to right now. So I just left the CenturyLink Center. I’m sitting right now in, um… I don’t even know where. Somewhere in Omaha, I guess? I don’t know, I wasn’t exactly planning out where I was going, you know? I just needed to get out of there tonight. I mean you guys saw what happened, right? Everyone saw it live on Breakdown and… I don’t even know what to say. God, I mean losing to David last week, after everything that happened between us… that was so hard to take. It took everything I had not to completely lose control. I was so angry, and not at him, at me. I should have been better. I should have beaten him. I mean god, after everything that happened I should have beaten him! But I didn’t. I lost, and god that was hard to take…”

She lets out a long sigh before wiping her eyes again. There were no tears in them, or at least none that were visible to the camera, but it’s possible that it was just a reaction to the fact that she’d clearly been crying before. “So I thought losing to David was bad, but then this week…” she says, trailing off before shaking her head and going silent for a moment, as if she can’t find the words. We see her sitting there taking a few deep breaths in and out before she looks back at the camera again. “Ever since Flawless I guess I’ve been holding out a lot of hope. It’s not often you get title opportunities in this business, you know? And god, if anyone should know that then I should. That was the first one I’ve EVER been given. All the others I’ve had to go through hell to get, with so much uncertainty and so much doubt. And it’s so hard doing that. It’s just like you never know, you know? You never know where the next opportunity is going to come from. You never know how you’re ever going to get yourself in to that kind of situation. When you can fight people and beat people but then see those people get given opportunities ahead of you, when you can see so many different names all move ahead of you in the list and you feel like you’re stuck there, like you’re invisible, like no matter what you do it’s never good enough, it fucks with you so badly. You seriously have no idea how much it fucks with you.”

She puts her head in her hands for a moment, shaking her head. “And when you’re in that situation, all you do is you feel bad about yourself. You feel bad about everything you say. You feel bad about everything you do. You compare yourself to everyone else and you wonder what they’re doing that’s that much better than you, you know? And it’s maddening because there’s never an answer. It’s not like anyone ever tells you that you need to change something or improve something, or that they’d pay more attention to you if you did something different. All you do is you sit there and you obsess over and over again, and you can’t sleep at night because you can’t stop wondering what you did wrong or why you’re not where you want to be,” she admits before taking a deep breath again and again letting out a sigh. “So it was my first ever opportunity at the World title that management have just given me and I won the match… but I didn’t win the title. That by itself is so seriously maddening. To think I came that close, that I won the match, that I was better than her on that night but I don’t have anything to show for it… I guess I haven’t gotten over that yet. But then I started to hope. And Mr D tells me that he needs time to make a decision and I continue to hope. And I’m not even like ‘I have to have a one on one match’, I’ve never thought that way. I just wanted an opportunity! It that was Kelcey and me, or David and me, or David and Kelcey and me, or any combination I’d have been fine with it. I just wanted the chance, you know?”

She takes another few breaths before wiping her eyes again. “So I’m sitting here right now and I’m not the number one contender, or the number two contender, or a contender of any kind, I guess. I’m not going to Taking Hold of the Flame, and if I don’t win the Battle Royal in a few weeks — if I don’t literally beat twenty-nine other people in the same match — then I’m not going to Rise to Greatness either. And if that doesn’t happen then what? If that doesn’t happen then I don’t know when the next opportunity comes. Is it Apocalypse? Is it Under Attack? Is it even this year? Am I just going to be knocked aside all over again, told I’m not good enough all over again, and have to wait behind everyone else for another year before I get another chance at a championship when I WON THE MATCH, you know? That’s what’s SO crazy and SO frustrating! I won the match,” she says, putting her head back in her hands again and then slowly running her hand through her hair before shaking her head. “You know I know what you guys are probably thinking right now. That’s why I’ll likely be deleting this video later. You guys are all like ‘you’re a whore and you’re pathetic and they’re all better than you and you don’t deserve it anyway’. Yah, I’ve heard that so many times. I practically hear it every damn week from every damn opponent. I’m never good enough, am I? No matter what I do, no matter how hard I work or what I win, it’s never good enough.”

She starts laughing and shaking her head before stopping and almost sobbing a little. “You know I keep trying to think what the next step is,” she says uncertainly. “That’s what Alexander is always trying to get me to focus on. He’s always looking on the bright side. He’s always trying to boost my confidence. He’s always so amazingly optimistic. He's all like ‘well, you beat this guy so you’re ahead of him’. He’s so sure that that’s the way it’ll work, but I know that it’s not. I’ve stood in the line long enough and seen so many others move in front of me to know that that’s not the way it works at all. A few weeks ago I stood in front of this camera and I said that the line starts with me, but oh look, I was wrong. I got strung along for weeks and weeks, I got my hopes raised for weeks and weeks and then they got shattered right in front of me and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that. I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to respond to that. Well, that’s not entirely true. I mean I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it, that much is true, but I know how I can respond. I basically have two options. They're the two options presented to everyone in this situation, aren’t they? The first one is that I take my ball and I go home. We’ve seen that one used a lot of times by a lot of different people. Go down the list of former champions and you’ll see what I mean. But I’ve never taken that option. I’ve always gone with the second one: I get back in that ring and I take on the next challenge that comes my way.”

“Do you guys want to know the truth? I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t think it’s fair at all,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “But what I think doesn’t matter, right? I’m just another former champion desperately hoping for another opportunity. I’m just another name in thirty competing for the next shot. The semi-finalist in Best of the Best is just the second-to-last loser. I don’t think it’s fair, the situation I’m in, considering how close I came and what I did, but I do know there’s a few people I can blame. Before you start to wonder no, one of them isn’t Mr D. I mean I could blame him, it was his decision after all, but blaming him wouldn’t really do much for me. My complaints would just be drowned out by the complaints of others who blame him for every failure, blame him for every week they go without a title, blame him for every match they lose, blame him for the fact that they went outside and it rained and they didn’t bring a coat or blame him because it’s cold in Canada. I think I have pretty legitimate complaints but I’m not going to get them across, am I? Not next to all of that! So who else can I blame? Well, there’s me. And I do blame me. I actually hate myself right now because I couldn’t win a tournament with sixty-three other entrants. I actually HATE myself right now because I couldn’t beat the entire roster in a single-elimination tournament. So I’m totally blaming myself, that’s without doubt. But then there’s more, isn’t there?”

“What do they call themselves, the ‘Keenie Nation’?” she asks before shaking her head in disgust, an angry scowl on her face as she clearly thinks about them all. “And every week it just gets bigger. It’s like someone sent out a memo that said ‘hey, want to look like a complete tool? Unable to think for yourself? Want to follow a dumb predictable bitch who can’t retain a title without an entire army helping her? Then we want you’. I want to say it’d be like an Uncle Sam recruitment poster but it wouldn’t be, it’d probably be more like a poster with three giant X’s on it and the guarantee of boobies. I mean that’s pretty much the deal here, right? And we all know it. But yet every week it gets bigger and bigger and last week we even saw a union with Silas World? I mean fucking seriously? Because there weren’t enough cliché-ridden empty exchangeable bitches in both groups already now we really have to watch them team up? It’s going from the Keenie Nation to the Keenie World Order with one message that we’ve heard a thousand times before, ‘we’re taking over’. It’s expanded from an army to something even more. Now I hate to do this again, since you know I already totally stole the Evil League of Evil once before, but what was it Autumn called this group? The Legion of Lackeys! And it really is becoming a legion now with more and more and more and more.”

“You can say whatever you want about the first match but I still want to remind you that it took a giant, a greedy little goblin, a dwarf and an annoying troll to take the World title off of my shoulder, but when I came within seconds of winning it back again it was ‘Keenie Nation’ that screwed me without doubt. Dante McCaffery is the reason that I’m not the current reigning and defending SCW World Champion, Dante McCaffery is a small part of the Legion of Lackeys but a much larger part of Punk Hazard, and Punk Hazard are a part of all of this because of Alexis Quinne. So if I hate myself right now for losing a match just imagine how much I hate them for everything they’ve cost me, and that doesn’t include Dante trying to claw my eyes out of my head a few weeks ago, or El Rudo trying the same thing in the first round of the tournament. Punk Hazard have seemingly made it their mission to make sure that I get knocked down and I made a whole bunch of promises on the night that I faced Dante, do you remember that?” I asked, looking into the camera with a renewed anger and determination. “I promised that I would hurt him. I promised that I would beat him in the middle of the ring. And I promised that I would send him back to Kennedy with his tail between his legs. Well, I’m highly emotional right now, my emotions are running all over the place, but come next week I’m going to have picked myself up and dusted myself down and I’m going to fulfil those promises, only it won’t be Dante this time around but the Queen Bee of Punk Hazard.”

She sits there for a moment before shaking her head slowly. “Wait, that’s not right, is it?” she asks, clearly disappointed in herself. “I mean Alexis isn’t really the Queen Bee, we all know there’s only room for one ego at the top of the Legion and we all know who that is already. So what does that make you, Alexis? I’ll tell you what it makes you. It makes you a follower. It makes you a disciple. And really, after everything you’ve done, is that what you want to be? It wasn’t too long ago that you turned your back on your partner and friend, was it? You turned your back on Collin Cole and had him beaten down by his own friends because he wasn’t good enough for you, because you thought that he was holding you back from where you wanted to be. And where did you want to be, sweetie? You wanted to be a nothing face in amongst an army of nothing faces? You wanted a background figure, a loyal puppy who barks on command and rolls over when she’s told to? No, that’s not what you wanted to be at all but yet that’s what you’ve come. Damn, Collin must be so disappointed that he didn’t get to join in the ride on that one, huh? He’s got to be totally devastated he got betrayed, beaten down and kicked out of the group who made the big promise of ruling the roost and reduced themselves to running errands instead. Is that what ‘Pint-Sized Awesomeness’ is all about, Alexis? Five foot two, one hundred pounds of puckering up ass-kisser!”

She starts laughing and shaking her head like she can’t even believe that that would be even slightly true. “No, I don’t think that’s what you’re about. I don’t think that’s why you betrayed your friend. I don’t think that’s what you planned to build when you unleashed Punk Hazard on us all. But I think that’s what you’ve become, and quite frankly I pity you for it,” she says with an honesty in her voice and another shake of her head. “You see I know how it feels to be in that situation. I’ve been there twice before. When Ravyn and Lucas and me started off the Infamous it was never supposed to be what it became, but so quickly it expanded out and we got joined by Christy Matthews and CHBK and before long I found myself at the back of that group looking forward. You see when it started it was all about Lucas and Ravyn and me, but within a few months CHBK was playing at being the leader, Lucas and Christy were the faces of the group, and I was in the background and I hated it! Every time it came to somehow handing out a microphone it was them that did the talking. Whenever someone had a question it was them that provided the answers. I was just a face at the back of the group, feeling forever cold by the shadows cast over me, and I hated it! It was never how it was supposed to be and yet that’s how it turned out. They were the big stars and I was the lowly little blonde girl in the background.”

She has a look of resentment on her face as she shakes her head again at the memory. “And you know I don’t think anything epitomised that more than the night that Infamous got to celebrate winning the Trios Tournament. The three of us worked our butts off to get the win, to get those contracts, to write our own tickets, and when we went out to the ring to celebrate Lucas got to talk, and Christy got to talk, and I didn’t get to say a single thing. I vowed, when the Infamous was over, that I would never be in the background again! I stepped forward, I beat just about everyone in the group at one stage or another, and I stepped in to the spotlight with the promise that I would never go back. Then Pinnacle happened, and Regan Street came along, and what happened? Elimination Chamber 2013, do you remember my involvement in the build up to that? No? That would be because the only damn thing I got to do was tell people that ‘yay, Regan is coming back’. That was it. That was my involvement. I was in the goddamn shadows AGAIN after everything I’d done, and once again I hated it,” she says with another scowl on her face. “So I walked away. I stepped out on my own. And that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’ve been on my own but goddamn if I hadn’t had that spotlight shining down on me and it feels good. So I know how it feels to be a face in the crowd, and with everything I know about you Alexis I can’t believe that’s all you want.”

“This is the part where you tell me that that’s not what you are,” she says a little mockingly. “This is the part where you swear blind that you’re Alexis Quinne and you’re small and fierce and you’re out for yourself and you’re going to beat me this week and prove that to everyone, right? And let’s say you’re right. Let’s say you beat me this week. Let’s say Alexis Quinne shows how much awesomeness is really in that little pint-sized body of hers and she does the unthinkable and she beats me this week… will people remember that Alexis Quinne beat Syren, or will they remember that the Keenie World Order triumphed over me? You might like to think it’s the first but trust me sweetie I speak from experience when I tell you it’s really, truly not. Next week on Breakdown they’ll talk about how I’m not a contender and Kennedy proved that. The week after as the build up to Rise to Greatness begins they’ll talk about how I’m not deserving of even a spot on the show because Kennedy showed that. It won’t be Alexis Quinne, it won’t even be Punk Hazard, it’ll be the Keenie Nation that triumphs and you, just like I used to be, will be lost in the shadows and maybe you’ll do what I used to do and you’ll convince yourself that it’s for the best, you’ll convince yourself that you’re part of something bigger and that that’s what you represent, but trust me soon enough you’ll be standing in that ring and your own job will be to tell the world how great someone else is, and you’ll hate yourself, and you’ll wonder how in the fuck you fell that far!”

“Now I didn’t tell you that because I expect you to turn your back on them. I didn’t tell you that because I expect that Punk Hazard will break away and they’ll go back to establishing their own legacy and not following the orders of Kennedy, or Ethan, or Silas, or any of the countless lackeys who are higher up the food chain than all of you are. I’m not telling you that because I think it’ll make you open your eyes and help you see the truth because I’ve been where you are and I convinced myself, just like you will, that it was all wrong and that I was exactly where I needed to be. I’m telling you that because this week, after I beat you in that ring, after I drop on your face and I send you crawling to the back to explain how you couldn’t get the job done, there will come a moment while they’re berating you and belittling you and taking all that credit for everything right while blaming you for everything wrong that just half a second that this wasn’t what you signed up to be, and when it does you’ll know I was right,” she says before smirking at the camera. “But I probably shouldn’t be concerning myself with thoughts like that when I face the very real possibility that this week I’m going to have another gang mugging in that ring the likes of which I’ve never felt before, and I’ve already been on the receiving end of Silas World attacks on numerous occasions so I know a thing or two about gang muggings.”

“This week it’s the mission of Alexis Quinne to continue the misery that I’ve been enduring over the past few weeks, to make sure that I feel even smaller than I already feel, to make sure that the day ends with me hating myself even more than I already do, and you know what? I’m looking forward to that,” she says before smirking again. “Like I said already there are two choices that everyone faces in my situation, the first is to take your ball and run on home and the second is to step up and fight your way all the way back to the top, and I’m electing for option number two. I’ve fought my way from the background, from the shadows, from the depths of nothingness to the very top of the mountain time after time after time and I’ve had to deal with more BULLSHIT than anyone else in the history of this company to get to where I wanted to be. I could take that as a sign that I should give up but this week instead I’m going to start the climb all over again. And this week it’s not about making Alexis jealous, what does she have to be jealous of right now after all? She’s the number one contender to the Women’s Championship and I’m at the back of the line for everything. There’s nothing I can do to make her jealous, but there is something else I can do. I can get into that ring and I can fight. I can get into that ring and I can overcome everything that stands in front of me, whether that’s one five foot two little scrapper with desire or whether that’s half a locker room full of reinforcements with the simple mission of taking me out.”

“This week it’s not about getting what I want, it’s been made very clear that I won’t be getting that any time soon. This week it’s about proving that you can knock me down, you can overlook me and you can ignore my claim but you can never break me. God knows I feel so bad right now. God knows I hate myself right now. God knows I don’t know where I’m going or how I’m going to get there, I don’t know what I’ve got to do when I can get to the brink of victory only to have it snatched away from me. I don’t know where I’m going or how I’m going to get there but I know damn well that I won’t let anyone stop me,” she says as all her anger and her distress seems to turn into an angry guttural determination. “Right now I’m feeling about as long as I’ve ever felt, I’m feeling about as small as I’ve ever felt, I’m feeling about as miserable as I’ve ever felt, and next week come Breakdown I have no idea how I’m going to be feeling, I don’t know if I’m going to have gotten over this or if it will have consumed me even more, but I do know that however I’m feeling and however many are standing around inside when I get there I’m getting into that ring, I’m fighting Alexis Quinne, I’m conquering Alexis Quinne and I’m standing in that ring once again, I’m STANDING TALL in that ring once again, and I don’t expect a single one of you to be jealous of me next Wednesday but I do want you all to know that even after everything that’s happened I WILL get it all back because you can knock me down but you can’t break the unbreakable!”

She wipes her eyes and her face with her hands before staring into the camera with determination before the video ends and we cut to black with the replay button flashing up on the screen.