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✘“I GOTTA KEEP MY HEAD HELD HIGH, STRAIGHTEN THIS CROWN, AND PRESS FORWARD. IT’S THE ONLY WAY I KNOW HOW TO LIVE.”✘

Name; Lena Palmer.

Age; 25 years old.

Ring name; Sabrina King.

Hometown; Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

Face claim; Sasha Banks.

Status; Unfortunately for you, she is TAKEN.

{#} WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ✘✘

From a famous wrestling family, her father and mother are legends and her family is considered royalty.

Started dating a wrestling legend and promoter for the company 25 years older than her when she was 18 as her mother decided it would help her career.

The relationship ended when she was 22 and the man died in suspicious circumstances; many think she killed them.

Has yet to make a name for herself outside of her family and has many self doubts as to whether she would be there or not if wasn’t for her family’s name.

{#} THE GOOD & THE BAD ✘✘

As every person in the world, Lena can be:

+ Kind, easygoing, intuitive.

Unfortunately, she can also be:

- Emotional, indecisive, pessimistic.

{#} THIS IS HER STORY ✘✘

Lena Evangeline Palmer’s fate was sealed from the day she was born, and…that’s kinda been the problem. It’s been both a gift and a curse, as it turns out.

“Poor little rich girl,” some would say. “Oh, it must be so hard having a ready-made way to get your foot in the door,” others would surely scoff, accompanied by a well-timed roll of the eyes. The issue wasn’t that Lena’s parents were Julian and Grace Palmer. No one knew who those people were. If she just tossed around government names, there would be no expectations for her to meet, no preconceived notions for her to have to overcome. Now, Victor King and Ruby Cameron? Oh, ears perked up when people heard those names. Their eyes sparkled. They wanted to hear all about what it was like for Lena to have grown up with wrestling legends for parents. Always, they were dying to know more.

Lena supposed she understood the fascination that others had with her bloodline. Her mother was a product of the notoriously tough Canadian wrestling scene, which had a reputation for chewing up and spitting recruits out whole, regardless of gender. She was really the first woman to truly become renowned all across the country, lauded for her wrestling ability and known for being notoriously tough. Ruby was everything that no one had been before her – beautiful, energetic, and a practical technical savant. The girl from Toronto effectively became the First Lady of Canadian Wrestling, kicking ass, taking names, and snatching titles from Vancouver to Halifax and back again. Of course, American promoters began to take notice of Ruby’s high profile, and she was soon in high demand for promotions in the States. It was backstage at a show in Miami in 1985 that she met Victor King, a Houston native who cut his teeth as the golden boy of many a promotion in the South. Victor himself was already following in the footsteps of his family; his brothers both wrestled, his sister was a referee, and his father, Duke King, had already been successful years before, a near-miracle considering the segregated nature of the South back in his heyday. It was at that point that Ruby realized nothing about Victor’s in-ring persona was an act. He was every bit as charming and self-assured as he seemed to be. The phrase “love at first sight” is so often thrown around, but the way the story is told to Lena, that’s really what it was. Her parents were smitten right from the jump, so much so that her dad wasted little time integrating her mom into his in-ring act. It was shortly after this that both of their public profiles began to rise, bringing them both to a level of fame they hadn’t previously experienced before. The ripple effect caused by this led to Robert Burgess insisting that both of them be picked up by ACW in 1986, long before it was the juggernaut it is now. Needless to say, the two of them made waves. Not just because they were amazing on their own and would each wind up with several championships to their name when it was all said and done, but because they were essentially the first big-name interracial couple in professional wrestling. They went on to get married in 1988.

Ruby took a sabbatical beginning in 1990 and went back to just being Grace for a while. The reason for her pumping the breaks was that she found out she was pregnant with Lena’s older brother Ezra – who years later would go on to become a well-known wrestler in his own right as Nico King. Ruby stayed home for a bit and played mommy and geared up for a pretty stellar return – one that was ultimately cut sort of short when she found out she was pregnant for the second time and gave birth to Lena in January of 1992. Now, Ruby loved her children, and she still does, but she felt she’d worked too hard to further her career to just concede to it being over after marrying and having kids. So she didn’t. In turn, the early years of Lena’s life are even more of a blur than they are for most people. She and her brother were always on their parents’ hip. With Victor and Ruby having been ACW mainstays, the kids spent the early part of their childhood in Greensboro, and Lena’s earliest memories involve being in that warehouse. She took her first steps there. She has vague, blurry recollections of seeing wrestlers stomping toward the Gorilla position years ago. She never stood a chance, really. If her bloodline didn’t steer her to that line of work, then just being around all of these people would’ve caused the wrestling bug to bite her. There wasn’t any other direction she could go in. She was set.

Fast forward to 2007, when ACW is infinitely bigger than it was when Victor and Ruby were killing the game. The two are all but retired now, and have opened a successful wrestling school in Boston with Victor’s brothers. By now, Ezra is seventeen and getting ready to go graduate high school. He was offered a full scholarship to Syracuse to play football, but does he take it? Nah. He’s too determined to follow in his parents’ footsteps. The fervor with which he follows this dream inspires Lena. Eventually, Ezra is snatched up by ACW’s Developmental program, rebranded Nico King, and becomes the poster boy of the company’s infamous create-a-wrestler factory. Meanwhile, when Lena turns eighteen in 2010, she’s given her parents’ blessing to begin training. She sort of assumed she’d have to do things “the old fashioned way”. You know, busting your ass on the indies for years and years, grinding it out, but she was okay with that. This was really the first time in her life that she got acquainted with her privilege on a professional level. Her parents were friends with retired wrestler turned ACW agent Richard Lexington – better known as “Filthy” Rich Rogue – and had known him for years. He was a recent divorcee with kids Lena’s age, but Lena’s mom knew an opening when she saw one.

“It could do wonders for your career, baby doll,” her mother assured her soothingly, having tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “This could kickstart everything for you. You won’t have to struggle and scratch and claw the way that I had to.” Was her heart in the right place? Maybe…if not in a weird, stage mom sort of way. Something about this just felt wrong. It wasn’t that Rich wasn’t a nice guy. There was nothing wrong with him, per se, but the whole arrangement – and yes, that’s what it was, an arrangement – felt odd to Lena. He had been a family friend, a colleague of her parents’ and now he was her boyfriend? Or, career sugar daddy, rather. Lena knew that people were whispering. She knew that folks had a lot to say, and that they had their suspicions about it all, but Rich – bless his heart – tried to insulate her from all of it. Things like that made Lena think that he really loved her, which made her feel guilty as all hell. She could say a lot of kind things about Rich, but she never, ever loved him. She spent four years biting her tongue waiting for the payoff when she got the call from her dad in 2014.

“I’m sorry, honey, but…it’s Rich. They just found him, face-down in the bathtub. He’s dead…”

Lena didn’t know if she stopped listening after that or what. It’d be heartless not to have felt sad over Rich’s death, but Lena couldn’t help but feel like there was a silver lining to all of this. She was free, sort of. They never did figure out exactly what had happened, with the coroner having not really known whether to label the death as suicide, accidental, or of unknown causes. The real kicker, the part that Lena hadn’t seen coming, was that the police actually briefly believed she had something to do with it. She felt like they should’ve been talking to Rich’s doctor about all the muscle relaxers and sleeping pills in his system – the ones that she’s threatened to flush down the toilet at least a year before and he’d begged her not to. The retired wrestler turned executive having been poisoned by his beautiful, much-younger wrestler girlfriend would’ve made for a saucy ass headline, but Lena didn’t have anything to do with it. She figured there would always be people who believed different, and she tried not to let on how much it bothered her.

By now, Lena was being marketed as the top female performer in developmental, and she was retooled as such. A killer weave, a beat face, sparkling charisma, and a name like Sabrina King just helped the case. She even won the women’s title down there on three different occasions. While no one was ever really hostile to her face, she couldn’t help but feel like there was an asterisk next to everything she did. Her parents got her foot in the door and the dearly-departed Rich greased the wheels for her to become a star. The more time that’s passed and the more she’s been able to accomplish, the more she’d dying for there to be something that she can call her own…but she doesn’t know when she’ll find it or if she’ll find it at all. She’s brimming with pride to be the ACW Women’s Champion. After all, it’s what she’s wanted her whole life. But still, too often she finds herself pondering the question of whether or not she’d be here if not for all of those special circumstances. If not for her grandfather standing tall in the face of segregation and discrimination, if not for her mother breaking glass ceilings, if not for her dad and uncles busting their asses to cement their legacies, would she have fared okay without all of them holding the door open for her? Could she have gotten this far on her own merit if Rich hadn’t held her hand for four years? Lena’s not sure she wants to know the answers, but she’ll be damned if she’s not going to spend every day trying to silence the loudest voice that doubts her – the one in the back of her head. And now, with neck fusion surgery having almost certainly brought her brother’s career to a screeching – and likely permanent – halt, she’s carrying the King legacy on her shoulders. She doesn’t know if they’re broad enough to carry the weight…but she’s gonna try. She’ll never stop trying. It’s all she can really do.

#c: lena palmer #gender: female #status: closed #sasha banks

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