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✖ THE CARNIVAL

Ⅰ. ARRIVAL & THE TEMPLE
You can read all about your character's arrival in the game lore.
You can see the lights of the Ferris wheel from the water, and by the time you pull into port you can smell popcorn, cotton candy, grease, sawdust. Music drifts on the air, interspersed with screams from the rides.

The carnival is in town.

Not just any carnival, either - the carnival. The one to end all others. Every circus you ever read about or saw in a movie, with striped tents filled with acrobats and sideshows, midway games complete with carnival barkers in straw boater hats. But it's also every shitty fair that ever rolled through your hometown, with unreliable looking men with greasy mullets smoking as they jockey the Wild Mouse, the Gravitron, the Zipper, the Corkscrew. There's a constant stream of 80s hair metal playing underneath the roar of the rollercoaster tracks, blending somehow with the traditional piping organ of the carousel.

Experienced Travelers will know by now that every island has its own temple, and this one is no exception. It’s not in the carnival proper, though; if you step away from the lights of the midway and tents, you’ll notice dozens of old wooden circus trailers, arranged in a circle, growing tighter together the closer to the center you walk. The trailers are functional living places, with built in beds - sometimes one, sometimes two - and a small table and an old wood burning stove with a cooking top just big enough to boil a kettle on. There’s a toilet, but if you want a shower you’ll have to go outside and find a tent set up at the outskirts of the makeshift trailer park where there are tent showers set up, locker room style.

The clearing in the middle of the parked caravan is completely empty except for a solitary midway game: a towering high striker. It must be at least twenty feet tall, surmounted by a round, red bell. A wooden mallet is leaned against a sign next to the game that reads, predictably, TEST YOUR STRENGTH.

Step right up.

Notes:
1. Please remember to mark threads appropriately with Content Warnings when necessary.

2. These prompts are a jumping off point - how they affect your character and their development is up to you.

3. The island temple is accessible to all. The High Temple is only accessible to new characters this month - it will re-open to all others next month.

4. The Test your Strength game can be played by anyone. How well your character does is entirely up to you, but the game does not necessarily measure physical strength.

5. These residents of the island are normal humans. Killing them is possible and will affect the colour grading of your Scrywatch depending on the situation.

6. Any food found on the midway is safe to eat, and is consumable by non-human entities.

7. Have fun!

Ⅱ. HALL OF MIRRORS
When it comes to amusements, the Hall of Mirrors has always been second-fiddle to the Haunted House. But the line for the former was shorter, so here you are. The guy working the door has weasel eyes and is smoking. He gestures for you and whoever is behind you to enter together; "No singles. For safety."

The lights are a dull neon, cycling from deep blue to cyan to purple and back again. You find that your outstretched fingers will bump against smooth, clear glass as often as not. The mirrors reflect the maze back into itself over and over, disorienting and strange.

Some of the mirrors are convex, some concave, and as you pass them your reflection warps and bends alongside that of whoever you're stuck inside the maze with.

At some point you will realise that the reflection looking back at you isn't quite right. It's still you, sure, but it's not how you really look, not on the outside.

Looking back at you from the cold glass is how you perceive yourself. Perhaps that's stronger, perhaps uglier, perhaps as a sniveling child or an ancient hag. And this reflection is going to follow you from mirror to mirror as you desperately try to find your way out.

One of you spots an exit sign, bleeding red light. Only catch is that it's behind a pane of glass. And another. And another. You could break your way through all of them, certainly, but it's not as if there's anything laying around for you to use to do so. Just yourself, which might work in action movies but tends to cause a lot of physical damage in the real world.

Above the glass someone has placed a sticker that reads, “who are you really?” in black sharpie. Answer it, and the glass will swing open. Don't, and well...

Guess you'll have several years worth of bad luck.

Notes:
1. Yes, characters can bash their way out of the maze, but it is real glass and will cut anyone who isn’t invulnerable. There is a first aid station run by extremely unreliable carneys on the premises, so hopefully they can patch themselves up enough there.

Ⅲ. THE CAROUSEL
CW: childhood trauma
Old fashioned organ music and a million flashing lights draws you to the carousel. It's a vintage delight: huge, with ornate animals carved out of wood and lovingly hand painted. There are horses, of course, but also lions and leopards and birds and rabbits and wolves... any animal you could want! In fact, you'll see an animal that looks perfectly YOU. You just have to climb up on it for a ride.

Settled on your mount, the ride begins to move. To your surprise, it begins to move backwards. You can't seem to ungrip the pole you're hanging on to, so you're helpless to escape as the ride spins again and again.

When it stops and you step off, you will be younger. You will in fact be the same age you were when a formative event happened to you.

You're a kid at a carnival! How fun! Well, maybe you're not that young, and it's probably not very fun at all considering that now your trauma is fresh.

The only way to become your proper age again is to get on the carousel and get it to run forward. Depending on your age, you might not be able to figure any of that out, but surely one of the other Travelers can help you. You'll definitely need someone to man the carousel controls. Oh, and be careful not to knock it into overdrive...

Notes:
1. If your character does not get back on the carousel and ride it in reverse, they will revert to their actual ages at the end of the month.

2. Please be especially mindful of content warnings with underage characters. A reminder that the game does not allow explicit sexual content with minors.

3. You do not have to regress your character to childhood - if a very formative event happened at age 20 for example, you can choose that route instead.

4. Speeding up the carousel while it is moving forward will result in, you guessed it, aging your character UP. Obviously you can ride it backwards again to fix this, or again the aging will be reversed at the end of the month.

Ⅳ. COULROPHOBIA
CW: clowns, suffocation
Who can possibly resist the big top? Not you! You're ushered into the tent and you take a seat in the stands, where you have an excellent view of the huge ring before you. The excitement in the air is palpable, and even if you're the grouchy type you'll find yourself a little bit thrilled.

It's a little surprising when the lights go up to the sound of screaming guitars. Mist belches from hidden foggers, and flames shoot from near the center of the ring. The lights stutter red, blue, green. The whole thing is a lot more rock show than it is Ringling Brother's.

At any rate, even if the ringmaster looks like a reject from a trailer park metal band and the music is liable to burst some eardrums, it's still a circus. There are trained horses and riders, contortionists, and a score of talented trapeze artists. It's all sparkling and impressive and terrific fun.

The trapeze artists take their bows, clearly ready for a break. And if a break is needed at the circus? You know what happens next, don't you?

SEND IN THE CLOWNS!

The clowns spill into the ring, all sorts of them! There's Harlequin and Pierrot, Auguste and Tramp. There's Bozos and Ronalds and Clarabelles and Krustys. Hopefully no Gacys, but there's so many of them that it's hard to know for sure.

One of these clowns - the one you hate the most, of course - approaches you in the stands. With comically exaggerated movements, it leans close to you and whispers...

Well. It whispers horrible things to you, really. It recounts to you some instance in your life where you delighted in the suffering of another, a moment where you really and truly were happy that somebody else was hurt. It's not a moment to be proud of, for sure, but as the clown tells your own secret shameful joy to you, you start to laugh. Really laugh - soon you're bent over double, tears running down your face, absolutely howling with laughter.

Your stomach hurts, and you're running out of breath. Very soon you won't be able to breathe at all.

Eventually, one of your fellow travelers won't be able to resist asking you, "What's so funny?"

The only way to stop laughing is to tell them. Otherwise you're going to pass out right where you sit, a creepy clown leering over you the whole time. Maybe your fellow traveler will be nice enough to drag you out of there if that happens, because if you're left alone? Everybody knows clowns get so much scarier alone in the dark.

Notes:
1. What happens if you really do get ditched with the clowns? Great question. Maybe they make you one of them. Maybe they eat you. Maybe you just wake up in the Big Top dressing room and see all the clowns smoking cigars and taking their floppy shoes off to film Clown Foot Erotica.

It wouldn't be a party without some jams.

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To Chloe, this feels like - well, like a hysterical reaction to a bad dream. Trixie has never reacted quite so strongly to one, but Chloe understands the general idea.

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” she says, soothingly. “Try to take a breath, okay? Do you want to tell me about it?” Because that’s what she does with Trixie - talking about the bad dream helps it fade away.

Taking a deep breath was becoming harder and harder. She did try, because she knew Chloe was really trying to help and she probably knew more than Molly did because Grownup, but that deep breath fueled another bout of laughter.

"I..I...I..."

It was getting harder and harder to talk. But she felt a powerful need to tell Chloe what was wrong, because she could see the worry in her friend's eyes. Chloe might not be her mom, but in that moment Molly felt an attachment to her as all she had here.

"HE SAID I LIKE TO PUNCH PEOPLE AND THAT I LIKED KILLING MY PARENTS!!" She spat it out really fast and in a rush. Then the gasped a few times, and the urge to laugh started to subside. It wasn't completely gone, but clearly she'd done something right in getting that much out, anyway.

It's clear that, laughter or not, Molly is actually incredibly upset by the whole situation - not that Chloe can blame her. For starters, that clown had been creepy and invasive.

And then she says that. And Chloe feels a bubble of anger in her chest - not at the child, but at the clown.

"That was a cruel thing to say," she says after taking a breath. She'd have stronger words with the clown, if she thought she could find him. "He shouldn't have said that to you."

Normally, Molly is decent at reading people and might have correctly read Chloe's pause as anger - although she likely would have mistaken it for being for her - but she's pretty distracted by everything going on in her had and with the laughter so it's all she can do to start to try to get a handle on herself.

"Buh..buh..but it might be true!!" She cries harder than she laughs now, at least.

The thing was, she did enjoy playing the hero and punching people, but she'd never twisted it quite like the clown did into something terrible. That kernel of truth in the twisted words made them strike home so much more deeply than if it had just been all false. And that naturally led to wondering, if she liked punching people and it was so horrible, did she like what she had to do to defeat her parents...which resulted in their deaths?

"Hm."

Chloe doesn't dismiss her out of hand. She doesn't wave off the fear she clearly has. She takes it seriously, considers it for a moment, brushing a lock of hair away from Molly's face as she does so.

"Something tells me it's not," she says thoughtfully. "Something tells me that you care - about other people, about doing the right thing, about being a good person. People who care about that stuff, they don't go around hurting people for fun. And you don't, either."

Her laughter seems to cool down more and more as she talks. Even her sobs turn more to sniffles as Chloe works to talk her down from the ledge that the clown shoved her right up to. Confronting this stuff isn't fun at all, and she barely even understands the complexity of it. There is an element of this feeling like sucking out some poison, but that is more for the parents than the twisting of her love of playing the hero. Her parents' death is a weight she carries with her always, and this is just another fresh way to address the grief that she typically keeps buried.

"I..d-do," she says, wiping an arm across her eyes. "But I do have fun punching bad guys. Is that...is that bad?"

This kinda sucks. Chloe feels like this isn’t a moral conundrum a child Molly’s age should have to be grappling with. She should be able to just have a normal childhood, with normal childhood moral conundrums. But here they are, and whether she likes it or not, it seems as if Molly has a lot of violence in her life.

She sighs.

“I killed someone once,” she admits after a moment. “He was a very bad man, who kidnapped my daughter, threatened her, tried to kill me and my partner. Just, all kinds of bad. I didn’t have a choice - he wasn’t going to stop until he was dead or I was dead. But when I shot him, it definitely felt good. It felt… satisfying.”

Molly's sniffles quiet more as she listens to Chloe. Oh wow. She was the perfect person to have come upon Molly to help her out. Chloe hadn't even needed the clowns to get in her head to make her admit that - this was a lesson she didn't need to learn.

Molly reaches out a hand to put over the woman's hand as she talks. "Sometimes you gotta kill the bad guys. And if doing it makes the world a better place...I think that's why we feel good. Not because we like killing or hurting people, but because when you do something good you feel good."

She frowns a little. "I think. Unless that's a bad thing to think. Maybe the bad guys feel the same way, and they don't know they're bad guys but think they're good guys. But saving your daughter, and your partner, and yourself...I think that's pretty obviously good."

Chloe sighs. This stuff is so complicated, even adults don’t often get it. She knows she doesn’t, always.

“I think doing what’s right, or what’s good, doesn’t always correspond to whether we enjoy it. I did what I had to do, to save myself and the people I love. Yeah, in the moment it also felt good, because I was mad at him for what he did - maybe I even hated him. But a couple of years later, I caught the guy who murdered my dad. I could’ve hurt him, killed him, as well. I hated him, too. I wanted to hurt him. It probably would’ve felt good in the moment. But I didn’t, because I knew it wouldn’t have been the right thing. That’s the difference between good people and bad people - we try to do the right thing, regardless of our personal feelings in the moment.”

"Why wouldn't it have been the right thing?"

She tilts her head, curious. No, she's not exactly advocating for revenge-murder, but at the same time...the guy killed her dad. That had to make killing him the right thing, right? But then, she'd participated in actions that had killed her parents. Should she be killed for it?

"Was your dad trying to bring back some evil gods that would devour the world?" That was the complication she knew to explain why killing a parent might be okay...although she still didn't know that it was okay that her parents were dead.

Chloe has to laugh at that. Maybe that sort of thing happens in Molly's world, but it's a ridiculous thought to Chloe - especially when paired with her father, the kindest, most compassionate man she's ever known.

"No," she says. "It wouldn't have been right because it wouldn't have been justice. It just would've been revenge. A murder for a murder. It would've made me no better than him. This is why we have laws, why we arrest people, give them trials, and put them in prison. We hold people accountable for their crimes, we don't murder them out of hand."

Molly can't help but grin as Chloe laughs. It did sound kinda ridiculous. Of course, it was absolutely something that had happened in her world, so it was all too real, but she was well aware that most of the time, there were no evil gods trying to devour the world, let alone people trying to help them do it.

"But what is justice, then?" She frowns, trying to digest this philosophy. "Isn't killing him holding him accountable? And keeping him from killing other people's dads?"

It isn't that she is a big fan of the death penalty or anything. Honestly, she has never even participated in that debate, in part because she's, you know, twelve. But she has done some heroing, and she's thought about trying to be a good hero a lot, and this is something that she sticks on. What if stopping someone required, you know, stopping them? But then, how did you avoid becoming someone like The Punisher, a guy without powers who just killed everybody?

It was enough to make a kid's head hurt.

"Putting him in prison would've kept him from killing other people just as well, and given him the opportunity to turn his life around," Chloe says with conviction. "Everyone deserves that opportunity." She believes that, genuinely believes it. How can she not? She's in love with the literal Devil. If Lucifer can be a better person, then anyone can - if they choose to.

"Huh."

Molly's face screws up in thought. That did make a lot of sense. You couldn't turn your life around if you were dead. And prison did stop you from doing terrible things.

"I think you're right. That totally sounds like a good person thing to say. But...what happens if that person breaks out of prison and kills more people? That happens in my world a lot. The heroes put the villains in jail, and they break out and kill more people, and then they go back to jail, and..." She puffs out a breath of air. "How is that justice?"

She sighs. "I know I'm gonna grow up to be a super hero. I just...I just want to be sure I get it right. I want to do actual good. But the older I get, the more complicated it seems."

Admittedly, that does stop Chloe up for a moment.

"That... doesn't really happen much in my world," she admits carefully. Which is true! Like, sure, prison escapes happen from time to time, but they're rare, and they don't often result in mass murder or anything.

"I think it's important to remember you can't save everyone. You can't always stop people from doing bad things. There are always things outside our control. That's what happens when people have free will, to make their own choices. Some of them will make bad ones. But we can control our own choices. We can choose not to do bad things in response."

"Am I responsible if I don't stop a bad guy, like a really bad guy, from doing bad things in the future? Which is a worse thing, to stop them by doing something bad or to not do enough to stop future-them? Why does it feel like I'm choosing between bad things?"

Ugh. This was so hard. Maybe she needed to go find Squirrel Girl and see how she did it. Molly had followed her career too, and somehow Squirrel Girl always seemed like a really good hero. Like, totally the best. Sometimes she had to eat nuts and kick butts, but pretty often you heard about how she solved things without having to kick too many butts.

Was Chloe like that? Maybe without a Squirrel Girl to turn to, Chloe could help her out!

"You're not responsible for what other people do," Chloe says firmly. No child should ever feel responsible for the bad deeds of adults. "People make their own choices. If, when you grow up, you want to help hold people accountable for the bad choices they make, that's great. That's your choice. But you can't single-handedly stop evil things from happening."

Molly heaves a heavy sigh. What Chloe was saying really sounded nice, but she also had a lot of baggage to contend with that she was not, at twelve years old, equipped to handle yet. Her parents had done what they had done for her, and on a deep level that made her feel responsible for what they did. That was probably the root of where this was coming from. And she wanted to single-handedly stop evil things from happening, because the evil things she'd experienced sucked and she just wanted them to stop.

"I wish I could, though," she responds quietly. "It'd make everything better."

"Trust me, I wish I could, too," Chloe says, glancing away for a moment. What she wouldn't give, to be able to go back in time and stop those bastards from killing Dan. Or further back, stop her dad from being killed. Or any number of other things.

"But you can't let it eat you up inside, either," she adds. "I know that's easier said than done, but it's the truth. You have to live your own life. You're just a kid - the world's problems aren't yours, yet. Or they shouldn't be, anyway."

Molly nods once, firmly. "You're right. I bet that's what happened to Evil-Chase. It...it sounds like something that would happen to him."

She sits back and pulls her knees up to her chest and hugs them. "When you lose your parents, it sure feels like the world's problems are yours. I'm like some kind of weird not-a-kid-but-not-an-adult. I don't know how to be a person because I don't know what I'm supposed to be."

"I know. Trust me, I know."

She can feel her heart breaking for the girl. Both of her parents, gone. She's lucky, by contrast - she'd lost her father young, but she'd at least technically been an adult. And her mom is still alive. But it's exactly what she fears for Trixie - having lost her dad, and now she's stuck here, what if Trixie's lost her mom, too? She's already had to go through so much that no one her age should ever have to go through. And it sounds like Molly's had it worse. Chloe swipes absently at a tear.

"I'm sorry."

Molly smiles and reaches out a hand to pat Chloe. "It's okay!! I don't mean to be a downer!! I guess that creepy clown just really got to me. I'm over it! See!" She points to her smile. "I've got friends, and I go on adventures, and I know that my parents were doing something bad and that's why something bad happened to them when me and my friends stopped them. If you do bad things, then bad things happen. I totally learned that life lesson early."

Chloe sighs, and gives Molly's hand a squeeze. "It's okay to not be okay," she points out quietly. Maybe someday she'll learn to take her own advice. Today is probably not that day, though.

This is probably the first time that Molly has ever heard that. Her head tilts slightly to the side as she considers it. Honestly, she's not sure if it rings true to her, but she's not about to contradict Chloe on that. She just...if she's not okay, then it feels like everything will fall apart. Her friends can not be okay, but they need Molly to be Molly, right? And Molly needs Molly to be Molly.

But the sentiment will stick with her, and it's possible that eventually it may start to work through her defensive layers of being "okay".

"Yeah but...I am. I promise." It's not a lie if you make yourself believe it, right?

It's Chloe's default as well. I'm fine. Everything's okay. Don't worry about me. She can hardly blame the girl for doing the same thing she's done countless times, through numerous crises. If she were talking to Trixie, she'd maybe poke and prod a bit more, but - this isn't her daughter. Even if Molly is an orphan, even if her parents were terrible people doing terrible things, she still doesn't feel like it's her place to pry too much.

"C'mon," she says, absently reaching up to wipe a bit of dirt or something off Molly's cheek. "Let's get a funnel cake."

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cute_hats - 2021-10-16 18:49 (UTC) - Expand

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