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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.

Network · Logs · OOC · Memes · Plurk

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Chloe just sort of huffs faintly. As if she'd be offended by anything he could say right now. Mostly she's just trying to get her bearings, catch her breath, regain some semblance of self-control.

Push back the breakdown that threatens to overwhelm her if she spends too much time dwelling on her situation.

"I wouldn't want her here," she points out after a moment. "She's home, where she belongs. Getting back to her there is what I'm planning to do."

But she needs to focus on something else. Stop letting the worry and the fear eat her up.

"It's okay, you know," she adds, changing the subject. "To not have things figured out yet."

"Yeah, point," Kyle says. "You don't want to put kids through shit like this, it messes them up." He laughs shrilly again. "I'd know."

He manages to get a better hold on himself by walking, putting more distance between them and the House of Mirrors. "Is it, though?" he asks. "I'm twenty-four. I did four years of university already, and I'm still not sure if I'm doing the right thing or just doing what my folks said I ought to. That's not okay, that's STUPID."

"Yeah, you're only twenty-four," Chloe says with a faint snort. "Whoever decided that high schoolers should know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives - what their calling is - was an idiot. I didn't decide to become a cop until I was twenty-five. I know people who've taken a lot longer to figure things out. Everyone has their own journey."

She waves him in the direction of a corn dog stand.

"Is it your parents who want you to go to law school?"

"For seriously?" He supposes he knew logically that some people don't decide on a career path right out of high school, but he hadn't really believed it.

He nods and walks in the direction she indicates. "Yeah. My dad's a lawyer. My mom also would have accepted doctor, but I hate hospitals."

Chloe nods. "My dad was a cop," she admits. "My mom is an actress - you know, not super famous, but she's done all right for herself. And for as long as I could remember, I knew I was supposed to follow in her footsteps. My childhood was a whole lot of me being shuttled between lessons and auditions and sets and agent meetings and back again. It was never a choice I made, just what was expected, so I didn't think to question it much. Then my dad died, and that got me questioning everything."

She buys two corn dogs, and offers one to Kyle.

"I realized acting wasn't what I wanted, it was what Mom wanted for me. She meant well - it's what makes her happy, so she thought it'd make me happy, too. But it didn't, and this is my life, not hers. It took me a few years to realize I wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps instead, but eventually it just clicked. So anyway, long story short, when my daughter says she wants to be the president of Mars when she grows up, I trust her to figure that out in a way that makes her happy, and in the meantime I send her to science camp in the summer. You don't owe your parents a lifetime of unhappiness just because they raised you. That's not the point."

Kyle's eyebrows go up. An actress. That seems impressive to him. But then Chloe says her father died, and his expression immediately turns to one of deep sympathy. "Dude, I'm so sorry about your dad," he says as he accepts the corndog.

He listens and then nods. "Science camp is awesome," he says before taking a bite of his corndog. He thinks some more and looks at the lights of the ferris wheel. "Was your mom mad at you?"

"Thanks," she says quietly, accepting his condolences. She learned a long time ago that's the best way to handle it when someone says something like that.

They begin to stroll again, and she's not really seeing the amusements around them, mostly just eating her corn dog and glancing up at the sky.

"No, she wasn't angry. I think she was disappointed when I didn't want the same thing she wanted. But she's my mom. She loves me and she wants me to be happy with my life. Being a cop is what makes me happy."

Or it was, until very recently. Though she does feel a pang in her chest when she thinks about quitting. A pang she's felt since she made the decision. Not regret, necessarily, just... a touch of longing.

"Can I ask why being a cop makes you happy? Because, and I say this with the expectation that you're not gonna punch me, there's a LOT of bad cops. I don't think I ever met a good one, to be totally honest. And that's always fucked me up because when I was like, eight I assumed people did it because they believe in the justice system."

Edited 2021-09-18 18:09 (UTC)

Chloe studies him for a moment. No, she's clearly not going to punch him.

"I mean, hopefully now you can say you've met a good cop," she points out, her lips twisting upward. Hello, what is she, chopped liver?

But she shrugs it off easily. "No system is perfect. But I do believe in the justice system. I believe it exists for a reason, and when it doesn't work, those of us who are inside it need to try and fix it.

"I like solving puzzles. I like putting clues together. I like chasing down leads. But most of all, I know what it's like, having someone violently ripped away. I know the pain and devastation it causes. And when that happens - knowing that nothing can bring them back, nothing can reverse the pain and the loss - the least I can do is help find the truth, help hold people accountable for it. I like to think I've done that."

Kyle grins back. "Okay, ONE good one," he amends.

He listens carefully, and then nods. "Okay," he says. "I can understand all of that. I feel that way myself, about the need for a justice system and how it should work. I get really mad at the world and how people are taken advantage of a lot."

He chews meditatively. "So that is one thing that's really alluring about going into law. Being able to help people who need it."

"I think if you're going into it for the right reasons, then you'll probably be fine," Chloe says with a faint smile. "I think that's true for a lot of professions, though."

Maybe avoid becoming the sort of lawyer Charlotte Richards used to be, is all.

"I hope so. It just seems like people are really easily corrupted, you know? Like if the culture is poison, how do you keep from letting it get to you?"

He pitches the stick for his corn dog in a waste bin. Yeah, he's a 20-something guy, he eats like a starved racoon. "It sounds like you did okay. Figures the only non asshole cop is dating the devil."

Chloe looks sort of blank at that question. "I've never known the culture to be poison. It's the culture I grew up in. It's a boys' club, for sure, and I had to bust some ass to earn the same respect as some of my male colleagues, but that's true of a lot of professions."

Honestly, she's starting to think Kyle's world just has a really shitty police system or something.

"Yeah, I know, I'm a good person, dating the guy who's supposed to be evil, oh the irony," she says with a wry smile. "I get it, but he's really nothing like that."

She wouldn't be wrong. His hometown was especially bad; the BEST of South Park's cops was merely inept. The rest were actively malicious more often than not.

"So what's he like?" Kyle asks with interest.

Chloe shrugs, smiling a little, but also maybe looking a little sad. It's okay, though. She's okay talking about him. More than okay, really.

"You mean, apart from being really hot, and not having horns?" she says. "He's charming, and funny. Likes to break rules and push boundaries, but he'd never make anyone do anything they didn't want to do. He hates injustice, and hates being blamed for humanity's sins. He can be reckless, and thoughtless. He can also be kind, and generous, and sweet."

Kyle laughs. "So, Milton had him right? Sorry, this is all like... I'm Jewish, we don't blame Satan for our fuckups. Sure sounds like you love him a lot."

"I wouldn't say Milton got him right." Chloe looks thoughtful. "Maybe he came the closest, in some ways. I did a lot of research, when I first realized the truth." She pauses to explain, almost sheepish. "Got all the way to the Vatican archives, actually. But I never found anything that really matches up with the Lucifer I know. Milton's Lucifer doesn't make nearly enough puns or sex jokes."

"How the hell did you get into the Vatican? And did you see the bunny cult?"

Kyle forgets how nuts he sounds sometimes.

Chloe’s face scrunches up in confusion. “Uh, the Vatican is open to the public. Not all of it, obviously, but thousands of tourists go through it every day. Anyone studying law, history, religion, and a bunch of other stuff can get into the archives.”

She… is not touching whatever the hell a “bunny cult” is.

"Well THAT part is, sure. I just assumed the archives were off limits to normal people. Because, you know. They do really weird shit."

Yeah, probably for the best. Probably best to never ask him about Jesus, too.

“I mean, the archive is just an archive. You know, a big collection of old books and manuscripts.”

There definitely isn’t “weird shit” going on in what amounts to a really big, really old library.

“It’s a library. Library stuff happens there.”

"So not the secret archive," Kyle says easily. "That's too bad. They have some pretty wild stuff under lock and key. Missing passages and weird relics. Not sur eif any of it would help with your boyfriend, though."

"Is that, like, from The DaVinci Code?" Chloe asks, definitely amused. "And no, there was nothing helpful in the Vatican, because no one who wrote about Lucifer actually knew him. I do."

Kyle looks at Chloe and shakes his head. "No," he says. "It's... you know what? Nevermind." She'd just think he was nuts.

"Other people must have known him over the years, though."

"I mean, that depends on what you mean by know," Chloe says after a moment. "He's definitely had sex with a lot of people. But I don't think any of them ended up writing about it in manuscripts that wound up in the Vatican."

The thought seems to amuse her, though. "I mean, everything about him there was written by people who, you know. Thought he was the embodiment of evil."

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