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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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Nore. The name sends flicker through the cold and closed-off Elenore in the mirrors, a flash of a bright and shining teenage girl with a looming shadow behind her before the adult returns. It is becoming increasingly obvious that she is made entirely of sharp angles and hard lines. Not that the real Elenore watches, of course. She prefers to ignore her own emotions in a potential emergency.

"Okay, I can fix the seeing part." She strips out of her shirt, giving no shits about the implication because his is covered in blood, and it's clear that Kyle is going to need blinders to get out of this. "Close your eyes and tilt your head forward, you don't want to swallow the blood." She waits until his eyes are closed before dropping the shirt over his head, knotting it so that it stays in place with minimal pressure on his nose. "Better?"

Elenore might give no shits, but Kyle goes pink anyway. It's just how he's wired. "Aw, dude," he says, but he does what she says. Shirt knotted, he nods carefully.

"Yeah," he concedes. "But. I mean. You saw it too, right?" His hands fumble through the air as he moves to stand up. He could use one of the mirrors for support, but he doesn't want to. He's afraid he might feel another hand reaching through.

"It's me, but it's NOT me. Nore, what does that MEAN?"

At least she found a bra at some point. Not that it would have stopped her, but they haven't crossed into full 'you've seen my boobs' territory. He wins points for not arguing about it too much. Practicality is more important than arbitrary nudity standards.

Just like she offers him a hand to stand up. No point in another crash. "I saw it, or at least something." She looks at the reflection, barely noticing the condescending mockery on her reflection's face as she studies the cartoon of Kyle. "And I don't know. Mirrors are like physical metaphors, right? And that seems like something the magic here would like to use that to fuck with us. Something about how we see ourselves or maybe how other people see us?"

"I am so fucking SICK of this," he mutters. "I know what I look like. I'm a ginger stork. It's not like I'm unaware."

He can see cycling coloured light through the shirt if he opens his eyes, but that's all. He keeps on hand in Elenore's.

"I've known I was ugly since fourth grade. I didn't need the reminder."

"You're not, though," she says, her tone is more full of confusion than an attempt to console him. Elenore has always been varying degrees of attractive and doesn't quite understand the struggles of other people's awkward stages. Still, she'll try to logic their way out of the situation. No sense in moving yet if he's just going to freak out again, but she does keep hold of his hand.

"I mean, look, on a ten-point scale where 10 is the extremes of masculine beauty and 1 is the opposite extreme, you'd be in 5-7 part of the range. You know, like most guys who still manage to get laid and have normal lives. You aren't a goblin or anything."

Kyle scoffs. He reaches his free hand out, feeling for blank space.

"Probably a four," he argues. "I'm ginger. People hate male gingers. I know. I once had someone tell me, to my face, that they wouldn't normally fuck one but I had a cute ass so they'd make an exception."

"You really chose to be dumb sometimes." She's going to start walking at a glacial pace if he's going to start trying to feel his way around, tugging him along. "Dudes say heinous shit to people they want to fuck because someone decided negging was a thing. It's not a reliable way to measure your attractiveness. And you have definitely been alive with internet access for too long to not know that there are plenty of people have a thing for redheaded guys.

"That's just the most recent example. And not true, people have a thing for girls with red hair."

He half lets Elenore steer him, but keeps a hand out so he can feel like he's helping. His nose throbs painfully.

Because he's blindfolded Kyle doesn't see that his reflection has changed. Instead of a gangly scarecrow of a man, there's just a little boy. He has the same red curly hair, the same sharp features. He's a funny looking kid - in fact, you could definitely call him ugly. He also looks incredibly hurt.

"Yours looked weird. Your mirror you," Kyle says.

"Prince Harry. Put a beard on an older redheaded man and there's a whole broad category. If anything, your biggest flaw is being too young to have grown into it."

Elenore watches the mirrors and the child. Emotional insight is not her strong suit, but she knows the look of a fucked up kid. She is pretty sure Kyle would not be excited to see his child self being led by the version of Elenore in the mirror. It looks like a cautionary tale in the making.

"Really? I hadn't noticed." A blatant lie, but damned if she'd let the mirrors bother her. There was nothing this isle could show her about herself she wasn't all too aware of and no trauma it could offer that was worse than coming back after she was taken. The fact that it might be reflecting the way she thinks about herself since that event goes over her head.

"I can grow a beard," Kyle protests.

"Really? Oh." He frowns. "So. You see yourself just fine, then, that's what you're implying?"

"Yeah, but you're not craggy yet. Red looks better with craggy." She scoffs, trying not to let him know she hit a mirror before turning another corner. The kid and her worst self doesn't get less upsetting.

"What I'm implying is that I don't give a flying fuck what an enchanted mirror wants to try to tell me about myself. I've already seen what I look like in my worst permutation. This is just a pale imitation."

Kyle grumbles, momentarily distracted from both his nose and the fact that they're being stalked by their reflections by the fact that his beard growing prowess might be in question.

"Really?" he asks. "When the hell did you see that?"

"Have you even had to shave on the islands?" Oh, she hears the pissiness and prefers it to his previous blind panic. This is a deliberate attempt to provoke.

His question provokes her to glare briefly at the version of herself being reflected in the mirror, hard and selfish and nothing she's hurt to think about because it is so thoroughly enmeshed in her vision of herself. "A decade ago a very smart man made some very stupid decisions. We both found out that he shouldn't have tried to include me in them."

"Yes!" It's a particularly effective tactic with Kyle.

He frowns, not paying attention to his own reflection for a moment. "Where is he now?"

"Like, what, once? Maybe twice?" When he shows off stubble later, she's totally going to deserve it at this point.

"Dead. Or close enough." She's comfortable being ominous. Or thinks she is. The shadows behind her reflected self loom large.

"Fuck you, Nore, I'm not thirteen."

Kyle glances at her doppelganger again. "Did you kill him?"

"With that potty mouth? Are you sure?" This says something about the 13 year olds Elenore has known.

"Nothing that kind," she answers, dismissing her reflection after another glance, attempting to focus on moving them through the maze. Her focus echoed in the other face does not make her look like less of a supervillain.

Kyle frowns even deeper somehow.

He follows along, unable to ignore the mirrors as easily as Nore does. "So, what? You lobotomized him? Castrated? Made him eat his own brain?" He doesn't sound particularly disturbed by these ideas.

She'd keep poking, but everything that comes to mind is too mean with edges that are too sharp. This doesn't seem like the place to indulge her meanness.

His question gets her to look away from seeking the path to look at him, frowning briefly before forcing herself to look back at the path. "That list either says a lot about people you've dealt with or how you see me." Would it make it better or worse that she thinks his list is boring? Her reflection yawns and she suspects that she thinks it's worse.

"People I've dealt with," he says with another shrug. He glances at the mirror Elenore.

"Oh, sorry, am I boring you? Fuck. We need to get out of here." He can see, closer now, the exit sign.

"Don't pick fights with a reflection." She knows she doesn't want to touch the glass again, but the twisting path is definitely making that difficult.

"I broke him once and then I broke him again. It wasn't enough, but it was as much as I could manage and still mostly be myself." She looks around at the mirrored wall above their heads where she doesn't have to stare at their reflections. "Is that what you want? Or do I need to give him the gory details, too?"

"Sorry." He's not really, because he can't help but be argumentative with everything.

Kyle keeps moving forward, not sure of what it is that this place wants until they reach the exit and its stupid little sign up in the corner:

WHO ARE YOU REALLY?

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

She snorts dismissively at his apology but keeps moving until she sees that sign. The sound that comes out of her is pure annoyance.

"Is that all, then? Well let's have it out then," she snaps, "I'm Elenore fucking Evans and I am not amused." The Mirror version of her seems delighted by the theatricality of the line.

Kyle studies the mirror's little sticker more closely, frowning.

"...I'm Kyle Broflovski," he says. "I'm a student. I'm twenty-four. I'm... I'm a small town guy who thought he'd do well in a big city and was pretty fucking wrong about that, I guess. Uhm. I'm Jewish and kinda conflicted about that sometimes." He pushes at the mirror experimentally and sighs when it doesn't give.

"I don't know what else to say," he says, glancing behind him. "I mean you can SEE what we think we are, are we supposed to have some huge fucking revelation that we're not just that?"

"Who knows at this point?" She seems pretty offended by the fact her declaration wasn't enough. Kyle has known her long enough at this point to know she gives information about herself away like it hurts her to give it away. this is not what she signed on for.

"My guess is they want us to bleed for it. Some admission about why or how we came to see ourselves like that and why it isn't true. Except I know that, and I also know how thin the line is." Her eyes narrow. "I choose not to be her, it doesn't mean that she isn't part of me."

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kyley_b - 2021-10-24 05:44 (UTC) - Expand

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