Re: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round Two: Interplanetary Circus
12-22-2012, 08:14 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
”Runaway?” asked the menagerie-man, four-armed and malnourished, the consummate Vaudevillian in his yellowing decrepitude.
“Kidnapped,” answered Trisha.
The menagerie-man clicked his teeth. “A push out the door, then,” he said. “But you’ve got the stink of a runaway about you. Most people carry their homes around with them right here—“ he pinched Trisha’s stomach, causing the young veterinarian to squeak and jump back, “—Like a stone. Your home is a leaky balloon, tied to your heart, oozing nasty green stuff.” The menagerie-man was upside-down now, for some reason, standing on two of his hands. There was something about him that was inherently hard to keep track of. “So you’ve come to work with the animals, right?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. There’s three kinds. First is freaks.” The menagerie-man offered Trisha a cup of tea, which she accepted graciously. “The freaks are anyone who disgust themselves enough that they feel they ought to be paid enough. Boss tells ‘em all the same thing. Big galaxy out there. Takes a special kind of different to freak on a professional level now’days. Second kind’s the old-school hobo. Will-work-for-travel type. Some get the shit jobs, some wind up displaying some use and get a performance gig.” The menagerie-man sipped delicately at his tea with a proboscis that snaked shyly between his lips. “Hobos are always just hitching a ride until they hit this arm or this city or this distance from their parents. Some make it. Others get scared of life away from the lights and become lifers.”
Trisha wondered if she was making a mistake. The menagerie-man was kindly enough but in a way that left her feeling she didn’t have an escape route.
“Third kind is the kind comes looking for the animals. A kindred soul. A wild girl got herself runaway by some kidnappers.”
“I’m a licensed veterinarian,” corrected Trisha.
“A schoolgirl with an animal heart. We get all kinds of freaks here.”
“I’m a professional and prefer to be treated as such.”
“Kinship of sapients don’t do it for wild girls. She wants a deeper connection the like she’s got with her galloper.”
“Neigh,” acknowledged Hippocrates.
“And a fine, healthy beast it is, too.” The menagerie-man smiled ear-to-temple, being possessed of only one ear. “I understand because I feel the same way. The girl belongs in the wild. Don’t get wilder than a spacefaring freakshow. A delicate ecosystem we got ourselves.”
“I’m good with delicate ecosystems,” said Trisha levelly.
“Aye, once you’ve got ‘em in a jar. Here there’s no tweezers and no soft-frequency headlamps. Here we live wrist-deep in the pulsating stuff. Is the runaway ready to give herself over to the wild?”
“Like I said, I’m a professional. I can do what’s asked of me.”
Menagerie-man hopped up onto his desk. “We ain’t big on askin’.”
“Do you give this routine to all your prospective hires?” Trisha rolled her eyes. “Look, I know you have to cultivate an air of wonderment, or what-have-you, but there are jobs to be done here. There’s a discipline underneath it. Otherwise your operation wouldn’t be as successful as it is.”
“Ah, we got discipline and we got dattipline, we do. Now, our specimens ain’t just gallopers and mammally-types like you might see on your home zoo. Like I said, it takes a special kind of different. No schoolgirl will have seen a Nadavore or a Glamourby in any of her books.”
“I’m adaptable.”
“Better start adapting fast. You’re hired. Now, do you want to see the cages or don’t you?”
Trisha tried not to squeal.
* * * * *
Patricia shared a dressing room with a rock-skinned, nine-foot-tall hulk of a woman-thing called She-Boom. She-Boom was a grenade swallower. Members of the audiences were called up to produce their own improvised explosive devices, dirty bombs, chemical weapons, controlled-release parasites. She-Boom would eat them. There were tiny cameras inside of She-Boom that would display a few brief images of her insides being torn apart before the cameras themselves inevitably exploded. She-Boom would just stand there. Sometimes her skin would change color or her tongue would fall out of her ear, but she would never fall.
She-Boom was A-game: biology pushed to the limits of its limits; physics themselves bending in the face of sapient discipline and training. The very real threat of death was key to most performances in Cirque des Étoiles. This late at night, that which wasn’t pain was pleasure. Out away from the big top, pockets of burlesque were beginning to crop up in the artificial night, luring patrons in with smells and winks and coded advertisements. Safe in her dressing room, Patricia understood that she would never have the willpower needed to make it big here. For that, one needed to grow up poor and shameless.
There was a knock on the door. One of the performers’ handlers barged in without waiting for a response. “Something’s gone wrong with Galatea,” the woman said. “She-Boom, get out here. Patsy, we might need you, too.”
Patricia groaned. In her short time at Étoiles, she had learned to resent Galatea Paroxysm, who had definitely grown up poor. Her air of nouveau-princesse and unbridled enthusiasm reminded the commander-princess far too much of an offensive stereotype from her own home, before the war. That the star acrobat had suffered some sort of mental breakdown on-stage did not come as a great shock. She ran out onstage, hoping to bear witness to her least-favorite circus performer getting the snot beaten out of her by She-Boom.
The situation was more complicated than she had expected, however, due to the fact that Galatea seemed to have manifested the ability to fly and shoot fireworks out of her hands. The grenade-swallower held one arm in front of her face to reflect the worst of the damage—either the acrobat’s energy signature was rather extreme, or She-Boom wasn’t quite as sturdy on the outside as she was on the inside. In any case, this wasn’t a situation that was going to be resolved quickly: Galatea was flying circles around all attempts to restrain her, doing untold amount of damage to the equipment, and the crowd was loving it.
Patricia’s rational instinct was to stay out of the fray entirely but there was a spare rope hanging down from the rafters and she saw an opportunity to restore order. Order was important to Patricia. She ran towards the rope and leapt onto it, letting her momentum carry her into the air above the audience, making a half-assed effort to hide her face. Galatea, alternating between blasting She-Boom and waving at the audience, didn’t notice as Patricia climbed the rope and crossed over gracefully to a trapeze, swinging her legs out to preserve her velocity.
She was working without a safety net now.
Patricia crossed from one trapeze to another, bringing herself into position above Galatea’s head. Her mind ran algorithms, her muscles twitched, and she could feel her immediate future coming into alignment before her. She had no idea what she was doing but she could tell for certain that it was going to work.
Patricia dropped off the trapeze. Her boots cracked Galatea square on the back of her neck, bringing the acrobat down to the ground.
The crowd roared. Men whistled and women screamed. She-Boom caught Galatea in one arm and Patricia, roughly, in the other.
“Get that rabbit!” called the handler. Patricia dropped down to the ground and ran after the offending animal, who was gliding away into the audience, ears and legs outstretched.
“Excuse me,” called Patricia as she executed a neat handspring from the ring into the seats, grabbing the thing by the tail. It definitely wasn’t a rabbit per se, as evidenced, among other things, by the fact that it started talking to her as soon as she grabbed it.
”Trisha, listen to me,” it said. ”The girl’s a bit out of her wits right now, but I need her to help me find Lynette. You need to help her!”
Trisha? “How do you know my name?” she growled at the rabbit.
The rabbit narrowed its eyes. ”I, uh...” It wiggled its nose uncomfortably. ”Sorry. Mistook you for someone.”
Patricia held the struggling animal to its chest and handed it back to the handler. “Get it to the menagerie or something,” she said.
“Uh-huh.” The handler held the rabbit at arm’s length cautiously; it squirmed and scratched at her hands. “Hey, Patsy, you really showed something there.”
Patricia shrugged. “I was lucky.”
“Look,” said the handler. “If G.P. doesn’t wake up in about half an hour, we’re gonna find ourselves without a headlining act. You think you could put those talents to use when it really matters?”
Patricia looked out into the crowd. She kept expecting to see certain faces looking down at her. Enemies’ faces. “I’d rather not,” she decided.
The handler pulled her aside. “You don’t really have a choice,” she intoned. “What’s the first rule?”
Patricia sighed. “The Show Must Go On,” she answered.
* * * * *
The glass tank harboring the Hwael strained against the bulk of what it contained, which was to say, nothing. “Hwael prefers a nice vacuum,” explained the menagerie-man. “He can handle an atmosphere in short doses, long enough to trot him round the big top, but for stableage purposes, it’s nothing or nothing.”
The Hwael sang, its wordless utterances manifesting in bright colors around its three mouths. Trisha was certain she had seen something more beautiful at some point, but couldn’t bring it to mind. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“Difficult to prognose,” admitted the menagerie-man. “Hwael’s slow around the edges, and he secretes something foul in his sleep. Gotten to the point where they’re talking jettisoning him into the wild vacuum, letting him fend.”
“Would he make it out there?”
“Not hardly. Our boy was raised in captivity. Wouldn’t know what to do if we gave him the space.”
Trisha patted the glass and frowned. The Hwael’s optical song turned melancholy. “So how can I get in there?”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? You get yourself out of that dress of yours and into a containment suit, sit half an hour in the airlock, poke around for a bit, and the second you need a tool you’ve got to recompress and start the whole process over again. It’s a nightmare, it is.”
“So I’d better be prepared before I go in,” resolved Trisha. It was a unique problem to a point, she admitted, but nothing too different from what she’d faced treating aquatic creatures in the past. “Do you have a sample of that secretion?”
“Alas, I might have bottled myself some for later. Let me check the pan—“
An enormous, muscular yellow-skinned woman walked in, holding Vigil. “New specimen for you, Double-M,” she bellowed, tossing the rabbit in menagerie-man’s direction.
“Vigil!” cried Trisha, cradling the rabbit. “How’d you get here? Where’s Lynette?”
“Pet of yours?” asked the menagerie-man.
“Oh, he’s sapient. Whoever sent him this way must have made a mistake.”
“Doesn’t look very sapient to my eyes.”
”I’m sapient!’ assured Vigil, hopping up on Trisha’s shoulder. ”And I could use your help, if you aren’t too busy with, um... that.” Vigil pointed up at the Hwael, which looked down at him with its forty-one soulful blue eyes, singing a deep blue lament.
“I’m busy, yes,” Trisha admitted. “But after I take care of this I should be free for the night.” She looked Vigil over circumspectly. “Hey, how are you in total vacuums?”
”Runaway?” asked the menagerie-man, four-armed and malnourished, the consummate Vaudevillian in his yellowing decrepitude.
“Kidnapped,” answered Trisha.
The menagerie-man clicked his teeth. “A push out the door, then,” he said. “But you’ve got the stink of a runaway about you. Most people carry their homes around with them right here—“ he pinched Trisha’s stomach, causing the young veterinarian to squeak and jump back, “—Like a stone. Your home is a leaky balloon, tied to your heart, oozing nasty green stuff.” The menagerie-man was upside-down now, for some reason, standing on two of his hands. There was something about him that was inherently hard to keep track of. “So you’ve come to work with the animals, right?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. There’s three kinds. First is freaks.” The menagerie-man offered Trisha a cup of tea, which she accepted graciously. “The freaks are anyone who disgust themselves enough that they feel they ought to be paid enough. Boss tells ‘em all the same thing. Big galaxy out there. Takes a special kind of different to freak on a professional level now’days. Second kind’s the old-school hobo. Will-work-for-travel type. Some get the shit jobs, some wind up displaying some use and get a performance gig.” The menagerie-man sipped delicately at his tea with a proboscis that snaked shyly between his lips. “Hobos are always just hitching a ride until they hit this arm or this city or this distance from their parents. Some make it. Others get scared of life away from the lights and become lifers.”
Trisha wondered if she was making a mistake. The menagerie-man was kindly enough but in a way that left her feeling she didn’t have an escape route.
“Third kind is the kind comes looking for the animals. A kindred soul. A wild girl got herself runaway by some kidnappers.”
“I’m a licensed veterinarian,” corrected Trisha.
“A schoolgirl with an animal heart. We get all kinds of freaks here.”
“I’m a professional and prefer to be treated as such.”
“Kinship of sapients don’t do it for wild girls. She wants a deeper connection the like she’s got with her galloper.”
“Neigh,” acknowledged Hippocrates.
“And a fine, healthy beast it is, too.” The menagerie-man smiled ear-to-temple, being possessed of only one ear. “I understand because I feel the same way. The girl belongs in the wild. Don’t get wilder than a spacefaring freakshow. A delicate ecosystem we got ourselves.”
“I’m good with delicate ecosystems,” said Trisha levelly.
“Aye, once you’ve got ‘em in a jar. Here there’s no tweezers and no soft-frequency headlamps. Here we live wrist-deep in the pulsating stuff. Is the runaway ready to give herself over to the wild?”
“Like I said, I’m a professional. I can do what’s asked of me.”
Menagerie-man hopped up onto his desk. “We ain’t big on askin’.”
“Do you give this routine to all your prospective hires?” Trisha rolled her eyes. “Look, I know you have to cultivate an air of wonderment, or what-have-you, but there are jobs to be done here. There’s a discipline underneath it. Otherwise your operation wouldn’t be as successful as it is.”
“Ah, we got discipline and we got dattipline, we do. Now, our specimens ain’t just gallopers and mammally-types like you might see on your home zoo. Like I said, it takes a special kind of different. No schoolgirl will have seen a Nadavore or a Glamourby in any of her books.”
“I’m adaptable.”
“Better start adapting fast. You’re hired. Now, do you want to see the cages or don’t you?”
Trisha tried not to squeal.
* * * * *
Patricia shared a dressing room with a rock-skinned, nine-foot-tall hulk of a woman-thing called She-Boom. She-Boom was a grenade swallower. Members of the audiences were called up to produce their own improvised explosive devices, dirty bombs, chemical weapons, controlled-release parasites. She-Boom would eat them. There were tiny cameras inside of She-Boom that would display a few brief images of her insides being torn apart before the cameras themselves inevitably exploded. She-Boom would just stand there. Sometimes her skin would change color or her tongue would fall out of her ear, but she would never fall.
She-Boom was A-game: biology pushed to the limits of its limits; physics themselves bending in the face of sapient discipline and training. The very real threat of death was key to most performances in Cirque des Étoiles. This late at night, that which wasn’t pain was pleasure. Out away from the big top, pockets of burlesque were beginning to crop up in the artificial night, luring patrons in with smells and winks and coded advertisements. Safe in her dressing room, Patricia understood that she would never have the willpower needed to make it big here. For that, one needed to grow up poor and shameless.
There was a knock on the door. One of the performers’ handlers barged in without waiting for a response. “Something’s gone wrong with Galatea,” the woman said. “She-Boom, get out here. Patsy, we might need you, too.”
Patricia groaned. In her short time at Étoiles, she had learned to resent Galatea Paroxysm, who had definitely grown up poor. Her air of nouveau-princesse and unbridled enthusiasm reminded the commander-princess far too much of an offensive stereotype from her own home, before the war. That the star acrobat had suffered some sort of mental breakdown on-stage did not come as a great shock. She ran out onstage, hoping to bear witness to her least-favorite circus performer getting the snot beaten out of her by She-Boom.
The situation was more complicated than she had expected, however, due to the fact that Galatea seemed to have manifested the ability to fly and shoot fireworks out of her hands. The grenade-swallower held one arm in front of her face to reflect the worst of the damage—either the acrobat’s energy signature was rather extreme, or She-Boom wasn’t quite as sturdy on the outside as she was on the inside. In any case, this wasn’t a situation that was going to be resolved quickly: Galatea was flying circles around all attempts to restrain her, doing untold amount of damage to the equipment, and the crowd was loving it.
Patricia’s rational instinct was to stay out of the fray entirely but there was a spare rope hanging down from the rafters and she saw an opportunity to restore order. Order was important to Patricia. She ran towards the rope and leapt onto it, letting her momentum carry her into the air above the audience, making a half-assed effort to hide her face. Galatea, alternating between blasting She-Boom and waving at the audience, didn’t notice as Patricia climbed the rope and crossed over gracefully to a trapeze, swinging her legs out to preserve her velocity.
She was working without a safety net now.
Patricia crossed from one trapeze to another, bringing herself into position above Galatea’s head. Her mind ran algorithms, her muscles twitched, and she could feel her immediate future coming into alignment before her. She had no idea what she was doing but she could tell for certain that it was going to work.
Patricia dropped off the trapeze. Her boots cracked Galatea square on the back of her neck, bringing the acrobat down to the ground.
The crowd roared. Men whistled and women screamed. She-Boom caught Galatea in one arm and Patricia, roughly, in the other.
“Get that rabbit!” called the handler. Patricia dropped down to the ground and ran after the offending animal, who was gliding away into the audience, ears and legs outstretched.
“Excuse me,” called Patricia as she executed a neat handspring from the ring into the seats, grabbing the thing by the tail. It definitely wasn’t a rabbit per se, as evidenced, among other things, by the fact that it started talking to her as soon as she grabbed it.
”Trisha, listen to me,” it said. ”The girl’s a bit out of her wits right now, but I need her to help me find Lynette. You need to help her!”
Trisha? “How do you know my name?” she growled at the rabbit.
The rabbit narrowed its eyes. ”I, uh...” It wiggled its nose uncomfortably. ”Sorry. Mistook you for someone.”
Patricia held the struggling animal to its chest and handed it back to the handler. “Get it to the menagerie or something,” she said.
“Uh-huh.” The handler held the rabbit at arm’s length cautiously; it squirmed and scratched at her hands. “Hey, Patsy, you really showed something there.”
Patricia shrugged. “I was lucky.”
“Look,” said the handler. “If G.P. doesn’t wake up in about half an hour, we’re gonna find ourselves without a headlining act. You think you could put those talents to use when it really matters?”
Patricia looked out into the crowd. She kept expecting to see certain faces looking down at her. Enemies’ faces. “I’d rather not,” she decided.
The handler pulled her aside. “You don’t really have a choice,” she intoned. “What’s the first rule?”
Patricia sighed. “The Show Must Go On,” she answered.
* * * * *
The glass tank harboring the Hwael strained against the bulk of what it contained, which was to say, nothing. “Hwael prefers a nice vacuum,” explained the menagerie-man. “He can handle an atmosphere in short doses, long enough to trot him round the big top, but for stableage purposes, it’s nothing or nothing.”
The Hwael sang, its wordless utterances manifesting in bright colors around its three mouths. Trisha was certain she had seen something more beautiful at some point, but couldn’t bring it to mind. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“Difficult to prognose,” admitted the menagerie-man. “Hwael’s slow around the edges, and he secretes something foul in his sleep. Gotten to the point where they’re talking jettisoning him into the wild vacuum, letting him fend.”
“Would he make it out there?”
“Not hardly. Our boy was raised in captivity. Wouldn’t know what to do if we gave him the space.”
Trisha patted the glass and frowned. The Hwael’s optical song turned melancholy. “So how can I get in there?”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? You get yourself out of that dress of yours and into a containment suit, sit half an hour in the airlock, poke around for a bit, and the second you need a tool you’ve got to recompress and start the whole process over again. It’s a nightmare, it is.”
“So I’d better be prepared before I go in,” resolved Trisha. It was a unique problem to a point, she admitted, but nothing too different from what she’d faced treating aquatic creatures in the past. “Do you have a sample of that secretion?”
“Alas, I might have bottled myself some for later. Let me check the pan—“
An enormous, muscular yellow-skinned woman walked in, holding Vigil. “New specimen for you, Double-M,” she bellowed, tossing the rabbit in menagerie-man’s direction.
“Vigil!” cried Trisha, cradling the rabbit. “How’d you get here? Where’s Lynette?”
“Pet of yours?” asked the menagerie-man.
“Oh, he’s sapient. Whoever sent him this way must have made a mistake.”
“Doesn’t look very sapient to my eyes.”
”I’m sapient!’ assured Vigil, hopping up on Trisha’s shoulder. ”And I could use your help, if you aren’t too busy with, um... that.” Vigil pointed up at the Hwael, which looked down at him with its forty-one soulful blue eyes, singing a deep blue lament.
“I’m busy, yes,” Trisha admitted. “But after I take care of this I should be free for the night.” She looked Vigil over circumspectly. “Hey, how are you in total vacuums?”