RE: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round Two: Interplanetary Circus
06-06-2014, 01:26 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-06-2014, 01:29 AM by Benedict.)
Keagan Lambert was awake. It wasn't the bright spotlight that woke him up, though. He was blindfolded, which kept the light off his eyes. It also wasn't the smell of wood shavings, sand, and grease that did it. And you might have guessed it was that he was spinning lazily around the surface of a levitating wooden ball, but... that wouldn't be it either. What woke Keagan up was the sudden massive shout coming from all directions- a cheer that indicated something very exciting had just happened.
"Pepper Pinwheel, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and variations thereupon! The moment you've all been waiting for!"
She strode out from behind the curtain and into the ring, posing and waving for the crowd. Her act was clearly a favorite. Truthfully, she preferred the old-fashioned two-dimensional spinning target, with its nice circular rings... but trends were how they were. A knife-throwing act needed a sphere, these days. Still, this promised to be fun. She'd get to show off, this time, without having to worry about the mark's safety.
The new target was something else, she'd found. After knocking it out, she'd taken a couple minutes to test its claims- and sure enough, with its eyes closed, nothing was breaking the skin. It was perfect for the show! A vulnerable-looking kid to get the audience gasping, but no holding back with the fancier tricks on the off chance she missed. The audience was going to be loud tonight.
"H-hey! What's going on?! Someone get me down from here!" Keagan began struggling against his restraints, unsure which way to pull. The erratic spin of the target ball made it hard to move, and his stomach was churning. He couldn't get his bearings, much less try to wriggle free.
Pepper shot him a dirty look, and gestured a throat-slitting motion. Then she remembered the blindfold, and called out "Hahahahaha! What a kidder! Did you doze off up there? It's showtime, remember?" She let fly a pair of stilettos to start the show. They landed dead on target, pressed against either side of his neck. That ought to send a message, she thought.
It sent a message. Keagan stopped struggling, to the uproarious laughter of the audience.
The act progressed stupendously. Pepper didn't get into the Cirque des Étoiles by being dull. Knives embedded in the hilts of other knifes, magnetic knives curving in midair to strike their targets, a knife caught between the target's teeth (the kid DID have good reflexes! or at least a sturdy esophagus.) Her trick shots began to form an outline around Keagan, like a full-body hand turkey. The audience was especially blown away by the thing where she tossed knives into the air and batted them towards the target with her tail. Wasn't usually allowed to try that one for safety reasons, but she really nailed it.
The crowd was very impressed with Keagan and Pepper Pinwheel.
This was no good.
Gomorrah had been biding its time for too long. Looking for opportunities to cause natural misery was not a strategy that had been paying off. Whenever it could subdue the crowd, the ringmaster would bring out something deliberately put together to make people happy and excited. It was getting really, really frustrating.
So enough of that. If it couldn't have languor, it would have panic. In the power rooms, a few Grant Bledsoes. Cheapskate electrician, he'd pull the wires and tell people he'd need to come back tomorrow to rewire the whole building. Make a lot of money making richs folks afraid their dives weren't up to code.
The lights went out.
The ringmaster acted quickly. "Ladies and gentle, uh... people! Don't panic! There's been a temporary-"
The sound system went out. And then the artificial gravity.
Keagan had sort of figured out the movement of the sphere by then. His stomach had settled down some, and he was getting used to the weightless feeling of the levitation. It took him a minute to realize what was happening- the lights going out meant nothing to him blindfolded, and the piercing screams of the audience were indistinguishable from Pepper trying another one of her more death-defying stunts. It was only when he realized the screams were starting to come from below him that he started to suspect something was wrong. And it was when the sphere came to a halt against the fabric of the big top that he realized he'd drifted away from the ring and up to the ceiling.
Panic. Panic was good, though harder to manage than slow decay. People were in some ways predictable when they were panicking, but less predictable in others. Remembering a hostile mob wouldn't quite fit, but remembering fires would do nicely. Gomorrah lit up a handful of exits, to force as many people out one door as it could. People trampled in a stampede to the exit would work.
Wait, no. They weren't running for the exits. They were floating helplessly in midair. What were they doing? This didn't make any sense. In all of Gomorrah's experience, gravity kept people on the ground. It didn't know what to make of this... spontaneous-flying behavior. From its perspective, the universe had just conspired to ruin its plans by suddenly breaking all of the rules for no reason. Well, Gomorrah wasn't going to play the universe's game, thank you very much. Its people would be staying right on the ground.
"Boss! What do we do here?" Pepper yelled. She'd dug her tail into the ground to keep from drifting off, and the ringmaster had retrieved an emergency lev-pak. "You stay put! I'm going to try and turn the power back on!" he said. Was he being dense? "Boss, things are on freakin' fire! This isn't an ordinary power outage! We gotta call security!" He threw his hands up in annoyance. "An outage this big, security already knows! I've got everything under control, got it?" Pepper was left to stare out the window at the rest of the circus, which glowed brightly in the darkness. The power outage, whatever its cause, had been localized to this tent, and probably the exterior concourse.
She was sure that her colleagues on the other show floors couldn't be having nearly as bad a day as hers.
Meanwhile, Keagan struggled against his restraints again. This time, the ball wasn't spinning, but that hardly made it any easier. They'd buckled the straps down tight. There had to be an emergency latch, right? Surely they didn't make a habit of kidnapping random kids for their act- there'd be a performer up here, and they'd need to be able to get down, right? It was just a matter of finding the right...
"'Ello, mister!"
"Huh?" Someone was in front of him, he couldn't see.
"Someone tie your eyes? Woss with that?" He felt tiny hands undoing his blindfold, which came away and confirmed his suspicions. He was at the top of the big top, in zero gravity. He could see, some, by the light of the rest of the circus outside, and the... fires? The light was enough to see, floating in front of him, a little girl dressed in rags. She was holding an empty cotton candy bag.
"M'name's Amy! You looked like you was stuck!"
"I... I am stuck, yeah. You're... aren't you..." Keagan looked her over. Her clothes and accent weren't from this space circus, clearly. That meant she had to be part of...
"You're from Gomorrah! You... get away!"
"I'm what? From where I'm from, or somethin'? What's so bad 'bout bein' from where the town is?"
She was part of that... thing. The thing he needed to take revenge on, for Jolene. It had to be some kind of trick. "Get back! I know what you are! You're some kinda... one of those, its ghost things! What do you want?"
"Ghost? Me, a ghost? I s'pose that'd 'splain the floatin'... you seein' this?"
"Don't play dumb!" It was probably playing dumb. It... did control them, right?
"You sound like Sister Flora. "Don't be dumb! You're being a dumb godless li'l child!""
Well... whatever it wanted to do, it would've done it by now if it were openly hostile. He was defenseless. "Hey, uh... do you think you could undo these buckles for me? You're right, I'm sorta stuck."
"You want me to help you?"
"...Yes." This would prove whether he could trust the thing, or if it was toying with him.
"Only if you take it back!"
"What?"
"You said I was dumb! You gotta take it back, else I won't help you loose!"
"Wh- okay, you're not dumb! Now give me a hand here!"
"...I don't think you meant it! I think you still think I'm dumb!"
"No! I mean it! You're not dumb at all!"
"Promise?" Amy spun in place, giggling.
"Yes, I promise! Just undo these buckles!"
Little Amelia gave him a funny look. "Buckles?" she asked. "I never knew there was buckles on snakes." ...Snakes? He wasn't tied up with- and then Keagan felt something smooth and wriggling slide across his wrists and ankles, and squirm away into the air, leaving his hands and legs free.
"Gah!"
"And how come you're surrounded by all those fish, anyway? Are we in the harbor or sum'n?" The knives outlining Keagan- the sardines- pulled free of the wood and swum off into the lack of ocean. "If we're in the harbor, you oughta learn ta swim, right?" Little Amelia suddenly flew off- doing the breaststroke through thin air, as if it were water.
"Hey, wait! What did you just do?" He tried to swim after her, but the air failed to act like water in his hands. Looking around, he grabbed a handful of the tent's fabric, and slowly began crawling down the side. Someone would have to answer for... whatever this was.
"Pepper Pinwheel, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and variations thereupon! The moment you've all been waiting for!"
She strode out from behind the curtain and into the ring, posing and waving for the crowd. Her act was clearly a favorite. Truthfully, she preferred the old-fashioned two-dimensional spinning target, with its nice circular rings... but trends were how they were. A knife-throwing act needed a sphere, these days. Still, this promised to be fun. She'd get to show off, this time, without having to worry about the mark's safety.
The new target was something else, she'd found. After knocking it out, she'd taken a couple minutes to test its claims- and sure enough, with its eyes closed, nothing was breaking the skin. It was perfect for the show! A vulnerable-looking kid to get the audience gasping, but no holding back with the fancier tricks on the off chance she missed. The audience was going to be loud tonight.
"H-hey! What's going on?! Someone get me down from here!" Keagan began struggling against his restraints, unsure which way to pull. The erratic spin of the target ball made it hard to move, and his stomach was churning. He couldn't get his bearings, much less try to wriggle free.
Pepper shot him a dirty look, and gestured a throat-slitting motion. Then she remembered the blindfold, and called out "Hahahahaha! What a kidder! Did you doze off up there? It's showtime, remember?" She let fly a pair of stilettos to start the show. They landed dead on target, pressed against either side of his neck. That ought to send a message, she thought.
It sent a message. Keagan stopped struggling, to the uproarious laughter of the audience.
The act progressed stupendously. Pepper didn't get into the Cirque des Étoiles by being dull. Knives embedded in the hilts of other knifes, magnetic knives curving in midair to strike their targets, a knife caught between the target's teeth (the kid DID have good reflexes! or at least a sturdy esophagus.) Her trick shots began to form an outline around Keagan, like a full-body hand turkey. The audience was especially blown away by the thing where she tossed knives into the air and batted them towards the target with her tail. Wasn't usually allowed to try that one for safety reasons, but she really nailed it.
The crowd was very impressed with Keagan and Pepper Pinwheel.
This was no good.
Gomorrah had been biding its time for too long. Looking for opportunities to cause natural misery was not a strategy that had been paying off. Whenever it could subdue the crowd, the ringmaster would bring out something deliberately put together to make people happy and excited. It was getting really, really frustrating.
So enough of that. If it couldn't have languor, it would have panic. In the power rooms, a few Grant Bledsoes. Cheapskate electrician, he'd pull the wires and tell people he'd need to come back tomorrow to rewire the whole building. Make a lot of money making richs folks afraid their dives weren't up to code.
The lights went out.
The ringmaster acted quickly. "Ladies and gentle, uh... people! Don't panic! There's been a temporary-"
The sound system went out. And then the artificial gravity.
Keagan had sort of figured out the movement of the sphere by then. His stomach had settled down some, and he was getting used to the weightless feeling of the levitation. It took him a minute to realize what was happening- the lights going out meant nothing to him blindfolded, and the piercing screams of the audience were indistinguishable from Pepper trying another one of her more death-defying stunts. It was only when he realized the screams were starting to come from below him that he started to suspect something was wrong. And it was when the sphere came to a halt against the fabric of the big top that he realized he'd drifted away from the ring and up to the ceiling.
Panic. Panic was good, though harder to manage than slow decay. People were in some ways predictable when they were panicking, but less predictable in others. Remembering a hostile mob wouldn't quite fit, but remembering fires would do nicely. Gomorrah lit up a handful of exits, to force as many people out one door as it could. People trampled in a stampede to the exit would work.
Wait, no. They weren't running for the exits. They were floating helplessly in midair. What were they doing? This didn't make any sense. In all of Gomorrah's experience, gravity kept people on the ground. It didn't know what to make of this... spontaneous-flying behavior. From its perspective, the universe had just conspired to ruin its plans by suddenly breaking all of the rules for no reason. Well, Gomorrah wasn't going to play the universe's game, thank you very much. Its people would be staying right on the ground.
"Boss! What do we do here?" Pepper yelled. She'd dug her tail into the ground to keep from drifting off, and the ringmaster had retrieved an emergency lev-pak. "You stay put! I'm going to try and turn the power back on!" he said. Was he being dense? "Boss, things are on freakin' fire! This isn't an ordinary power outage! We gotta call security!" He threw his hands up in annoyance. "An outage this big, security already knows! I've got everything under control, got it?" Pepper was left to stare out the window at the rest of the circus, which glowed brightly in the darkness. The power outage, whatever its cause, had been localized to this tent, and probably the exterior concourse.
She was sure that her colleagues on the other show floors couldn't be having nearly as bad a day as hers.
Meanwhile, Keagan struggled against his restraints again. This time, the ball wasn't spinning, but that hardly made it any easier. They'd buckled the straps down tight. There had to be an emergency latch, right? Surely they didn't make a habit of kidnapping random kids for their act- there'd be a performer up here, and they'd need to be able to get down, right? It was just a matter of finding the right...
"'Ello, mister!"
"Huh?" Someone was in front of him, he couldn't see.
"Someone tie your eyes? Woss with that?" He felt tiny hands undoing his blindfold, which came away and confirmed his suspicions. He was at the top of the big top, in zero gravity. He could see, some, by the light of the rest of the circus outside, and the... fires? The light was enough to see, floating in front of him, a little girl dressed in rags. She was holding an empty cotton candy bag.
"M'name's Amy! You looked like you was stuck!"
"I... I am stuck, yeah. You're... aren't you..." Keagan looked her over. Her clothes and accent weren't from this space circus, clearly. That meant she had to be part of...
"You're from Gomorrah! You... get away!"
"I'm what? From where I'm from, or somethin'? What's so bad 'bout bein' from where the town is?"
She was part of that... thing. The thing he needed to take revenge on, for Jolene. It had to be some kind of trick. "Get back! I know what you are! You're some kinda... one of those, its ghost things! What do you want?"
"Ghost? Me, a ghost? I s'pose that'd 'splain the floatin'... you seein' this?"
"Don't play dumb!" It was probably playing dumb. It... did control them, right?
"You sound like Sister Flora. "Don't be dumb! You're being a dumb godless li'l child!""
Well... whatever it wanted to do, it would've done it by now if it were openly hostile. He was defenseless. "Hey, uh... do you think you could undo these buckles for me? You're right, I'm sorta stuck."
"You want me to help you?"
"...Yes." This would prove whether he could trust the thing, or if it was toying with him.
"Only if you take it back!"
"What?"
"You said I was dumb! You gotta take it back, else I won't help you loose!"
"Wh- okay, you're not dumb! Now give me a hand here!"
"...I don't think you meant it! I think you still think I'm dumb!"
"No! I mean it! You're not dumb at all!"
"Promise?" Amy spun in place, giggling.
"Yes, I promise! Just undo these buckles!"
Little Amelia gave him a funny look. "Buckles?" she asked. "I never knew there was buckles on snakes." ...Snakes? He wasn't tied up with- and then Keagan felt something smooth and wriggling slide across his wrists and ankles, and squirm away into the air, leaving his hands and legs free.
"Gah!"
"And how come you're surrounded by all those fish, anyway? Are we in the harbor or sum'n?" The knives outlining Keagan- the sardines- pulled free of the wood and swum off into the lack of ocean. "If we're in the harbor, you oughta learn ta swim, right?" Little Amelia suddenly flew off- doing the breaststroke through thin air, as if it were water.
"Hey, wait! What did you just do?" He tried to swim after her, but the air failed to act like water in his hands. Looking around, he grabbed a handful of the tent's fabric, and slowly began crawling down the side. Someone would have to answer for... whatever this was.
Spoiler