Character Carnival

Valentine chuckled at the duo's antics. "For the sake of your minds, I suggest you try not to think too hard. Worked wonders for me."

Stepping towards the portal, she took a deep breath. So I just enter the portal, and presto! Instantly home? She steeled herself. Well, at least I'll have and interesting story to tell back home.

She turned towards the people that were left. "Well, I can honestly say this has been quite the adventure. It's been an honor working with you all." Smirking, she added, "But if I happen to run into you all again, I would like to suggest some team-building exercises. You know, team work and all that."

With those words, she turned and strode into the portal, not stopping to look back.

—-

Valentine snapped awake and immediately looked around.

Weird. I'm back in my bedroom. She rubbed her head, What the Hell am I saying? of course I'm in my bedroom.

She yawned and laid back down. Must have been one hell of a dream to mess with my bearings. I wonder what it was about...

She racked her brain for answers. Let's see now, I remember... Ninjas? And Magicians, and, wait. Carney angels? And someone named Polly. But who?

She pulled her covers back over her. I'll see what I remember later. Before she fell asleep, she muttered to herself, "What the Hell did I take to cause that dream?"

Even more cracks formed in the sky, like a spiderweb. The ground began to rumble, and cracks even began forming there. It spreaded onto the buildings, covering the place with a black glow. The sky faded from a grayish blue to a purple, and then to a blood red. The rain stopped, and the ground turned dry. A reddish glow splashed onto everything. An errie hum reverbed throughout the area.

Mary's body laid on the lawn. Bloodied, but bleeding.

Three...two...

"She's in, Helen."

"No, dude, seriously, she's not," Helen said, poking her head back out of the portal. "I'm fucking serious, the native is still outside—"

Frederick's hand shot out and grabbed Mary's collar, tossing her into the blue abyss. His disembodied voice emanating from the portal, he said, "There! Fuck! How the hell is she not in the portal, anyways? Did she trip? Was this portal dropped on the head when it was a baby or something? Is she in now?"

Around Helen, the world continued to fold in on itself, like origami paper, or sandwiches being made at Subway. If I imagine that the red sky is like the tomato and the ground is like the bread, and when they all come together...

Helen's stomach grumbled. Tasty dying universe. Could use some mayo. Ooh! That ferris wheel over there just collapsed! That can be the mayo!

It slowly dawned upon Helen that she had stopped giving a fuck.

"Nope, she's gone," Helen said, keeping a careful eye out for spontaneously reappearing natives. "Okay, lemme wait for a few more seconds just to make—"

"Helen, just get the fuck in the portal."

"Fine, fine..."

edited 28th May '11 12:15:42 PM by Chubert

And then every character was gone from the carnival. Every single one.

In the last seconds of the tiny universe, the spirits disincorporated from their physical forms and ascended to the sky. They snuck through the large black cracks, where they were sent back to where they were suppose to be.

At last, the carnival was truly abandoned. There were no people, no spirits, and no rain nor wind. Nothing moved in the vacuum, as time itself was fleeing. Cracks were everywhere, on every surface, adorning everything. Only the colors black and red glowed, as if the universe was displaying one last warning until the end.

One second past.

...

...

...

Everything shattered.

Like the greenhouse, everything broke apart, fracturing into millions of uneven pieces. Chaos ruled all, with elements suddenly decaying and coming into being. The place turned into a mush of matter, shimmering. They then turned into hard, hot pieces, transparent and smooth like glass. A ring was formed around the nothingness, where point zero once existed.

The laws of physics were repealed. Some bits went up, while some bits went down, all at variable speeds. Explosions of high energy splashed the area with all the colors of the spectrum, then some. Within seconds, micro-verses of hydrogen and oxygen came to being, only to fade away. It was a masterpiece that nothing could experience personally, lest they would die.

The remains of the carnival floated apart. They were slowly pulled into the darkness, and into oblivion. The atoms dissolved and disappeared, with the remaining energy to be dormant until the next creation. The copy of the Malone Carnival was no more. In fact, in the minds of all of the visitors, it never existed.

...

But you remember. That what matters in the end.

edited 28th May '11 12:56:15 PM by chihuahua0

The End

Epilogue:

Mary stretched her arms out and yawned as she stood up. She rubbed her back, as she was leaning on one of the booths. Her flashlight was still in her hands.

"I fell asleep..." she thought as she turned on the flashlight. It was quite dark outside, and she could barely see what was beyond the light, "How could I fall asleep like that? I don't even remember sitting down and..."

She headed back towards her house. She waved the flashlight around. Everything looked normal. Same gloomy carnival.

"That was a strange dream..." she thought as she brushed some strands of hair out of her eyes. Her dark green hoodie felt a little wet, and her bones were creaky. The ground was dry though, and there was no breeze.

Mary pushed open the front gate and walked across the cracked, stone pathway. The shingles of the house looked okay too. She reached into one of her pockets for her keys.

"That dream was very avid..." she took out the key and placed the flashlight on the windowstill. She proceeded to insert the key into the lock, "Those were zany characters I thought up..."

The key was stuck.

“Open up!” Mary jiggled the key in the lock, which still refused to budge. Her black umbrella laid by the window, closed but wrinkled. The hood of her dark green hoodie was still up, to protect herself from the chill. The poles holding up the roof of the porch smelled of wet, rotting wood. The shillings of the façade were made of white rotting wood.

She looked behind at the direction where which she came...and saw one of the Ferris wheel passenger carts laying on the lawn. Its windows were shattered, and its sides were battered up. It sank into the drying mud.

"Oh no..." Mary thought, her eyes widening. Quickly, she lifted up the sleeve of her hoodie.

Dried blood covered her arm. However, there weren't any cuts.

"This can't be...It was only a dream..."

It wasn't, Mary. It wasn't.

edited 28th May '11 1:32:13 PM by chihuahua0

And we're finished!

We concluded Carnival! Yay...!

There was an ending, an ending, an ending...

/shot

Ow...so, time to review.

First, what do you think of Carnival in general? How about Mary?

edited 28th May '11 1:32:45 PM by chihuahua0

Well, the ending was... messy, though I may have contributed to that.

I sent in the Damur mostly to serve as a Grim Reaper of sorts, to force the plot along through means fair or foul. Damur aren't supposed to have personalities, given their central philosophy, but it's clear writing someone like that is hard, so some personality (arrogance, fanaticism) slipped through. I think I'll keep it, make the Damuros hypocrites in addition to everything else. I also should have skipped the attempt to fight off Hector and co. and skipped straight to his being Too Kinky to Torture, because it's so much more effective and keeps things from turning into an absurd Lensman Arms Race. Oh, and don't worry, that son of a bitch is stuck in between worlds with a very thick book on English grammar in case he ever shows his face again.

Alice left early because Real Life Writes the Plot. But I think I'll have her be more honest next time I use her just so nobody has to juggle "who knows, who doesn't know". But I didn't need to make her act out of character to leave, at least; in the Terrible Trio of her, Isaac, and Sigmund, she's always the one who knows when it's time to go, and I think that sort of rational caution could help separate her from the usual Heroic Sociopath.

edited 28th May '11 1:41:44 PM by KillerClowns

Well. Since this was my first rodeo, I had to learn some things rather quickly. Namely that fight scenes are a bit more difficult to carry out here than when I have solo control.

Other than that, mostly I realized that I need to bring a character whose first reaction to adversity isn't "punch things."

Kiora was toned down a bit for this, the average power level in her world is a little bit high, and I didn't want rampant cries of "Mary Sue! GTFO!"

All in all, I enjoyed this, I will definitely be joining in future threads, though hopefully with a more appropriate character. I still want to roleplay Panty and Stocking at some point, but I'll put that on hold for a bit.

About Mary...I still don't really know what's her personality.

Hmm...she's a Genre Savvy author. She's protective of the carnival, and everyone in it. If she would've found out about the death of Polly, she would've suffered a Heroic BSoD. She's slightly introspective too.

She's an interesting character, but not one that I would use again and again. She works as an Audience Surrogate.

What do you think of her?

(By the way, I liked how the whole thing climaxes near the greenhouse, considering how the world ended, much better than what I planned).

Oh, Samar'thra? She never appeared.

edited 28th May '11 1:46:37 PM by chihuahua0

I sincerely apologize for starting the fight between Frederick/Helen and the Damur.

But hey, at least Frederick got to "save" Mary in the end...

I didn't really see any major problems this time around, aside from a little Ending Fatigue towards the end and some continuity. For the most part, this was pretty good aside from the massive fight scene in the end.

So my only character was Cyrus Favonius.

In the span of this story, he went from being the affluent Doctor Adrian Kunstler's adoptive son to being his foster child, in addition to growing a little more sensitive and a little less callous. He always had an uncaring feel to him what with starting out his journey as an antisocial Farm Boy who seemed to enjoy slaughtering the animals a little too much for comfort, but here, I really worked out his motivations and his thought patterns, even if he plays almost no role in any plot I currently have.

I also learned how to write a fight scene.

Frederick and Helen learned that, in a new environment, it's better to more clearly identify everybody's motivations before busting out the guns.

They also learned that unstable cause-effect timelines suck.

I learned when not to write a fight scene.

edited 28th May '11 1:53:02 PM by Chubert

Oh yeah: I also learned that it's more fun to be proactive rather than reactive in these threads. I spent so much time waiting for things to happen, then doing whatever it took to react to them, and then waiting for reactions to that.

Ugh.

Cyrus seemed to get many reactions for doing stuff instead of reacting, such as leaving groups so that he could go do his job which was to clean the ghosts out of the place.

Yeah, the reactive thing bit me in the ass a lot.

Also, I enjoyed writing out Valentine's reactions to all this crazy stuff happening around her. Going from "Oh God, whats happening?!?" to "Okay, can this get any weirder?" to "I just don't care any more. Do what you all want." was really fun. But I really need to work on pacing something fierce.

Even though I left halway through, I actually learned a lot about my character from doing this. In my story, Polly is already dead when it starts, so I needed to develop her a lot so I could actually give her a presence, rather than just have her characterization rely on her absence. Doing this also made me work on dialogue—which really improved—and understand how to play two (or more) characters off each other. It was interesting to see how Polly was when she was interacting with Valentine, Evan, and Kiora.

As far as being more proactive goes, I wish I had been too. And I need to work on restraint a bit more.

edited 28th May '11 2:50:34 PM by BetsyandtheFiveAvengers

Mary should've been more involved. Being the The Arthur Dent of the thread is hard.

Fortunately, I liked the carnival and their spirits in general. I'm definatly going to recycle them into another story.

And any thoughts on the last two posts?

So, a clone setting was created, just for her? And it was all just a dream? Eh, no real complaints about that.

I'm just wondering—what exactly was the tesseract? How the hell did the entire place even work?

The tesseract was the core of the place, providing all of the energy, enforcing consistancy (although it was bad at that sometimes, due to ninjas) and basically keep the whole place together. When it got broken, the damage was reflected on the place. When it shattered (which I may forgot to mention) the carnival literally fell apart.

Or was it a dream?

Now now, we can't go around blaming Kiora for the consistency problems. It wasn't just her 'ya know?

Uhhhh but why was the Damur so averse to Frederick/Helen destroying the thing?

I mean forum ninjas, not literal ninjas!

The point is, AnA wanted the tesseract to create an universe for her master. However, both the methods of achieving that and what would follow are not good.

edited 28th May '11 8:53:16 PM by chihuahua0

Because he had no clue what would happen, but figured that as a general rule, things like that tesseract should be left to their own devices.