[They'd been here a couple weeks now, long enough to fall into a numbing groove despite the deaths. Their hosts called it the Carnival, full of garish tents and booths that were almost more nightmarish than the deaths they'd witnessed. The whole complex centered around the massive bigtop where they held the now-weekly trials, and bordered by thick, impassable fog. Any attempts at leaving ended up looping back to another part of the carnival.]
[Ned had been trying to work out a way to escape the bubble world, the trailer she'd been assigned as a bedroom full of sheets of scribbled notes and glyphs and magical formulas, trying to find some kind of casting that could punch a hole back to reality. But so far, the suppression of everyone's powers, her own lack of expertise in the relevant branches of magic, and complete lack of her usual resources had left her entirely stymied.]
[So today she's in the carnival's arcade tent, feeding tokens into the prize machine that had been spitting out items from home, hoping to get some of her mother's research or something that might be helpful.]
[The tightly-packed bag of high quality coffee beans wasn't the most useful of reminders of home, but it was highly welcome, for a second. Until she saw the small subtitle underneath flourishing 'dark roast' script.]
>Decaffeinated
...I'm being mocked. This is mockery, and the Ringmaster has to die now.
how bout some murdergame shenanigans
[Ned had been trying to work out a way to escape the bubble world, the trailer she'd been assigned as a bedroom full of sheets of scribbled notes and glyphs and magical formulas, trying to find some kind of casting that could punch a hole back to reality. But so far, the suppression of everyone's powers, her own lack of expertise in the relevant branches of magic, and complete lack of her usual resources had left her entirely stymied.]
[So today she's in the carnival's arcade tent, feeding tokens into the prize machine that had been spitting out items from home, hoping to get some of her mother's research or something that might be helpful.]
[The tightly-packed bag of high quality coffee beans wasn't the most useful of reminders of home, but it was highly welcome, for a second. Until she saw the small subtitle underneath flourishing 'dark roast' script.]
>Decaffeinated
...I'm being mocked. This is mockery, and the Ringmaster has to die now.