[SOLO - Awakening] Eat or Be Eaten
Ah, the Carnival! The Circus! Lights and bells and people laughing… Elijah loved it down to his very core, and had he been allowed to, he could have lived at the Carnival of Fate. Ate popcorn for every meal, sleep under one of the clapboard booths… just to be closer to his passion. Off of work for the night and loathe to leave his lady, the lanky young man wandered the closing grounds of the carnival in plain clothes, his hands stuffed down into his pockets.
The customers were slowly clearing out now that the carnival was closed for the day, loitering like he was, sad to leave the brightness and joy of the atmosphere. Eventually he would have to leave too, but a lot of the staff would be staying after hours to do clean up, so he had a while yet. Animals to feed, booths to clean, equipment to stow… oh yes, he had time. So Eli wandered, passing rides as their lights winked off and booths as the operators pulled down the covers.
The world was steadily getting darker as the lights went out, but at first he was hardly aware of it, and then unconcerned when he noticed. He had never been particularly afraid of the dark, even after the attack on opening day. He’d never seen another monster, so it never occurred to him that one might be hiding here in his home, right out in plain sight…
The first hint he got that something wasn’t right was when he noticed a weird shuffling sound between his own footfalls. Pausing, he glanced around; getting the oddest feeling someone was watching him. An empty carnival greeted him and he frowned. He could have sworn there was someone behind him… hunching his shoulders, the young man pulled his hood up around his neck and walked on, though now he angled himself back towards the entrance and brighter territory.
The first hint he got that something was well and truly following him was the gasping moan of breath he heard and Eli spun with wide orange eyes to stare at… a zombie looking clown.
“Ha ha, nice going Sal. How long did that take you to do up? Does Chester now someone as ugly as you is wandering around his Carnival?” He laughed boisterously, though there was an edge of nerves to it. The fact that the clown staggered towards him drunkenly only brought up childhood terrors and it was hard to really dismiss the thought of the monsters he had seen not too long ago, the ones that had tried to eat him…
“Hey, knock it off Sal. It’s not funny.” He growled as the clown stumbled closer, reaching out to give him a shove. When his hand sank into the form of the clown, he dry heaved and jerked his hand back, clapping the other over his mouth. Oh god… that was NOT Sal…
“Bloody hell…” He squeaked as the clown grinned big, sharp teeth and lunged at him, the young man ducking and dodging to the side. A yelp escaped him as he scrambled behind the booths and struggled to lose his pursuer. The monsters were back! A gab between two boards beckoned and he slid between them, plastering his back to the wall and hunching down to make himself as small as possible. Oh, god, please… please don’t find me…
He heard shuffling and that weird, rattling breath again, but it only paused and moved on, the sound getting fainter as it moved away from his hiding place. Please… please… just go away… A sharp crash pulled him from his prayers and he screamed as the monster came smashing through the side of the game booth. It had back up for momentum and now it gnashed its teeth as it reached for him with fingers that were decidedly sharper than they should be.
“Help me!” He screamed as he kicked at it with his sneakers, pressing back against the wall and groping around for something, anything to fight it off…
A light in the darkness caught his attention and his groping hand fell on a stick that seemed to just slid into his palm like it was made to be there. A voice in his head was saying something, whispering something to him, but Eli had far more pressing matters to worry about. A bright light overwhelmed him and he cried out as he felt something changing…
When the light cleared, the monster was shaking its head, trying to recover from the blinding. Moving fast, Eli lashed out at it with his booted feet and pummeled the monster with all his desperate strength. Every blow seemed to knock parts of it off and suddenly it cried out as it exploded into a shower of dust that rained down over the area.
“Bloody hell!” Eli gasped out as he stood panting, his eyes wide and staring. A jangling sound seemed to come from everywhere each time he moved and the young man started, looking for the source. What the hell… bells? He could feel them in his hair, and his clothes felt different… was he wearing boots? What the blood hell was going on?
“Chester!” The newly awakened Ys shouted as he climbed out of the wreckage, stumbling off to find the one man he had ever seen change his clothes this way before.
