Midway Mayhem (OPEN)

[Forge]

Forge saw structural instabilities everywhere he went. That was why he kept very, very quiet during the conversation regarding the safety of the rides. Just because they were unstable didn't mean they were unsafe, after all. They were working just fine right now. Besides, carnival rides couldn't afford to operate using the highest standards of safety; they had to be moved, which meant lightweight.

Basically, Forge didn't care that the rides before him had only about a couple dozen more weeks in them, because he wouldn't be there that long. He did care about the sudden breakdown of camaraderie between them, though. He had to admit it, though; Chris was kind of a downer. Still, that didn't excuse what had just happened. Forge thought of all of these people as his friends, and he hated to see friends fight. That was as close to family fighting as you could get without, well, being family.

He knew the retaliation was coming, so he stepped up from his hiding spot behind Guido (he felt that this was probably a safe move in the long run, anyhow, considering how much grease the large man was eating) and put a hand on Kitty's shoulder. He didn't say anything to her, because he didn't know what to say. Instead, he said, "Hey, Bobby! Wait up!"

Idly, he noticed that the hat that Bobby was wearing was working just fine.

[Tatiana]

“Come on Tatty. None of this outsider stuff tonight."

With those words Tatiana felt herself being drug away from the one thing she had been looking forward to all night. "But...But...Can't I get my food......?" Her personal bubble had been breached and the shock was borderline too much. 'All I wanted was a caramel apple with sprinkles..." Her voice came out in a squeak.

She just felt herself being taken along for the proverbial 'ride'. People were arguing and she just kept silent. Soon enough this idiot Bobby would forget about her and she could slip away. And what was with that hat??

[Kurt Wagner]

As carnivals go, it wasn't the best one Kurt had ever seen. But then, Kurt was a bit of a carnival snob. Years of his young life spent navigating the underside and dark corners of small villages had given him some very specific notions about carnivals.

But it wasn't the worst one he'd seen either.

The lights, the sights, the intoxicating tension of being so close to so many normal people. So close to danger more often than he would ever admit.

He loved it.

He passed through the crowd effortlessly like a shadow, blue hands and face buried beneath a dark grey hoodie. He found Christine and approached her from the other side just as she was almost run over by a clown.

"Guten abend, fraulein", he said in a low, conspiratorial voice. He watched with amusement to see what she would do as the clown gallantly offered her a balloon.

It wasn't the best clown he had ever seen.

But it wasn't the worst one, either.

[Guido Carosella]

Guido's eyebrows shot up at the exchange between Chris and Kitty. Both of them were pretty sweet girls, but putting them together was like tossing a flaming cat in a swimming pool of nitro. Chris got a weird, blank look on her face, and strode off into the crowd. That solved the immediate problem, but Guido would have to go looking for her later. He WAS supposedly in charge.

He handed the fuming Kitty a stick of cotton candy and gently steered her towards the rides. "Ah, don't worry about it. We're all in kinda strung out shape lately. Let's just relax fer tha night."

At Bobby's suggestion, he stopped to finish off the rest of the food he was carrying. The ride operators tended to frown on chili and nachos flying off their rides. Speaking of, he noticed Forge eyeing the contraptions with a critical eye. Guido almost asked him what he thought of the stability of the machines, but decided he'd rather not know. Covering a belch, he followed Bobby to the ride.

[Bobby Drake]

This was so freaking AWESOME!

Hell to the yeah!

Bobby was in his element, leading the group to a spinning and fully lighted ride that was run by a guy with the biggest handle bar moustache he had ever seen. Even though it was dark out, the man wore mirrored cop glasses. He kept his leather rough face trained to ‘stoic’ even as Bobby stepped up and got in line.

“Howzit goin’?” Bobby said to him with a smile. The man just nodded. Goin’ good.

Looking over his shoulder, Bobby wondered where everyone was. Right now it was just he…and Tatty…and Guido was ambling up with quite a bit less food in his tree trunk arms. Man that guy could pack it away! Forge was hustling up too. Bobby threw him a wave.

“You getting on or what?” Bobby then realized that the dude was holding the gate open for them and that the ride was almost filled to capacity. “Only room for two more,” he clarified, looking up at Guido.

Bobby looked from Tatty to Guido and back again. “Okay, you wait here for the rest of the gang,” he said to her. “Guido and I will test this out and make sure it’s safe.” It sounded like a good plan. And Guido was really the only one besides Kitty who wanted to do this anyway…and though he’d rather sit with her, she was just too slow.

“Come on,” Bobby said to Guido and walked through the gate.

[Kitty Pryde]

Kitty could only stand there and stare, open mouthed, as Christine walked away. She couldn’t believe it. Right here, in the middle of all these people, the telepath had actually used her powers against her! Okay, so nobody else could tell but Kitty, telepaths didn’t have the most visible powers in the world - quite the opposite, really - but still! Right here in public!

“Did you see that?” she asked when the hand on her shoulder brought her back to reality. Looking over, she found that it belonged to Forge. She liked Forge. With him there was no weirdness, no memories that felt out of place, no lingering snapshots of dreams that she couldn’t remember. She felt normal around him, and as horrible and crazy as she had been feeling lately, that was more than a welcome feeling. “She pushed me!”

Realising that nobody could have seen Christine ‘push’ her, Kitty quickly clarified. “With her mind! She mentally pushed me! I’m pretty sure that’s against the rules!”

But nobody was even listening, they were already heading off toward the rides. Fuming to herself, Kitty thought of running off on her own too, but she didn’t want to follow in Christine’s footsteps in any way. Besides... suddenly she had cotton candy. Looking up (way up) at Guido, she looked almost like a kicked puppy. “That’s what I was trying to do before someone decided we don’t get a night off.”

Letting Guido lead her forward, Kitty stopped trying to talk to anyone else, but just continued to no-so-silently fume to herself. “Orders? Pfft, what orders? We’re supposed to be having fun! I don’t know what high horse she climbed up on, but we weren’t sent here to protect anyone.” All the while she was stuffing bits of cotton candy into her mouth. “She can’t even have fun at a carnival! Get back to work my ass...”

[Roxy]

Roxy's grin broadened as she rubbed her hands together at the sight of a large fluff ball of pink be spun onto a rather long cone. Carnivals were great! Food, games, rides, FOOD, clowns, animals, FOOD... It was all about the food, really! And Roxy already had her eyes set on a satisfaction to her sweet tooth. She had a growing mound under her cami top, as she pretty much tried and ate everything else... She really was that greedy.

Disappearing, her smile dropped into disappointment as the vendor handed the cotton candy over to a little scruffy looking kid with two pigtails set on either side of her head. That was so not cool, she mused, looking from the girl to the vendor. Kid or not, she could have swore she was in line FIRST.

"HEY! That should have been MINE!" A natural loudmouth she was. Always creating a scene over the littlest of things. Roxanne folded her arms, narrowing her lavender eyes. The Vendor nervously smiled as he blindly searched for another paper cone.

[Forge]

Forge listened attentively to Kitty, because it was the thing one did for a friend, and Kitty was his friend. Well, Forge considered everyone to be a friend. Even Chris, though she did act kind of weird sometimes.

"I saw." Ish. Kind of. The blank stare that Chris gave Kitty combined with Kitty's reaction made the math a bit easy. Chris had used her powers on Kitty. He'd always considered that a kind of no-no.

As they walked, he waved back at Bobby, paid for the candy apple that Tatiana was about to get before being grabbed by Bobby, and took Roxy by the arm and drug her along with the rest of them, towards Bobby. No point in causing a scene over cotton candy, and with the way tempers were flaring around here, there was no telling what might happen if one mutant let loose around a bunch of others.

He knew exactly what he would do in that situation: go behind the ferris wheel and hide. He was armed with his wits and luck; and lately his luck seemed to be running low.

"Just remember, Kitty; she may have had to learn how to not delve into your thoughts on accident, but you had to learn how to not fall through your bed at night when you sleep." He was trying to calm her down, but he wasn't sure if he was doing a decent job of it.

He looked at the rides that lay before them. There was a ferris wheel and a carousel, because no carnival could live without them. But then there was this interesting enclosed space-ship looking thing that seemed to just spin around so fast it threw you to the walls and kept you there. There was one of those elevator drop things that Forge refused to go on. There was something called the "Sizzler," which consisted of nine bench seats separated into sets of three. It seemed that as the whole device spun around, the three seats that were connected to each other would spin around their own axis. That seemed like it would hurt the person on the far end of the seats if they weren't that big. Or even if they were.

Then there were the roller coasters. He spotted at least two from where they were, in front of the gates, and he guessed there were more further back.

And then there were the games. There were people throwing darts at balloons; there were the essential ring-toss game where you try to get a ring around a glass bottle, a whack-a-mole, and several those games where you shoot a stream of water to try to fill up a balloon.

It all looked like a heck of a lot of fun. There was a Batman poster as a prize at one of the booths. He was going for that one as soon as he got in.

"You ready for this?" he asked the two girls (both a little grumpy) as he handed the candy apple to Tatiana.

[Fred Dukes]

Directly across from the Scrambler, a pale slender man stood with a microphone clutched in his skeletal fingers. Looking at the crowd with sunken eyes shadowed beneath a tall top hat, he suddenly spoke in a keening , shrill tone. “Come one, come all,” he invited. Above him was a hand-painted sign, the letters brushed on in garish red. It had one word painted on it.

FREAKS

“You’ve seen them before,” he continued now that eyes were turning toward him and a hush started to descend over the area. “Medical oddities, marvels in human form…” He grinned as he took them all in, a gesture that looked almost malevolent. “…freaks. And you tried not to stare. You were after all brought up right and staring is considered rude.” He looked over his shoulder into the shadows as if contemplating something for a minute before turning back to the swelling ranks of onlookers. “But this place, we play by different rules. And I’m telling you…here you should stare.”

A light flickered to life behind the man, and then another and another, revealing first a man completely covered in hair, then a woman who only appeared to be a few feet tall, then a man with two heads, one of them alert, the other lolled off to the side with its tongue lagging out. Next was a slender man with angular features and greenish skin, squatting down and looking at the crowd through yellowish eyes.

And then there was Fred. He was eating a foot long sandwich that appeared to be a bite sized snack in his enormous hands.

“Take the Blob here for instance.”

Fred stopped chewing, casting a derisive look at the man that bordered on murderous.

“Let’s say we play a little game before the show gets going,” he said to the crowd. “We all like games, don’t we?” The response was a little half-hearted, but the man didn’t seem to take it to heart. “Tell you what. I’m gonna make it interesting. Who wants to win some money?”

That got more of a reaction.

“That’s what I thought,” he said with a grin. He gestured back to Fred. “Whoever can guess the weight of the Blob here gets this nice crisp fifty dollar bill.” With a flourish of his white gloves he pulled out a green bill and held it up for all to see, then he waved his hands and it disappeared.

“So how about it? Who’s going to be the first to guess the weight?”

Fred smiled a little more now as he took another bite.

[Guido Carosella]

Elsewhere...

Guido patted the horrified ride operator on the shoulder reassuringly as he squeezed throught the turnstile and headed towards a seat. There really wasn't much of a science to getting a good seat on a ride like this one. The only thing you really had to look for was one that was reasonably free of spilled soda and/or puke.

Finally spotting a promising one, he squeezed into it and scooted over as far as he was able to make room for Bobby. Looking around furtively, he bent the lap bar up ever so slightly to get it secured across his knees.

The posture that he settled on was not a comfortable one, but darn it, he wanted to go on a ride. His size limited his options, and he was probably pushing his luck with this one, but he didn't get an opportunity to do this very often. Especially not after that whole getting hit by a bus thing in seventh grade.

He just wished he could get some pressure off of his stomach.

[Kitty Pryde]

He had seen it. Forge had seen it. Despite all her anger, Kitty felt a small slip of relief at his words. She knew she was acting crazy, somewhere in the back of her mind. She knew how bad she was making herself look, and how innocent Christine looked, how innocent she always looked. It was so easy to look innocent when your gift was sneaky and invisible, but Forge had seen so at least there was that.

His following words, though, were not so comforting. Not only was she not quite sure what he meant by them, but the fact that she had been slipping lately and had woken up in the kitchen several times over the past few weeks made his little reminder unnecessary. Everything was just so out of control lately, and she hated it. She just wanted one night where she could relax and have fun and forget about stupid dreams and everything. Why couldn’t anyone give her that? Just one night?

Managing to bite back a retort, Kitty settled for just brooding silently and letting Forge lead her around. At least he seemed like he was trying to get into the spirit. That she could appreciate. “Well, I was,” she muttered, before silently chastising herself. Wasn’t that exactly why she had gotten mad at Christine in the first place? Because the girl refused to lighten up and have fun? Well no way she was going to fall into that pattern. She forced a smile onto her face. “That’s why we’re here after all, right? But where do we even start?”

As if answering her question, a shrill voice cut right through the crowd, attracting her attention. Turning toward it, the first thing Kitty noticed was the sign: it was big, red and terrible. She knew what it was like to be different, all mutants did, but for people to exploit that was just horrible.

“That’s just sick,” she muttered to Forge and Tatiana. “If someone tried to make money by using me like that they better be putting it toward medical insurance.”

[Kenny Orion]

What is it about a Carnival that brings people together? Was it the fact that people enjoy going out to have a good time while others feel left out? For Kenny it was like he always felt he was never allowed the chance to do things like hanging out at festive events because of what he is. Dressed in a long dark blue cargo vest over his black t-shirt and dark jeans with red sneakers and wearing a blue ski cap which covered his spiky hair, the young mutant was relieved that some of the mutants from the school decided to go have some fun and it was a good chance for him to finally have some fun and probably for once not run into any trouble. As he watched the others he checked his wrist bracelet to see if it was on tight. "What should i do? Where should i go?" He said to himself when he smelled something very good as he went and followed the scent to what appears to be a booth selling some food. Kenny looked at the booth as he saw that there was something that caught his attention as he got himself a thing of curly fries with some ketchup as he sat down on a table and munch on at the delicious snack as he suddenly heard a voice nearby.

"Step Right Up Step Right Up, try your luck in the toughest challenge knock the stack of bottles and win a prize." A booth owner said as he was pointing at many stuffed animals. "However, if you can manage to knock them all down in one throw then you will win this big penguin." he added as Kenny looked up and saw a nice looking penguin stuffed toy dressed up like a surfer as the mutant smiled while walking by the booth" The booth owner saw Kenny and proceeded to speak to him. "Young man, want to try your luck?" he said to Kenny as he was startled a bit as he looked at the stack of bottles as he saw that it was about 10 bottles stacked like a triangle 4 on the bottom, 3 on the middle, 2 on the near top and 1 on top. Kenny took the ball and carefully looked on as he took his time and a deep breath as had a feeling it would be like throwing one of his cosmic spheres. He then fired the ball as hard as he can as it hit the bottles and like that the bottles fell down off the table stunning the owner. "Young Man, heres your penguin" the owner said as he was still shocked as he gave Kenny the Penguin toy. "Just how did you manage to throw like that?" Kenny looked at the penguin and then at the owner. "Just happened" Kenny said as he walked away carrying the penguin as he tried to find the other mutants along the way.

[Bobby Drake]

Bobby was the first to climb aboard, and he scooted as far over as he could to make room for Guido. The guy was easily three Bobby’s wide and probably weighed as much as a handful of Bobby’s as well. For a split second he wondered about the weight limit on this ride, his eyes traveling to the connection point that held the swiveling carriage in place. For a split second he envisioned their car popping free and hurtling across the fairgrounds and then like exploding or something. He could see Guido and him flying free from the explosion except Guido kind of looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger and he looked kind of like Brad Pitt before he got old.

Guido climbed aboard and managed to elbow Bobby a few times while trying to find the right position. One time it totally took the wind out of him, and he cast a dark scowl upward at Captain Humongous. “Comfy?” Yeah, that was sarcasm.

Sarcasm was a language that every teenager eventually became fluent in. Bobby was no exception, and considered himself bilingual by every right.

The lights flashed twice, signaling the start of the ride. Just then a fairly foul odor struck Bobby like a fist to the nose. “Dude,” he said with a wrinkled up face, “Did you just-“

His words were drowned out by the start of AC/DC’s Ride On playing unbelievably loud through the speakers in the middle of the ride. Going from zero to out of control in no time, Bobby soon forgot the stink as the wind smeared his hair back and the ride started spinning faster and faster.

This only went on for a few minutes before the ride started wobbling. As they spun faster and faster it started going up and then down and then higher and then dipping low and this went on until they were inverted almost upside down while the ride spun faster and faster to a loud and very long guitar solo.

Bobby closed his eyes and smiled.

Carnivals were so freaking cool!

[Fred Dukes]

All at once people started shouting out their guesses to the Blob’s weight. The vulpine man didn’t seem at all deterred by the amount of requests, but only swept his eyes across the crowd as they yelled them out. After several minutes of this he held up a gloved hand and waited for the crowd to grow silent.

“I heard 300 pounds,” he said pointing to a bald gentleman up front. The man nodded and crossed his arms somewhat self-consciously. “Not even close.”

Fred snorted.

“The lady with the curls said 450?” She nodded a little, looking a little more reluctant to publicly admit it, especially with Fred’s eyes on her. The man shook his head and laughed. “No cigar.” He swept a gaze back across the crowd. “The highest I heard was 550, and let me tell you ladies and gentlemen, you aren’t even in the right area code on this one.”

He looked back to Fred and the crowd waited silently for the right answer.

As if on cue, Fred strolled over to a full sized Ford pickup. Putting one meaty hand on the bed, he climbed up into it and stood, folding his arms as the shocks compensated for his heft. With a smirk on his face he just stared at the silent crowd, smiling darkly. And for a few moments nothing happened.

Then the truck groaned and there was a loud explosion that brought about an audible gasp from the crowd. As the tires exploded one by one the crowd backed up a step, carrying about them the demeanor of a deer about to flee. A horrible sound of metal wrenching filled the air as Fred slowly sank to the ground. The bed of the truck was folded slightly in half and he had to flex his knees ever so much as the bed hit the dirt, sending a billowing cloud that rolled slowly toward the astonished crowd.

“How ‘bout it folks,” the man’s voice broke the silence shrilly, “ain’t he just a ton of fun?”

[Bobby Drake]

Faster and faster the y continued to spin, the world passing by in a blur of motion and color and loud guitar solos that mixed together in a terribly dizzying cocktail. And just when things couldn’t be any more dizzying, the car that they were sitting in started toppling. It spun clockwise and then turned upside down and pivoted haphazardly this way and that. Bobby screamed with his arms in the air as his point of view kept changing from the sky to the ground to the people behind him.

Bobby was glad he was seated on the outside; otherwise Guido would be crushing him right now.