08/03/2026: The Infernal Fairgrounds

In front of one of the ruined tents of the infernal fairgrounds, canvas rotted to lace and swaying in a wind that smells of scorched sugar, Thunk crouches beside a hellhound and decides the name Adolph no longer suits him.

"Your name is TBA now," they announce. The hellhound tilts his burning head, unbothered by the demotion.

TBA seems to take the rebranding as an invitation to work. He noses through a heap of bones at the foot of the tent, selects a yellowed skull with the enthusiasm of a connoisseur, and trots it back to Thunk, tail crackling like a lit fuse behind him. Thunk hurls it. TBA retrieves it. This repeats several times, right up until TBA decides retrieving no longer requires relinquishing, and clamps down on the skull with his tail wagging harder than ever, flames licking pleasantly at the night air.

“Drop it, boy, drop it!” Thunk pants, priesing the skull loose by force, from the hellhound's snout. It leaves a thin, smoking welt across their palm. They shake out the burn, already making a mental note: gauntlets, before the next game of fetch.

⚔

A chain devil sidles up to Borark, still riding high off his success with the tower and bell game. He gestures toward a snorting, four-legged shape tethered nearby — something with a rodeo steer’s horns and a minotaur's temperament.

"Bull ride, my very strong friend?" the chain devil rasps, oil-slick and cheerful. "We split the take, fifty-fifty."

Borark considers this for exactly as long as it takes to climb onto the creature's back. The minotaur-bull erupts beneath him, and for thirty long seconds the barbarian is spun, dropped, whipped side to side, and generally treated like a rag doll with poor life choices — but he does not let go. When the dust settles, the chain devil collects fifty gold from the losing bettors and hands Borark his half with something like respect.

Buoyed by the crowd's noise, the chain devil doubles down: a second ride, sixty gold on the table this time. Borark dispatches the bull-minotaur with even less effort than the first round, and walks away eighty-five gold richer and only somewhat dizzy.

⚔

Elsewhere in the fair, a horned devil — still smarting from being humiliated by Vali's open mic set — has decided that murder is the appropriate encore. Gearloose steps between them, crossbow raised, and fires a warning bolt before following it with a snarled incantation and a swing of his battleaxe, freshly wreathed in the crackling edge of his blade.

The horned devil is not intimidated. He answers with his pitchfork, and even Gearloose's armored suit isn't enough to stop the damage that follows.

It's Vali who talks the devil down — or rather, reminds him of his contractual obligations. The show, after all, must go on, and the grand finale was agreed to in advance: the horned devil launched from the cannon, Vali there to catch him.

Grumbling that a contract is a contract, the devil folds himself into the cannon's mouth and lights the fuse himself. As it hisses toward zero, Vali raises a shimmering, spectral fist overhead — Bigby's Hand — and lets it hover, patient, waiting. Somewhere offstage, a drumroll begins that has no visible drummer.

The cannon fires. The horned devil rockets skyward in a streak of sulfur and sparks, and the great arcane hand plucks him neatly out of the air. Vali and the devil take their bow together to a roaring, many-toothed crowd, coins raining down onto the sawdust. Vali, ever practical, palms a few extra gold with a secret legerdemain before the devil can count his cut.

⚔

Having exhausted the spider game, Reklaw wanders into a game of blackjack presided over by a medusa in a fringed shawl, a rack of potions gleaming behind her. He wins three hands running, walking away with both coin and a choice of prize: Invisibility, Healing, or a nameless potion in an unlabeled bottle.

Reklaw, being Reklaw, chooses the mystery.

He uncorks it and drinks it down in one go. Nothing happens — for a moment. Then a heat blooms across his tongue, spreading through his mouth like a struck match. He turns to the medusa to ask if she notices anything different about him.

She does. Her face goes ashen, several of her snakes visibly wilting, as the full, garlicky force of Reklaw's breath reaches her. Gagging, she waves him off and retreats into her tent to lie down, leaving her table unattended and her composure thoroughly ruined.

⚔

TBA's game of fetch winds down, and Thunk drifts into a poker table, sitting down without any real understanding of the rules being played. Cards are dealt. Cards are examined with polite confusion. Somehow — on the strength of a pair of twos, of all things — Thunk beats the dealer, who does not take the loss gracefully.

Deciding not to press their luck, Thunk excuses themself to go find the rest of the party. They track them down inside the performance tent just as the horned devil, still steaming faintly from the cannon, climbs down out of Vali's enormous glowing hand to scattered applause.

⚔

Kiki and Borark try their hand at the crossbow shooting gallery and walk away with an odd haul. Kiki wins a small music box — ornate, lacquered, and inert, its lid carved with a shape she can't quite place — that the game's attendant explains requires a black feather to activate. She also wins a large green slug, which she determines, after careful and cautious prodding, to be acidic but not poisonous. Borark wins a brass whistle.

He blows it. No sound comes out — not to their ears, anyway. But somewhere across the fairgrounds, a large dog begins to howl.

⚔

"I don't know why he's doing that!" Thunk protests, looking helplessly at TBA, who is alternating shaking his head and howling. The horned devil, still nursing his wounded pride from earlier, has heard quite enough from this group for one night and asks them to leave.

The party regroups — quieter than usual, still absorbing the news of Arman's departure — and files into the big top instead.

Inside, the ring is visible from every bench in the house, a wide circle of raked sawdust under a canvas ceiling. Infernal clowns cartwheel and tumble across it in loose, chaotic loops, waiting for their cue.

⚔

"Ladies, gentlemen, and assorted damned," announces the ringmaster, a cambion in a coat of chains, his voice a smooth rasp. "Tonight's first act requires patience. Yours. Certainly not his."

He lifts one chain-wrapped hand, and a spotlight of sickly green flame finds the high wire above.

A bone devil crouches there, thirty feet up, arms spread for balance and radiating deep, personal unhappiness about the entire arrangement. He takes one step. Then another. The wire hums under him like a plucked nerve.

"Come now," the ringmaster murmurs, almost gentle, almost fond. "Point your toes."

On the third step, the bone devil's back foot finds nothing but air. He pinwheels, shrieks something that might be a curse or might simply be the word "No," and falls.

He does not so much land as arrive in pieces — ribcage here, skull there, one clawed hand still twitching several feet from the rest of him.

The crowd, an assortment of things with too many teeth and things with none at all, applauds politely. This, evidently, is expected. The party claps along, unsure what else to do.

Three of the squat, infernal clowns trot out from the wings on legs that bend the wrong way at the knee, ruffled collars stained the deep brown of old blood, painted smiles stretched wider than any jaw should allow. They gather the bone devil's pieces with brisk, practiced efficiency, humming something that is part lullaby, part dirge, and begin reassembling him like the world's worst jigsaw puzzle.

Once whole again, the bone devil is urged — gently, inexorably — back onto the wire by the ringmaster.

He will try again. And again.

⚔

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Kiki has acquired a second item keyed to a black feather — a music box, inert until activated. This runs parallel to the carved box already in her possession and the open feather prophecy tied to Vali and the rooster in Calypso's tower. Worth tracking whether one feather could theoretically satisfy both items, or whether this raises the stakes of that scene.