At the Magical Café beneath the fairy-tale castle, Jacques handed an animal-shaped biscuit to Ali, hoping she would accompany her tea with this overcooked sweet snack. My copilot sat at the end of the table, in a throne that could accommodate five like her. Wearing a cardboard crown, she didn’t even take the time to clean herself up of the fake blood used to prank me.
The cosmo-pumpkin, Ali and I weren’t the only ones at the table. We had been joined by the park’s residents and friends of Jacques: Arsenic, a tall woman dressed in black with an extremely pale complexion and limbs stretched by the low gravity; Doc Grimm who held a disturbing resemblance to his tiny demon robots; as well as the Twins, two Siamese brothers fused by the cheeks.
“Come on, little one! Now is not the time to be in a huff!” Arsenic said with a brittle voice, passing me the cookie plate with a shaky hand.
“Sorry to mess up your tea party with my bad mood after such a clever joke,” I grumbled after grabbing the last biscuit. “You’re all off your rocker!”
“I could not agree more!” the woman declared. Hesitant, she finally threw the silver plate over the Twins’s heads, directly to the moat. “But according to the trials’ results, Ali takes the crown.”
I frowned, quickly glancing at my partner. “Whatever. I am not yet convinced that you aren’t ghosts!” I rebelled, loudly chewing my cookie.
“Life iz nothing but déstruction!” Jacques, who had rediscovered his French accent, replied. “If so, we are even moar than alive!”
“Hush, Jacques! You’re frightening the kitty!” the creepy Cher rebuked him. “Do you also want a cupcake, little one?” Tears were rolling on her cheeks for no reason, and she sobbed until I accepted the pastry.
“Leave this grumpy ass alone, Arsenic!” Ali intervened. “He doesn’t like pranks and gets scared by animatronics!”
“Animatronics?” Jacques reacted, taking off his gloves to better grasp the small teapot which resisted him. “Oh… Oui—of course. Animatronics!”
I stared at my partner, squinting. She pulled her tongue out, and I had to refrain myself to kill her on the spot.
“Tell me Ali, would we have met somewhere? Your nose, eyes and elbows look familiar!” grumbled Doc Grimm.
“I think we should have remembered you!” I replied before her.
Pouring a few drops of tea in the sugar bowl before reaching for a set of spoons, the Twins snickered in unison. “We believed so—we believed so!”
Aside from their madness, I realized that these curious characters all had another common feature: a barcode tattoo on their right wrist. Their sinister identity was later confirmed when I saw the symbol of the noose flowing under the holographic figures deeply printed in their flesh.
I took advantage of Ali going to the bathroom to warn her. She jumped when I crawled under her graffiti-covered cabin’s door. “Gee, Lee! You scared me!”
“I figured out who these people are,” I said, confident as she violently locked the shutter.
Ali opened her black suit before settling in. She then tapped nervously under her armpit. She had left her gun on the table. “These dudes? It’s just a band of merry chaps—certainly gloomy…”
“Are you blind? They appeared to be former residents of the Eurydome’s asylum!” I explained. “A mega-psychiatric hospital closed ten years ago because Ratched-Medical—the corporation which ran it—no longer considered it profitable!”
“So? Having a few little mental disorders doesn’t make them criminals, as far as I know!”
Perched on the broken jumbo tissue dispenser, I tried to persuade her: “The entire medical station was abandoned with all its occupants inside. They have drifted for months into the void before someone came to rescue the handful of survivors!”
“What you’re telling me is terrible,” she said ironically. “Can we pursue this conversation somewhere else?”
“Except that they weren’t saved by the Marine nor a cargo ship passing by!” I went on despite her looking daggers at me over some privacy nonsense. “They were saved by a pirate, and a former resident of the institution: Lucille Blaine—nicknamed ‘Lulu Long Drop’! She’s also known for attacking Lunar ships on the spot! She even killed an Arch-Baron once… among hundreds of innocent civilians!”
“Well, people die every day—despite that, your Lulu looks pretty decent—saving her friends and pissing off the Gods is a tubular move!” Ali replied. “Now, excuse me, but since I can’t pee in peace, I have pastries to stuff down.”
“But she turned them all into her crew!”
Ali grunted but finally came back to reason: “Alright… alright. Let’s get the fuck outta here before we stumble upon Captain Hook or whatever.”
Irate, my partner opened the door but, unfortunately, we could not go far as we were greeted by the two obscure mouths of a shotgun. Sitting on the edge of the ceramic sinks that folded under her exoskeleton’s weight, a young woman with blue hair and a bounced belly was waiting for us. “G’day, Barbie!” she gushed. A smile in the corner of her cracked lips, she passed a purple lock behind her ear. I saw on her neck a red scar caused by the rope of a failed hanging. Lucille Blaine was holding us at gunpoint. “I should punish Jacques again—for his indubitable stupidity…” The double barrel of her weapon slipped along Ali’s nose and mouth before continuing on my copilot’s throat then her heart. Lulu had recognized the auxiliary badge, and she was tapping it with her rifle’s muzzle. “Now, he brings us Alliance drongos.”
“Jacques and the others were very pleasant hosts,” my human replied. “We would never hurt them.” My sapiens raised her arms in the air. There was no way to try anything with a double 12 gauge under the nose; even less disarmed.
“And we had no idea that this eldritch Six Flags was your hideout…” I added, hoping to get out of that washroom alive.
The pirate captain burst out laughing before clipping her weapon behind her back. My partner glanced at me at a bias, not knowing what to do or even what to think. Lucille Blaine then slapped her on the shoulder before resuming: “I don’t like busybodies, but O’Lantern mentioned you love challenges and you got a screw loose somewhere—which makes me believe we have at least two things in common! Come on…”
Once outside, we saw the curious pirate crew clearing the makeshift tea room. As the robots with poison darts returned to Doc Grimm’s flared jeans, the little burlesque troupe left soon after saying goodbye. The light in their eyes was gone. Lucille Blaine terrified them.
“What is going on?” I asked, somewhat worried by the strange merry-go-round.
Emerging from the carbon fiber stems of the exoskeleton’s right shoulder, a tiny bee-like drone beat its wings. It held Ali’s caliber between its claws. Under the orders of the pirate captain, the machine flew towards the park, beyond the labyrinth, the gardens of dried roses and finally the croquet course.
“I’ll allow you to part on your old UN piece of crap,” Lulu replied. “But you will have to earn it, Titaneans!”
“What do you mean?” my partner asked. She thought the joke had lasted long enough.
“The parking lot is at the other end of the park, leaving us with an incredible amount of space to play… wolf?” The pirate pulled her rifle out of her back holster. Then, she put her left hand devoid of nails over her smoky eyes. She finally started a countdown, but randomly skipped some numbers before, sometimes, going back.
“Shit! Run, Lee!” immediately screamed my sapiens.
We fled through the maze of boxwood whose anemic hedges were no obstacle. Once out of the rose garden, I looked over my shoulder. Behind us, our pursuer leaped forward with her exoskeleton. She sang head on: “Let’s walk into the woods!”
“She’s nuts! They’re all crazies!” Ali gasped.
“Again. I told you so!”
“And I fucking need to pee!”
A first volley of lead passed between Ali’s legs, spraying a decorative pink flamingo. “While Lulu isn’t there!” Long Drop resumed as a second grazed the shoulder of my human.
“Fucking hell!” Ali yelled as she took me in her arms to walk through a souvenir shop cluttered with litter and disemboweled soft toys. A few lead shots had struck her scapula, but the adrenaline helped her ignore the pain.
Lucille Blaine continued her song throughout the abandoned animatronic-zoo. Nevertheless, we managed to sow her near the animal enclosure, common with the circus. But the foul-smelling cages weren’t empty. The former visitors who had not taken up the challenges had been chopped there to reproduce horrible scenes with lions’ animatronics.
“Do you remember where the parking lot is?” Ali asked, holding her nose. “Or another restroom?”
We jumped. A speaker spewed white noise before retransmitting a new verse of the nursery rhyme perverted by the pirate.
“I’ll have a heart attack before reaching the hangar—” I started before my partner’s fingers tightened on my snout to shut me up.
Behind the canvas of the big top danced Lulu’s distorted shadow. She grossly mimicked the bogeyman who advanced on the tiptoe to devour the careless children we had been. At least, what Ali had been. It was all her fault after all, remember?
“If Lulu were there,” the speakers sang during Lucille’s grotesque march before the latter stopped. “She would eat us!”
“She’s right in front of us!” I whispered through Ali’s fingers.
“Fuck!” my partner shouted as she started running at the same moment a double bang pierced the canvas and crushed the cage’s steel bars behind us. Anchored to Ali’s neck, my claws drew blood. My associate winced but told me to hold on until we were both safe.
“Ali! We need a better plan!”
Stopping by a food court, my human nodded. “Down here! Go!” she ordered as we crawled in musty caramel under a food stand before we found shelter in the Ice Palace.
The drone possessing Ali’s weapon had disappeared. With her exoskeleton, Lulu could catch us the moment she was tired of playing. The only solution that came to mind was to trap her and fight her hand to hand. For that, the Ice Palace was the perfect place.
“What’s she doing?” I grumbled, keeping a close eye on the pirate from the Palace’s entrance.
However, Long Drop couldn’t be fooled that easily. The Ice Palace was leveled by a rain of bullets less than a second later. Anything above twenty inches from the ground was swept by a Gatling in a deafening roar.
“That was close,” I coughed, covered in dust. “Are you all right?”
“Take a guess,” whined my sapiens, slowly pulling out pieces of glass from her bloody forearms.
When we finally fully emerged from the rubble, the machine gun was still smoking. At its side, the pirate was playing on a station of Whack’a’Mole without paying any attention to us. Her mind was as volatile as helium.
“You see the drone?” Ali whispered.
“I hear it but you’re not going to like it.”
The flying hornet was positioned at the heart of the highest rollercoaster’s biggest looping just behind the wiped-out Ice Palace. Unfortunately, the attraction was surrounded by sharpened fences and deep ditches. We had to find an alternative and my human had the idea to reach the most eccentric rails by jumping from the Ferris wheel that passed by.
The first part of the climbing wasn’t a piece of cake, but our hunt was on hold until Lucille Blaine overcame her attention disorder. Alas it couldn’t last.
“Ali! I think the wheel is moving under your weight,” I cried, feeling vibrations shaking the steel branches beneath us.
“Are you calling me fat?”
“No! Someone has restored the power. Look!” One by one, the rides all round us were starting their ignition. The multicolored still-functioning light bulbs flashed while the heady music resonated across the dilapidated park. The atrocious carnival awoke from its torpor for the highlight of the show: the Kitty’s death knell. “Let’s go to the nearest gondola and wait for it to pass by the tracks!” I said to Ali.
But the latter stopped just below the cupcake-shaped basket. Suspended in the void, my human then asked me in a half-voice: “You see what’s hanging?”
I did. Lulu Long Drop didn’t only deserve her nickname for the scar she proudly displayed on her neck. In front of us, corpses hanged by cables swayed to the rhythm of the carousel and the rotational force producing gravity. Some of them were Marines, merchants or even colonists; but some civilians among the dead wore the asylum’s barcode tattoos on their wrist.
“This bitch ain’t no pirate. She’s worse than the fucking Bebhionn Strangler,” Ali uttered. “Lee? I promise to listen to you. Starting tomorrow!”
“What about today, dear?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Nah. Today, we’re probably gonna die.”
The ricochet of bullets in the metal structure concluded our banter. As soon as we were in the rickety basket, we had to jump on the rollercoaster tracks. Weakened by time and its sinister load, our platform collapsed into the void when Ali’s feet left it.
I heard another shot and my partner got hit on the leg. She had to let me go to catch up, from her fingertips, the set of beams that held the tracks while I fell towards the second level of the aerial walk. Fortunately, the felines always land on their feet.
“Climb the loop!” I shouted after not landing on my feet. “Then use a power cable to rappel down to the drone!”
“Smart move. Let’s become a swinging target!” angrily cried my partner, holding her injured thigh.
“If you have a better plan, I’ll be all ears!”
At the foot of the rollercoaster, a crowd of animatronics started dancing. Their twisted limbs and empty eyes gesticulated to the rhythm of the new music spat by the speakers. They were mimicking a parade from a terrifying carnival. But it was not the time to be rocked by the quaking sound of the Beach Boys because the first train had left its launch lane. The cars were slowly moving towards me, squeaking the support elements. I found there how to quickly reach Ali.
As my partner limped towards the top, my leading trolley shaped like a European rocket was gaining potential energy along the lift hill that preceded the loop. With support elements not adapted to my size, I had to hope the bars’ foam was strong enough to hold my claws.
Halfway, I froze with horror when I saw the pirate on the slope of a spin supporting the vertical loop. The exoskeleton had abandoned its body armor function and had expanded from Lulu’s spinal cord to form long metal spider’s legs. Clamped to the rolling areas, she was teasing Ali with deliberately missed shots. While reloading, the psychopath uttered a wild laugh that turned into a hissing sound. She then sang nonsense, covering the music and false shouts of the crowd.
Hurt and dazed, Ali gained the loop’s top when I reached the end of the acceleration slope; below was still flying the drone. I saw my partner stare at Lulu with her arms wide open, daring the pirate to strike her final blow to the heart.
“You will never dare to jump! You are not crazy enough,” Lucille Blaine exclaimed.
“You know nothing about me, Long Drop,” my copilot yelled, short of breath. “Nothing!”
Lucille Blaine aimed, but unexpectedly dropped her gun. “Don’t I, Koviràn?” she uttered.
