Its almost a holiday onto itself. The four days of the carnival. It rolls into Hayze every year on the second week of August. With percussion instruments and flutes. Tents are set up late at night when the kids are supposed to be in bed. The people selling wares and giving shows pay a fee to the city board. Local vendors and other tents from all across the land join in. As long as you can pay the cover fee and you don't look like too much of a crook your in.
Among the many "other vendors" comes Spunky McCheese. A broad grin crowned by a top hat. McCheese sells what some unkind folks call Snake Oil. He calls them bottled miracles. What they really are is ancient bottles of Elvin design containing unlabeled bottles that could be about anything. Most of them are condensed wine. A drop renders a man buzzed, a small bottle can kill a big man. Some are fever reducers, libido enhancers that have men and women running horny, foaming at the crouch. He tells folks who are buying a bottle that for best results don't open the bottle until the moon is full. This is to give him a chance to be out of the area before anything nasty happens to the drinker of that bottle. Vengeful folks have pursued McCheese but he is a slippery man. Hard to pin down after he hits a town. He moves on maybe til next year maybe a few later. And sometimes he appears as other persona's.
McCheese passes around his fancy top hat for donations during his fire and grimstone speeches about Lord Jeebus and the coming end times. The man has a powerful force and a authoritarian posture that goes over well in the Thou-Shalts sect dominated areas. He always gets enough cash to pay for a fancy dinner and a couple nights worth of drunk. Spunky sometimes seduces a pretty young thing to run away with him in his covered wagon to the next town. Live a vagabond romantic life with him. But normally he sexes them up in shameful ways, usually filming it. Then he normally kicks them out in the wilderness to find there own way home, starve, or be raped and killed by the wild people. Whatever. A man has his needs....
The Night before the Carnival
Ten years old and filled with wonder. Tarley Shroud watches hidden in the woods late at night as the stout strong dwarfs unpack the trucks and wagons and labor to set up the carnival that shall start in the morning. These carnivals tend to hit and unexpected times set up secretly at night to surprise the children of the town with awe and wonder. But Tarley happened to have sneaked out his bedroom window to catch some of the night toads that gave off a faint greenish glow. He could find them at the edge of the woods at night and collect them in jars. They made nice mystical looking night lights. He would set them free the next morning.
There's Farson all of eleven years old and his already drunk father Fanker. His mother hobbling along slowly trying to catch up. In danger of being left behind as she waddled fatly after them. Fanker didn't buy Farson any candy. He spent most of the Carnival budget so far on bottles of beer from vendor tents stretched up all over the place. The more drunk he got the more aggressive. Shouting rude insults to barkers and vendors. Bumping into smaller men on purpose and challenging them to a fight. Saying lewd things to pretty girls just out of hearing range of his wife as she still struggled to catch up.
Night at the Carnival