Well, this is a big fat Pentex oopsie. After they take a moment to stare in horror at this latest development, Rey fills in anybody who wasn't there for the last go-round with this traveling abomination. Ambrose tells them about Astarte, the true fae in the Renaissance faire. The changelings know her name, and her reputation for being completely insane.
A large attachment suddenly starts coming in on Ambrose's laptop. It's a report on the circus compiled by an Etherite, but Ambrose can't get any information on who sent it to him. Still, this isn't the time to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he starts browsing through it. It's got some extremely interesting information.
He reads aloud the bit about how it was founded by the followers of Cara, a spirit of fair trade and equal returns, around the demon-serpent Apophis, in order to keep the monster contained. The Wyrm and other infernal interests got brought in later by successive circus-keepers who found Apophis' hold growing too strong and sought to balance it out with other forms of entropy. Cavendish has stepped that up to a whole new level, making all sorts of pacts with various forces. He's also interested in the bit about Astarte joining opened up 'new gateways,' and freaks out at the narrator's frightened comment that "the Man with No Name pursues me."
The Garou spot Caleb the werebear. Getting his attention, they explain to him about the circus.
Ambrose looks up from the report to see the Ringmaster talking to Dr. Fiedler, an old enemy of Doc Eon. He was a Nazi super-scientist, but he was supposed to have died in a volcano or something... Astarte glides up, brushing the scientist aside. She glances toward the house to see Ambrose peeking out the window (staring at her in enchantment, at the moment). He smiles sappily when she waves at him. The Garou notice the ring on her finger, which seems to contain a fragment of, well, nothingness. Aila spots a man walking toward the swiftly-assembling circus, talking to a ghost. He's some kind of squirrely-looking kinain. Oddly enough, Rey recognizes the signs of Boggan kin. He'd have guessed Sluagh. Then a Tellus rep walks over to talk to Cavendish, who walks him around seemingly explaining the circus's operations to him before they finalize a contract.
Ambrose spots a cyborg standing at the edge of the circus grounds. He points him out to the others to ask if they want to talk to the guy, but (to his relief) they nix the idea of working with the Technocracy on this.
Sonya snags a program after a kid drops it. There's an ad inside introducing 'Dr. Quintrell's Tales of Adventure!' The cyborg, she notices, sees it too, and looks fairly confused about it. Shortly after, Ambrose's phone rings. Ambrose speaks before the MiB can say anything: "It's not me, it's an evil duplicate, don't go into the mirror maze." He suggests that maybe they shouldn't send in the cyborg. The MiB says that's not his department, but he asks if Ambrose really thinks it's a bad idea. When Ambrose affirms that it really really is, the cyborg keels over with a heart attack. I'm not talking to you anymore, murderer!" Ambrose snarls, aghast, then hangs up. He ignores the phone when it rings again.
The incident has the Ringmaster irritated. They have to call an ambulance and fuss over the poor man. Evil Ambrose spins by to hand Cavendish the code for a video game. He gives the Tellus rep a DVD that looks to be a demo of the game, which starts at the circus gates. Cavendish and the Tellus rep both look pleased, and Cavendish gestures Evil Ambrose toward the arcade with a couple of machines with the demo loaded onto them.
Vendors are offering 'ghost glasses,' which are billed as letting you see spirits. Kids are snapping them up left and right. They can't just leave and let the circus suck up the children. Besides, an unreasonable percentage of them are Kinfolk. Sonya begins musing on the possibilities of sabotage, when the fae get distracted by something in the air. It feels like a storm blowing in. Waves of rainbow mist begin rising from inside the circus, and then detonate in a multi-colored explosion. It knocks down tents and rumbles against the buildings. A changeling has just gone into Chrysalis.
It all blacks out for a second, and then they wake in not-a-circus. It's a field in a town that looks considerably more rustic than the one they were just standing in. And then the circus arrives again, coming in on horse-drawn carriages and carts. Startled, Ambrose takes a reading and determines that it's somewhere around 1880. His mind boggles at the thought of being knocked through time. It must be the wild energy of the chrysalis that did it, interacting with the strange energy fields of the circus. There's still residue drifting about from the event; he figures if they can find that kid, they might be able to follow it back.
The Garou quickly latch on to the possibility that something happening now could be the reason the area gets so messed up by Pentex later. If they can change that...! Mark cuts in, alarmed. It's way too dangerous to go messing about with time. They could unravel the whole fabric of reality or something. They need to find the fledgling who set this off, and avoid changing the way things should happen, both of which require going into the circus.
It's easy for the changelings to find 'ground zero.' From there, the Garou start tracking by scent. The trail heads, unsurprisingly, toward the Renaissance faire. Between one step and the next, Ambrose vanishes.
He suddenly finds himself back in the present-time circus, except somebody steps right through him. A quick test proves that he's out of phase with time. The older something is, the more "real," and the harder it is for him to pass through. Looking around, he spots what seem to be holes in time all over the place. A scan of the area and some quick calculations give him an idea of where he'll be able to find them. He ducks out of sight when he sees the Ringmaster stride past, looking warily at the time holes as if he's searching for the cause, then decides to go catch up to the others.
He steps through a hole and reappears right next to them, then has to protect his PDA from an invisible force trying to take it. When the whatever-it-is shocks him (and he zaps it back), he realizes it's his evil duplicate. "Hands off!" he snaps, driving the guy away.
After he explains what's going on, the Garou plot. They need to keep kids away from the most dangerous places, so Faris and RF keep watch over the ferris wheel, Caleb and Aila stand guard on the mirror maze, and the rest keep following the new changeling's trail. The ren faire is packed, and saturated with changelings. A small group is gathered around a vendor who's being roused from unconsciousness. Somebody stole his clothes. The others hesitate, wondering if that could be their quarry, but Rey has a better idea (not least because he's feeling the call himself): the candy shoppe. And indeed he spots the boy there almost immediately. "Hey, kid!" he calls. The boy darts away, the others in hot pursuit.
Except for Ambrose, who finds himself summarily kidnapped by elephant. It drags him back through another time hole, where he sees Evil Ambrose sitting astride the beast. But Ambrose immediately fades out, phasing through the elephant's trunk, and dives back through the hole to catch up to the others. "Hands off!" he repeats. "Get your own!"
In the rear of the candy shoppe, Rey spots a candy barrel with a straw sticking out of it. Jared reaches in and hauls the boy out. He notes that the kid looks Fiona. They quickly reassure him they're not 'after' him, and Rey gives him a brief Pooka-style rundown of the wonderful world of changelings. Ambrose records it.
Elsewhere, a clown wearing a white robe gives Aila a card for a free fortune-telling. There's a crescent moon and a tree on it. RF, Faris, Aila, and Caleb see present-time people starting to stumble in and out through the time holes. They call back to report it. Whatever's going on, it's getting worse. Evil Ambrose tries to take Ambrose's PDA again. Ambrose slaps his hand, then makes copies of the map for the others.
They arrange to meet at the location on Aila's card. After they do a round of introductions for Tom, the sidhe boy, they step out of the candy shoppe where they're confronted by Evil Ambrose astride his elephant. "Knock it off!" Ambrose commands him irritably. The elephant's eyes glow red. "What did you do to that thing?!"
"I built a HITMark elephant," Evil Ambrose replies with a grin.
"Run!" Ambrose shouts. Rey, Jared, and Tom duck back into the candy shoppe and head around to the fortune-telling tent. Mark, Ambrose, and the Garou hightail it.
Near the edge of the ren faire, the elephant vanishes, replaced by the Autumn Queen, who wants to know where their fae friends went. Since they honestly aren't sure where the changelings have gotten off to, they have to honestly tell her they don't know. She hands Ambrose, who's staring again in smitten awe, a box, with instructions to give it to the changelings when they see them again. The box is enchanted, but he shakes it off, and they finally catch up to the others.
Ambrose and Rey argue over the box. Rey's upset that he accepted something from a faerie ("Don't you know how dangerous that is?"), and is reluctant to take it, though he wants to see what's inside.
"Shall I open it, then?" Ambrose offers.
"Are you autistic?" Sonya asks him in disbelief.
Ambrose figures that if they don't want to open it, he could throw it at his evil duplicate's elephant. Rey says he does want to open it; he just doesn't want Ambrose to do it.
Confused over who wants the box open, Ambrose finally does it anyway. An image of the Autumn Queen appears, holding a jar. Inside...is a piece of Arcadia, the lost homeland of the fae. Jared and Rey go into hysterics. The image vanishes, the box falls to the floor, Ambrose picks it up and puts it away.
Aila turns to the fortunetellers, who've been watching all this with bemusement. "Can I have my fortune read now?"
They draw her cards: a tower that's the big top with Devyn Cavendish standing on top, being hit by lightning. A magician who is the vampire, Decarabas. A silver tree. Aila asks what it means. "Well, you're schooled in reading fortunes, aren't you?" the oldest woman asks. They're aghast when she replies she's not. They seem to think her mother should have taught her. "That's just like her," Sonya hears the old woman mumble.
But since Aila doesn't know, the youngest woman explains the fortune. "The way out is when the vampire does things he doesn't know he's doing," she tells them. Sometimes, she explains, Cara is able to channel herself through him without him knowing. Ambrose remembers that being mentioned in the file. If they're head back to their own time, Aila reminds the others, they'll need to take that Boggan kinain. He's in the food court, one of the women tells them.
On the way, Ambrose narrowly dodges the Ringmaster's grab for him through one of the time holes. "Ringmaster on the prowl!" he alerts the others.
The kinain sticks out here. Rey simply walks up to him and asks, "You wanna go home?" "Shit yeah," the man responds.
They use the time holes, getting as close to the edge of the circus as they can before they step back through into their own time. The kinain crosses the edge; the others bounce off. Reaching back through, he tells them, "Hold hands!" and pulls them out. Which is when they catch sight of the ancient-looking crescent moon pendant he's wearing. He hands them a card that announces he's with the Arcanum. Devyn stands nearby, looking ticked. "How do you people keep doing that?" he asks. Ambrose bites his tongue to keep from saying, "Can't you?" because it occurs to him the Ringmaster quite possibly can simply step over and swat them.
They move away in a hurry. Tom tells them his school goes on a field trip to the circus tomorrow. There are no trods nearby, so they send Tom with the Arcanum agent, Fitzsimmons, to take him somewhere safe. Fitzsimmons hands Ambrose an extra pendant before he leaves.
They lace the cafeteria food with mild food poisoning to keep the kids out, but that still leaves 110 Kinfolk children to clear out. They're mostly Uktena descent, RF notes, adding, "One thing that'll lure Uktena away from a puzzle is a bigger puzzle." "So we wave Ambrose at them?" Sonya asks.
"The circus is cool," RF observes, "But there's no puzzle there."
"What?" asks Ambrose. "There's a huge puzzle there!"
"SHUT UP," Mark tells him.
Ambrose turns to find RF staring at him expectantly from about six inches away. "What puzzle?"
"Um, nothing," Ambrose mumbles, suddenly aware he couldn't explain it anyway, even if he tried.
Instead of puzzles and luring, they decide to take a simpler route: mess up the town's gas lines. Ambrose declares this to be his bailiwick (he doesn't even need to use magic! He just gets into an access point), while Mark and Caleb, two people the Ringmaster hasn't noticed yet, go back into the circus to spread the tale.
It certainly ticks off Cavendish. Outside, Ambrose's phone rings, displaying Cavendish's name. He doesn't answer. The phone starts to spark. "NO!" he tells it. "Bad phone!" Since that's actually countermagic, the phone settles down. The phone rings again, no number listed this time, and Ambrose lets it go to voice mail. The third time it rings, it's his own number, which he thinks is completely gratuitous and nonsensical.
They spot the Tellus representative preparing to leave with the documentation. Jared sneaks over and pours sugar into the gas tank to slow him down. When the car won't start, Rey saunters over to volunteer his mad car skillz in getting the thing running again, then knocks out the Telluls rep while the man's distracted by car troubles. Jared slinks back in to hold people off, declaring, "I'm a doctor!" The Ringmaster, seeming quite naturally concerned, offers Jared the use of their medical tent until emergency services can arrive.
Sonya turns to her Ragabash. "Jonas. Away." Jonas sneaks behind the car to get the briefcase. Then, unexpected to all, the driver turns and pantses Cavendish, who's so shocked he doesn't even react. Rey shoves him over. Jonas runs. Rey runs. Jared runs.
Rey calls up his car and they get the hell out of Dodge, only to notice a minute or so later that they're being chased by a really angry Nephandus Ringmaster in a limo that shouldn't even be mobile. Jared tries to shoot out the limo's tires. He even hits one, but it doesn't stop the car. Ambrose doesn't answer his phone again, and then finds his hands full with a radio that tunes in to frequency 666 and starts chanting in Dragon's Tongue. He disrupts that with his sonic pointer when it starts opening a portal in front of Rey's car.
The limo's wheels are on fire, and it's not stopping. Deciding urgent measures are called for, Jared gates Rey's car about a mile away, depositing on them on the highway. Since they're pointing in the wrong direction, Rey does a bit of daredevil maneuvering and spins them back into the right lane.
They come to a stop about 20 miles further north, where they figure they've cleared enough distance to stop and go over their options. They get stopped by an incoming train at a railroad crossing...and it's a circus train! The circus train! Good lord, this man is persistent. The train comes to a halt and riders jump out on horses that're actually banes. Sonya stares one down and scares it off. Caleb gets out and shifts. Ambrose seals the train car's doors shut, but one gets ripped off its hinges by one of Dr. Owl's monstrous constructs. Rey, still behind the wheel, feels the road vibrate and begin to soften, the car sinking into the tarmac. It's Evil Ambrose, using his sonic pointer to soften the asphalt.
The others dive out of the car, and Rey turns it back into a box. Clowns attack. Jared calls up briars in their midst, entangling and ripping clowns apart. Aila shifts into Crinos when she spots a metal-masked spectre. Then Devyn gets off the train, looking enraged. "Cheese it!" Aila yells.
And a clown pantses him. "We may need to give your Deed name away," Sonya tells Jonas.
Then something really fast grabs the Nuwisha (it's Tim again, of course) and pitches him through a train car. Holy crap, the vampire's fast. And strong. Rey, Jared, and Faris are distracted, however, because the Autumn Queen's car is opening and a red carpet is being rolled out. If she's able to leave the train safely, then it means they're in the circus's sphere again.
Their Ahroun is otherwise engaged, so Sonya grabs Olesya and they square off with the vampire, activating Luna's Armor because this is likely to hurt. Jonas uses a Gift that calls to trickster spirits. Ambrose ducks as he senses mage behind him, and a Primium net flies over his head to wrap around Devyn (who if he gets any angrier will probably die). It's two MiBs wearing an odd insignia. Tim leaps back into the fray, rolling into Devyn's legs to trip him up again. Cavendish howls in fury.
Ambrose suddenly realizes his duplicate is standing behind him. The copy grabs him and knocks him down. The MiBs look confused. "I told you!" Ambrose says over his doppelganger's shoulder. "Evil clone!" One of the MiBs shrugs and shoots Evil Ambrose in the spine with a dart. Then the Monkey Girl turns up out of nowhere and covers the two MiBs in burning silly string. Faris activates his wayfarer staff and things go dizzy for a moment.
When the world rights itself, they're standing in the street in Tokyo: all of them, including Evil Ambrose and the MiBs. Evil Ambrose hits a button on his belt and vanishes.
"Why does everyone have teleporting belt buckles but me?" Ambrose asks no one in particular.
Then he's struck by sudden wooziness, and one of the MiBs, noticing, asks if he'd happen to have any kind of mystic connection with his double. Because what they shot him with was a hallucinogenic nightmare drug that makes your worst fears manifest. Ambrose manages to shrug it off without more than hearing Tillingtast's coughing rumble in the back of his head. Then he laughs, because it occurs to him that Evil Ambrose will be conjuring his worst fears around fairies.
The MiBs usher the group off the street and try to get them to hand over the briefcase. Ambrose doesn't have it. Jonas does, and the pack won't turn it over. The MiB insists they don't have the capability to protect it. "You can't even protect yourselves. Or your labs!" Ambrose retaliates, "You burned my lab! Communists!" As usual, the Etherite and the NWO mages argue about magic and reality; when they try to act all virtuous about it, Ambrose pegs them for changing the rules to suit themselves. Presumably deciding that two MiBs are not enough to get on the bad side of a pack of Garou, they give up, hand Ambrose a number and tell him to "Call if you see the light of reason." right after they leave, Devyn calls again. Ambrose doesn't answer.
Then, noticing the Monkey Girl, he warns her that he told some Japanese guy he'd given the map to a shapeshifter. She thinks it might be a 'yang-aspected' akuma (thus he might look like he's alive even if he isn't) who works for Emma-O, the Japanese god of death. Sonya asks her if it's true the Beast Courts are led by honorable Shadow Lords. More or less, Monkey Girl tells her: them and the dragon-shifters.
Faris books them a hotel and arranges a flight back. Monkey Girl decides to stick around for a bit to take advantage of a five-star hotel, and Aila campaigns for visiting Tokyo's electronics district. Ambrose checks his voice mail on the way: three messages of the Ringmaster snarling in Dragon's Tongue, which he quickly deletes and adds his cell phone to the list of "Stuff to get a VA to look over."
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