Happyland had once been a hell of a place. Dazzling shows to wow the crowds, glitzy rides stuffed full of thrills, smiling carnies running all sorts of satisfying and completely legitimate carnival games, food stands selling every fairgrounds flavor of heart attack one could wish, trinket and souvenir ships for those who wished to try their wallets rather than their luck – it had been exactly the sort of place kids dreamed of going to and parents dreaded setting foot in. A neverending circus of happy fun time…up until Happyland’s owners had been outed as cannibals using their gleeful circus to scout for their next victims.

Looking, as the tabloids had said, for their next Happy Meal.

Now, the disgraced fun park had been shut down and left to rot. Old, dilapidated stalls and stands creaked in the wind, rusted rides occasionally squealed as a bolt finally broke and the slowly decaying hulks shifted another few inches into their unburied graves. The great big grinning clown head over the central administration building that had served as the park’s mascot was canted to one side, its supports starting to rust through and fall away. Somehow, even after all this time, no one had bought the lot that had earned a reputation as cursed, haunted, possessed, or possibly just plain spooky. No one had opted to rebuild the park; more surprisingly, no one had bought the land and torn the accursed place down, paved it over, and built low-income housing where Happyland used to be.

Occasional bits of long-forgotten circus trash flitted around the abandoned carnival, forlorn reminders of Happyland’s days of only slightly bloodstained happiness. Hot dog wrappers, boxes of popcorn, non-biodegradable drink containers of the sort that’d have any environmentally-conscious crusader for social justice frothing at the mouth. The occasional torn-up, filth-smeared stuffed critter, missing most of its stuffing and all of its one-time fluff and luster, looking at once both wrenchingly sad and faintly menacing. At least one shoe – once a cheerful red with a little lacy bow, now as dirty and lost to time as everything else that had been trapped behind Happyland’s long-closed gates.

Today the miasma of creeping melancholy clinging to the park was thicker than usual, as it was raining. A steady, beating shower that somehow did nothing at all to rinse off the dirty disuse that suffused the park, the late afternoon sunlight hidden behind a solid ceiling of sullen grey rainclouds. The weather seemed a perfect fit for the old despair lurking in the abandoned circus, washing away any faint patina of Happyland’s long-forgotten happiness.

It was not the worst place Meteor had ever found herself, but it was a damned far cry from the best, either.

The Shin-Ra Knight was…not actually sure what she was doing here. She’d been making use of some leave time from the Company to wander for a while, see what there was to be found, but she couldn’t quite remember how a stroll around the frontier worlds had landed her in this old, ugly, dirty heap. All she really knew was that something was going to happen here. The knowledge thrummed in her bones, resonating in her mind without the faintest shred of evidence or experience to back it up and yet unshakably, undeniably true. Something was going to happen here. Something nasty, something violent, something dangerous. She would need to be ready.

Meteor was in her Executive Power Suit that day, sauntering through the wreckage of Happyland under a telekinetic umbrella. A charcoal grey business suit with electric violet piping and accents, Meteor’s EPS was a sensible pantsuit design, eschewing the silly skirts most other female employees used. It wasn’t really a combat uniform even then, but it was close enough in her case. The suit’s built-in HUD showed her what scant details were available in local databases for this place on its linked contact lens – mostly tales of the unnatural hunger of the park’s former owners, gristly shots of the now-sealed underground kitchens that had been used to feed that hunger, and the occasional background shot of Happyland in its bright, glittery prime. No explanation for why the poisoned place still existed, save perhaps for the lingering (hopefully purely metaphysical) ghosts Meteor could feel clutching to the grounds.

“What a dismal dump. If not for the rain, I should light this place most thoroughly on fire and let it finally die,” Meteor muttered to herself, one hand drifting down to the hilt of her smallsword. The only incongruent piece of her corporate-officer monkey suit, the lightweight blade and its tooled leather swordbelt hung around her waist like the familiar old companions they were. She had her normal belt pouch with her corporate I.D., various memberships she’d been unable to avoid, and a few credcards as well, but the blade was her only visible armament. No cannons, hand or otherwise. No power armor. No mystic artefacts buzzing with pent-up power. Just one slender little woman and her slender little blade, alone in the rusted ruins of a cannibal’s playground.

They made movies about that sort of thing, back where Meteor was from. Of course, when those movies were about Shin-Ra Knights such as herself, it was the monsters that ended up running in terror. She didn’t look like much – barely more than a meter and a half tall, not even fifty-two kilograms, and built like a gawky fourteen year old girl, Meteor was not and never would be the type of imposing, statuesque specimen that went on military recruiting collateral. She kept her black hair almost mercilessly short, just barely long enough to swish into faintly feminine sass, and no hint of her power showed in her ice-blue eyes. To most onlookers, all she really seemed to be was an unusually small woman in a weird business suit with an anachronistic blade wandering around where she wasn’t allowed.

Except for the fact that rain simply stopped falling a foot or so above her head, sliding off a circular barrier visible only because of the wet it was keeping off of Meteor. That was probably a clue.

Now if only whatever she was here to do would present itself. She was starting to get bored, and there wasn’t even Enki around to harass into doing something amusing…

Tattered had been drawn to the forlorn fun park though he couldn't quite explain how. He now wandered about not caring about the rain or the ominous feel of the place, there was something here something that he was going to find. He saw a small stream of water seemingly vanishing into the ground and approached finding a hatch he forced the rusted hinges to work one last time as he lifted the heavy metal door. It made a sound like that of a dying animal being caught in the jaws of it's executioner. Inside the secret room was a fairly simple kitchen save for the smell of death and human bones scattered about. Leaving the room Tattered closed his eyes and focused on what he could hear.

Water on metal, water on wood, water on his on skin, water on... something else. He took off in the direction of the odd sound moving quickly quietly he closed the distance and their he saw it. It looked female, small, and unassuming, but the primal instincts in the back of his head told he otherwise. He took his time observing her, noting what stopped the rain, the blade at her side, and her movements. This place was one that even the rats would not infest and yet she is unphased by it. Finally he decided to begin testing her to see if she truly was everything he thought her to be.

Vanishing into the shadows, Tattered moved ahead of the girl and then stepped out in her path, about 100 yards away. A soaked figure wearing layers of torn and threadbare robes, with long matted hair and haunting green eyes that seemed less a humans and more like a beasts. He smiled, or what he called smiling, it was more akin to widely opening his mouth revealing rounded, pointed teeth. Then he dashed at her on all fours like a beast and would close the distance in 10 seconds. His eyes stayed firmly locked on what might soon be his prey.

So as it turned out, there was a monster hanging out in decrepit old Happyland. Meteor had to admit, she was somewhat less than completely shocked.

Her Mind's Eye tracked the new arrival as he maneuvered closer to her, psionic senses picking up a weird but unmistakable wrongness clinging to this...thing. Which, when Meteor finally laid eyes on it, only made sense. The creature looked like some sort of crazy swamp-hobo, wrapped in an obscuring shroud of ragged, ripped-up cloth that concealed the details of its form - for which Meteor was eminently thankful. It looked like the thing hadn't been within fifty feet of a bar of soap since its inception; she could almost hear the banjos playing in the background as the thing gaped at her, flashing thoroughly inhuman fangs before taking to all fours, charging at her as if it had only just realized that she reminded it of its favorite cousin.

"Oh, absolutely not," Meteor muttered, surrounding herself in a nimbus of telekinetic power. She lifted about six inches off the ground, buoyed by her mentalism, ready to defend herself or move where she needed to go. First, though...first, she was going to have to discourage Smiles from getting fresh with her person. As the moldy malodorous manbeast bore down the walkway towards Meteor, it would pass a number of old carnival stalls. Most of which would fade into the background as unimportant, save for one. Perhaps fifty meters away from Meteor, halfway through Smiles' charge, one of those stalls turned out to be quite important indeed - mostly because it exploded violently right as the charging swamp-hobo thing passed next to it.

A combination of pyrokinetic blast spark and a directed-force telekinetic concussion bomb ignited the old stall and what remained of its contents while simultaneously splintering it into a makeshift shrapnel bomb, flinging sharp-edged burning wreckage at killing speed directly into Smiles' flank. The sheer noise of the concussive force burst would be enough to blow out the beast's ears, while the shockwave would hurl it mercilessly into the stalls on the opposite side of the path whether or not it proved somehow immune to being shredded into tiny, inoffensive pieces by the blazing bits of carnie stall flung in its face. The rain would probably keep it from being lit aflame...but those rags it was wearing looked awfully flammable, so perhaps she'd get lucky.

Meteor herself drifted back and away, putting more old stalls between herself and Smiles. She could track the creature sightlessly with her Mind's Eye; hopefully it would be unable to do the same. After all, she had taken a long, lovely shower that morning and was thus not a walking nose-sore a monster could smell from a thousand yards away. Resting her right hand lightly on the grip of her sword, Meteor continued winding her way through the old stalls, keeping her Eye on her enemy as she assessed the damage her psionic grenade had done. Whether or not she'd put the beast down - she rather doubted she had, such things were never polite enough to stay down the first time she put them on the ground - how it responded to her strike would tell her quite a bit.

@DLL advances to the next round via timeout!