Chapter 10 of 26 · Book 2, Carl's Doomsday Scenario
Chapter 10 — The big top
Book: Carl's Doomsday Scenario · Previous: Chapter 9 — Heather the Bear · Next: Chapter 11 — The pitch · Floor: Floor 3 — The Over City · Series: the series
Opening
I held the circus ticket tightly in my hand as I approached the main entrance.
Summary
Through a clown's mouth into the big top, where the transformed performers perform for nobody and ignore the man with the ticket. The smell of the circus — peanuts, cotton candy, hay — throws Carl back to his fourth birthday, the weeks his mother ran away with him to Texas, the shoebox of photographs under his parents' bed, and the realisation that she had been crying about more than a dropped hot dog. The game has just taken that from him, and he wants to tear it all down.
The vine is a bush the size of the ring: Ringmaster Grimaldi, Pestiferous Vine, Elite, level-85 city boss, keeping his family alive by making them monsters. Mordecai's lecture on collective-mind plants is recalled: poisoned blood on a root kills it in twenty minutes. Carl takes off his cloak, double-potions himself into poison, cuts his palm on a lemur's knife, and bleeds on the root.
Characters
- Ringmaster Grimaldi — Introduced: the vine in the centre ring.
- Carl — The circus smell; the poisoning.
- Apollon the Mighty — Selling worm cones at the bottom of the bleachers.
- Mordecai — The Pestiferous Vine lecture, in flashback.
Locations
- Grimaldi's Traveling Circus — Inside the big top.
Motifs
- Seeds — The circus memory behind the seeds of ch. 11: his mother, and 'I just wanted to tear it all down.'
- 'You're not going to break me' — Repeated to calm himself among the clowns.
- Achievements — You Can't Fight City Hall! — 'A city boss.'