The Carnival

[Belle Hibiki]

Belle's feet hit ground with a loud, solid whump, and she staggered, almost falling over.

Her entire body seemed to be sizzling. Waves of steam rose off her skin like fumes from an overheated engine as she looked around, blinking, slightly confused. Was the match over already?

"Figures," she muttered, reaching a hand up and cracking her neck. "Just when I was about to kick some ass."

She pulled one strand of her hair away from her forehead and eyed it, the locks no longer golden. The transformation had been easier than she had expected, given her body, but she didn't want to press her luck by doing it again - at least not so soon. Becoming a Super Saiyan probably wouldn't help her in the Carnival, anyway. Given that this world was operating under Gamer's rules, probably no amount of strength would be enough to shatter the illusion..

Letting her hair fall, Belle started to walk. She only had the vaguest idea of where she was, having been apparently dumped at random within the carnival's confines, but the ferris wheel in the distance acted as a landmark to travel by.

She saw few people as she made her way through the tents. The couples that she passed still talked and laughed as if they didn't have a care in the world. Almost every single one of them had to be a computer fabrication, she realized; the actual players, when they showed up, stood out like sore thumbs.

And there were fewer and fewer of them each round. At the beginning, before the first round had started, Belle had scarcely been able to turn a corner without running into someone that looked out of place. The carnival had been lively and bustling. Now, stalls stood empty, and confectionary treats went uneaten. Plates sat on the tables where their owners had left them, some still steaming hot.

Belle throat tightened unexpectedly as a surge of anger flooded her. There was a good chance that some of those who played would never enjoy another meal. The enigmatic Gamer had claimed from the start that failure to win would mean death, and Belle went over in her mind the several people that had already been eliminated. Most of them were fighters that she didn't know, but their loss angered her, the same way she had felt when Meridian City was wiped out. These people had never made the choice to come here: they had been forced to play along inside someone's sick, twisted version of a video game. Another man trying to play God.

"He has no right," she whispered aloud, her voice just barely audible over a masking growl.

It wasn't just life that Gamer was toying with, either. Belle caught a reflection of herself in a mirror hanging outside the entrance to a large purple-and-white tent and cringed. The tape had done a good job of binding down her fake chest, but it must have started to come loose in the battle against the Reaper. Her breasts pressed out against the front of her loose tank.

Stopping, Belle looked around for a place to discretely fix the problem, and settled for ducking into a narrow gap between two tents. Looking left and right to double-check that she was alone, she started to adjust the wrappings, and suddenly wish Kaden were there to help her. The courier had done the job when she was too nervous to do it herself, and she found that she wasn't quite over the idea of touching herself. Her breasts hurt as she started to rebind them, and every so often she would hiss as she tightened the knots with trembling fingers.

When the tape was resettled she paused, staring down at herself, and let out a slow, deep sigh.

She was confused - more confused, probably, than she had ever been in her life. How was it possible that she could feel so ... normal? Sure, her balance was different than it had been before, and yes, she was missing some very important pieces of anatomy that she would rather not have been, but all in all, the transformation had been absent of the cataclysmic events she would have expected. She would have been distressed, but not surprised, to be be approached by a demon horde beseeching her wishes; to grow hair on her palms; to look at her arms one moment and find scales instead of skin; or to find herself possessed by the desire to deceive and betray her closest allies.

The absence of all that was, somehow, even more frightening.

"It's not true." The words fell from her lips as the glow from the enormous sign overhead spilled over the carnival, bathing everything in a soft, pinkish hue. "This isn't normal."

~+~+~+~

Piper was gone.

Kaden had to face that fact, but doing so was easier said than done. Could he have done anything to save her? Was she was really ... dead?

The courier swallowed and pulled the PDA that he had been given at the start of the contest out of his jacket pocket. The percentage of remaining contestants had dropped sharply after the last round; a check on his pager-like device showed the list of elligible targets for items, and skulls had been plastered across the portraits of the players who were no longer in the game. New among the skulls was Piper. And the others...

He pushed the pager back into his jacket. No; he absolutely refused to believe that they were all dead. The courier had no great love for Ander, to be sure, but he didn't wish him harm. Juno, either. But Sophia...

"So much for being a hero," he muttered, shoving his hands into his pockets and staring off through the tents. Brooding was something that came naturally to him, and was something that he had spent a great deal of time practicing while on the road, occupying him in the long stretches between pit stops and fast food joints; before he had been wrapped into fighting for his life what seemed like every other week.

No matter how much he brooded, however, he couldn't seem to think of a way out of his situation. He was in the middle of contemplating what the next test might be when a crash from nearby made him stop. The noise seemed to come from a familiar-looking nearby tent. Walking closer, Kaden realized that it was the clothes shop that he and Belle had visited earlier. "Hello?" he called hesitantly, poking his head through the entrance.

Everything seemed normal, save that a single stand had been knocked over. Colorful clothes of every hue lay in scattered layers across the ground, some almost looking like rainbows. "Is everything alright?" Kaden asked, looking up to the woman behind the counter.

The young woman looked shaken. "She just came in and started demanding to know my 'secret,'" she said. "Then when I said I didn't know what she meant, she started tearing things off the racks at random."

"Who did?" Kaden asked, though he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he already knew the answer.

The woman shrugged. "Your friend from before, the girl with the pink hair."

Perfect; that's just what he needed, another Hibiki meltdown. He sighed. "Thank you. Don't worry: I'll take care of it."

The woman nodded. "Please do. She's acting... Well, I'm not sure she's quite right in the head."

"If you only knew," Kaden muttered, then set off through the rows of brightly-colored clothing.

He found Belle, surprisingly, in the women's section. Several pants, shirts, and dresses had been scattered to the floor, and the red-head was in the process of ripping another one off the shelves. She shoved the neck open, looked at the tag, squinted, turned it inside out, and started peering at the stitches. She let out a sound of disgust and threw the shirt on top of a growing pile of garments.

"Bella?"

"Don't call me that," Belle snapped, shooting a look at him before returning to her task. He had thought she hadn't noticed him, but apparently she was instead too preoccupied with whatever it was she was doing to care that he was there. "What does this say?" she demanded, shoving a dress at him, tag extended.

Kaden read. "Size 8?" he offered.

Belle 'tsk'ed and tossed the dress down as well. "I'm trying to find it, but there's nothing here."

"What are you trying to find?"

"The secret!"

"You asked the cashier about that, too," Kaden said, rubbing his temples. "What secret?"

Belle turned to him and brandished a pair of jeans in his direction. "I think I've figured it out: it's not just girls themselves that are weird. It's got to be something else. Something about their clothes, maybe, but I can't find any magic runes. Maybe it's what they eat, or their - " she paused, eyes widening, "Makeup. I didn't think about makeup. That could be magic, too." Another pause, her brows furrowing as her mind worked furiously. "It makes sense! All those perfumes, they're just a distraction, like an ILLUSION!"

"Belle-" he started.

"I'm going to find out whatever it is that makes them like they are!" she cut across him, ripping down another piece of clothing and roughly shoving it open to peer within. "I'm going to! I'm going to! I'm-!"

She stopped, her eyes widening. After a few seconds her expression settled, hardening, as if she had just made a difficult decision. "I need your help again," she said, her voice shaking.

"Oh." Kaden remembered all too well what Belle had forced on him before, and he wasn't eager to jump into another cramped space with the half-naked half-saiyan. Kaden had barely managed to avoid coming out without bruises the last time. "Well, I've got ... I need to use the shop."

"You can do that later," Belle insisted, stepping towards him.

"Belle, no, I'm sorry, but I'm not - "

She threw herself at him - and not in the metaphorical sense. The movement was so quick that Kaden barely had time to register it before Belle's shoulder slammed into his chest, sending him sprawling onto his back. Then she was on him, knees clamping down on either side of his waist as she leaned over, her face less than a half a foot from his as her hands pinned his wrists to the ground.

Her eyes were bright, sky-blue crystals, her face a mask of nervousness and determination. "I'm going to find the answer," she whispered, her warm breath puffing against his lips. "You're going to help me."

Kaden smelled strawberries - faint but distinct. He stared up at her for a long couple seconds, considering his options, then sighed. "Alright," he acquiesced. "Just promise you'll stop throwing everything on the ground? And," he added, almost as an afterthought, "please get off me?"

~+~+~+~

Belle was a fighter, and a pretty good one, she liked to think. However, despite her ability to topple buildings and beat evil into a pulp, she was not, as the city people called it, a fashionista. Consequently, her first attempts at manufacturing a suitable outfit for witchery were complete abortions. It was only when Kaden offered to help - probably trying to end the episode as quickly as humanly possible - that it started to feel like she was making progress.

"Here we are again," Kaden muttered, almost too low to hear.

"What was that?" Belle asked, growling as she pulled off the tank that the courier had handed her and dug around for something else.

"Nothing," the courier assured her, but Belle could see him roll his eyes in the mirror.

"Look," Belle said, slightly testy. "I would ask someone else, but I don't KNOW anyone else. We went over this last time."

"That really doesn't mean you can kidnap me whenever you want."

"It's what friends are for," Belle countered.

"Oh, really?" Kaden asked, picking out a dress in the pile and holding it up against Belle's front. "How would you feel if Sayana forced you to watch her play dress-up?"

Belle shoved his hands away. "I said no dresses." She folded her arms. "I wouldn't do it, because she's a freak. She'd probably try to ... I don't know." She waved her hand as if dismissing it. She knew perfectly well what Sayana would TRY to do, but something stopped her from telling Kaden. Her relationship with Sayana was ... complicated. "She's always acting way more like a girl than she really is."

"But she is a girl," Kaden said.

"No she's not!" Belle suddenly snarled. "She's a kid!"

Kaden raised his hands in silent mea culpa as Belle went to the pile. "Like... Like this shit," Belle recoiled, holding the straps of a black, lacy bra between her index fingers and thumbs as if it might carry some kind of contagious. "She always wants to buy crap like this - all this... Lace stuff. Why do you want it to be see through? Wouldn't that be cold? It doesn't make sense."

"Belle," Kaden said suddenly, interrupting her rant. "Why do you hate women?"

Belle froze, shoulders tensing. "What?"

"Well, it's just..." The courier trailed off, then continued. "You don't give them a chance. Ever. You seem like a nice person around anyone with, well, a penis..."

Belle twitched, her mind floating back to a decade before; to that dark, smoky room. To those loud voices, and staring, uncaring eyes. She opened her mouth, then thought better of what she was going to say. "Isn't it obvious?" she said instead. "Because they're witches. They're... evil. It's just something that they DO. Like snakes. They're different."

"I thought you said that you felt normal?" Kaden gestured at the clothes. "Isn't that what this is about?"

Belle suddenly felt like hitting him. "That - you - Shut up! They are different, I just have to find out how!"

"Do you really believe that?" Kaden continued. "Or is there something else?"

Belle turned around. She didn't hit him, but she did shove him against the wall hard enough to make the booth shake. "SHUT UP! You're just saying that because that Soapy chick is pretending that she likes you! She's going to EAT YOU one of these days, you watch!" She looked down at the crumpled black undergarment in her hands, her fingers closing into fists. "You can't trust them. Any of them."

Thick silence filled the air. Perfect for brooding, Belle thought bitterly, but it wasn't something that she ever did. She preferred to act, to keep moving.

Finally, Kaden spoke. "Can I tell you something, Belle?"

She didn't want to look at him to see if he was hurt, so she kept her eyes trained to the side "What?"

"It's about a girl that I knew," Kaden murmured. "A long time ago."