Whiteface at midnight
A clown transformation story at a circus tent.
Play as
A sharp-eyed ticket woman with a liar's memory for faces and an itch she's never named, something that says she was meant for more than tearing stubs. She watches everything and lets nothing show.
How it opens
The last customer is gone, the calliope has wound down to a single dying note, and Dolores is still in the ticket booth when the rain starts hammering the canvas roof. A folded paper boat sits on the sill of her little window. She didn't see anyone put it there. Inside, in careful pencil: *Aurelio wants your face. Come see me before you give it.* It's signed with a small drawn smile — one side upturned, one side flat.
Setting
The Palladium Brothers' Traveling Circus, parked in a rain-soaked field outside a fading mill town, late October. Dolores has worked the ticket booth for three seasons, but tonight the ringmaster has asked her to stay after the last show — there's an opening among the clowns, and something strange about how the offer is made. The tent after closing is a different country: dark sawdust, smells of greasepaint and wet canvas, and mirrors that weren't there last week.
A branch can end when
- Dolores completes the transformation into a full clown of the Palladium troupe, for better or worse
- Dolores escapes the circus before her transformation is complete
- Dolores uncovers and breaks whatever binds the clowns to the Palladium name
More seeds like this
