Refined Theatrics Meet Ill-Defined
Praxis in Shameless Actions
September 15, 2025 — Other than a few arrests made for minor disputes, fistfights, and lewd and lascivious behavior, never in the City’s history had a live theatrical performance caused such wanton carnage and civil unrest, perhaps never in the country.
Bonus Day featured free back-to-back live performances of the play “The Gain of the Creature: The King of the Glass-Skinned Kin,” a surprise smash hit, still running strong after its premiere eight months ago at The Circus Empiricus Museum of Awe-full Wonders and Re-Volting Phenomena.
The hour-long performance took place on the Smithfield stage, an outdoor venue without a physical boundary between the audience and the rest of the carnival. Before “The Gain of the Creature” started, The Witlings comedy troupe lived up to its name, with their set producing groans and boos from the entire audience. The crowd got so boisterous that they attracted more carnivalgoers to join in the spectacle. However, all eyewitnesses confirmed it was nothing that should have warranted the sudden appearance of a battalion of GAFFErs to line up around what you could consider the outer periphery of the theater’s audience before it spilled into the larger carnival crowd.
At 11:00 am, Condé Gaspard, dubbed the “Duke of Disguise” by theater critics, took the stage and began his award-mentioned performance as the titular King of the Glass-Skinned Kin. The performance calmed the rowdy audience, entrancing them with a light-infused choreography of glass, mirrors, and human movement. The play’s climax, a long, elaborate dumbshow in which The King stared at his face and bare torso in his bathroom mirror, only to see his body begin glassifying as he was inspecting himself, and the mirror reflected the reflection from his glassifying body, which reflected back onto the mirror, and back and forth and back and forth, creating a self-contained, self-referentiating loop, thanks to the brilliant set design and stage lighting that flickers and flashes in luminous fluxes until the light curved just enough and the TKotGK’s glassified face and torso turned clear as glass, revealing his heart and soul… meanwhile the mirror’s reflection of his glassified face and torso reflect images of his friends, family, neighbors, community members, etc.
Right at the crescendo’s apex, when the lights, sounds, atmosphere, and scene could squeeze out no more emotions, and the moment hung perfectly in everyone’s hearts, the power went out.
The second it went dark, a booming chant erupted from the audience, like spooky action at a distance, as a handful of people held up and unfurled a banner that read NO GLASSIFICATION, NO REPRESENTATION, NO JUSTIFICATION. A few seconds later, their chants became understandable: “If that ass ain’t glass/You’re working with rats.”
With the performance paused, the crowd split between boos and cheers, its decibel level increasing inversely to its rapid devolution. Then, amidst this verbal volatility, a glimmering object streaked toward the stage at Gaspard’s face, slicing open his cheek like a comet leaving a bloody tail. Despite all the video footage captured by audience members as the scene unfolded, authorities have yet to identify the individual responsible for hurling what turned out to be a shard of bio-tetraboroxol.
The blood spurting from the actor’s face was like gas on a fire, splitting the audience into factions and accelerating more bloodshed. What started as a heated discourse between those seeking glassified representation and those who didn’t want to be told what to care about became a physical clash between those seeking retribution for glassification versus those seeking an outlet for years of pent-up, though, imaginary, anger.
Gaspard’s silent performance that required such grace and elegance to become the titular character had dissipated into a discordant ruckus of hair-pulling, sucker punching, and fear turned violent.
From the audience’s outer perimeter, the GAFFErs began marching toward the stage, slowly but methodically, corralling the crowd, trying to contain the growing conflict and hold the line between the audience’s passionate actions and the carnival’s passive apathy.
Bound by Fascination, we are all too deeply enchanted by the theater of the absurd’s memes and optics.
Top Stories
Health, Home, Happenings, and How-To’s
In front of the Smithfield Stage at the Free-For-All Carnival, the ring of GAFFErs encircling the crowd continued pressing inward, squeezing the brawling mass into a smaller and smaller circle. As the space dwindled, the sucker punches and eye-clawing and hair-pulling only intensified. Relentless and methodical, the GAFFErs marched in short steps, squooshing the crowd closer and closer together, compressing the circle until the violence stopped, replaced by a single agonized scream erupting from the crowd — this frightened mix of cries for help and cries of pain and shouts for room and shouts so strained.
The GAFFErs locked arms, like an ouroboros clothesline, and heaved forward, using their combined strength to force the crowd into a space too small for its mass, when…
SSSCCRRRRSSSSSHHHH
A massive tinkling crash reverberated from the center of the GAFFEr circle, which suddenly contained a lot more empty space. The pressurized crowd — which had included the first mass gathering of glassified people — had reached its literal shattering point, shattering more than a third of the audience. The bioglass shards shot out in every direction. Those who didn’t suffer from glassification and didn’t shatter received extensive lacerations, incisions, gashes, and mutilation from the glass shrapnel, resulting in the immediate death of another third of the audience. The remaining third, while alive, were gravely injured and in need of immediate medical attention.
However, multiple eyewitness reports have confirmed that the GAFFErs kept marching forward and began dragging and kicking the remaining living people, all blood-soaked and writhing in pain on the blistering hot asphalt. Accounts stated that the GAFFErs were forcing these gravely injured individuals to crawl and roll over across the glass-speckled ground to corral them into an even tighter spot. Once the arm-locked GAFFErs formed the smallest, tightest circle they could make, they held the position for about an hour, each one of them embracing the person on both sides as they stared forward quietly.
Once the GAFFErs broke their circle, the Young Orangeforester Union (YOU), the self-proclaimed “Vaunted Volunteerers” eager to secure access to the GAFFE Mutual Benefit Association, spent the rest of the afternoon sweeping up the bioglass shards of once living people. GAFFE maintained a small, but well-armed contingent to guard the entire sad, stultifying scene, while the rest of its forces engaged in its own free-for-all activities for the rest of The Day of Flesh.
Motives, Votives, and Protips
Upon investigation, the Observer learned that the astronomically expensive ticket prices for the theatrical run of the “King of the Glass-Skinned Kin” had prohibited workinfolk from ever seeing the play (despite its award-mentioning popularity).
Taking into consideration that the workinfolk were the primary group affected by glassification, the opportunity to finally see the play live astounded so many of them when they learned that the actor playing the King of the Glass Skin Kin, Condé Gaspard, had never suffered from glassification.
To add additional intrigue to the matter, credible sources have suggested that GAFFE planned the entire event from start to finish. The sources state that GAFFE, with so many of its top members also Orforcorp executives, used targeted ads for the play on Bonus Day that they sent specifically to people known to be suffering from glassification (thanks to discovery from Blervus v. JJ Bros Co.). According to the sources, the goal was to gather up as much available bioglass as possible, which explained why GAFFE immediately kettlepotted the crowd so forcefully and then maintained that prolonged hug — because they couldn’t allow any bio-tetraboroxol to get into the hands of anyone else. Additionally, the sources claim this is the same reason that the City holds its quarterly bioglass reclamation and disposal event — to keep this highly important metamaterial hidden from the public.
We at the Observer, including I am Ambe, mourn greatly for the loss of every sentient lifeform, whether glassified, Zemblan, or newspaper.
