Inferior’s Log, September 1, 2025 — Huzzah! ‘Tis Bonus Day! The Most Goodest Day of the Free-For-All Carnival! Woo-eee! It’s also the hottest day I am Ambe have ever recorded in my 75 years as the paper of record for Orange Forest. On top of the City’s record-setting heat, you can feel the 100% humidity thicken the air. A resistance against your movement. A counter force against your progress. A damn good reason to take your shirt off and swirl it ‘round your head, swirl it like a drone-a-copter. 

And my oh my oh me my self, do the folks at the Free-For-All Carnival take off their shirts and shorts. It is Bonus Day, after all.

As you force your way through the air’s thick humidity and through the gates to enter the Logistic Complex Hub Phase II parking lot, whiffs of deep-fried everything and diesel gas fumes and rank BO force their way up your nostrils. Littered across the grounds you see lumps of shirtless bodies slumping about like globulous slugs and snoozing sea lions, all of them slick with sweat that drips down and sizzles and hisses as it hits the sun-soaked asphalt that’s soft as taffy. You watch folks amble between the loungers — a mingling of peanut butter people oozing out of tank tops and sports bras and spandex, along with shirtless, belt-busting Michelin Man humans who could also benefit from athletic bros (or mansierres, if you prefer). They all belch and fart in between gluttonously gobbling up bowls of galimafree and sucking down unquenchable gulps of Nechtr Watr Shareables™. You pass the Glorbobingo tent, and it’s full of couples swapping spit and sucking face, one couple openly fondling each other fondly while the woman thoroughly enjoys her partner’s digital prowess.

Despite the heat, most of the shirtless, sweat-soaked carnivalgoers you see wear carnival masks (when they’re not indulging in bodily urges). LED-infused fishbowls. Flower pots with eyeholes. Michael Myer masks galore, from Halloween to Austin Powers to Shrek. A museum of rubber presidents and a rainbow of bandannas with knifeslit eyeholes. Pillow cases with eye holes. Ceramic death masks of Napoleon, Jabba the Hut, and Quincy Forbin Jambres Junior. Papier-mâché Superfun!s and 3D-printed Iron Mans. Leather vizards lined with perfumed taffeta. Husks of pumpkins and melons with eyeholes. No shortage of chainmail coifs or plague doctors. Plenty of Polliwoggy fans wearing brown paper bags without eyeholes. There was also one enormous, veiny eyeball with eyeholes. Everyone else wears the celebration’s signature 100 glasses, the zeros framing their eyes and the numeral one abutting above their right ears.

In hindsighted surprise, you also notice a lot more of the Boys in Black there than you would’ve guessed. They don’t stand out so much for the ski masks, balakavas, skeleton-jaw bandanas, camo rags, or the riot helmets, bulletproof vests, utility belts, sunglasses, elbow pads, knee pads, boots, gloves they wear. No, it’s the golden epaulettes that give them away as GAFFErs. There were plenty of other Boys in Black without the epaulettes, as well as a sizeable number of Privocular agents who stood out in their black suits and ties. No matter who they are, though, you think they have to be sweating their asses off under all that gear.

Woven into the background, foreground, and aboveground you hear the muddled thrum of techno music with its thumping bass that’s remixed with the bells, whizzes, chimes, and dings of games and arcades, the distantly close hum of unseen live music, the mechanical clunkings and pressurized wheezings of poorly maintained rides, and all the amusers barking for marks, the teenagers yapping for social status, the children howling with excitement or throwing temper tantrums or somehow doing both, the friends and families reacquainting and catching up and sharing laughs and backslaps, and the general cacophony of the Free-For-All Carnival, of The Big Everything happening all at once. Of life.

Around midday, with the sun laughing down at your heat-melting misery from its highest point in the smooth blue sky, and as I am Ambe am worrying about being left in the path of a sunray turned death ray by a mirror or glass, when suddenly all the flashing lights and the constant muddled thrum dies. It sounds to you like a vacuum for power slurped them up. A moment later, you hear a more profound, much more tangible silence creeping into the Free-For-All Carnival as the collective realization of what’s happening clicks and ripples through the crowd. 

The power went out. A few Orforcorp gensets start to hum and a burst of noise kicks in, but then dies out. Pockets of silence create an unnerving background soundtrack.

Just like all the other carnivalgoers, you make no attempt to leave. Everyone stays sprawled across the pavement or lounging in beach chairs. It is Bonus Day, after all, and you’re all waiting for the biggest headlining bands and sexiest burlesques and funniest comedians and grossest grotesqueries and playfullest plays and dumbest dumbshows and most magical magicians. The Free-For-All Carnival will soon be over, summer is fading fast, and the ho-hum humdrum of life without free pizza and entertainment and carnal indulgence speeds toward the crowd faster than they want to accept.

Yet as the analog clock drags on, you sense a tension growing thicker than the humidity solidifying the air. The parking lot heats into a seething kettlepot unlike any you’ve ever felt spilling out into the DITCH parking lot after a crosstown Penultimate showdown. You recall last quarter’s Raw Courant, when your Cool Aunt Judy explained the phenomenon of you getting that goosebumpy, hair-raising sensation of an impending gutwrenching hell-raising catastrophe. The calm before the storm goddess unleashes her fury. You sense a splat a’comin’.

You need to go. Now. Skedaddle. Shake a leg. Get the steppin’. Hit the road, put the pedal to the metal, go balls to the wall, burn rubber, and VROOOOM! the fuck out of town.

Speaking of burning rubber, though, let’s talk about the ground. Once recognizable as asphalt, the parking lot has become a scalding, tarry mess, a sticky and malleable border between this world and the underworld that grows flimsier and spreads thinner by the second while your shoes’ rubber soles melt into the gloopy ground, glueing you into place, as if readying your soul to merge with whatever awaits you down below. Then again, it is Bonus Day, after all, so why leave?

I am Ambe cannot leave. There are too many of me my selves strewn about. Scattered across Glorbobingo tables. Crumpled up in and around overflowing garbage cans. Hundreds of me my selves’ pages trampled upon the ground and suntorched into the taffy asphalt, morphing me my selves into the papier-mâché mask of the entire Free-For-All Carnival.

Head to Pt 2