Enter the CarnEVIL (Danny)

As far as Max could tell this all started weeks ago with an instagram post from a user calling himself DarkJester69. It was a grainy cellphone photo of a flier for a carnival stapled to a telephone pole. The flier featured clip art of a clown on a unicycle and read "Coming Soon to LA County! World Famous Canerival! Fun 4 WHOLE FAMILY!" The odd grammar, typo, and hideous font all screamed low effort prank and the post itself read "MWAHAHA It's is ALMOST CarnEVIL time again boys and girls! Thrills, chills, spooky surprises (and maybe a little romance? tehe ) await any heroes brave enough to confront it! Who will survive? What will be left of them?! Whaddya say?! MWAHAHA (and yes I know the poster is kind of bad but you get what you pay for I guess)" He and some girl he'd never even heard of were tagged in the post and all of that really solidified it as a shit prank to him. This kind of thing happened to him hundreds of times a week, and usually blocking and moving on was enough. It was not enough here though. For reasons he couldn't figure out he found himself unable to block the account. Every time he tried, it popped up again on his feed the next day with the exact same post again and again and again.

Eventually he had enough and typed up a furious response, "look dude! idk who the hell u are or what this is supposed to be. but this stupid ass app wont let me delete this and or even block u and u post it everyday so idk if youre just trying to get your ass kicked or what but when your stupid ass carnival comes around im gonna kick your ass and every single clown and carnie in its ass and even the elephants ass idgaf live on stream for my 1 MILLON subs if u dont knock it off." Obviously this post was viewed by all of his followers and did not have the intimidation factor he hoped it would. Quite the opposite, really. The carnival was coming and Kid Dynamite was the clown. DarkJester69 simply responded with clown emoji and "honk honk". The trolls and their memes were merciless for days. Eventually though it faded from his memory and the goldfish like memory of the internet, until today.

Nobody knew where it came from. It wasn't there yesterday, but it certainly was today. A full carnival complete with Big Top and Ferris Wheel seemed to have manifested itself out of thin air in the middle of a park and a large crowd of people grew around it. They crowded around it because they could not actually get inside of it. Anytime someone tried they found themselves repelled by some sort of forcefield. Many assumed it was some kind of art installation, perhaps a commentary on the working class being kept just outside the fun and excitement the system perpetually dangled in front of them. It did not take long at all for that to reach the internet, and of course the internet had to reach Kid Dynamite. Suddenly his feed was flooded with pictures, videos, and posts of the carnival, including the huge banner at the entrance featuring the clipart clown from the flier that had been used to taunt him weeks ago. And finally another message from DarkJester69 himself, "Danny! KD! Its here! Its here! HaHaHoHoHeHeHe. If you two don't show, I'll blow up the city! Just Kidding! Unless..." He groaned and cussed under his breath. He would never live it down if he didn't show up.

Even with LA traffic it really was not that far away and he was dressed in full gear and there in no time. As he got out of his car, the Dynamobile, he turned on his trusty drone and started yet another live stream. "What's up, Watchr! It looks like it's your lucky day, and not mine, because, well, you all remember that carnival bullshit from a couple weeks ago, right? Well I guess it is real because I'm here now. Dude said he would blow up the city if I didn't come through and being everyone's hero slash role model slash idol slash protector of the city, I couldn't let that slide so now-"

He was cut off a a young kid approached him from behind, a chubby ginger kid with curly hair and freckles, they couldn't have been a day over twelve. "Aw man! Are you Kid Dynamite?!" He asked.

"Uh, yeah. But I mean I'm in the middle of a stream right now, kid. You know anything about this whole carnival thing?"

"Nah. It just appeared today I guess. I was gonna ask though, do you think I could get a selfie?"

Max sighed and shrugged as the chat on his stream filled with two types of people, those urging him to do it and those who would make fun of a child's appearance on the internet. The groups were not mutually exclusive. "Trying to impress the chicks at school? Yeah. I got you, kid." He forced a smile as he posed with the kid, "You gonna post this online? Because you should."

"Oh, I will!" the kid nodded with a grin as he hurried away. He posted it online, with the caption "this guy sucks NUTS."

Whenever Danny's phone gave her an alert she could feel a tinge on the back of her arm. Especially when it alerted her two consecutive times. And, who the Hell was Kid Dynamite? "I'm deleting my Instagram." At no point did Danny's well manicured finger make any attempt to go for the account settings.

"Sure." Tsukimi walked next to Danny, sunglasses pulling her hair out of her face with a coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other. The slender Japanese woman glided along in a white skirt with red Stanford shirt proudly displayed.

"I mean it." The heat of Southern California baked down upon the duo as they continued their surprisingly undisturbed glide through the busy street. Danny beat the heat in a pair of shorts with her cheerleading jacket zipped up and her hair pulled back, but Danny did not just want to beat the heat. "This guy keeps telling me about a carnival. And he spells it wrong every time!"

"Sounds rough. Who is he?" With her eyes finally leaving the screen of her phone, Tsukimi looked to see Danny lifting her phone above her head.

"Great afternoon everybody!" Danny let the screen reflect off her sunglasses. "So, it's come to my attention a carnival has come to town and a fan of mine, DarkJester69- ew- wants my attention or something." The camera lowered down to an up angle. "Listen DJ, I'm not going to your show. I'm busy. You've been pretty rude. And, there's just so much wrong with your post, so please stop sending me messages. Okay?"

The duo came to a stop, only a few feet from another guy in a muscle shirt talking to his phone.

"And, who is Kid Dynamite? And why do you keep tagging him with me? This is an invasion of privacy! Agh!" The sporadic twitch of Danny's expression calmed to a steady hold. "Okay, well like, share, and subscribe. Keep things wonderful and remember doing good is its own reward!" Danny smiled and gave a quick peace sign before ending the video.

Her smile faded as though the shake of her head dislodged it. "Don't say 'suck nuts'. It's rude, toxic, and homophobic. Act better."

"Wait." Tsukimi looked down to the kid. "Are you DarkJester69? You better come clean. We will be much more lenient if you admit to your carnival crimes."

"Eff off! Both of you suck nuts too." The little bastard flipped the two young women hassled him off with both hands as he backed away and hurried off.

"Too? What does he mean too?" Kid Dynamite wondered out loud as the incredibly insignificant discussion momentarily took his attention away from the more pressing situations at hand such as the giant carnival run by a mad man possibly threatening to destroy the city. He honestly wasn't sure what DarkJester69 intended, but that did not mean he would mean he would shut up about it. "Anyway, Dark Joker 420 or whatever, I don't think you know who you're messing with right now, or maybe you do and you're just an idiot. Either way I'm gonna walk into this carnival and rearrange your face, so I hope you're ready for that." He spoke to the little drone as it hovered in front of his face, and as he hurried forward it zoomed behind him, and hovered just a few feet behind him. He didn't have to hurry long. As soon as he made it to the edge of the carnival, the translucent field around it repelled him backwards and he landed on the ground just barely missing the drone with his fall.

The cellphone in his pocket began vibrating. Someone was calling him. He pulled it out and instead of a phone number the caller ID simply read "Dark Jester." Great. From the ground, Dynamite held the phone up so his drone could get it on camera. "Great. He's calling me now. Which one of you gave him my number?" He groaned before he answered, "Who the fuck even are you dude?"

"Oh, Hi, Dark Jester, my greatest nemesis! How nice of you to call." A man's voice dripping with sarcasm answered from the other end, "Oh, no problem, KD. My pleasure."

"Dude, what?"

"Listen, you would NOT BELIEVE the hoops the city made me jump through to get the permits to set this stuff up here today, and I pay my staff by the hour, so PLEASE work with me here, and work with Danny T." The voice continued, "I just know the rest of the country if not the WORLD is gonna ship the two of you like I do after this, so I designed this little death trap for the two of you. You gotta work together to get in and stop your shared nemesis. That's how these things go. You'll figure it out." It hung up.

"Who the hell is Danny?" KD asked, still on the ground.

"No! Eff you. Why don't you go run celebrities off Insta, you little incel!" Danny almost threw her phone at the kid, but remembered how delicate a phone could be. That was her only reason. "You better walk away!"

"That guy with the vanity muscles is talking to someone named DarkJester." A point from Tsukimi verbally and physically.

"That kid probably does that in school and the other girls just have to deal with it!" Danny could shoot him with her powers. She really could.

"I Googled him. There's a livestream. Looks like Kid Dynamite." Even with an acrylic nail, Tsukimi found no trouble at all with getting her phone where it needed to get. Tsukimi looked down at KD on the ground. She held her phone to get a positive ID off of a picture. "Yep, same vanity muscles."

"Who the Hell is Kid Dynamite?!" Danny looked down at the hobbled mess on the ground before feeling a vibration in her hand.

"Danny T, my greatest foe! You'll need to work with my lesser nemesis if you wish to defeat me! I've got a great arc for you where you start off arrogant and belligerent and thinking you're too good to date me! But, those will quickly change with the help of Kid Dynamite!"

"Are you the 'suck nuts' kid?!" A disconnection silence hung in the air. Then she heard the word 'Danny' from the ground. "I'm Danny! Who the hell is Kid Dynamite?!"

"I'm Kid Dynamite! Who the hell are you?" He asked while he jumped to his feet.

Without any command from him the drone spun around and focused in on the annoying woman as they spoke. As it did that hundreds of viewers filled the chat with a variety of comments on her appearance, jokes about Kid Dynamite's sexuality, and suspicious links to click through for free iPhones. His moderation team was kept busy as usual. If she said anything to him he didn't hear it as his focus was on the stream of comments displayed directly to his retina in the lens of his sunglasses.

"So if you're Danny, that pervert that called me said I'm supposed to carry you through this with my cunning, skill, charisma, and incredible super powers. So if you've got any ideas, it'd be cool if you could spit them out already. Oh, and say hi to the people watching at home. We're live in front of about 3k right now but that should pick way up when we get to the cool part, so lets get this show on the road, huh?"  Kid Dynamite lowered his sunglasses and pointed at the camera with a wink and a winning smile

"I'm Danny! I already told you that! Danny freaking Tamamoa!" A phone pressed into KD's face, showing her Instagram account. "Maybe you and 1.6 million followers have heard of me!"

A whirl of media swung around Danny. "Oh great. A flying camera. I bet you don't use that for anything creepy at all." Each swat of her hand merely worked up air instead of making contact with the drone which would actually hurt her. "Listen guy- wait, who are you talking to? Are they saying things about me? What are they saying?"

"Skill? What does carry mean? It sounds like you're insulting me, but I don't speak this dumb lingo you're spitting, homefry." Once KD's sunglasses dropped, so did Danny's jaw. "Who are we even stopping?! Just tell me and I'll-"

"Oh." Not a hard room to read. "That thing. I guess we need a key."

The bracelet did not require her to crack her knuckles. And, cracking her knuckles did not make the turquoise pillar appear. But, 3 thousand people were watching and she needed a little exposition as the turquoise fell to crash the barrier. "Carry that."