Cirque Noir

The cirque leaves Yokohama at 11.32pm on Wednesday night, but doesn't arrive in its new location until 1.26am Friday: more than 24 hours lost somewhere in the shuffle, but this is not unusual. If the cirque leaves and arrives by the cover of night, it has to find night hours to make that possible.

What happens to the cirque in those missing hours is something that many of its inhabitants have talked about, with no definitive answer yet to be found. For them it is like no time passes at all between moves.

But time does pass and the cirque must go somewhere during it.

Perhaps it passes into another reality, another realm, and perhaps it is not always alone when it does. Who is to say what exists beyond the world the cirque usually lives in? Plenty of beings who have joined the cirque come from worlds beyond earth as well.

When the cirque leaves Yokohama it carries 257 beings, all held safe and close and silent. When it arrives, Cirque Noir carries 257 plus 1, a single non-contracted something that has hitched a ride and spends its first hours at the cirque burrowing in while it settles. Undetected as yet to anyone around it, ( the little traveller waits. )

"Human beings do not seek pleasure and avoid displeasure. What human beings want, whatever the smallest organism wants, is an increase of power; driven by that will they seek resistance, they need something that opposes it - displeasure, as an obstacle to their will to power, is therefore a normal fact; human beings do not avoid it, they are rather in continual need of it"

Absinthe eyes drowned in those words, a heady cocktail of gin and philosophy permeating the air surrounding the blonde with that patent unapproachability that contradicted the vampiric allure his blood cast upon pale features—the tilt of a chin, the arch of a slender wrist, all enticing and protected by the air of ( a discontented housecat. )

The midway was somewhere Etienne did not often get the opportunity to visit—despite its allure and the atmosphere of utter magic and wonder that patrons left lingering in the air each night, the longer the pierrot had been with the cirque the more he found himself exclusively between the big top, his caravan, and off-grounds. It had been at least a month since he'd really wandered the grounds without purpose, and deciding to do so before their next move seemed something worthwhile ( with which to fill his spare time. )