Olivia O’Neil’s Ovation

He-he-hey! What’s goin’ on my peeps?

Oh. Oh wow, that was awful. I mean, looking at it written down like that, it looks so much worse than I thought it would. I am so sorry I made you read that.

You know what? If it’s all the same to you, I think I’m gonna start over now.

>Scene break!<

He-he-hey! What’s goin’ on my peeps?

Dang it! Why?! Why did I type that again?! What is wrong with me?!?!

You know what? I’m just gonna own it. You’re my peeps now.

Anyway! I should tell you get on to telling you the story I have in mind, don’t you agree, my peeps?

First let me give you a bit of backstory/worldbuilding/a slight expository dump. I’m a classic adventurer. I am quite handy with a sword, have an animal familiar (Mark the Parrot), and I go on all sorts of epic quests the likes of which you’d see in any classic fantasy world. Or video game. Or both.

And that’s all you need to know.

So, let’s get to it. This is the story that I call Olivia O’Neil’s Ovation.

I’m Olivia O’Neil, in case it wasn’t obvious.

No, you can’t call me Liv.

>Scene break!<

I think a good place to start the story would be with when I hid behind the big red curtains hanging behind the stage of the abandoned theater. Shortly after I hid there, Mark flew through a gap between the curtains and settled down on my shoulder. He let out a soft coo and began playing with my hair.

“I take it that means we’re safe, then?” I asked. Mark didn’t respond. He just kept nipping at my hair. I shrugged with the shoulder that he wasn’t standing on. I held my sword up with a tight grip and peaked out through the curtain. Through the low light in the theater, I could just about make out the auditorium.

Most of the chairs in front of the stage were gone entirely. The ones that remained were broken and had the plush lining peeling off their cushions. Save for a single chair in the center of the front row. That one was pristine and undamaged, and for some reason even larger than all the rest. It wasn’t untouched, however. Oh no, it was touched all over. What else could it be with someone lounging around atop the chair.

I sighed and slid my sword back into its scabbard. “Melody.”

“Yo,” Melody said, lazily waving up at me.

I hopped off the stage and landed on the messy floor. Papers crunched and crumpled as I marched over to stand in front of Melody. “This isn’t where we agreed to meet up.” I even went so far as to raise an eyebrow and cross my arms for emphasis.

Melody wasn’t exactly deterred. “Yeah, but you were taking too long.” Melody hopped up and absently stretched her arms. “Besides, the lobby’s clear. Figured I’d check out the auditorium for you. It’s clear.”

“Yeah, I’d figured that part out myself,” I countered. “Fine. Whatever. Don’t suppose you checked on Juno?”

“Nah. She can take care of herself.”

“Thanks for that,” I grumbled.

“Thanks for that!” came Juno’s chipper voice, echoing around the theater. Melody and I looked up at where her voice came from. The upper levels weren’t lit up. Like, at all. But I at least could just about make out the vague outline of Juno wandering around the second level of seating. Melody had to follow my gaze to track her down.

Heh.

“You’re welcome!” Melody responded. She pitched her voice loud enough for Juno to hear. At the same time, she patted me on the shoulder. Mark hopped up, fluttering over my head to settle on my other shoulder.

“Have you two found anything yet?” Juno shouted down to us.

“Not yet,” I called back. “We just finished checking the perimeter. We’re clear.”

“Pretty sure that last part was implied,” Melody pointed out.

“Well, I said it anyway.”

Before Melody could respond, and I knew she would respond, Juno called out to us again. “Great! You two look around down there, I’ll keep up here covered!”

“Got it!”

“Copy that.”

None of us said a word as we got to work. Melody sat down in one of the few remaining chairs and bent over to scoop up a pile of the abandoned papers. I, on the other hand, knelt down to look around properly. Moving carefully so as to not dislodge Mark, I grabbed the nearest paper and held it up to the light. An abandoned ticket that, according to the name printed across it, had once belonged to a patron named Gilderoy.

It was not what we were looking for.

I tossed the ticket in a random direction. It landed on top of an overturned seat. So the bottom of an overturned seat? I guess? Either way, I decided that it was as good a place as any to pile up everything I looked at.

After Gilderoy’s ticket, I found one for an Emily. Again, not the one we were looking for. After Emily I grabbed a trio of tickets for Akira, Keira, and Olivia, funnily enough. They went onto the pile as well. I’d just extracted a ticket from a discarded playbill when Melody spoke.

“I found it!” she cried out. I hopped to my feet and jogged over to Melody. She triumphantly held up a ticket in her hand.

“That’s great!” Juno called back. I tilted my head to examine the ticket. Melody wasn’t exactly holding it to catch the light very well, so it took me a moment to make out the faded text. “I’ll be right down!”

“Wait!” I shouted up to Juno. “False alarm! Keep looking!”

“Are you kidding?” Melody demanded. “This is what we’re looking for! A ticket for Salvador. Seat Q17.”

I grabbed Melody’s wrist and twisted her hand around so the light properly shone down on the ticket. “Check again. This ticket is for a Silvador.”

Melody stared at the paper, her mouth dropping open in disbelief. She groaned and tossed it aside. The paper fluttered to the floor. “This is ridiculous.”

“The three hundred gold reward says otherwise,” I countered.

“So, that’s Salvador with an A, right?”

“Right.”

I dropped down to start sorting through the papers again. Beside me, Melody pulled a trident off her back and used it to pierce some of the papers and yank them closer. I grabbed a ticket and held it up. The writing was so faded I could barely make it out in the dim light. Rob, I think it said. Or probably Bob. Maybe Fob. I dunno, it’s possible.

“This is still ridiculous,” Melody said again. “I can barely even read these things. How are we supposed Salvador’s ticket? And why does that girl want it? I mean, hellooooo, stalker much? What’s she gonna do, sleep with it under her pillow? Use it as a dress for the Salvador doll she made out of locks of his hair?”

“You’re right,” I decided.

“What?”

“Yeah, I know, I heard it too. But you’re right. It is ridiculous how little we can see.” I looked up above us. Most of the lights weren’t on at all. Those that were either flickered, were incredibly dim, and both for most of them. I pushed against the ground and hopped up to my feet once more. Mark dug his talons into my shirt to stay in place. “Hey, Juno!”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“By any chance is there some kind of tech booth up there? Maybe one containing a soundboard with a conveniently labeled lightswitch?”

Juno didn’t answer at first. “No, there’s nothing.”

“I was afraid of that,” I muttered to myself. “Okay, thanks! You can get back to looking around! Let us know if you find anything!”

“Will do.” Juno waved down at me and disappeared behind one of the rows of chairs.

I turned to Melody. “I’m going backstage. There’s gotta be some way to get the rest of those lights on.”

“Alright,” Melody said absently. “I’ll keep looking here.” She waved me off with her trident, nearly piercing through my stomach in three different places.

Backstage wasn’t in any better condition than frontstage. Only instead of tickets and playbills littering the ground, it was covered in spare scripts and the odd poster. About what I’d expect to find behind the great big red curtain. And you know what else I’d expect to find back there? A lightswitch. Or one of those fancy soundboards with sliders. Or even a torch. But no. Nothing like that to be found.

Even so, I wasn’t going to just give up. I couldn’t. Then I’d have had to face Melody and tell her I gave up, and… ugh. No thank you. That thought alone spurred me into making a decision.

If there wasn’t a convenient way to turn on the lights, I’d have to go the inconvenient route. Because sure, I may not have had access to a switch, but you know what I did have access to? A convenient, if inconveniently rickety, staircase up to the catwalks crisscrossing the ceiling.

Surely there would be some way to manually turn on the lights, right? Right. That’s exactly what I thought too. And, as luck would have it, I found what I was looking for almost immediately. Most of the lights hanging beside the catwalk had been disconnected, left to hang there by a thin wire run through a frankly annoyingly overcomplicated pulley system. I couldn’t make out much of the lights because, you know, they weren’t on, but I could see that the battery ports were empty and broken.

I couldn’t exactly turn them on.

But you know what? There was one light that was different to all of the others. One, hanging in the center of the rest by its wire running through a pulley system, that still had a bright blue battery connected to the side. All I had to do was decipher the complicated controls. I just had to figure out what did what on that thing. I just had to get in the headspace of the designer and figure out where they/I would have put the power switch amid all the other fancy buttons, dials, and switches that could conceivably be put onto a stage light.

I pushed the big red button on the back.

Good news. It didn’t explode.

Gooder news! A spire of warm light flared to life, spiraling down to illuminate the center of the stage!

I leaned over the edge of the catwalk. Even though the spotlight shone down onto the stage, the light it provided spread further than that. I could clearly make out Melody reclining on her chair, using the light to properly read another ticket. She scoffed and threw the ticket away. My gaze turned up to check on the balcony across the theater. The light didn’t reach there nearly as much, but I could see Juno wandering around. Probably. It might’ve just been some dust swirling a bit.

Mark released an ear-splitting cry and jumped off my shoulder. I didn’t bother to look where he was flying. Instead, I drew my sword and spun around to look along the catwalk. On the other end I could now see that a hammock had been hung up below the rafters. Just as I noticed that, some stranger dropped out of the hammock and landed on the catwalk with me.

I held my sword up before my body. The Stranger tensed and then shot towards me, barreling across the catwalk like a rocket. I swung my sword down. I wasn’t planning on doing any serious harm to them. Maybe just graze their arm a bit. Give them a new haircut, perhaps. Or even do that thing where I swing my sword in front of their face so they could see their reflection in slow motion.

None of those things happened.

The Stranger pulled a knife from their sleeve and caught my sword against it. They slid to the side, knocking my sword out of the way, and dove forward. They didn’t dive at me, however. No, no no no. That would have been the obvious pick.

The Stranger dove past me.

The Stranger dove off the catwalk.

The Stranger dove toward the spotlight.

They landed against it and latched onto the wire. The pulleys began whirring and squeaking. The Stranger and the spotlight began lowering down toward below. They landed pretty gracefully on the center of the stage.

Melody let out a yelp and some kind of strangled demand toward the Stranger. They lashed their knife to the side, cutting through the wire holding the spotlight. The Stranger caught the spotlight and hefted it up. The light shone right in Melody’s face. She cried out and stumbled to the ground. She curled up and hid her face in her hands.

The Stranger hopped off the stage and ran toward the nearest exit. I traced their path by the bobbing light streaming out from their arms. They slammed the door behind them, once again plunging the theater into darkness.

“What was that?” Juno called out.

I took a moment to consider the question. While I did that, Mark settled down on my shoulder again.

“I honestly have no idea.”