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In the swirling, twirling, lights of the carnival, crowds buzzed over tickets, food, and tat. Their hands pawed at stuff, pushed and shoved, held and dragged eachother. There was a ravenous, crazed energy about the buzzing, busy bazaar that frightened the outsider.
The outsider drew her cloak around her. She wore a long black skirt, a red cloak that draped around her and over her head, and long black gloves over her hands. She stalked into the crowd, shorter than most so concealed by their shadows.
"Ooh, ouch!" A portly penguin whined as he bumped into her, and she proved terribly solid.
She turned her covered head slightly to him, but quickly looked away, and disappeared into the crowd.
She sought a quiet corner, and found none that were empty, but the mysterious ambience around the soothsayer's seemed to cause the crowd to grasp their coats and shuffle off to merrier go-rounds. She stood in the curtains, withdrawing into her cloak, where two red eyes spied the crowd and pinged a signal to her master. She didn't spot the green irises from the curtains behind her, until a pair of gloved hands grabbed her by the sides, and pulled her in.
"Don't be shy, madame! I can see from your aura that you were destined to come to me!" said a spooky girl in a white mage's headband and a green dress that glittered cheaply. A pink hedgehog girl. A pink hedgehog girl with a terribly familiar toothy grin.
The girl in the red cloak wriggled wordlessly, as the pink hedgehog plonked her into a chair, that suddenly became tight around her ankles. The girl beamed a distress signal that was blocked by the thickest curtains imaginable, and in the dark, she glowered across a tablecloth covered in moons and stars.
"Welcome to Madame DeRose's fortune telling, I know exactly why you're here..." She cooed. The girl in the cloak tried to move her feet, but the chair she sat in was well engineered.
"Your fate guided you to my tent, no doubt it now compells you to stay here. And in a cloak this red, I know it must have been a dangerous journey!"
Madame DeRose's eyes glinted mischieviously as they saw a hint of bright red behind the crimson cloak.
"While you were enjoying Bob Beaky and his Travelling Circus, was a question called to mind that you would like me to read?" She sneered, shuffling her tarot cards flashily. She flitted and flicked them across the table, but one of the cloaked girl's gloved hands clanked down, stopping the deck from rolling out into a selector's spread.
Madame DeRose grabbed that gloved hand in her own, and tugged it forward with impressive strength, until its partner was forced to appear to steady the girl stuck in the chair. DeRose laid those hands flat on the table, where they stuck magnetically.
"Perhaps, the lady enquires what her hands can tell me?"
DeRose whipped the polyester gloves off, revealing two shining metal contraptions, of claws and exposed wires.
If she were normal, DeRose would have been terrified: but as she was, she smiled a cocky grin that sparked such loathing in the trapped 'lady'. If she could just catch her off guard, she was sure she could start an elecrical fire with the cheap fabric and the wood of this table, but she'd need a few sparks, and to choose her moment. But no better idea arrived in her mind, disconnected as it was from the signals that guided it. So she waited, red eyes narrowed and glowing in the dark.
"Even unusual hands such as these hold a future, my dear. You don't need to hide from me... because of course I know all I need to know about you!" DeRose stroked the wires and the lady's fingers twitched viciously.
"First, I note how symmetrical these hands are. As though this person is inherently balanced... or perhaps too dull to have two original thoughts in their life."
The claws twitched again, and the lady scratched her chair harshly on the cheap wooden crates this shack perched on.
"Oh, don't trouble yourself for another, dear! And let's see, here: the shape of the fingers, yes, we should be seeing innate analytical abilities and strong communication skills? Your silence tells me all I need to know, I am clearly staring deeply into your soul." She spoke to the hands, the curtains the table, and sometimes, just as she licked the ironic words off her teeth, straight into the glowing red eyes. The cloak practically smoked with rage.
DeRose tutted gleefully: "The plain of Mars has been reinforced, I see;" She stroked over the lady's blue translucent plastic cover over the centre of the hand: "This tells me you suffer from aggression, and Chihuahua's temperament, but I suppose you've the terrible doggedness to contend with that nasty fire."
The room was smelling of acrid plastic smoke now, but that mixed with the heavy artificial incense, and gave the ambience an even more mystical effect.
"Your headline is terribly, awfully short. The shortest I've seen." DeRose pointed to a wire behind the blue plastic; "This suggests you've got barely any understanding or interest in the wide and wonderful world of intellect, content to stay dull forever. How lovely for you, and it's straight as a line could be: you've never even heard of creativity. Now if I just look..."
She squinted close to the plastic, her eyes in gouging range, but as fearless as ever.
"Juat barely there. Your lifeline. It's long, but faint. You are dependent. Your experience lacks the rich depth of freedom and fancy."
Strangely, her voice was softening, as she stroked both hands with hers. She didn't notice the room filling with more and more smoke that eminated from the cheap cloth of the red cloak.
"You lack a heart line." She said simply, as though that meant something on its own. Somebody scuffled outside the tent, but the lady in the red cloak was powerless to move.
"You lack a fate line."
DeRose stroked the hands where a line would be, in an arc in the centre of the hands.
"... no, I am wrong there. This is your fate line," She traced a crack in one hand, that arched in the middle and let the electric light blare through from the right angle.
"and this is your sun line." She traced another split in the plastic on the other hand, below the smallest finger.
"It's unconventional, but with them so far apart, I must conclude:"
DeRose grasped those hands in her own, pulling them from the magnets with a terrifying amount of force.
"Your destiny, your true life - is so far from where you are now. It will never be formed, until you break away from the trappings of your-"
The lady caught fire, and the smoke quickly tore at the tent, lighting a hole in the top that she burst through, taking half the chair and the table with her, stuck to her legs.
Also tearing at the tent, a rogue blue saw emerged from the side, to scatter the tarot cards still on the table and send imitation crystal balls rolling.
The unburnt sides of the tent were thrown over the burning one, as DeRose was whisked from sight.
The Freedom Fighters quickly extinguished the tent that had been their trap, frustrated that Metal Sonic had escaped with potential knowledge of their movements. Amy picked through sadly as they prepared to leave, and found her tarot all but ruined. She knew she couldn't buy another set like that, and she would never be gifted one, so she salvaged what she could. Within the wreck, she found a red cloak cropped by fire, and put it on over her shoulders, green eyes glowing with vengeance behind the hood.
"I know I was right. I'll show you, lady!"