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Ash detested carnivals. They were nothing more than ring toss scams designed to steal your money so they can unload a fifty cent goldfish on you that you were unprepared to keep and would be dead within a week. There were always children running around screaming, and sometimes she couldn’t tell if they were excited or being murdered. She looked distastefully at the refreshments, which were 90% grease and sugar with the rest being salt. Was this what actually counted as food these days? She was fairly certain this was one of those things people just pretended that they liked.
Yet here she was, dragged along on another stupid adventure with the other legends. “You have to be there,” they said. “It’s important for your image!” they said. “Revenant will be there!” they said. Well, at least the last one was right. One out of three ain’t bad, right?
Well, she might as well make the most of it if she was expected to remain here. There had to be at least one activity here that was dignifying enough to be worthy of her attention.
Said attention was quickly drawn to a shooting gallery carnival game when she heard a little girl running away crying. Pathetic. Couldn’t hit a few targets, so she immediately resorted to whining. Ash liked to think herself above such poor sportsmanship.
The carnival attendant seemed to realize that he had caught her eye. “Hello, miss. Care to try?” he asked.
Ash wasn’t sure what it was about his voice, but she really hated how smug it was. It was worse than Revenant’s smug, snarky attitude on his more annoying days. She wanted nothing more than to show him up and wipe that stupid look off his face.
“I could hit those targets in my sleep,” she replied. “Step aside,” she said as she shoved a patron out of the way.
They were simple little bullseye targets, not that far from the counter. She’d taken out sniper targets with a simple handgun before, she could do this just fine. This was child’s play, easily. She dropped the fee to free the gun she was meant to use and noted that it looked disturbingly realistic.
“This isn’t a real P2020, is it?”
“Yes…but those aren’t real bullets,” he reassured her. “They’re made of rubber.”
There was still something really weird and off-putting to her about a carnival game allowing drunk patrons and children to use real guns, albeit ones that were clearly neutered, but who was she to judge?
“Okay, all you have to do to get the big prize is knock down all the targets,” he said. “You only have as many bullets as there are targets, so aim carefully!”
Ash pulled the trigger and watched the target bounce…and yet it remained standing. Her optics flared with rage when she realized that she’d already failed the simple task of taking down the target and winning the big prize.
“This game is rigged!” she said angrily.
He had that smarmy look on his face again, and suddenly she really wished the gun had real bullets in it. “Rigged? No. Maybe you’re just not as good a shot as you think you are.”
Ash fired another rubber bullet at the same target and once again heard the metallic ping that indicated that the metal target had made contact. “That one should have gone down! I made a bullseye!”
“Sorry, miss. The rules state that you must knock down all the targets to win a prize, and you haven’t even hit one yet,” the carnival attendant said.
Ash fired off all the bullets in her gun and only managed to knock down two of the ten targets. “Clearly those targets are reinforced somehow!” she said.
“Well, better luck next time.”
Ash looked infuriated as she put more money in and reloaded the gun. “I will knock those targets down, one way or another!” she said as the two targets reset.
Five failed tries later and Ash was seething with rage. Ten failed tries later and her softer side suddenly came through, wondering in sorrow if maybe he was right and the problem was her, and she wasn’t really as good a shot as she thought she was. Fourteen tries in total and she was back to being enraged and screaming that the game was rigged, which was drawing in a lot of attention.
“Ash,” Fuse said when this was starting to get sad. “Of course the bloody game is rigged. Why do you keep playing it?”
“Because it’s the principle of the thing!” she insisted as she put more money in. When the first target failed to go down, she screamed, “Goddammit!”
The seventeenth try later, and Ash was ready to jump over the counter and beat the worker’s head in with nunchucks. She was only stopped when she heard Revenant’s cackling laughter.
“What exactly do you find so funny, simulacrum?” Ash asked as she glared at him.
Revenant started laughing again when she put more money in and punched the counter after the target failed to go down. “This is the most emotion I’ve seen you display in an entire month, Dollface, and it’s a carnival game that has you this worked up.”
“This game is cheap!” she said before slamming the gun down on the counter.
“Maybe you just suck,” Revenant suggested. Ash remembered she had one rubber bullet left and shot Revenant in the shoulder. “Seriously?”
“Like you could do any better,” she mumbled.
“I’m sure I can. I once managed to hit Octane with a Bocek in his tiny, stupid head while he was sprinting through a crowded battlefield. This is a cake walk.”
Ash stepped aside and gestured for him to try. Revenant put in the necessary funds and pulled the second gun. He fired at the first target and then looked shocked when it didn’t fall.
“The fucking game is rigged!” he screamed. He fired the entire clip into the target and only managed to tilt it slightly.
The carnival worker and his smug look decided to rub it in. “Oof, how tragic. Guess you’re not as good at this as you thought either.”
Ash picked up the rubber bullet that she had shot at Revenant and turned it in her hand. The shot to the shoulder hadn’t even made him flinch. “Do these things even have enough impact to knock a target down?”
“Of course they would, if you could actually hit the target.”
Revenant and Ash both glared at him with an intensity that chilled the air around them. The other legends all knowingly started to back away slowly as they watched the pair seething, while the carnival worker seemed not to catch on that he probably shouldn’t have made such a mistake.
Ash stared him down and asked, “Remind me, what are the rules for getting the big prize again?”
“You just have to knock down all of the targets.”
“Knock down all of the targets…is that all?”
The worker nodded.
She looked at Revenant to see if he was picking up what she was putting down and realized that he seemed to be on the same page as her when he smirked and nodded.
“Okay,” she replied. “Challenge accepted.”
He barely had a chance to realize what that thing Revenant pulled from one of his pouches was before he flung it towards the targets, when he realized that the thing looped around Revenant’s claw-like finger was a grenade pin. Realizing that he was now on the same side of the counter as an active frag grenade, he screamed and dove over it just in time for every single target to explode. The main one was still standing, for about half a second before it completely disintegrated into ashes and then blew away in the wind, like in a cartoon.
The worker stood up and looked at the mess in shock while Ash and Revenant both waited expectantly.
“Well?” Revenant said, his voice just as smug and snarky as the worker’s had been just moments before. “The rules were that we had to knock down the targets, it didn’t say we had to use the gun,” he said as he waved it around in one hand.
“I…uh…” he said when he realized he’d backed himself into a corner there.
“Now then, I believe you owe my girlfriend a stuffed animal from the top prize rack.”
Ash pointed at one of the biggest ones there. “Gimme the Squirtle.”