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Scott's on the run from the circus he used to work at. He used to be their llama handler and then acrobat after the first one mysteriously went missing.
Then the other performers had started getting strange things happened to them. Some mysteriously vanished like the previous acrobat. Others went missing from anywhere between an hour and a day and came back with different personalities and a creepy smile on their face. And yet even more get strange injuries that no one knows where they came from.
Scott isn't an idiot, so he discreetly looks into what's going on. Maybe the circus is hypnotizing the troupe, maybe the circus is kidnapping people and murdering them, maybe the circus is a cult. Whatever the dark reason behind all of this creepiness, when Scott finds out what's up he understandably runs away, but not before stealing some of their powerful magical artifacts in an attempt to sabotage the creepy circus.
That was years ago.
Scott thought he got away from it all, but one day Jimmy goes to Chromia only to find Scott missing and a circus poster is the only clue to his disappearance.
The emperors all team up to find their friend and track down the circus, with some of them joining the act to better investigate. Lizzie became a fortune teller. False is a knife thrower. Joe and Jimmy are clowns.
And a certain colorful acrobat isn't the same as when they'd last seen him.