6 o' Clock

In an ideal world, the cirque would have taken off first thing in the morning, and arrived at their destination that night. In the world where their ringmaster had turned temporarily homicidal and the Cirque was avoiding legal sanctions and professional vengeance, the airships were flying through the night. It was now something approximately resembling morning, if one used a generous definition, and Alexandra was bouncing a bit in her seat from the caffeine she had been mainlining in the form of strong black tea. Marguerite was awake as well - she had a strange mini-lantern type device perched on her shoulder like an boxy brass bird, directing light to the pile of papers on her lap on which she was trying to recreate her lost notes. Marie was asleep, having curled up on the floor in a pile of scarfs dislodged from their proper place by some early evening turbulence. Never one to stay still even while asleep, she had tossed and turned her way around the airship through the night, and was currently settled with her head resting on Marguerite's boots. Colette had finally drifted off as well, or at least stopped muttering darkly to herself, and as far as late-night fleeing went all was really going rather smoothly indeed.

And then the airship did a maneuver which, performed by a person on foot on land, would have been something akin to stopping dead mid-stride and nearly falling on one's face as a result. The resulting jerk of the cabin, combined with a string of profanity from Alexandra, woke Marie with shock. Rubbing her eyes groggily, she twisted herself up into a sitting position, realized how uncomfortably close she had gotten to Marguerite, and quickly and unsubtly scooted to a spot a safer distance from the mad scientist while also out of Colette's range.

"Trouble?" Marguerite asked, adjusting the lantern on her shoulder.

"I believe Asmodeus might still be drunk," Alexandra said tersely.

Marie inched over to the nearest window, pushed the curtain aside, and looked outside. The sun was rising over the city, all pink and orange light and grey clouds of smoke from the factories. Marie had been with the circus long enough to recognize the cities they most often visited, and this one was unfamiliar, and furthermore, it looked like something out of a fairy tale. Marie had never been terribly fond of fairy tales, even as a child - the nuns had preferred bible stories to fantasy ones, so Marie's childhood heroes had included Mary Magdalene and the plague of frogs in Exodus - but the sight of this town took her breath away. The city, all bright little houses and factories along the river, sprawled out like a skirt around a castle up on a hill. For a moment, Marie stared, starry-eyed and jaw-dropped; then she took another moment to wonder why such a pretty castle had inspired such swearing; then she realized that the airship in front of theirs, Asomodeus', was descending to land, with the only open space he might be aiming for being the large green to the castle's back.

"What's he doing?" Colette asked. Marie turned with alarm, but Colette's homicidal rage seemed to have subsided; she was undoing the ropes behind her arms with a careful skill that Marie wouldn't have thought her capable the day before. She dislocated her shoulder and pulled one of her arms free of the chair. "Thanks for the help," she griped to Marguerite. By the time Marguerite had carefully blown out the lantern's flame and set it aside, and stacked her papers and put them neatly on the table, Colette had half undone the next knot herself.

"He's landing behind some castle!" Alexandra said. The other airships were starting to descend as well, having performed the mid-air equivalent of shrugging and going along with it.

"But if we're not allowed, won't they put us in a dungeon or something?" Marie asked, though she didn't seem convinced that this was a bad thing, and in fact thought it might be quite an adventure. Then, as a sort of reluctant afterthought: "Asmodeus usually knows what he's doing, though. In a sort of crazy way."

Alexandra sighed, and shortly thereafter the circus was arranged in the back yards of a building which was nothing if not a Cinderella castle.

By the time Alexandra, Marguerite, Marie and Colette were stumbling out of the airship - everyone stretching from the long flight, but Colette with particular enthusiasm and frequent glares at the others - the castle's inhabitants had noticed the visitors. A woman in a long dress and apron was bustling out, waving a wooden spoon in the direction of the nearest cirque member - Asmodeus, naturally - and yelling in a language that Marie wasn't familiar enough with to identify.

Asmodeus responded in kind, though with much less yelling. He even sounded friendly, though Marie thought every word in their strange conversation sounded like they were swearing. Still, the woman was menacing him with her spoon when someone else started crossing the yard from the castle towards them.

"Ah, Didi!" Asmodeus called when he saw him, brushing past the menacing cook to greet the man coming towards them. He was much better-dressed, though in a dressing gown and with his hair sticking out at peculiar angles.

"Asmodeus!" the man - Didi? Marie thought, disbelieving - said, in French now, so Marie could understand - "Welcome, welcome! I wasn't expecting you so soon!"

The rest of the circus had sort of gathered around and was marveling at the peculiar display. "May I introduce," Asmodeus said, with his usual flair, "Baron Deiter Geltmacher."

Another person had followed the Baron out, having apparently taken the time to dress - he was fixing his cravat as he walked to join them, then reaching up to adjust his bowler, though his jacket was still askew on his shoulders. He regarded the assembled circus with a sideways little grin, and Marie felt an uncomfortable little skip in her chest that translated to bouncing a bit on her heels. The boy - surely near her own age, she figured - caught her eye, and she promptly stopped bouncing, blushing furiously.