Friends, if our cotton candy seems just a little bit special, don’t blame yourselves. It should seem spectacularly overwhelmingly special, but the human palate really isn’t programmed to handle the level of candy we have going on, and therefore, there is no shame in simply feeling that its velvety ethereal sucrose misty flavor is simply something quite nice. And, indeed, that might be best; this is the Circus! Here, everything is special…but also, that carnival magic pulls us a bit into dreams, so that we’re not quite as surprised when something alchemizes us, galvanizes us in a way we might not experience anywhere else.
Yes, obviously, it ought to be extremely, incredibly, unbelievably special. It ought to be peculiarly fairy-flavored with the sweetest scent and sips of sweetest sky, since yes, we do mine all of our cotton candy from the furthest flavorful flares of the Firmament.
People often pretend that Cotton Candy is made out of clouds. That’s just silly. Clouds are mere water vapor, plus they contain Storm Giants; and Storm Giants taste terrible.
No, we do it the old-fashioned way—we shoot a very intrepid explorer out of a massive cannon, having armed that person with some reasonably stable Icarus wings and one of those suitcases which, for no particular reason, is not full of air, but rather full of an odd vacuum which sucks things right into it and holds the there until—conveniently—when you need the thing, you can open the suitcase and it’s inside.
If you want to know where we got the suitcase, it was the same place we got the cannon. If you want to know where we got the cannon, you should change your mind: trust us, you actually really don’t want to know what strange armaments one finds when one invades Candyland.
But our high-flying hero has a mission. When she gets to the most succulent part of the sky, she climbs high on some thermal winds, then nosedives straight towards the rich vein of True Cotton Candy. She captures it in her enchanted valise, and glides slowly to the ground. She sets off a flare or two, and hitchhikes a ride with whatever passing airship pirates have a sweet tooth and are willing to negotiate, which is all of them.
And that’s where WE get OUR cotton candy. Accept nothing less.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
