Was the webnovel app not loading anything yesterday for anyone? It took 5 hours to get back on, and it was already 10 pm for me
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London — 2006
The madness began in whispers.
Not in the loud, raving kind of way you'd expect from something that claimed a city but in the quiet ways that sank under the skin.
People started smiling too long. Eyes lingered where they shouldn't. Street performers began to appear on corners where there had been none the day before jugglers, mimes, acrobats dressed in clothes too vibrant to belong to this decade.
And always, somewhere nearby, faint carnival music that didn't echo right.
By the second week, London's sky had taken on that off-color grey of something thinking about storming but deciding to wait until you let your guard down.
Rain slicked the streets of London, but it didn't fall right anymore. Every droplet bent midair, sliding off invisible walls or spiraling upward as if gravity had decided to take a coffee break. Streetlights flickered between color palettes that shouldn't exist—red that hummed, blue that screamed softly when no one was listening.
Rain slid down the black windows of the van like nervous sweat. The streets were empty, or rather, the people left were wrong. Faces twitching. Smiles painted too wide. A radio somewhere nearby played a distorted circus tune that warped in and out of pitch.
Agent Nash adjusted his earpiece, eyes locked on the readings flickering across his handheld scanner. The screen jittered like it was afraid of what it was showing.
"Level's rising again," murmured Agent Lira Vance from the passenger seat. "Three-point-six Cacophony index. We're officially past containment threshold."
Nash frowned. "Three-point-six? That's near full incursion."
"Yeah. Carnival Queen territory."
He didn't answer. The word Carnival Queen always left a taste like static in his mouth a name whispered in the archives but never written. The living embodiment of irrationality and magic, they said. Born when the first civilization, a civilization of titans of time, tried to make sense of everything… and failed.
They turned a corner into an alley where the air itself looked drunk. Posters peeled themselves off walls, faces whispering secrets in old English. A busker's guitar floated three inches off the ground, playing itself, strings snapping one by one.
Lira scanned with her thaumometer. The readings spiked, then flatlined again. "She's getting closer," she whispered.
"Who?" Nash asked.
"The Queen," she said quietly. "Or what's left of her."
But that wasn't what made her stop mid-sentence. Because at the end of the alley, under a flickering streetlight, stood a woman.
Black trench coat. Matching pants. Boots that clicked like ticking clocks. Her hair was midnight black, streaked with two purple locks that framed her face. She was humming along to something in her earbuds, head bobbing faintly. The song carried faintly through the rain—"Neffex—Life."
Lira blinked. "Is she… listening to music?"
"Out here?" Nash hissed. "In this mess?!"
The woman looked normal. Too normal. Her outline was sharp, where everything else warped. Reality seemed to cling to her, like she was the reference image the rest of the world was trying to copy.
Then the impossible happened— the street straightened itself.
The whispers stopped. The floating guitar fell with a wet thunk. The rain remembered how to fall downward.
All around her, the world snapped back to sanity.
Lira's hands shook. "Did she just—?"
"Force the irrationality to retreat," Nash finished. "Yeah. I felt it too."
"What is she?"
"I don't know. But the Old Circles had a name for her kind." He swallowed hard. "Caillou."
Lira stared. "Those are a myth. Time ghosts. Rational gods. Whatever they are, they don't show up in person."
"She's here now," Nash said, watching the woman's reflection ripple in a puddle. "And I don't think she's trying to hide it."
[Back to the engineer]
The Engineer was bobbing her head to the music she always did like Neffex song, bright-eyed and soaked, scanning her surroundings through her faintly glowing purple eyes.
"Oh, the good old days when you go on YouTube and amv anime recommendation videos."
"System," she said cheerfully under her breath, "explain to me how this magic works."
[Query Accepted.]
[Magic detected: Residual irrational field produced by pre-Time psychic constructs.]
[Note: Pre-Time entities exist as narrative feedback loops—magic = story logic. Rational universes reject story logic.]
She grinned. "So it's like the universe throwing a tantrum because someone forgot to pay their narrative taxes."
[Affirmative.]
"Hmm, okie. Okay, question two: how'd the Dark Age before the Time Lords let this nonsense control run wild?"
[Answer: The Time Lords purged irrationality to create a stable universe. The expelled fragments formed entities like the Carnival Queen.]
Her brows furrowed. "So magic isn't gone, it's just hiding behind the walls of the rational universe. Cheeky little thing."
She reached out, fingers brushing the air where distortions lingered. The ripples recoiled instantly, collapsing like frightened animals.
"Oh, that's fascinating." Her grin widened. "They're scared of me."
[Hidden Perks]
[Magic Nullification: Any supernatural or arcane force that touches the Time Lord is unraveled into raw energy. Spells collapse into math, curses scatter into starlight.]
"So glad time lords have anti-magic, this would be a problem without it, with just low-tech I could make."
Behind her, Lira and Nash crouched behind a rusted car, hearts pounding.
"She's talking to it," Lira whispered.
Nash's throat was dry. "No. She's commanding it. And it's obeying."
"What the hell kind of human can do that?"
"She's not human."
The woman turned slightly, and for one awful second of a moment, her reflection in the puddle wasn't her. It was a silhouette made of nebulae, eyes like collapsing stars, an outline that shouldn't fit into three-dimensional space.
Lira's charm-glasses cracked down the middle.
"She sees us," Nash breathed.
The woman tilted her head, smiled faintly, and went back to her music.
Lira forced herself to breathe. "We follow her. Carefully. The Bureau needs to know what we're dealing with."
"Follow her? Are you mad?" Nash hissed.
"She's stabilizing the field just by existing," Lira said. "If she leaves and the Carnival Queen resurfaces, London's done. We don't have a choice."
So they trailed her two invisible shadows behind a being that wasn't supposed to exist while she wandered the half-healed streets of London, humming to Neffex and asking her invisible System how the universe worked.
And for the first time in weeks, the madness stopped spreading.
The world started to work again.
But the whisper beneath the city hadn't gone silent. The Carnival Queen was still awake. Watching. Waiting. And she was laughing.
The night deepened, and London breathed in rhythm again. The fog clung low, exhausted from having been rewritten by something that shouldn't have been able to care about it.
For the first time in hours, the world was quiet.
Too quiet.
Lira and Nash followed at a distance, weaving through alleys slick with oil and shadows. The instruments in Lira's satchel flickered uselessly, their readings bouncing between zero and infinity.
"She's killing our sensors again," Nash muttered. "They can't process whatever she's doing."
"It's not interference," Lira whispered, checking her thaumometer. "It's compliance. The world's obeying her."
The wind carried the faint rhythm of a song, a different pulsing Neffex track, tinny through her earbuds, like defiance given a beat. The woman moved with purpose: slow, precise steps, like a clockwork dancer pacing out equations across the street.
Lira's eyes narrowed. "She's tracking something."
Nash exhaled shakily. "She's walking right into the epicenter."
They turned the corner and froze.
The Thames shimmered like mercury. The bridge ahead of them pulsed with impossible geometry, arches bending through themselves. In the center of it stood the woman, hand raised, her reflection writhing like it was trying to crawl out of the water.
"She's not reacting," Lira murmured. "She's… scanning it?"
"Lira," Nash said. "Look closer."
She did. And that's when she saw it — faint sigils glowing under the waterline. Carnival markings, scrawled in looping paradoxical scripts. A warning, or a doorway.
"Cacophony residue," she whispered. "The Queen's been here."
The woman crouched, touched the water, and the sigils evaporated.
Just like that.
The distortion screamed as it died.
The Engineer's eyes glowed faintly purple, irises glowing in fascination. The song in her ears switched to another Neffex loop — upbeat, grounding. It helped her mind focus while the System filled her mind with data.
[Scan Complete.]
[Residual magic source identified: Cacophony Fragment — a pre-Time irrational construct.]
[Warning: Entity classified as high-tier memetic predator. Engages through chaos spread.]
She hummed. "Predator, huh? Cute."
"System, define the Carnival Queen."
[Entity: The Carnival Queen — the collective irrationality expelled from Gallifrey's mass psyche during the Purge of Magic. Exists as a gestalt anti-logic. Goal: restore magic as natural law and bring back the Universe to irrational.]
She tilted her head. "So she's the universe's temper tantrum. Got it."
Her boots clicked against the bridge as she stood. The System pinged again.
[Note: Prolonged exposure to your stabilizing field will cause irrational constructs to flee. Cacophony fragments will avoid proximity.]
She grinned. "So I'm radioactive to nonsense."
[Approximation: correct.]
[Recommendation: Reinforce the glamour field with temporal static.]
She tapped her temple. "Right. Got it."
The air shimmered. Her outline softened, rehumanized. The subtle hum of her presence dimmed enough that the onlookers in the shadows, the ones she knew were following her.
'Don't want to drive anyone insane.. Well, more insane."
"She's stabilizing again," Lira whispered. "It's like she's... tuning the world."
"Lira," Nash murmured. "Look at her reflection."
Lira did, and her blood ran cold.
The reflection wasn't syncing. The woman moved; the reflection lagged a heartbeat behind. And when it caught up, its face was all wrong, too many eyes, faint cosmic flickers swirling under its skin.
"She's wearing a human mask," Lira whispered. "And it's slipping."
Nash stepped back instinctively. "We shouldn't be here."
"Not yet," Lira said. "Not until we know what she's doing."
She turned down the street suddenly, and both agents ducked into the shadows.
"She's heading into the Underground," Nash whispered.
Lira followed, pulse hammering. "That's where the first madness outbreaks started. The Queen's cult nests down there."
They slipped into the dark stairwell after her, and as they descended, they felt it. The pressure. The air thickened with unreality, colors bleeding from the walls, sounds twisting into half-memories.
Where the world bent, she stayed straight. Where the whispers screamed, they went silent near her. The madness parted for her like the Red Sea.
And when she reached the bottom of the stairwell, she stopped, tilted her head.
Lira's blood froze.
"She knows," she whispered. "She knows we're following."
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Still thinking how to write this, given how young she is, while not having any Time Lord tech to fight Carnival Queen, if you look her up, she's goddamn powerful
Yog-Sothoth (who's the great intelligence in verse), who is an elder god, is nothing but a baby to her
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