VOLUME III: 59 – Dancing Bells

A week later, I was back at Parfait HQ.
Different conference room, same existential dread.

This time, the whiteboard had been replaced with a projector. Less cult meetings, more TED Talk. The room was smaller too, with a long narrow table that felt as if it had been stolen from a law firm liquidation sale. Beige walls, sterile water pitcher sweating in the corner, and those fluorescent overheads buzzing faintly as though a mosquito you couldn’t swat.

Corporate liminal space. My natural enemy.

Weaver sat at one end of the table, corporate as ever, flipping through a neat stack of papers like they were going to protect him from me. They wouldn’t. If I snapped and crawled across the table like a raccoon, those sheets would fold faster than he did.

Across from him sat a woman with round glasses, messy bun, and a tablet she looked way too excited to be holding. She radiated a kind of caffeinated chaos, the kind you only see in grad students who’ve merged with their Wacom.

“Nice to meet you,” she said brightly, voice too cheerful for this beige graveyard. “I’m Seth. I’ll be your mama.”

I blinked. “…I already have one of those.”

She smiled, undeterred. “Then think of me as your artistic parent. I will give you a form. I put you into the world.”

“Sounds horrifying,” I muttered, immediately regretting coming here sober.

Weaver cleared his throat like he’d sat through this ritual a hundred times. “Seth specializes in expressive characters. Her range matches your… energy.”

“Artistically inclined,” Seth corrected, tapping her stylus against the table. “You’re the Fool, right?”

My stomach dipped. “…Wait, you know about that?”

She showed me papers and swiped her tablet, and the projector hummed to life, throwing light across the beige wall. A slide appeared, big bold letters across the top:

Talent Concept: The Fool Who Sees Everything

Underneath the papers was Weaver’s handwriting from last week, my cursed whiteboard confession turned into an official header.

I gawked. “You made minutes of my breakdown?”

“Documentation,” Weaver said smoothly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world to archive my mental collapse into a corporate deck.

Seth leaned forward, eyes shining. “I love it. Jester archetype, but twisted. A mask that laughs while bleeding underneath? That’s powerful. That’s… marketable.”

“Oh my god,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands. “Please don’t make me sound deep in a PowerPoint.”

“It’s literally your concept,” Weaver said.

“Shut up.”

Slides kept flipping. Moodboards of theatrical masks, color palettes balancing neon chaos against muted shadows, motifs of mirrors and stages. Every few seconds, Seth added a quick sketch with lightning-fast strokes, as if her stylus was an exorcism tool.

A grin stretched far too wide. A crooked silhouette, bells dangling with each sway.

One hand clutching a marotte, its painted face smiling back.

It was uncanny. Seeing the abstract mess of my words—“fool,” “chaos,” “hidden-in-plain-sight”—suddenly solidifying into something visual. My nonsense rambling had grown legs. Legs in striped tights.

And glorious.

“Okay, so this is how it will go,” Seth said, tapping her stylus against her chin like a surgeon plotting incisions. “We strip it all down, build a Fool persona from scratch. Chaos wrapped in something deceptively clean.”

I squinted at the last sketch. “…So, a wolf in sheep’s cosplay?”

Seth gasped as though I’d handed her a sacred text. “Exactly!”

Weaver didn’t even look up from his papers. “Seems promising.”

I leaned back in my chair, staring at the projector slide. My own words glaring back at me, a contract I hadn’t realized I’d signed.

The Fool. Laughing, watching, bleeding. The mask and the mirror.

I blew out a breath. “Fine. Let’s do it. Make me your Fool.”

Weaver gave me the faintest smirk, the kind you only caught if you were staring long enough to wonder if he was human. “For once, we’re aligned.”

Seth’s stylus was already flying, new sketches appearing on the projector. Harlequin diamonds. Masks. Teeth bared in a grin too wide. Bells that looked less like cheerful accents and more like warning signs.

“Perfect,” she murmured. “This will suit you.”

Something about the way she said it made my skin crawl.

She glanced up, suddenly casual, as though we hadn’t just summoned my cursed alter ego into the room. “I’ll keep sending you progress drafts as we go. First concepts, then linework, then color passes. You’ll get to give notes on each stage. Then you’ll get the finalized illustration once we’re locked in. Standard process.”

Weaver nodded like this was a quarterly review. “Expect weekly updates. They’ll want feedback promptly.”

“Feedback,” I repeated numbly. As if I could ever look at one of those cursed sketches and think: Hmm, needs more bells.

Seth grinned. “Oh, don’t worry. It’s fun! Watching your avatar come alive, piece by piece. Seeing it go from nothing to someone. It’s like raising a child.”

I blinked. “…That sounds fun.”

She laughed as though it was the most normal thing in the world, getting emailed pieces of the mask I was about to wear.