Welcome to the Black Parade

Cancer

So, apparently it's possible to get cancer after you're already dead.

At the tent in the center of the circus complex, there's a trapdoor, I believe.

Beneath the trapdoor, that lay beneath the faded tent, that lay beneath the foggy stars, is a rusted twisty stairwell.

Now, this stairwell goes down about a hundred feet until you actually reach a certain room. This room contains dusty beds with burnt curtains afront. Sinks that leaked sewage water and bandages hosting mold. And the nurses and doctors and patients, looked somewhere in between being alive and dead.

However, this usually empty room was crowded today.

Twenty men and women piled on the tattered hospital beds, nurses rushing back and forth.

And it's all thanks to Mr. Daes, I believe.

How do I know all this? Well Paxton had told me not to come down here, but guess who did anyways?

I'm hiding under the staircase, behind a few wooden crates and a blanket. A few people had sailed up and down the stairwell at this point.

One right now, actually.

Oh.

Oh, it's

It's Gee.

He does not seemed distressed, he seems calm, very collected.

He has a gas mask on, similar to Mama's. "Isha, status reports on the patients." Gee croaked beneath the mask.

"Stage 4 Cancer. All of them." Isha reported, behind a gas mask as well. "I have a feeling this plan is treading swimmingly."

Gee nodded, then carried himself back up the stairs.

I had a sudden urge of curiousity surge through me. What even was this plan?

I spun my head around several times, looking for something that could help. Wait... yes.

Gas masks and doctor cloaks hanging from a metal rack, about five feet from where I am crouched. Now how do I get over there?

A rock was kicked down the stairs at that exact moment, as if someone was thinking the same thing I was.

I skidded the rock across the floor of the room, drawing their attention in that direction.

Just then, I leaped to the rack, slipping on a cloak and gas mask.

Good.

Trying to maintain my breath at a steady beat beneath the mask, I hurried over to the Isha. "Yes, hello, Isha," I boomed in my most sophistocated tone. "I am here by the likes of Gee. I'm just doing a... staff check. Now, I need you to tell me Gee's plan... so he know's who's in line to follow through and who isnt." She stared at me for a moment. "Proceed to tell me the plan, Ms. Isha."

She nodded. "Well, Mr. Gee has a belief, one of his many beliefs, that if you are consumed by death in the afterlife that you will be taken back up to the land of the living for a second chance. But no regular death-after-death should work like this, so he hired Nixon Daes to use a special sort of black magic to release a... 'reverse cancer'. This should bring these patients back up to the sky. Now, the only reason we're giving them a second chance is so they can disappear for a bit, die again, and come back to our parade so we can hopefully march for eternity... oh am I forgetting something? Oh! Yes! Nixon also put a special toxen in his 'cancer' to make the patients age backwards a bit, to the ages of 14 to 22, making them young enough to host a new lifestyle." She gave me a blank look. "That was it, right? Did I forget anything? I can't risk losing my position."

I smiled as Isha. "No no no, you're fine. You did perfectly. Thank you." I sprinted up the spiral staircase, dropping my coat on the way up.