When the Wheel of Misfortune at the Old Endland Amusement Park span the customers around, there were always those persons that somehow managed to drop their new ice-cream or their wallet or their iPhone or old family heirloom or their cigarettes or their sunglasses or their pet lap dog or their book, magazine or newspapers or sunhat or sex toy or telescope or whatsofuckingever down there despite all the signs that told them not to do it. It was a huge pain in the ass all the constant dropping stuff and there was a corresponding huge pain in the ass accumulation of detritus below the Wheel of Misfortune that from time to time obvs needed to be cleared – partly a matter of rules concerning lost property and partly a matter of not letting flammable materials build up underneath a fairground attraction because ‘health and safety concerns’. As boss and CEO of the Old Endland AP etc Monroe was down with the fact that it all needed to be cleaned out but she was ‘profit focused to the end’ and not down with any idea that the Wheel of Misfortune should be stopped for a single moment thereby incurring any deficit of income or losing out on corresponding revenue. With that (greed) in mind it was decided Valiant and 3 other child labours that scored badly on the IQ tests should undertake the clean up task while the machinery of that attraction was still in perpetual motion.

For Valiant and the three kids that worked with her – Plaster, Broth and Suzette – the hole thing started as a big adventure. You spend yr hole life with people telling u to stay away from complicated moving machinery for your own safety and then someone comes along and tells u to actually climb inside an enormous construction that’s  moving all the time, violent, dangerous and totally thrilling. It was way too good a chance to miss. For Valiant looking into the mechanism that stretched as far as her eyes could see, it seemed for all the world like an actual enchanted forest, an infinite glade of gloom and levers, gears, chain drives, swinging arms, centrifuges, cam-and-follower-systems, pistons, crank shafts, blades, pulleys, bearings, axles, wheels, block and tackles, brakes, clutches and interconnected wires, all of it smeared in a mixture of lubricant and the dripping sweat of those concurrently experiencing the ride.