#first statement woooo

I used to love going to theater day camp as a child. Every summer, from the ages of eight to thirteen, I would pick a week to go and learn songs and dances so we could ultimately put on a show. When I turned sixteen, I was finally eligible to work there, and so I decided, why not? I'll give the next generation the same joy my counselors gave me.

Going in as a near-adult was strange, though. The place was both bigger and smaller than I remembered it, with rooms I'd never seen before and counselors that seemed even more cheery than I recalled. Of course, that's nothing paranormal, I had to put on that wide camp-counselor smile too, but it did unsettle me. In my first week, I was assigned to supervise a group of preschool aged children throughout their days.

The preschoolers have a very different routine from everyone else. The song we sang in the morning was different, about how our mascot wanted to play with us, and all our time indoors was spent between three rooms. These rooms "belonged" to our company mascot, a jester by the name of Jingle. (I know the Archivist reads these, and I know some others may have access to the archives as well, so I do ask that if you recognize the company, not to mention it. I'd rather not lose my job, as unsettling as it is to work there.) Jingle has a fair amount of lore, including a birth certificate that simply lists his date of birth as "Tuesday". Canonically, his social security number is 1. He may very well be ancient.

Working with the little kids, I have often had to mention Jingle. I told them that we were doing art classes in his "house" because he invited us, that he never showed up to the children because he was always somewhere else or just shy, and of course, we had to keep up the lie that he existed in the first place. Images of jesters are everywhere in the building, whether they be dolls or paintings, so it wasn't that hard to pretend any one of them was the real Jingle. However, whenever we passed through the hallway where the preschool kids store their bags and lunch, I couldn't shake the feeling that the eyes of all those jesters and painted characters were watching me.

Jingle has an evil twin, Jangle, which we often don't tell to the younger kids. Jangle is the trickster jester who scrambles up the puzzles or makes kids solve his riddles in the newsletter they send home with the students. He was never truly scary, not even when I was little. But when I was around nine years old, on our daily walk to the field by the building for recess, a fellow camper pointed at a small box-like structure, taller than it was wide, probably large enough to fit an average adult, with a gated door and an interior too dark to see. "See that?" they asked me. "That's where they keep Jangle locked up."

That scared me for a while, the idea that the camp was keeping Jangle so close yet so isolated in his cell, but I always found comfort in the gate door always remaining closed. A couple times, I could have sworn I could see a jester-like figure inside, but after a while I dismissed it as my imagination just making things up.

Now that I work there, however, and have worked with a couple different age groups, I'm not so sure. For some reason, I feel a little pang of fear whenever I see that structure and notice that the gate is open. We don't take that route to the park anymore. We take the longer one instead. (Though we do have to pass a cybertruck on that longer route, so... maybe risking meeting the evil jester would be preferable).

Statement ends. (And I have many more where that came from, this is arguably my most normal statement-type story)

(Don't worry idk what summer camp you're talking about, and even if I did I ain't a snitch!)