Welcome! Bienvenue! Other Languages Pending.

   The ceramic greeting placard stood on an archway over a wide avenue. Layers of concrete traffic barriers formed a shallow, winding trench system that blocked the road up to a hefty iron gate. Rusted-over chains and barbed-wire surrounded this structure, never meant to serve as a gatehouse.

   Sun-baked graffiti, long faded into unintelligibility, covered the gate. Dilapidated hotels sat far back on the road, well beyond an invisible property line. Someone had thrown their weight into zoning committees, establishing quite the green belt as a buffer zone, keeping the neighbors out. There would be nobody around to notice a flashlight poking through the adjacent gatehouse.

   “Welcome back to the hap-hap-happiest place you ever will see.” A mechanical screech came out of a speaker, in imitation of a cartoonish guffaw. “It’s been… eight hundred twenty-five days since your last visit.”

   The intruder stood in front of a computer terminal embedded into a cartoon mascot twice the size of your average man.

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   “The Park is currently operating at… Emergency Lockdown… capacity.” A mechanical screech punctuated the automated voice.

   “Do they have to keep the theming up even in employee only areas? Really?” Nevertheless, the intruder placed their hand on a terminal on the creature’s outstretched porcelain paw.

   “Notice. Due to… recent corporate acquisitions… all Devereaux’s World of Tomorrow FuturePlex stockholders are eligible for our new park VIP experience. Please wait here for a security detail.”

   “Figures they’d lock it down like that,” the intruder said, with a reflexive, nervous bite on the interior of their cheek.

   A whirring of mechanical gears started up from an unseen closet.

   “It was never going to be easy,” the intruder muttered, fishing an oblong canister out of a rucksack.

   The stranger was gone long before a pair of elongated wire-frame cat ears peeked around the nearest corner. Only the cylinder remained behind. Its invisible pulse fried the terminal, mascot, and approaching sentry, along with every security camera in the gatehouse. After a moment, the canister caught fire, then imploded, and there was scant evidence that any break-in had occurred at all.