AUTHOR'S NOTE: Yet another story inspired by a computer game. This one was called "PuppetShow: Mystery of Joyville," which was developed by ERS G Studio. What can I say? Sometimes, a game is the terrific source for an idea. As always, the Impossibles and Big D belong to Hanna-Barbera. Everyone else belongs to me, though one of the characters in my story (Felicia) is named after a character from the game.
1766, Vienna, Austria.
Just outside of Vienna, there was a small town known as Hasenpfeffer. Several people in town were gathered at a theater at the edge of the town. Playing at the theater was a rendition of "Sleeping Beauty," done with mechanical puppets. Every show at the theater was done with puppets. The owner of the theater, known only as the Puppet Master, carved all of his puppets out of wood, and fitted some of the larger ones with gears to make them move. The people in this little town never missed any of the Puppet Master's performances. Children and adults alike visited the theater every week to see what the Puppet Master had in store for his audience. And, always seated in the front row of every performance was Felicia, the Puppet Master's sixteen-year-old daughter. She was very beautiful, with long, dark hair, and sparkling green eyes, the most beautiful girl in the village, people said. And she knew it. All the boys in town chased after her right and left. Felicia enjoyed the attention, and she loved to tease the boys, and flirt with them mercilessly. This made her terribly vain. But despite her vanity, she did love her father very much, and never missed any of his performances.
One day, a fire broke out in the theater, and all but completely destroyed it. It had claimed the lives of many of the townspeople, including the Puppet Master and his daughter.
Since the death of the Puppet Master, the puppet theater (or what was left of it) closed it's doors forever. No one tried to reopen it.
Everything in the little town was quiet for the next five years, until strange things began happening. Mysteriously, girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one suddenly vanished. The police noticed that the girls who went missing were quite attractive. They filed an extensive search, but the missing girls were never found.
And again, things were quiet for a few years. Then, suddenly, it started happening all over again, except this time, girls between fourteen and twenty-one were disappearing all over the world. Law enforcement agencies from all over the world searched for a clue, or a trace or something that would lead them to the missing girls. But nothing ever turned up, and year after year, girls kept turning up missing under mysterious circumstances.