Casey was so done with this shit.
She walked around the auditorium, making sure nobody was in any of the other rooms adjacent to it before locking each door around the stage.
She had done so much for this theater, touring groups for hours a day with only a few breaks in between. Doesn't help that she doesn't have any co-workers, and her boss up to this point, Stephen, was constantly receiving calls and doing business with so many different suits that she barely could talk to anyone.
Damian was somehow even worse, Stephen probably took all of the constant phone calls with him when he left vacation, so whenever she would visit Damian, he would usually just be watching TV on the monitor above the door, perfect for him to view from his desk. In spite of the lack of other people to constantly occupy his attention, he doesn't seem to care about taking care of the theater at all. Stephen did very little for her directly, sure, but Casey can at least recognize that his constant work was for the theater, a place that she loved too. She wished for more company, but when she could catch him for a minute, he was a pretty cool boss, and he always made sure to drop everything for tours.
Damian was not that.
This guy just abandoned her and made her do the tour on her own. This is supposed to be one of Stephen's closest friends, this should by all means be a job he's capable of doing. So why not? It's only today that she managed to get the guts to try and question him, because she's had enough. Maybe on the first days he was just trying to get a hold of the ropes, that's fine, but that's the twelfth tour group he's abandoned and forced her to do on her own. She doesn't understand why Stephen put him in charge if all he seems to be able to do is be a smug asshole whenever she asks him for anything, but it ends today. She doesn't care what Stephen might have to say to her when he gets back, and she doubts he'd fire her over this, she's gonna leave tonight and give him a piece of her mind.
As soon as she checks on sound and lighting.
In spite of her current frustration, she takes her job very seriously. As a kid, she grew up watching YouTube reuploads of performances done at this theater. She doesn't really fancy herself an actor, but this is a place that has a lot of sentimental value and magic to her, and the fact she was able to get a job as a tourist here due to the theater's proximity to her college dorms is really cool.
She continues up the spiraling staircase. Nobody got keys today, but she does sometimes use that as a little hangout between tours and other little odd jobs around the theater, so she may as well check to make sure she left it unlocked.
She makes it to the top, and she doesn't even touch the door before she realizes it was unlocked.
The door abruptly opens, giving her a scare and causing her to stumble backwards, nearly falling over. Before she can say anything, a spotlight comes on from inside, the flash briefly blinding her for enough of a window where someone pushed her back down, sending her falling down the stairs and landing hard back down on the ground.
She slowly sat herself back up, the light redirecting to face her direction as she covered her eyes with her arm. Her body was aching everywhere, and she was bruised in several spots.
"Who's there?! This isn't funny!" Casey yelled out, trying to get herself to stand up, though that fall still significantly weakened her.
Answering her call was a person covered from head to toe, donning an outfit that looked as though it had been made from things in the prop closet. Specifically, a pair of dark brown dress shoes and grey pants, a green dress shirt covered by a yellow vest, and a brown jacket. The most notable feature was a tragedy mask, obscuring this delinquent's face as they slowly descended the stairs, approaching her.
Casey slowly managed to get herself to stand up as her masked assailant reached the floor, now slowly approaching her.
"You must be the asshole Damian mentioned hanging out outside the theater," she spoke, still under the light. "Well guess what, you aren't funny, and I've got enough shit to deal with as is," she continued, assertive as ever, before getting herself to walk toward the tragedy mask, ignoring the pain.
"I don't know why the police didn't take care of you already," she said, marking that as one more reason Damian is shitty, "but I'm not making the same mistake as my stupid boss. So take your sorry ass back to the hotel, or I'm calling them," she threatened, planting her feet now.
The tragedy mask tilted their head at her, clearly not taking her seriously as they continued approaching the now still Casey. They reached out their arms, but Casey promptly shoved them back.
"Oh, that's the game you wanna play? Well guess wha-" Casey began, though she couldn't quite finish her sentence as she was promptly interrupted by the masked figure's response to the situation. She barely even processed that they had lunged back forward before she looked down to see a dagger in her stomach. Her eyes flickered between the knife and her assailant, and her fight-or-flight instinct kicked in as she rocked her attacker back with a kick to the stomach, before booking it to the auditorium door.
The knife hurt like hell, but she wasn't going to risk taking it out. Instead, she continued running with a knife in her stomach, blood slowly being absorbed into her shirt from the small crevice between the knife, and the wound created. She burst out the auditorium and back into the lobby, closing the door behind her as the tragedy mask gave chase. She shuffled between her keys, desperately trying to continue to hold the door closed as her attacker on the other side tried to pull it back open. She found the right one, but before she could do anything, she was tackled from the side, landing on her stomach as the knife dug deeper into her body. She barely had time to make out the image of her new attacker as she rolled over, but they looked to be wearing largely the same outfit as the first one, only this one was wearing a comedy mask. Casey tried fighting back, but she ended up taking a punch to the face before the knife was ripped right out of her stomach, causing her to begin bleeding out. The one wearing the tragedy mask came out of the auditorium with this new window, as their comedic counterpart began to stab her relentlessly. She screamed out, but this was fruitless, as nobody was around anymore to hear. The stabs stopped as her attackers picked her up, before they approached the rail that guarded the area surrounding the theater, looking down at the floor below them that the dual staircase led up to. Several desperate shouts of "stop!" and "no!" slipped out of Casey, but her attackers showed her no mercy, tossing her down to the ground onto the red carpet, directly in front of the ticket booth. Though it offered the world's slightest cushion, the carpet did little in helping her impact against the hard floor below it, shattering her bones, and finally ending her life.
Against all odds, something interesting happened tonight.