Did you catch the halftime show? We mean the UMBC one, not the AMBER one - wow, it's difficult to remember to separate the two nowadays.

We mean the Beetle Circus show. How can they keep producing new tricks like this? We saw their new move Cuckoo's Devour in the Ultimate Championship - well, those of us near the front of the wall with binoculars - but now THE TENT is just showing off.

It can stretch to engulf things twice its size. Just take a minute to process that, because I still can't!>

The icing on the cake of gruesome? That the things it was engulfing were larger tents - garish gazebos and dramatic big tops alike, those tents crumbled and vanished into that maw.

One things for sure: Pennythrift is a gooood Trainer to not only be able to control that horror, but keep pushing it into more and more terrifying things!

Keep it up X

- From Super Special Mega Awesome Stuff, Issue 496

Not content with their two-man show, Pennythrift Steeple set about expanding Beetle Circus aggressively. The Circus's involvement with Ultimate Maximum Battle Circus was obvious, but the true growth came from the Circus's rapid absorption of ex-Network Employees and hiring of many excited Creatives who, under the watchful eye of Steeple, became Circus aficionados bringing the best of Bastion to the show.

With Steeple's creativity, the Circus expanded, and some Arena commentators suggest that though the Circus was always part of UMBC, the Circus truly became an act of its own. Though there were three Arenas vying for attention, there was only one place where you could come to see Monsters not exactly fighting but entertaining in a way that felt more genuine than AMBER and less dangerous than UMBA.

The Beetle Circus kept rolling, like it itself was carried by Rollerpedes, and Pennythrift's fortunes kept rising - his stable of Monsters grew with every trip into the Wasteland, and Pennythrift's knack for finding the weird and wonderful of the Wasteland and training them into show-Monsters became renowned throughout both the city and the nearby Wastes.

Though age came for Pennythrift like it does for all of us, Steeple was not deterred: he picked a series of proteges and apprentices that he trained to run the Circus into the future, even when he would no longer be around. Rumour has it that even THE TENT has taken a liking to the new generation of Beetle Circus ringleaders, refusing to eat them, and proving that the power of entertainment can change even the most existentially horrifying heart.

– excerpt from “Beetle Circus - A Retrospective” published in Double Trouble, a Double Team focused zine edited by Snitch

– Beetle Circus leaflet