lostcarnival | HELL OF A HANGOVER PT. 1

Who: The people who escaped!
When: Very early Day 66 to Day 67
Where: The Carnival
What: The Ringmaster brings everyone she can back to the carnival after getting kicked out the Celebration, a bit worse for wear. Those that have resolved their threads at the Masquerade can start trickling over here as they sort things out.
Warnings: Angst, mostly likely, as well as potentially graphic injuries.

RETURNING HOME↴

About 45 minutes after the conflict with the vampires begins, the Ringmaster will finally show her face at the Masquerade - and immediately be mortified by what she sees. Though initially mostly confused by the fact that there's been problems over the week, and characteristically obtuse about what's going on, as soon as she realizes the severity of the threat she will launch into action. If the Host managed to miss the combat already going on, they won't be able to miss the Ringmaster tearing up the joint and looking for her people. She's quick to scoop up those that have managed to gather in the dining hall - but unfortunately her arrival seems to be the vampire's cue to retreat.

Her attempt to challenge the Host about this will result in the being finally losing their patience and banishing all the vampires and all of the carnival workers from the premises, forcing them back to the portals they arrived from and launching their remaining belongings out with them. The Ringmaster will be pretty fucking pissed off when they return (once again) and will tell everyone to take the time they need to recover, but to stick together and stay safe for the time being. She has a plan to chase down the carnival members that have been stolen, but it will take time.

► BEER PONG: Apparently the Ringmaster spent the entire week playing a nonstop game of beer pong, against several dozen of the Host's bodies. She hadn't quite won yet when the Masquerade began, so she was late. Whether or not she was caught up in the same spell as everyone else is up to interpretation, but the answer "definitely probably." She won, for the record.

► MISSING: Upon doing headcounts, it will turn out that all the supervisors are missing, as well as several regular workers - a few of which will have been spotted as freshly turned vampires during the fighting. Whether that was the point of the attack or not is unclear, but it's pretty clear that the Ringmaster is a little bit devastated about it - particularly about the supervisors. However, she will refuse to talk to anyone long enough to get into too many details.

► THE PLAN: The Ringmaster will announce that she intends to get everyone back - it's just a matter of figuring out their way back to the dimension they've been stolen off to. She guarantees that she will find it, but that it may take some time. In the end, the workers will have a total of two days to recover and plan - during the evening of Day 67, she will be leading a rescue mission to get them all back. You don't have to come, but lives do depend on its success.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Scout assessed him coming in - bloody, yes, but none of it's flowing, he doesn't act hurt, it's probably fine. She's had more experience with blood than someone from a setting where most weapons cauterize the wounds they cause ought to.

"Computer guys in suits? That's different." She smiles faintly and shakes her head. "Last time it seemed like everywhere we went was just annoying at the worst, and the violence was all in little, manageable packets, right up until the sanguivores. It was nice."

Edited 2017-03-05 01:06 (UTC)

"Oh," he says, tired in the way that makes everything unnecessarily confusing and a fresh revelation. "Were you here before?" He puts out his hand to shake - his fingers end in pink crystalline claws. "My name's Steven!"

"That's right! I had my year, went home, now I'm back." Used to aliens of various descriptions and remembering how people here tend to look after a while, she squeezes his hand with care for those sharp claws. Her own nails have a normal shape but are thicker, made of some tarnished golden metal.

"Tallisibeth, but my friends call me Scout. How long've you been with the carnival?"

"Two months," he says, after a moment of thought. "...My dad accidentally played a game when he didn't have enough tickets, so I decided to sign on too so we could stay together."

"I wish it was like how it was before the vampires," he says, frowning. "It's nice when there isn't something bad happening."

He'd certainly racked up a lot of changes, unless he hadn't been human or near-human to begin with. Scout speculates that it was because of the violence; she has her own theory about any changes not caused by the Ringmaster directly.

"Yeah... So much downtime, though. I had to set myself a schedule so I didn't go soft." She shakes her head, refocuses. "Anyway, were you hurt, or are you a healer? That doesn't look comfortable." Scout nods at him, indicating the drying blood.

Steven was already magic, so maybe that helped! Either that, or it was the getting shot thing. A mystery.

"Oh... it's okay, it's not mine," he explains, waving a hand at her clumsily. He's very tired. "I'm... I'm just healing people. I can do that. I'm a healer, like my mom!"

"Must be useful," she says, smiling. "I can do a few things, but healing proper is a rare gift." One she could have used, many times over - but it's also true that some of those had been cases in which even the most gifted Jedi couldn't do more than make someone comfortable. "You've been working hard, huh?"

He's at that point of being tired where he is far more rambly than normal, just saying whatever comes to mind. In this case, it's casually relating the story of his time at the Celebration, which was actually fairly bad.

"I met some people at the party place we were just at but I guess they gave me something bad to drink because my head is still all weird feeling... and my dad got attacked by vampires and then the vampires attacked me and then my dad again, and..."

"And now I'm just trying to help since Zecora isn't here."

Zeltros sounded like a much better party planet, she mused. Here was his dad again. Was that kind of relationship like serving under a knight?

"Well, you want help with your head? I can't fix people up, but I can help numb down pain and filter things out of blood." Her Force skills were feeble, but she'd learned that much. It always helped for a Jedi to not be drugged easily. Or intoxicated.

"You can filter people's blood?" Steven asks, sort of baffled by that concept. He squints at her wearily, drawing the wrong conclusions. "Do you... Do you have to take it out, first?"

He doesn't want that.

Scout snorts and crouches down, letting her tail trail out behind her. "No, but it helps if I know where the body does that on its own. You have a liver? Kidneys? They work all the time to pull out toxins and stuff. I can just kinda perk them up."

"Ohhhh..." he says softly, understanding. That's really helpful. He puzzles over it for a minute, trying to remember where those body parts are. He never went to school.

"I think my liver is... here?" he vaguely points to his abdomen. "And my kidneys are... here?" He puts his hands on his lower back. He doesn't know anything more specific than that. He didn't even know kidneys were used to filtering blood.

She nods. Standard basic positioning for humans and near-humans. "Sometimes when they're trying to get rid of a toxin they turn it into something worse and it gets back into the blood, and they can only neutralize it when it comes back. These things get complicated. Want me to try and help? Worse thing that'll happen is nothing and it looks kinda weird."

There's that. Scout had heard talk about it being possible for those with the gift to heal to screw up while healing. The worst she can do is, if numbing pain, also numbing normal sensation for a while.

He nods, readily. He knows that magic healing is weird sometimes, so he's not going to deny it coming from another person. Scout seems cool, anyway.

"Sure... I've never had anybody clean my blood before, but you can try!" An exciting new experience.

"Sit back a moment." She runs through the technique in her head as she goes from crouching to kneeling, something her heavy boots aren't built for. It's also easier if the subject's distracted, so - "Got a favorite food? Something they don't have here?"

The kid's body is weird in ways not even related to what the Carnival's done to him. She can't put a finger on exactly what it is, beyond the overruling importance of some kind of excrescence on the outer wall of his abdomen. But that's all right, she doesn't have to understand the anatomy of a new kind of alien-human hybrid, she just has to determine if he's got blood-filtering organs that work in the basic ways she's been taught.

HELL OF A HANGOVER PT. 1

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