lostcarnival | what's cooler than being cool? ice cold

Entry tags:

what's cooler than being cool? ice cold

Who: everyone!
What: hey wait a minute, why's it suddenly cold oh for fuck's sake Strange...
Where: the carnival + Alola
When: all of day 76!
Warnings: none, will edit if needed

the Carnival
Surprise, it's now winter.

Starting from the early hours of day 76, the Carnival is covered in snow, the temperature rapidly dropping from 'nice' to 'freezing.' Patterns of frost cover everything and icicles dangle from most buildings. Try to be careful as you're walking around, patches of the ground are frozen over and incredibly slick. Nobody be that dumbass who tries to stick their tongue to the ferris wheel, you're just going to regret it later. Enjoy the fact that almost anything that used to be a liquid is now frozen solid. All in all, it's like someone flipped a switch from summer to winter--there was absolutely no sign something like this would happen in the first place. Why not ask around to see what's up? Or, just enjoy the change of weather and pelt your friend in the face with a snowball, that's also an option. The Carnival re-enacting the plot of Frozen lasts all day, though things finally start to melt and/or magically vanish once dusk settles.

For all you vampires who've slept through most of this, the effects of winter still linger a bit after the faerie's vanished, though in slowly diminishing form. The temperature's a bit warmer and some of the liquids have started to melt, but it's still a bit uncomfortable. It's hard to clean up an entire magical wintery hellscape by yourself, okay?

Alola
Due to the way the Carnival drops people in Alola, it's entirely possible to miss the fact that something weird's going on at the Carnival. Still, some of the winter wonderland manages to seep it's way into the tropical paradise. For most people, the changes are noticeable but easily dealt with. The temperature drops to something more chilly but not downright freezing. Occasionally there are small flurries of snow, but they'll end up melting fairly quickly. Locals are downright confused, mentioning that really, it shouldn't be this cold, this weather is weirdly unseasonable.

Also, what's that weird little ice fox that keeps showing up? More and more ice Pokemon feel a little bit braver thanks to the cold temperatures and are willing to venture out into areas that ice Pokemon might not normally live in. Go train all your fire cats by having them beat up the sentient ice cream cones, everybody.

( ooc: here is the relevant ooc post! This is an open mingle-style log, so feel free to create your own threads, tag around & have some fun! )

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"You ain't k-k-k-kidding."

You think you have trouble, Lambert? Ash dressed for a day on the beach, which Alola seemed to mostly consist of -- so her shorts are even shorter, and she's wearing flip-flops. The poor girl was so wracked by shivering she had to struggle to form words.

"We-we gotta get somewhere warm..."

"We were somewhere warm," Lambert answered, gritting his teeth to keep them from chattering. Ash wasn't going to get much sympathy from him, because at least she had fur! That was warm, right?

His Mudbray was completely unbothered by these developments, looking at all the white fluff around them with a touch of curiosity, ears perked. In all its life in Alola, it had certainly never seen anything like this.

"I'm heading back there as soon as I check on something," the witcher added, finally, striding forward through the snow. It was only regrettable that the lakeshore was so far away from the entrance, but at least it would take them by the trailers and some of the bigger tents.

Yeah. She had fur on her ears and fur on her tail. That's about it. Not exactly toasty, man.

"Hey, you're gonna f-freeze if you just -- " But he was already taking off, leaving her to scramble on behind. She couldn't just let him get frostbitten!

No matter how much Lambert might bitch about how the cold feels, his body wasn't actually that susceptible to it. Winters in Kaer Morhen, that stretched on forever and wall you into a drafty ruined castle, were arguably far worse than any of this.

... Of course, at least in Kaer Morhen, he had fire. So.

At a particularly deep drift of snow he doesn't feel like wading through? Lambert just straight up holds out his hand and generates a stream of fire, melting it down into slush as he wades on through.

Cool!

You know, not SUPER cool, she could do that sort of thing too, but he didn't take any invoked spells or tricks to pull it off, which was always fairly impressive. Ash, on the other hand, WAS cold -- at least until she began to sing a song under her breath.

The two of them now paced through the winter terrain to the instrumental sounds of 'Ring of Fire', though Ash at least kept her voice low enough that the lyrics weren't intruding. This may potentially ruin Lambert's dramatic stride, though.

Lambert might not need more than a gesture to cast magic, but it's also hardly infinite. When the flame sputters out, they've at least made it to the tents, and the brisk walk means that he's managed to warm up some, at least.

"You've got a song for just about anything, don't you?" he asks, over his shoulder.

Ash nodded brightly, letting the song fade a little now that they'd both warmed up and the tents around them offered some shelter from the cold. "Music's infinite, man. But it's also about intent."

"You called down sunlight back in hell. Can't do it again here?" Lambert asked, without much real hope of an affirmative answer.

Given she seemed to dislike the cold as much as he did -- if only because she wasn't currently dressed for it, whereas Lambert's hatred for freezing temperatures would persist no matter how many layers he wore -- if she could have done that, she would have already.

"Sure, but the more I try to do, the more I'm putting my magic against whatever's causing this. And not that I'm doubting myself --" she cut off THAT thought with a horizontal slash of her claws through the air -- "but that can have side effects. You know, you push two things against each other, and when the weaker one gives, it does so kinda violently."

"Magic's got so many rules, you wonder why anyone ever bothers to use it at all," Lambert gripes, but really. What's the point of power if you can't toss it around the way the Ringmaster seems to, willy-nilly?

Ash would use the Ringmaster as a very excellent example of why she doesn't toss around power willy-nilly. She cared about consequences, whereas the Ringmaster seemed not to understand the concept.

"I dunno how you came across yours, but mine's as much a part of me as my tail. NOT using it would be weird and probably impossible anyway."

"All part of being trained to be a witcher," Lambert shrugged. As spells go, the signs he knows were simple enough that any magician with enough experience would scoff at them, but they do the job they're supposed to.

In any case, with them back among the tents and trailers, Lambert didn't seem to have any intention of stopping, cold or no cold. He wiggled his fingers at her lazily, clucking at his Mudbray. "Guess this is where we say goodbye. C'mon, Pig."

"Uh." A thought suddenly occurred to Ash, that maybe she might want to be more inquisitive when confronted by a grumpy man who had a clear purpose in mind and wasn't afraid to hurl fire around to accomplish it. "Where are you off to anyway?"

"Lakeshore," Lambert lifts a finger to point in its general direction, frowning slightly. "I was working on a garden." You know, before all this shirt happened.

"Just gonna make sure the plant the Ringmaster gave us hasn't died thanks to all of this, then I'm getting out of here." Someone else's problem to deal with, since there isn't any immediate dying or blood involved.

"Oooh." Well, that was a lot less worrisome than she'd feared, and involved much less Strange-burning, but it still sounded important. "You want some help there? I'm not gonna slam my magic into all this, but helping out a plant if it needs it I can do."

The offer of help's unexpected -- but it's not like Lambert has anything that could help a plant that was frozen, so what the hell. Don't look a gift cat in the mouth and all that.

"All right," he says, with a shrug. "If you want to, I'm not going to turn down the help." Although, more practically-- "Might as well swing by your trailer if you need something else to wear, if it's on the way."

"Yeah, just let me scramble into something warmer. I might have to magical-girl it just to get warm fast enough," she said, making some vague hand-gestures that probably involved punishing someone in the name of the moon.

A reference that's completely lost on Lambert, alas, but he'll give her a smirk anyway. After all that talk about magic, he hardly expected anything less.

"After you." He waved ahead, indicating she should take the lead. After all, he had no clue which trailer she was in.

"Right," Ash said, scrambling on forward in a way that registered as just feline enough to be odd to a mind used to watching humans move. She hurried up to the trailer that she shared with Carly, bolted in, then came out again only a minute later in a big ol' floofy coat, long pants, and boots.

"Booyah," she said with a nod.

So she really was a cat, after all.

"About time," Lambert answered once Ash popped back up, but mostly as a joke -- that was impressively fast for a wardrobe change, no matter how you looked at it. Still, everything could seem like a small eternity when you were out in the cold. Pig's not in sight, having been summoned back into the Pokeball, but with Ash's return Lambert starts heading them off back to the lakeshore.

It didn't take long to find what they were looking for, though it's not thanks to Lambert's great navigational skills or anything. There was no sign of a garden, buried under snow as the lakeshore was ... but there was, however, a neat circle in the snow, as though something had melted through it. Heading over, Lambert found himself squinting at the miniature tree, still innocuously planted in the mound he'd left it in... but with the ground completely clear of snow within a foot around it.

"Huh," Lambert said, out loud. "That's new."

Ash saw their way there with a little hummed tune that of course brought on full accompaniment -- she was terrible at stealth if you needed her powers, but great for keeping warm in this particular case.

As soon as she saw the tree and its sphere of influence, though, Ash dropped the beat -- mid-note, in fact, because she'd immediately made a guess as to what precisely was happening, a guess that made keeping her own music away imperative.

"Is that tree anti-magical?"

"Ringmaster never mentioned anything about that." Though the Ringmaster never says much of anything, let's be honest. Still, Lambert cautiously advanced until he was finally within arm's reach of the plant, but instead of touching it he just placed fingers to the gap in the snow, feeling around the melted edge.

"Looks like it just ... melted the snow before it could build up around it." Weird. But hey, on the bright side, it also means he doesn't have anything to worry about, it looks like.

"Yeah, but, would she?" Ash was of the same mind as Lambert and much more willing to voice her thoughts on the subject. "Either it's antimagical or really magical... so what's the deal with the plant?"

Curiosity killed &tc., but Ash knew better than to expect an answer. No harm in asking if you were okay with being told 'no'. Sometimes you weren't!

"I planted it from the seed the Ringmaster gave me. Knew it grew fast enough to be magic; didn't know it repelled snow. Didn't you get one of those?"

Lambert glances over at Ash, brows raised. "Thought everyone who risked their neck traveling down to Hell got one of these."

Comprehension dawned on her face, as she took a step forward to look at the tree. "Is THAT what that grew into? I thought it was gonna be some flower or something!"

Then she let out a little laugh. "You know, I don't know why I thought that except just looking at it..."

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what's cooler than being cool? ice cold

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