lostcarnival | ⇨ GREYSOL

Entry tags:

⇨ GREYSOL

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 155 - Day 169
Where: Greysol
What: The carnival resumes its tour, this time heading to Greysol, a city tied deeply into the fabric of the multiverse. Here, everyone has an animal companion from birth that is the second half of their soul - and thanks to the Ringmaster, so do you. (Remember,

joysweeper is our guest event runner for this location, and location specific questions should go to them.)
Warnings: Individually marked!

THE CITY OF GREYSOL↴

The carnival arrives in a manicured park in the center of a big city that sprawls out along where the river reaches the ocean. It’s spring, early enough that nights are chilly, warm enough in the days that people and their souls savor the weather, and sometimes shelter together from the rain. Greysol was designed from the bottom up to accommodate the human-dæmon bond. Go out and see!

► THE SHAPE OF YOUR SOUL: The dæmon-forming spell kicks in at about four in the morning. Most characters will wake up with their souls in some small form, curled against them. Even if they were awake, they became dazed and unfocused while their souls were being drawn out of their bodies and have little memory of how it happened.

Until that evening every character's dæmon is able to change shapes, and children and some teens will continue to do so. Most will settle on their permanent forms by evening. Characters without dæmons will just look on, and the few who are thousand-pound bears have to handle being really big.

► IT’S GOOD TO SETTLE: Elaine Tavis Aracari, sixteen-year-old daughter of two actors and a moving pictures sensation herself, just ‘settled’ - her dæmon Tavis stopped changing shape - as a stunning blue peacock. Settling is a major coming of age milestone and celebrated as such in different ways all over the world. She and her family are throwing a massive party in the central park and inviting the public to join in! Enjoy easy access to free catering, live music and showings of moving pictures, and displays of mostly trivial magic. There are also form readers from across the country setting up booths, happy to accept a small fee to inspect your dæmon’s settled or most favored forms and tell you what they mean. Is there anything to these analyses? Eh, maybe, but they’re flattering and fun.

► WITCHING HOURS: Characters who are clearly witches for this event will often be assumed to be in town for a lover, and people, witches and not, may want to know who that is. Humans usually regard them with wary respect and interest. Real witches living with their human families or on business quickly suspect that something’s up, but without clear and present danger take a relaxed wait-and-see attitude. Wait for long enough and any possible decision will come around again, they believe.

There isn’t time to learn much witch magic, but witches, real and carnival-made, have an inherent power: the ability to fly using branches of “cloudpine”, an attractive soft-needled tree common in the park. Witches usually ride large branches as if they’re steeds but can use even short sprays, and you’ll probably see the few witches in the city coming to the park to do so. Why not try?

► BEAR PUN: Human-panserbjørn relations have historically been troubled, but have warmed in the past century. It’s the 65th anniversary of the breaking of the Siege of Bertin, a much-mythologized time when Spectres flooded Greysol and a company of panserbjørn arrived and directed efforts to get the survivors out of the city. A statue is being erected and many florid accounts of the story are being told. If you’re in a panserbjørn shape for the duration of the visit you will probably get thanked and celebrated by people trying to hide their nervousness of you. Expect someone to ask if your dæmon would be a human - it’s a common supposition.

► KERNER ISLAND: From the harbor you can see a wooded island. Although there are no rocks to speak of it sports a tall lighthouse, and nearly all boat traffic avoids it carefully. On a clear day someone with binoculars or a particularly sharp-eyed soul can see loads of trash, birds and various other animals that don’t seem local, and… children? Adults and settled teenagers will see tall vague shapes moving about too.

When asked about it the most important thing adults will tell other adults is don’t go there. They’ll hold their dæmons close and tell you that on that island are things that eat souls. They may also admit with mixed pride and shame that it’s been a source of wealth and innovation for the city. There’s a facility there that can open windows into other worlds, and the children who can reach it can cross through and bring things back. Many of the children are recruited by research and development teams on the lookout for items they can use, but there are also kids out to have adventures or who’ve run away. More on this later.

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Syrlya stands a little bit behind out of respect, but he is lifting on his toes a bit to assure he can see over the heads of everyone else. The man is so vacant and lifeless he's almost sure he's just a corpse until they get him moving.

He looks around quickly at the white-coated men and their... strange transportation, the boat, and then follows that line straight to the island in the distance. Then it snaps back when he realizes they've already hauled the man in the vehicle, slamming the door, and driving off.

He leans over, asking nobody in particular in the hopes that anybody might answer while they're gossiping. "What just happened?"

The two men who'd been crewing this odd boat are hanging around, rubbing their faces and leaning on each other. Their dæmons are pointedly not snuggled up to them or even very close, but face away, their body language hunched up and unhappy.

"They took 'im to Kerner, so they did," a dockhand says. "Serves 'im right." Despite what he's saying, his painted turtle dæmon is hiding in her shell.

A noodle peddler shakes her head. "That's so harsh, though. Surely jail or the guillotine..."

"Nah, nah. If 'e was in prison 'e'd be in solitary all his days. Can't keep a seizer around normal people, even murderers. Either 'ed kill them or they'd hear about it an' kill 'im, so they would."

Syrlya's gaze moves back to the island in the distance. He's heard little bits and pieces so far, but nothing cohesive except for that it makes almost everyone apprehensive.

"So it is... some sort of punishment for criminals?" He furrows his brow. The man looked dazed and empty. It wasn't quite like the expression of shell-shocked soldiers, when there was no life in his eyes... but it was the closest thing Syrlya could visualize. "What did they do?"

Amser flies down to the ground, its feathers puffed as it sidles closer to the turtle daemon. It doesn't make any move of comfort, and is instead heavily scrutinizing the daemon while Syrlya is focused on the man's actual words.

The turtle dæmon remains in her shell, in her sling, peering out from the depths. She's small enough that she's normally carried when her body's walking around.

The dockhand glances him over. "Not from the coast, eh? Well what do you do to a man who goes an' grabs the fuckin' hearts right off people an' goes and pulls 'til all the tubes come loose, an' carries off their poor bodies? Wouldn't even jus' attack 'em like yer standard muderer, not 'im."

His dæmon's limbs tremble and pull further into her shell, and the dockhand strokes it with a bit of tremor in his own fingers. Many of the people around are making faces or turning away. Mostly these are sailors and dock people, ugly language doesn't dismay them, but discussing violating the taboo? It's like he was in polite company and brought up eating babies.

Syrlya's response to that actually probably would be to run headfirst into violent confrontation to stop them, but he isn't going to just say that.

Instead he keeps his face perfectly neutral at the dock hand's graphic description. He glances down at Amser, who still seems tense, and he's sure this is one of those daemon things-- if they're external souls, and his is gone, he's likely nothing more than a shell. Dead in everything except the air in his lungs.

But he'd hard sonething different about the island and it has him curious. "... I have heard children go to that island. Do they handle the... punishment?"

Someone has to. A corpse can do nothing for itself. Who else finishes the process and delivers the body back except those on the island itself?

The dockhand shakes his head. Someone else protests loudly. "Of course not! That's the worst part, having your little pre-settling adventures and then you see the pacification boat swing by..."

"I thought the worst part was feeding a Spectre at all."

"Prisons won't work out and guillotines' too fast."

"Then just hang these people! Then we don't have to do this and take them and keep them with the old victims, it's just over!"

Seeing Syrlya's confusion the dockhand clarifies for him. "They don't take 'im to the island isself, see? Spectres go an' reach out in ten, twelve feet of water. S' why the boat looks like it does, dunnit?"

The boat's extra, single-seat pontoon held at a severe distance does make it look very awkward, and it seems like there's some kind of mechanism of chains being inspected now - like the pontoon can be released to float on out and then a winch operated to reel it back to that distance. One of its pilots has a platypus dæmon, the other some kind of petrel. Presumably one's echolocation and the other's eyesight make them able to tell where to stop.

Syrlya leans over to peer at the boat. Well, that's less dark than he was imagining. He can't say the way his own people handle punishment isn't regarded as controversial, so he'll let them debate that much among themselves.

"I see... thank you for explaining it to me." He steps back to disengage from the crowd, Amser flying up and forcibly sitting on his shoulder to avoid getting separated.

That's when he notices Scout and makes a beeline to her. "Did you see it?"

Scout's been watching, the tip of her glamor-concealed tail making slow, troubled passes back and forth. Her dæmon has a very similar tail moving in synch, left to her right, and his ears are back. She shifts him to her hip; he's a bit too large to be comfortably held for long.

"See what? Where they went?"

"I think we have long last track of where they were taking him," he says, glancing down the road. "But I meant the state that island left him in. I suppose you would call it death."

Even if the body was still breathing, could it do anything except waste away? "It was a serial murderer, apparently."

"One that disregarded the taboo."

"I... he was very badly off, yes," she says carefully. Scout's abilities in the Force don't include much in the way of psychic power, but there had definitely been a sense of wrongness about the man. How much of that had been a reading of him and how much the obvious revulsion of the people around her, she's not sure.

"I did hear about where they took him. I guess there's other people there, too, but not all... 'seizers'."

Syrlya raises a brow. "Other people who have also lost their souls, or other criminals?"

Because that changes the nature of this 'place' a lot. Though, he's admittedly less interested in what they're dolling out as punishment than he is the actual nature of that strange island. IS feeding these soul-eating creatures even a good idea at all? How do they know they're not connected to something else?

"People without souls. It's not a prison, apparently. Someone called it a home?" She's not confident of this, but then, if the inmates are in a state like that, would it need to be a prison? "They seem to think of it with more pity than... all this, here."

Scout manages to hold back a shudder. "Given the controversy you'd think they'd just kill people like him. No one's happy about this, it looks like."

Pity, hm. Syrlya's gaze is drawn back to horizon, toward the distant island.

"Why do they continue to keep the body alive? Is there any hope that the soul can... recover?" He furrows his brow, sounding uncertain even as he says it. It's final, isn't it? Losing one's daemon and one's soul. If all that's left is a lifeless husk, then...

"It practically is death. I suppose they keep it for when they need more violent retribution than execution by blade." Or hanging. That much he can understand, but if it is a form of death, why bother to continue maintaining the flesh that housed their person in some sort of home?

"I don't... I didn't ask, but I don't think they think it happens," she says, playing with the braid dangling in front of her ear. "I guess the people who took the boat out were affected by being that close, and they'll recover? But not the prisoner there."

She nods. Scout's got a passing familiarity with the punitive systems set up on a dozen worlds, and knows that many of them get very harsh and even nonsensical. "That's what it looks like. It's sort of public, too, or this part at the docks is. Maybe that's part of it? A warning to anyone who'd go and do this kind of thing?"

Syrlya nods absently, folding his arms. That was probably it--and of course, nobody really wants to see it, so there's controversy. He can understand that much, although he still doesn't see the point of refusing to let the body die with the soul.

"That island is unsafe to inhabit, but they've still found a way to draw from its resources," Amser muses. "Has anyone from the carnival scouted it personally?"

"This is the first day we've got here, and we don't have any really young scouts right now." Not a lot of scouts in general, really. "So not yet. Maybe later."

She looks Amser over. Dæmons are strange. Her own soul, settled by now as an alien panthac, has been staring clearly, but he's glamored as a bird whose field of view is less easy to extrapolate. "How're you doing with... you know, this?"

"They would have to be very young by human standards, wouldn't they?" He's not sure if that's normal or not, children are en enigma. Taimi was always very independent but there also was a lot he would never take her along for.

His expression sours a bit as she points out Amser, and he and the bird exchange a look. "I don't care for being faced with myself like this--"

Syrlya pushes at his dameon's beak to shut him up before he goes too far. "I am tolerating it. I do prefer aspect of myself to remain inside my body, however."

"Yes. Not finished growing, not sexually mature. I think the age of settling is varied, though? I'm past it, anyway." Most people at her age would be settled by now, but there'd be some late bloomers too.

Scout trades a glance with her own dæmon. "It was really weird when the spell went live. I don't think I'll ever understand the whole scope of the Ringmaster's powers."

He pauses, considering that. "It is strange that she has such a spell for something that seems rather particular to this world, doesn't it? Do you suppose whatever she did originates here in the first place?"

That might be something to ask about--it would point favorably at the notion that they may, in fact, all be able to learn each other's magic in the right circumstance.

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⇨ GREYSOL

Worst Thing in the World

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