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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Reira, for her part, understands very little of the point to this play. Something about witches, and going home? The matter of the heart however is something that assuredly hits close to home though, enough that her daemon holds form for a solid sixty seconds instead of the typical thirty as Reira frowns confusedly to 9S.]

...Why not? Why can't a machine have a heart?

[OH BOY. You have opened a can of worms, Reira.

9S peers down at the small human. This would be a child, right?]

Machines don't have feelings or emotions. They're just mimicking humans. There isn't any meaning to what they do.

[He says it all with absolute certainty.]

[Definitely a child, and....Definitely not believing him at all.]

...How do you know it's faking it then?

[The question comes with a particular edge to it, and a frown comes on her face. It'll likely lighten if she has any reason to think this is a matter of differences in worlds, but for now.... ...Well she's pretty sure machine duel monsters at least have hearts sometimes, so it's enough to be irritated for now.]

[Because he's been in their metaphorical heads and seen things and he feels the need to reject the notion that machines can actually think and feel because it makes him uncomfortable--]

Their logic circuits aren't complex enough for them to be capable of it.

[Most machines are simple, truly mechanical in all senses of the words. But others...]

Sometimes they'll say things, but they're just accessing human data and imitating speech.

[A part of her wants to press again, that these are just statements and there's no PROOF, but the other seems to radiate so much...certainty, that it gives pause.

At least until her daemon (briefly a large st. bernard, before shifting about ten seconds later into what looks to be a massive coloured sheep with bitty ram horns threatening to absorb her into its wool) nudges her from behind.

Somewhat hesitantly, she asks-] ....The machines...here you mean? Or the ones where you were from...

[It does make sense, the pair think to each other, for in hindsight, isn't it a bit like how duel monsters and therefore those creatures and spirits don't exist anywhere?? Maybe machine means something like a toaster that talks.]

[Luckily...]

They don't have machine lifeforms here.

[It's nice to have a taste of what human life really is like, in a world where machines are only fantasy.]

Except in human entertainment like this.

[It's fortunate, but it does bring 'her point', in her opinion.]

....So then there could be places where they have hearts after all.... [The basis of her logic is admittedly quite flawed there, given it's mostly that they HAVE to base such entertainment on SOME truth, but oh well.]

[NOPE.]

Never.

[It's said with absolute conviction.]

A machine can't have a heart. If it did, it wouldn't be a machine.

[ALRIGHT she'll humor him on this, if only for a second.] What would it be then?

What if you thought it was a machine, and then found out there was a heart, would they be something else after that?

[A scoff.]

I wouldn't make that mistake. I'm built to be able to tell what's machine and what's not.

[There is a frown.] ...if you're built though, then what's the word. We use machine for anything built to do stuff, or anything mostly made of metal that moves, or different monsters...

[Throw her a bone here 9S, but also-]

The tinman they have might not be Your kind of machine though, because of that.

[Hard to say, given that it's obviously a living actor.[

[Well HE doesn't know the Tin Man is actually an actor.]

I'm an android. I'm mechanical but I'm not a machine.

[Not a machine.]

Biiig difference.

So if it's mechanical and has feelings, it's an android?

Nnno.

[That's too simplistic a definition for 9S to be satisfied with.]

We're made in the image of mankind, so we carry their thoughts and emotions.

[He presses a hand to his chest, where a heart would be on a human. For him, it's where his Black Box resides.]

You could say a part of humanity is in us.

Then what are the non-people ones? Things that aren't people have lots of feelings too, even if they're not exactly the same.

[Actually, she finds it easier to understand the nonhuman ones at times.]

Not androids.

[8)

As far as 9S is concerned, the remaining are either machines or mechanical devices. He can't believe he's even having this conversation. 9S glances back at the film. Well, now he has no idea what's going on since he was too focused on this discussion/argument.]

Hey, weren't you watching the show?

[Look, a distraction!]</small.

They're not 'machines' then either. You need a name. [She's stubborn on this and the distraction isn't working-] ...And they all went to go stop the witch, went through the forest, and now winged monkeys are attacking Dorothy.

[She's good at paying attention to Many Things 9S, and that Is indeed what's going on on the screen.]

[It's what happens when 9S actively avoids expending processing power on something he ultimately views as pointless. And hearing the summary...

9S wrinkles his face. Good thing he didn't waste his any of his CPU power on paying attention to that drivel.]

Wow. I'm glad I wasn't watching.

[Ugh. He can't believe he's even entertaining this conversation.]

Do I look like a wordsmith? If you care so much about it, why don't you come up with one?

How come you're here if you don't like it at all then. [She feels like watching when you don't like it defeats the purpose, really. Also.]

Because humans already had a word.

Machine.

So if we made one up, it'd have to do with machines, and you wouldn't like it.

Because I didn't know it would feature a machine!

[Indeed, he does not like it.]

And a machine can't be sapient. If you can bring me a machine you think is complex enough to have thoughts and emotions, then I'll look into it myself.

[Hrmmn. She just frowns...and...]

...Why is it 'android'?

What does that word mean in pieces? [she asks, changing the subject entirely.]

Huh? Why is it android?

[Ummm... Etymology isn't really his area, but...]

Um. I guess we were to break the word into its component parts... andro- means 'man' or 'male'. While -oid means 'having the likeness of.' Which is kind of funny now that I think about it, since almost all the androids I work with are female...

[Hmmmm. Well.] ...I think 'man' means just people sometimes, so it's probably that...

[Still. She tilts her head, making her decision.] ....So not human ones would be anidroids then.

Like animals. [The witch is now mEEEEELLLLTINGGGGG though, so her eyes move to the screen.]

...I think the 'tinman' might be an android, if that's what it means when they have feelings. If they made the tinman look really human, people watching wouldn't know they weren't human, right?

[He's pretty sure that's not right; there's another prefix for people man. But anidroids? Really?

But the conversation has returned back to this damned film, so 9S reluctantly dedicates some of his CPU to paying attention to it.]

People might be fooled, but just because it looks human doesn't make it an android.

....People made that one.

...It's a movie. [Even she knows movies aren't real.] ...They put a person in a costume and made a movie...

...I don't think they'd make a robot with fake feelings for that, [she adds, frowning. It doesn't seem like that kind of movie.]

Settle!

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