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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Reira's daemon, unlike most others, refuses to settle-it changes every thirty seconds at the least, lasting sixty if it feels particularly good about something, and the forms vary from vastly fictional to blends of the 'real', to animals she's witnessed while within the carnival, to any number of non-humanoid duel monsters locked away in her head.

Or at least, they take the forms of younger, childish versions of such. It is very briefly that they witness the duo on their way to the acquisition tent suffice to say, but brief enough that they pause and stare (and enough perhaps that a minute long tiger cub, followed by lion cub, followed by attempted liger or tigon happens).

It is such an...impressive amount of certainty that radiates into the air.

It's almost paralyzing, for the lack of better words.

...It may well BE paralyzing in fact, excepting that.

Well. Blue Diamond is going into the tent she needs to go into- "Ah-!"

She hurriedly follows after, albeit making sure to keep safe distance from anything she might bump into, such as someone's tail, or the other's dress.

Edited 2017-09-08 01:50 (UTC)

The tiger seems to take notice, of that ever shifting daemon if nothing else, measured blue gaze studying the little form for a moment before padding silently after his other half. It's interesting and worth noting, quiet enough to not be overheard.

That, in combination with the small noise that Reira makes, is enough to make the blue gem pause and turn back, studying first the small child and then her (for the moment) smaller daemon. She still doesn't quite ... understand how 'children' worked, beyond being half-sized humans, but that hadn't stopped much before.

"Hello. Are you going in?"

Little soon fades-briefly there is a rather large young eagle, and then some kind of griffon formed between those animals again, and so on, so on....the variety is in there, somewhere.

Reira herself focuses on the much much taller Blue Diamond, nodding. "UM-! Yes! I'm supposed to be a thief, so I have to steal things now that we're at a place to steal from."

This is not quite EXACTLY how it works, but it sort of hit the point.

"My, stealing." She does NOT approve. It's not her circus and thus her rules dno't apply but this whole thievery thing, surely it wasn't exactly necessary! Of course if one were intending to send someone out to steal, being small would be of benefit. "How terrible." And yet there's no judgment or reproach to Blue's tone in spite of the words and the feeling, it's just not her place to make that call.

"That may be difficult, with this one changing so much," the tiger murmurs, reaching out one enormous paw as if intending to try to hold Reira's daemon down, as if that would somehow help. "It's very noticeable."

"It's what the Ringmaster said," she merely replies, nodding. "...It's not that dangerous..." She has her reasons for that gauge, really.

As it is, the daemon instantly darts to the side with immeasurable speed, having swapped to a hummingbird.

"...That's why they just have to change into not noticeable things then." This looks easier said than done, but... ....Well. Every thirty seconds the hummingbird is apparently either still a bird of roughly the same size, or even just some sort of moth at one point. "...I can feel if someone's coming so I don't get caught though."

An interesting choice of words indeed.

....Bird may have a paw on their head, despite all of that.

Blue makes a humming noise under her breath, a single tone note of faint disapproval. The Ringmaster should not be asking people to steal! "Dangerous, perhaps not. But inappropriate. It is best to compose oneself in a manner that displays the brightest fire of our cuts, not the occlusions."

The bearing of a Diamond is not exactly suited to small human children, nor is the terminology.

Even if the tiger manages to catch his much smaller not-opponent, he's exceptionally gentle. Blue learned long ago how to measure her strength against possible fragility, and he inherited that as well. It's not helping though, that little daemon still changes! "Even so, accidents happen. This .. thievery is unbecoming. Is it the only task you have been given?"

"I'm looking after animals too," she explains, moving to find something to sit on for the time being. The daemon, meanwhile, turns into a snake, rather curiously burying their face into the fur. This is quite soft. They like it.

....They're now a small hamster on top of the paw. "...They're easier to feel the feelings, I think, so that job isn't very hard. ...It's nice, because I never saw most of them," she adds, and as if on cue, the undead sparrow she's been carrying around peers out to peep from in her hair. "...Like this one."

She's a little off topic though. "....It's supposed to just be stuff the carnival needs though, I guess..." ...Drawback; she has not been told what the Carnival needs.

She is absolutely stealing some useless crap later.

There's usually things about, if not benches than things like overturned buckets or left out props and the like. Blue would as well but for now she remains where she is, the height gives her a better advantage to see what's going on with her daemon and the smaller one.

"A better task, I think." She had her own zoo, she could approve of keeping animals! Granted, animals keeping other animals was a little odd but humans seemed to enjoy it. If that sparrow is undead, Blue doesn't know the difference. Surely that's normal SOMEWHERE. Being clueless lends to a certain broad-spectrum acceptance of things that otherwise should be exceedingly alarming. "And seeing new life is always interesting, preserving it is also good."

Like the snake that becomes a hamster. The tiger slowly turns his paw to make the littler creature run, crystalline claws carefully sheathed. "We need weapons, though you are too small to be finding the useful ones. The enemy may be coming." For all that it's an ominous statement, it like everything else either says is gentle. "What are your names?"

"...I can find them," she insists in turn, oddly serious when she states as much. "...I used to have to get lots of things for war... ...so...if I can do that, and do it for someone I like this time, I want to do that." That may be, but she is still a child-something that, being the child herself, she often fails to realize.

"...I'm Reira Akaba," she adds, but she doesn't so much as look to her daemon.

The daemon merely has no answer, making its way up now as a large centipede in attempt to reach the tiger's shoulders.

The tiger swivels to give Reira a long, calculating look. "I don't think humans can go into space well. That's where the best ones are. Are you human?"

Well, if she can that really solves a lot of issues Blue's having about the defenses of the Carnival. She's fairly certain orbital weaponry trump invading fae fairly easily. Put a little fear of the wrath of gem into them! For a moment Blue reaches for the insectile looking thing crawling through her daemon's fur but stops short of actually doing so, some instinct perhaps preventing it.

Touch is bad. OK. "Call me Blue." If Reira's not introducing her daemon, perhaps that too is etiquette, and she won't offer her tiger's. This doesn't bother him much, he's mostly occupied with waiting to see if Reira is capable of space travel and seeing if he can catch her daemon.

Space? Really??? She looks a bit disbelieving, but...well. "...if they're there, I could use duel monsters I guess... ...they don't have to breathe..." It Might work (it would not). But. Hmm. "Are they in this outer space, or a different one though..." A problem has been discovered.

Fortunately, the centipede-and then lizard-scoots a bit to the side to avoid Blue as it is. It just makes things easier. "Umnn...Okay!" Blue. That works for a name, she thinks.

Blue is blue, and thus it is a very easy name to remember. Her entire title is reserved for those that ... seemed to require it. As things stood here she lacked that rank so why focus on it? "All outer spaces would have the necessary things to make such weapons. For example a simple metal rod flung from orbit would have the force of a large bomb once it struck the surface."

Blue was rarely involved directly in combat strategy but she'd learned that one thousands of years ago! It had been VERY convenient.

"But for now I suppose terrestrial things must be considered, I see no spacecraft here." And the one gem she knew could reach space seemed recalcitrant at best. "But please, be cautious about thievery. Few cultures, biological or otherwise, seem to treat those caught well."

"Oh! ...We could probably have something for that then," she immediately notes.

"...Kurosaki had a card that went to space when it was summoned, and attacked from there..." That's right. Card game holograms made a LASER SATELLITE (shaped like a bird).

As it is, if land based is what they need, then land based is what she'll focus on. "Okay. ...Land things are probably easier to find anyway..." she decides, nodding in 'agreement'. "...I know stealing gets punished a lot. ...If I didn't steal properly, the people who told me to get things at home said something bad would happen if I came back to them without it." She chews her lip-it's no secret that 'something bad' would probably not have been something like a slap on the wrist. "...So I know how to be careful. ...And I can feel where everyone is, since everyone will be feeling something! So I can hide really fast."

"'Kurosaki'?" That's not a name she knows. "Is this someone new to the carnival?" That Reira's not even talking about someone in this reality completely eludes her. Surely the child would only bring it up if it were relevant to the situation and thus a potential way to use things in space.

Hiding, Blue suspected, wouldn't be enough. Animals had better senses than humans, that much had been in the earliest reports. Daemons seemed to be animals..

"And if hiding is not enough?" The tiger turns, to step awfully close to Reira; it's pretty clear he's simply scrutinizing the little human up close and personal, there's no animosity to be found. "What then? Can your companion defend you? Where are your weapons?"

"He's from where I came from," Reira explains, blinking. "...But if his cards can do it, I can probably find cards that can do it too...the duel disks do the same thing." That's all it takes, after all.

As it is, Reira's daemon briefly launches off of the tiger, shifting through a few larger, albeit still child-staged creatures, the majority of them resembling something more akin to perhaps a corrupted gem than anything. They are 'monsters', most certainly, but near the end those monsters are practically weapon formed.

Reira's deck, after all, was practically nothing but living weapons.

Even still, Reira herself doesn't back away from the tiger, if anything just looking him in the eye. "....I know what to do if I get caught. ...That's really hard though. ...Everyone has feelings-and when they think they found something, their feeling changes. ...It gets to a strange sort of scared and angry, where you don't know what's there. ...That's when you have to make sure you're going to be far away, or else."

That didn't necessarily mean that this person wasn't also in the Carnival, and Blue waits a few moments to see if this matter would be clarified. When it is not, she chooses to not backtrack to it. One way or another, if there was someone with orbital weaponry here she would find out. "Worth keeping watch for that too, then." A card can't be that hard to find.

The shapes Reira's daemon takes are all thoroughly unrecognizable, but for Blue Diamond that was pretty much anything on Earth and associated with it; for a few moments she's left wondering bemusedly if any of that was 'daemon' or if some of that was 'card'.

"I could catch you." It's said with utter conviction, as if it simply wasn't within the realm of possibility that a human could ever escape. Diamonds were good at rock-solid certainty. "Perhaps others of this place could as well." It's still not a threat, it's just ... not threatening. In spite of being a several hundred pound tiger. At best, just a warning. The universe was full of strange and unexpected things, and humans by and large were neither the toughest nor fastest things out there.

"We don't mean to suggest you are incapable," the tall woman murmurs; the description of emotions were certainly familiar to her, such things had run rampant during the rebellion, hadn't they? "But if there is one thing even I have learned here, it is that there isn't always a way to escape. Preparing for the worst.."

But here they are at acquisitions. The tiger glances towards it, thoughtful. "Perhaps we should see to a weapon while we are here."

"Not with more than seeing." Reira seems quite sure about this herself, and it becomes evident why in just a moment. "...They definitely can't. ...Because if the daemon side touches me, then the other side is hurt." It's a strong implication-and her voice is practically steel. "...The people here don't want to touch other daemons either.

"...If it means I can run though, I can do it. ...it really is okay," she adds, and her voice goes a little more appropriately quiet. "...Even if I got caught, they're not soldiers here," Reira murmurs.

"...they don't want to do the worst, so it's not the same as home. ...I know that."

Blue glances down at her tiger, who in the same motion looks up at her. Although nothing is actually said there's certainly some form of communication going on, one that sets the striped not-beast circling the small human child again. "They might, depending on the preciousness of what you've chosen to steal," the gem says, not ungently.

It seems straightforward, but on the other hand Reira really didn't seem to be preparing for what was likely inevitable. Everyone got caught eventually. "Are you prepared for a human being perhaps deciding to discard these unspoken rules and seizing your companion?"

Reira is not even remotely her responsibility but the idea of thievery sat so unpleasantly with her that she couldn't help but speak against it, even in a sidelong fashion.

In her mind, it is the foolhardy that get caught-the foolhardy, and also...well. "...Umnh-I won't be stealing everything...just things that might be important for here, so..."

A human discarding it though...Well. Her daemon briefly becomes an Extremely sharp looking sort of creature. Quite literally sharp, in fact. "...There were a lot of people like that where I used to live," she admits quietly. "....It's not good, but I know what to do because of it. ...They had me steal things sometimes too, but... ....it feels like I can decide if it's too dangerous to do, this time. ....I have that choice I think." And that's important, she feels. Since it seems like part of the worry here is....well, getting caught doing too much of it.

She knows not to get too far in the rabbit hole now though.

"What might be important to have that can't simply be ... 'paid for'?" Ah, commerce. Although Blue had been introduced to the idea of buying and selling and had a fairly reasonable grasp of it, she didn't have it all down pat. Surely everything a human had would have a price.

But she was proud of what she did know of how money worked, and she was pretty certain anything was for sale. Maybe Reira just didn't know she COULD buy things.

The spiky thing that was once a daemon is batted at very, very carefully by the tiger, whether this is to test sharpness or something else is a good question. "A choice to not steal is good," she muses. "Best to choose not to. If you find something you think must be stolen, perhaps investigate its cost first, payment can be easily found."

When in doubt, don't get into a situation where getting caught is an issue!

"I don't know!" It's quite the mystery actually. "....If I see people paying for things though, I guess I'll know then." ....Still stealing lots of shit though.

Like Money.

"...Having choices at all is good. ...It's nice to not be scared of what to do, any more," she hums, nodding in agreement with her own self. "...I'll make sure I look for the price first," she promises.

Stealing is 100% not okay and utterly improper. She's going to have to see about doing something about this untoward practice the Ringmaster is encouraging.

Still, she's done her best to hopefully sway this particular human away from such an uncouth path. "And remember, you don't have to pay for it yourself. The Ringmaster will do it." There's a pause, and a thoughtful noise. "I suppose I would, as there is no Treasurer yet."

Boy that's going to be a talk for sure. But, Reira does at least keep it in mind....albeit tucked neatly alongside the fact that the Ringmaster herself said she'd have to steal some things occasionally.

Well. "Um-you're standing in for the Treasurer..?"

"For now, yes. No-one else is available."

She hadn't much minded the workload, when one doesn't sleep finding something to do all night could take a bit of time, and a purpose beyond sitting about was nice.

"Until recently I also handled acquisitions."

"Oh! ....That's what Childermass does now," Reira observes aloud, nodding. "....umn...well, I'll make sure I talk to you then! ...Whenever something happens that needs money."

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diamondsare - 2017-10-11 04:23 (UTC) - Expand

end thread here maybe?

soft_focus - 2017-10-12 04:03 (UTC) - Expand

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⇨ GREYSOL

The shape of your soul

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end thread here maybe?