lostcarnival | ⇨ 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 at this point has yet to successfully locate 'Seagull Kid' to take her across right now-she has plenty of change ready to offer anyone (That She Stole), and even a fancy amber telescope of some kind, but a ticket to the island? Nooooope.

The fact that her daemon changes shape every thirty or so seconds might just have something to do with that however. Just a few of the forms Lapis might catch are-tiny white lion cub, black rat, multi-'horned' sea slug, and.... It's questionable what the last one is, but like anything, it moves on while Reira focuses on answering the comparatively gargantuan polar bear.

She may just be as big as Lapis' head. Maybe a little bigger-exaggerations could be happening. "....There's a lot of boats, but they all said they don't go all the way there. ...They said they couldn't do that, or something bad would happen..."

Y'know, like. Death. Mostly death. Bad stuff.

She squints a little at the answer she receives, and then at the daemon constantly changing shape, and gives a little bit of a huff, and waves a gigantic paw around dismissively. "What's the point of telling everyone about the island if they don't even have a way there?" Swimming is beginning to seem like the only course of action. Only because she doesn't know exactly how well flying would work in her current form.

"They said they can take people close enough to swim... ...but that's all they said before they told me they can't bring me, I guess." 'I guess' meaning that they told her she couldn't come, and that was that. But she'll find a work around, probably.

"...Do you think the things that are supposed to be there won't see you since you're a bear?" she asks as well, staring a little curiously. She knew already that just being a giant bear could APPARENTLY happen, but. Well.

She's a little unclear on the details when it comes to what that actually means. "The people on the boats said I couldn't go, since my daemon keeps changing... ...I tried to say it means they can change to what's important, but they didn't listen..." She doesn't sound especially upset about that, so much as upset with the people manning the ships. What kind of people don't trust little kids with these things! BAH!

"How should I know? It's not like I'm from here." And she's not normally a polar bear either. "And I have no idea what any of that means." Said with a tone that clearly says she's not interested in it either. "I don't see how that thing is supposed to be able to protect you, so they're probably right." She jabs a claw at the currently black rat.

Yes, she'll absolutely physically jab it if she can. Does she know it's rude to touch someones apparent soul? Probably. Does she care? Not in the least.

"I just thought someone would explain how being a bear works if you turned into one. ...Is it weird?" she asks, not paying any attention to the jabbing 'attack'. The daemon is very quickly avoiding that claw on their own, suffice to say-easy to do when it can just scoot down into a beetle shape-but rather than wait out the thirty seconds to hold form, it quickly scoots back around into a much...larger 'juvenile' of some kind, some sort of dragon.

"...They just have to turn into something that's good at it, it's not that hard," she grumbles. The form shifts into yet another 'young' but large thing, seeing fit to use appearances as their defense.

Reira's first mistake is thinking that Lapis would stick around long enough to let anyone other than Peridot or Steven lecture her on how to be a bear. And Reira's question is quickly ignored in favour of trying to continue jabbing at the daemon. If it had stayed a beetle it might not have earned her more focused attention, but now it's something interesting.

"I have no clue if it'd be good at defending, but it looks stupid, that's for sure." Nice, Lapis. Just insult someones soul. It's fine.

She's probably heard worst. Former galactic thorn thing is briefly a floating monstermouth gnashing its teeth, followed by something with an axe for a head...

"...We don't have to look good to fight. We just have to fight," Reira decides plainly. "...It's about fighting, not looking good." She shrugs.

"...I can feel when things are coming closer anyway."

With the daemon shifting again and again, her attempts at prodding slowly turn into outright trying to smack the thing, before she realizes that Steven probably wouldn't approve of her trying to slap someone's soul like it's a piñata. Not because she's aware that it's rude or could probably really hurt to get soul slapped by a giant bear.

"If it can change shape it might as well change into something that doesn't look stupid."

Well, she does have a point she supposes. Reira shrugs, and looks to her daemon.

"...What doesn't look 'stupid' then?" she asks, the daemon in question pausing a moment in the form of some sort of butterfly-ferret as a 'breather' from threatening devices. "...Right now they're just using shapes from cards I saw, but I don't know what things look stupid or don't."

....It could become quickly apparent that Reira does not quite know the definition of this word, depending.

"All organic life looks stupid." She says in a rather bored tone. And yes, that includes the bear form she's currently in. What's with this stupid carnival and continuously shoving her into different forms. "And getting your forms from a card sounds even stupider."

....Well in that case. "...I'll just have to make everything stupid forever then."

MIGHT AS WELL OWN IT YO. "...Does that mean you're not organic..?" What IS organic? She's about to find out, she hopes.

"I'm a Gem. Normally." And she doesn't appreciate being a bear, Ringmaster. You're not being witty or funny. "And that sounds about right for humans."

.....There is a very important conversation coming back to her. A conversation with 'Jonathan', who is forever going by that name in her head after all the fuss he made about 'Strange' totally being a name and not a word that sounded nothing like a name.

More specifically- "...Is there another gem here?" She pauses, and adds- "...A green one?"

SHE KNEW IT, SHE KNEW THE PERIDOT WAS LITERAL

Reira gets a rather squinty bear look at her, and suddenly Lapis is on the defensive.. "Yeah? That's Peridot. An Amethyst and a Pearl were here too at one point." And... There's also Steven, who is part rose quartz but is not Rose Quartz which is a little bit hard to wrap her head around.

And of course Blue Diamond, but Lapis would rather do anything she can to not talk about her diamond if she can get away with it. Which, considering she's currently a thousand plus pound polar bear, she absolutely can.

"...And she's also A Peridot?" asks, though she sounds a bit more hesitant now-that's a bit of a side effect to suddenly having the literal impression that this road might be a little. Dangerous. She still had to ask it though, so she quickly adds-

"...Jonathan said it was 'just a name', because he was trying to say that it was the same as 'Strange' being a good name, but if she's a Peridot, then it makes more sense than something being named strange. You can't be 'A' Strange."

⇨ GREYSOL

Harbour Docks!

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