⇨ GREYSOL

[ringleaders]

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.

Comments

Streets and also Wuehs

[insidescoop]

Who has two thumbs and is living alone in her trailer now? Take a wild guess. Carly has been handling it rather well considering the fact that she and Jack agreed to fill their contracts 'apart'. She certainly looks more 'brilliant' under the glamor-all filled with light, the aura flowing from her wings and such.

But for now, with the glamor, she sighs as her daemon mutters something about 'useless feathers', the former snake rather displeased with all of this.

"AH-" At which point she notices who's ahead. "Oh! Ash~!" ...That's uh. That's a bird. "A parrot..?"

[amusicaladventure]

"Hey, Carly!" Ash offered her best and brightest smile, because she was very good at pretending --

-- At which Twyth immediately says, "Be honest for once." Letting out a low sigh that sounded remarkably human even for a daemon, Twyth turned his attention to Carly. "A scarlet macaw, though we are conventionally thought of as parrots. Don't mind Ashleigh, she's embarrassed to be seen by you, but she'll get over it."

"Twyth--!!"

[insidescoop]

Be honest? Carly stares a bit, and for a moment her daemon is quiet as well-

For a moment. "Hehhhh, what's that all about..."

...Oh that is. "Embarrassed..!? Why embarrassed!?"

[amusicaladventure]

"Well, I mean, look at me." She might as well cop to it, because Twyth would just tattle on her if she didn't. Ash spread her arms slightly to show off her glamour. "Not exactly me at my best, you know?"

[fortuneglass]

"Well....you could say the same for both of us right..?" Her condor continues to pout, preferring the snake mode.

"Oh, are you normally a macaw then, actually..." she wonders, squinting at the bird a moment.

[amusicaladventure]

"I am always a macaw, Miss Carly," Twyth said. "Ashleigh has assumed the form of a witch, which means I am quite stable compared to most."

Ash, ignoring her daemon's sonorous and formal tones, waved a hand. "You always look good, Carly, what are you talking about?"

[insidescoop]

"Lucky...."

"S-Shush, Iskai..!!" The woman hurriedly waves at the bird, sighing until Ash's words sink in. "Ah-Hehh?! Seriously..? I've definitely had 'my days', you know..!"

[amusicaladventure]

"I don't know that. How would I? Never seen them."

In a fit of restlessness, Twyth took off from her shoulder, the better to fly a little circuit around the street. Ash's eyes tracked him and for one second her whole body gave a little twitch.

Having a bird daemon wasn't the easiest thing on a catgirl.

[insidescoop]

"Well, it's just a glamor, so if you focused..."

Well that's beside the point, and Iskai is still huffing. "A-Anyway, so you're a 'witch' here too then? It's sort of strange that all of them have birds no matter what huh..."

[amusicaladventure]

Ash shrugged. "Not really? I mean, souls are technically unmoored from all biological considerations, but the truth is that who you are is shaped to a large part by your biology. Think about how different you'd be if you were taller, or shorter, or had red hair even -- it'd make a big, big change in everything about you." Ash, at her normal towering height, lived knowledge of that every day. "So if you consider that witchcraft is apparently inherently biological, and is also directly correlated to a given range of physiological traits, then that pattern of commonality isn't unreasonable."

[insidescoop]

"Are they..? I didn't think I ended up the way I was because I looked like this...definitely not to the point that my soul would be really different..."

Well, she frowns, crossing her arms. "It just seems a little weird I guess...There's lots of other things that fly after all!"

[amusicaladventure]

"Oh, you think so? Don't tell me you haven't seen the difference between, say, how people treat pretty girls as opposed to plain." She cocked a finger at Carly, though the gesture lost a lot when it didn't have a claw to emphasize the point.

[insidescoop]

"....Well, I have, but..." ....That's the thing Ash.

She never really. Counted herself in that box. "...You're still pretty 'pretty', you know?"

[amusicaladventure]

"Ehhhhhh," Ash stretched out, looking down at herself. "Androgyny's a thing people can work, I guess, but I just identify with --" She made an hourglass figure in the air with her hands. "It feels weirder looking like this than it would if I looked like something else entirely, you know?"

[insidescoop]

"I guess that makes sense.... ...it IS kind of weird not to have to worry about my top when I'm running..!!"

This is not quite what Ash was talking about Carly.

[amusicaladventure]

But she can't argue that Carly had a pretty good point. Ash had been forced to surrender a certain level of tomboyism herself when she got top-heavier. "Man, you're completely oblivious, Carly. I don't know what to do with you some days."

[insidescoop]

"That doesn't tell me anything about what you're meaning at all..!!!" HELP

[amusicaladventure]

"I mean how other people look at you. How other people treat you. Both good and back things -- I haven't had to tell anyone 'eyes up here' since I got here, but it's gonna be a lot harder to flirt my way into getting what I want, too."

[insidescoop]

"Hmnmmhh... ..I only really had to do that after I joined the carnival..." Clothing thing, maybe? "Ah-H-HEY, should you really be doing that to people anyway?!"

[amusicaladventure]

"Hey, hey, I promise nothing and offer nothing. People are always, always gonna treat me different because of my looks, so what's wrong with taking advantage of that? If I'm gonna be ogled and treated like a thing, then I'm gonna own it instead of just getting beaten down by it."

[insidescoop]

"Mmnnhhh.... I guess I can't really argue..." She murmurs, grimacing.

"At least they're not ogling now..?"

[amusicaladventure]

"Yeah, but... I know I shouldn't, but I kinda miss it," she said rather sheepishly. "Like between these glamours and the fact that no one in the Carnival looks twice at me, I'm starting to feel real ugly lately."

[fortuneglass]

"...But... ...You're not..!" That doesn't mean much coming from her right now, probably, but. Well. "Really, you're not..!! You remind me of a friend at home sometimes, and she's a super model you know..!"

[amusicaladventure]

"Glad someone still notices," Ash said, with a bemused grin. Really, she did appreciate it -- but Carly was so easy to rile up, it was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Easy mode, when she was used to playing on hard at best. "Even if at the moment it sure isn't true. Glamours, feh."

[fortuneglass]

"That's what looking through the glamor is for isn't it~?"