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

The gasp Reira makes is a truly astounded one. "HAAAAAUUUHHHHHH...." Her daemon, quite briefly, is some sort of sun-bear cub. "...Foster!" she shouts, eyes wide and amazed.

...There is...a bit of a pause however, since. Well. "...Why are you a bear..."

"It's become something of a theme," he replies promptly--and a bit unhelpfully.

He can actually tell the little undead sparrow is nearby, though not exactly where. Well. He can kinda tell where. He can tell it's on her person, anyway. In her pocket, probably.

"Besides, daemons are souls, right?" He gives hers a short glance--it seems like it's shifting around a lot more than any others he's seen, although maybe he just hasn't been paying the right kind of attention. Which is extremely possible. But he says it like that settles things--which to him it does, but probably not in a way that makes any sense to her.

"That's what they said," she explains, looking at her daemon a moment. "...It's weird, because everyone's feelings are in two places now though."

So if the fact that this kid has empathy wasn't obvious already...well.

Also surprise Foster, the bird is in her hair.

Foster doesn't hear 'I have some kind of empathic power' in Reira's sentence. It may be his own inability to really feel them, but 'feelings' are way too abstract for that conclusion. What he hears instead is that those with daemons are experiencing their emotions twofold, either twinned by the daemon's presence, or two different emotions altogether.

Which sounds... like some kind of nightmare, frankly. He can barely imagine feeling something once, except--

Well. Is it even really a feeling?

"Not everyone's," he replies plainly.

Well, as long as they totally understand each other, there's no issue right? Missed point, what missed point. Reira just blinks for a moment, and nods. "...Umn....yeah, not bears I guess. ...How come some people are bears though..?" she asks, frowning a bit. It seems a little strange, all things considered.

"No one should have to look at a soul like mine."

His tone is.... icy.

Foster's eyes have been glamoured to be as dark as any panserbjorn's, which makes it much harder to tell if he's making eye contact or not. But it probably doesn't matter.

Not even he wants to see what his soul looks like.

".....Ummnnh...." ....Yes it is, but she's noticing there's not much feeling behind it for some reason. ...That's super weird, but she won't push on it. "...Does that mean you don't have armor things..?" she instead asks, realizing that something is missing about all of this.

She was pretty sure she heard at least one person talk about bears and soul armor.

That's because Foster's emotional well is generally pretty shallow. It's more like an emotional puddle, really.

If you're not putting him above his place or talking about blood or fate or disease, he's... it's just not that deep.

"No--isn't it more fitting this way? Even magic cannot disguise the nasty truth, can't change what despicable, revolting worthless trash I am. Even if I go back to the carnival grounds, I'm blond again...! Not even a real white bear!"

His lips curl back into something like a snarl, but not--it's more like the agony of thought, a grimace of struggle between the tatters of language and meaning and idea, the effort of taking that fragmented grasp and putting it together in reality to... make something--if not coherent, then at least a frustrating shadow of what he knows.

His claws scrape audibly against the pavement.

"It's not... it's not real."

Edited 2017-09-12 01:49 (UTC)

Yeesh-it's for the best that he's not feeling 'much', at this point, because even what's happening now actually stings a bit. She grimaces, and holds back a flinch, but at the very least does her best to try and understand. Or help.

Or...something.

"...Is being a bear better?" she asks, looking to the side. "...If people change sometimes, maybe you could end up turning white instead of blond..?"

Foster is still in pieces when she says it, scrambling for words and purchase, and his response is equally reflexive and fractured, gritted out through bared teeth and clenched jaws--

"I'm blonde because I'm half white."

It's an inherent contradiction. Is being a bear better? Better than what? Better than being human? Why does it matter what he is? Why does it matter, how could it possibly matter--

But once challenged, he's still baring his teeth, still digging his claws into what he has left, snarling that it's his, it's his and you can't take it from him....!

She's not stupid-but there are things she hasn't grown up with, and this is one of them. A very big, big social matter she's grown up without, though really she's missed plenty over all. Reira is now starting to feel a little ill-it makes her feel sore, and she almost takes a nervous step back-

But this is Foster, isn't it? And from what she knows so far, he won't hurt her, right?

"....I thought blonde was yellow..."

She has to say it. She has to. She's quite confused. "...Mine's almost white, so maybe that's got white in it... ...but how does yellow have white in it?"

He.... blinks. A long, slow blink, like sediment at the bottom of a lake.

Things falling back into place, reality settling back down.

He's.... annoyed. Except he feels slightly sick now, but sick in a physical sense only. Even if it's not really.... meant for him, it's almost like a slap in the face, the way that it comes up here. Taako didn't have any idea what he was talking about, either--Foster had chalked it up, largely, to the ambiguous, undescribed elf world that Taako had come from, but it wasn't like he hadn't noticed.

The carnival was almost completely devoid of black people.

Taako was the first face he'd seen that wasn't Asian or zebra or alien grey. It wasn't entirely welcome: the first face he'd ever seen so close to his, in a way that even his parents never had--but at the same time, it was almost a relief to look across the trailer and see someone brown.

He pushes one paw back through his fur, digging claws into his scalp.

"Do you not have black people where you're from?" He regards her like that, his eye turned downward, narrow and dark. But whatever the feeling was, if ever it was a feeling to begin with--whatever that stone under the sediment, that light reflected on breaking waters--it's gone now.

".... just............ never mind."

Black??? Solid black, is what her mind thinks.

"....There's...brown people, like you are?" But she stares at the other and finds herself nervous. No longer hurting-just nervous, anxious perhaps, and she finds herself looking down.

"...Okay. ...I'm sorry if I don't know something. ....I think there's lots I don't know. Everyone has been showing me lots of new things here-like 'ice cream', or 'pasta'..." She swallows, and looks to the side.

"...You showed me what little birds look like. ...I only saw those on cards, before..."

Cards... flash cards? Postcards? It doesn't matter. He's... angry now. Honestly. Or as close to 'angry' as he can muster, which is more like--

A reflex. An instinct. The recognition of an expectation and his inability, his illegitimacy, his incohesion and how ~~it's~~ ~~he's~~ she's wrong, wrong, wrong.

"It's not special," he tells her, claws curling at the side of his muzzle--just one paw, his ursine shape not designed to lift two that easily.

"It's just a bird, it's just a carcass, it's just a failure, it's just fucking trash!"

He's... not just talking about the bird.

She flinches-and for a moment a sharp, sharp pain does bite through her, because even self hate is hate, and whether it's a form of anger or otherwise it still hurts. She flinches as if burnt, and her fingers twitch with the reflex to hold her head, to cringe, to do anything-

She swallows. "....I never saw little birds though," she manages, taking a deep and shaking breath. "....L...lots of bodies... ...but not birds..."

"...And... ...and that makes him special to me...!"

Foster is silent for a long time. An eerily long time, actually, while he churns those words in the storm inside his head--the hurricane passing over and through these conversational waters, as the metaphor might go.

He misses details--he's always missing details, catching impressions, honing in on key ideas and losing messages all at once, unable to process and too able to process things in the blur of the moments. But what he does hang onto--

His mood, as outwardly apparent to Reira and anyone else, does one of those abrupt shifts... though whether it's the storm's eye or the eerie calm of its aftermath is yet to be seen.

"....so it's a he now, is it?"

Well. Well. ...About that.

".... ...I...don't know how to tell on a tiny bird..."

Birds don't wear clothes, or say handy things to identify themselves, see.

Well.... that's a response.

Foster's paw is back down on the ground now, and he's squinting like he's actually trying to think about this--though honestly he's thinking more about Reira's intentions.

Her attempts to be sympathetic to him were undeniably wrong. A dangerous mindset, one absolutely forbidden to let pass. Her values were wrong, and she was wrong to value him.

But she valued 'him' because of the bird--in that sense, she didn't value him at all. Only the bird. Which was stupid, in its own way, but harmlessly so. Or at least harmless enough.

Which, unfortunately, does bring him back to the current conversation. He's still feeling that invisible pressure, run ragged and raw--and suspended, more or less, between calm and storm. But he angles his head away slightly, eyeing her and something off to the side of her simultaneously.

"You're at least as likely right as wrong."

.... what, he's not an ornithologist either.

They're both missing each other quite completely. But as he calms down, so does she, and there is an audible sigh of relief as she keeps from holding her head. The sparrow does come out, at that moment. Peeping worriedly, and quietly. And she slowly takes it on her hand, stroking its head to calm it down.

"....Do you think another bird would know..?

Foster's brow furrows at her.

He doesn't actually care if it's a boy sparrow or a girl sparrow, but it's obvious she does. He's always been pretty contemptuous of the way people attach to pets and use them to fill the holes in their lives that they could fill themselves. As far as he's concerned, a dead sparrow is a dead sparrow--a usable body, not an independent creature whose specific details he needs to invest himself in.

So if this were a cartoon, gears would be appearing over his head--layers and layers of them, stacking in increasing numbers as he tries to figure out the logic behind the question.

After a dramatic screenpan to reveal that the tower of working gears was hundreds of metres high, it would zoom back on his face, just in time for him to speak.

".... what?"

Reira, what are you even talking about now.

"....There's a big bird at the Carnival, named Julien. ....Maybe he knows, since he's a bird."

After all it makes sense for a bird to know what the gender of a bird is, doesn't it? It seems important. "...Things should be able to know what they are. ...Knowing's important," she murmurs, her daemon briefly mimicking a larger young sparrow just to nail the point home.

.... a big bird at the Carnival.

Foster has no idea what Reira is talking about. Or... who. Whichever. Both.

'Knowing's important.'

Is it?

Or did knowing ruin everything?

How much weight can the scales actually take?

"....do whatever you want."

...

"You're 18, aren't you?"

One day, perhaps, they'll meet. Or maybe not. It's really a mystery.

But hearing the 'age' come up has Reira's face brighten considerably, and a smile slowly starts to overtake her expression, before finally the girl nods.

And probably goes a step too far by trying to wrap her arms around one forelimb for a hug.

That...

That's a bad idea.

Her brilliant smile is his only clue, but it's enough to warn him away from what's coming. A nauseous feeling, anger, something like a twinge of fear--

Unfortunately, reflex is.... a dangerous thing, when you're a bear.

The only thing that saves the streets of Greysol from being accidentally splattered with the blood of a seven year old girl is a month or so spent in Portland, Oregon, and the residual instincts tied to the memory of being an even bigger 900-pound bear.

Instead of slamming Reira into a wall, his heavy ursine head swings down, blocking her path to him before he rears all the way up--standing to present a much more imposing, much more frightening posture than the steady-looking quadruped she was trying to hug.

By the time he takes a swing--backhanded, or perhaps backpawed--one hopes she's had time to get the hint.

"NGHHK-" By the time he's slammed his head between them, there is no need for the frightening posture. She's not even looking at it.

Instead she's holding his head. It's her very soul that his paw makes contact with, shaping itself into a giant, protective thing of spines, because frankly the last thing Reira can think to do is run and the only thing she can do is hold back a scream again. "Khhhgf...Gh-"

Anger, and Fear, and all the negativity that swim with it-and suddenly just like when there was hate stewing on the air, everything hurts again and this time she can't even take a guess as to why, instead curling up as she fights for breath.

Her daemon speaks, but it doesn't likely help. "BE CALM! BE CALM!"

⇨ GREYSOL

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reira dats racist

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nOPE

oh n O

??????

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