⇨ 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

[criticallyfucked]

Once he has the basic idea, Foster is going to ask... repeatedly, and with increasingly aggressive persistence... about how humans find bears tolerable or acceptable at all. He's looking for a catch, because there is no way a sentient being would be allowed to get away with being so impolite.

Eventually he'll also ask about the island, because of course he does.

[joysweeper]

Past a certain point even the most tolerant bear is going to cuff him and tell him not to act so human. (If it helps, claws pulled and the blow's not strong enough to really hurt a bear, this means Stop and isn't seen as as big a deal to bears as hitting someone mid conversation does to humans.) People used to bears will glance over at that and away, other bears will visibly not care. Bears don't really go in for doubts and long chains of "why". Their human friends would give him odd looks but if anyone answered that kind of thing it'd be one of those - and it's really because humans and panserbjørn can give each other things they can't do as well alone, and they give each other space.

They really don't like the island but someone's commissioned every fifteen years or so to head over and repair the wrought iron housings for the knives. Panserbjørn don't experience Spectres in quite the same way as humans - as adults they see them, yes, and they're affected, but if they don't bring their soulworks (usually armor) then they've got hours of functioning before they shut down the same way humans do. They feel that same nausea and sense of wrongness as adult humans at first, but instead of screaming tearful panic and loss as the Spectres start to feed they breathe harder, gradually go up on the fight-or-flight edge, and start to lose their dexterity. Some of this stays lost until they can build themselves up again, which bears do by creating things out of metal or blowing glass.

They can't fight Spectres and think creating those facilities was exceptionally foolish, but to bears "warm" cities like Greysol are basically in the ass-end of nowhere and if humans want to be foolish like that, it's their business.

Aaaand done! P...robably.

[criticallyfucked]

He pretty much seems to relax into being a bear 100% after that.

Honestly, that's the most refreshing thing that's ever been said to him.

As for being cuffed--he spends months inviting (or aggressively demanding) people at the carnival to do that kind of thing and he shows up here and the bears don't even need telling.

He listens carefully to the information about the island, but doesn't ask anything else about it.

[joysweeper]

I should also note, if someone human works with bears in their forges and workshops their dæmons tend to touch those bears pretty casually and sometimes the bears will indulge by like nudging them or very lightly cuffing at them. The taboo is different there, it doesn't feel like the gigantic deal it does when two humans are involved. Not that Foster will be permitted to touch them himself, nor will they touch him.