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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Scout shakes her head, smiling to try and take any sting out of it. "I can get by without having to sleep in quite the same way other humans do, but I can't go without. You're lucky."

Her dæmon declines to speak, but does scuff brass-gleaming toes against the ground, watching Papyrus and his bird soul.

"No, this is another of those times where it just gets sprung on everyone." Scout rolls her eyes, smooths her hair back from her face. "I'll set out when there's more light, I think. The sun's hours from rising and I bet the other scouts are sleeping."

Won't they be in for a surprise.

"Hard to meet the local people when they're all in their bedrooms..." Papyrus grins in response, though he tilts his head a little. "Humans really do have to sleep, huh?"

"So do most monsters," Sistina points out. "Remember Undyne lying around on the couch all night?"

She shifts into a small rodent and clambers off his head onto his shoulder, where she can burrow her face into the fabric of his shirt for a moment... "All these surprises... They're like puzzles, but without any solution. Why? To see how well we handle them...? Practice for some other, bigger surprises??"

"Yeah. Wake us up if you have to, but let us sleep if we don't! We're in so much trouble when we can't get shuteye for too long." Scout's feeling it, the urge to yawn. She fights, even though she's a little curious. Among a lot of different species yawning is contagious, a sort of signal that spreads from person to person. She's pretty sure her dæmon would also do it. Would Papyrus? Would he feel the urge but conceal it until he wasn't right in front of someone?

Scout's dæmon responds, becoming a beaked reptile-bird of some sort, just a few feet tall. He still has brass claws. "It amuses her."

Scout herself shrugs. She's always cautious talking about their fae patron. "I feel like if you asked the Ringmaster she might give a long answer, but yeah, she probably thinks it's fun. This one's pretty novel, I guess."

Papyrus nods, frowning, at the reminder to let people sleep. It's not his first choice, to lay in a bed all night or encourage anyone else to. Between his brother (who he fears would sleep a majority of the day left to his own devices) the vampire who already left the carnival, cranky short-sleeping Lambert, and now frustratingly messy Allen... His experience with regular nocturnal sleep is that it's for messy, inactive people. Not as a necessity. It's mainly memories of Portland that convinced him of anything different. His daemon will need it, though, which will surprise them both.

She pokes her head out enough to watch the bird, wary in some way she doesn't understand. "Well, she's had time to get bored of hand buzzers..."

"Two times is enough to get tired of those" the skeleton sniffs. "This is much more creative."

Delicately she stretches her arm out and taps her forefingers on her dæmon-pikobi's head. He looks back at her but doesn't react. Scout has no idea how to feel about this situation.

"Yeah, if she's after comical expressions of surprise those are probably coming. Well. Two weeks, right? Should get interesting."

"All the surprise will be in the morning! I think I'll linger around the trailers. Catch glimpses of faces, as people first emerge into the morning... After that, the surprise will be... wait. Two weeks... What happens to..."

Papyrus trails off, looking at the figure huddled on his shoulder. Where he stops talking, trying to dismiss the idea, she takes it up.

"...Will we stop being like this, after? All the other stops, we turned back to, mostly, normal."

Scout smiles as the tall skeleton starts planning to enjoy peoples' reactions - it does sound like fun, maybe she'll do that too - but it fades as he falters and his other half takes the thread.

"That's usually how it works. This would probably be a spell, not a change. Something so we fit in more with the world, even if it means kind of... pulling something out of you and making it into its own thing." She'd been so dazed while it was happening, but she'd been awake, and it had been dismaying.

Very quietly, her dæmon says, addressing the dæmon-rodent, "Do you like it?"

"Yes," she says, poking her head up to meet the pikobi daemon's gaze, even through that nervous, hunted undercurrent of prey watching predator. Papyrus touches a hand up to her, and she snuggles against it. "We're not alone, we're not... lonely. I like this."

"If it could happen once, it could happen again. We could... talk to the Ringmaster, and ask," Papyrus offers. He has - they have - talked to her about the longer term changes before, and it worked out. She'd seemed pleased, and what he'd asked for happened.

Looking between the skeleton and the little rodent, Scout asks, "You don't feel vulnerable, having your heart just wandering around outside of you?"

"Soul," her dæmon says. "Hearts are physical. We're souls made of magic dust."

"If you're part of me, how do you know that?" Scout folds her arms over her chest, shifting her weight on her long feet.

He just shrugs, a weirdly human gesture coming from a bird-lizard. "You saw it too. Besides." Leaning his beak down he nips at his own foot - Scout winces - enough to scratch his skin. Rather than droplets of blood welling up there's something luminous and ethereal.

"Okay, don't do that," she says instantly, vaguely creeped out.

Papyrus shakes his head at the question, but they both listen attentively to the explanation - and demonstration.

"No wonder I don't feel more vulnerable," the skeleton says as the daemon shifts to a moth, drifting down to look at the injury close up. "I'm already dust, magic, and soul! So we really are just split in two. And she's not going far."

The moth's wings flutter, hovering a foot or two above the scratched foot. "But... monster dust doesn't glow. Does it?"

"You are?" Scout feels foolish immediately after asking that. She'd learned while working on her first contract that sometimes - often - it was a terrible idea to try to make every little thing she saw make sense according to the rules of the galaxy. Of course a talking skeleton without flesh to sustain him is magic and may not be made of the same things as human bones. "Uh, okay. Good for you?"

She has no idea if monster dust glows, so she looks up at Papyrus too. Her own dæmon watches the moth, less in a predatory way and more with an aspect suggesting general wariness.

"I mean, I haven't seen many dead people." Papyrus quickly admits. "Visiting people who fell down, to encourage their friends and family... That's different than lingering around for the funeral."

"Sans' dust didn't glow, that... time," the moth offers. Admittedly, it was Sans-the-giant-bone-wolf, rather than Sans the skeleton. A big giant transformed shell around him, like a magic mecha, that he learned at some point in his time with the carnival. The spell might not be the same as a dying monster. "It was just dust."

Scout feels like she should also share now? She's seen plenty of dead people but he probably knows, he's got to know by now, that usually corpses stick around and start oozing.

"Um, well, when my people die we prefer to cremate them. Burn their bodies to the point where nothing's left, but all the physical substance in them is just made into smoke and air. It's symbolic."

She decides not the comment on 'that time'. A lot's happened and she knows about the rebirth thing, if that's relevant now.

After Hell, probably a lot of people know about the rebirth thing. And by now he does indeed know about most peoples' remains stick around after death. Lapis' decorative lawn skeleton, being a real corpse found in Atlantis, made an excellent if unsettling introduction to that concept. Oozing, though... that would be news.

"So nothing's left?? How do you have funerals, without something to..." Papyrus gestures with one hand, fingers flickering down like he's carefully sprinkling something.

"Scatter the ashes? We don't. Part of the funeral is watching the body be burned. What's left after we die just becomes part of everything, just like our spirits do."

Scout glances at her dæmon, who looks back steadily. She doesn't feel all that different with him here. Would Jedi in a world like this just die and leave their dæmons behind?

"'Part of everything'..." Papyrus slowly repeats, his voice softer than usual. "That sounds nice. Monster souls don't last like human souls, so..."

The moth shoots up, flying at Papyrus. He raises a hand, somehow anticipating what she wants, and she clings to a finger with wings fluttering.

"...We hold onto what we have, and put their dust with their favorite things."

Scout's dæmon becomes a purple, mammalian falcon-analogue and hops up to glide to her wrist. She runs her fingers down his tail.

"That sounds nice too," she says, because she doesn't know what else to say. Jedi hold communal property and don't usually collect much in the way of personal effects. Ash treated that way would mostly end up housed with lightsabers. Maybe scattered in the Temple. "Sorry to get you down so early, Papyrus."

"It's no matter!" he insists, wiping at any stray tears and flicking them away. "None at all. The people I'm mourning... they're not even, really, technically dead. I'll see them all again!"

Well. Most of them. Assuming all goes well. He goes shifty for a moment, at the end of that thought, but recovers soon enough. Most is pretty darn good.

The falconlike creature makes a little noise, like a squeak or a chirp. He'd like to nose sympathetically at the moth, if she weren't on her body at the time.

"Oh. I hope so." Everyone she's grieving is dead. Oh, they live in the Force, she knows this, but not as people she knows and can talk to, not as individual personalities and voices. One of Scout's teachers, long ago murdered, had talked about this. These hands and eyes that have been knit into a shape by the universe, will hold it for a few score years, then lose it again. That must be enough. After, one dissolves into the Force, like honey into hot tea.

She sniffs and rubs her hand under her eye. Her dæmon hops onto her shoulder, ducks under her hair, and presses his delicate furry flank to her cheek. Scout swallows and tries a smile. "It's hard, though. They matter. There's no shame in being sad."

Papyrus goes still, disconcerted. "I..."

Dismissing that he misses them... is that like dismissing their importance, too? That's not a thing he wants to ever mean.

Being a moth makes it hard to get cuddles from anyone, skeleton self or other daemons alike. She lifts from his hand, expanding into a very large, very fanged tiger and landing on four paws... then turns to nuzzle at his leg. He buries a hand in her fur, scritching at her head and chin for a moment.

"They do matter," she offers while he's still working through the idea. "We didn't mean it like that. It's just... We can't show people how sad we are. It gets them down, it gets us more down... and keeping spirits up is hard enough."

"I get it. It's better to let yourself admit to being sad, sometimes, but drowning in it doesn't do anyone any good." She's not always good at feeling grief without giving in to it. Both are important.

"You can still remember them, though. Tell stories about them. Celebrate their lives. Cry, maybe, but laugh too." Scout leans her head against her dæmon. It's surprising how bracing that feels. "I guess I haven't told a lot of stories about my people, lately. I wasn't in a place where that was a good idea."

She's been living with Mandalorians, who are... Hearing that an eleven-year-old boy had deserved to be murdered by a relative of her hosts isn't something Scout can stomach.

"...That's a good idea," the daemon decides. "I'll feel better, thinking aloud about them."

Papyrus nods, shoulders relaxing as he continues the head scritches; they have some kind of feedback effect where he can feel how calming it is, too. Truly, the advantages of an external soul can't be dismissed.

"Do you think you're in a better place?" he wonders. "If you are... I can offer an ear any time."

Metaphorically. He can be a great listener, when he stops talking over people and overshadowing their words with his own expectations. And so many stories Scout could tell him, well, there's so much new to it that he'd be more drawn into listening.

Screened by her hair, Scout's dæmon-twirrl opens his mouth and closes it on her ear, gently, reminding her without words that she has to keep it together. She's always got to keep herself in check.

She straightens her spine and lets her tail curl in an arc down to near her feet. "I appreciate that, Papyrus. This is better. I'm not sure it's good enough."

Here, now, it's more about her. Scout keeps wanting to tell people this or that. She still dearly loves a way of life and a people that are lost, or nearly, and it's hard to keep quiet sometimes. It would hurt to be open about it all.

"But maybe a little. Still, though - I'd want to hear your stories too. You can cry around me. I won't mind if you don't when I cry."

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⇨ GREYSOL

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