⇨ 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

[espigeon]

Julien hasn't had this human body for very long. He responds with how the weather affects a giant bird. "I'm more comfortable in the cool, but it's so much harder to fly when it's raining and there aren't all these updrafts! And I'm not completely waterproof."

"It's a good start on a bath, though! As long as there's not ash in it," Julie pipes in, upside down.

He presses his lips together, a tighter smile. That's something he'd discovered in Keye, when things had gotten really bad. "Ugh, yeah, when you have to fly through ashy rain, that's the worst. I was all gray and gritty forever."

[kingsroads]

Strange...just isn't mentioning the whole 'how does Julien know about updrafts and flying' sort of thing. This probably has something to do with the giant bird and truth be told, Strange has absolutely no idea what the hell's up with that in the first place and has decided that it's safer for his own sanity if he doesn't ask.

Instead, he's just going to keep lightly talking about the weather, like every sort of boring small talk convesation ever.

"My problem is I'd prefer my baths to have soap in it. And, at the moment at least, I don't know a spell to call forth sudsy rain."

[espigeon]

"Ah. Yeah, that'd be tricky, I bet! And that'd make everything gross, I'd appreciate if it didn't actually happen." Soap destroys what waterproofing he has, and it's such a horrible pain washing it out of feathers. It irritates his skin.

Still clinging with her feet, Julie pushes her little bat self forwards, looking at the seal. "So, if he's magic, do you do magic too?"

[kingsroads]

"Of course!" the seal remarks, with a haughty tone. She's a part of his soul, after all. Scooting away from Strange, the seal gingerly places a flipper on a tree. Closing her eyes, she starts to mutter something under her breath. A moment or so later, the tree slowly starts to bloom, flowers blossoming seemingly out of nowhere.

Stepping back from the tree, the seal gives it a little nod--and Strange just looks downright delighted. Because he actually had no idea that the seal could do magic in the first place.

"Well this is wonderful!" he laughs. "You've performed the spell just as well as I usually do."

[espigeon]

Julien's eyes go wide, and in fact a whole collection of new eyes appear and open, over his skin and clothing and even out over nothing, hovering in the air to look. Julie twists as she becomes a gold-and-white dove to see better herself, hanging much more awkwardly with bird feet.

"...oh," he says, belatedly thinking he was probably supposed to applaud or exclaim. The eyes start closing, and disappearing after that. "Wow. Uh, it's not that I didn't believe you about magic! Just, that was pretty cool."

[kingsroads]

Strange has gotten used to all sorts of people with all sorts of changes during his stay at the carnival. That being said, the possible bird man is slowly rising to the top of his list of people who are too goddamn weird. That eye thing is creepy as hell and Strange's confused expression plainly shows that he thinks it's creepy as hell.

"Well thank you?" he tentatively responds, still looking at Julien with a wary expression, as if he expects the man to do something equally weird next. "I suppose it's got something to do with the fact that she's part of my soul as well. She's me so she can do what I can, things like that."

[espigeon]

Hard not to notice that. He has so many eyes, before all the unusual ones disappear. Typically Julien doesn't open that many at once. He knows people don't like them. It tends to happen when he goes too long without doing it, and then when he's surprised or intent on something. He can't feel dismayed by them, personally. As Iuliael he'd been much, much weirder.

Well, nothing for it, besides not telling Strange about his inventory thing. He shrugs. "Makes sense, I guess? As much as anything here does. I'm just rolling with it."

[kingsroads]

"Truth be told, some aspects of daemons make more sense than other worlds did." When will Strange get over his hateboner for digital worlds? Answer: never. It's become a petty grudge for the sake of a petty grudge at this point but he does not care.

"After all, this is just magic—or, at least, the Ringmaster's spell is just magic. Though perhaps the actual daemons are magic also, just a long-forgotten kind."

Strange trails off, lost in thought. A spell to change an entire world? Well it is possible.

[espigeon]

Julien boosts his dæmon to his shoulder, where she busies herself with pulling on and preening his blue, feathery hair.

"I bet there's something in mythology, if it's forgotten. If not here than somewhere else in the world." He feels a bit guilty. It would probably be smart of him to get interested in these worlds and their histories, not just going along for the ride. Well, there's still time.

[kingsroads]

"We'll have to see if there's a library around," Strange remarks, with a wry little smile. He's already dreaming of libraries and all the books and just settling down to read. Before he can continue talking, however, his seal butts in with another annoyed seal huff.

"Or we can ask someone else. If you go to a library, you'll spend the whole day there!"

[espigeon]

"Bookish, huh?" He grins. "Too bad there isn't the tech to just download them for later! An inter-planetary... inter planar? Uh, a Kindle that had literature from across the multiverse would be aces." Julie nips his ear to remind him about references; he has no idea if Strange had known about ebook readers in Portland or retained the knowledge if he had. "Those are, um, they're sort of a blank book that can show the writing from hundreds of other books in them."

[kingsroads]

Strange just blankly looks at Julien. He opens his mouth, about to ask what a Kindle was, but thankfully Julien pipes in with an explanation. Of course...Strange still has no clue what he's talking about. He thinks he's got it though, and continues talking with a little scoff.

"Surely it would be easier to just find the one book you were looking for. After all, a book that can show the writing of hundreds of other books must be terribly huge."

[espigeon]

"Oh, no, they're tiny. Here, actually, hang on a second."

Better not to demonstrate his inventory power here. Strange isn't comfortable with the eyes, dark window-voids and water would probably also be too weird for him.

Julien turns his back, his dæmon swaying on his shoulder as he does, and raises his hands to chest level for a moment. He turns back unzipping a plastic bag with an e-reader in it. "It's a tech thing. When my place was wrecked I lost all the books I didn't have on me, but I still had all of these."

The one on the screen is a romance novel involving dragons. He's not the intended audience for it and that does not really matter.