lostcarnival | ⇨ KERNER ISLAND

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!event,
@greysol

⇨ KERNER ISLAND

Who: Anyone who fits the stipulations below!
When: Day 160 - Day 169
Where: Kerner Island
What: Remember the Spectres? Now's the time to meet them, if that's something you want to do for some reason.
Warnings: Individually marked!

A GHOST TOWN↴

[This is a selective mingle log. Note: characters who are young, have flying dæmons or no dæmons at all, and/or have angelic aspect can come to Kerner. Others will feel the presence of Spectres too keenly to set foot on the island. Ask Joysweeper if you want to see what your characters find or talk to NPCs. ]

Kerner Island is covered in plants and animals not local to the reality, let alone the area. Most noticeably it’s absolutely overgrown with a version of kudzu which produces fuzzy kiwifruits. The vines half-choke trees and splay across buildings, creating deep cover for various animals, including shy, harmless rabbit-deer-rodents sporting tiny antlers. There are a few windows to other worlds scattered about, and during the day a couple dozen children ranging from ten to their mid-teens can be found ducking in and out of them. The oldest of them stays night and day unless persuaded to leave. The biggest concrete danger comes from blue tektites ranged in size from softball-sized juveniles up to beachball-sized adults. The children kill them whenever they can, seeing them more as a nuisance than a real danger - a twelve year old and their dæmon and a big stick can easily defend against several at once.

To children and unsettled teenagers the tektites and any new hostile creatures coming from other worlds are the only danger on Kerner. Teenagers closer to settling will feel a sourceless unease, and their dæmons will see things out of the corners of their eyes. The closer someone is to settling, the more they will be able to perceive Spectres, and the more Spectres will notice, passively leach from their souls, and be drawn to them.

The Spectres are intangible, insubstantial, noiseless, and nearly invisible even to adults. They seem formed out of tenuous things like mist, heat-haze, smoke, light reflecting on water, and have twelve-foot-tall shapes that are usually read as columns, or trees, or humanoids. Adults and settled teens can sense a Spectre’s effect on their soul and and pinpoint it by the feelings of nausea and wrongness. Spectres are mindless, drawn to consume souls in the same way fire is drawn to consume fuel. If they can physically reach a dæmon it only takes a few minutes to consume it; if they can’t they feed passively on the internal soul or the soul’s connection to the body, which takes hours to a day to complete. A Spectre’s passive range is much wider than their physical reach.

Having an adult soul and being anywhere near Kerner is unpleasant. Even a few minutes of passive exposure to Spectres leaves the soul worse off. It's more obvious with dæmons, which go quiet and appear to be in pain, but their bodies, and anyone who still has internal souls, feel it too. Most people experience nausea, disgust, weariness, and mounting despair often coupled with a desire to hide it and pretend nothing’s wrong. Even when safely away effects linger, but creating or building things, or spending time around other people, helps restore the soul.

Different kinds of magic can lure and direct some Spectres out of the way. They can’t be damaged physically or by most magic. Angelic magic has some effect on them directly and might destroy a few, but the Spectres are so thick on the island that staying to fight is just going to result in being overwhelmed. This is not a place of glory, unless you’re a kid.

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"...I already know that being worried about the feelings us a bad idea," she remarks, frowning. "...I just said they're there. People can feel lots of things, but that doesn't mean I'm going to always be sad if something is sad. That's not how it works.

"....Your feelings are real by the way. ....Fake feelings are the ones I don't feel. The ones that happen when people get worried about someone else, and try to smile, when they're not actually happy at all."

"They're not real," he snaps, rising off his forelegs--and it comes out louder than he intended, startling him into lying back down immediately.

But again, the gap gives him a second to recover his thoughts. The relentless pace of conversation--constant, immediate--is usually what overloads him so quickly. This time, he's finding enough interruptions in between to sieve his thoughts from the chaos.

"How do you know?" he asks first. He's gotten the gist of it, that something is going on here he doesn't really understand, but the face of it is still amorphous, cast in shadows. Like the island around them, it's made of fog, full of whispers and flickering, fleeting shapes. Then:

"In a matter of... moments, they'll be gone anyway. It's just a few months. Feeling them doesn't make them 'real.'"

Reira flinches-not at the shout but at the anger, a slight grimace accompanying the motion. It lessens quick, however, as she is used to such recoveries-and with a slight bit of apprehension, she tries to answer.

"....They're just there. ...I don't have the same feeling as the ones I can feel are there," she explains, shrugging. "....I just know they're there. Like if someone is confused, or happy, or sometimes hurt, or hungry. Those two aren't....all 'feeling', I guess. But people feel something when those things happen. Like being tired.

"....It's bad ones that do something, I guess. ....Bad ones...hurt," she explains a but slowly, looking to the rabbit den. "...Not a lot I guess. All the rabbit things are really scared of everything but...it only hurts like a shock. ...Almost as much as when my Daemon touched you. It's easy to ignore that much, especially with animals. Animal feelings aren't busy. They just are."

As an aside however, she turns, frowning. "....a month isn't a moment though. Months are long."

Reira's words.... finally make some sense to Foster. No, more than 'some.' It's pieces, like a puzzle, interlocking to form a picture. Individual parts, physically tangible, to create a larger meaning.

'Bad ones hurt,' 'I don't have the same feeling as what I can feel,' 'animal feelings aren't busy.' He can understand these little concepts, and he can see the larger tapestry of meaning they comprise.

He doesn't break it back down into new language ('when someone feels something negative, it causes me pain'), but instead absorbs the unified thing as it is, grasping the consequences better out of the whole.

For example: the reason she perceives his disease's 'emotions' is that whatever tangible byproduct they produce causes her physical pain.

He is very quiet while he thinks about that.

He has no response to it. If there were something to say, it evades him completely. Maybe this is what feelings are for. No, he knows it is. He's supposed to say something like 'I'm sorry.' But he doesn't even know if that's really what he 'is.'

So instead, he says the only thing he knows is true in response.

"....not long enough."

The silence, to Reira....says he understands.

It's nice to have someone not question it. ....But with what she feels from him now, well. ...Reira tilts her head a bit.

".....Not feeling anything ever isn't nice, you know." There is a pause, and she stares at her shoes. "....I had to do that for a while. ....It was too dangerous to feel things. Anything. ....So I stopped feeling things, because that way I wouldn't get hurt too far. ....I wouldn't end up like the 'other people', that the soldiers talked about. ...but...." Well.

"....it wasn't good, to not feel anything."

"....I know."

Foster obviously isn't talking about her past with these soldiers, or what it was they made her do. He doesn't know, and isn't sure whether he's meant to ask. What he does know, though--

He knows how it 'feels' to feel nothing. He knows because it often feels like he can't escape it. That no matter what he does or how deeply he devotes himself to it, it comes back sooner and sooner every time. He assumes it means he's near the end... of his transformation, or his usefulness, or maybe just of what's left of his brain. But he knows that very soon it won't matter which.

He tries, usually, not to think about that. He can't look at his fate too closely. It will happen... soon. That's all he can usually think about. It's all he can ever think about. That's enough.

He thinks about this, his brow creased as his eyes wander, searching out irregularities in the dirt, his rot-riddled thoughts weaving through what's left in there to link the pieces together to draw some kind of conclusion. Any kind of conclusion.

But all it comes up with--

"Where I am head towards.... you are headed away from." He says, gradually. He's both thinking out loud and voicing his conclusion to give solid form to his response. Maybe he's hoping that Reira will know where this is meant to go.

It is, after all, her meaning. Not his.

".....'m I allowed to ask?"

Foster's feelings...do not leave her the answer. She sounds unsure. Hesitant. And her eyes slowly move toward the polar bear, while her daemon merely continues its shifting forms in silence.

"....why you're still going that way? ....Am I allowed to ask that?"

"....."

Foster blinks like he's dazed. Then he bursts out into inappropriate laughter, which is... not unusual for him, but still much crueller and more jarring in the foggy limbo of the liminal island.

"I'm rotting. I'm diseased! Nothing about me... will last very much longer. No, there was never anything to begin with. Three and a half pounds of... meat and decay, that's all I am." His claws dig into the soil, leaving dark furrows in the haunted earth. "I was born sick... the time I have is only for me to waste away in. That's all!"

....Rotting? The laughter, as usual, is strange. The feelings don't quite match it and....

...Well that's not really the point. Reira stares at him. Stares, frowns, and stares some more.

"............Why didn't you just ask the Ringmaster to fix it."

It seems like the obvious solution. "....She could probably stop the rotting from happening any more. ....Or make what got rotted come back. ....But she stopped me from being 'reset', so she can probably do that." Who knows what 'reset' means to anyone else, but. Well.

"To what point?" Foster asks venomously. He's trying to ask what the point of 'solving' him would even be, but as usual, his words fall short of his purpose. It doesn't help that he doesn't know what Reira means by 'reset.' The only familiarity he has with that phrase is... Sophie's video games, and he cannot fathom how one would be reset outside of that. Maybe... that's what it means? Is resetting a kind of death? What does that mean?

"To reset... or to restore, or just end it all?" He laughs again, this time actually rising to his feet, shaking dirt and ghosts out of his white fur and into the fog.

He doesn't go anywhere, though--just settles back down into the same soil he's already warmed with his own worthless but very living body.

"I was born ready to die... just a disease disguised as some kind of hope. There's nothing to be recovered. I have nothing, I am nothing... it doesn't matter what kind of nothing the Ringmaster would make of me. If you Reset nothing, it is still nothing."

As vehement as his words of choice could be, there is a kind of... absolute comfort in them. Even in Portland, he could not be that much better than he is... only he could find a place for himself, and that was something he didn't know he lacked so deeply. But that was a lie, a fantasy... maybe a fantasy he's wasting his time on now... he doesn't have enough time to waste any. Or maybe he has so little time that all he can do with it now is waste it... but he knows that to be false. Any second could be the one that matters. That's why he's still here.

"....That doesn't make sense at all." Ooof, but the feelings are so, so very strange. "....I was originally supposed to end up a baby again, with Zarc, so that Zarc could have another chance to live again. ....When you're like that, there's no memories any more. It's a new baby. So.... If someone else looks after you, and different things happen, you become someone else."

She's literally talking about reincarnation. Anyway.

".....If it doesn't matter, how come you don't try it then?"

That sounds... like something that would not hurt, but also something that would change... nothing. Something he too would have been opposed to, were it offered to him. What is the point of a new fate if it benefits you not at all? Isn't that the same as death itself?

"Because there is no change," he replies simply. "There is nothing of me that is not diseased. I am the disease... the sickness is all I am, there is nothing else!"

A cure that stopped the disease would still leave him a rotted, drooling, waste of life. And all those years that were wasted before now...

"But it's not worth worrying about." No one worries about the garbage before they take it out, except to worry that it's going to go too bad... and then all there is to it is to take it out sooner.

"...it sounds like you have a lot more to live for."

"........that's not how disease works," she replies, with a tone that rather clearly shows how she thinks of it.

That's dumb Foster. It's super dumb. "...And right now you're definitely a bear." The. End.

She shrugs. "...I wasn't supposed to. Yuuya made a contract, and had Zarc pulled out. ....So I asked the Ringmaster to give Zarc another chance anyway, even though he destroyed a lot of things, and hurt a lot of people. ....I'm still....not happy with Yuuya, I think," she adds, quiet. "...But. ...I know why he did it. ....So I won't be mad at him. I just have to make sure that I keep Zarc safe, instead."

Reira's words are perilously reminiscent of Psi's, but then he has to actually try to follow the rest of what she's talking about. Though it doesn't do him much good. What he does get out of it is... limited. Amongst other things, he recognises Yuya's name. His contempt and mistrust for the teen isn't very subtle, honestly.

But the combination of factors do mean he doesn't actually speak; he's too busy giving her a long, penetrating look.

No, no it certainly isn't-not when she grimaces, and actually moves to hold her head this time.

Yikes. Stop that hating, Foster, it hurts.

Foster reacts by turning his head away sharply, breaking eye contact and shutting down on a very instinctive level. One of the problems Foster has always had with himself suddenly saves them both: beneath his feelings, no matter how performed or sincere, there is a kind of yawning abyss, the emotional experience pathetically shallow. Turn it off, for any reason, and he goes blank.

They're not real.

But at least they're easy to erase.

It works. She doesn't know why it works, or what he did. But it does, and she breathes calmly, looking back to him for a moment.

".....I don't know what you hated, but... ....I'll try not to talk about it I guess." It seems important.

"..................You don't hate being a bear though, right?"

Why he hates Yuya is sort of complicated, if also pathetically simple. It comes down to a single sentence, or maybe two. But each word Yuya spoke in that moment adds up to a crime, a cruelty, an insult that Foster will never forgive.

Fortunately, Reira has bigger issues to address.

"Pfff--hahahaha." Foster is caught off guard, and loses his hold on a much more sincere laugh than she's probably heard from him.

".... no. But it's becoming... something of a trend, I think."

He doesn't mind that either.

It's sincere-and she catches that. It brings a small smile from her, and her daemon as well seems to brighten. "I guess that's an 'okay' trend then, if you don't hate it."

Not a bad way to end their conversation at least, she feels.

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⇨ KERNER ISLAND

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