⇨ JAILHOUSE ROCKS

[ringleaders]

Who: Everyone who IS imprisoned, brainwashed, or infiltrating.
When: Day 175, 11:30PM onward.
Where: The Prince's shiny new fortress.
What: Those that have been imprisoned by the Prince languish in their underground cell, while those that are under his control continue to do his nasty bidding. Also, Foster might be here? We'll see how that goes.
Warnings: General fuckery, maybe torture.

THE LAIR OF THE BEAST↴ As the fortress comes into being, the Prince has been reaching far across his realm, beckoning his servants back to him and corralling as many helpless hostages as he can manage. In the case of the unfortunate carnival members who made the mistake of crossing him during their stay, they are being locked away in the most secure inner sanctums, held as collateral against their former master. Those freshly captured haven't yet been bent to his will, but they can certainly be neutralized. Carted away by security and pulled deep underground, there feels like there is little hope of them escaping on their own. ► GROUNDED: The Prince's dungeon is a simple one - in place of cages and manacles, there is only natural stone. A claustrophobic cave somewhere deep in the earth, those within it will soon be completely cut off from the outside world. All the prisoners will have been injected with manticore venom at some point or another, which will be slowly turning parts of their bodies to stone, and if that wasn't enough they have also been partially encased in the stone walls and pillars, as if phased halfway into the rock and left there in various positions. It is an enclosed area, and all the prisoners are within talking distance of each other - which is a good thing, because there isn't a lot else to do with their powers mostly bound and their bodies becoming less and less capable of movement. ► CONTROLLED: Those of the brainwashed that manage to return to the fortress will be set to work guarding and attending to these hostages, along with the help of some of the long term Manor servants. They still need to eat, right, and that can be difficult when you arms are stuck in a cave wall. Otherwise, there may come a time when the Prince calls upon them to do something more specific - and there's also the chance that the new prisoners will fall victim to his power and succumb to his control as well. With the poison in their bodies, it's only a matter of time before they lose themselves.

Comments

[espigeon]

Over the more than a year that he's been basically all bird Julien learned to both love and hate how expressionless it is to people who haven't learned the weird subtleties of bird body language. Here and now he's barely using his human body at all, and so it's his voice that gives away confusion and conflict.

"That's true," he says carefully. "And like. I really really shouldn't say this, but like, if I say I'm not talking about the Prince. Some other guy. The Dauphin, I don't know. That one." Julien pauses and marshals his thoughts, then goes and shuts his beak with a snap.

He produces all the sounds for speech down in his chest, no need for lips and tongues to interfere at all, so he can speak perfectly clearly with a closed beak, but it's muffled. "Is the biggest fucking asshole I've ever seen oh my God." Eyes ringed in faint white light open in the air around him, looking for anyone who might have heard that outburst and would report it. There's just captives looking like a weird art exhibit. He closes the eyes again. "I belong to him but even if I was his favorite kind of servant, all pretty and completely human, he still takes their names. It's going to happen even if I'm really good. So... in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess?"

God but he feels so unsafe saying that. He's pretty sure those are the thoughts he'd had out in the open air, but of course, there's the more or less functional namelessness of the servants who've been like this for years, and there's doing it without care for preserving ability. As punishment. Even so. He has to make some token defiance while he's still able.

[whattaprick]

Lambert really does have to try to turn and take a look at Julien at that, catlike eyes narrowed in the dim light. There is one thing, though, that is eminently clear.

"He hasn't taken yours yet," he guesses, and even feeling out the name in his head, he knows that's correct. There's none of that yawning, empty void where the skeleton's name was in his head, no blank space where there should be an identity. The bird may be brainwashed and poisoned, but he's still whole -- but considering they were taken the same night, subjected to the same punishment, how close is he riding the edge? Is there something about being a monster that made it easier for the Warden to succumb, or something about having two bodies that made it more difficult to break someone's will?

"Julien," the witcher says, slowly. "What else shouldn't you do?"

[espigeon]

His head is swimming. He shouldn't be here, maybe he can tell himself they're neutralized and harmless but he knows he shouldn't talk to any of these people, he's going to be caught, he's going to-

A deep breath escapes him when he hears his name, and his pupils go very quickly from tiny pinpoints to gaping and back a few times. It hasn't been taken yet but he's taken a lot of poison by now. There's this weird, painful-happy shock of recognition when he hears it out loud.

"I shouldn't interfere with the other servants. I shouldn't contradict my master or his wisdom and benevolence, or his inevitable victory. I shouldn't talk to the enemy, unless it's to try to goad them. I shouldn't even get close unless, again, goading, or if I attack them. I shouldn't think about... I shouldn't question why I'm...." The feathers on his neck bristling, he mutters a stream of words that don't make any sense in context, lined up and rattled off in rapid sequence, when I go for a drive I like to pull off by the side of the road turn out the lights get out and look up at the sky and I do this to remind me that I'm really really tiny, until it's been enough of an interruption of the thought. If this body sweated, he'd be pouring with it. "Loyal, so loyal."

He can think around the fact that he's being controlled and has to serve pretty well by now, after all the poking he's done. He just can't actually think it or say it. Of course he has reasons to be here, to do this. Of course they're real reasons.

"But actually there's shouldn't and there's can't and it's not... there's only so much flex. And I can't let you out or allow you to go if you were out, even if I knew how to... um, unchip. Maybe if you were in cement or hardwood." Woodpecker attributes. Julien's not all pigeon. "I was kinda hoping for more traditional jail here? But he's wiser than I, of course."

[whattaprick]

The compulsion to serve the Prince can be resisted, then, if not explicitly. Lambert knew that much already, in some sense -- the rabbit girl, the bicorn, even the butler, they've all found ways to slip his rules and give them answers, but maybe the Prince has the arrogance and confidence that holding their names makes rebellion a trivial concern. Fishes trying to slip off a hook already pierced through their vitals. Here and now, where there's still a mind to fight against, the enchantment must be more heavy-handed. And clumsy.

Not for the first time, Lambert wishes he was smarter. Word games, loopholes in contracts, he's not good at those, not as fast as he should be. So it takes him some time to come up with an answer, turning his head away again, staring at the wall. This feels like a farce, but there's not much room to be embarrassed at this point in time, is there?

"Nobody's talking to anyone," he says, staring at the wall, frowning. Is it intent that matters, or the performance of it, he wonders? "Just thinking out loud. That's all we can do down here." For now, anyway. Ugh. If Julien was can tell the Warden's been recaptured (reclaimed?) by the Carnival, that must mean he was somewhere he could see it.

Outside.

"If I could fly," he murmurs. "I wonder what I'd see out there, right now."

[espigeon]

"I know I think better in the presence of extremely tasteful and attractive hunting trophies," he says as brightly as he can manage. It sounds sarcastic. It probably is sarcastic. Julien would like to find somewhere to lie down, pop something in his inventory so he can heal, but he already knows that won't help. There's nothing he can do about this. "Or. No. I think more correctly around trophies, they remind me of the Prince's power and the fate of the benighted fools below."

There, he can bridge talking to himself like that.

"It's all ridiculous out there. Completely different. I think... your Ringmaster stole something and the Prince is mad as hell and now the whole domain's like in ruins and divided up. Here's just this giant bunker fort thing. It's cut off from outside, which I'm absolutely put out about because it means I can't hang out in here while flying." He's spending most of his time flying. "All the people were let out of the underbelly, that's where the bad servants go and get super fucked up, and most of the regular servants are out too, it was messy for a while, but now they're kind of in camps and the Carnival's feeding them. There's some kind of route back to the Carnival too, I see people appearing and disappearing there all the time."

[whattaprick]

There's an urge to snap back at Julien for that, something equally sarcastic maybe, but it would all be misdirected anyway. Lambert waits a little impatiently for him to work through it, frowning as he realizes he's learning more about exactly where the hell Julien and the rest got taken to -- the place no amount of scrying or scouting could find.

"She took his Rose," Lambert murmurs, quietly. Foster had at least already filled him in on that much; he might as well pay back the favor and let Julien know just what's gotten them into shit. From the way it sounds, it looks like the Carnival's settling in rather than pulling out, which is both encouraging and dismaying. The smart thing to do would be to get out, but it is the Carnival, after all.

"Idiots," he snorts quietly. But that really doesn't seem like it's directed at anyone in particular, nor is it unnecessarily vehement. They're all idiots: the ones stuck down here, the ones who got caught in the first place, the ones who don't have the common sense to leave while they can. Then again, maybe the Ringmaster took taking the Warden's name as a personal insult. Hard to tell, with fae.

[espigeon]

"A rose? With a capital R? Wow, this is kinda beauty and the beast." A delirious ghost of amusement touches his tone. This is the first time Julien's heard of the Blue Rose. "I have no idea if that's good or bad, but he's angry about it. That's. That shouldn't be good." It's not right, to want his master to be stalled out and inconvenienced, he knows that even as he does want those things. "But, anyway, he has a... he has a shiny rock as big as me that's all powery, and he has his trophies, and he's making them upset out there. I don't know his plan but he thinks he's winning."

Julien struggles to think, and dips his big head to restlessly pick at and worry his neck, usually only tugging his feathers hard enough to preen on them, once or twice clamping down with his beak and pulling a feather out with a soft and unpleasant sound. If he was using his human body he'd be swaying, but he's more stable as a bird.

What should he do? What should he say? He's powerless, whatever half-fantasy he'd had out there deciding to come visit them. Julien knows the only reason he could get here at all is because he hasn't specifically been barred from it, he's probably on the list of people sent to feed the prisoners and it's just that he's usually outside so he hasn't. "I think... I've kinda, maybe got the feeling I've got poisoned. Maybe everyone who was down there got poisoned. The, the warden got stung by my master too, on top of that. He's definitely poisoned. I think it's a theme."