ringleaders: (Default)
Lost Carnival Mods ([personal profile] ringleaders) wrote in [community profile] lostcarnival2017-11-11 10:17 pm

⇨ THE PRINCE IS DEAD

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 178 - B1: Day 6
Where: The Carnival and sometimes on top of the Heart of Stone.
What: Now that the Prince is dead and gone, there's a lot left to sort out. As the remaining servants are liberated and those captured by the Prince are tended to, it's time for recovery and goodbyes.
Warnings: Nothing in particular.

HOME GROUND

At long last, it is over. The Prince is dead, and all of his stolen Names have been restored - all that's left to do is treat the wounds and move on. For the first day or two, the Ringmaster will be arranging passage for the servants that are left, all of which have remembered their names for the first time in years. The earth elemental that had been trapped and forced to serve as the Prince's manor, the Heart of Stone, is happy to help for the moment. It appreciates the Ringmaster's mercy, and is free after untold eons of imprisonment.

Yet, there are plenty of aspects that are far from simple. There are still servants left mad and transformed into beasts, with no easy way to change them back. The Prince's spells outlive him, and those bearing his poison and his curses will have a difficult road ahead of them. Though most of the bestial servants have been rounded up, and a large number that had been reduced to unmoving statues returned, even the Ringmaster can't return them to normal so simply.

The next week is for rest and for settling remaining affairs. If you want to bid farewell to any particular NPCs, or assure care is given where it's needed, now is the time to do it.

A CURE: The Ringmaster will tell everyone simply - there is no simple way to undo another fae's magic. The Prince's powers were essentially on par with hers, which means that those who have been transformed to stone and those that were cursed into beasts and driven insane are not something she can trivially fix. It will take the work of the carnival and a couple weeks of treatment to shed the curse of stone, and the maddened servants are an entirely separate matter. She will do what she can, but for the most part she is arranging for the Prince's servants to be cared for elsewhere. At least for now, the Ringmaster will be animating the stone portions of people's bodies with magic, though those portions will still be a bit clumsy and numb feeling.

THE NEW HEARTSTONE: In the absence of the prince, the Heart of Stone will be taking over the remains of the Prince's realm and preventing it from collapsing into void. As it turns out, the manor had been an earth elemental all along - a form of Wyld Fae almost on par to the Prince and Ringmaster themselves. How the Heart of Stone was enslaved is a long story presumably, but the Ringmaster considers it to be a sign of the Prince's own depravity. The Heart will be allowing visitors for the first couple days of this period through the portal, but keep in mind you are essentially just walking around on its body. At least the realm has a floor, now, instead an endless abyss surrounding it.
drrdrrdrr: (....?)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-11-14 04:01 am (UTC)(link)
She looks away sullenly at first, because that's true, but...

"You, uh... what? Why wouldn't I be back?"
Edited 2017-11-14 04:01 (UTC)
criticallyfucked: (It's all in who you know tonight)

Please stand by, your Foster is melting down

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-11-14 04:16 am (UTC)(link)
He looks more confused, and less patient.

"I'm not... I'm not gone. You're here, and I'm still here. I don't--you're six months too early!" He keeps glancing down at that mouth, which is still chewing, but he's arguing with her face. 'Arguing' might not be the right word. Pleading. He's pleading with her--begging, because it's all starting to be too much, very abruptly, and he all-too-suddenly remembers where those potato peelings came from, and why he's dragging them across the Carnival, and what a horrible, disgusting, absolute fucking failure he is--

And how long it took at the end of Portland--

And--

No. This is his fault. It's always his fault and he doesn't understand why she's back, or what he's supposed to--

Supposed to--
drrdrrdrr: (blammo)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-11-14 04:35 am (UTC)(link)
It takes her a couple moments to pick up what he's putting down, but when she does she looks absolutely perplexed.

"What?? Dude, you -- no, I just left because I couldn't handle, like... Ugh, y'know, all the... feelings an' stuff, not because you suck."

Now she looks super embarrassed on top of everything else, THANKS FOSTER

"--And anyway, that wasn't even the whole reason, there was a bunch other stuff too," she adds quickly.
Edited 2017-11-14 04:37 (UTC)
criticallyfucked: (Blink if you can hear me)

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-11-14 05:09 am (UTC)(link)
That last sentence actually jogs Foster's abysmal memory. Literally abysmal; his brain doesn't really store memories so much as it just condemns them to a black void. For the most part, this isn't that bad--you can go through an awful lot of life with very little idea of what you've done, especially if you don't care about anyone, and no one cares about you. But it's less of a featureless void now, thanks to the Ringmaster.

And sometimes he'll hear echoes come faintly back when someone calls down into it.

For example: Peridot said something very similar, something about Amethyst having other reasons. At the time, he'd interpreted it as a genuinely offensive act, like she was attempting to make him feel better or deflect blame from him, which...

"I do suck," he points out, rather simply.
drrdrrdrr: (pbbbttttt)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-11-14 05:12 am (UTC)(link)
"Yeah, so what? I suck too, obviously, otherwise I woulda talked to you before I left or whatever," says Amethyst, shuffling awkwardly in place as she swallows that stomach-mouthful of potato peelings, however the hell that actually works.
Edited 2017-11-14 05:13 (UTC)
criticallyfucked: (When your laughter was meant)

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-11-14 05:18 am (UTC)(link)
Foster opens his mouth.

Closes it.

Seems to think about that for an actual second.

Then he laughs. "No, don't worry about how I feel!"

That's ridiculous, Amethyst. Ampersand? The flicker of that memory--

Mmmm.

But it's weird, he doesn't... feel as bothered by it when she doesn't quite follow the script.
drrdrrdrr: (pbbbttttt)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-11-14 05:32 am (UTC)(link)
Amethyst just makes a drawn out fart sound with both mouths and rolls her eyes.

"Look... I know we're not actually related or anything, but..." She shrugs lopsidedly. "I dunno. It wasn't the worst."
Edited 2017-11-14 05:32 (UTC)
criticallyfucked: (Where proud you stand)

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-11-14 06:05 am (UTC)(link)
No. It wasn't. It was, by far, the best life he'd ever had, or ever imagined having. As a matter of fact, until that life, the only improvement he could even conceive of was one in which he was dead. And he knows that if he had never been there, had never been seduced by the illusion of happiness, of actually living--

He knows what she's actually saying, and he hates it. He should hate it. He wants to--he wants to laugh, what a terrible fate--he's supposed to prevent this...!

"I'm just garbage here. Worthless. Disgusting! Pointless, nasty trash. Repulsive, rotting--poisoned! A corpse walking! You're wrong. Wrong, wrong...!" Saliva flecks his lips, his prehistoric teeth, eyes wilder--his claws burying in his hair. Under the lime green clip. Vicious, vehement, excited, anguished. Which is it? Is he angry now? He doesn't know. It doesn't even matter. He just knows this is wrong--wrong, wrong, wrong, he's wrong, and she--

"You should have stayed gone."
Edited 2017-11-14 21:32 (UTC)
drrdrrdrr: (UGH!!!)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-11-17 01:19 am (UTC)(link)
Amethyst's eyes widen, and she backs up a little.

"Dude..."

And then her expression shifts from alarm to indignation, and she stiffens in anger, making fists at her sides with both hands.

"What the heck, dude! You don't get to pull this crud on me." She takes that step back forward, and it honestly looks like she might thump him, although she doesn't. "You know how tough it was for me to come back here and even speak to you? Because I thought you were gonna be like, oh wow, gross, I can't believe this trash pile wants to be -- I don't know, friends or whatever? I -- ugghhh, you clod!"
criticallyfucked: (Where proud you stand)

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-11-17 01:52 am (UTC)(link)
Foster is, in turn, briefly hopeful she will thump him, and there's a pulse of disappointment when it doesn't come; her response, however, is somewhere between 'offensive' and 'entirely bewildering,' and he actually narrows his eyes at first instead of just launching back at her with a tirade.

"My opinion?" He asks, his voice clotted and wet. Better not to worry about what it's wet with. "To be--to be afraid of my opinion...!!" He barks a laugh--harsh, violent. Then he keeps laughing, and it becomes obvious that his voice was thick with heavy saliva, because he's drooling it from the corners of his mouth and over his bottom lip.

"You can't possibly be more vulgar, can't be more despicable, more insignificant and vile... you can't be friends with something so inhumanly low, no more than you could become trash without being made to be filled with it!"
drrdrrdrr: (gross even by amethyst standards)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-11-17 02:26 am (UTC)(link)
Frustrated, she kicks him in the shin, although not especially hard, "What are you talking about, dummy, I literally eat garbage, I'm --" She grabs another big handful of potato peelings and waves it at him to illustrate her point. Some raw potato bits spatter onto his chest. "I'm literally eating garbage right now!!"
criticallyfucked: (Rocks and bridges holding back disease)

This is his worst icon

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-11-17 04:35 am (UTC)(link)
A full-strength kick from Amethyst probably would have been the second-best thing that's happened to him all week; as it is, she still forces him to back up, stumbling, off balance, still laughing repulsively.

"Yes, yes--!!"

The peelings stick to him. It's kind of gross.

"... those are just potatoes. I'm... not a potato. I'm... decayed, decomposed, degenerate--a disgusting disease! Discard me, it's fine! It's my purpose here, anyway...!"
drrdrrdrr: (jasper sighted)

i really cant argue with that

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-11-22 02:32 am (UTC)(link)
"You -- uuughhh!"

Amethyst just throws the potato peelings at him in anger.

Splat.
criticallyfucked: (Default)

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-11-22 04:37 pm (UTC)(link)
Foster doesn't attempt to deflect them, so he actually just takes an entire faceful of wet peels. Most of them don't stay, but there are a couple on his cheeks and nose. He regards Amethyst like that for a second, then makes an attempt to get a claw tip under one peeling that's plastered to his cheek.

"...and?" he asks, after another moment, like he's waiting for a conclusion.
drrdrrdrr: (UGHHH)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-12-01 10:56 am (UTC)(link)
Amethyst stares at him angrily for a moment.

Then she grabs him by one of his big furry bear arms.

"Okay, dude, you know what? Okay," she says as she yanks him after her. She is, it should be noted, superhumanly strong, even if Foster wasn't a malnutritioned emaciated disaster. "You ever seen my trailer before?"
criticallyfucked: (It's all in who you know tonight)

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-12-02 02:06 am (UTC)(link)
This is actually startling enough to stop him from resisting her--not that it would have done any good, as Foster is not only a bit below the standard of 'humanly' strong to begin with, he's simultaneously poisoned, petrified, and literally starving. His attempt to stop her begins and ends at trying to pull his arm out and realising in a matter of seconds that he could probably break his wrist trying.

And by that point he's being dragged along anyway. So his protest is kind of pointless.

"Why would I have seen your trailer?!" What does her trailer have to do with anything at all? Why is she--?!

But it's too late, so he guesses he's going to find out.
drrdrrdrr: (what do YOU know)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-12-04 03:07 am (UTC)(link)
"I dunno!" she snaps back at him as she hauls him into the supervisors' grotto, "I dunno what you guys have been doing while I was gone!"

She huffs out a frustrated breath, and shoulders open the door to the trailer she shares with Sans.

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, kind of a disaster in there.

The trailer is significantly smaller than her room back in the temple, but she's also had way less time to accumulate stuff. The junk in the trailer is also less varied than her temple junk, which spans centuries of human civilisation and the entire globe. Here, she mostly has stuff left behind by the Carnival's patrons -- used glowsticks, empty bottles, deflated balloons, a few dolls and stuffed animals dropped by children who might be sorely missing them or might not be, depending on the passage of time and whether the carnival will be going back to their world -- and stuff picked up from the places they've stopped at that for some reason caught her eye. There's a stack of used tyres (both inside and outside the trailer, in case you didn't want to go so far to get your used tyre fix), some dead pot plants, some alive pot plants, bent street signs in various different languages, old carrier bags, at least one busted out TV, rocks, pipes, straight up just a few heaps of dirt, what looks like a broken-down, water-damaged cannon... gradually accumulated junk that for some reason she decided was worth dragging back from their stops around the multiverse.

She also has a lot of game prizes.

The Carnival's games have prizes from all kinds of worlds, but it's still a carnival, which means all of them, to the people they were purchased from, are basically trash. Hideous chalkware dogs are nestled alongside inflatable bananas and giant foam hands. A plethora of unpleasantly textured cheap stuffed animals are draped over the furniture. Junk made out of seashells, junk made out of wood, junk made out of sturdy glass... A dozen worlds' variations on the theme of Shit Produced Cheaply Enough To Be Profitable Mass-Purchased As Prizes For Games That Cost A Quarter To Play. Amethyst has a ton of it.

It's not all garbage. There are a few things in there that look like priceless antiques or valuable treasures. But they're crammed in with the rest of it, indiscriminately: a worn old trunk spills over with equal amounts of sparkling jewels and broken parts of offputting chalkware figurines and stale bagels; the impressive fossil skull of some long-gone beast is crammed lopsided against the wall with a broken umbrella jutting out of its eye socket and a the deflated body of a cheap inflatable mascot of indiscernible species draped over its snout.

Amethyst kicks what looks like a detached sink full of dirty socks out of the way of the door so she can step inside and make room for Foster. She lets go of his arm.

"D'you get it, dude?" she says after a couple of seconds. "Do you think I care if you're garbage or you think you're garbage or other people think you're garbage? Do you think I care if this is garbage?" She brandishes a vintage lamp with no bulb in it whose slightly scuffed base is in the shape of a smiling old man with rosy cheeks. "D'you think I care if any of this is garbage?"
Edited 2017-12-04 03:10 (UTC)
criticallyfucked: (When your laughter was meant)

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-12-04 04:54 am (UTC)(link)
Foster barely hears her. He's processing, in disconnected chunks, the sight in front of him--not just the sight, but the musty, sour-stale, indecently off smell, the crushing, claustrophobic feeling of having stepped into a segment of something much bigger than the space meant to contain it, a landfill compressed into a hallway.

Foster has... to put it mildly, seen some shit. A decade of his life spent living in homeless camps and 'sleeping rough,' he's met some atrocious collections of garbage. But this isn't a hoard of semi-salvageables or could-be's with impossible plans to 'improve' its contents. This isn't memories someone couldn't let go of, buried ever-deeper under a new layer of worthless 'unforgettables.' The odd piece of potential worth only highlights what a reprehensible gathering of garbage this space contains...!

By the point Amethyst is shoving some ugly, faux-vintage lamp base masquerading as 'sculpture' into his face, he's dropping to his knees--

He doesn't realise he's laughing until seconds later, and at that point he just gives up, falls back on his ass--landing on his tail, which causes a sharp pain up his spine but he doesn't care, doesn't even flinch, though his voice cracks and he feels the crack of some tendon or bone in his hip.

He's filled to overflowing with it, with something terrible, he's overcome by--no, moved by this disgusting display, this den of contaminated debris and worthless castoffs, a nest for even the most wretched trash to make its bed.

It's like coming home
drrdrrdrr: <user name=poisonparfait site=plurk> (uh)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-12-04 05:00 am (UTC)(link)
"Uh--"

Amethyst leans down a little, still holding the old man lamp. She doesn't know what she was expecting, but it ... pppprooobably wasn't this?

"Bro, are you OK?"
criticallyfucked: (Everything will go tonight)

CW: self injury with shitty ceramic dog

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-12-04 06:08 am (UTC)(link)
Bro--

He can't stop laughing, and he repeats the word, breathlessly, incredulous with joy(?)

But he's already rising--up off his tail, which sends a shudder of something, pain or relief or some unspeakable combination thereof through him, and then he's searching, clumsy with the awful high and his own deplorable state--

His claws land on something solid, something he can feel the potential of.

It's a shitty ceramic shar pei dog, the kind of poorly-painted kitsch piece with slightly-misaligned eyes and cheap production that belongs in a dollar store.

Or it was a shitty ceramic shar-pei dog, anyway, because the instant he seizes it in his heavy, hairy paw, he raises it above his head and brings it smashing down, shattering it on the edge of a pipe attached to her sock-filled sink.

His eyes are shining, his prehistoric teeth bared wide in a smile that might still be real, and he snatches back the biggest piece (somewhat awkwardly, the piece that retains the dog's head) to take another swing. This time, though, he diverts its trajectory, abruptly changing its course before he strikes the ground and instead burying the point of it in his own stomach, producing a short, choked-off gasp of pain.

But his eyes are bright with emotion, with passion, overflowing like his blood, his sharp-toothed smile more clearly defined than ever.

He rips it back out, and begins bleeding all over his paw.
drrdrrdrr: (ugh!)

[personal profile] drrdrrdrr 2017-12-07 12:27 am (UTC)(link)
"What the fuck, man!" Amethyst explodes, grabbing the dog piece out of his hand with one paw and swatting him about the head with the other. "What are you doing?? Gimme that, that was my favourite ceramic dog!"
Edited 2017-12-07 00:27 (UTC)
criticallyfucked: (Where proud you stand)

[personal profile] criticallyfucked 2017-12-07 05:30 am (UTC)(link)
Foster surrenders the bloody knick-knack without a fight; the smack upside the head is pretty effective, and while he easily falls into submission, he's visibly startled and confused by her reaction. The force of it is more or less exactly how he expects people to behave--it's just that he totally fails to understand what she's upset about at first. Then he realises, yes, of course, he destroyed and defiled her ceramic dog. Garbage or not, it's her garbage. And by its value to her, vastly more valuable than him--!