lostcarnival | ⇨ THE PRINCE IS DEAD

Entry tags:

⇨ 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.

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Peridot winces slightly, but considers her answer carefully for a long while before answering. "...I can't force you to change how you feel about her," she begins to reply carefully, "but if I told you more about her, and you still decided you didn't like her? At least I'd consider it an informed decision."

She picks at the cuff of one sleeve on her button-down shirt anxiously, averting her gaze again while she continues. "It's not like I'm asking you to be best friends with her or anything." He couldn't be, even if he wanted to, because Peridot knows that SHE firmly holds the position of Lapis's best friend. Obviously. "I like you, I consider us to be friends, but... Lapis means a lot to me, and you said some really hurtful things to her. I want you to at least have the context for why Steven and I got so upset about it."

After Strange giving Peridot grief for the fact that he didn't know anything about Lapis (and considering that Strange has a bit of a complex about not knowing things in general), he can't help but admit that okay, Peridot does have a point. He should at least hear her out about Lapis and then give a snap judgement.

He simply adjusts his posture while Peridot averts her gaze, hands still in his pockets.

"If you're willing to talk, then I'm willing to listen."

And thus continues Strange's longstanding tradition of getting info on people via straight up gossip.

She finally looks back up at him, and flashes a weak smile. "Thanks," she says gratefully. Of course, now the real question is where the heck she should start with explaining a friend's backstory when it involves thousands of years of war and an alien society that Strange is still only tangentially familiar with.

Peridot settles back and huffs, looking pensive. "I guess you did want to know more about that mirror, anyway... so in a way, this kind of works out in your favor. I guess should clarify that never saw the thing for myself. She'd been freed by the time we met, so everything I know about this, I heard straight from either Lapis or Steven..."

She pauses again, still contemplating how to best lead into things. And then she picks up with this:

"Lapis... doesn't trust people easily. And she has an even harder time with forgiving people. B-But it's not really her fault! She's been... Hurt. Badly. Repeatedly." It makes Peridot real sad to think about. "By strangers, by gems that she trusted... by me, even, before I knew any better."

As Peridot mentions the mirror, Strange nods. Unsurprisingly, the thought of things involving mirrors is interesting to a person with reflection magic.

Though hmm. If she hasn't seen the thing herself, perhaps he should find a way to ask Steven about it. It's slightly worrying, but Strange is interested in the mechanics of the trapping just as much as he is the story of Lapis getting stuck in that mirror himself. If he could learn more details about this type of imprisonment, perhaps he could find a way to replicate the spell via magic, trapping people in reflections the way Childermass traps them in shadows.

...well he's certainly not telling the gems that. Instead, Strange continues, making brazen assumptions about Lapis. "I assume part of those trust issues stem from the mirror?"

Definitely do not EVER tell the gems that.

"...Yeah," Peridot confirms with a sigh. "See, in our little corner of the multiverse, back over 5,000 years ago... the Earth was caught up in the middle of a war between two gem factions: The forces of Homeworld, who wanted to colonize the planet... and a rebel group known as the Crystal Gems. The rebels were seeking to drive Homeworld away, in order to protect the Earth's indigenous lifeforms. That is, humans and other organics like you."

"It got pretty messy. I didn't exist yet, but, Lapis did. And she was there."

All just establishing details. Peridot hasn't even started getting to the heart of the issue yet, but she's steeling herself to now.

"I guess she got caught up in some kind of skirmish between the two sides. She's never really given me the details on exactly what happened, and I haven't pressed her for them, because it's obviously a painful topic for her. The important point is: she had her physical form destroyed in the process, and was forced to retreat to her gem to recover."

Peridot makes more meaningful eye contact with Strange at this point because, hey, remember what she was just talking about earlier, about getting destabilized? This is that. "When you retreat to your gem, you don't have a body. Or a voice, or any method of interacting with the world around you. You're just... inert. Inanimate. We do it to recover from taking heavy damage but in doing so, it also leaves us vulnerable and, for the most part, unaware of what's going on around us."

Strange is just taking all this in with a blank expression on his face. It's only when Peridot starts to describe Lapis's experiences that Strange can't help but frown, more fully understanding what was going on and what she must have gone through. After all, being completely cut off from the rest of the world, being inert and locked in yourself was certainly a different experience than the phrase 'trapped in a mirror' would imply.

"I think I have an idea of what you're talking about," Strange explains, to Peridot's possible surprise. He's obviously trying to keep his voice calm and level as he talks, like he's discussing something clinical and not something he still has issues with. His hands are firmly jammed in his pockets as he talks. "It was a rare occurrence but when I was in the peninsula, occasionally a musket ball would hit just so that it would render someone inert. The injured man was still alive, but could not talk or interact with the rest of the world. Likewise, men occasionally turned that way due to the stress of combat itself."

Of course, when someone's brain-dead thanks to an injury or catatonic thanks to stress on a battlefield in the 1810s, there's not much one can do for them in the first place. At least Lapis somehow managed to get restabilized.

She is a little bit surprised. What he's describing doesn't sound exactly the same, but... its more of an attempt to relate to the issue than he'd been making before, so. Progress?

Peridot nods briefly. "Yeah. It's kind of like that. Except unlike with humans, gems don't have a big heavy fleshy body to get in the way when we're disabled, which means we're easy to move. Capture... Shatter... Harvest." That last word seems to make her particularly uncomfortable, a vaguely nauseous look quirking her features. "Our bodies reform and we reactivate after a highly variable period of recovery, but that reformation process can be easily prevented by a number of means. In Lapis's case, her gem got picked up by some Homeworld soldiers-- People who should have been her allies. But they assumed she was a rebel, and..." She sighs, meeting Strange's gaze reluctantly. Wearily. "That's when they affixed her gem to the back of the mirror. To power it, as a means of interrogation."

Harvest? A part of Strange wants to press on that point, ask Peridot what it means, be nosy and curious...but whatever the connotation 'harvest' has to Peridot, it's a terrible one. She looked sick for that moment or so.

He's still not getting some of this. How can bodies reform in the first place? Although, maybe it's something to do with souls? The gem's souls are stored in the gem after their death as the Ringmaster's was stored in the egg after Portland. But how on earth could it be that considering that gems were barely magical in the first place? It's not being rude, it's a simple fact.

Strange views Peridot with a quizzical expression as she continues explaining what happened to Lapis. Being mistaken for the enemy, he can understand that, but then they get back to that damn mirror...and he's lost again.

"How exactly could a mirror interrogate someone?"

Peridot shakes her head. "No no no... The mirror doesn't do the interrogating. YOU interrogate the mirror."

Jeez Strange, KEEP UP.

The good thing about this question is that it has somewhat distracted Peridot from the haunting thoughts of some of the horrible things Homeworld can do to its subjects. "See, the gem is, in some ways, the only 'real' part of us. Everything but this--" she points at her own gem again-- "is made up a kind of hard light. That's why mortality isn't really an issue for us, we don't have a flimsy meat body made of cells and bones and stuff. Disease, aging... those are non issues for gems. But the gem itself is like... it's kind of like it's own self contained, perpetual power source. So in this case, when the lazuli gem was bonded with the mirror, the mirror served as a kind of... conduit, or a pseudo 'body' that allowed Lapis to regain consciousness, despite being locked in an otherwise inert form. Of course, it had..." Wince. "...Troubling limitations."

Strange can't help but give Peridot a fussy little frown. He didn't know that, okay? They thought she was the enemy, this made sense in his mind!

That fussy little frown is still on his face as Peridot continues to explain. And...he's not getting some of this. How can light be hard, for all of Peridot's talk about a flimsy meat body, the gems still could get destabilized (was that the word?) so honestly, who's the flimsy little meat body now. But it's as he's mentally berating whatever the hell hard light is that Strange realizes he should probably pay attention.

Alright. Stick the gem to the mirror, the gem could look though the mirror but couldn't act through the mirror. Which does indeed have troubling limitations. But then they get right back to Strange's problem in the first place as, at least in his mind, he can see past some of those limitations.

"Troubling limitations such as the lack of arms or a voice. But if a magician is talented enough or has enough power, they could bypass limitations like that entirely." There were plenty of faerie stories about the fae doing something like that, after all, casting spells with only a thought. "Of course, that's assuming the world actually has magic to begin with. Yours does not."

At least, Strange thinks it doesn't. And blunt as these words are, his tone is pure wistfulness. If only Peridot's world had magic! If only Lazuli was more of a magician herself! There were so many ways this could have been prevented but the greatest tragedy of them all is that none of them stuck.

Peridot's tail thumps once against the surface she's sitting on, a lazy, vaguely frustrated twitch. "There were other limitations aside from the lack of a body or lack of magic. Lapis described to me a situation where she was conscious and aware of her surroundings, of what the people interrogating her were saying to her, but her free will was extremely limited. She could only respond directly to specific questions asked of her."

"Much like the bonds of a summoning," the pro-magic peanut gallery pipes up. Can this conversation go one minute without Strange comparing some aspect of Lapis's plight to magic, the world may never know.

"Depending on the nature of the summoning, the magician can set the terms of the one being summoned. If one was particularly cruel, they could set the criteria of the summoning to restrict the summoned's will that much. Obviously, most wouldn't do that as the summoned being does have a life of it's own outside of the summoning and it'd be immensely suspicious if they weren't able to talk, but it is a possibility."

Just don't ask how he knows that. Because wow is Strange saying all this in a matter-of-fact tone like he knows what he's talking about.

Peridot's own lack of knowledge regarding summoning magic blessedly keeps Strange from any questioning on that front, because she mostly just listens to all that and hears information on a topic that he's clearly more familiar with than she is. No reason to inquire, and nothing to do but take his word for it.

"So you do have an idea of what I'm talking about. Good," she says, nodding once, deciding to take Strange's constant references to his own world's magic as a sign that he's at least listening to her. At least he's engaging with what she's saying. "Now imagine a situation like that, except where the people who summoned you or bonded you or whatever, abruptly leave the planet, leave you behind, and you stay like that, alone and trapped in your own head, for the next several thousand years. And after a couple millennia, when someone DOES finally come along and picks up your little mirror prison, they don't recognize that you're even a person! And you have no way of telling them. So you spend ANOTHER thousand years trapped and used like a tool. That's what happened to Lapis."

Peridot SURE HOPES he's getting the picture by this point, or she's not really sure what else she can do.

Strange is indeed getting the picture. Summoned and trapped, stuck with your own thoughts for what feels like a lifetime. Lazuli might not be literally cursed but from the picture Peridot is painting, he could easily see how she might feel like she was cursed.

"One could become quite mad," he simply says, in a matter-of-fact tone. After all, he knows madness. And nothing makes madness worse than the simple act of being alone and helpless.

He pauses for a moment, as if mulling his words over. When he speaks again, it's in an exceedingly tentative and hesitant tone. Because oh if there is one thing that Strange hates doing, it's admitting that he messed up, that something he did was his fault and there's no way he can ignore this or (entirely) shift the blame onto someone else. "Perhaps...perhaps I should have waited and gained more information before passing judgement on Lazuli."

Arabella once told him he was a bit too rash. Do not act, Jonathan. Think. He really needs to live by those words a bit more.

They're of one mind on that point. Peridot still loathes to admit when she's wrong, but she is steadily warming herself to the benefits of doing so. She offers Strange an encouraging smile at that, looking considerably relieved already.

"Yeah." He should have. She's not going to disagree with that. "But, you wouldn't be the first person to jump to conclusions about her," she reassures him. "I mean, the first time I met her was in an interrogation room, so at least you're a step above that."

Now there's got to be a story behind that. Strange frowns slightly as he looks over at Peridot. In an interrogation room? She said before that when she first came to Earth, she did a lot of things that upset people. Was interrogating Lapis one of those? But why was she interrogating Lapis in the first place? Or was she even interrogating Lapis to begin with: they could have both been captives.

"The first time I met her, I was a madman," Strange responds, with a little shrug. That conversation lasted for all of ten minutes, terrible first impressions all around. But it's time for gossip or, at least, Strange trying to pry further into Peridot's past.

"Were you interrogating her? Or were you both captured together?"

Strange are you really sure you're prepared to deal with the all the worms that are residing in this can that you're opening? It's a short jump from interrogation rooms to fusion and geo weapons and basically the gem equivalent of Frankenstein's monster. And Peridot doesn't tend to supply the abridged version of things.

"I was interrogating her," Peridot confirms, looking just a teensy bit embarrassed. "I mean, I was just doing my job at the time. I was still working for Yellow Diamond and I'd been assigned to evaluate the status of some geo-weapon experiments that had been left to develop on Earth at the end of the war. But my progress was being continually stalled thanks to unforeseen difficulties in re-establishing a working warp-pad connection between Earth and Homeworld. Lapis had just returned to Homeworld FROM Earth, so it just made sense to interrogate her for more details."

Oh my God, he has no idea what any of these words are. Geo-weapon? Warp-pad? There were multiple colored diamonds? Strange just gives Peridot a blank look as she continues talking. He doesn't really know where to start first but he knows that Peridot mentioned a war so okay, that's a thing, he can focus on that. And Peridot was trying to find a way back to Homeworld from Earth, right? At least, that's the implication Strange got.

But wait a moment. Wasn't Homeworld the one that was trying to colonize Earth? Peridot said that she didn't exist yet, but the point still stood.

"Out of curiosity, were you aligned with Homeworld when you were interrogating Lapis? And, again just out of simple curiosity, was Homeworld still trying to colonize Earth at that point?" There's a little bit of a judgey tone in Strange's voice as he looks down at Peridot with a little frown.

Because party foul, buddy. He lives on Earth!

And now Peridot is steadily flushing an intense shade of blue-green, because they sure are getting into troubling territory. It's frustrating, actually; she never used to be afraid to share details about her past life because it just was what it was, she was made to serve the diamonds and it was the only thing that she knew.

But she ALSO never used to have numerous human friends who might take issue with the fact that she was once working to help destroy their home planet. 9S's opinion of her has made her extra leery of that kind of judgement, of being rejected, and Strange's tone isn't exactly inspiring any confidence either.

"I mean," she starts, a strain of anxiety in her voice, "technically I'd say I'm still 'aligned' with Homeworld--? No, no no no that's not right. I just mean-- Homeworld is a place, it's where I'm from. And I still care about it! Even if I can't go back there, ever again, but I'm sure as heck not aligned with the Diamonds anymore! Though yes, I was, at the time that I interrogated Lapis. But all gems serve the Diamonds, at least starting out. It's the only reason we're ever even created to begin with--"

The more Peridot talks, the more Strange realizes there's no way he's going to be able to keep up with what she's talking about. Homeworld's a place apparently, not an organization, and all gems were created to serve the Diamonds who might be in charge of Homeworld? It's a miracle if he even retains half of this information.

Honestly, the whole thing is reminding Strange a bit too much of the Wyld Fae and the Courts in Portland for his tastes. A few members of a long-lived jargon-filled race defect from the rest of that long-lived jargon-filled race to go fight people and piss off to somewhere else? Sounds familiar. Not that he's going to mention this to Peridot, of course. He's honestly got no idea how she'll take the comparison. Especially since Strange has a sneaking suspicion this conversation is going to take a quick nosedive.

'I'm sure as heck not aligned with the Diamonds anymore.' That...might be a problem.

"Do most of the gems here have such a, erm, negative view of the Diamonds?" Now it's his turn to have a little strain of anxiety in his voice. Though, Strange is just going to go ahead and air out his concerns. It's not a secret who he chatted with, after all. "Blue Diamond and I got along splendidly when she was here. I don't see why you wouldn't want to associate with her."

It helps that 'technical mass murder' and 'rampant speciesism' didn't come up on a regular basis in their conversations.

Edited 2017-11-24 04:49 (UTC)

'Nosedive' is probably an understatement for what this conversation is about to do, and Strange will see his suspicions start to be confirmed as Peridot's posture stiffens noticeably.

"All of the gems here have that negative of a view of the Diamonds, because the Diamonds are a bunch of short-sighted, ego-maniacal, bossy clumpy jerky CLODS!" she snarls, tail swishing agitatedly. Perhaps recalling her promise to Strange that she wasn't going to yell at him, she takes a deep breath and calms down enough to add as an afterthought: "Well. All the gems here except for Jasper, but. She's an idiot, so she doesn't really count."

So there you go.

"I don't have quite as much of a personal issue with Blue Diamond as I do with Yellow Diamond, I guess. But regardless, they're all universally bad. Like, for starters--" She starts ticking off points on her claws-- "They boss other gems around, they act like they know better than EVERYONE else, they shatter people for showing the slightest bit of disobedience-- And THEY'RE the ones who wanted to colonize your Earth! Sure, Blue Diamond may seem sympathetic, being all weepy and emotional all the time, but did you know she wants to kill Steven!? STEVEN! Also, she keeps humans as pets in a ZOO. You're actually lucky she left, if she liked you it means you were probably on the short-list of people worth adding to her little 'menagerie'."

It's a bit hard to reconcile 'lovely woman who you had plenty of wonderful conversations with' and 'woman who would literally put you in a zoo' as traits that belong to the same person. Strange can't help but gape a bit as Peridot goes on this long, drawn-out rant about Blue Diamond. There's a bit of an awkward silence after Peridot's rant where Strange just kind of stares at her for a confused moment.

"She gave me a present before she left," Strange admits, with a little frown. And before Peridot can say anything, Strange just continues. "Which doesn't excuse any attempted murder or shattering gems, I'm certainly not apologizing for or condoning her actions, it's just...well, it was a thoughtful present."

He's working on reconciling the two aspects of Blue Diamond! But it might take a bit.

Peridot makes a scoffing noise and shrugs her shoulders, which she's still holding up stiffly so it kind of just looks ridiculous. "I suppose it's possible that being reduced from her lofty position and being forced to interact with her 'lessers' as 'equals' may have humbled her. But I feel it's more likely that she was just on her best behavior so she could get what she wanted from the Ringmaster."

A beat. She narrows her eyes, then asks: "What did she give you, anyway?"

"A way to best explain the peninsula." Strange continues talking as he moves over to the large desk in the room, opening one of the drawers and pulling out what looks to be a framed Google Maps image (not that Strange would get the reference). "I had talked about the magic I performed there with Blue and mentioned that really, nobody in the carnival seems to understand what the peninsula is. She gave me this to help better explain it before she left."

Strange moves over to Peridot and shows off the framed picture of...an overhead shot of trees. Still, as someone who looked at overhead maps of the terrain for at least a few years, Strange knows precisely what he's looking at. He makes a pinching motion on the picture and 'zooms in' to look at an overhead shot of a river, with a town to the east.

"And look!" As he moves his finger across the image, the map zooms in to look closer at said river. "That's the Zadorra. Wellington had me around one of those trees, moving rocks and changing the river and putting out fires and things like that."

It's like the world's most boring topographical photo album, but Strange at least thinks it's pretty cool. And there's something oddly nostalgic in his tone as he describes the peninsula. For all that Strange hates the idea of murder and frets about the changes war wrought...he can't deny the fact that by the end of the campaign, he had become damn good at it.

Curious as ever, even while knowing that this item came from Blue Diamond, Peridot peers at the map attentively, standing on her tip-toes to get a better look.

"You've mentioned this peninsula a few times before, but I don't believe that we have ever discussed it together at length," Peridot says, still studying the picture. "So the Zadorra is the river? And who's Wellington...?"

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