lostcarnival | ⇨ 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Julien winces a little and listens. The Stage Manager's voice has a bit of strain to it, it must be important.

"No, it makes sense." He crosses his legs at the ankles and looks at them. "It's all complicated and even if some of it was on me and dumb shit I pulled, I'm not... I'm just one piece of a whole lot of mess. We're all here now, so it'll be okay, in the end." Right?

He exhales through his nose. He wants to ask, does Joker remember dying. He doesn't want to ask it, too. Julien tries not to hunch his shoulders.

"Thanks, Joker. You've gone to a lot of effort, huh?" Julien opens his pedipalps up out of the way so he can give a smaller, less flashy smile and have it actually be seen. "Has anyone thanked you for it yet?"

"Yeah," he mumbles, even if he's not entirely sure himself. "We'll be fine." Or, at least, if some of them believe it hard enough, it won't be quite a lie. As one of the supervisors, he figures it's his job to spread some encouragement. None of them can survive on pessimism. Well, optimism isn't on the plate either, but at least it makes them want to keep eating.

Being told he's made a lot of effort makes him want to laugh, for all the wrong reasons. Instead, he only smiles a little. "Not been much of a reason ta thank me, I figure." So that's a no.

Julien sounds a little more certain. "Well, the chances are better than if we didn't come back, you gotta admit. It's kind of amazing that we did at all." He hasn't seen the medical Supervisor since the ball but no one seems worried, so maybe it's okay.

"Heh. I want to, though." He nudges lightly at Joker with his elbow. "Thanks for caring, and for trying as long as you did. I'm sorry you got drawn into the bad shit at the end - and that's not 'I'm responsible', sorry, that's 'I regret that it happened' sorry."

He definitely wouldn't want a position of authority here. Pretty much anywhere, really, but especially here. It seems nervewracking.

If he's nudged any harder, Joker is fairly certain that he's going to go tumbling off of the bench. Still, that is just enough for him to stay right where he is, and Joker huffs out a sound that barely misses being a laugh.

"We were all gonna get dragged inta it one way or the other." That much he knew from the second he'd come to himself and realized all the horrible little parallels to Celebration. "Better ta mess up on my own, eh?"

He snorts. "I feel that. Sometimes the bad thing will happen no matter what you do so you might as well go spring it first."

"You were the tree deer, huh?" Julien knows he was the tree deer, the one that had smelled like deer and crow at the same time. His bird self has a rather more acute sense of smell than his human self, though it's not a patch on a daspletosaurus nose. "I was a smaller version of our menagerie's dinosaur. That's way more normal than being that one angel, and yet. It was just so close to being a bird, so somehow it feels weirder."

"Tree deer?" That sounds like a reference to something awfully specific, if only Joker could remember what. Sure, there's his general state of being, with the wings, and the antlers, but he can't really think of anything off the top of his head that would fit that bill. Well, there's the time he got drunk and stuck in a tree, but he's pretty sure that Julien doesn't know about that. Probably.

Which means.... This has to be a reference to something else. That period of blankness from being stuck in a wall to laying in a medical tent bed. Something, he imagines, must have something to do with the blurry and indistinct visions and dreams he sometimes has when his mind spaces out enough.

Julien pauses, his palps slacking and a couple of spectral eyes opening in surprise and dismay. His normal, human expression just looks mildly concerned. "Oh. You don't remember any of it, do you?"

There's such a sense of isolation to that realization. Julien hasn't spoken to any of the others about the hunt. Maybe he's the only one who remembers. It's better that way, anyway.

He draws his palps back up by the sides of his face and closes the extra eyes, and gives Joker a smile. It's too late to claim he doesn't remember anything either, so he downplays. It's not important. "Lucky! It's just as well."

The problem with trying to lie is that, in the face of someone observant enough, even the slightest slip up can put everything into doubt and reveal a lot more than is necessarily wanted. Joker knows this very well. While he might be poisoned to all hell, he doesn't miss that pause, although the realization is a bit slow in coming.

When it does hit, he huffs out a long sigh. "'Remember' is a bit of a strong word," he admits plainly, trying not to show too much himself. Good thing he's so tired that he can't be bothered for the effort of emotions. "Frankly, I figured I was just hallucinatin'."

He is poisoned, and relieving traumas of his own, after all.

Julien shrugs. If Joker doesn't remember being some kind of deer in a tree then he doesn't remember much of it at all. "It's for the best, really. It's better as some kind of dream. It's not that much more than a dream for me." A vivid one.

Well, anyway, Joker would have at least casually known anyone who came after him - Julien has no idea who killed whom, aside from who came after Julien himself, but it's a logical assumption. Maybe more than casually. He's been here a long time, there are people who care about him, they might have taken it upon themselves.

Not that Julien will admit it but he doesn't know if it's more upsetting that he was hunted down by someone he knows and at least gets along with, or by people he'd never met or spoken to. It's more intense when people you really care about are involved, he could see that.

Very, very slowly, Joker starts to raise up one foot... only to abruptly snap it out and kick Julien in the side of his leg. With the state he's in, it's honestly not that big of a deal. He's tired, and poisoned, and preoccupied with hiding his own mental wounds. That doesn't leave a lot of effort for kicking.

"Don't try ta lie when yer poisoned," he mutters. "Never comes out the way ya want it."

Joker catches him in the middle of putting his guitar away. He snorts. "Lie about what? I have weird, involved dreams sometimes. Sometimes they even feel real."

In its way it feels less real than his memories of being Iuliael - the older memories, not the ones of that last month in Portland - but those memories do feel real, if fragmentary and odd. Being a dinosaur, not being able to think clearly but with a little part of him aware that he couldn't really think, being beaten to death. That's worse.

"It's better not remembering. Really."

There's another kick, this one possibly even less effective than the first. "If it's weird involved dreams, then I doubt yer alone there." Okay, no, this is getting ridiculous, and he lets his foot go back to the ground again.

"Since I sure remember somethin' by that explanation."

⇨ THE PRINCE IS DEAD

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