lostcarnival | ⇨ SPACE OLYMPICS

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⇨ SPACE OLYMPICS

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 30 - Day 44
Where: The carnival, Zargon, and Olympic Spaceship
What: Things return back to normal as the carnival performs for aliens of all sorts at the Space Olympics. Or at least, as normal as it can be when you've got an underfunded and falling-apart spaceship hovering over a deadly planet.
Warnings: Sports and people's inability to do them.

REACH FOR THE STARS↴

At first glance, the Space Olympics seem marvelous. Aliens from all over the universe, of all shapes and sizes have joined together in an intergalactic display of teamwork and sportmanship. What could be more inspiring than that? It's only when you hang around for a bit that you notice things aren't exactly in tip-top shape.

► OLYMPIC SPACESHIP: This is where most of the events are held. It's a massive spaceship spanning hundreds of miles and consisting of multiple floors. Teleportation discs and space public transport can take you anywhere on the spaceship in a blink of an eye. It has almost every amenity an athlete can think of: multiple gyms, practice arenas, saunas, etc. Likewise, there are plenty of things for civilians and spectators: merchandise stands, shopping malls, grocery stores, and television screens everywhere so people can watch the event. Shuttles to and from Zargon arrive on a regular basis.

► ZARGON: Facility wise, Zargon itself is less impressive than Olympic Spaceship. The carnival and the athlete's village comprise most of the habitable areas. Both are concealed underneath a large biodome, the main thing making the area livable. Enterprising Zargonites have set up stands that let people explore outside of the biodome. Rent a spacesuit and you too can enjoy Zargon's natural wonders, such as the distant red plateaus and the stunning solar winds. Just try and stay away from the toxic mold, naturally occurring pockets of hallucinogenic gas, and ten foot tall Zargon Death Flytrap.

► 1980s TRAINING MONTAGE: Since carnival members can only attempt to medal in one event, why not try different sports to see what that one event is? There's equipment for all sorts of sports: gymnastics, swimming, biathalon, snowboarding, etc. They've even somehow brought space horses up here for Space Dressage! There's also equipment for sports that carnival members might not have even known existed: Space Gymkata, Space Pooh Sticks, Space Limbo Skating, etc. The sky's the limit!

► A BIT OF A BUDGET SNAFU: The Space Olympics is kind of falling apart. After performance week, the carnival is drafted to help out and keep the Space Olympics running as smoothly as possible. This means fixing buildings, breaking up fights, helping in the kitchen, trying to sell merch, etc. If there's a feasible problem, the carnival members will be drafted to help fix it. The biggest problem of all is the multiple mechanical failures: artificial gravity stops working, temperatures on the ship rapidly shift from hot to cold, and the snow machines for Space Slopestyle won't turn off.

► PERFORMANCE: Performance week will start early this stop, to try and get everyone back into the swing of things after the chaos of Wismuth. Athletes from the village roam the carnival, taking in the sights and sounds. A lot of them haven't ever seen anything like the magic of the carnival and it's workers and will proceed to ask question after question about how all of this works: turns out that sci-fi and fantasy don't crossover as much as one would think. Still, don't be alarmed when you turn the corner and there's a Hutt trying his hand at test your strength.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There wasn't any way Rita's book could prepare him for this sort of an answer. He thought the blastia were just an element used! Why was she acting so defensive about it? As such, when Rita yells at him, Strange just looks so damn confused.

"Not even for a moment? You'd obviously be supervising the magic. It's not like anything bad would happen."

Which Strange realizes is pretty much inviting something bad to happen, but still! There's no need to be so defensive!

Rita shakes her head. "Not even for a moment. It doesn't matter if nothing bad happens, it's just..." She trails off, hand over the blastia in a protective gesture.

Ugh. She'll probably sound like an idiot for saying this, but...

"She's like... a partner, or a part of me. I won't let anyone else handle her."

A part of Strange wants to point out that this is a literal rock, how on earth could a literal rock be a partner or a part of someone. But then again, this is the guy who decided that the best response to Childermass stealing his creepy wife gem is to throw a fuckin fireball at his face. Rita might have a point.

And Strange realizes she might have a point! So, he drops that fight. It'll probably get picked up again later, but now isn't the time. Instead, he turns right back to nosy questions, as he looks at Rita's blastia with a small frown.

"Do other mages in your world feel the same way about their blastia as you do?"

"...No," Rita answers, somewhat reluctantly. Her obsessive love for blastia was, in fact, one of the reasons she was treated like a freak and ostracized by her peers in Aspio. But rather than getting into the details of her lonely childhood, she opts for a less specific answer.

"Me and the other mages didn't see eye to eye on much, to be honest."

"I've found that when something like that happens, the best option is to simply get away from the other mages," Strange remarks, with a bit of a bitter tone in his voice. Says the man who once he decided England was set against him and he and Norrell would never see eye to eye, fucked off to Venice to be a crazy hobo. Do as he says, not as he does.

"It's easier to do what you need to when you don't have other people breathing over your shoulder or criticizing your every move."

Rita sighs, her shoulders heaving. "That's what I did, sort of. Got a house at the far edge of town, put a nice big keep out sign on the door, barely had anyone bother me for years."

Well... the knights did, sometimes. And she still had to go out into town and interact with people once in a while.

"I suppose I did get a lot of work done," she adds, more or less agreeing with Strange. "My research tended to be a few months ahead of the other mages." And now she's bragging.

There's a wry smile on Strange's face as he continues talking. "I went to a different country."

Granted, his was more like being left alone for a month and a bit instead of being alone for years, but the general idea is still the same. Though hey, now that they're talking about this, time to delve into a little bit of shit-talking other mages.

"Did you ever have any of the other mages try to spy on you and see what you're doing?" It's obvious from Strange's tone of voice that something like that happened to him.

"Had a few cases of people trying to steal my work... That stopped pretty quick after I started specializing in offensive magic. No surprise that anyone cowardly enough to try that would be deterred by a little risk." You know, the minor risk of being blown up or burned to death.

But Strange's example was awfully specific... "I take it something like that happened to you?"

And Strange nods. "When I was in my self-imposed exile, a magician from back home sent one of his cronies to spy on me. I don't know why he did that," Strange grumbles, sighing slightly. "It wasn't like I had anything to hide."

Strange was always annoyingly open about his plans and intentions. That didn't change even when he was bonkers. When had he ever done anything secret?

"I don't know what mages are typically like where you're from, but in Aspio, there's a certain amount of prestige that comes with being the first to discover something... or the first to publish it, anyway. Maybe they wanted to see if you had any findings they could snipe."

Rita's mind, of course, goes straight to the danger she's most familiar with: plagiarism.

And therein lies the difference between Rita's world that's full of mages and Strange's world where you can count all the English magicians on one hand. Strange and Norrell's focuses are so radically different that even if Norrell did spy on him for plagiarism purposes, no one would believe he willingly studied along the lines that Strange did.

Still, it's a valid hypothesis. Strange frowns for a moment, considering what Rita's saying, before shaking his head slightly. "Truth be told, I think the man was simply nosy."

Pot meet kettle.

Nosy?

"Like you?" Rita retorts, not missing a beat. Between the scrying and the way he keeps letting himself into people's trailers, she doesn't feel all that sympathetic.

Wait what. Strange pauses for a moment before scowling slightly at Rita. He can't really argue that and he knows he can't argue that and it pisses him off that he can't. "I am not nosy enough that I'd send someone else to spy for me."

He'd just do the spying himself!

"It's the same thing!" she cries. "Next time you think about walking into someone's home without knocking, try thinking about how it'll make you just like that guy!" Rita doesn't know a damn thing about who that guy is or what he's like, but if Strange has any complaints about his behavior, then maybe he'll see the negativity in his actions.

It's very fortunate for him that Rita hasn't yet been told about his spying during the lake party.

"How is sending someone else the same thing as doing it yourself? By doing it myself, I'm taking up responsibility! Sending someone else is just pushing the job off on someone inferior."

He does not see the negativity in his actions in the slightest. Granted, a bit of this is splitting hairs. But in Strange's mind, there's a world of difference between the two choices!

Never mind the fact that the only reason someone else was sent in the first place was that Strange was magically concealing his location. He'll remember that eventually.

"Yeah, yeah." Rita dismisses his protest with the wave of a hand. "The other guy's a huge coward, and you're only half the coward. You're still just as nosy."

That's the only difference as far as she's concerned. It's still mostly the same thing, and Strange is fooling himself if he wants to think otherwise.

Strange grumbles something under his breath that suspiciously sounds like 'I'm not a coward.' Still, he knows that if he keeps this up, he'll end up arguing with Rita all day. So, time to shift the arguing to a different lane and a different set of arguments.

"Maybe if you knew how to scry, then you wouldn't have to threaten them in the first place. You'd know they were coming and could prepare your counterspells when they arrive."

Rita makes a sound like a small, derisive snort; it's a little hard to tell when she's not actually using a nose.

"Scrying isn't a thing in my world. And that's probably a good thing, because then I'd have to worry about people using that as a way to steal research, too. It's bad enough that I have to write my name on everything I own, in case it falls in the wrong hands." She totally doesn't need to do that, but she does. Full name, too.

"It could be a thing," Strange points out. "You're going to radically change the magic of your world: it only makes sense that the spells you could or couldn't cast would change with it."

He doesn't really know how aer might be manipulated for scrying purposes. But it seems awfully silly for Rita to declare something 'not a thing' right before she goes back to her world and changes the entire system of magic. It could be a thing.

Rita just gives him a long, quiet look, because he's right and that's kind of annoying.

"It could," she admits after a delay. "But I'll be happy if it doesn't become a commonplace sort of thing. Having one person magically spying on people is plenty, if you ask me." Yes, Strange, she's talking about you. "I've never had that much interest in it, myself."

Except she did try scrying magic once, back in Portland... if anything that happened in Portland really counts.

Of course he's right. He's always right. Rita's admission causes Strange to give her a brief, smug, 'told you so' sort of smile. But then there's her admonition that scrying isn't really her thing: something that Strange doesn't understand at all. How could Rita not have interest in it to begin with?

"Why? Nosiness aside, there's so many practical applications to scrying. The magic was damn useful when I was in the peninsula."

"That war? Hmph..." Rita would like to say she doesn't know anything about that, but unfortunately she knows all too much, thanks to Lambert lending her whatever reading material he had handy back when she was recovering from poison.

"It's just not my style!" she eventually offers as a counterpoint. Yeah, sure, it's useful and convenient, but also, who wants to be more like Strange? Not Rita.

"Anyway," she adds, forcefully segueing to another topic, "I was meaning to ask you about something. I heard you're working on another book?"

Thankfully, the conversation shifts to something both of them won't argue about: books. Strange perks up as Rita mentions his work in progress book. He nods, before launching into an explanation.

"I am! It's a memoir, to be precise. I've written chapters up to our visit in hell and I've started to draft the chapters on Alola and the Mainframe. I'm honestly dreading writing about Portland, that will be a nightmare and a half to explain."

Any grumpiness about Rita's disinterest in scrying is starting to fade away as Strange continues talking. He's just yammering away as if he expects Rita to actually give a damn about the contents of his memoir.

So it is a memoir, like he said he'd write some time ago; one that includes his experiences in the carnival.

And luckily for Strange, Rita does give a damn about this memoir, because...

"The Alola visit was when I came to the carnival. To be honest, I don't know much of what went on before then." Something about vampires...? That's about it, really. "I'd be interested in taking a look at what you've written."

And Strange just brightens up. There's a wide smile on his face as Rita mentions her interest. Because honestly, that's perfect! He trusts Rita's opinion and he needs someone who wasn't there to read things over and make certain he's explaining things properly. This would be wonderful!

"I'd be happy to lend you the drafts," he remarks, grinning still. "Though, if you want a concise summary of what happened, I can give that to you here and now."

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