lostcarnival | ⇨ DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS

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⇨ DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS

Who: Anyone out in the library.
When: Day 59
Where: The Athenaeum
What: Towards the end of the visit, we are visited by a series of worrisome NPCs, who may or may not be illusions. There will be at least 5 NPC toplevels posted overall, all happening in a similar time period ICly (in rough chronological order), so not everyone needs to be in every thread.
Warnings: Possibility of very real danger to anyone who participates. Remember that Sans has told everyone to travel in groups, so if you aren't, you'll probably get a scolding later.

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As the carnival continues to explore the Athenaeum in the pursuit of more information about the legendary Miracles, the tension is thick with the knowledge that the Summer Court could be in pursuit any day now. On Day 59, a series of threatening encounters will begin manifesting - but are they real, or an illusion?

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The green gem goes down with a yelp, and then recoils both from his touch, which is painful, and from his appearance, which is frankly kind of terrifying.

"Steven...!? No, wait-- An organic--?" There's weird half-recognition in the way she looks at him, like she identifies who he is but doesn't really grasp the significance of his being here, other than it being sort of out of place. She looks around the room frantically, teeth gritted. "No no no, that's not right-- There can't be any organics in here-- Where's that immolation button--?"

As she asks that, another panel on the far side of the room springs off the wall, and the mechanisms underneath burst into flames. She squawks and scampers in that direction, a console pillar similar in construction to the one from the other kindergarten rising up out of the floor to meet her. She moves to place her hand on it (ostensibly to activate something), but... She doesn't have limb enhancers in this dream. She's too short to reach it. And it keeps getting taller and taller and taller the harder she jumps.

"No-- No no no no no no no, COME BACK, PLEASE--"

It's hard to get up again after falling, sprawled out on all fours with his painfully inarticulate hands clinging to the floor panels. It's hard to think fast in this circumstance, but if she's stuck in the dream, the only thing he can do is try to remind her.

He scrambles after her as she tries to reach the control pad, and does what he did what feels like so long ago. He pops his head through her legs and picks her up onto his shoulders, steadying himself against the pillar so that she can use him as a step stool.

"It's okay," he tries, strained as he looks up at her. "It's a dream. It's me, Steven."

Peridot wobbles a bit as she's lifted, looking back down at Steven with surprise.

"A dream..." she says carefully, frowning. Alarms are still blaring all around them, but for the moment she's shutting them out, focused solely on him. "Steven...?"

She gasps. Instantly, the alarms stop, and everything broken in the room abruptly poofs back into place, like the very surroundings have been corrected by this information. "STEVEN! Steven-- Is it really you? Are you projecting into my mind right now!?" She squirms and then tumbles off of his shoulders, immediately scrambling back to her feet to get a better look at him. "Are you alright!? What-- What HAPPENED to you?"

When she tumbles over, he tumbles over too, leaving them both on the floor. He's relieved to find that none of my body parts end up shattering off as a result, as he's been paranoid about happening, but his thoughts don't stay with that for long.

He feels like he's melting with sheer relief at seeing her, and having her see him. He crawls onto his knees instead of standing up as he manages to smile, so happy to be able to find her, here. The wings on his back have been reduced to stumps of broken off vine.

"I wanted to see you," he explains, sniffling a little. "So I went to sleep, and... you're here." He rubs his eyes with one of his weirdly mutated hands. "My mom just... she did something to me that made everything the Blue Rose started doing worse. She... she said she wanted to strengthen the bond or something, and all of this happened..."

He's really not happy about it, but it doesn't seem to matter as much right now. Though, it's probably unavoidably horrifying for Peridot. He looks corrupted.

Yeah she is really not enjoying what she's seeing, and her feelings on it are written pretty plainly on her face. The uncomfortable grimace only strengthens the more he explains.

She's tearing up now watching him tear up. Relieved to see him, to be speaking to him at all, but horrified to see what's become of him in the short time that he's been missing. "Steven... I'm so sorry, we should have never split up in the first place I-- I was just so worried about finding Lapis in time, and then I couldn't even do that right, and then I ran into those horrible, AWFUL little pixies--"

Edited 2018-05-22 03:44 (UTC)

Steven shakes his head, not wanting her to put it on herself. He did the same thing, he was so worried about Lapis, he didn't know...

"It's my fault too," he says, wanting to quell her sense of blame. He puts out a hand to her, and then pulls it back. He knows it feels weird and he doesn't want to hurt her. "I just thought Lapis was having trouble with the book specters, and then... we couldn't get back. I wandered right into the rose gardens, and... and I thought I could outsmart her but I was wrong."

Her hugs himself, looking at the floor.

"None of us knew the fae were around until it was too late," he says. His ears are folded down, almost reluctant to ask. "Did... they get Lapis, too?"

"....Yeah," she chokes out after a second. She's not going to bother lying to him. There's no point in it. "The Winter Court got her. They have Jasper now, too. Some fae we haven't seen before now did it..."

It's easy to get bogged down being upset about everything that went wrong, but. It occurs to her that she has a unique chance here: She has a way of talking to someone on the inside, and that's absolutely invaluable. It fills her with some hope. Best to take advantage of that while she can, because who knows how long Steven can keep this up for?

"Forget about all that, Steven where are you? How can I help you??" She asks, suddenly urgent.

Steven shakes himself, trying to focus on what she's asking. Right! They need to do something, they can't just talk about the things that are already wrong. They need to fix things instead. He has to keep trying. He tries to think.

"I'm somewhere deep inside the Rose Queen's gardens," he says. Unfortunately, he's had little mobility, so it's hard to give any major specifics. "I think in like... the middle? It's like a circular area with roses all over, and some dirt in the middle. Mr Strange is in the same place right now, but I don't know how long he'll be here. He said that Ignatius was making him fight, to train him as a soldier, and he looked really stressed out and tired. He's wearing some kind of soldier armor, now?"

In retrospect, he wishes that he'd asked for more details about that, but he hadn't been expecting to make any use of the information. Now, on to the part he wants to explain even less.

"I'm... I'm stuck to the ground, kind of, with these roots growing from my back? They grew out of my wings and trying to break them hurts, so it means I can't move very far..." He puts a hand to his face, trying not to break down as he thinks about everything that had been happening. "But, before I couldn't get up at all, so I don't know if that will happen again..."

The description of the roots lines up directly with the stubs coming out of his shoulders. Steven keeps trying to pour out as much information as he can give.

"My mom and Ignatius keep coming and going... they didn't realize me and Mr Strange were talking, and they haven't stopped us yet, so... I don't think she's watching me, unless I start messing with stuff."

Peridot is staring with rapt attention, nodding and committing every detail he gives her to memory. Nothing could be more important right now. She doesn't even interrupt at all until the end, when she grimaces uncomfortably at something in that last statement.

"Okay, hold on," she says, literally holding a hand up for him to stop. "This is all extremely useful to know, and I'm feeling much more hopeful about our chances than I have in the last twenty-four hours just for having a better idea of what we're up against," not that it's a high bar to clear, "but I need you to pause for a moment and listen to me: You have got to stop calling that weirdo your 'mom'. It's incredibly creepy."

Edited 2018-05-22 05:09 (UTC)

Steven stops. He looks at her. You can practically hear his mind go blank just from looking at him, because he clearly has no idea what to make of that request, at all. The ellipses in his proverbial thought bubble goes on for quite some time.

"She is, though," he says, his voice dull with the brain freeze that has apparently prevented his emotions from catching up with him.

Edited 2018-05-22 05:18 (UTC)

"I don't care if she is or isn't," Peridot says stubbornly, still holding that hand up. "It's still creepy." Real talk time, Steven: Peridot's on a tear. "She thinks she owns you because of this supposed relationship you have, but she doesn't, Steven. And you calling her your 'mom' just reinforces that. Think about it, you don't hear Rita or Childermass calling Ignatius or the Count 'dad', do you?"

It hurts to hear, mostly because it makes him feel pathetic for doing it - humiliated by the idea that he's somehow weaker for feeling like this than any of the others dealing with the same thing. It feels so stupid to explain that it takes a triumph of willpower just to make himself do it.

"I know her better than I ever knew my real mom," he says frailly, looking at the ground. He feels paralyzed.

It's hard for Peridot to understand this, for obvious reasons. She barely even remembers the foster mom that fate slapped her with in Portland, and has no particularly strong emotions or opinions tied to her. Steven looks upset, though, which she does feel kind of bad about. She exhales harshly, shoulders sagging, and forces herself to take it back down a notch.

"Look: I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert on these sorts of familial relationships. I'm incredibly knowledgeable in a lot of topics, but 'moms' isn't one of them. But... Just because you've met her doesn't mean you really know her any better, or that she's worthy of that title. I mean, think about it! Your real mom-- Rose Quartz-- She did some pretty incredible stuff!" Some of it extremely problematic, in Peridot's opinion, but still incredible. "What has the Rose Queen ever done besides stick you in the ground like some sort of plant and act like her being your 'mom' means she has absolute control over your life? She doesn't even know you! Not really! She doesn't care that you kicked Jasper's butt at the beta kindergarten, or took down the Cluster and saved an entire planet, or any of the dozens of other incredible things that you've done!"

He knows she's right. He hasn't really been thinking critically about any of this, at least until she points it out for him. It just felt natural to say, somehow - he did the same for Rose Quartz, who he'd never really know and who had also mostly just left him with a truckload of problems rather than anything helpful or nurturing.

They're both more mythical figures to him than they are people. The Rose Queen is even worse, so why does he feel so attached to the idea of acknowledging their connection?

The Rose Queen doesn't care about who he is outside of his connection to her, just like so many gems don't care about who he is outside of Rose Quartz. The parallels in Portland were so strong... maybe that's why its been so hard to shake. When he first saw the Rose Queen again, he'd felt like she would look after him, somehow. And now this is the result?

"I don't know why I feel this way," he says, hugging his arms as he glances up to Peridot and tries to meet her gaze, even though it's hard. "I know she doesn't care about... anything about me, that isn't hers. I just didn't think it... mattered..."

Peridot frowns at him, and sighs softly at the last statement, tilting her head back to stare at the ceiling of her dreamscape for a second while she thinks.

Actually... now that she's really taking a moment to acknowledge her surroundings, she decides she really doesn't want to be having this conversation in one of her depressing old stations back on Homeworld. And with that thought, the scenery shifts: Peridot takes that same mastery over her own mind that basically gave her superpowers all the way back in the Matrix, and uses it to force a location change to somewhere more pleasant. The kindergarten control room seems to melt away in seconds, while the warm and familiar space of the barn emerges in it's place, like a secondary set that has been hidden behind another backdrop this whole time.

"Sorry, that was really bothering me. Anyway..." she huffs, settling back as soon as she's finished. She's back to giving Steven a weird Look, her head cocked slightly to one side as she considers what he just said. "I think it does matter, unfortunately. I... Ugh. Look, this is just a theory, but, hear me out: One of the things that happened not too long after you were taken was... we ran into the Count of Crows. A whole bunch of absolutely insane garbage happened that I can try to get into in a moment, but what's important to this topic at hand is that the Count tried to use... Nnngh. Something called a bloodbond? To make Childermass surrender himself, so he could hand him over to the Rose Queen. I don't really understand exactly how that works, but, if the Rose Queen has the same sort of power over you..."

She pauses to grumble wordlessly for a second, trying to figure out how to put this delicately. "I just... don't think it helps your ability to resist her thrall if you yourself keep lending further credit to this narrative she has crafted that you're her son! Do you get what I'm saying? Your name isn't Steven Rose Queen, it's STEVEN QUARTZ UNIVERSE, and she's just some cracked up fae that the cruel and unknowable multiverse happened to slap you with while trying to find a place to put you in a universe where none of us belonged!"

Edited (sorry WORD REPETITION, AND I FORGOT TO sPECIFY CHILDERMASS) 2018-05-22 15:40 (UTC)

Steven had been mostly ambivalent to the previous surroundings, because with everything else going on it didn't seem to matter. The barn setting, however, is actively a comfort. He wishes he could go to sleep here, even if he's always sleeping somewhere else.

To hear that about Childermass isn't totally surprising, but it does confirm something he was already afraid of. He didn't know before if the Rose Queen was just using standard fae enchantments, or if there was something wrong with him in particular that made him vulnerable to her swap. This seems to be confirm that it's the latter. He tries to take that in.

"She's been doing something like that to me," he admits, warily. "Whenever I try to fight her, all she has to do is just... look at me, and I can't." He puts his hands to his face. "...When I tried to talk to her, to lure her away from the others... I was going to run, but... I ended up wanting to go with her. I didn't understand what happened..."

"So it's like a compulsion," Peridot observes, rubbing her chin thoughtfully (something that she can no longer easily do in real life, thanks fuck-off huge claws).

She pauses to wince and grind her teeth for a moment with frustration, that familiar caustic hatred for the fae boiling up in her gut. She can't stand that they can do this to people, that Steven is having to put up with this kind of treatment.

"I know it can be resisted," Peridot says with confidence, punching one hand down into her open palm. "Childermass couldn't resist it completely but, he hesitated long enough that Rin and Shima were able to do something to knock him out, and then Lambert and Sans and I got him away. Maybe if you know going in and you... I don't know... Convince yourself to deny the strength of that blood connection?"

Maybe she's on the right track, but THAT part she sounds less confident about. Even coming out of her own mouth it sounds like a load of sentimental tripe.

"I think... maybe I do, sometimes, but... when I can't get away from her she just keeps pushing until I mess up," he says. Not that he's been thinking about it in a denying the blood connection kind of way, though. But, the longer it goes on, the less energy he has to try.

"I'm really glad Mr Childermass is okay," he says, smiling faintly, despite everything. "I was really worried that maybe... all of this would be happening to him, too."

He's quiet again for a little while longer.

"...Thanks for being honest with me, Peridot. Maybe... I needed to hear that. Maybe it will help."

Peridot momentarily considers telling him that it wouldn't be happening to Childermass, because Steven's 'mom' would have straight up murdered him by now, but she decides against that course of action, thankfully.

His other words make her smile, though. She still looks sad, and worried, but she really hopes that it does help. "It's going to be okay, Steven," she says, and puts both hands on his shoulders despite how uncomfortable it is. "We'll figure something out to save you, we-- We're going to get you all back. And I know you can fight her, being a rebel is your thing! You're a crystal gem!"

And that's about as much touching as she can stand to deal with, and withdraws again. They may have limited time here in this dreamspace, and she feels like they should take care of exchanging information while they still can. "You're still warded against the Rose Queen, right? Remind me how that works, exactly?"

Steven finds himself getting choked up again, but at least it's in a good way this time. The display of support is much needed, and it makes him emotional to think about people trying to help him despite how dangerous it is. He wibbles a little, appreciatively, before trying to balance himself enough to respond. He nods decisively before going on.

"I... think I am? It was supposed to make it so she couldn't sense me from a distance... and it seemed like it was working. It only stopped working when I walked up to her and got her attention. Normally... she would have been able to feel that I was close, even if she couldn't see me."

He has to pause to think about it.

"...I don't know if it will start working again, if I get away from her."

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⇨ DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS

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