⇨ THE EPILOGUE

[ringleaders]

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 61
Where: The Carnival
What: After all the rescues team return, it will be matter of tending to the wounded and getting the hell out of dodge. The Ringmaster can handle the fleeing part, but someone will need to look after those in the medical tent. Or, maybe, you just want to show up and ask what the hell happened.
Warnings: Some messed up consequences of faerie fuckery.

IN REPAIR↴ As the minutes tick past, all four rescue groups will eventually return. Everyone in the carnival is encouraged to help out, ensuring that the rescues and victims both are taken care of after the fact. You can tag in here as rescuers taking care of business around the carnival, victims recovering, or other workers checking in to see what's going on. This log is for general aftermath threads, made by anyone.

Comments

[drrdrrdrr]

"Yeah, I'm Amethyst," she says, leaning on the table to get a better look at what he's doing. She frowns, her tongue poking out of her mouth a little bit as she peers at the beakers and stuff. Then she glances up at Herbert. "You uh... you think he's gonna be OK?"

[scientificist]

"Physically, he seems to be making a swift recovery," he says. The chemistry set is honestly probably kind of fun to watch, there are those swirly tubes, and things dripping through to various places, and little fires and different colours. Prime movie chemistry. "The...crystal may be an issue but I've dealt with petrification before. And his limbs are, certainly regrowing."

[drrdrrdrr]

"Okay. Okay, cool."

She slumps against the table in relief and watches the chemistry take place for a bit. It's pleasantly distracting.

"Thanks, doc."

[scientificist]

He nods in initial response, and then looks like he's thinking for a moment before he adds. "You're...welcome. It's. What I'm here to do..." It trails off because he feels weird about it. He's trying, but being a polite, public relations type of person just doesn't come naturally to him.

"There is something you can help me with," he says abruptly, "while you're here. What's the...progression. Of cracked gems. Should I be looking out for something, are you aware?"

[drrdrrdrr]

She perks up a little, clearly glad for the distraction. "Oh, I know all about this stuff, I been cracked before." She pushes a beaker aside a little so she can hop up onto the table. Hopefully that wasn't anything important! "Lemme see, she's just got some weird stuff goin' on with her legs right now, right?" She glances over at Jasper on the other side of the tent, who glares at her. "Pfft, well, if she keeps takin' it easy she'll probably just stay like that, but when I got cracked we had to trek out to Rose's -- uh, to this magic fountain, to get it healed, and it got pretty bad..."

[scientificist]

Herbert actually pushes the beaker a little further away, to be certain she doesn't knock it off moving around. Supplies are finite.

"It's exertion-based?" Reaching sideways, he pulls over a notebook and flips it open. "How bad can it get?"

[drrdrrdrr]

"Uhh, kinda? I think so. I think the way it works is like... when it's broken, it's tougher for your gem to hold your body together, right? So if you make your body do a bunch of stuff... it just messes it up faster. The worst it gets is your gem gets shattered, which is, uh, pretty much the same as dying? 'Cause the crack just gets bigger'n bigger until the whole thing just--" She holds her closed hands together and then draws them apart, spreading her fingers.

[scientificist]

After writing all of this down neatly in shortform, Herbert looks thoughtfully into the middle distance for a moment.

"Is there anything preventing Steven using his saliva on, completely broken gems? Or do they shatter into a fine powder?" This is probably upsetting but Herbert has trouble being thoughtful about death at the best of times, let alone when it involves rock people. "I'm...trying to determine what sort of. Time Jasper might have."

[drrdrrdrr]

"Oh," says Amethyst, and winces. "Yeah, naw, that kinda thing doesn't work if you're straight up shattered. Gem shards are uhh..." She pulls a face. "They're not totally dead the way humans get but they're not really... y'know... You can't bring 'em back."

She looks at Jasper again, considering her limb situation. "She'll prolly be OK for a while, though. I held out a pretty long time last time it happened to me and I was like--" She makes an extravagant waggling gesture with bother arms. Good thing Herbert moved that beaker. "Everything was just all over the place, I couldn't even talk right."

[scientificist]

Herbert nods, and doesn't say anything. He's writing down 'not dead' in his notebook and hoping that eventually, he has some reason to explore this further. Sorry about any future gem mutants, Amethyst. Maybe some sort of....reagent epoxy...

"Then if Steven personally heals as quickly as his saliva allows for in others Jasper should be fine." Which is relieving. He doesn't particularly want anyone to die when they're personally in his care. Though. "What does..." He does a slightly less extravagant version of the gesture. "...mean. Is it actively dangerous to anyone else around the, gem in question?"

[drrdrrdrr]

Amethyst laughs. "Nah, not really. It was kind of..." She squints a little, trying to remember -- and then reproduces the effect with her shapeshifting. Her face recedes into her hair and appears on the other side of her head with one large googly eye, and her limbs and neck extend into long, thin, limp noodles with her lower arms and legs at their usual width dangling on the end. Flopped over, she looks at Herbert upside down. "Kinda like this, except I could only talk backwards, and I kept, like... y'know, kinda glitching?"

[scientificist]

Fervent note-taking from Herbert now. Gems are the most interesting non-human species in the Carnival, bar none. He's honestly so interested that he's devolved into a sort of notation-style expression of his thoughts as they come to him.

"Are.....gems computers? Hologram-based.... Do you control your appearance? What decides how you look?"

[drrdrrdrr]

Her form glows again as she resumes her usual shape, and she shrugs. "Yeah, I mean, there's some stuff I can't change, like... I'm always gonna be purple, y'know? And I can't hold a different shape for super long or it gets pretty uncomfortable..."

[scientificist]

Presumably related to the gem colour... Amethyst is a lot more helpful than he ever would have assumed, actually. Herbert had been running on the assumption of the small purple woman being fundamentally the least useful of the gems here--but he's having to re-evaluate that assessment. She's incredibly open to question answering.

"What...decided what your light form looked like to begin with--how does the Carnival affect that? Is it...reprogramming your gem?"

[drrdrrdrr]

Amethyst is definitely pretty down to talk about this -- not only is she keen for a distraction from Steven's troubling state, it's also just kind of nice to be answering questions about gem stuff like she's any kind of authority on it? She might not know anything about Homeworld or gem culture or any of that stuff, but she has plenty of experience with shapeshifting and getting cracked and having to regenerate.

She scratches the side of her nose, thinking. "I dunno, I guess? I mean... you come outta your gem one way, like, pretty much all Amethysts are big an' chunky an' purple with long hair, I'm just smaller than usual 'cause I was in the ground for longer... whenever you regenerate you can change it up a little, but like the basic shape's gotta be the same. If you try an' push it it gets messed up. So, like..." She swivels in place and points at her tail. "I wouldn't be able to keep this around all the time if I hadn't gotten it here. I dunno how that works, though, I never really thought about like reprogramming or whatever."

[scientificist]

Computer chips, as far as Herbert is aware (not his field [though apparently he's going to have to make it one]) are constructed of minerals, so perhaps it's feasible that gems are...tiny AIs? With. Holographic projections around their core? It seems a little odd to him, honestly, that if their physical gem is their one vulnerability that they wouldn't surround it with their hard light form like a shell. But possibly that's up to...poor design, rather than strange evolution?

It's too bad the Library became dangerous before he found this out, he could have done with some books on computers. Or gems! Maybe specifically gems! They probably would have been flowery and useless, though.

Actually, hang on. He has to backpedal a bit after writing down more furious notes because something in Amethyst's explanation definitely stands out.

"What do you mean you were in the ground--are you...mined like...non-sentient gemstones?"

[drrdrrdrr]

"Uhh... not exactly," says Amethyst. "It's more like... a buncha stuff gets injected into the ground... an' then when it matures into a gem and the physical form emerges you just pop outta the rock." She shrugs. "It can't be, like, any rock, it's gotta have the right... I guess composition or something? You should ask Peridot about it, that stuff used to be like her whole job."

[scientificist]

His theory is looking more and more likely the more information he gets. Peridot understands programming! Peridot used to be in charge of gem creation! He is definitely on the right track, here.

"I wouldn't have known to ask her about, this specifically without your help," he acknowledges. "I appreciate your explanations, they've been...enlightening. If you have any future questions about Steven, I'll be... Here."

[drrdrrdrr]

"Yeah, uh... thanks, dude." Amethyst hops down from the table and shoots him a couple of finger guns.

[scientificist]

Herbert pauses, shoots her one, stilted finger gun in response, and then goes back to his chemistry set.