lostcarnival | ⇨ THE EPILOGUE

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⇨ THE EPILOGUE

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.

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"Yeah, it's me," he says, too exhausted and generally sad to get very ruffled about her attitude. It doesn't make a difference anyway. He makes it to the cot next to hers and sits down, curling his legs to the side.

"Herbert told me your gem got hurt, so... I'm here to fix it." He doesn't put much more into his sales pitch than that. He isn't sure what she wants him to do. "If it breaks in half I don't know if I'll be able to heal it anymore."

She nods slowly. "I don't... owe you for this," she rumbles uncertainly. "I'm not going to join you."

"I don't care about that right now," he says, too tired and irritated enough that he isn't even going to bother trying to put a positive spin on this. She just treats him like he's trying to abuse her regardless, and he doesn't have it in him to deal with that right now.

"... Okay," says Jasper, frowning, and carefully gets down off the cot where she's sitting. She kind of stumbles a little because her hands are feet and her feet are hands, and she grunts in annoyed embarrassment. She manages, though, to kneel in front of him, where she watches him anxiously.

Steven would spit in his palm like he sometimes has, but he doesn't want to risk it interacting with the crystal somehow. So, instead, he gingerly leans forward, putting a glassy hand on Jasper's shoulder. He gives her nose a little lick, like the affectionate gesture of a cat.

His gems will glow pink instead of blue, and the damage will knit itself shut. Soon enough, the gem well be sensitive but whole.

Before Steven can say anything, though, his head is swimming. He tries to brace himself against her shoulder, but instead just slumps forward on top of her as he falls unconscious from sheer strain.

Jasper isn't sure what exactly she was expecting, but it wasn't this. As Steven leans forward to lick her, she goes extremely tense, and then extremely cross-eyed -- and then the damage to her gem eases away, the unspeakable pain of the crack beginning to subside. Her gem is whole again, and her form shimmers, correcting the errors in her limb orientation. The stability she's been missing since she reformed also allows a couple of new changes to assert themselves, but Jasper doesn't even begin to have time to notice them, because the next thing she knows Steven is collapsing on her. Good thing her hands are in the right place now so she can catch him???

She frowns down at his limp form. It's... surreal. Sure, Steven is inexcusably small and weak, but seeing him this defenseless doesn't feel right. It makes her feel weird and conflicted in a way she can't quite explain and also really doesn't like.

With his unconscious body in her hands, she rises to her feet and scans the room for Herbert. When she spots him she barks, "Hey! You!" because she doesn't remember what his name is.

"Dr West," is the first thing Herbert responds with, rather tersely, before actually turning to look and hurry over.

"What did--" he starts, and then notices Jasper has a complete nose and normal limbs, and he sighs instead of finishing the accusation. "Overexertion. I suppose it must be related to his willpower or presence after all--a shame." What he could have done with healing fluids personally available to research...but he'll simply have to work on something else himself.

He isn't just standing there as he regrets the loss of this potential research source, though, he's checking Steven's pulse and making sure he's still breathing. "Bring him back over to his cot," he tells Jasper, after these preliminaries.

Steven is still breathing just fine, thankfully. He's just passed out for the exact reasons Herbert guessed, and he's already dimly stirring as Jasper is directed towards the cot.

Jasper responds with an uneasy grunt and carries Steven back to his cot as instructed. She's pretty careful about putting him back down, almost uncharacteristically so.

"Is this -- I mean, is he... He's not dead, right."

"No. He's unconscious." She is an alien, though, made of light, so he tries, "Not unlike your destabilisation, I assume. To some extent." Already, Herbert's getting fidgety. He glances over at his chemistry set, back at Steven, and then up at Jasper again. "Call me over again if Steven needs me, my work is time sensitive." The crystal can't possibly be good for him, after all. A solution needs to be found.

Pointing at Jasper and giving her a serious look, he turns and walks away.

"What," says Jasper, but Herbert is already leaving??

She looks down at Steven with a perplexed frown on her face, and then straightens up and folds her arms. Fine, she supposes she can... keep an eye on him, or whatever.

It takes about five minutes for Steven to really start waking up. There are a few airy sighs as he comes to, his mutilated wings twitching and his tail curling close to his body.

Eventually, he opens his eyes, staring into space and not totally registering who is there with him.

"Did I fall asleep?" he mumbles.

Jasper grunts.

"You were unconscious," she says. "From... healing me."

A pause.

"... Thank you."

She says it very curtly and then looks away, as if the other goings-on in the medical tent are of great interest to her.

Steven half waking mind doesn't totally process how unusual it is for Jasper to thank him, even if she did it in the tersest way possible. Thanking someone for healing you is normal right? He thinks?

"Oh... right," he says slowly, vague memories of that happening coming back to him. Her nose isn't broken, so that's good. He did the thing successfully.

"How did your nose get broken?"

She looks back at him, slightly confused by the question, like she isn't sure why he'd ask.

"Fighting the Lady of the Lake," she says gruffly. "One of the fae."

Steven stays laying on his side, still pretty winded from using his healing powers. Since Jasper seems to be going along with it, he decides to just keep talking to her.

"Oh... I don't think I've seen her before," he says. He'd thought he'd seen most of the fae that had been chasing them, but he guesses not. Steven still isn't super caught up with the events that went on while he was imprisoned.

"They can be really awful," he says, which is obvious, but he's tired, okay. "I don't understand it."

Jasper looks at him for a moment without replying. She doesn't particularly want to talk to him, but she's been told to stay here. After a beat she concedes, "I thought they were going to take us for some kind of purpose. But this one just wanted someone to hurt for no reason. Like it was a game." She doesn't sound rattled or upset, exactly, just disgusted; disapproving. "You've been here longer than I have. Is the Ringmaster like that too?"

He has to consider it, but not because he really thinks the Ringmaster is anything like them. He just needs to figure out how to articulate the difference, even as he's cringing from the idea of what Jasper must have been through.

"No... she messes up sometimes, but I really don't think she means to hurt anyone. And when she does, it doesn't really make her happy."

Frowning, Jasper mulls this over; then she nods, slowly.

"Good."

She wouldn't want to be working for someone that unapologetically wasteful. Her opinion of the Ringmaster is kind of dubious, because let's be real, a lot of the time she does seem like a pretty frivolous person -- the kind Yellow Diamond would disapprove of -- but that's something, at least.

Steven wasn't really sure what Jasper's take away from that would be, so when she answers, he ends up laying there beside her for a while without saying anything more. Finally, he makes a decision, though.

"Is... what happened with the fae making things hard for you right now?" He really doesn't know a lot about what went on with Jasper, but he kind of wants to.

She blinks, and frowns.

"You healed my gem," she points out, genuinely puzzled by this question. Her extremities are in the right places now and she's not going to die, so clearly she's fine?

"Yeah, but..." He was honestly expecting she'd say something like that, so it doesn't really throw him off. "Do you ever feel like... you're so mad about something that happened, or that thinking about it bugs you? And so... it makes it harder to do things, because you keep getting distracted with thinking about it, and whenever you remember it you feel like you did when it happened all over again?"

"That's kind of what I mean," he clarifies, frowning.

Jasper's brow furrows further. Is this... some kind of trick? Of course she feels like that, pretty much all the time, but she's fairly sure that's normal? Sure, she's never heard anyone say anything about it before, but...

"Everyone feels like that," she says dismissively. "It doesn't stop me from getting anything done."

"That okay," he says, glancing away. "I just... know I feel more like that after something like this happens. Kind of like I do right now." He blinks away a few tears. "I've been trying not to let it get in my way, but... it's hard."

She's right that everyone feels like that sometimes, but it shouldn't have to last like this.

That's...

She looks down at her folded arms. When they were still on the wrong way because of her broken gem, it had been very difficult not to keep thinking about whether shattering would feel the way drowning had -- if she'd lose control of her body completely as her gem came closer to breaking in two, helpless in the face of that immense pressure from inside and outside all at once --

Her big blunt fingers are digging in too hard at the tense muscles of her arms, and the sensation brings her back to herself, abrupt and staring. She jerks her head round to look almost accusingly at Steven, lowering her hands to clench at her sides.

"Why are you telling me this. Why are you telling me your weaknesses."

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