lostcarnival | ⇨ CAMPING GROUNDS

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⇨ CAMPING GROUNDS

Who: Everybody!
When: Day 64
Where: The Camping Grounds
What: While the Ringmaster attempts to purge the carnival of magical tracing spells and deal with the angry fire fae in her belly, everyone else is getting sent on an emergency camping trip with some unusual local fauna.
Warnings: Camping.

CRYPTIC CAMPGROUNDS↴

You're given about three hours to prepare, after the Ringmaster tells you her plans for the coming week. There is a vast selection of camping equipment at your disposal, and the means to take along enough food for the length of the stay. The wilderness of the planet you're left on is nearly idyllic, but some people just don't like the great outdoors.

► CRYPTOZOOLOGY: As it turns out, the carnival won't be alone here. There is a varied ecosystem of cryptids to be found as well, living in relative peace and mostly reacting to the newcomers with curiousity. More details can be found on the plotting post. You are free to NPC the cryptids as much as you need to, as long as you stick to the behaviours described.

► DREAMSHARING: There is a player plot going on which will allow characters to share dreams! These are specifically more dreams than nightmares, and the mushi-adept characters will be here to help.

► CHILLAX: There isn't any plot twist for this setting, so this is mostly an opportunity to decompress from the last plot and get ready for the future. The Ringmaster will show up occasionally to help with needed medical treatments and check on things, but won't stick around for long.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

CAN'T FORCE IT Scout's vaguely aware that things have happened, but she's been entirely preoccupied by things she found in that library. While she'd gone in looking for items of interest to the Carnival, she'd only wound up finding writing that hit closer to home. A lot closer. At some point she'd given in and let herself collect and collate it, copied the shorter things and traded for the longer ones.

Some of her findings are like a punch to the stomach. If not for the fact that she knows full well that there's nothing on Kyrimourut for her but condescension and despair she'd ask to go 'home' for a while. There's half a year left on this contract and it feels like an eternity. Oh, yes, she knows very well that she's not missing anything by being here, that she could serve ten years and become entirely unrecognizable and things would be exactly unchanged when she stepped back in.

She wants to go home. There's no home left to return to, so she wants to help her people, she wants to be there. Scout keeps to herself out in the woods, by herself or with her togetic, who doesn't understand a thing about her change in attitude.

After the first couple of days she doesn't bother keeping herself cloaked all the time. She raids the camp for things she can eat without preparation and lives off them, off by herself, getting increasingly disheveled and upset looking as she pores over things repeatedly.

NOT ALLOWED: The local mothmen and bigfeet are curious about the young woman who's so preoccupied she doesn't seem to notice them. Black shapes swoop low overhead, and great apes take turns finding long twigs and prodding her, then rustle away like mischievous kids. It's not a threat, so she doesn't pay attention after the first couple of encounters.

Her togetic Thranta, on the other hand, does. Its angry chirping and trilling sound in the woods for a fair distance as it chases the cryptids, scolding, and returns to perch on Scout's shoulders, clucking and tugging at her hair.

DREAMSHARING:

"Relax, you must!"

A classroom for young children, all soft edges and large, simple writing and bright colors and scaled down furniture. The windows are open and the room is warm and sunlit. On an assortment of mats there are a variety of children, some human, around five years old, eyes closed, mostly quiet but giggling and whispering when the teacher's eye is elsewhere. The teacher himself isn't any larger than they are, and smaller than some, green-skinned and large-eared and clearly as fond of the students as they are relaxed around him.

"A child full of the Force like a cloud carrying lightning is. Let the charge run through you to the ground, to the ground."

Scout is there and not as a child, a touch of heaviness to her but peaceful in a way she rarely is while awake.

With Strange's egg safely hatched - outside a brief alarm over his new propensity for being on fire - Papyrus is freed from one task, facing again the prospect of being alone with his thoughts. It's alarmingly adrift, going without the day-to-day routine of cleaning and maintenance at the carnival...

But Papyrus is nothing if not an expert at coming up with things to do. Listening to the radio chatter, chattering on the radio, even helping search in the woods for these missing herbs that Ginko and Tanyuu need.

Really, the herbs are important for everyone. Dreaming about private things and having people stumble in on them could be a little embarrassing. And with mushi interacting it's especially important for Papyrus, to make sure that dreams stay just dreams so he can safely sleep a little without incident. Going a solid week without a nap just isn't feasible, he's learned from unfortunate experience.

So he's out a little ways from the group camp area, squinting at various herbs on the edges of clearings for matches to the one described earlier.

It might take a moment to resolve Scout's image. Her clothing is rumpled and earth-toned, the coloring on her legs and tail isn't too unlike last fall's leaves, even the paler, goldish dappling on her face and throat might be sun through a gap in the canopy. She's here, anyway, sitting against a moss-covered tree with her long legs folded to one side, staring listlessly down.

Her dæmon is splayed across her lap, an open book laid over his back. He's more animated, heavy head raised to look back at her, speaking quietly, as ever, in this case laying out what sounds like a plan. "-remember how long it'll take to disable the other ships. If they come after us for theft that's troublesome. No, if we can just take Skirata's beckon call that'll mean a lot less running back and forth."

Scout blinks slowly, scrubs her hand over her face - it's grimy, she's grimy - and looks up, her gaze drifting in a vague way until she focuses, is visibly surprised to see someone. "Papyrus..." She makes a face, and stops to clear her throat; her voice is rusty. "What're you doing here?"

"Shouldn't have settled so close to camp," Tràkata opines in a mutter. He looks clean enough, but his mane and tail-tuft are clumpy, tangled.

It does, with her being roughly camouflaged against the backdrop of tree and leaves. But there's nothing wrong with his ears - besides not literally having them - and he hears the soft words before putting a face to the voices. He's hardly figured out where they are, starting to approach, when she looks up at him.

"I... am foraging," Papyrus answers slowly, glancing down between them. They seem unkempt in that way of not taking care of themselves, a familiar scene if he changes who's in it. At least they seem to have the attention to be peering over a book. Maybe they just went for a jog and didn't bother cleaning up after themselves. Rivers and waterfalls are different things from showers.

"You know!" He continues, brightly and loudly and chattering on like he hadn't hesitated for a few seconds. "Gathering supplies from the flora around us. Not for cooking, but, for other things... As I assumed you were doing. Hey, have you got a radio with you?"

Scout winces in the pause. Of course Papyrus rebounds from it, but still. "Oh. No, I left it behind, I'm... I've just been considering my options. For when I go back. It's not going to happen yet, I just never really made plans before. So I'm catching up."

She closes the book and folds her arms over her soul, a reminder that he shouldn't say anything compromising. He's silent now, as he typically is, but characteristically wary to Scout's uncharacteristic dazed.

Dragging more of her focus to the here and now, she tries to look brighter, sharper. "Something about mushi again, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, it's mushi again, something about naps being bad, but..." With what she did say, it's seeming a little less pressing to make sure she has all the info.

After all, Tanyuu and Ginko said it could take a week before anything goes really wrong. And it's a cureable sort anyway, so Scout should be fine for now. The question of her cleanliness, too, only warrants a brief, concerned/judging pause.

But going out with a radio is an entirely different matter.

Papyrus shakes his head. "Without Psi's helpful reminders... will everyone start up those bad habits? No radios, wandering around no buddies? Oh no! Imagine how much worse kidnappings will get then."

"I don't know why they aren't just banished from the grounds," Scout sighs. She suppresses the urge to tug her tunic straight. People get dirty sometimes, it's fine. Papyrus can deal.

"There's always been people ignoring Psi's rule. With what..." She has a pause of her own, just noticeable. "-we're facing, I'm not sure a buddy is enough. Anyway, this place is supposed to be safe. That's why we're here. Plus I'm not even actually that far from the camp."

Papyrus hums but doesn't respond about the mushi. The Ringmaster could probably cure even the most incurable infestations, like Ginko's and his, but... she's busy. Maybe that could be his contract another year. No sense fixing things out here so they're safe, fixing things at home to stop the loops, and then going home only to fall into an endless slumber or whatever.

"We thought the library was safe, too," he points out instead, unhappy about it. For all that it had a hideous 'organization' system, it had been nice to walk through the shelves, finding interesting stories, even hearing his brother find some proof of their past. And the Athenaeum would've been a better place to do this reading and planning... But maybe she had been. They did get interrupted. And the area people are camping in... isn't very quiet.

"But, I guess, the carnival isn't here, so there's nothing to follow us here," Papyrus grudgingly admits. "And if you're in shouting distance, it's close enough... This time. "

Scout flicks the spaded tip of her tail. "I didn't think the library was entirely safe, but this is the pattern. Maybe it'll collapse soon, but not while everyone's shifted out of the carnival."

Before the current run of misfortune, while serving out her first contract in those days when there had been more people in the Carnival, she'd heard about bad stops here and there that were followed by mellow stops. Scout doesn't really have a timeline of anything earlier than the bird stop, but she'd worked with people who'd been in the Carnival for years. Sometimes things went wrong, even before the vampires and the other fae showed up, even if that had been a smaller definition of things going wrong.

"Anyway I have my cloak of shadows, Papyrus. You don't need to worry about me," she adds wearily.

"Of course I don't! We don't get in danger every single outting," Papyrus says, bright and chipper and increasingly insincere. "Just most of them. And now we're being hunted. Nothing to worry about. A nice protective cloak is all you could need."

It's been a little different for him, coming in during a quiet time. His first few stops were places with some innate dangers, sure, but he'd been too preoccupied with the differences in his brother to focus on it all. It wasn't until the Celebration, and Hell, and the reveals that these were recurring vampires that things felt a little less infinitely large and fun.

"I am relaxed."

There's at least one person in this dream who isn't a child, though the argument could be made that he's certainly sufficiently immature. Lambert sprawls out on his back on one of the unrolled mats, in no sort of proper meditating position at all, eyes shut as he suns himself in the light spilling from a window.

"I don't even know what that means."

"Hrmmm!" Children peek and titter as the tiny old Master comes to see, his gnarled cane tapping on the floor. "Observing the wrong lesson, you are? Perhaps return you should later. Teach techniques for napping I will, when these younglings are quiet inside!"

The young pupils whisper indistinctly to each other, giggling, and start to subside when their teacher taps his cane on the floor and waves it at them, mock-stern. "Notice this, I have! Think you that your lives without distraction shall be?"

The classroom has become a space in a vast, thickly planted greenhouse or lush indoor garden, the mats and floor replaced with thick moss dotted with starry petals falling from a high, spindly tree in bloom. There's a constant sound of running water and calling animals and in the distance the hum and clash of lightsabers, and a woman's sudden sharp laughter. The pupils are quiet again, focused on their meditation, but most still react when an amazingly ugly bird lands heavily on that spindly tree, rocking the branches, and makes a loud, metallic cry like PEEEENT!

Scout doesn't. She sits in proper posture, dwarfing the teacher and children, seeming oblivious.

"I'm practically a master at napping by now, too," Lambert grumbles -- but he'll open his eyes when he hears that odd cry, blinking slowly as he situates himself.

Or rather, fails to. This isn't a familiar place to him at all, though it doesn't occur to him to question it. Pushing himself up to a sitting position, Lambert blinks, looking around him.

Scout stands out, being one of the only people around his side. Lambert's close enough to reach out and poke her if he moves, so he does -- rolling onto hands and knees and reaching out with one clawed finger to prod at her side.

The lesson continues, though it seems to draw further away, the details blurring until it's just the concept of the tiny old master teaching the young students. The garden and the life and sounds it hold persists, though now the starry moss carpet is cut with paths of white gravel, crisp-edged. It's an amalgation of some of the common areas in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, not a clean copy.

Scout opens her eyes before he can get there but doesn't actually stop Lambert from sticking a claw in her. With a heavy, teenagerly sigh she finally acknowledges his presence. "What? Are you going to pass a note next? There's better ways to get someone's attention, you know."

"But this needs much less imagination," Lambert answers with no remorse, settling back on his haunches with a fluidity he only wishes he had in real life right now -- not that it's on his mind. The memory of injury and pain is distant right now ... as is the changes from the Carnival. The Lambert here is Lambert looking more like he did when Scout first met him, bereft of horns and tail and baseline human except for his eyes.

"Are you really just going to sit here?"

"Are you really gonna keep prodding me? It's been too long since I sat with everyone." A shadow crosses her face, crosses the surroundings. There's a cloud up somewhere, between the glassy enclosure of the great Room and the planet's sun, and everything seems a little bit grayer and heavier, the ambient noise more muted. Even in a dream, Scout can't quite manage to forget why it's been so long.

This isn't a nightmare, anyway. Scout tracks a star-shaped white flower drifting down from the tree, spinning and tumbling on whims of the air, until it lands in her lap, and she exhales deeply. The shadow passes, though a little line is between her eyebrows now. "Give me a reason to get up."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

⇨ CAMPING GROUNDS

Scout | OTA

CAN'T FORCE IT - D68

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Dream Sharing

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