Mingle - Emergency Potluck

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WELCOME POTLUCK

Greetings, residents! Those more observant sorts among you may have noticed a large influx of very crowded ferries. In order to welcome our new residents en masse, Town Hall is holding a potluck in Town Square. Please bring a dish if you are able and make a new friend!

All of our newest arrivals need only bring themselves. We look forward to welcoming you all into our community, and may your lanterns always be lit.

This event is open to all! In light of our new influx of prospective players following the Great Sail Migration, we've decided to offer a small public event to tide everyone over until the TDM this weekend.

Comments

[crushed_pearls]

"Real unhelpful word, isn't it?" Erin, in fact, interrupts. "I haven't had nearly enough alcohol or rest to explain my deal to a stranger, no offense doc. 'Magic' is what you get."

[hate_gettin_older]

"Nah," he says, a touch of bitterness edging his grin, "we din't get jobs, back where I grew up. Y'had to be economy class for that."

[thelatechrisfreeman]

"Economy class?" Chris repeats, confused. It means a certain something in their world... but what does getting the cheap seats on long-term transit have to do with getting a job? "What does that mean, like, a social class that drives the economy?"

[hate_gettin_older]

"It's like this," he starts, and bites into a buttered roll, delaying his further explanation for the space of chewing and swallowing.

"The whole world froze over when I was little. Only people still alive are the ones who got onto this train that goes round the world and never stops. Up in the Front, that's where the rich bastards are, the ones who paid first class. In the middle, there's the people who got economy class tickets, they work for the Front. And in the Tail, there was us. The ones who got on by lottery."

[battlebyballad]

"A hundred pleasures to meet you, Vespertine! My name is Music." She grins widely, places her cup down on the table again briefly.

"I hope it's not too forward of me, but I am really quite curious about you, and I have lots of questions."

[immortaldemonsoul]

"I'll let you in on a great secret," Ellarinne says playfully. "Food always, always tastes better, when it's made with care by someone else." She grins at Erik. "Promise you'll make bread for me now and then, and I'll consider myself amply repaid."

A week later, she keeps her word: she calls Erik on the sending stone and invites him to come over to her house, in the southeastern part of town. All he need bring is himself and clothes he doesn't mind getting dirty -- and perhaps, if he's feeling generous, a bottle of wine.

Cooking is nearly always more fun with wine, Ellarinne informs him.

[astrogator]

Ari follows! Alright, the food-in-the-hand is unexpected, but it's harmless, and only throws her off for a moment before she hurries off after Elsie. She quickly catches up and matches the other young woman's pace.

'Is it far? I haven't had much of a chance to explore yet,' she admits.

[astrogator]

'I'm sorry,' says Tayrey softly, but of course it's projection, it's imagining how devastating it would be for her to lose her own past, all the things that matter to her, and imagining how she'd cling to any clue that she found. That she thinks Fever to be the same isn't wholly without logic; her need to escape the ship and go home had seemed to mirror Tayrey's own, with not dissimilar motivations.

She doesn't ask what Fever remembered, but it's a deliberate omission, because if Fever has the space to talk about home and doesn't, Tayrey shouldn't pry. Instead she lightly touches the other woman's arm. 'I'm very glad you survived it. It sounds like something we could have at least tried to fix back home, but it'd be ludicrous to attempt brain surgery here even if we did have someone qualified.'

With a shake of her head, she adds, 'We're all too stubborn to just die. It's brought us this far, yes? We'll find a way through. Do you... do you want to know what happened? Who attacked you, if that's what it was?'

[astrogator]

Tayrey nods eagerly. 'I heard that. Company housing if you take the right job. I'm sure I'll find something soon enough; I'm not fussy.' She goes on to explain: 'I'm doing casual construction work for now, but that's only because I needed a job immediately and they needed unskilled labor immediately. I'm not bad at lifting heavy things. I'm better at flying starships, but I hear there's not much call for that here,' she jokes. 'Or anything else I trained for shipside. I'll figure it out.'

She certainly doesn't want to make him feel responsible for figuring it out for her, so she adds, quickly, 'And then I can try everything in that store you mentioned! Everything without bacon in it, anyway. It sounds like a good place to stop by for a hot post-shift meal.'

After a moment's pause, curiosity gets the better of her. 'What are you doing for work here?' she asks.

[cacophonish]

Jeff laughs, trying to picture spaceships in a place like this. Maybe one day there will be a thriving zeppelin industry, but even that is probably a far cry from what she's used to.

"Hey, maybe you could pilot one of the waterships here!" he teases, before pausing, reflecting on his word choice. There's already a word for ships of the sea, Jeff. "I mean. Boats."

Anyway!

"And, oh, I just kind of-- I was doing little things here and there for a while. I busk sometimes, and I was helping the candy maker as, like, an apprentice? Only I wasn't any good." He tried his best, mostly, but Jeff wasn't cut out for it. "Now I'm working for Deir-- for Ms. Breugaire." Jeff looks around for the tiefling woman in the crowd, then points her out. "She's in charge of the marina. I, ah... I'm her maid?"

[abhorrently]

The touch is a surprise, but a welcome one. Her expression softens minutely at it, knowing it for the comfort it's meant to be.

"I have suspicions, but...right now, knowing would do nothing but make me want answers from someone who isn't even here, and who would be unlikely to ever come here. If I'm to know for certain, I'll let it come back to me in time, so that I can deal with the knowledge when I'm not also trying to sort out what happened to earn us our freedom."

Reasonable, logical. And not mentioning how she'd want the most bloody revenge against the perpetrator.

"You think you really could fix it, back in the Tradelines? I'd take at least getting rid of the headaches...though everyone would have to put up with me asking about nearly everything in sight."

cw: violence, gore, all the fun stuff

[hadnoright]

Violence in this form still doesn't come naturally, to her. The Hunt made her an animal but it didn't make her an animal. This has always been something else. Something new. Something she shies away from until suddenly she doesn't.

The way she rears back from Dahlia's claws is clumsy and unpractised, someone moving in a body that's mostly-but-not-quite-right. And so the strike catches her. More than distance, it's blood that spread between them as the flesh of Daisy's flank tears.

She lands spread-pawed and braced. The pain only invigorates her. And though the blood stains her pale fur, mats it together in dark red clumps, the gored skin beneath starts to knit back together.

The wolf bares her teeth. Snarls. And lunges first.

[hadnoright]

For a split second, there is what can be best described as Schroedinger's Daisy. She could either laugh, or lunge. The end result? A sharp quirk at the corner of her mouth that could be an amused smirk, but is rather undermined by her deliberately shifting like she's going to come at him.

Look she's behaving but if she's not acting a little threatening when sufficiently pushed, is it really her?

[notinflictthem]

It's odd, because for being a corn doll come to life from being loved sufficiently without losing any of his brittleness, Hawk seems... relatively fearless about it.

Guns, he has a healthy terror of. Knives, sure. But someone threatening to kick the shit out of him is just another Tuesday, and at least this time he'd have it coming. So he's watching, for the moment. If it's just threats, he can laugh at it. If it's an actual attempt on his life, he can use the several inches of high he has on her to get the hell out of dodge.

[maximumcake]

"Okay..." Max hesitantly sinks back down onto the chair.

He's still so stirred up about the fact that Erik was here before him and has, apparently, made both friends and enemies already. Where does that put Max? Does he have to... weigh in? Are there people he'll have to stay away from? He both wants to talk about it and doesn't. But it won't be to Hawkeye. Not now.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to... ruin the mood."

[maximumcake]

"I bet you could still help them in smaller-scale ways. Hey, if you can figure out an efficient way for me to make larger quantities of powdered sugar without having to grind it every day forever, I'd pay you for that." He's not even joking.

"You look like you're doing all right to me. You might not be the star of the party, but you showed up and you made a new friend, didn't you?" Max nudges him lightly on the shoulder. "That's me, by the way."

[maximumcake]

"I can see why. It's a good thing you told me he's taken or I'd have embarrassed myself trying to ask him out." A+ good taste.

She totally should have said it out loud. Max would laugh for days.

"Yeah, I'm sure that doesn't make the work any easier for you, either. The offer is a real one. I don't mind at all. It'll be kinda like how I used to take care of my baby sister."

[thelatechrisfreeman]

Chris thinks that over.

"But how can the train never stop? Surely there has to be some form of maintenance being done, entropy being what it is. And if the whole world is frozen over, wouldn't that include the tracks that the train runs on?"

They give themself a shake -- don't get sidetracked (ha) by questions that probably can't be answered.

"And you grew up in that situation? The train's been running that long? Damn." They poke at their food for a little while, though they don't take another bite -- instead looking up to say, "I'm not surprised that rich bastards preserved the old order with them on top, even in the face of the world ending."

[theresalwaystheview]

"Something to facilitate automatic grinding perhaps, or a simple hand machine that will convert less effort into more product," Bart muses, trying to remember enough of the food production side of his degree to nail something down. "I can get back to you with a plan and see what you might prefer. There is electricity available here, so that will make it a bit easier, it's just a matter of getting the parts together to try and put it together. I may need to outsource the labor to put it together, but I'm sure that it will be done it if means that you'll be able to provide something the village will enjoy." He actually looks more animated as he thinks all of this over, especially considering that it meshes his own skillset with the opportunity to expand what he knows how to do, with the promise of helping someone else.

He looks back at Max at the reassurance, and not for the first time he's rather blindsided by the up-front, earnest statement that he's made a friend. He colors faintly around the ears and looks back down the road instead. "I'd much rather be a background player anyway. I certainly wasn't built for being the center of attention."

[astrogator]

'Not me personally, but a specialist doctor planetside? Very possibly.' She sighs. 'I know it doesn't do any good talking about it, when there's no way to bring you there, but if I could I'd just say you were from somewhere real isolated, and then everyone would be happy to answer all the questions.'

Fever is someone she trusts, someone she'd take shipside and vouch for to her captain. If such a thing were possible, and desirable. 'But I hear you,' she goes on to say. 'Knowing now and not being able to take action would frustrate me immensely, for sure. Only...our freedom wasn't earned. It was stolen from us by that bastard, and we took it back. Are you worried about the finer details? I don't remember them, but it's enough that it happened.' She'd been in a haze of pain; she doesn't remember much of anything after Clarke left her.

[lordoftheozarks]

"As long as you promise not to sue me if whatever I make causes you to fall ill." RIP Cesar and the fudge.

He arrives wearing the clothes he'd come to the island in. Simple cotton, with a few patches on the knees and elbows now to repair the rips he put in them whilst fighting the River Walker in its own caves. (At least there aren't any blood stains showing.)

He knocks, and then stands back a little so he can hold up the bottle of wine he's brought. He does appreciate when someone makes it easy on him by telling him what to bring in these situations.

"I hope red is to your taste?"

[astrogator]

She sees that look on his face, and she's silent for a moment, soft sympathy in her eyes. It's hard not to let knowledge of the other man she knew bleed through, the man she saw celebrate his partnership contract, the man she saw lying in a hospital bed in a foreign land on an impossibly faraway planet.

In that order - or not, depending who's doing the recollecting.

This man is different, but she can feel for a stranger, can't she? 'There's always hope,' she tells him. 'Your London can be better, and you - is it home for you? If it's home, you can always find something of value there.' She'd left Cardalek in anger, and it hadn't been until she'd been torn away from all she knew that she realised how much there was to miss.

[hereticofthewilds]

Elsie shakes her head. "Don't have to. But..." her gaze drifts out over all the people around her. "I Don't ...belong."

[cacophonish]

"Fuck..." Jeff whispers, thinking about party planning, on top of the already daunting notions of schedule keeping and paperwork. Like, sure, he could throw a wild party with his friends back home, but he doubts it would pass for anything suitable here. Not with the moneyed crowd, anyway. Now he's looking at Max is if the man were a superhero.

"I don't think I could handle all of that. I mean, I'm supposed to file her paperwork, but... I'm definitely not cut out for all of that, man. You're, like, the Superman of butlers."

And hey, to be fair, Max is built like Superman. Maybe he really is a superhero...

"Thanks for the advice. Taking notes... I can do that." He laughs a little and adds, "Well, I mean. I can try to do that. I always sucked, you know, notes and details and stuff. And cleaning. And... organizing." Why is he a maid again? "But she really wanted me for the job, and the benefits are great so I'm gonna do my best."

[hereticofthewilds]

"Not far." To Elsie, who has traveled every inch of these woods, it's barely any distance at all. But even to less seasoned adventurers, it's not a long journey, just to the edge of the forest.

Roots begin to show under foot. They lead to a large, moss covered tree adorned with bits of glass, cloth, or other trinkets hanging from its branches. There's a hollow in the tree large enough that items could be placed in there, and about the trunk, the name 'Elsie' is spelled out with metal bits pressed into the bark and left to be partially grown over until fused with the wood.

"See?" Elsie says, poking at a piece of broken ceramic dangling off a limb by a length of string. "Shiny?"