[Mini Player Event] Never Have I Ever

[crushed_pearls]

Who: EVERYONE
What: A rousing game of Never Have I Ever, and other entertainments
When: Saturday, May 4th, starting at around noon
Where: Oak & Iron
Warning(s): Intoxication and whatever you bring in with you; the prompts here are ideas for your own TLs

Shortly after the island comes back and rebuilding begins, the esteemed Mister Yorick of the newspaper gets the Erin Peters experience, where she flings his door open and yells, "YOU LIKE GETTING DRUNK MOTHERFUCKER?" Somehow this kills him, and Erin honestly is not sure how, but a much more sedate second visit leads to an announcement in the newspaper:

Never Have I Ever
Saturday the Fourth, Oak & Iron
First Round of Drinks Free
If You Drink, You Play
We're Never Going To Say This Again But Food From Home Encouraged, Our Chefs Aren't Immortal

If You Have Never Heard Of This Game, Start Talking About Large Boats And Ask The First Person Who Has A Flashback How It's Played

Attendance isn't mandatory, but it's about to be hard to miss at least seeing the damn thing...

The Party

Erin's come prepared for this one. It took some cajoling. It took pleading and browbeating to get extra chefs on deck so people could switch out to participate. It took opening extra kegs and casks, and, yes, it took stealing and fixing a whole lot of furniture that had been damaged by the flood, but right now Oak & Iron is not merely the building, but most of the Outside(tm) near the building. The event proper starts at noon but setup started at 8 PM the night before and Erin straight up just did not go to bed until it was done. The Pine Devil can come at her if it thinks it's hard enough.

The end result is a whole lot of mismatched outdoor seating with a variety of chairs, stools, tree stumps carved into "chairs", Frankensteined tables, and an outdoor bar. Staff from the inn collects money from that bar, where Erin Peters is working, every 25 minutes on the dot, and your hostess has a sharp and sly grin on her face whenever she's not actively engaged in a conversation. Food is available but bringing dishes of one's own is strongly permitted. Hell, come bring it and sell it, this may be the only time the inn doesn't care that you're technically competing with them.

She has, after all, been starving for Glamour under the sea. She expects to feed well.

A large sign next to the bar reads: I'm Blind As Fuck And This Game Goes Hard, Drink At Own Risk

Smaller letters immediately beneath say: Anyone Dying Of Alcohol Poisoning Will Be Mocked

The Game

Never Have I Ever is a simple game. Someone makes a truthful statement, such as "Never have I ever had a fist fight with a bear," and anyone who can't truthfully agree with that statement must take a drink. Though there's no actual formal obstacle against lying, people fudging the truth while Erin is walking past with drinks or to see friends might get a nudge with a wing and this blind bitch announcing 'liar' in a sharp tone that might be play or might be bullying and is probably both (feel free to NPC this happening if it's of interest to you!).

Feel free to simply tag in with your question as the header, as seen here. Even the prose is optional! Folks will come to you with whether or not their character drinks and you can thread or not thread from there.

The Long Walk Home

Did you survive your own poor choices? Do you have a plan to make it home safely before, or after, dark? Not like Oak and Iron can bear the entire town within its walls, so...

Comments

[graphomaniac]

"Drink'st thou grape juice at every wedding?" Lev/Lyubov blurts, before taking a drink.

They're already tipsy enough to have forgotten that the Jewish love of wine is what got the Romans assuming that HaShem was actually Dionysus as seen through the eyes of a very small Cana'anite nation whose other primary concerns were literature in the vernacular language, letter-writing, shepherding and keeping goats from upsetting their sheep.

[hadnoright]

Daisy snorts a laugh and shrugs, "Didn't go to a lot of weddings. Plus I've never been the alcohol type. Don't like clouding my senses. And these days it doesn't even affect me."

Fever wasn't wrong that it's a little cheaty, but...

cw? might lead into discussion of intoxication, including drug use (prescription and not)

[graphomaniac]

"Affects thee not?" Lev/Lyubov says, deciding not, for the moment, to let slip that it hadn't even occurred to them that some people might not get invited to many weddings in the first place. "Nu like, just alcohol or other such things, too?"

Truth be told, the prospect of being unaffected by mind-altering substances sounds ... harsh. Unpleasant, even.

cws continue + references to poor attitude towards addicts

[hadnoright]

"Haven't really tested it. Didn't like the idea of drugs for the same reasons." And others; her old man always did raise her to think of people as druggies and worse. An attitude that's been forced to shift alongside many of her other attitudes, as her own... adjacent, experiences, came to the fore. "But I'd guess no. Think it's a weird. Metabolism thing? I dunno."

Trying to trace the biological logic of the way the Fears affects its Avatars is an exercise in futility, she thinks. It's all too... intangible.

[graphomaniac]

"Ah," says Lev/Lyubov, and then asks, blunter than they would were they sober, "so thou hast been ... changed, nu?"

Maybe it's a strange conclusion to leap to, but it's something in how Daisy's talking about the whole thing. And given the context, it's likelier that something weird happened to Daisy than something mundane.

"I mean, like, the people who've been brought here ... I sometimes wonder if there's any pattern, nu? And the only one I see is like. Many people here aren't what we started out as, or what we thought we'd be."

[hadnoright]

"Changed would be the nice word for it." She's not even sure what the more fitting word would be and it's not like she's never used the same, but... what it is the Fears do, it's not something that's ever felt— neutral. "I used to be human. Now I'm not."

That took a long time to accept.

A loose shrug. "You're not wrong. Lot of similar stories about."

[graphomaniac]

Maybe it's because they're tipsy, and maybe it's also because this persistent mystery's eating at them, and Anzu won't explain shit.

"For my part," they say, a little sullenly, "I ken not what a human might even be, nu?"

[hadnoright]

A slight head tilt. "Like, what, you... weren't human? Don't have humans?"

[graphomaniac]

"I know not what a human is, or feh, like, why I'm supposedly one?" Lev/Lyubov says. "I'm starborn, a nephil. Most of you all here look like you're nephilim, though like, there are those what like to quibble and say I'm a nephil but someone like thee," they jerk their chin at Daisy, in lieu of pointing, "is a lovek, on account of having only two eyes and four limbs, and nu, I assume not being prone to like, sudden transformation? But I hold not like that."

They scowl unhappily, and lean forward, one elbow on the table, chin rested on the back of their hand.

"Feh."

[hadnoright]

Daisy is very much listening, but at the same time, "Definitely missing a lot of context for this one." She swirls her glass. "I mean, did a lot of thinking about what it means to be human over the last couple years. But how stuff works in my world's not how it works... anywhere else."

[graphomaniac]

"Nu?" says Lev/Lyubov, meaning okay, I'm listening, tell me about it.

"What's so different about thy world? Surely like, it can't be ..." they wave a hand, "nu. Okh. Like, what shape is thy world? When I learned worlds can be different shapes, I just sorta decided to stop being surprised by any differences. Confused and baffled, yes, of course. But surprised? Feh. Surprised not."

[hadnoright]

"Rrrround?" comes with the rolling 'r' as she drags the word out in confusion, but that does very much make her accent more prominent for a moment. "What's different's more what's there. The thing that changed me's not in other worlds."

Not in the same form, anyway. Flan, April, Victor, their universe was close, but not the same.

[graphomaniac]

"Round and like, nu, in one piece?" Lev/Lyubov insists. Then they blush. "Nu, look. I know like, I'm sounding stupid? But ... please trust me, I need to know if thy world's in one solid piece. Like, materially. Not metaphorically."

As for the other thing, they seem entirely unbothered.

"I come from a place where the further one goes underground or into the sea, the likelier it is one will end up in the realm of dreams and death," they confide. "Metaphysics confined to one particular garden or public, nu, oy. Uhm. Amenities?" — yes they're pretty brazen about a lot of things, but too delicate to talk about public toilets in as many words to a stranger — "those I can tolerate. It's like, the physics what bother me, not the metaphysics."

"... but what's different, by thine?"

[hadnoright]

You know what a world that's not in one piece wouldn't be the weirdest thing she's ever heard of, but it's still a first. Enough so that it takes her a moment to turn the implication over in her brain before nodding, "Yeah. One solid piece. That part's never been remarkable before."

Usually the more unusual part is, "We've got eldritch entities constantly influencing our world. You get unlucky, and you can end up in one of their domains at any time. Weird metaphysics. Dream logic when you're awake. The whole nine yards."

[graphomaniac]

Lev/Lyubov shrugs.

"Such a thing is uncommon?" they say, a little skeptically. "One has to walk to find where the Silver begins to encroach onto the land, but walking into a dream as one awake is about as common as stepping into, feh, pardon the comparison, destrier guano. Or cow manure, when one's out in the country."

They lean forward and lower their voice, "but okay like, what mean'st thou by eldritch? There are like, distinctions. The ones what gather about stagnant water and bring blindness, they're as the microbes what bring cholera. Ones what walk around at night, and ones what must be kept away from bedrooms and maternity wards, they're as people. But there are ... nu, like. There are things what cannot be understood except in how they shape one's story."

They're on something of a fishing expedition, not really expecting that Daisy will get what they mean. But the term she used, that was the term Anzu had used for a certain animate statue, and for certain ... events they both encountered in the course of Anzu's work. Generally, the supernatural claptrap Anzu deals with is more or less people. Sometimes ... sometimes it's not.

[hadnoright]

Frankly Daisy's one of the worst people from her universe to try and explain this stuff, at least so far as those deeply enough involved in it all to be able to even try goes. She didn't even know what she was serving by name until she'd long since lost her humanity to it and she's hardly the academic type, she never did any real research. What she knows she knows based on raw experience and Jon explaining the lines.

But she's had to give it a go many a time now, so... "Like— unknowable beings that sit just outside our dimension and screw with it. People try and understand 'em. And there's patterns in what they do, sure. They even whisper in the heads of people. But they're not something you can talk to. They just sit there. Making and feeding on Fear."

[graphomaniac]

"Oh, nu," says Lev/Lyubov, nodding. "Not like, the Fear bit? And I feel like thine might be heavier on the outer wights than any inner." They pause and then clarify, "s-such um. Persons? Persons. Persons what live way out in the Deep Silver, rather than among other people upon the Bones. Or on the periphery in the Near Silver. Nothing lives in the Far Silver. The dead like, live not. But worry not. I know full well what might walk the land, without no legs of flesh and bone. Or at least like, none of its own. Some like to ... feh, catch rides, so to speak."

They started out stammering a little — suddenly finding it awkward to be explaining these things, feeling foolish for being from a different place as the alcohol got to them. But then the flow caught, and their usual deceptively casual patter returned.

They pause again, and then say, "uh, remembered I to introduce myself? I think I remembered not."

[hadnoright]

Daisy does nod along, though she's still the worst person to try and understand a lot of this stuff. She's so much better with hands-on stuff than discussion, in just about every arena.

"I mean. Neither did I. Daisy Tonner."

[graphomaniac]

Lyubov looks Daisy up and down, makes up her mind and nods back. Taking in Daisy's whole demeanour, she decides that an offer of a handshake might be pointedly rejected. Not that she thinks Daisy is necessarily stone, just that Daisy seems like she skips conventional social gestures by choice.

"Lyubov Morgenshtern," she says; from a seated position, it's hard to give the requisite bow, so she lays her hand over her heart and bows her head. "Thou may'st have heard others call me Lev, but to thee, I'm Lyubov. If thou'rt that curious about why, I might explain, but if thou care'st not, then I'm content to explain myself not."

[hadnoright]

There's a momentary tilt of her head, but then Daisy shrugs casually and nods. She never has been much for probing into personal details. Tends to just take things at face value. "Lyubov. Alright."

cn: semi-oblique mention of cisnormative attitudes to nonbinary/genderfluid people

[graphomaniac]

Well. That's rather new.

Lyubov assumes that when most people agree to her name/pronoun rules, they're still privately wondering what exactly's going on. And sometimes, mercifully not often, some people look like they're just dying to ask why she's not doing anything else; the worst is when it turns out they pity her, assuming she's holding off going chymical for someone else.

But mostly, when the other party's not fully comfortable with what she's doing with her life, she just catches brief flashes of curiosity and awkwardness.

But far more often, she sees the oh-wow-that's-really-none-of-my-business face. At best, people who do get it try very hard to look understanding, or sympathetic. Rarely, someone like Zivia flat out tells her she takes her word for it, which is always a relief.

But Daisy's not doing any of that.

She just looks like she cares not one way or the other, which is not a reaction Lyubov has seen before.

"Wait, like. Thou hast not no questions? Since like, nu. I'd rather get the awkward ones out of the way first, rather than be ambushed with them in five months' time?"

[hadnoright]

Another loose shrug, only one shoulder this time. "Not really the awkward questions type. Probably not going to ask anything I don't actually need to know. Don't usually tell anyone anything they don't need to know, either."

Deeply private person, this one.

[graphomaniac]

Lyubov snorts.

"Few people can like, truly mind their own business," she remarks, with uncharacteristic venom. "Many like to think so, but, nu—"

She falls silent, but her expression remains bitter.

[hadnoright]

Daisy snorts too. "Oh believe me, I know. I'm friends with a guy that can't mind his own business to literally save his life. Drives me nuts. We're real opposites."