[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

[astrogator]

The color drains from her face.

'To clarify.' One always needs to clarify. No good comes of leaping to conclusions.

'Your corporation used people as fuel? Imprisoned them, and... and...'

Please clarify, Jean!

[restingslasherface]

"While the personhood of Abnormalities is ontologically questionable...yes." Jean strokes Charlie's head with a finger, their eyes sliding away. "I can explain further, comrade, but...be certain you want to hear it. Descriptions of the City have frequently disturbed others, and I needn't hear that it's horrific - I have grown quite aware. The Wings...the Wings answer only to profit. And I'm very, hahaha, hahahahahaha, HA, ha...very sorry to say that Lobotomy Corporation may have been among the least egregious."

[astrogator]

'Ah. You decided they weren't people first.'

This is not making it any better. Sorry Jean, Tayrey's projecting hard here. She catches herself just before she tips over into a rant about how someone responsible for such horrors could never be her comrade, because that word carries real significance where she's from.

What she actually does is push back her chair and stand, one hand extending, touching the table to steady her.

'I am either too drunk or not drunk enough for this,' she declares loudly, before looking over her shoulder in search of an ally, or at least a safe distraction.

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta hears that, looks over just in time to meet Tayrey's eye, and mutters a curse under his breath when she makes the abort mission signal. He grabs his crutches.

"Tayrey!" he calls over the babble of the crowd. "There you are! I forgot about the, uh, thing, can you come help me for a second?"

Look, just be impressed he's able to walk right now, he's not going to come up with a better cover story than that.

[restingslasherface]

"..."

Jean just kinda. Slumps over their drink. Defeated.

[astrogator]

Gaeta. She doesn't even notice how flimsy the cover story is; it's there. He's there when she needs him.

'Have to go,' she tells Jean hurriedly. 'Safe skies!'

Then she flees, pushing through the crowd, making her way over to Gaeta as quickly as she's able.

'Thank you,' she gasps in relief. 'Thank you. I was about to flip out at someone who probably only halfway deserves it.' Not that she can tell for certain. She's still pale and shaken.

[not_a_traitor]

"Of course," he says, brow drawn taut with concern. "It's why I'm here. Come on, wanna go outside and get some air?"

He tips his head (carefully) toward the exit.

[astrogator]

She nods quickly, not caring what he'll think of her for it, because at this moment she needs very much to be away from all these people. She needs to see that the door will open and she can step outside and there will be real stars in the sky.

And then maybe she can calm down.

The only reason she doesn't rush for the exit is that she doesn't want to leave him unable to keep up. They make it out together, and the cool night air hits Tayrey's face, and she looks upwards.

'Much better,' she says softly. 'Thank you.' She doesn't look much better, but give her time.

[not_a_traitor]

Just as soft: "You're welcome."

He leans his back against the building, following her gaze upward.

"...Do you wanna talk about it at all, or just enjoy the view?"

cw: imprisonment, suicidal ideation

[astrogator]

It's a very good question, and at first it seems her answer is given by the way she keeps staring up at those distant stars. Tayrey never really wants to talk about any of this, but sometimes she feels she ought to, and Gaeta is a person she trusts. He won't minimise it. He won't tell her she's to blame.

'Agent Jean was talking about their own past,' she says, 'and using logic that reminded me of - of my captor. Back there. He was a monster. He kidnapped us because he could extract our energy through making us suffer.' She frowns. 'I know exactly how wildly out-of-sector that sounds, but I mean it completely literally, and I don't even know in hindsight how true it was but he believed it, he did it, and he didn't care, because we weren't people to him. We were fuel.'

Tayrey bites her lip, fixes her gaze on the brightest star she can see. 'He tried to convince us there was no way out. No hope. I never believed it but too many of them did. Collaborators, you know? People who wanted to tear me down because I would do whatever it took to be free. I remember one of them screaming in my face that I was nothing but fuel. That was - it was after I got out a distress call. I thought it would give the others hope, but it didn't, they just... turned on me. He'd convinced them that everything outside his prison ship was worse than being in it, but being inside it all I wanted to do was die, so.'

Finally she looks at him, and her eyes glisten with tears, but she keeps her voice low and steady. 'Some of those people are here. Citizen Mortanne couldn't have reached them if not for my beacon tearing a hole through that prison wall, I'm sure. But they still...' she trails off, not knowing how to express her fears. That she was still hated. That they still thought she was worthless and deserved the torment they'd put her through. That they'd harm her, given half a chance.

[not_a_traitor]

"Gods," he breathes, staring.

What else can he say? It's horrific. Beyond what he could have imagined when she first mentioned being trapped aboard that ship for a full year. Gaeta's seen enough magic since he arrived on Marrow Isle that he doesn't waste time with questions he might have asked six months ago: how is that possible, that sounds like a fairy tale, you can't mean you were literally fuel.

And to be told at every turn that something so awful was normal, preferable, the right choice, the only choice --

"Tayrey, I'm so sorry. That's..." He doesn't have to fumble for words anymore; his voice firms. "They were wrong. That's intolerable. You did the right thing, sending out that distress call. And they shouldn't have turned on you because of it."

cw: violence, cannibalism

[astrogator]

'That's exactly what I used to call it. Intolerable.' Tayrey doesn't believe in fate, but it has to be some kind of probabilistic synchronicity that he used that word, that he sees it that way. 'And they shouldn't have. That caused so much of the damage, you know? One evil man capturing you and not caring about your rights is... it's horrible, but it's one man. Having almost all your fellow prisoners side against you is something else.'

She should leave it there. She should. But Ari's drunk and she trusts Gaeta so much, more than she ought to, and her emotions are all so close to the surface right now.

'I told you that I died back there, right? But not how. It was because of that distress beacon. Our captor had this... closest I can come is calling her an AI. Humanoid figure without a face, enforcing his rules. Constant surveillance, materialising as soon as anyone stepped out of line. We had to be real careful, working on that beacon out of her sight. We needed a way to launch it without her immediately stopping it. So I came up with... with overload. Get people breaking so many rules all over the place that her processor couldn't handle it. And it worked!'

She can't help but sound triumphant, even now. 'It worked. Only a friend of mine, turns out he was real fond of this artificial prison warden. We had a contract, he and I. He'd promised never to hurt me. But because of her? He transformed into a monstrous animal, and literally chased me down, clawed and bit and crushed me, planned on eating me, and made out it was my fault for not being satisfied with living in captivity and being tortured. Because he... he fucking liked it. So that's how I died. Not that day. Days and days later, after doing my best to fight for my life.'

Her tone has changed, and not to the flat impersonal approach she usually takes when talking about her unpleasant past, but genuine distress.

[not_a_traitor]

She keeps talking, and for a moment he can't comprehend it. Everything feels strange and unreal, like he's watching a vid play out from a remove; like his brain is trying to pull him back from the visceral, horrifying violence Tayrey describes before it comes for him, too. Hunted. Eaten. Her body shutting down in slow increments, over days, under the claws of someone she trusted, for the crime of standing up to an injustice and saying no more.

Gaeta doesn't know when he clamped a hand over his mouth. Maybe somewhere around 'crushed.' He only realizes when he has to pull it away again, unsteadily, so he can limp closer and wrap his arm around Tayrey.

[astrogator]

She practically clings to him, because that look of horror she saw on his face? It's proof that rationality still holds. That there are normal places where people - even people who have suffered awful things themselves - hear something like that and understand how wrong it is.

'Ask the others who came out of there,' she mutters, 'and half of them will tell you I should have known better or I deserved it, or some other dehumanising...' She trails off, blinks back her tears. 'You see it for what it is. I know you do.' She leans her head on his shoulder.

'I'm free now,' she says, her voice firmer. 'I'm free and I'm around people who don't treat horrific torture like it's acceptable and that means I can heal, right? It has to. I don't want to go home and be unfit. Tradelines don't like damaged goods.'