Blizz
shylarahHey!! So I know this is marked as “full” but Canary’s been gushing about it for days in one of my discord servers, and it looks super interesting! Would it be possible for me to join still?
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oooooh! Mark me down as interested pls. I'm drowning in schoolwork this week but I'll work on a sheet as soon as I can!
@ItMeGritty sweet! Welcome aboard. Let me know if you’ve got any questions!
Hi friends! After way, way too much radio silence from my depressed ass, hi, I'm finally here and back with another gifrickinormous post. :D If anyone's interacting and wants to continue their interaction, that's totally fine, I just don't want anyone to feel stuck! If you want to keep playing the interaction out or timeskip or whatever that's entirely okay, don't feel too constrained by the "Time" listing in each post.
(also, there needed to be a bit more chaos going on. Just saying.)
(also, there needed to be a bit more chaos going on. Just saying.)
Time: 5:19 PM -> 5:26 PM
Location: Campus Commons
Interacting: Naomi Johnson @canaryrose, mentions Alice Gray @Blizz
Echo grinned at their incredibly tall best-friend as she crossed the gathering of people to sit by them. As she spoke, they nodded along, popping a bite of melon into their mouth exactly as Naomi mentioned this being her first prank. With wide eyes, they chewed intently for a moment, holding up a finger in pause until they quickly swallowed, clearing their mouth enough to talk. “your first prank? I mean, makes sense. You know they’re gonna say I’m corrupting –" they cut themself off for a moment, cringing slightly at the other implications the word had for Star kids in particular. “That I’m a bad influence on you.” They finished the thought rather lamely, nibbling on a bite of cookie now and not touching the actually-nutritive bits that they had gotten (mostly just to throw off the campus nutritionist – the high schoolers were somewhat more supervised on that front than the college students were, to keep them healthy and their brains developing to their maximal capacity. Or something. The health teacher was always on them, even at events such as this, about their health, wellbeing, and development.)
“I know, this is gonna be so good. I’m so excited. I don’t think anyone saw us, so we… should be good. Hopefully.” Their storm-trooper-helmet-wearing classmate flitted by, making a hand-sign that was attempted to be discreet (and failed spectacularly.) Echo rolled their eyes, giving a thumbs up and a wave.
Theater kids. Most people would give the theater kids a pass.
A particularly orange-haired welcome leader was wandering up towards the stage, and Echo groaned to themself, visibly rolling their eyes. Of course Phoenix got to do the student welcome speech this year, before the faculty came out on the field and spewed a boatload of propaganda and other unpleasantries.
He seemed particularly nervous, just slightly too well put together for the situation. Echo had always found it particularly – to use an internet word with not-great connotations – cringey. But adults and other responsible sorts seemed to just lap it up. He stepped up to the microphone, tapping on it to make sure it was on. It wasn’t; there was a muffled curse from the storm-trooper-helmet-wearing classmate, who bolted towards the soundboard and frantically started pressing buttons, fading out the generic-pop-music that filtered through the speakers scattered around the common grounds and turning on the mics on-stage. The classmate then gave a theatrical thumbs-up, before dramatically ninja-rolling away and making more of a scene than if they had just walked.
Echo rolled their eyes again. Theater kids, everyone.
They didn’t particularly want to pay attention to the goings-on on stage, their gaze flitting around the crowds of people. “So many new students this year,” they stage-whispered to Naomi. “I wonder if there’s any in our classes?” There had been all of one transfer student in their year that they’d noticed so far, but she had seemed a snarky, reclusive sort – though Echo could empathize with that, there was no obvious common ground, and the girl – Alice, they vaguely remembered, from the awkward icebreaker introductions during English seminar - seemed quite unwilling to make the acquaintance of anyone else. That was fine, Echo had been there and done that too… but… still.
They kicked their heels against the retaining wall absently, swaying from side to side and fidgeting with their phone, anxiously counting down the time until the clocks would begin. "I'm so nervous," they quietly whispered, glancing to Naomi.
GM Post
Please take your time at finishing up your interactions in the next couple posts! This is just so that those who are stuck / at a dead end in interactions can.
Time: 5:20 PM -> 5:26 PM
Location: Campus Commons
Interacting: Everyone!
Phoenix adjusted his blazer once again as he checked his watch. It was precisely 5:20. After a final scan for straggling or struggling young students, he started over towards the stage, making sure his hair was properly arrayed (he bit back his internal annoyances at the wind and other such constructs of the environment) and that his speech cards and other such belongings were exactly as they were supposed to be, though it was purely mechanical.
Of course they were; he was far, far too meticulous to ever lose something so important as that. It wasn’t like he would need them, anyway; he’d had his speech learned since the start of the summer, when Professor Edwards had approached him and asked him to give it. It was a sort of tradition that one of the graduating students, especially one who’d attended for at least the entire duration of their high school and college, give the welcome speech on the first day of classes, and Phoenix (with his upstanding GPA and disciplinary records, his familiarity on campus as a resident assistant, and his very particular aesthetic) had been a quickly suggested choice.
He adjusted the sleeves of his jacket one final time, stepping up to approach the microphone. The stage techs were nowhere to be seen, but that was fine; he bit back his annoyance as he tapped on the dead microphone, clearing his throat and staring pointedly back to the empty soundbooth.
A high schooler quickly leapt into action, pressing buttons and ending the music after far, far too long of a pause. Phoenix rolled his eyes, stepping away from the microphone and pressing two fingertips lightly to the underside of his jaw, swelling the air that formed his words and projecting his (already theatrical voice) out over the entire field. The microphone tech did not take the hint, but that was fine; he angled the shape of the waves to avoid the microphone lest he cause feedback or other unpleasantries.
“My fellow students, welcome to another great year at the Nova Excelsis Institute of Higher Education. My name, as many of you know, is Phoenix Gallagher; I am a student senate member, resident assistant in Carter Hall, and the principal clarinetist of our student orchestra. But beneath all my other titles, I am a student just like you, and I am so proud to have the honor of saying that.” He shifted in place, lightly altering how the air currents flowed and yet again adjusting his suit jacket, shifting to stand as tall as he possibly could.
“Ten years ago today, I arrived on a bus just up the road at the Academy, and my life forever changed. Since that fateful day, I have been able to blossom into a role that I never could have even dreamed of filling with a conventional education. I have been privileged to work alongside the very greatest musical artists, both those gifted with Stars and those without; I have been pushed to the extreme limits of my ability and set up for a world-spanning career in that which is both my passion and my gift. Truly, the limits of one’s potential here are realized only by their wildest imagination.
"I am here to congratulate you all on making the choice to be here today; those of you who are returning students, to thank you for returning to this bastion of learning, and those of you who are new, to welcome you to the greatest place you will ever find. Here, and only here, Starred students are enabled and empowered to explore every facet of their ability, to hone it and grow into more gifted and accomplished individuals than they ever could have been in the conventional world. The world does not understand us, but the Institute does. Our faculty – world-renowned, incredible individuals who have singlehandedly made leaps and bounds in each of their wonderfully diverse social and academic roles – understand us, and are here to help us become all that we can be.”
He absently fidgeted with his suit jacket, reaching into the pocked where he kept his cue cards – more for the familiarity of having them than anything, of course – and managing to pull a perfectly blank face when he realized he didn’t, in fact, have them. No matter. He had his speech memorized. Perfectly, perfectly memorized.
Everything was going fine. He cleared his throat, adjusted his posture again, and put a smile on his face, making eye contact with some of the new students as he continued.
“We sit today at the beginning of what is sure to be the greatest year the Academy has ever known; as for the last fourteen years running, the Academy boasts higher enrollment than ever. In response to this, our faculty has added even more diverse degree programs at the collegiate level, while featuring the nation’s best selection of AP and IB courses -and even more specialized classes specifically taught to the higher achievement of Starred students – at the high school level. Truly, we are on the cusp of an era of greatness, and we will be the future of it.”
After a strategic length of pause, he smiled and opened his mouth to speak again, but found himself distracted by a rhythmic, droning beeping that quickly swelled in volume – an alarm. “Is – Is someone’s phone going off?” he asked distractedly. It was quite far away, at one of the picnic tables near the middle of the field, he thought. He tried to ignore it, hoping someone would make it stop beeping soon. “As I was saying, the future is now; the future is us. Remember this, if you become discouraged. The future of our world can hang in your hands, should you – should you choose to rise to that – occasion.”
A second beeping had joined the first, just a half-second out of phase with it and from a different part of the field. He growled to himself, turning a strainedly bright smile to the gathered students. “Friends, if you could please silence your phones. Please.”
He finally paused in his speech, clasping his hands in front of himself and waiting annoyedly for the sounds to be resolved. He didn’t dare present the professors, not with this cacophony.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a bright teal flash. His sibling. They didn’t seem at all perturbed by the noise…
He shook his head irritably. Surely they didn't actually know anything. They wouldn’t be trying to – sabotage this event?
Nenra nodded curtly as Zakroti mulled over the idea of a plague. He seemed rather horrified by the idea, and to some extent she could understand why, though it was a truth that she and everyone she’d ever known had grown to live with. She took the offered pewter cup with a nod and a quiet “thank you” to the servant who brought it. An embarrassed tinge of red crept up her neck and ears as she drank.
To think she was being waited on. Like some kind of noble. As if. Her family would never have let her hear the end of it.
Miry, intently listening to the conversation, signed her agreement to Zak’s mutterings. It was common knowledge to most (well-educated) Gems; the blistering pox (so called for the tiny blister-like boils it created across the surface of one’s skin, ultimately inside the mouth, throat, and even lungs too in the most severe cases) had likely been carried back from the Yugrin of the southern wastes by Drakken soldiers returning home. It never did seem to leave the small towns of the south-central farmlands, at least – the time which it lasted was too short for it to travel well, but it had been a generational affliction in some regions for the better part of decades, stumping scholars and common folk alike.
”As far as we know, Drakken aren’t affected. Some scholars think it’s a parasite spawned from the Yugrin; southern border towns are often stricken by it every few years. Some even say it’s a blessing of Vivari, protection against –“ Miry wisely cut herself off before she could finish the thought, turning her attention to the pewter cup of water. A moment of concentration, her brow furrowed, and a layer of ice crystals formed on the inside wall of the cup; she swirled the water gently and they quickly melted down, but the result was her water being quite chilled to cut through the dust and heat. It was a trick she'd learned as a child, as did many other water gems. She extended a hand to Nenra, inquisitively shaping the signs for “cup” and “ice”, but the older bride ignored her.
“A blessing to protect against the Drakken brutes who would take us from our homelands,” Nenra finished Miry’s comment after just a second too long a pause. Miry shot her a look, which she ignored. “Though in most cases the symptoms are merely uncomfortable – and only for a few days! They’re almost never dangerous in any way, but they leave plenty of visible marks.” Most of her cousins and siblings bore scars of their past infections, bumpy, uneven swathes of skin with circular discolorations of red and white surrounding each, resulting in a deeply unsettling pattern covering much of their bodies. She’d been fortunate enough to never catch the pox, though, or if she had she was one of the few who never showed signs. “The Reapers don’t take anyone with marks that are visible. And the nobles don’t bother us at all, because they’re so scared of getting it and disfiguring the pretty posh people at their pretty posh courts. Even grain and textile tithes aren’t enough to entice them to brave it. But… once you’ve had it once you can’t get it again, so it doesn’t usually have a huge effect when it comes up – and it only does every ten years, give or take. But we’ve no idea where it comes from. We’ve burned the soil, cleaned our houses, built new houses, and it still returns.” She stared off absently into space, perking up again when Zakroti mentioned gardens.
She was certain he was trying to get her to talk, but all the same, she couldn’t help but flash a grin at the mention of beautiful flora. Especially around valleys of farmland, where earth magic collected, tilled into the ground by generations and generations, there were some delightful plants (and creatures, but that was beyond the point) to be found. Ordinary plants grew to extraordinary sizes under the influence of magic; there were rosebushes in the forest downstream that grew blossoms larger than a person’s head, and the ambient magic collected so strongly along the riverbank that everything – be it rose, water-lily, or simple reed-plant – grew with an iridescent sheen to its leaves and petals.
She was uncertain if she should mention it, but her hands itched to go through her satchel of belongings, to hold the seed bundles. Some part of her was certain that it had to be a trick; he was prying with the intention of destroying that which she had brought, stripping the last of her homeland away from her desperate attempts to cling to it. But some part of her wanted to trust. Surely, if she said she had brought some of what was grown at home, he would not immediately have it burned – he was an academic, and a noble besides. Nobles appreciated pretty things, and academics foreign things, and so presenting a foreign, pretty thing was a sure way to get them to comply.
How ironic. A sharp laugh escaped her once again, her lips curling up. Miry glanced over to her inquisitively. “Tell you not-now,” she signed, her hands clumsy and finger shapes uncertain – it was clear she was far more used to interpreting the sign than she was to constructing it.
“If you seek simple garden weeds, perhaps I can assist you,” she constructed the phrase mentally, pausing before she finally said it, the formal words and lofty tone feeling awkward on her tongue. The formality slipped out of her voice quickly; so much for being proper and respectable.
“Any sort of plant can be grown anywhere, given the right attentions. It won’t be our river at home, of course – the water carries the magic and energy down from a dozen other villages upstream, and it seeps into the land and makes plants as grand as anything even from the king’s garden – but anything will grow with water and attention. Great Mother’s Roses would be the easiest to start a floral garden with.” She cast a disdainful look at the ground, before glancing to Zakroti out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he was familiar with the plant she mentioned.
Miry tensed up, signing something angry at Nenra and glancing anxiously to Zakroti as well, her eyes wide at the implications. Everyone knew of Great Mother’s Roses, the crowning jewel of the flower festival held in the city of Vivari. The festival was hosted by her disciples and attended by thousands, from the wealthiest of merchants and nobles to the poorest of farmers, to sell their wares and celebrate their great mother in the grandest temple in all the realm. The first year of the mandatory reaping, these festivities had been halted, the grounds searched. That year, every bride taken from the event had been a dancer, and bore a crown woven of iridescent, impossibly fragile Mother’s Roses in her hair. Well-intentioned lords tried to placate the Drakken, offering bushels and seeds of rare, beautiful flowers and trees and other commodities, spices and dyes and other grand, costly items in exchange for sparing their lovers and daughters, and the angry reapers laughed and took it all and extra maidens besides, leaving the festival in ruins and hundreds of grief-stricken folk left to clean up the pieces.
As word of what happened had spread, the roses had become a sign of Gemmenite defiance – in as much a sense as their people understood it – graceful and delicate and also unflinchingly eternal. The flowers, though they took exceptional work to grow from seeds, were hardy once they’d taken root and near-impossible to kill; some said they spread like weeds, once they’d been introduced outside of the carefully-cultivated gardens that they originally came from.
Families and friends of those had been taken began to grow the flowers, (which were incredibly delicate plants, fully-matured bushes only a few inches tall and leaves and full-bloom blossoms the size of a fingernail, with iridescent pastel petals so fine they were nearly transparent) and within merely a decade they had spread to every city, town, and village in the kingdom. Given enough warning time, it had since become a tradition that those of Vivari’s daughters who were taken away would be given a bloom, hidden somewhere on her person (since Drakken reapers were seemingly instructed to tear them away if found.)
It was intended as a subtle (or arguably not-so-subtle) jab. We remember; we are remembered. We are eternal.
Unfortunately, the reality of it was that many were forgotten just as quickly as they were taken. It was Gemmenian legal culture to consider those who were taken dead; even if a bride was eventually permitted to return home, as happened in a few exceptionally rare cases early on, she would have been stricken from her family record as though she had died on the night of the choosing, removed from inheritance and genealogy alike. It had been quickly decided, the first year those reaped included legal heirs, to set a precedent of just that; it was far simpler than opening up the possibility of those returning home into turbulent political situations, and brutally kinder than permitting grief-stricken families to hold onto the hope that their lost daughters would someday return.
Incredibly few ever, ever did.
Miry stopped her thought process before it could wander too far down the line of wondering if her family had spoken her name – or even thought it – since the night she had been taken, or if her urn had already been lowered into the wellspring, her name written in the family records to be “remembered” and soon forgotten. She stared intently at the inside edge of her water glass, eyes misting over.
Nenra met Zakroti’s eyes for a moment, wondering what the lord would say.
To think she was being waited on. Like some kind of noble. As if. Her family would never have let her hear the end of it.
Miry, intently listening to the conversation, signed her agreement to Zak’s mutterings. It was common knowledge to most (well-educated) Gems; the blistering pox (so called for the tiny blister-like boils it created across the surface of one’s skin, ultimately inside the mouth, throat, and even lungs too in the most severe cases) had likely been carried back from the Yugrin of the southern wastes by Drakken soldiers returning home. It never did seem to leave the small towns of the south-central farmlands, at least – the time which it lasted was too short for it to travel well, but it had been a generational affliction in some regions for the better part of decades, stumping scholars and common folk alike.
”As far as we know, Drakken aren’t affected. Some scholars think it’s a parasite spawned from the Yugrin; southern border towns are often stricken by it every few years. Some even say it’s a blessing of Vivari, protection against –“ Miry wisely cut herself off before she could finish the thought, turning her attention to the pewter cup of water. A moment of concentration, her brow furrowed, and a layer of ice crystals formed on the inside wall of the cup; she swirled the water gently and they quickly melted down, but the result was her water being quite chilled to cut through the dust and heat. It was a trick she'd learned as a child, as did many other water gems. She extended a hand to Nenra, inquisitively shaping the signs for “cup” and “ice”, but the older bride ignored her.
“A blessing to protect against the Drakken brutes who would take us from our homelands,” Nenra finished Miry’s comment after just a second too long a pause. Miry shot her a look, which she ignored. “Though in most cases the symptoms are merely uncomfortable – and only for a few days! They’re almost never dangerous in any way, but they leave plenty of visible marks.” Most of her cousins and siblings bore scars of their past infections, bumpy, uneven swathes of skin with circular discolorations of red and white surrounding each, resulting in a deeply unsettling pattern covering much of their bodies. She’d been fortunate enough to never catch the pox, though, or if she had she was one of the few who never showed signs. “The Reapers don’t take anyone with marks that are visible. And the nobles don’t bother us at all, because they’re so scared of getting it and disfiguring the pretty posh people at their pretty posh courts. Even grain and textile tithes aren’t enough to entice them to brave it. But… once you’ve had it once you can’t get it again, so it doesn’t usually have a huge effect when it comes up – and it only does every ten years, give or take. But we’ve no idea where it comes from. We’ve burned the soil, cleaned our houses, built new houses, and it still returns.” She stared off absently into space, perking up again when Zakroti mentioned gardens.
She was certain he was trying to get her to talk, but all the same, she couldn’t help but flash a grin at the mention of beautiful flora. Especially around valleys of farmland, where earth magic collected, tilled into the ground by generations and generations, there were some delightful plants (and creatures, but that was beyond the point) to be found. Ordinary plants grew to extraordinary sizes under the influence of magic; there were rosebushes in the forest downstream that grew blossoms larger than a person’s head, and the ambient magic collected so strongly along the riverbank that everything – be it rose, water-lily, or simple reed-plant – grew with an iridescent sheen to its leaves and petals.
She was uncertain if she should mention it, but her hands itched to go through her satchel of belongings, to hold the seed bundles. Some part of her was certain that it had to be a trick; he was prying with the intention of destroying that which she had brought, stripping the last of her homeland away from her desperate attempts to cling to it. But some part of her wanted to trust. Surely, if she said she had brought some of what was grown at home, he would not immediately have it burned – he was an academic, and a noble besides. Nobles appreciated pretty things, and academics foreign things, and so presenting a foreign, pretty thing was a sure way to get them to comply.
How ironic. A sharp laugh escaped her once again, her lips curling up. Miry glanced over to her inquisitively. “Tell you not-now,” she signed, her hands clumsy and finger shapes uncertain – it was clear she was far more used to interpreting the sign than she was to constructing it.
“If you seek simple garden weeds, perhaps I can assist you,” she constructed the phrase mentally, pausing before she finally said it, the formal words and lofty tone feeling awkward on her tongue. The formality slipped out of her voice quickly; so much for being proper and respectable.
“Any sort of plant can be grown anywhere, given the right attentions. It won’t be our river at home, of course – the water carries the magic and energy down from a dozen other villages upstream, and it seeps into the land and makes plants as grand as anything even from the king’s garden – but anything will grow with water and attention. Great Mother’s Roses would be the easiest to start a floral garden with.” She cast a disdainful look at the ground, before glancing to Zakroti out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he was familiar with the plant she mentioned.
Miry tensed up, signing something angry at Nenra and glancing anxiously to Zakroti as well, her eyes wide at the implications. Everyone knew of Great Mother’s Roses, the crowning jewel of the flower festival held in the city of Vivari. The festival was hosted by her disciples and attended by thousands, from the wealthiest of merchants and nobles to the poorest of farmers, to sell their wares and celebrate their great mother in the grandest temple in all the realm. The first year of the mandatory reaping, these festivities had been halted, the grounds searched. That year, every bride taken from the event had been a dancer, and bore a crown woven of iridescent, impossibly fragile Mother’s Roses in her hair. Well-intentioned lords tried to placate the Drakken, offering bushels and seeds of rare, beautiful flowers and trees and other commodities, spices and dyes and other grand, costly items in exchange for sparing their lovers and daughters, and the angry reapers laughed and took it all and extra maidens besides, leaving the festival in ruins and hundreds of grief-stricken folk left to clean up the pieces.
As word of what happened had spread, the roses had become a sign of Gemmenite defiance – in as much a sense as their people understood it – graceful and delicate and also unflinchingly eternal. The flowers, though they took exceptional work to grow from seeds, were hardy once they’d taken root and near-impossible to kill; some said they spread like weeds, once they’d been introduced outside of the carefully-cultivated gardens that they originally came from.
Families and friends of those had been taken began to grow the flowers, (which were incredibly delicate plants, fully-matured bushes only a few inches tall and leaves and full-bloom blossoms the size of a fingernail, with iridescent pastel petals so fine they were nearly transparent) and within merely a decade they had spread to every city, town, and village in the kingdom. Given enough warning time, it had since become a tradition that those of Vivari’s daughters who were taken away would be given a bloom, hidden somewhere on her person (since Drakken reapers were seemingly instructed to tear them away if found.)
It was intended as a subtle (or arguably not-so-subtle) jab. We remember; we are remembered. We are eternal.
Unfortunately, the reality of it was that many were forgotten just as quickly as they were taken. It was Gemmenian legal culture to consider those who were taken dead; even if a bride was eventually permitted to return home, as happened in a few exceptionally rare cases early on, she would have been stricken from her family record as though she had died on the night of the choosing, removed from inheritance and genealogy alike. It had been quickly decided, the first year those reaped included legal heirs, to set a precedent of just that; it was far simpler than opening up the possibility of those returning home into turbulent political situations, and brutally kinder than permitting grief-stricken families to hold onto the hope that their lost daughters would someday return.
Incredibly few ever, ever did.
Miry stopped her thought process before it could wander too far down the line of wondering if her family had spoken her name – or even thought it – since the night she had been taken, or if her urn had already been lowered into the wellspring, her name written in the family records to be “remembered” and soon forgotten. She stared intently at the inside edge of her water glass, eyes misting over.
Nenra met Zakroti’s eyes for a moment, wondering what the lord would say.
@Infinite Cosmos hey sorry for the lateness, I thought Aurora got back to you! I love him, go ahead and move him over to the char tab. :D
I’ll also hopefully be posting soon! I’m sorry friends, my existing health issues are acting up in addition to quarantine stuff, plus my father decided quarantine is a great time to clean house -.- I’ll post when I can, hopefully tonight or tmrw!!
Time: 4:56 PM -> 5:15ish PM
Location: Campus Commons – Welcome Banquet
Interacting: Naomi Johnson @canaryrose
The afternoon had been an uneventful one for Echo Gallagher. They’d spent much of the day climbing about in the theater catwalks, organizing boxes and boxes of dusty props that had been shoved up there at the end of last year’s productions, like they always were. Technically, they weren’t involved in leadership of the club, yet. That was mostly the college kids. They just had a knack for knowing where everything went, and with no afternoon classes on Mondays, the club’s advisor had tasked them with beginning the annual inventory.
They were startled out of their cleaning (which was really more haphazard than such a word would imply, more a squirrely flinging of things into piles and scribbling of illegible notes into a Steno pad) by their phone quietly beeping, and for the moment they ignored it, letting it beep for approximately three minutes before they remembered how important today was.
They’d had the foresight to set their alarm for 4:40, to give themself just enough time to get to the commons without too much rush – or being too conspicuously early. Echo was never early to anything. They hadn’t accounted for being in the middle of a project, however, nor that they also had to stop and pick up their… accomplices.
Without bothering to remove the flower leis from their neck, or the variety of spangled bangle bracelets stuck from their wrists to their elbows, they scurried out of the theater, leaving their project strewn about. After the festivities, they’d be right back to finish it, and didn’t trust themself to remember how they’d put things away.
A quick knock on the door of the costume lab, and two of the underclassmen flailed out into the hallway to meet them, trailing all manner of absurdist disguises. One sported a dollar-store “disguise” mask – the plastic ones with the fake glasses and nose and mustache - under a comically oversized and slightly squished fedora, and the other a stormtrooper helmet in fairly rough condition, likely all pulled from the same bin of props.
“What’s the plan, boss?”
Echo snorted at the use of “boss”, running their fingers through their freshly-shaved hair absently. “Now we go find Naomi, grab the payload, and then…” they rubbed their hands together evilly. ”Mischief.”
The three of them got some strange looks from the various faculty and staff, strange looks that were quickly averted. The faculty members were no strangers to the weird shenanigans that theater kids often pulled, and the trio of eyeliner-sporting, brightly-dyed-hair-wearing teens left little doubt in anyone’s minds about their affiliations. Usually, it was best to let such individuals be about their own business, so long as there was no chance of rulebreaking. And none of them seemed to have anything particularly, overtly rule-breaking on their person.
They arrived at the field and quickly scoped out an unoccupied corner, tucked behind some less-well-manicured shrubberies and near to some of the old oak trees. There, they waited for Naomi.
They only had to wait for a few minutes. The tall girl all but sprinted over, panting and mumbling about band letting out late. Echo wasn’t surprised; the music kids always were kept over-time, and the building was clear on the other end of campus. “You’re fine,” they said, giving a reassuring, toothy grin to their best friend.
Their eyes went a little bit wide at the sheer absurdity of the assembled alarm clocks. “Did you have to sacrifice a clarinet for this one? Jesus Christ, Naomi. You weren’t kidding that they’ll do anything for the meme…” They’d gotten the high school theater kids to contribute a modest number, 10 in addition to their own, but Naomi had outdone herself. This was going to be good….
When Naomi turned to address their help, they nodded seriously. “And distract any of the welcome crew or faculty who come to see what we’re up to, please!” they added quickly, then motioning the others to scatter.
They knelt beside Naomi, scooping as many wireless alarm clocks as they could fit into their bookbag. “If we get caught, you know I’ll take the blame. They’ll never believe sweet ‘lil Naomi Johnson did anything bad… But we won’t get caught, not by anyone that matters. It’s not like we’re hurting someone, it’s just – a little fun. This week hasn’t been nearly fun enough!”
Having grabbed several of the small clocks under their arm, and about a dozen and a half more stuffed into their messenger bag (which they carried half-open, readily accessible, just for this purpose) they blew a kiss in Naomi’s direction, as they often did to most of their friends, immediately chucking one of the clocks underneath a nearby shrubbery. “Meet you in a few minutes!”
They continued on mostly around the perimeter of the field, placing alarm clocks in inconspicuous locations – among rock beds and under shrubberies. After several minutes of this, they put their shoulders back, a big smile on their face, and plowed into the gathering masses of people, attempting to sneakily drop alarm clocks just hidden behind the legs of tables that were unoccupied – or else where the occupants were too busily conversing to notice them.
Naomi was going to put clocks around the speaking podium, nestled in among the sound equipment, so Echo was going to put them around the food line. Students were already beginning to filter through it by this point (though any of the faculty remained to be seen) so Echo got into line, absently checking their phone while nudging a clock under the first table with their boot.
5:12. The first of the clocks would start going off in fourteen minutes; they were set to varying times until 7:30. Some would go off at the same time, most with a couple minutes between, though sometimes as long as ten minutes, just to make certain that people were caught unsuspecting.
As college and high school students are prone to doing, most of the students around them were hyperfixated on the food. They took a risk and placed one of the clocks on a table, mostly hidden between two bowls of various chips- they knew that most students wouldn’t be paying attention, and at quick glance it could’ve passed for a paperweight used to hold down the tablecloth. Another two were nudged into place under table legs, and one behind the enormous cooler full of sodas and ice.
Food in hand, and alarm clocks depleted, Echo scurried off to find a table. They failed at finding one that wasn’t occupied, and so perched on the raised edge of a flowerbed, balancing their plate in their lap. Acting nonchalant was difficult, but they did their best, though all they wanted to do was giddily flail about what was about to transpire.
A thought idly flicked across their mind that they had no real idea of how they were going to retrieve these devices, nevermind ensure they remained in working condition, but such pragmatic thoughts were quickly banished.
This was gonna be so fun.
@Mistress Dizzy looks great, just make sure you add a written description to their appearance as well when you move them over. :D
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