Fandom Library, Wednesday, November 27th

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

There were turkeys in the Library today. Multiple turkeys. Singing turkeys. Singing turkeys with choreography.

Arden watched the madness in front of her with something akin to horrified fascination. She wasn't even nauseated by the mention of eating turkeys the way she'd normally be - too busy trying to figure out if she was having some kind of episode.

"Eat me!" a turkey warbled at her.

"...You know, I almost wish the gremlins were here instead," she muttered, putting a book in front of her face and trying not to look up again.

Except, sadly for Arden, this wasn't a performance. No, that was for tomorrow. This was their rehearsal.

Before the afternoon was over, she would come to dread the words, 'Let's take it from the top!'

Morality of Action, Wednesday Afternoon

[weirderthanthou]

There was... still a cat in the classroom. That cat was still radiating disdain at the group.

The redhead in front of the class radiated more of a can-do attitude, overlaying a vague hint of jittery anxious energy. "Hi," Jesse said. "Uh, I'm Jesse Faden. I'm the mayor. Your teacher is having a major cat episode, so the administration asked me to step in for a minute. Something about keeping the moose away from Portalocity paperwork."

She cleared her throat. "I'm... not... completely sure what you've been learning here," she admitted. "But I do have a few thoughts. Specifically, when do you know if you've gone too far? Say you've dedicated your life to figuring out how supernatural events work. How to stop them from getting people hurt. But as time goes on, your methods start to involve people getting hurt. Sometimes you have casualties, right? We're still working to make the world better. That kind of thing."

Shit. I am so bad at teaching. What was I thinking?

"Where do you think the line is?" she said, catching herself. "Does it start with hurting one person? Ten? Twenty? Is it when you stop thinking carefully about the numbers? Or when getting people hurt becomes about something else, about showing you have control over something?"

Beat. "I... wonder about that. Sometimes."

No reason.

Exploring American History, Wednesday, November 27, 20204

[heroic_jawline]

Your two teachers were bundled up today because standing near the Atlantic Ocean in late November was not for the faint of heart. "Welcome to Plymouth, Massachusetts," Steve said, "the historic--if possible apocryphal--disembarkment spot of the colonists who arrived to this part of North America in December of 1620. It wasn't the first colony of English-speakers, but it's the one we tend to talk about more because leaving Europe in search of religious freedom plays better than Jamestown, where we left Europe searching for riches to exploit."

"Admittedly, the religious freedom aspect has since shaped this nation for good and for ill," Tony added. "These colonists would have also died had it not been for the local people whose land it actually was helping them with what crops actually grew well in the area. The Wampanoag were almost immediately rewarded for their help with deadly diseases brought over by the colonists to which the native population had no immunities to."

Steve nodded. "Smallpox had ravaged the Wampanoag even before the arrival of the Pilgrims, leaving this space as an abandoned village that the Pilgrims moved into, taking over the corn fields that had been left behind." His lips quirked up humorlessly. "That part is generally left out of the mythos of the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving."

"The Wampanoag people were decimated by disease, but also dealing with another native group seeing this as a weakness in a longstanding rivalry between the two of them and as such they decided the Pilgrims would be a good ally," Tony said. "The gathering of Pilgrims and Wampanoag people for the big feast that we now call Thanksgiving was actually preparing for a little war."

Because people always gonna people.

"But first there was pie, right?" Steve checked.

Tony snorted. "We have supplied pie for the class. So, please enjoy."