fandomhigh | Fandom High Welcome Picnic, Front Lawn of the School, All Day: Part III

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!event: welcome picnic

Fandom High Welcome Picnic, Front Lawn of the School, All Day: Part III

The benches in this section were a little further from the bonfire than the others. If people were sensible, they might want to keep all their clothes on over here, but Fandom, of course, has never been graced with an overabundance of sensible people.

[~~Please wait for OCD!~~ OCD is up! This is the SECOND post for general mingling. Use this post if your browser can't handle the comment load of the first mingling post. Roommates, fake siblings and teachers are here. Since it's outside, the picnic is open to all students, teachers, and townies!]

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"That sounds strangely romantic," she laughed. "That I'll always be your first Elena. I'll have to see if I can think of a new pun, for you."

"Well, you are," Bod said, letting her laughter bring a brief smile to his face. Odd, he'd smiled a lot today after barely smiling at all for so long. "I always like remembering my firsts especially when it's something good."

Ever since leaving his home, he'd been cataloging a lot of firsts. Not all of them were good but he preferred to think of the good ones. "And I'd say I'd try and repay the favor but I can' think of a pun for Elena. And I have been thinking too."

"Then I'll have to hope I'm something good," she nodded. "Elena's fairly pun-safe. I have a friend named Reno. He gets lots of jokes about it, here. I guess there's a town?"

Proof that Elena wasn't from this world, yes.

Bod, being from England himself, was aware of the city but hadn't ever been here there.

"I think so." It took him a minute to remember a map he'd seen. "It's...in the west somewhere. I've never been there. I'm guessing you're not from this country either?"

He'd only been vaguely introduced to the notion of time differences and other worlds. He still had a lot to learn.

"Not ... exactly," Elena said, wondering exactly how much this was going to break his brain. "I'm from Midgar. You've never heard of it, so don't worry about it. It's not really ... anywhere near here, is all."

"I haven't heard of it," he confirmed, not recognizing the name. His brain didn't much break so much as grow more curious. "Though, I'm hearing a lot of things I've never heard before. Apparently, there's an incarnation of Death here too."

Bod held back on sharing his own childhood for a moment, giving her either more chance to explain or to dismiss the conversation. He wanted it to be her choice, at least.

"I've heard about her," Elena said, nodding. Okay, so, he wasn't that far out of the loop: that helped. "... Midgar's a city on a planet called Gaia. One that's not really here, as far as I can tell. I don't know what that makes me. An alien? I mean, I don't think it's just the next planet over or anything. It seems like it's just ... somewhere else. Dimensional, different reality, I don't know what you'd call it."

"You sound like you miss it," Bod said, letting his mind slowly process the news of different worlds. Freaking out, if it occurred, would occur internally and would lead to thought, not panic attacks. "Midgar. Elena from Midgar. Telling you from I'm from England won't have much impact, will it?"

He laughed, lightening the mood as best he could. She didn't look like an alien to him but he'd been exposed to ghosts, ghouls and humans before. He didn't have a lot to compare aliens to.

"I do," she said, frowning a little. "It's ... complicated. I can go back home, but Midgar itself is gone. We ... had a bad patch, recently."

Crazed psychopath trying to end the world. It happened.

"England ... means you have an interesting accent," she said, happy for a lighter topic. "It has a pleasant lilt to it. But I've never been there or anything. The strange bit is that there are parallels. I can speak a little bit of Wutaian, for one, and people here think it's Japanese."

Bod frowned. Despite leaving his home, leaving what he knew, the graveyard was still there. Knowing that your home wasn't made Bod's stomach turn a little.

"Thank you," he said, laughing a little. He hadn't ever paid much attention to his accent since he'd been around so many who sounded like him. "I've heard a little bit about parallels though I think she meant it differently. Someone I talked to earlier met an older version of herself at one point."

That was one thing Bod thought might actually surprise him. An older version of himself, lived and learned. He shook it off. "I've never heard either language. What do they sound like?"

"I've never managed that," she laughed. "But there are people at this school who are from Gaia, just from different points in time. A girl two years back, and a boy from eight or nine years, at least."

She didn't know the exact timeline, in Zack's case. She wasn't sure she wanted to.

For the latter question, she cleared her throat and hoped her pronunciation wasn't too awful.

"Konnichiwa. Watashi no namae wa Elena. Hajimemashite! Ogenki desuka?"

Despite understanding one word of what she'd said, Bod still smiled. It sounded completely foreign and almost sharp but it was nice. Different.

"You sound fluent," he complimented. "I understood your name but nothing else. I'm guessing you don't use it too often here?"

From what he'd seen, everyone tended to speak English even if the crowd was accent tinged here and there.

"Not even close," she admitted. "I'm trying to learn, but I'm still back at how are you, my name is and things like that. Slow going. A few people here would probably know it, but most of them don't speak it, as a rule."

"For someone that doesn't know, it sounded fluent," he assured her. Bod would argue that it sounded good to his ears. He knew, of course, that those more familiar could argue but he wasn't so he didn't.

Instead, he said, "I grew up in a graveyard." It seemed fair, to share a little of his past since she'd share hers. He wasn't ashamed.

"A graveyard?" she asked, tilting her head slightly at that. It was unexpected. "Metaphorical, or a literal cemetery?"

"Literal cemetery," he answered, simple and firm. Bod hadn't imagined it would be a story most would have heard before so the surprised was expected. "It had ghosts and everything. That's who raised me, for the most part."

"Was it nice?" she asked. Raised by ghosts, that was a new one. Just when she thought she'd heard it all, in Fandom. "It ... sounds as though it might have been lonely."

She only barely remembered her mother; a scent here, the sound of her voice. Stronger than any of that: sitting on her lap, feeling warm and safe and loved.

"Sometimes." Bod loved his parents, loved Silas and felt affection for a lot of the ghosts in the graveyard but he couldn't deny the longing he'd felt when he'd gotten older. "It was nice, though. I was safe. I learned an assortment of different things that traditional schools don't tend to teach. It was as strange as you'd imagine it though, being the only human in a place full of the dead."

Bod knew Silas wasn't dead but he wasn't quite alive. Silas was an enigma that Bod didn't try and explain.

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Fandom High Welcome Picnic, Front Lawn of the School, All Day: Part III

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