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 food? Still there. The school? Still standing. Students? Still mingling.

Ahhhh. What fun this weekend was for us all. WHAT FUN. And this time it was actually the good weather for shirt removing!

[~~Please wait for~~ 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.]

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Toby had eaten... a fairly ridiculous amount, actually. None of it contained any spinach, though, so he was safe there.

Unfortunately, his telepathy wasn't faring quite as well. As the day wore on, the excited mental chatter of the rest of the picnic-goers was starting to break through the barriers he had to work so hard to keep up. So he was standing a little off to the side, curling his hands into fists over and over as he tried to summon enough concentration to make the voices stop.

"Excuse me?" Karla said, from behind him. "Are you all right?"

She was frowning and sounded concerned, but at least her thoughts weren't yammering in his head.

"I, um," he whirled to face the source of the voice. "Just a bit of a headache," he admitted, because that was... sort of true after a fashion.

"Newbie day can be a little stressful," Karla said sympathetically. "Would you like something? A glass of water perhaps? Or a cold cloth for your head?"

She wasn't going to be like Raven and demand to take his pain away, but she couldn't not offer any help.

"Water'd be nice," Toby admitted, touched by the concern. Which was, as far as he could tell, actually genuine. Not something he'd had a huge amount of experience with as of late.

Normally, Karla would just float a bottle or two over, but the last thing this poor male needed was a bit of Craft to really send him ass over tea kettle. Bidding him to sit, she wandered over to the closest table and grabbed a water, using a cooling spell to make sure it was nice and cold when she handed it over.

She also grabbed a sandwich or four. He was pretty scrawny and underfed-looking and probably needed to eat more. Also, she was hungry again.

"Here," she said, giving him the water first. "You might just be dehydrated. Are you feeling dizzy?"

And now, now he was actually being fussed over. This was really kind of surreal ~~but not Surreal~~. "No," he replied. "I mean, I don't think so. I think it's mostly what you said, about the stress? I wasn't expecting all... this," he waved a hand vaguely in the direction of everything going on.

Karla would protest if he referred to it as fussing. She was just following her Healer's instincts. So there!

"I don't think anyone ever does," Karla said with a small smile. "It's a lot to take in no matter where or when you come from. Hell's fire, it would be a lot to take in even if it weren't also gifted with Fandom's special brand of oddness."

"I'm Karla," she added, offering him a sandwich. "Welcome to Fandom."

"Toby," he said, taking the sandwich and resisting the dual urges to either wolf it down or tuck it away inside his jacket for later, settling instead on just nibbling at a moderate pace. "Oddness?" Like guys who claimed to have been raised by ghosts?

Karla eyed him. "How much do you really want to know?" she asked, a smile still hovering around her mouth. "In deference to your headache, I can pass on the really odd stuff."

Of course, from the way he felt to her senses, Karla was guessing that Toby was no stranger to oddness himself. It was faint and definitely untrained, but there was an elusive something to the boy.

"My 'big sister' mentioned something about alcoholic wildlife?"

"Oh, the squirrels." Karla nodded and rolled her eyes a little. "They like rum, than the Darkness, because it means you can bribe them to go away. Here. I was going to give these to my little sib, but he's a completely loathsome gutter son of a whoring bastard, so you can have them instead."

And completely forgetting what she'd just said about not freaking him out too badly, Karla called in several nipper bottles of rum and handed them over. "Offer them to the squirrels whenever you want them to go away. Otherwise, they'll try to watch everything. And report on it."

Toby was just going to stare, thanks, and not actually reach to take the alcohol just yet because how the hell had she managed to pull those out of absolutely nowhere?

"Huh?" Karla was confused. "Look, no one's going to care that you're underage," she said, not even realizing what she'd done for a moment. "There's a bar in town that doesn't even car--oooooh."

Hello sudden dawning realization.

"Okay, so, yeah, about that oddness," she said, a little sheepishly. "I'm a witch. From another world. I don't ride brooms, I don't turn people into frogs, but I can do magic. Craft, my people call it. There are a lot of people here with powers, actually. Magic, cryokinesis, teleportation...telepathy..."

Just, you know, throwing that last one out there.

"A witch," Toby said slowly, slanting a suspicious look her way. And trying not to visibly twitch at the mention of telepathy.

Karla heaved a giant sigh. Oh, she was so put upon. Because showing ~~off~~ Craft was such a hardship. "Let me know when you start believing me," she said.

Another water bottle and a sandwich came heading towards them--Karla had finished hers and was still hungry. A teapot appeared, along with two mugs and a packet of tea. Karla unscrewed the cap, dumped the water into the pot, and then created two tongues of witchfire to heat the water.

As the water began to boil, a tea ball plunked itself into one mug, which then got filled with hot water and floated over to hover in front of Toby's face. "It's a headache tea," she explained as the process began a second time. "I made it myself. Though if you're not fully convinced, we can always drink it several feet in the air. I'm flexible."

"...I like my feet planted on the ground, thanks," Toby managed finally, reaching up to- to poke at the mug of tea tentatively, actually.

Karla just grinned a little and sipped at her mug of tea. "So, yes, witch." Toby's cup just drifted a little before idling back to its original position. "Keep an eye out for my boyfriend. He's the handsome male with bird wings. There's Elphaba, who is a lovely girl with beautiful green skin, and I believe we still have an alien or two on the island."

Toby reached for the floating mug and grasped it in his hands, and all at once it became perfectly clear what had happened: he'd snapped, obviously.

The voices got me. Finally. Just like they did with her.

Edited 2011-05-08 15:58 (UTC)

Karla was keeping a sharp eye on him, growing more and more uneasy. That was not the face of someone who was coming to accept the fact that he had come to an island where the impossible was not only possible, but it lived down the hall from you and liked to come by and chat every now and again.

"Toby?" she called. "Toby? Didn't your big sib explain any of this to you?"

"She said- she said it takes some getting used to," Toby replied, his tone vague and distracted. Truthfully, she'd offered a bit more in the way of explanation, but he'd been a little too focused on the food table to really absorb what Claudia had been trying to tell him.

"She wasn't lying," Karla said gently. "If anything, she was understating the case. But you'll adapt and soon it won't be quite so jarring. I promise."

Still totally weird, but not quite so jarring.

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

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