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tropes & scope

Tropes and Scope [Class 8, Period Three]

Today, the Danger Shop was transformed to look like the inside of a prototypical haunted house. There weren't desks, but students could take a seat on dusty chairs and a moth-eaten chaise lounge in the parlor, where Belle was sitting. In the corner, a large spider web hung, but there was no sign of the spider itself."

"Since next week is Halloween, I thought it might be the perfect time to talk about horror," Belle greeted them, swathed in a dark blue cloak for...no real reason other than sheer effect. "Horror has been at play since man was old enough to tell stories at all. We talk about what scares us in the hopes of feeling reassured that it was all in our heads, or just a dream. We talk about the things that frighten us because we don't understand them, like the dead. Scary noises in the night become ghosts, and we live in fear of things that exist just in our minds...or do they? Vampires, reanimated mummies and werewolves don't exist where I'm from, nor do killer clowns. But every place in the world has their own things that go bump in the night." Sometimes they were Belle's boyfriend, actually, in an earlier stage.

She gestured around. "The haunted house, where it is always both dark and stormy. Take a look around. See if the place gives you the shivers. Meet back here in a few minutes, and we'll talk about what scares you, and why."

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Like you're scared.

Gabrielle

Tara Maclay

Ryan Clark

Elphaba Thropp

Rilla Blythe

Squall Leonhart

Hanna Marin

Petra West

Billy Kaplan

Richie Ryan

And wonder where that spider is....

As far as Gabrielle was concerned, nothing quite beat her whole experience with the Bacchae for personal horror. (Because really. Reanimated dryad skeletons ~~WTF CANON~~ in a graveyard, ~~really hot~~ scantily-clad blood-drinking women, Orpheus's disembodied talking head ~~NO SERIOUSLY CANON WTF~~ . . .)

Still. She was so spending the lecture eyeing that spiderweb dubiously, and wondering if she wanted to risk ruining her notebook by using it as an anti-arachnid weapon if necessary.

Ryan did not like insects. She moved as far away from the spider web as possible, but still kept an eye out for the spider.

Elphaba didn't find this place scary at all. She did wonder about the spider, though. Not out of fear, but because she had a feeling that her classmates might just smash it out of irrational and stupid emotion.

Speaking of irrational emotion...

Ryan shrieked and ducked behind Elphaba. "I think I saw something move," she said. "Don't let the spider come near me!"

"What is it possibly going to do," Elphaba said a little dryly. "You're probably twenty-times the size. It can't eat you."

"It can still bite," said Ryan, still hiding behind Elphaba. "I had a really, really bad reaction to an insect bite in South America and I don't want to go through that again."

"But it didn't kill you," Elphaba pointed out. "But fine. I'll watch for it. Just to protect it from you, mainly."

She had no problem speaking plainly.

It hadn't killed her yet. Not that Ryan was going to explain that she contracted a fatal illness from the bite of the assassin bug.

"Thanks," she said rather meekly. "I really do not like bugs."

And if Elphaba knew that, she'd have relented a bit. She wasn't heartless or cruel, after all.

"Think of them as... puppies with extra legs," Elphaba offered.

"And millions of creepy little eyes?" added Ryan with a shudder.

"Oh, yes, having extra eyes is so wrong," Elphaba said, sarcastically.

"Well, it's not the eyes that bother me as much as the teeth," said Ryan. It's too bad she forgot that spiders don't really have teeth.

"Those nasty, pointy teeth that spiders have none of," Elphaba said plainly.

"Really? I never looked that closely at one," said Ryan. "But whatever they bite with, I'm sure it's sharp and pointy."

Rilla was looking bedraggled from her first period death run with Pinkie Pie, and was not best pleased to be in a house that had never seen a duster.

She was also sure she could feel that spider crawling up her back.

Belle didn't program in anything to jump out at you, and there actually is no spider -- it's sheer atmosphere for a reason. So wander around and wonder when something's going to scare you, and peek in grandfather clocks and behind doors, etc.

Tara already knew the place gave her the shivers, but it seemed lame -- a witch afraid of a haunted house. So she made some tentative explorations, staying close to the wall as she poked her head up the stairwell.

She almost jumped when her shoulder bumped the railing, then apologized frantically. To the railing, of course.

After Ultimecia's castle, it was going to take a lot more spookiness than this to faze Squall -- not that he had ever been easily fazed before, either. Instead, he wandered around making a mental checklist of things that needed to be cleaned, repaired, or replaced in order to restore the house to a usable state.

"Why do you think things like big abandoned buildings scare people so much?" Belle asked, when they had reconvened. She had some experience in that area, anyway. "Why do you think there are so many common myths among cultures, about reanimated dead or people who aren't what they seem? What purpose does that serve? And if you have people at home that might be considered monsters here, like ghosts or vampires, are they as fearsome as we all decided they were?"

"The possibilities," Gabrielle spoke up promptly, from ample personal experience. "So much empty space, but not in the same way as some -- some untouched patch of forest; obviously, someone must have lived in that space once. The evidence is all around us. And now that they don't, well . . . in a way, the empty space is its own kind of ghost. Just a faint trace of what might have once been here, and a mysterious one."

She paused for a moment, chewing her lower lip. "And the silence. It's so easy to wonder what else is out there when all you can hear is your own breathing, and you know the amount of that empty space you're taking up is just a drop in the bucket. I don't think we can help it if our imaginations fill in those possibilities, and the unknown -- that's always scary."

She'd leave the second question alone for the time being, though.

"People have all KINDS of irrational fears," Squall answered. "It helps distract them from the mundane problems all around them that they can't do anything to fix."

"You don't know what's inside," Richie said with a shrug. "So a big abandoned building could have anything in it. Abandoned buildings don't freak me out too much," since they made for a useful hiding place at times, "but I can see how they could be really creepy."

"And I think people are just scared of the idea of not really dying once they're dead," Richie ventured. "I mean, who wants to live forever ~~sorry I had to~~? Especially as a monster?"

She's trying to remember whether she actually did program a giant spider in.

(She didn't.)

Ugh I had class almost finished and then my computer overheated. Bless you, autosave.

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Tropes and Scope [Class 8, Period Three]

Sign In [Tropes 8]

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Explore the haunted house [Tropes 8]

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Talk to Belle [Tropes 8]

OOC [Tropes 8]