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

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!event: welcome picnic

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

When the planning for the new semester had started, no one had really noticed that the welcome picnic would coincide with Cinco de Mayo. When the food arrived and all of it, including the desserts, had somehow ended up as a variety of Mexican food, well, it was a little too late to change anything.

Hopefully, the wandering mariachi band that had shown up wouldn't throw anyone either. It was a festive day of new arrivals, after all.

The blue and gold tables and chairs had been set out, along with nametags and the lists of Big and Little Siblings, and rooms and roommates for the new students. Assuming the shuttle arrived with all of the students and teachers in one piece, everything was set for the picnic to begin!

[OCD is up, have at it! This is part one of the picnic, specifically for meeting siblings, roommates, and teachers. The rest of the picnic is happening here and here, in an effort to keep browsers from breaking for as long as possible. Since it's outside, the picnic is open to all students, teachers, and townies!]

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Which could mean anything from that Fawn had superpowers to that her mom had gotten the same kind of brochure Petra had gotten, where the place looked totally normal. Right. And Fawn was sort of freaking out on top of that. So Petra was going to take this carefully. Step one: remove the height disparity. "Why don't we sit down?" she suggested, gesturing to the picnic bench she'd just been standing on. "And we can go over...well, there's a lot of ground to cover. Did that sound ominous? That wasn't supposed to sound ominous, I swear."

Fawn sort of look at Petra desperately for a moment, because everything sounded ominous to her right now, and that did not help the pit sinking heavily into her stomach, and even a little further. Numbly, though, she bobbed her head in a nod. "Sitting down is good," she said, and she didn't need any prompting for that. And, just as she had at the bus station, she sat down with her legs cross tightly so that the pain could distract her from everything else going on. Her hands balled up tightly in her lap.

"Sorry," she murmured, to Petra, though it was mostly directed at her own knees. "I guess I'm a little nervous."

Ha ha ha. A little.

"I totally get that," Petra assured her as she sat down next to her. And she did. She knew not everyone was as outgoing as her. "New school, new people, new place...it's a lot to take in. That's why they gave you me!" she said brightly.

Her original plan to just rip the band-aid of 'Hey, welcome to Crazytown, population us, the pink pony's real,' had gone out the window when she met Fawn, so now she was going to Plan B. "Do you want to tell me a little about yourself? So we can get to know each other. Like, where you're from and all that?"

The comment about it being a lot to take in and that's why Fawn got Petra reminded her so much of something Cookie would say that some of the nervousness managed to burn off enough for Fawn to look over and give Petra the desperate sort of spare me look she'd have given Cookie. She wilted a little, but not enough to lessen the pain she was secretly causing for herself underneath it all.

"New York," she said, "so it's not that far away." She decided not to mention how she realized earlier that day that she'd never even been out of New York; Petra probably thought she was pathetic enough as it is. "What about you?"

"I'm from Providence, Rhode Island," Petra told her. "And I know, it's really not that far, but it seems like it, doesn't it? I've only gotten to go home once since last fall, and I miss my family. But everyone here is great. So, okay, here's the part where it might start to seem like I'm playing 'mess with the new kid,' but I swear I'm not. If you decide I am and get mad at me, that's fine, I completely understand, and once you see that I wasn't if you still want to talk to me I'm in room 511, just knock, but I'm really hoping you'll hear me out." She took a deep breath.

"Would you agree that the following is a true statement: today is May 5, 2012?"

And now Fawn was going to take a moment to stare at Petra, eyebrows lifted up practically to her hair line, and wondered just how much messing with was about to go on here. Because it wasn't enough dealing with everything already.

"Um, no," she said, cautiously, eying Petra carefully to try to figure out where she was going with this.

"Okay, well, surprise?" Petra said. "Because it totally is. I can show you on my phone. And...possibly introduce you to cell phones at the same time, I don't know? Do you know cell phones?"

Since the whole possibility that she had traveled into the future was just absurd, Fawn blinked at Petra and focused on the part that she could at least wrap her head around. "You have a cell phone?" she asked, almost hating her a little for it because another reason to be in awe of Petra right now wasn't helping things. She knew Cookie and Vidamiá were talking of getting their own, too, but that was only because their business was doing so well.

Okay, so that was a yes, but judging from the tone, Fawn might not have one? What kind of parent shipped their kid off to another state without a phone? Maybe she was from the eighties or something when they were rare as hens' teeth. Did they have cell phones in the eighties? Petra didn't even know. "Well, yeah," Petra said as she rummaged through her purse for the thing. "Most people do now. I mean, it's not a smartphone or anything fancy, but it does the job. We can get you one in town if you want," she offered. "Here!" she said victoriously, pulling out her phone and showing it to Fawn.

It was...a phone. Touchscreen, keyboard, you know. The usual. If you were from the present.

And Fawn was from a time where cell phones could be used as doorstops. There was more staring.

"That's tiny!" she gawked, but her brain pointed out that of course they would be getting smaller if this was over a decade into the future. But she seemed fairly amused, even if it was completely boggling her brain. "That's almost smaller than a cassette tape!"

Petra...sort of knew what a cassette tape looked like, but only because she'd been in the music industry. "Yeah, we don't really use cassettes any more. Now we have..." she pulled out her iPod. "This is an iPod. It holds thousands and thousands of songs in digital format. Look," she said, bringing up her library and slowly scrolling down while holding it where Fawn could see the screen.

At the very least, hopefully she would conclude this was too involved to be a prank.

Fawn leaned over for a close look, still finding it hard to believe, but if there was music on the little devise, she was curious enough about what kind of music to put the other more complicated stuff aside for right now.

"Thousands?" she asked, looking at Petra with a cautious skepticism that suggested she wanted to believe her. "Just on that little thing?"

"Thousands," Petra confirmed. "Would it help you believe me to listen to something? What do you want? I have a ton of different stuff, I don't know, do you like Patsy Cline? Janis Joplin? Boyz Will B Boyz? Not Hot Vampire Boyz, we do not speak of them. Lady Gaga? Probably too recent..."

Some of the later names Petra listed just made Fawn snort a little in amusement; they sounded like the sort of bands her sisters used to listen to before they were too cool for them and started listening only to Madonna. Fawn's musical sensibilities ran a little differently.

"I like Patsy Cline," she said, feeling grateful and comforted by something familiar. "Do you have any Willie Nelson? Johnny Cash?"

"I have some Johnny Cash," Petra confirmed. "It looks like the only Willie Nelson I have is 'Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other' for the Pride playlist. I should fix that."

Fawn bit her lip a little, though it did nothing to actually hold back the blush that went spreading over her face. She ducked her head, hair tumbling forward, but she brushed one side of it back behind her ear. "You should get his 'Me and Bobby McGee,'" she suggested. "That one's my favorite."

"I will definitely download that when I get back to my room," Petra promised. She noticed the blush and ventured casually, "Oh, yeah, I run the school's LGBT Pride chapter. Although like half the kids who come are straight. Allies welcome, you know?"

"What's LGBT?" Fawn asked, though she garnered enough from the other words to venture a guess what it was about, and it did nothing to help her blushing. She found her mind reeling back, trying to think of someway to get the conversation casually back onto music. Music she knew. Music, she was comfortable with.

Petra had been asked that question so many times since getting here she didn't even blink. "Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender. Add the Q on there for Queer and Questioning, too, I guess. Whatever, we take everybody." Petra was casual and matter-of-fact about it, hoping to show Fawn it was totally cool by example. "Here, you can use my earbuds to listen to Johnny Cash if you want."

And the roller coaster was plummeting again, right down into Fawn's stomach, right when she thought maybe things had smoothed out a little. She seemed to wilt a little, the distressed expression that had probably surfacing all throughout this conversation showing up again. They had a group for that? Like a support group, and they accepted everyone? Perhaps it was the second part that Fawn found so distressing, because it wasn't as if she was a stranger to the acceptance of any of those things, but in her mind, even if provided with a million examples of truth, she would have trouble believing the idea that she would really be accepted anywhere.

She was definitely going to just focus on the music. "Cool," she said quietly. "And earbuds are...?"

Her face twisted again, this time a hard twist, and she hated it, but she felt like such and idiot and Petra had to think she was such an idiot, too.

Okay, they could come back to that. And Petra totally didn't think she was an idiot. "They're headphones, only way tiny," she explained, holding up the ones attached to her iPod. "They uh. They go just inside your ear, but if you think that's gross you can just hold it up next to your ear. But I swear these are clean! I just cleaned them last night." In anticipation of possibly having to use her iPod to convince someone she wasn't lying through her teeth, yes.

"Way tiny," Fawn agreed, her head tilting a little bit and focusing on the tiny little earbuds and the tiny little music player, and shaking her head as she let the awe of it distract her from everything else. "Are there are things here that are a lot smaller than they used to be?"

There was a brief pause.

"Flying cars? In 2012, you think they'd at least be getting a jump-start on those. Or maybe they're just way tiny, too?"

"Well, there aren't any cars on the island at all," Petra said. "Local ordinance. And there's no drinking age at one of the bars in town, Caritas. But in general...no, sorry, they haven't gotten us our flying cars yet. Or our jet packs, although here? I bet you could find somebody who could build you one. There are some pretty tiny cars around, though. Like the Smart Car." She smiled at Fawn and asked her, "Do you believe me yet?"

"I don't know," Fawn admitted, though she met Petra's smile with a shy one of her own. "But I think it could be pretty exciting if you are telling the truth."

Besides, she didn't like to think that Petra could sit there and lie to her like that. She seemed genuinely nice, and so she wanted to believe her...about more things than just the year, too.

She ducked her head a little with embarrassment as she admitted, "I've always wanted to travel around the country...or the world...never thought much about traveling through time, but that just adds a whole new level."

"Hey, you might get to do some traveling here!" Petra told her. "We do really cool trips for spring break and stuff. This year we went to Rio de Janeiro, and the school footed the bill. It was really fun. So I completely understand being unsure of the whole 'time travel' thing--when I got here I was convinced I hallucinated one of the teachers for like three days. It was kind of embarrassing when I found out she was real. But once you get over that hurdle...okay, this place is kind of weird in other ways, too. We don't just get people from all over the world, or different time periods. We get people from, like, different planets. Different universes, even, where magic is real or people have superpowers or something. And I know it's a lot to wrap your head around. Just...when someone shows you their wings or is blue or whatever, think of it as part of the experience."

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

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