fandomhigh | 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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Great, Britta, now you had Sia wondering if her big sibling was hooked on spice or death sticks.

"What sort of 'weird stuff?'" she asked cautiously.

"There were human-eating bears falling from the sky during graduation," said Britta, pulling out the most recent one because, honestly, she sort of pushed everything out of memory as best she could. She said it with the sort of tone that suggested that anyone would think they were on drugs experiencing something like that, "though I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have bothered coming here if there wasn't something wrong. I would attack and eat humans, too, if they were destroying my ecosystem for big oil and capital gains."

Believe it or not, it was not the human-eating bears part that got this particular look out of Sia.

"You think human-eating bears rained down on graduation... because people are destroying their habitats?"

"Duh-doy," said Britta, with an air of knowledge. "Why else would they?"

"To begin with, if they rained down, I'd be hard-pressed to say that they wanted to be here, in which case they may have attacked because they were somehow mistreated before, or not pleased with the method used to bring them here," Sia said. "Or they might have been a naturally aggressive species with a new migratory pattern."

Those were...decent points. Some of the points Bruce had offered, actually, but Britta was going to maintain her skepticism. "Either way," she said, "drop-bears are people, too. They were probably frightened and scared and I think they could have been dealt with in a more humane fashion."

"Though if they were attacking people and you know them to be human-eating, then people probably dealt with it in a way that would spare their own lives, which is sometimes the only possible course of action."

Sia would have been a drop-bear killer, yes.

Britta sucked in a reluctant breath, considered objecting to Sia's point, but then let it out with a reluctant, "Maybe. Whatever. The point is, that's the kind of weird stuff that happens here and doesn't make any sense, so it's really just best to not think about it too much anyway."

"So I should prepare myself for the eventuality of something like murderous bears."

She didn't think that was at all normal, but if she couldn't sense a lie...

"And you want to avoid the gremlin," Britta added. "I think they put that in the pamphlet on how to be a good big sibling, but I'm pretty sure the gremlins are just misunderstood. I can grant you that drop-bears falling out of the sky are pretty confused and likely to attack, but something tells me that the gremlins bite people out of rebellion. And you want to avoid that because when they bite you, something in their venom makes you think you're someone else entirely. And then usually someone video tapes it and puts it up on the World Wide Web."

Yes. World Wide Web. Shut up, she's from the nineties.

This was still not the strangest thing Sia had heard today. "Right. And what do one of these gremlins look like, so I can avoid them in case they decide to rebel against me?"

"They're small and they're quick and they're usually green," Britta offered. "And they're actually our school mascot."

Which seemed to disturb her for a moment; little did Britta know that the Gremlin was not going to be the most disturbing school mascot in her life.

"Big ears, scaly skin. They tend to sneak up on people, but, believe me, you'll recognize one if you see one."

"And when I see one, you would recommend that I..."

Sia knew she'd Force throw the thing against a wall because she had no intention of being bitten, but she was curious as to Britta's solution.

"Well," said Britta, "most people would probably suggest running away or maybe bribing them not to bite you, but you know what I say? Let them bite you. Just hold out your arm and say, 'It's okay, gremlin. I understand that you're only doing what's in your nature, and I respect that.' Most of the time, they'll actually bite you, but maybe, some day, they'll realize that they really don't need to bite us after all, and all this time, they've just wanted respect."

Oh, Britta. Britta, Britta, Britta. Sia half wanted to tell her what was going on back home with the Sith just to see what solution she might come up with.

Half wanted. Half.

"And have you ever tried this yourself?" she wondered.

Britta lifted her chin proudly and pulled back the sleeve of her shirt, holding out her arm for Sia to see.

"Well," she said, "these ain't heroin tracks, I can tell you that."

Sia stopped herself from asking what heroin was. ~~Unless they had it on Endor, which is where every Earth thing in the GFFA is.~~ "You actually let them bite you. And yet they keep doing it?"

"You know, I might be crazy," said Britta, who definitely was, "but I'm pretty sure that they don't bite nearly as hard any more. It's like a nibble; I can barely feel it."

"The repeated exposure to venom may have damaged the nerves in that area," Sia told her.

Britta...had not thought of that. Her arm tucked itself in closer to her body.

"Ooh, I...might want to get that checked out. Or maybe the repeated exposure to the venom is also building up an immunity at the same time, so it might be worth it. And I'm earning their trust, slowly but surely."

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

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