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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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."

It was an awful lot to wrap her head around, so hopefully Petra could excuse the excessive amount of blinking going on from Fawn's side of things.

And all she could really come up with in response was a slightly distressed, slightly excited, "...Really?"

Hey, at least she was capable of forming speech. Petra was sure some people wouldn't have been at this point. "Really. It's totally cool."

"It's..."

Fawn was going to say weird, because it was, but, at the same time, she realized that what she was hiding was just as weird. This did not do much to help abolish her fear of having been sent off to Freak School, either.

"...different," she decided.

"Yeah, it's definitely that," Petra agreed. "Weird would also be a good word. But good weird. Mostly. I mean, sometimes there'll be a bunch of creepy dolls everywhere for a day, but then another day you'll find random chocolate in your shoes."

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

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