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

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!event: welcome picnic

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

Were you a veteran Fandom resident? Did you finish getting your brain broken by your sibling and/or buddy? Did you just want to sit down to recover from the shuttle ride? If so, then there were plenty of tables and chairs set up across the lawn just waiting to be filled!

[This is the picnic post for general mingling. Roommates, fake siblings and teachers are all here. Since it's outside, the picnic is open to all students, teachers, and townies!]

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"Once in the fall, again right after the New Year, and then right in the beginning of summer," Kathy explained, holding out her plate so Jalian could snag a few pieces of tempura if she was so inclined. "There used to be two batches of newbies in the summer, but they didn't do that this year. But hey, it means you're not a newbie anymore. Congratulations?"

Jalian took a piece of the tempura and sniffed it experimentally, then nibbled it and smiled. "This is good. And I suppose not being new is good. Though I still haven't figured out what to do with myself," she confessed.

"What do you mean?" Kathy asked, taking a sidelong look at Jalian. "For most people, just going to high school is enough. What more do you need to do?"

"I came here by accident," Jalian answered. "I had been trying to skip back along my own timeline, to stop Armageddon. Instead I ended here, and it didn't happen here. If I want to try again, I will need to know the temporal physics of this island, but nobody seems to understand them."

"Not even Barry?" Kathy asked, surprised. "If anyone had sat down to map those out, I would have figured he had. Or knew how."

She frowned. "Is playing in your own timeline safe?" It never was in any of the stories she'd ever read, but then, they were only stories. "You're not going to create some kind of paradox by trying? Maybe you were sent here to keep you from doing that instead of stopping Armageddon?"

"Why would you create a paradox?" Jalian asked curiously. "You create another timeline. Or you rewrite your own," she allowed, "but the threshold for that is very small. And I haven't asked Barry." Mostly because of the whole "male" thing, though she'd seen he was smart. She was a little leery of him. "I don't know him well," she went with.

"Admitting that temporal mechanics isn't even properly a science yet in my world, most novels that deal with the idea of changing your timeline suggest that by changing it, you've set up a closed loop. You need to go back, you do and fix whatever the problem is, now you have a future where you don't need to go back and fix anything, so you don't, etc etc etc." She peered up at Jalian curiously. "That's not how it works?"

As for Barry...Kathy turned to find him in the crowd, then turned back to Jalian with a rueful smile. "He's the smartest person I know," she admitted. "I mean, he's also as dumb as a box of rocks sometimes, but that's more like, social and self-preservation things. But he's a good guy and if you have an interesting science problem, he'll probably love to help you work on it."

Jalian shook her head. "Each decision forms another branch of the Great Wheel. Make a different one, create another branch. Below threshold, you overwrite the original branch entirely."

She turned to look at Barry, too. "He seems very smart," she agreed. "But he is very arrogant for a male. He makes me want to punch him sometimes."

"Arrogant for a male?" Kathy asked. "What happened to the patriarchy between my time and yours and who can I thank for it?"

Because...seriously. Had Jalian met a lot of guys?

"Barry can be arrogant sometimes, sure, but at least he has reason to be. Go to any normal high school or start tuning in to talk radio and you'll really be thrown for a loop. Arrogance is considered a guy trait."

Jalian laughed. "It was the males that caused Armageddon. When our mother Margra Hammel took her people to the mountains, she brought no men. Only some boys, and only after did they allow some males to join them, because of the need for children."

She rolled her eyes. "Our males would be lucky to live if they spoke to most huntresses as he speaks to everyone."

"Wow," she said, blinking in surprise. "That's some serious gender rules you have going on there. How long ago was this Armageddon?"

"Seven hundred twenty-four years," Jalian answered. "Why?"

"And you don't think it's just a little absurd to hold an entire sex accountable for something none of the current members alive were responsible for?" Kathy asked. "That's like arresting people now because a family member from a thousand years ago committed a crime."

As opposed to the patriarchy, Kathy?

"Why do you think we blame them?" Jalian shrugged. "Margra Hammel was being careful, so soon after the Fire. We have a lot of males now. They're not very bright, but they're good for some things. Not just children," she added charitably.

Kathy also thought the patriarchy was terrible!

"That's really sexist," Kathy said, inwardly quailing at calling someone out, but unable to back down. Social Justice Warrior strikes again! "It sounds like what a lot of guys say about women now. Or about black people and Latinos... Basically, it sounds like what every prejudiced member of the majority says when they're talking about a member of the minority they don't respect."

Jalian wasn't going to get upset at that, but she was going to get confused for a moment while she worked out the vocabulary. Then she shrugged. "The males here are mostly different. What are Latinos?"

"Probably because they haven't been raised as second-class citizens all their lives." In fact, they had the opposite problem, but that was an argument for another day. "How many of them do you actually know, besides just generalizing them in a group?"

Kathy forced herself not to fold her arms over her chest. Aggressive body language would just escalate the conversation. "And Latinos are an enthnic minority here in America. They get stereotyped and treated as different and lesser by members of the minority because of their skin color and various racial prejudices people have internalized."

"I know several males here. I used to know most of Ken Selvren ones my age, until I began learning. Then I didn't have time." Jalian shrugged.

"You have made their acquaintance," Kathy argued. "You don't know them. It's not the same thing."

Jalian scowled, tried to figure that out, then gave up and muttered something in Silverspeech that would have translated to "stupid language". "What is the difference?"

"Do you see them as individuals? Do you know what they think and feel? Personally, versus just what you assume because they're male? Do you even feel like that stuff matters?"

Kathy frowned, trying to figure a good way to explain. "When you think of them, do you think of them as individuals, people with their own personalities and dreams and feelings? Or just part of the background, people you can differentiate from strangers only because you recognize their names and faces?"

Jalian thought about it and shrugged. "There were around twenty males in my age grouping; there are probably eight now." They'd lost a lot of the field workers in the Battle of the Meadow. "I know three?"

"Just know by name and face?" Kathy asked. "Or know them well enough to be considered friends? Or, heck, know them well enough to respect as a person?"

Jalian threw up her hands. "I know what games they liked as children! Why should I know them better than their sisters?"

Jalian didn't exactly hang out with the rest of her clan much.

Kathy was starting to get that idea.

"Because you don't treat their sisters like second-class citizens," she pointed out. "Because I bet you think of them as individuals, but lump all their brothers together. And that's wrong."

This debate was making Kathy's stomach ache; she hated confrontation. But she wasn't going to back down. There was still a lot of Social Justice Warrior in Banzai.

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

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