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

Entry tags:

!event: welcome picnic

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

Thankfully, the weather on the island today was fairly nice for the tail end of December, but there was still a medium-sized bonfire going in the middle of the lawn, partly due to tradition and partly due to the potential for shirtlessness (which, Zoe supposed, was also tradition.)

The usual tables were set up with warm foods, nametags, and lists for the new and old folks to find each other. Once everything was set up, it was time to celebrate a new year and the start of a new semester!

[OCD is up! I'm consolidating this down to one post, so bring all your new and old folks over here! Since it's outside, the picnic is open to all students, teachers, and townies!]

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"Cute Maryland winters, even," said the Canadian. "It isn't even below freezing today."

Sparkle, don't complain about it being a nice day. That was just inviting Fandom to pull a blackout snowstorm or something.

"Should've brought my backpack."

And here he went, right back to the food stealing, while thoughtfully taking a bite of the vegetable pie. Because it had been a topic of conversation, and not at all because he was still nerving himself up to eating red meat offered to him by Hannibal, mostly. Somewhat.

Hannibal chuckled. "Help me finish these, and you can use the bag," he offered. "Why didn't you? Was it insufficiently professorial?"

Edited 2016-12-31 14:24 (UTC)

"That was maybe part of it," Sparkle muttered, scuffing one toe against the ground. "Anyway, I'm like a couple years older than most of the students. Bringing a backpack to the welcome picnic might confuse some of them, or something."

No, Sparkle. You had a history with a few of them that would probably confuse things a bit more than that.

"You could have made the most of that," Hannibal suggested. "Though we seem to have few new people here this semester."

"Yeah, all I've really noticed is, like, the super pink girl," Sparkle agreed, looking around. "I think she's the only new name on the roster. Which means either we actually have more new teachers than students, or I've just been really unobservant lately."

And they were all older men, so Sparkle doubted he'd been that unobservant.

Ahem.

Hannibal shook his head. "I have a teacher assigned to me, and I've met another, so there are at least two new ones, to one new student."

"Three," Sparkle replied, putting his hand up slightly and wiggling his fingers around. "That's... nuts. That. Is. Freaking. Nuts. I wonder what happened out there that kept us from being swamped by kids this time around."

Maybe the island didn't want to subject too many unsuspecting minors to the hollows.

"Perhaps it was as taken aback as the residents at that last world, and hasn't yet had the energy for grabbing random people," Hannibal suggested.

Sparkle shuddered and shook his head. God, he didn't need that reminder. That meat pie was going to be well cold by the time it made it closer to his mouth.

"Maybe after that, it didn't want to take too many new people to a place where it might hit them, too. Did you notice any people there we don't already have around? I didn't."

"I didn't meet many people at all," Hannibal answered. "And there's no telling how many might have come and gone." Died. Gone hollow.

He smiled and squeezed Sparkle's shoulder. "Remember the good futures you've lived here. Even remember the mediocre ones. That fandom was a different place entirely from whatever we have waiting for us."

He hoped. And he was very good at sounding certain, for Sparkle's sake.

"Already been there once," Sparkle pointed out, though he sounded sort of resigned to just letting it drop. "How do we know whatever was going on there wasn't, like, contagious? We wouldn't even find out until people start forgetting things."

Since they still had no idea how it had started.

Sparkle had actually sort of lost sleep over that one.

"If that were the case, then we would now be warned in advance," Hannibal noted. "And we could move to stop it before it spread."

"I mean... I guess so, yeah," Sparkle allowed, frowning down at the ground. "Now that we know how it turns out..."

If he were to realize that his memory was developing holes in it, he wouldn't want to end up like that. Not at all.

Hannibal nodded. "So, forewarned in this case is most definitely forearmed."

And he would be keeping a particular eye on Zoe for any signs.

"Probably goes without saying that I hope we don't ever come across anything like that again," Sparkle sighed. "But at least we know what it looks like. If people start to just... forget things... we know what that is."

He was pretty sure he would just not be able to deal.

"That or something like it," Hannibal agreed. "But for now, all we can do is be aware without letting fear of it dominate."

He put a hand on Sparkle's back, just offering the contact. "It could be that your next time in Baltimore, you will get hit by a bus. You can't live in fear of everything."

"No," Sparkle agreed. "But I can be concerned about the possibility that we'll be affected by something."

It didn't dominate, per se. But that didn't mean that he was over it.

"I would say that there's a certainty of being affected by something every day of your life," Hannibal said, amused. "Nor are all things - or even most things - problematic."

"You know what I mean," Sparkle muttered. "Something specific. I'm not going to, like, stop crossing streets because I might get hit by a rickshaw, but this was something big and real and dangerous, and we don't know how it started, or whether there's a chance we brought it back with us. That's... it's terrifying."

Maybe it was less scary when you had your psychic husband on hold to keep a backup of you in his head, but Sparkle was fresh out of backup plans.

Hannibal always had backup plans. "So, you remember that we are forewarned, and unless it should happen, you live your life as you would anyway. You look both ways before you cross the street, but you still go where you need to go."

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

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