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

Entry tags:

!event: welcome picnic

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

Despite the not-so-great weather earlier in the week, the weather today looked nice and... well, decent for the end of December, and while the rest of town might still have signs of last week's snow, there were no traces left outside the school. (It just meant one less uncomfortable question for the big siblings to deal with, you're welcome.)

The buffet table was ready, set as far as possible from the glittered-out blue and gold tables and chairs. The winter bonfire was crackling for warmth and food-toasting opportunities. The lists of siblings and roommates had been double-checked. It looked like everything was ready for a picnic!

[OCD is up! This is part one of the picnic, specifically for meeting siblings, roommates, and teachers. The rest of the picnic is happening here. Since it's outside, the picnic is open to all students, teachers, and townies!]

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Fair was fair. She'd sized him up before even walking over.

It took her a second to realize what the hand was for. A flicker of quizzical blankness before memory filled in that blank. Shepard and Kaidan, shaking people's hands. Almost never something offered to her. She quickly took it and shook it, though, when she remembered. The hand was strong and she had calluses and scars all over it but she wasn't even trying to compete for grip. Fjord was huge and she wasn't stupid.

Usually she wasn't. Today she was trying and that made her feel incredibly stupid.

"Jack," she returned, "Civics. Teaching the teens how to recognize when the law ain't justice and what to do about it when that happens."

When. Not if. She had almost no faith in the 'justice' system. Too much experience.

Fjord would be so very amused if he realized so many people were thinking of him as huge.

He was, certainly, by human standards. So far as half-orcs were concerned, he was almost laughably small. Whether that was a result of his rough childhood or something else entirely, even he didn't know.

Maybe didn't want to.

"Important lessons to learn," he noted, making the handshake brief yet firm, also not aiming to make a competition out of it. A handshake was a sign of peace, of greeting. Anybody who made it anything but wasn't worth shaking hands with in the first place. "Important difference to be able to spot. Good."

Jack was, as far as she knew, entirely human even if her own people kept trying to classify her differently.

"Especially here, now," she said while she let her gaze run over the kids again. Checking on them. Finding nothing to worry about.

"My galaxy's from further in the future. It's not this planet but it's similar enough to be creepy. Real creepy. Not a good time out there." Across the causeway. "My favorite big dumb idiot said a lot of the kids come from places worse off. Figured it'd be some useful life skills."

A beat.

"Better than gladiator training them until they're all good little murderers, anyway."

It had been, after all, the only sort of schooling she'd had.

"I imagine someone on the faculty would object to that approach," Fjord agreed, frowning thoughtfully. "There'll be combat in my class, most likely, but I'm told the training room has safety protocols in place. Nobody can actually get hurt."

Which was a relief, honestly. He had no idea where this class was going to lead, but he'd seen enough of the students around here to know that someone was going to want to throw a fireball eventually.

"Your class sounds far more practical."

"Hopefully. I'd be first in line to crack some skulls if they weren't," Jack said cheerfully.

"Yeah? Hand to hand or all the other sh.. stuff?"

She shrugged at the compliment. Didn't know what to do with it.

Fair enough. Fjord wasn't going to push the point, either.

"Probably some hand-to-hand. Maybe some swordwork. Possibly even magic, depending on what the training room will allow and whether I can figure out how to... program... it?" He paused for a moment to clarify. "Where I'm from, we don't have most of what's here. Electricity? Television? Computers? None of it. We have firearms that people in this world would think of as laughably rudimentary, but they're not common. You're far more likely to see someone firing a crossbow or swinging a mace."

Or just flat out delivering an Eldritch Blast to something's face.

Aw, it even rhymed.

"If you want some help with that, hit me up," Jack offered, "I'm good with all of that electrical stuff, and I'm a bang hand at computers."

She'd hacked enough of them.

"Or if you want someone to throw more wacky at 'em. It ain't magic, what I do, but it's effective as hell."

Hell was not a swear, damnit.

Really, if you asked Fjord or half the people he spent his time with, neither was 'fuck.'

"You know, I might take you up on that," he replied, looking grateful. "I've reached a point where I know how to place a phone call. And that Google is dangerous."

He tended to steer clear of Google as much was was half-orcly possible. There were just some things you did not look up with safesearch off. Ever.

"Though now you have me curious what it is you do, if not magic."

"Safe search, buddy. Turn it on if you haven't," Jack advised him. She'd learned that one last time she was here when she was letting EDI pair up a phone.

Not that she bothered with safe search.

"I'm a biotic," she explained without expecting he'd know what that was, "People born like me, in my galaxy, can feel an energy stream nobody else can. We can use it to do all sorts of stuff that looks like magic."

A shoulder lifted. Easiest way to explain..

She made sure the path between herself and the drinks were clear. Lifting a hand that glowed white, she yanked one of the cans of soda into it. Her hand stopped glowing and she tapped on the top of the can to break up the bubbles the sudden journey and even more sudden stop would have caused before snapping the tab and taking a drink.

"Sh..stuff like that."

"Well, would you look at that," Fjord mused, looking at the soda can thoughtfully, and then back to Jack. "Haven't seen that one before, no. And most of what I've got probably shouldn't be trotted out at a welcome picnic."

He considered, made a small gesture with his hand and muttered under his breath, and then standing there in his place, an illusion that had him looking very much like Fenris. A beat later, another gesture, and he looked like Jack herself. He gave her a grin, gestured again, and then he was standing there looking every bit like himself, but human.

Eldritch invocations were fun and educational!

"Still," he added, tone fairly light, "you did show me yours."

"Most of what I got shouldn't be trotted out around anyone you don't want turned into parts," Jack drawled. It was true. Kaidan had finesse and control, she was mostly smashy-smash. She was learning to be more deft with it and was a little pleased she'd pulled just the one can instead of the entire table.

She squinted at him, "Did you just turn yourself into a fucking badger-striped elf?" The human illusion got a critical up and down and a shake of her head, "Nah. The peach tone doesn't suit you at all."

"Friend of mine," Fjord explained, by way of explaining the Fenris illusion. He smiled faintly, lifted a shoulder, and then dismissed the illusion completely. "And I've had a few people say the same. Thinking from this point forward I'll probably just start making up faces. Little too uncanny, apparently, using my own."

"Might be the skin tone," Jack mused, thinking about it, "Little too peachy." She looked around for ickle-bickle and pointed at him, "Try something more that shade or darker. Swarthier."

That was a word. Someone had used it about Kaidan once and it conjured up the mental image of someone in a swashbuckling outfit and made her laugh for a solid ten minutes. So she kept that word.

Fjord's gaze followed to where she was pointing, and he considered Kanan for a few moments before nodding, casting the illusion spell on himself again.

So, himself. But... yes, swarthier. Made sense enough, he supposed. Hell if he knew what the non-orcish half of his parentage looked like, but it was rare to find a merchant sailor who hadn't worked up a hell of a tan after a few years at sea, all the same. He glanced back at Jack, brow raised in question.

"Yes? No?"

Jack gave him a critical ~~role~~ look over and nodded. "Yeah, that's better. It makes you look less uncanny valley. I still like your regular look better but I'm biased."

Fjord met that with a wry smile, and once again dropped the illusion.

"Well, thank you, then," he replied. "I'll bear that one in mind, next time I need to leave the island. Green doesn't tend to go over well on the mainland. Around here, it's a little more comfortable living in my own skin."

"Yeah, the planet's pretty full of humans and they're kind of all as.. jerks.. about aliens of any kind," she said sourly, "Even their own kind. They get better in the next century or so. My Earth does, anyway. Still have some of the bigots but they're fewer in number and nobody really misses them if they find themselves accidentally jettisoned into vacuum."

Oops. Who would possibly ever have done that to someone?

"I want to say that's reassuring," Fjord mused. "Seems like no matter where you go, there's at least someone like that."

It wasn't easy being green.

"Here they typically at least pretend to be decent."

"Always gonna be someone who thinks there has to be a pecking order and that they got a right to be higher up on it than someone else," she said, "Insecure motherf..jerks.. gonna be that way all the worlds around. It's when they're the majority instead of a small, skulking minority that it's bad."

She looked up at him, "People that matter won't care what you look like. People what care how you look shouldn't matter. So I keep getting told and sometimes, most times, it's even true. More often than I ever figured it would be true, even."

Little bit scary.

"Can't deny that," Fjord replied, nodding. Looking thoughtful. "Seems to have been the case in my life, anyway."

Where he'd come from, what he was, those things hadn't mattered when he'd been taken in. Hadn't denied him a place on Vandran's ship. He sure as hell wouldn't have made first mate, otherwise.

Wouldn't feel half as comfortable in his own skin as he did. And he still had a long way to go, he recognized that.

"Generally is. I'm human as fuck and where I'm from what I can do makes 'em want to classify me subhuman." Jack snorted loudly. "Used to, anyway. Got kind of a reprieve on that after the war. Can't really look at your big badass biotic heroes and still in the same breath call 'em subhuman mutants."

Not that there weren't some people who tried.

"Even without that? I'm female and I don't fit the mold for it. Never have. When you can't fit the mold, break the damn thing. Be as you as you can be."

"Make a new mold?" Fjord's lips pulled into a faint twist of a smile, lips parting, but not nearly enough to put his damaged tusks on display.

They were about due for more filing down.

"You know, I actually envy people who can lean into that and make it work. Respect."

Edited 2018-12-30 19:27 (UTC)

"Ah, you'll get there," Jack assured him, "If I can, anyone can do it."

No - truly.

"That's the goal, I suppose," Fjord mused. "We'll see how things go."

He had put a lot of time and effort into fitting in as well as he was able, after all. His people weren't generally known for their fantastic people skills.

"You ever need a break from all this," Jack gestured around at the sea of still-mostly-humans, "hit me up. I'll haul you home for a weekend where about the worst you'll get is a bunch of little blue beauties wanting to climb you like a tree."

The Asari would be on him like cats to catnip. Tall, broad, easy on the eyes, and with an entirely new genome? Catnip.

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

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