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

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!event: welcome picnic

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

So this week had been... less than great overall, but everyone in town was okay again (as okay as they ever were, at least) and now there were new people to welcome to the island! Thankfully, the weather was warm and sunny, perfect for anyone who wanted to take part in some shirtless shenanigans, and the front lawn of the school was all set up for yet another tasty picnic. There were tables of blank name tags, lists of information, and enough food to probably feed two Fandoms. Time to be welcoming!

[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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"I mean, I can walk towards a table full of delicious-smelling food and talk at the same time if I really put my mind to it," Owen said, grinning easily. "Unless you are, in fact, simply here to haze me and eager to release me onto the public full of ridiculous ideas."

"That does sound like fun," Prompto admitted with a wry smirk, "but, I swear, nearly every ridiculous thing coming out of my mouth will actually be true. But, hey, maybe we should start a little with you, too, since, I mean, you don't seem too thrown off by being here, so that's not a bad foot to start on. What sort of place are you coming from?"

"Ah, I see you've bought into my excellent disguise, that's a load off my back," Owen said easily, as he began to walk towards the table. "I'm still trying to decide whether I'm having a very elaborate, strange dream." A pause. "I'm from Heliost, originally. Recently, ah, graduated from the local Satomi."

In a particular sense of 'graduating' that was really more of an 'unscheduled, prolonged break'.

Well, then, there were some nice unfamiliar words that Prompto had pretty much expected. "Is Heliost a planet?" he asked, moseying on over to the table along with Owen. "Or a city? And the local Satomi...is that some kind of school or something like that?"

Deductive reasoning powers, activated!

That finally got a genuine blink out of Owen, instead of his usual steamroll of babble. "Uhhh, yeah, mate, Heliost is a city," he said slowly. "And you know, Satomi - cypher school?"

"Nope," said Prompto, feeling...weirdly proud about that blink and those slow questions. He felt like maybe he wasn't doing his Big Sibling job quite right if he wasn't shaking his little bro up at least a little, especially considering how he'd pretty much had to pick his jaw up off the floor after talking to Sabine that first time. "Sorry. I don't know Satomi. And I'll bet the majority of people you asked around here wouldn't, either. Let's roll it back a little, to that whole, multidimensional, people from different places things. I mean, like.." His hands spread out in front of him to indicate just a fraction of how wide of a scope he was building here, "...eeeverywhere, including most places you've never even heard of. For example, I'm from a place called Insomnia, on a planet called Eos. This planet here that we're on is called Earth." Which he still felt sounded kind of dumb and flat. Earff. Kind of a dumb name, Earthlings, sorry 'bout it.

Buuuut, all that said and done, he had to admit, he was a little curious about that last part.

"Like, what's even cypher school? Because it sounds cool as hell."

"It's where they teach you how to be a cypher," Owen said slowly. "You're really not having me on here, are you?"

... The confusion was not stopping him from reaching out to grab a pizza roll, mind you. If Prompto was going to break his mind, he might as well get some free food out of it.

Yeah, nothing worse than a broken brain and an empty stomach.

"I'm really not," Prompto vowed, holding up his hands as if to show how little ill-intent he was holding. "I swear, but I will say this, if cypher school is anything what it sounds like," which was, like, spying shit and things, right?, "then I think there's a slight chance your old school may have actually been cooler, as sweet as this school usually is."

And maybe he should have him meet Nina. But unleashing Nina on someone was not something to tread into lightly.

"My old school," he offered for point of comparrison, "was totally lame and normal and the most exciting thing that ever happened there was that our prince also went to school there, so..."

"I mean, cypher school is just the usual, really," Owen said, attempting to blanket himself with his earlier blase attitude again. "A spot of information processing, a bit of experimenting with ember, learning how to speak into people's minds across great distances... okay, I'm lying, it was rather exciting for a while, there."

Learning to....

"Yeah, no," said Prompto immediately, "your old school was way better than my old school. I don't know how much of that you'll be getting while you're here, but everything here is pretty much all over the place. I've had cooking classes, shop classes, a few classes that seem to pretty much be loosely based on a theme as an excuse to hit things, a class that was pretty much just a virtual reality video game..."

Not quite learning to speak directly into people's minds across great distances, or anything, but, hey, not too shabby, either, though, right?

"That doesn't actually sound too bad," Owen said, shoving a bite of the roll-- "Oh, this is good-- er, I mean, I get bored of doing the same thing over and over again. Do you get bored?"

Prompto grinned faintly at the completely understandable food distraction. "I'm a fan of the burgers, myself," he offered, "but those are a little harder to manage when trying to talk.

"And, yeah, I mean, sometimes. The class load is a lot lighter than I was used to, so there's a lot of downtime, but the classes themselves are way more interesting. And, like, everyone here is really cool, so even in your downtime, there's plenty to do, and this place is...weird, really weird, and tends to keep things....interesting."

He decided to put a particularly ominous spin on that last word, to see how Owen might pick up on it before figuring out the best way to dive into some of those little tidbits of info.

"Interesting how? Out of control relics, bad guys to fight? You lot don't have walls..."

"Ha!" If the laugh that squeaked out of Prompto in response to that sounded a little bit desperate, well...that's exactly what it was, though he tried to smooth it out a little with a chuckle as his face sort of filled up with some red. Sure, he was planning on going into last week as his go-to on the things that weren't awesome about this place, but, damn, that was one hell of a segue just handed right to him on a goddamn silver platter, wasn't it?

"Funny you should say that," he continued in a tone that suggested that wasn't a whole lot funny about it at all. "Because you pretty much just missed one. A big one. A whole dome covering the island that no one here put there, but that some deceptively charming idiot," and that would be Prompto pointing straight at his own dumb mug for the folks following at home, "decided to break down, which effectively brought in a small waves of vampires who actually bit a few people. But, like, that wall was actually built to try to keep all of us out? Because vampires were biting people all over Baltimore...that's the nearest city, by the way, on the mainland...and this place is filled with just the sort of people who would gear up and go kick some major vampire ass when given half the chance."

There was a slight pause.

"Which they did. Like, and how. And I'm talking, like, you juuuust just missed it. Like it all went down two, three days ago. Just in time for everyone to sort of recover and get ready for..." He gestures to the picnic around them, "this whole thing. And you guys. The new strapping examples of personhood joining our ranks for the new semester."

Well.

He did ask interesting how, and Prompto was pretty confident that that was a pretty good example if there ever was one.

Even if Paris didn't think anyone should be leading with it. But if you asked Prompto, it was just the thing to lead with, because now he knew.

"Huh," was all Owen said, at first.

Then, a moment later, "No Scars though?"

Hmmm. Well, a 'huh' could be a very good and understanding response, or a 'huh' could also have been an indication of just all that blowing through one ear and out the other, which he wouldn't exactly be surprised about, because it was kind of a lot.

"Well, I mean," Prompto shrugged a little, "I'm sure someone's got some scars, you don't go into a fight like that and not come out completely unscathed."

He wouldn't touch emotional scars on this one, because, yeah, no, those ones were running a little too deep and tender at the moment and he was trying to not think about that today if he could help it.

"No, I mean, Scars, creepy scavengers made up of lots of bugs shaped like humans?" ... Owen's home planet was, uh. A lot.

Prompto's eyebrows took a little jaunt up toward his hairline.

"Yeah, no," he said. "None of those. Yet. Or that I know of. I mean, anything's possible. My friend has a daemon made out of peanut butter and jelly, so....I don't know, give it a few months, and we might. But, I mean, no offense, dude, I kind of hope not, I hate bugs, they're so icky. Blech."

Prompto was making no effort to hold back his disgust on that one, making a face and rolling out his tongue for a moment before shivering. Especially picturing all those bugs in a creepy scavenger human shape as described.

PASS.

"And nothing tried to kill you before or after these vampires showed up?" Owen pressed. "No... major catastrophes, wolven attacks, that sort of thing?"

"Well, I mean," Prompto offered, "a bit before that there were these snowmonsters that attacked the town. And there were giant bees," again, a shiver, bees were close enough to bugs, "that attacked at graduation? But that's all I think I've gotten to experience, but anything else was probably before my time, I'm sure there's a bunch others, it doesn't stay quiet around here for too long, and if it's not something attacking the place, it's just the island doing....weird stuff. Like, there's this one time when everyone kind of turned into kids? Oh! Oh, and here's a big one that I kind of wish someone had definitely told me about before hand, but apparently, after prom...which is like a big formal dance thing?...there's a possibility that your potential kids from, like, the future show up."

And totally mess with your head and traumatize you for pretty much the rest of your life, but, hey, no big deal, right?

Prompto was just doing what he could to save you the surprises he'd been in for, Owen, buddy.

With the threat, he was now realizing, of Owen thinking he was completely out of his mind, but....eh, there was a learning curve. He could handle being thought of as crazy until the first bout really smacked him in the face.

"Where I come from, you're dead if you step outside the walls with the right equipment," Owen volunteered.

He took another bite of the roll. "And I'm just going to assume the rest of that is you having me on."

"And that's fair," Prompto said. "I know what I sound like, but you'll see. I mean, I know I've got a pretty good imagination, but it's not that good. You can't make some of this shit up. One thing I will add, though, is that you definitely want to stay away from any little ugly green monster dudes running around the island. Those are gremlins, and if they bite you, it's mostly harmless, but it makes you think you're someone else for a while."

That first thing he'd said, though, Prompto shifted a little and offered up a faint smile, because he definitely felt the need to go back to that. "And it's like that where I'm from, too," he offered. "About stepping outside the walls being pretty much a death sentence."

Something he said with a pang in his chest, too, because he really should have known better.

"But it's safe here, man, most of the time. Just the occasional attack, and, even then, everyone here is really good at fighting or, if they're not, they're really good at doing other things to help. Trust me, though, I get it. It took me about a month to even be comfortable with the night sky around here, no lights, no walls, no nothing, just us and the wide open world..."

And then he discovered it was kind of the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, but, clearly, it had made him grow a little soft in that respect.

"It's good, though. It's nice."

"As long as fighting and occasional excitement is your bag, by the sounds of it," Owen said, tilting his head. "Say, is there anywhere around here you can go to learn that sort of thing? Asking for a friend."

"What? Fighting?" Prompto asked, his own head tilting in an unconscious mimic of Owen's. "Well, I mean, I don't think there's anything really formal about that, but half the classes here seem to have some sort of fighting element to them. A bunch of the teachers could probably teach you a few things, and a lot of us will get together and train sometimes. I know I'm a pretty decent hand with firearms, but there's still others, like my friend Vette or my girlfriend Yang, who're, like, way better. And there's lots of people who know swords and things like that, too. I guess it's just a matter of what you..r buddy is interested in, and then a matter of figuring out who to talk to or just making the time, I guess. But, yeah, no shortage of people who can teach fighting around here, like, at all."

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

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