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

The good weather continued throughout the day, making it very comfortable to be out on the lawn. Who would want to miss such a nice picnic?

[OCD is up! 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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"I didn't catch the other one," Julius said, still a little apologetic. "I'm out of practice. Do you want me to go get you another one?"

... What?

"Wh-- what?"

He was so smooth.

Also shaking his head. "No, I mean. It's my taco, that I dropped, so I think generally that makes it my own responsibility to get another. Or to, you know, just -- face the consequences of dropping it in the first place, which is mostly just having one less than I meant to, when I was getting them." Okay, he was babbling. Take a breath, Uly! "What I mean is... You really don't need to do that."

"Okay," Julius said and sat back down. "Uhh, I grabbed too much to eat anyway, if you want to share some of what I got?" He offered Uly one of the plates full of sides he'd grabbed back when he'd assumed he'd have his original-sized appetite.

Okay, none of this had gone the way Ulysses had originally pictured in his head. In the two seconds between spotting this guy and tripping all over himself, anyway.

Still, he should've done better than these two seconds of kind of just gaping at Julius as his brain tried to catch up.

"I..." Come on Uly, you can do this. "Yeah, sure. I mean, if it's cool with you, man."

"Plenty of food to go round and I don't like the idea of trashing it," Julius admitted. "Thought I was hungrier than I turned out to be."

Sadface. Stupid seal.

"Yeah, hate when that happens," Ulysses replied, mostly on autopilot.

He did, however, not spill anything further off his plate as he moved to take a seat.

Also, there was something obvious he hadn't said yet: "Oh, um. I'm Ulysses. Hi."

"Oh hi!" Julius said, wiping his hand on a napkin before offering it to Ulysses. "Julius. Uh Quetz. Julius Quetz."

Maybe with repetition, he'd make that sound natural sometime.

"You're not a new kid, right?"

"Nope," Ulysses replied, really popping that P at the end there while a distracted par of his brain made note of the vague similarity in their names.

Also wow, those were some really green eyes.

Oh, right, handshake. "Did my whole junior year here."

Julius nodded like he knew what a 'junior' year was. Look, he'd been tutored by dragons his whole life, and even absorbing human culture through books and TV and the internet left weird gaps sometimes.

"And came back again, so I'm guessing that means it's a good school?" he asked, keeping up the eye contact.

Thus doing zero favors to Ulysses' ability to keep his train of thought going, thanks. But he was soldiering on! "Didn't so much 'come back' as just... not leave?" he said, shrugging. His parents had asked whether he wanted to come back for the summer but hadn't really pressed him on it. "And, I don't know if this is really, like, a good school. But it's -- interesting."

At least for a guy like Ulysses who was perpetually drawn to danger while remaining woefully underequipped to deal with it.

Julius would like to introduce him to the revolutionary concept of running away.

"Okay, so can I ask you a weird question?" Julius asked, giving Ulysses a small, self-conscious smile.

He had dimples. Sorry, Uly.

"... You can ask me anything you want."

That did not, it should be noted, come out sounding at all smooth. Not that he'd tried to. It was one of those things that he maybe hadn't meant to say at all.

But there it was.

"Thanks!" Julius said, his smile growing bigger. "That's really nice of you! But, uhh. I was hoping you'd tell me what year it is? Here?"

Because the bus driver had said 2020 and that absolutely couldn't be right.

"Oh." He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting. He kind of kept forgetting that was a question that was even an option. "Uh, it's 2020."

"Really?" Julius pressed. "I mean, really-really? This isn't some kind of...I dunno. Island-wide prank?"

Like the time all the Ks and Js had pretended that Julius had turned invisible and no one could see or hear him.

"Really," Ulysses replied, his chin bobbing up and down on a few nods. "Why, what year'd you think it is?"

Wait, no, that was the wrong way to ask that.

"Or, like, what year is it supposed to be for you?"

"2097," Julius said with an awkward laugh. "Guess that explains why nobody understood what I was talking about, half the time."

"Yeah, that'd do it," Ulysses decided after a beat, eyebrows knitting together in a befuddled-ly curious frown. "Wait, so we must all seem kinda backwards to you, right? Like, I'd hope another hundred years would bring, like, advancements that make us look like we're just... playing with rocks or something."

"Yeah, kinda," Julius admitted with another one of those small, self-conscious chuckles. "So, back home, we have immersive AR and cybernetics and suborbital flights and all sorts of stuff. Also, umm, magic? A comet hit - will hit? - Canada in the thirties and that brought - brings? Tenses are really hard, wow - all the magic back. So yeah, there's magic, and tech, and magitech. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw that the bus didn't have as much as an autonav system."

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

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