fandomhigh | Summer Shenanigans, May 25, 2022

The park today looked like an insane person with a ridiculous love of bunting had been allowed to go absolutely nuts setting up mazes.

(In related news, Beaker had been consulted for ideas.)

There were four main areas ~~of concern~~: a maze with four wheelie recycling bins set before it; a series of folding tables with a variety of fruit and implements on top of them; two large fences with roughly 300 rubber ducks perched on top of them (and a velvet rope 100 feet away from it); and a final maze of bunting with a chair in the center of it.

In the center of all of this mess was a large shed with a closed door.

Anakin looked extremely pleased with himself as he leaned against the Table o' Terrible T-Shirts.

"Welcome back!" he yelled into his bullhorn. "I am pleased to see such enthusiasm for our weekly community building activities."

Sure, let's go with that interpretation. "Today we have several new obstacles for you to master! The specifics of each shall be made clear-" well. Clear-ish. "--as we move to them. The team with the most number of points wins! Listen for your names:"

TEAM NIGHTMARE CLOWNS
Steve R
Steph
Graham
Jo
Scott
Lana
Danny

TEAM 'MERICA
Clare
Tony
Sakaki
Connor
Goose
Vi
Liz

TEAM CHICKEN ON THE BEACH
Libby
Margo
Duke
Cara
Billy
Miguel
Irene

TEAM UNICORN BATTLE CAT
Travis
Sidon
Beaker
Rey
Summer
Stark
Steve M

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Sidon took a moment to nod as their plan started to come to fruition, holding his blindfold and not yet attending to it (fastening it around his head would prove to be a...slight challenge, but he would manage well enough!), as he looked down (and down) at Travis. He offered out a hand.

"Did you need assistance in getting into the bin?"

Teamwork was important!

Please pardon Travis from instinctively pulling back a little, Sidon. You were extremely large and Travis had grown up in Seattle, near enough the water to have a healthy respect for the inherent dangers of even gentle large aquatic life.

"I got it," he said, covering with a small smile. "But thanks."

And he climbed not at all gracefully into the bin.

How was this his life.

"Meep meep!" Beaker said, giving Travis an enthusiastic thumbs up. He gave kind of near Travis an enthusiastic thumbs up? He couldn't see.

And, with that, Sidon went to go tie on his own blindfold, paused for a moment to think better of it, and went to pick up Beaker to set him on his shoulders as Travis had suggested first, although he liked to think he could have managed to have found him by the meeping.

"Hold on tight, my meeping friend!" he said, releasing him to tend to the blindfold and then carefully bending over (and over) the bin to get a good hold on it. "And to our trusty navigator to guide us, let us begin! We can do it! I have believe in you!"

"Oh good," Travis muttered. "Glad someone does." He tried -- and failed -- to find a comfortable position, then realized they'd missed a step. "Um, what language should I use?"

"Meep meep?"

Didn't matter to Beaker!

"Ah, yes," agreed Sidon, again, still with no idea what Beaker had actually said. "I think meep shall be for going left, and meep for right! That sounds excellent, do you think you can follow that, Travis?"

They were, for the record, still very distinctive meeps. Or, at the very least, Sidon seemed to think so.

"Yeah, that all sounds like 'meep' to me," Travis said. "I don't suppose either of you knows Korean?"

They were going to lose so much time on this question alone.

Beaker went into an elaborate explanation of a semi-sentient gochujang that lived in a fridge in college so his answer was "a little."

But all in meeps, so...

Sidon, for his part, did try to follow that, but he was terribly lost by the end of it and wasn't even sure if he was following the other nonverbal cues very well, so, once Beaker finished, he just said, simply (and with an incredible amount of needlessly cheerful enthusiasm), "No!"

Travis sighed. ". . . Spanish?" he asked the shark man hopefully.

"Sorry, friend," said Sidon, with a regretful smile and a shake of his head. "And I don't suppose you know Hylian or Ryl. But if we just keep it simple, it seems to me that you could easily give us a quick crash course to get us through enough to understand where to direct you."

And then he seemed to have realized what he said and let out a bark of a laugh.

"But not a literal crash course!" he added merrily. "If it can at all be helped! We'd best avoid that, I should think!"

With Beaker on board? Sidon truly was an optimist, indeed.

Probably good they had the firefighter too, given Beaker's...entirety of life.

"Meep meep!" Beaker agreed.

Travis was only too aware of Beaker's . . . Beakerness, yes. Which was why, rather than trying to teach them the Korean terms for left and right, he let out a long sigh and said: "Tell you what. Let's say 'soup' means left, 'sneeze' means right, and 'trout' means --" 'please for the love of god save me' "-- 'stop before you run me into something'."

There was a small pause, where, were he not blindfolded, Sidon might actually have been looking to Beaker for support in just one small matter.

"But...and I don't mean to be difficult about things, not at all, I assure you, those all sound like very good options, but..."

He hesitated a moment, all too aware of the fact that they'd already wasted more than a few of those already, but it wouldn't matter if they were all disqualified regardless.

"Isn't that...still English? Perhaps I'm understanding the rules wrong, though, especially as it is not exactly my own first language."

"Meep meep meep mee?"

Maybe if Travis said them in Korean?

Travis was all set to argue that while, yes, the words themselves were English, they were not being used in anything even remotely resembling their actual meanings, making them basically not English as a result --

And then saw that they were already far behind the other players and decided to lie.

"They're not. They just sound like English. Soup, sneeze, trout." He settled into the bin and gestured for Sidon to grab on. "Varoom."

Sidon was...doubtful, and he would have cast a questioning glance toward Anakin for some sort of confirmation if not for the blindfold, but, well, Travis seemed quite certain, and teamwork was all about trust, and so, with that nudge, he gripped onto the barrel tightly, and call out, "Then off we go!" and launched himself forward with all the power and might you'd expect from a nine foot tall sharkman pushing a firefighter in a wheeled bin.

"To VICTORY!" he called out encouragingly.

"Oh god," Travis muttered. Then "Soup. Soup!"

"Meep meep!" Beaker said, perched on Sidon's shoulder and triumphantly producing soup from...somewhere.

Muppets physics.

It was in a pot and steaming! Just accept these things!

Summer Shenanigans, May 25, 2022

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