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

[bigdamnprincipal]

Whoever worked the weather magic around here had done an excellent job to make sure things were nice outside for all the new (and old) residents of Fandom. It was warm and sunny, but not so humid that people would melt. There was plenty of moddable food and drinks, places to sit in the shade, and more than enough nametags to go around. It was time to celebrate the start of the summer!

Comments

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[x_wondrous_x]

The light of approval in Stewart's eyes seemed to spark brighter and brighter with each word out of her mouth, just as the grin in the corner of his mouth grew along with it, until there was all but one thing to say in response to a mini-tirade put so succinctly and eloquently.

"...wondrous," Stewart hissed out, giving the S a little extra time to linger at the end before adding, "Now tell us how you really feel, Arden."

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

She blinked. "But I just did...?"

Oh noes there was a test and she'd thought she'd done okay on it but now there was a second test?!

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[x_wondrous_x]

"I was being facetious," Stewart assured her, head tilting a little with open amusement at Arden as he seemed to work through some of her idiosyncrasies revealing themselves now. "Hyperbolic. Employing the use of irony for humorous effect, especially since I'm not terribly accustomed to veritable strangers communicating their opinions so succinctly, so eloquently, so...."

He scoffed out a laugh, lifting an eyebrow at her.

"Dare I say it?"

In the dramatic pause that followed, his head shifted, bobbling on his neck to the left, right, and back again.

"Arden-tly."

Oh, he was going to be riding the high of that one for a while...

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Arden groaned. "Booooo," she said, burying her face in her hands. Ugh, the only thing worse than being around people who thought puns were funny was being around people who punned with your name.

"But also, that's not an opinion, it's a verifiable fact and we just can't admit it because people can be persuaded to work against their own best interests pretty much at the drop of a hat."

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[x_wondrous_x]

Stewart's grin was relentlessly apologetic. Being presented with an opportunity like that and turning it down was a level of self-restraint that Steward did not, nor ever care to, possess.

He gave another soft huff of a laugh. "Ohhhh," he said, smirking at Arden speculatively, "I'm sure there's plenty of filthy rich fat-cat billionaires that are quite happy with the state of capitalism, and plenty of sycophantic, boot-licking, ass-kissers who are more than content to be crushed under the heel of their own exploitation."

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

"Well, I mean, obviously," Arden scoffed. "Because they're just temporarily embarrassed billionaires who will one day join the lucky ranks of the people who get to wear the book, not just lick it. Scratch any toadying sycophant you can find and you'll find a fascist just waiting for his turn to having his boot on someone's fucking neck. It's facts."

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[x_wondrous_x]

Oh, Stewart was feeling quite sure he could go at this all day, each response seeming to spark that veracity for fulmination even brighter.

"And what about you...Arden?" he hedged, leaning in with the intrigue of it all. "No desire on your part to ever don a sturdy pair of boots," his eyes dropped pointedly as if to check what form of footwear she was actually sporting, "yourself, hmmmmmm?"

His brow lifted perfectly in time with the lilt of his voice in raising that hum to its inquiring pitch.

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

She was, hilariously enough, boots.

"No," Arden said, with a sudden swap from aggrieved to...quiet. Withdrawn, even. But steady. "I don't ever want that kind of power over anybody. It's bad enough that there are already people who are bigger and stronger and more powerful than you, but then to be able to wrap people in debts and strings that takes away their whole lives and their futures and make them dance for crumbs just to subsist because everything is built into the whole same stupid fucking system--"

Welp! At some point, she'd left quiet behind and was not just passionately ranting. "I don't want any part of that! I just want to be left alone! I'm so tired of being scared and the last thing I want is for anybody to be scared of me like that!"

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[x_wondrous_x]

It was alright, Arden. So was Stewart! They were both, apparently, equally guilty of being already well-equipped for metaphorical subjugation.

"I....seem to have struck a nerve," he noted, and he couldn't possibly sound more delighted by that fact. Well, perhaps...there was some room there for more, as there was just a small thread of curiosity, genuine and sincere and maybe just a slight bit worried, that she'd mentioned being scared, although that also just fed into his intrigue that much more. Who was this Arden, in the cowboy boots on this island off the coast of Maine, with her staunch defense of the natural order and rhythms of time and even more fervent decrying of systems that humanity has developed as their own siren song of oppression? He. Was. Entranced. "A chord. A...soft spot?"

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Interestingly enough, the word chord got a reaction. Just a small blink, a little twitch, but enough to be noticed by someone watching her closely.

Curiouser and curiouser.

She shrugged. "Anytime you kick over the rock of capitalism, you're going to find the bones of somebody crushed by it," she said, although that was only parallel to the truth. Arden had spent her life crushed, but not by capitalism - though the elves had certainly subverted their fair share of the mechanisms of it to continue their stranglehold on political power in Othersider society.

Hearing that delight, she put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow at him. "Finding my soft spots aren't terribly hard." And, since he seemed to enjoy a flair for the dramatics and they'd only just gotten over that whole narrative thing with its trip to the orchard inside Special Collections... "Low-hanging fruit as it were. Sure, might still count as the fruit of knowledge, but if you think that's all of me, you'll find yourself real fuckin' surprised."

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[x_wondrous_x]

And if Arden expected a response like that to lessen Stewart's intrigue, his delight, his newfound fascination with just who she might be and what she might say next, well...oh, he had some terrible news for her, indeed.

"Oh," he stated, grin somewhat scheming, with a small, serpent-like shift of his shoulders and his head to one side, "I wouldn't dare to dream otherwise, my ardent Arden."

Yeah, sorry, it was absolutely going to be a thing now.

"I've always found low-hanging fruit to be the sweetest, especially when the roots run deep. I am, after all, a creature of the deep, the dark, the underground. I find the view from the muck and the mire far more interesting that it could ever be from the tops of more lofty, high-reaching branches...."

Re: Meet Your Buddies!

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

"We all have feet of clay," Arden said. "We all have baser natures and darker parts of ourselves and bits that never grew past the toddler's I want phase, where all that matters is that the desire is gratified and fuck the consequences. But isn't that exactly where capitalism springs from? The idea that so long as I get mine, fuck everybody else?" She tossed her hair, curls caught in a light breeze, eyes catching the sunlight to almost shine gold. The air seemed almost full of a gathering tension with a faint hint of ozone, the way it felt before a lightning strike.

"Maybe you think that by knowing a person's darker nature means you know them better than anything else, but you're wrong. Because people are just as much the heights they aspire to as the depths to which they'll sink. Knowing only half a person isn't more impressive because of which half you know, it just shows others where your blindspots are. So stew on that a bit."

Yeah, absolutely not as good as 'ardent Arden,' but Stewart was harder to pull that on, okay?