Interactions: Anya
@Fernstone & Jack
@Blizz(Teleporting All Over) The Halloween Festival
Drunken friend? Sloane gave Jack a look that lacked the typical vacancy in her eyes, showing her confusion and indigent rejection of the statement. Drunk? She didn’t like being drunk and she liked how she felt right now. She felt warm and tingly, like she was in a hot, steamy bath while sipping on a hot chamomile tea and reading a steamy romance novel. She wasn’t drunk. She couldn’t be drunk. If she were drunk then that meant she had been overserved, and the waitstaff were responsible professionals. Perhaps Jack was drunk. That must be it, of course, that was it, Jack was clearly drunk because ooooh! Ooooooh!
Anya. Anya was drunk. Obviously Anya was drunk. Yeah, Anya could hardly even stand up out of her chair. Sloane covered up a little smile with her hand as she followed Anya and Jack outside. She had never seen Anya drunk before, but wow, yeah, the way she walked in an almost perfectly straight line out the door made is sooooo obvious that she was trying as hard as she could not to appear completely wasted. Wow. Anya really hadn’t been holding back tonight. She must’ve desperately wanted one fun night to forget about all the terrible things in the world right now almost as much as Sloane did. Except obviously Sloane wasn’t drunk unlike Anya, who was clearly drunk and not like Sloane who wasn’t. Drunk, that is.
Where were they even going? The festival was the other—wait!
Before Sloane could protest against Jack teleporting them it happened. She felt like her body was dumped inside of a cocktail shaker and vigorously shaken over ice until she was nice and frothy, then she was flipped in the ass over head by an amateur bartender trying to show off but failing to snap the lid all of the way down as they tossed the shaker in the air. Sloane spilled out from the teleportation, a desperate and lucky catch upon Jack’s robes the only thing keeping her from becoming a human party foul as she just avoided spilling out onto the ground. Her body stopped but the world kept spinning. She let go of Jack, tilted her head back, covered her face, and held her breath as her body continued to swirl and mix because of Jack’s stupid teleportation spell and nothing else.
She pulled her hand away from her eyes, blinking rapidly at the chorus of singsong voices chanting toga, toga, toga. As Sloane was about to turn to take a look when Anya stumbled into her (because she was, despite how well she hid it, obviously soooo drunk, and the teleportation probably didn’t help with that). Sloane let out an absolutely foreign sounding girlish giggle as Anya “steadied” herself by bracing her hands on Sloane’s shoulders, allowing her friend to steer her so that she wouldn’t fall even if it meant being spun quickly in a half circle.
”...Best to get work out of the way so we can enjoy the rest of the night!”“I mean I should but…” She had only even mentioned her stall to further push the conversation away from Drake.
It would be fine, really. Her employees were handpicked by her after all. They would really only need her if there was an issue they couldn’t fix, and the amount of things that qualified as that had become smaller and smaller and smaller. Sloane still got heavily involved when dealing with certain parts of her clientele and anything involving antiques of substantial value, but the souvenir side of things was essentially self-sufficient. Tonight should just be about fun and honestly, those strangely familiar voices chanting about a toga sounded like they were having a ton of it.
Sloane tried to turn to get a look at the party, but as she turned her head Anya shifted her in the other direction. She turned her head the other way and Anya shifted them again. Another strange sounding giggle saw the wardens had their backs turned, hopped the fence, and fled out from Sloane’s mouth before she could block it with her hand. Jack said something she couldn’t register as she tried to look back at Anya and once again found herself steered the other way. It started to make her feel like she was on a boat in choppy waters, the feeling of nausea making her clinch her eyes shut.
“Anya, how much did you—” Jack teleported them again. Acid and alcohol bubbled violently up to Sloane’s chest and quickened her heart rate as she nearly collapsed, just barely keeping herself from both sprawling and spewing onto the ground, hands grabbing at Anya for support.
“—driiiiink. Ugh”Sloane righted herself and held up her head to bat away any raised concerns.
“You know, I am quite capable of walking by myself, Mr. Hawthorne. Just because you were gone for ten years didn’t mean that I’d lost the ability to go places. I got around just fine without you,” said Sloane, the acid that still lingered in her throat reacting with the embarrassment burning in her cheeks, making her normally cold tone sound heated.
What am I doing? Maybe, possibly, as ever so unlikely as it was, she could’ve been just a little, teeny tiny bit drunk. She held her head up and took a large breath in an attempt to calm herself.
“If I need a magical Uber, I’ll tell you. I just…”She couldn’t find the right words to express how she felt. Sloane only wanted to have a nice night, but now she only had a head full of steam. She didn’t even know why. It wasn’t like she was actually angry at Jack. Sure, perhaps he could do a little work to perfect his teleportation spells so that it didn’t cause motion sickness, but that wasn’t really the problem either. Everything just felt off. She wasn’t having fun anymore. She had just wanted to have fun. No, more than that: Sloane had wanted to pretend that she was someone else, but right now she was just a shitty and drunk version of herself dressed like a cartoon character from a television show she’d never even watched.
An annoyed sigh exploded out of Sloane as she sharply turned, violently flicking her hands out before shoving them down into the pockets of her red trench coat, hunching her shoulders, and walked away without caring whether or not the others followed her. Sloane stormed past her own stall, a surprisingly festive display staffed by a trio of witches selling a mixture of cutesy halloween decorations like tiny straw voodoo dolls in Halloween costumes, spooky bitch essentials like incense burners and tarot sets, and basic souvenir shop bullshittery like mugs with the cityline of St. Portwell on them and t-shirts with slogans like “Straight Outta Cracker Island” printed on them.
A man dressed in an Italian suit with slicked back hair was casually chatting with one of the witches. The witch waved and shouted at Sloane as the
man turned with a smile that quickly faded as the woman in red blew right past them without even an acknowledgement. The smile fell from the man's face as he looked back at the witch who, looking apologetic, immediately began saying something. The man shrugged and stepped away from the stall, putting down the three-faced voodoo doll he had been holding and pulling out a cigarette. He was about to light it with a match when he paused, looking in the direction of where Sloane was heading and then back in the direction of where she’d come from. His eyes skipped over the shrouded Jack and lingered briefly on Anya. The little smile returned to his face as he lit his cigarette and turned, heading off in the opposite direction of Sloane.
Interactions: Linqian
@Fernstone Toga Town, USA. The Halloween Festival.
For over ten years Sullivan McPherson had been scared, gripped by a fear so strong that sometimes awake, nearly paralyzed and having to fight himself to get out of bed and go to work. It was a fear that had made him give up on his dreams, a fear that had pushed him into accepting a life of irrelevancy. It was a fear that not many of his peers seemed to have, despite how many of his peers tended to trigger the fear inside of him and cause his stomach to tighten with dread just by their very existence. It was a fear aggravated by grabbing drinks with the boys after a hard day's work and hearing their life stories, all of them that started with a “yeah, I could’ve been somebody if” and ended with them in the same bar as Sully drinking a light beer and bitching about their back.
Sully was simply afraid that he’d peaked at eighteen, as saving the world was hard to top—even when his role in it was being nothing more than a glorified waterboy. However, in this moment as he drunkening led a parade of revelers in togas through the Halloween Festival he no longer felt fear. This was his greatest achievement in life: his Mona Lisa, his Godfather, his Jordan Game 6. It was the Prince Superbowl Half-Time Show of spontaneous toga parties. It was his magnum opus. He was a man with a magnum away from being mentioned in the same breath with the likes of King, Kennedy, and Lennon. Tonight, he had truly ascended, going from the party god, to the God of Parties.
Unfortunately, there was absolutely positively no way he was going to remember a single damn thing, as he had already been a few drinks in when he made the decision to fully commit to his now forgotten “Sully” costume and shave his beard into a mustache. Yet in this moment he was glorious.
The toga party wasn’t just an excuse to be drunk and half-naked, although being drunk and half-naked was a perk. The toga party was about coming together. It was about putting down differences and embracing the things that really matter—the person right in front of you (otherwise they couldn’t have a conga line). But think about it, really think about it. They had Sycamore chanting with Greenwood. They had Greenwood sharing a drink with 8th Street. Even 8th Street was getting friendly with Sycamore, although it was hard to tell if Drake could breath given how hard that one girl was squeezing on to him. Three Covens, One Line.
Can you dig it? But of course Sully had no time to preach to his magical brothers and sister about how through unity they could run Cracker Island. He was too busy filling the Chalice, passing it back, chanting toga-toga-toga, leading the cult of Dionysus through the crowded fairgrounds and recruiting true believers. Sully wiped sweat from his eyes and smoothed his missing beard as the line snaked through the stalls. It was only through happenstance—no, no, it was fate, divine intervention—that he looked when he did and made direct eye contact with Linqian. He always liked Linqian. He especially liked partying with Linqian. She might not be a sister yet, for no matter how close the dress of her Little Red outfit was to a toga it was not a toga, but she was still a friend.
And she had just made the grave mistake of using a cell phone. Linqian may not have realized what she had just done, but Sully had transcended. He knew the rules. He knew what happened to people with phones. He had to save her. He would save her.
The moment would be documented in the camera roll on Linqian’s phone in a choppy stop-motion: Sully’s eyes widening in horror, his mouth dropping, his hand reaching into his toga. A balled up toga palmed in his hand, his arm raised and cocked back. His hand thrown forward, fingers spread, mouth still shouting, the rest of his face obscured by a balled up toga that had just been released. A toga spiraling like a football through the air towards the camera screen. Getting closer. And closer. And closer as it began to unravel, leaving the next few photos nothing but a blank white screen as the toga continued to fly towards Linqian.
“Linqian! TOGA!” hollered Sully, a bit late on his warning despite his purest of intentions. Inside the conga line she’d be safe from any kidnappers or brawlers who hated phone users. Plus, maybe she would jump between Drake and that one chick and let his boy stop having to worry about cracking a rib.
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AtomicEmperor
