Xerxes Break (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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deercountry2021-11-05 03:47 pm
payingfordeliverance) wrote in deercountry2021-11-05 03:47 pm
Entry tags:
House Log 002: Be our guest
Who: A pile of Pandoras and a pile of RWBYs and perhaps some assorted close attachments
What: A mingle log in which two houses alike in dignity have a slumber party for great CR kickstart justice
When: End of the first week in November, before the month becomes established as a horrifying shitshow
Where: Pandora House, which still needs a cooler name
Content Warnings: Nothing in the log prompts; mushroom monsters are present if we feel like being rude.
Somewhere around the end of September, Xerxes Break made a joke about slumber parties explicitly because he knew it would make Qrow Branwen's life difficult and that struck him as very funny. Now, he has to make good on this and throw a proper one. You'd think this would count as the joke backfiring on him but no, no, it most certainly does not -- Break and his pack of feral Victorian teenagers all thrive on a good party in their own way, and having come from an old-fashioned world they are already quite busy preparing to hunker down inside for the wintertime. Unused to being able to pass long, harsh nights with things like television and video games, they have many activities at hand to indulge in, and Break has already been hard at work stockpiling food like some sort of rabid hobbit.
The house itself is warm and pleasantly haunted and cozy in a way that only happens in homes that aren't accustomed to things like electric heat -- there are piles of quilts and blankets scattered around most rooms, free for the taking if someone wants to wrap themselves up, and all the communal rooms have fires going in their fireplaces. The heat that radiates from those spots is the kind that can thaw out frozen bones in a way that nothing else can. And the feel of the house itself is...well, despite the various struggles of its inhabitants, it just feels like the house is daring to hope that it can be happy. After all, it sat abandoned and empty for a long time, the more terrible of the ghosts that haunted it always inevitably chasing away anyone who dared try to settle down here. Those ghosts are gone as of last month, and the fact that every single person living here is now getting a second chance at simply being someone has already begun seeping into the walls themselves. Although it's still early enough in the month that the intense danger November brings with it hasn't yet become widely known, the house feels decidedly safer than the outside all the same, with a faint sense of benevolent sentience hitting as soon as one walks through the door.
That's what you get in a house full of darkbloods (and Oz).
Food: Probably it's no surprise to anyone who knows Break that the kitchen is where that sense of protectiveness is strongest; this is the room he's taken over as his personal territory. Feeling much better with last month's homesickness finally easing up, he spends the day of the party cooking enough to feed the whole crew -- he's been learning to cook mostly in restaurants, so this is no problem. Having been warned that beef in particular is about to become scarce for the season, he's gotten a hold of a good chunk of it and has put together a big cauldron of beef stew, with potatoes and leeks and many, many mushrooms and things to round it all out. This is one of exactly two proper meals that Break has mastered already, given that the basis of a stew is to chop up exactly the right things and then put them in a pot, and the house smells more and more exquisite the closer you get to the kitchen. There's fresh bread, too, and though the loaves are still a little misshapen they taste just fine, and he's recruited Lysithea to help out with her wonderful baked sweets. Break will sneak away for further baking when he's in want of a bit of quiet, too, so expect further treats all night. Of particular note, in the wee hours when the house is getting properly chilly, he produces a wonderful warm drink: A big pot of (non-alcoholic) spiced berry juice, rich and red and warmed up with cloves and cinnamon sticks and slices of the last fresh oranges he was able to snatch up at the docks floating about inside. Victorians know how to do winter food, and why wait for the snow to really get going?
Movies: This is something new and exciting for the Pandoras. Bereft of any kind of proper screen, they've been taught to pin up white bedsheets against the wall in the parlor, and someone's omni has been recruited to project things onto it. Given the recent spooky season and some of the kids learning about Halloween, many of the movies of choice tonight are themed thus, such as Hocus Pocus and The Others. But someone having figured out how to search the omni has resulted in Beauty and the Beast, too, for something a little less creepy. This whole thing is super great. Who knew you could go to the theater without having to get dressed and leave the house?
Arts and Crafts: The other thing happening in the parlor is the coffee table being taken over by art supplies. The Alices like to make things, and have been amusing themselves lately putting together decorations for the house. We have paints, fancy papers with pretty patterns on, scissors, glue, glitter, the works. The sorts of art supplies you'd expect from a couple of girls who spent the bulk of their early lives locked, in some capacity, in a tower. It's something fun to play with while the movies are running. It is possible that White Alice may be working on painting swirly bits on an animal skull of some sort. Don't worry about it, it's fine.
Game Room: The house does have an actual dining room, nice and long and with high ceilings. Given that the kitchen with its huge wooden table is plenty big enough to eat in, they haven't bothered to use it as such. Instead, there's a table set up off to the side for board games and jigsaw puzzles -- and, more importantly, the bulk of the room is totally clear for things like indoor badminton and a ball made for kicking about. Possibly this is because Break spent all of September trying to convince himself it was silly to worry that the Alices had been eaten by something only to have them turn up in October and tell him of having been eaten by a giant fish, and he freaked out and decided he doesn't want the kids playing outside where the beasts are unless they have to. He is not telling.
Training: That said, weapons training simply needs to happen outside, and it's entirely possible that sooner or later it will come up that this slumber party is full of weapons enthusiasts and at least four of them, inexplicably, are scythe users. If that happens, there's a clear space outside in the backyard that Break has been using for his own drills, grass already trampled flat and a few nice sturdy posts that a blade has clearly been whacking away at. There's a nice stone wall around the property that will keep a great many of the unsavory creatures out, as some of the back used to be a garden which has long since grown wild, and Break has taken a hint from Gaze and set up several tall incense burners, too. If anyone is feeling in want of a midnight spar for some reason, this is where they can go -- but keep in mind that the wall won't keep the poisonous floating mushroom creatures out, and given that said garden has proven to be a mushroom oasis, the horrible little shuffling ones that induce hellscape hallucinations may be about, too.
What: A mingle log in which two houses alike in dignity have a slumber party for great CR kickstart justice
When: End of the first week in November, before the month becomes established as a horrifying shitshow
Where: Pandora House, which still needs a cooler name
Content Warnings: Nothing in the log prompts; mushroom monsters are present if we feel like being rude.
Somewhere around the end of September, Xerxes Break made a joke about slumber parties explicitly because he knew it would make Qrow Branwen's life difficult and that struck him as very funny. Now, he has to make good on this and throw a proper one. You'd think this would count as the joke backfiring on him but no, no, it most certainly does not -- Break and his pack of feral Victorian teenagers all thrive on a good party in their own way, and having come from an old-fashioned world they are already quite busy preparing to hunker down inside for the wintertime. Unused to being able to pass long, harsh nights with things like television and video games, they have many activities at hand to indulge in, and Break has already been hard at work stockpiling food like some sort of rabid hobbit.
The house itself is warm and pleasantly haunted and cozy in a way that only happens in homes that aren't accustomed to things like electric heat -- there are piles of quilts and blankets scattered around most rooms, free for the taking if someone wants to wrap themselves up, and all the communal rooms have fires going in their fireplaces. The heat that radiates from those spots is the kind that can thaw out frozen bones in a way that nothing else can. And the feel of the house itself is...well, despite the various struggles of its inhabitants, it just feels like the house is daring to hope that it can be happy. After all, it sat abandoned and empty for a long time, the more terrible of the ghosts that haunted it always inevitably chasing away anyone who dared try to settle down here. Those ghosts are gone as of last month, and the fact that every single person living here is now getting a second chance at simply being someone has already begun seeping into the walls themselves. Although it's still early enough in the month that the intense danger November brings with it hasn't yet become widely known, the house feels decidedly safer than the outside all the same, with a faint sense of benevolent sentience hitting as soon as one walks through the door.
That's what you get in a house full of darkbloods (and Oz).
Food: Probably it's no surprise to anyone who knows Break that the kitchen is where that sense of protectiveness is strongest; this is the room he's taken over as his personal territory. Feeling much better with last month's homesickness finally easing up, he spends the day of the party cooking enough to feed the whole crew -- he's been learning to cook mostly in restaurants, so this is no problem. Having been warned that beef in particular is about to become scarce for the season, he's gotten a hold of a good chunk of it and has put together a big cauldron of beef stew, with potatoes and leeks and many, many mushrooms and things to round it all out. This is one of exactly two proper meals that Break has mastered already, given that the basis of a stew is to chop up exactly the right things and then put them in a pot, and the house smells more and more exquisite the closer you get to the kitchen. There's fresh bread, too, and though the loaves are still a little misshapen they taste just fine, and he's recruited Lysithea to help out with her wonderful baked sweets. Break will sneak away for further baking when he's in want of a bit of quiet, too, so expect further treats all night. Of particular note, in the wee hours when the house is getting properly chilly, he produces a wonderful warm drink: A big pot of (non-alcoholic) spiced berry juice, rich and red and warmed up with cloves and cinnamon sticks and slices of the last fresh oranges he was able to snatch up at the docks floating about inside. Victorians know how to do winter food, and why wait for the snow to really get going?
Movies: This is something new and exciting for the Pandoras. Bereft of any kind of proper screen, they've been taught to pin up white bedsheets against the wall in the parlor, and someone's omni has been recruited to project things onto it. Given the recent spooky season and some of the kids learning about Halloween, many of the movies of choice tonight are themed thus, such as Hocus Pocus and The Others. But someone having figured out how to search the omni has resulted in Beauty and the Beast, too, for something a little less creepy. This whole thing is super great. Who knew you could go to the theater without having to get dressed and leave the house?
Arts and Crafts: The other thing happening in the parlor is the coffee table being taken over by art supplies. The Alices like to make things, and have been amusing themselves lately putting together decorations for the house. We have paints, fancy papers with pretty patterns on, scissors, glue, glitter, the works. The sorts of art supplies you'd expect from a couple of girls who spent the bulk of their early lives locked, in some capacity, in a tower. It's something fun to play with while the movies are running. It is possible that White Alice may be working on painting swirly bits on an animal skull of some sort. Don't worry about it, it's fine.
Game Room: The house does have an actual dining room, nice and long and with high ceilings. Given that the kitchen with its huge wooden table is plenty big enough to eat in, they haven't bothered to use it as such. Instead, there's a table set up off to the side for board games and jigsaw puzzles -- and, more importantly, the bulk of the room is totally clear for things like indoor badminton and a ball made for kicking about. Possibly this is because Break spent all of September trying to convince himself it was silly to worry that the Alices had been eaten by something only to have them turn up in October and tell him of having been eaten by a giant fish, and he freaked out and decided he doesn't want the kids playing outside where the beasts are unless they have to. He is not telling.
Training: That said, weapons training simply needs to happen outside, and it's entirely possible that sooner or later it will come up that this slumber party is full of weapons enthusiasts and at least four of them, inexplicably, are scythe users. If that happens, there's a clear space outside in the backyard that Break has been using for his own drills, grass already trampled flat and a few nice sturdy posts that a blade has clearly been whacking away at. There's a nice stone wall around the property that will keep a great many of the unsavory creatures out, as some of the back used to be a garden which has long since grown wild, and Break has taken a hint from Gaze and set up several tall incense burners, too. If anyone is feeling in want of a midnight spar for some reason, this is where they can go -- but keep in mind that the wall won't keep the poisonous floating mushroom creatures out, and given that said garden has proven to be a mushroom oasis, the horrible little shuffling ones that induce hellscape hallucinations may be about, too.
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Alice's style is not what you would call perfectionist, or even consistent. She doesn't like making a lot of the same thing in a row, that's boring, she might as well stare at the wall. So if she is making decorations, like for a party, her poison of choice is paper chains. She makes up her own patterns, and you can usually tell what she's going for. You make a design, you make sure it hits the edges, you fold something a bunch and you cut it up, then you have a lot of something instead of the one. Brilliance.
She is also intermittently drawing people, omens, and objects that catch her attention. You may interpret this as flattery. The omens are traced over in glitter, as is Lysithea's outfit, and all of the scythes. She's drawing a lot of scythes, questionably, from memory.
Training
For posterity, Alice isn't limiting herself to drawings - she's practicing the art of swinging about a practice scythe just about every day and will accept corrections from the more advanced weaponsfolk on her footwork and such with minimal whining. We can handwave any combat loggery we're here for the party.
She will be running afoul of a floating mushroom either on or offscreen during all of this, as a harbinger of things to come.
Movies
While the paralysis isn't lasting or harmful once it's been yanked off, Alice has nevertheless allowed herself to be bundled onto a sofa with a hot mug of juice to stop the assembled fools from dithering about it.
She has eaten her Omen's weight in beef stew by now, and is quite sleepy, leaning on either the arm of the sofa or whoever is sitting next to her. She manages to blink to wakefulness and pay attention to all of the singing bits and most of the exciting shouty bits of the beast movie and mutters a little bit from time to time. What if their dishes could dance around like that and serve and clean themselves, that would be handy, why's the Beast being such a weenie about looking like a big animal he looks cool, and so forth. Her opinion on the memetic Gaston is that his chin looks like a butt, but she does remember main character names, on the grounds that at least one song per each involves someone yelling the names over and over.
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[Oz is teasing about her dancing dishes comment. The teens have been forced to pull their weight for Gilbert, but not enough that he can't tease her.
granted, oz can't really talk, can he? he doesn't know how to sweep a broom.
He settles back on the couch with her, having gotten up to refill mugs and check on the kitchen. Though not about to take any blankets from those who might want them later; Oz tells himself that the warm company and fire are plenty enough.]
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I would if we had these dishes. Not if they came with the candlestick, though. I don't like him; he's annoying.
[ There is a certain clowny quality there that she trusts not. ]
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He is pretty proud of himself, isn't he? But he gets along so well with the clock. It's nice, right?
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...And I like the way all of them fuss over the Beast even though he's so much bigger, it's pretty funny.
[ The beast represents the ultimate wish fulfillment of being a big scary animal who can kick all the ass and having people who love you anyway. The clock represents - look, we know who the clock is. ]
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[... Oz wonders if he's the candlestick, though. hm.]
Everyone loves him a lot, huh? He's kind of grouchy and mean, but he loves them back~ What a lovely castle! Beauty sure has her hands full with how silly they all are.
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[ Around Gilbert, everyone spontaneously turns into Lumiere, that's just how it is. ]
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[If he says that the Beast reminds him of Alice, will he get decked?
Debating this now.]
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Well, that's because you're the most like Beauty, you read those books and you get in trouble all the time.
[ For heroine-like self sacrificing reasons, nonetheless. ]
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Eh~ That makes sense, since you're like the Beast, aren't you? Everyone likes you, no matter what you do!
[Well.
Oz will always like her. Alice is his precious mistress, after all.]
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And because I am very strong and in charge, and if anyone bothers my people I would fight them on top of a roof.
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We are very lucky to have a mistress like Alice! [There's a laugh in his voice to cover any embarrassing sincerity.] Though hopefully it won't come to that. Being on the roof sounds dangerous~.
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[ Despite that while viewing the relevant scene, Alice had felt a deep yearning to be clung to and cried over as proof of affection, she has already forgotten this in the heat of boasting about her prowess. ]
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Training
Unfortunately she doesn't have a chance to much past half squeal in excitement and yelp in fright as she sees the floating mushroom drift toward Alice. She makes an effort to dash onto the scene and tackle her out of the way. Except things don't go quite as planned and the mushroom ends up latching onto the both of them.
"Uh- ...This played out better in my head."
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"I don't have anything in my head and I still expected better! I can't move! What is this thing, some kind of big mushroom?!"
Fortunately for the ungainly heap in the yard, Alice's practice scythe at the bottom of the pile is safe and dull. It still isn't fun to be lying on.
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"If it makes you feel any better. It looks like I didn't have anything either-" She tries to shift or move a muscle but her body doesn't respond at all to her commands. "Uh- Yeah. They've been going around town lately. ...Apparently when they stick to you they paralyze you."
There's a long pause before she adds in.
"Which just happened to us."
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"Gross! What for, are they gonna eat us? Idiot, you don't even have a mouth!"
Alice tries to tauntingly kick it, and cannot. This further vexes her.
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"I don't know! Either way it's super rude! Ugh- Should we call Uncle Qrow or Break?" There's a really weary tone in her voice. She didn't want to get the adults involved but their attempts at escape weren't working too well.
"...And I mean I'm Ruby. Figure it's probably good to introduce myself before we possibly die by hungry mushroom."
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She does not bother mentioning that there's another Alice about, it doesn't seem as important as the mushroom thing.
"I don't really wanna to ask the clown. We're not bleeding or on fire or anything, so he'll be all clowny and make stupid faces about it... Qrow's not a stupid face kind of uncle, is he? He's been well behaved so far, but you never know."
In the offscreen lessons, presumably nobody is inclined to goof off while swinging around weaponry, even Alice. For all she knows this is another Uncle Oscar situation??
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"Jeez- Now that you mention he would do something like that wouldn't he?" She pauses and considers her Uncle attitude. "He might get a little snarky about it but not in a bad away. ...But knowing his luck he could just as easily end up stuck here with us instead of getting us out."
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It all makes perfect sense now.
"...Well, I don't want three of us to get stuck, who else did you bring? I've got three other people - two, because Yelliot's right out. He'd pitch a huge fit and yell."
Hence the nickname. Come, let us swap the hot goss about our friends.
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She considers her options briefly before she speaks up.
"Uh Well Ange and Oscar are both super reliable- But I think they're bound to get super fretful about the whole thing. Something about me getting into dangerous situations when I shouldn't." ...She pauses and thinks briefly on it.
"We're probably least likely to get any trouble out of Oscar though. He wouldn't squeal."
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This grumbling goes on in the background while Ruby does her pondering, painting a picture of a capering idiot going around with a doll. If Qrow is really that sensitive, she'll have to bully Hatter into making sure he doesn't scare him off.
"...I used to know an Oscar, he was also someone who could put up with a lot of nonsense. Yours looks pretty squishy, but let's get him over here. Oz is mostly reliable, but you're a girl - sometimes he'll ditch me and run off with girls, and I don't like that one bit! Raspy! Go find that creampuff looking guy!"
The Omen appears, looking as judgmental as a small creature that is mostly nervous rabbit possibly can. It taps its long hind paw and hops off across the lawn.
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"Wow. He definitely sounds like a huge pain in the butt- how did he even fit under furniture with all those gangly limbs?" Look she's asking the real questions here.
She watches as Raspy dashes off to find them help. "Oscar is super squishy- like one of the squishiest people I know. But you don't have to worry about Oz running off with me- Ange is my girlfriend and I'd give myself a knuckle sandwich before doing something like that to her."
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"A knuckle sandwich doesn't sound too bad - chewy, maybe. I don't get all that girlfriend stuff," Nevertheless it is reassuring, somehow, probably because Ruby here sounds confident that it is reassuring. "Do girlfriends stop you from running off and going on dangerous adventures? Should I get Oz a girlfriend?"
...She has been trying to be a little more self aware and think things through. As such, she has to admit that she does run off on her own and get into trouble a lot.
"Should I get a girlfriend?"
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