Birthday Party

[peripheries]

Who: Paul Atreides and all his CR
What: Throwing everyone’s favorite Duke a surprise birthday party
When: Forwarded dated to April 1st
Where: Bone House in Gaze

Content Warnings: Drinking, underage drinking, drugs (both fictional and not), drawings of space worms, skeletons, will add further warnings if necessary



When you arrive at the house in Gaze, (affectionately known as Bone House), a skeleton will open the door and offer to take your coat if you have one. No need to take your shoes off or anything!

The large house has been decorated with black streamers and confetti. In the entryway and hung on the railing to the second floor that overlooks the entrance to the great room are large banners that say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL” (though one looks like it used to say “Jaune” but was just painted over? Whatever).

In the Living Room, there is a large board and various colored markers for people to write messages to the birthday boy. There is also a table full of bottled water and various couches, chairs, and beanbags to collapse into if the party gets to be too much and one needs a quiet place to rest or a place to chill if you’ve imbibed too much… well, whatever you had.

It is also where all the food and drinks are.

There’s an extremely large charcuterie board with the usual meats, cheeses, and olives as well as an extremely eccentric collection of snacks ranging from individual sized Cheez-it bags, to humungous bags of Doritos and salty chips, as well as nearly every kind of Oreo one can imagine.

There are also various cakes, all angel food. Some are misshapen, some have an attempt at being frosted with whipped cream and fruit, one even says “Happy Birthday Ka-” before that was hastily covered with a bunch of strawberries jammed really close together.

At the island, a skeleton is playing bartender. Surprisingly, it can seem to take and understand individual orders, but there’s always a constant flow of tequila shots being made and sent out to the great hall to be served by another skeleton.

And, no, of course it’s not going to check your age to see if you’re legal. It’s a skeleton. Why would it care?

The Great Hall is the center of activity and where everyone is encouraged to mingle and have fun. There is a skeleton on the grand piano in the corner gleefully playing piano covers of the hits from the Shrek Soundtrack with the occasional cover of “DaRude’s Sandstorm” when it has another one to help out.

In another corner, on huge piece of paper that spans nearly 6ft wide and 8ft tall is drawing of an Arrakis sandworm and it’s giant maw. The game is Pin the Tooth on the Sandworm and it’s… very easy… because the worm maw is most of the board. Even if the skeleton spins you as you’re blindfolded, it’s pretty hard to lose. If you manage to do it, which is likely, the skeleton running the game will award you a tequila shot! If you lose, the skeletons will award you a tequila shot (but it’s rail).

(It’s a drinking game, isn’t the point to drink?)

There’s also a table that has many candelabras on it, numbering up to seventeen. They’re still lit and burning even though there is a sign that says “make a wish!” even though it almost looks like a shrine for the dead.

…It’s maybe clear that the concept of “birthday candles” was greatly misunderstood.

There is also a skeleton dealing out small doses of “Spice”, a psychoactive drug straight outta the Duneverse. However, you must check in with this Skeleton to get a dose. There will be no “permanently melting your brain with ancestral memories” at this party!

Teacher’s/God’s/Jod’s/The Emperor Undying’s study, adjacent to the main hall, is closed and locked. Though, the lock is fairly easy to break if someone really wanted to get in. There’s not even skeletons guarding.

That said, many things are warded with eerie runes of blood and bone.

So, fuck around and find out.

The upstairs is generally off limits. Party goers can climb up the stairs, and it’s encouraged if they want to look over the Great Room from above, but all of the bedrooms are carefully guarded by more skeletons who will SCREAM VERY LOUDLY if you try to enter and will become hostile if done by force.

Of course, this won’t happen if you are with someone who lives in the house.

Enjoy the party! Mingle away!

((ooc: if you have any questions or anything, please hit me up at worldtype)) or via PM.))

Birthday Board | At the Party | The Morning After | IC Party Games | Spice Dealer

Comments

[terriblepurpose]

Paul raises his hand towards what appears to be a light, turns it this way and that in his field of vision.

"Anything. All of it." He shrugs, as if that's somehow coherent, useful communication.

[ezra_of_lothal]

He reaches, very gently, through the Force towards Paul, who feels rather extra glowy himself, right now.

"Yeah, Paul," he says, with a soft laugh. "I don't know exactly how it feels to you, but 'anything and all of it' is pretty much how it feels when I stretch out into the Force, or let it in."

[terriblepurpose]

"Because it's life," Paul says, sagely, relinquishing his hand to the powers of gravity and letting it fall across his chest. "The connections between it."

He remembers that. He also remembers, off-handedly: "It's not magic."

Someone had been very specific about that. He should remember who.

[ezra_of_lothal]

"That's all correct." He leans in a little and whispers conspiratorially, "But honestly, I think magic is at least sometimes a different way to tap into it."

[terriblepurpose]

"That's what I thought." Paul lifts his head just enough to nod in vindication, which turns out to make things very interestingly disorienting in a way that requires lowering his head to appreciate.

"The distinctions you all make between things seem so - arbitrary."

[ezra_of_lothal]

"People just stuck in...word-" Even with this title bit of alcohol in him, his magicked up memories of vocabulary from high school feel extra slippery. "Earth word. Starts with a P. Um. Classification system?" he tries.

[terriblepurpose]

"Paradigms?" Paul offers up, slipping further down the couch until his heels manage to form a brake. He took off his shoes, at some point.

[ezra_of_lothal]

"That's the one," Ezra confirms, with a stab of a gloved finger in Paul's direction.

"Not that I want to just toss away what I've learned as a Jedi. But I think it't neat, all the differences and overlaps."

[terriblepurpose]

"The...synergies." Paul agrees, with a solemn nod.

"So - you'd know. Does the Force feel different than magic?"

[ezra_of_lothal]

"Not really, to me," Ezra admits. "But that may be the limitation of my senses. Maybe I'm just feeling the shifts in energy, but I'm missing whole aspects of how."

After a beat, he adds, more hesitantly. "Like - the internal stuff you were doing. In the cave. Can I ask what you call that?"

[terriblepurpose]

"Or maybe they're continuous," Paul says, encouragingly. He doesn't let his thoughts linger on the communion with Leviathan long, but he does remember the brush of Ezra's mind against it, subtle and inquisitive.

"And that's prana-bindu training. Breath-nerve control." He raises his eyebrows, thoughtfully, and holds out his bare hand palm up. "Do you want to feel it again?"

[ezra_of_lothal]

Ezra mouths 'prana-bindu' considering the being that had called itself the Bendu, but the translation Paul offers doesn't seem to relate to anything that he immediately connects to the Bendu. So...probably coincidence.

"Sure," he replies, agreeably, and pulls off a glove and drop the bare into Paul's.

[terriblepurpose]

The amount of contact Paul has made with people outside of his household tonight exceeds any night - or day - that he can remember. It's still an almost illicit jolt, and he wonders how much of that Ezra can sense in the flickering moment before it passes.

Paul lets his head fall back against the couch. He folds his other hand over his belly and slows his breathing, his eyes half-lidded as he looks at the ceiling unseeingly and focuses his attention on the singular task of slowing, breath by breath, the majority of functions in his body.

[ezra_of_lothal]

Ezra closes his eyes, and reaches just a little in the Force, in what the healers at the temple called a 'scan'.

"It's certainly a kind of manipulation of your life energy. There's a reason one of the fundamentals of Jedi training for any species with anything like lungs is mediation focused on the breath."

[terriblepurpose]

"It's the one thing you always have with you," Paul says, dreamily, from the bottom of the sensation of being suspended in a sunlit pool. "Or you're in no position to meditate."

He doesn't think he needs to specify the reasons a person might not have access to their breath for focus are generally not happy ones. No one needs to think about that, not here.

"What do the ones without lungs focus on?"

[ezra_of_lothal]

"Pulse, or whatever the equivalent is, in a circulatory system, is another option. And then there's just...the flow of the Force itself. But something that's more obviously part of you is easier."

[terriblepurpose]

"Does the Force help you all understand each other? The...commonality of it," Paul asks, slipping his hand from Ezra's with a gentle sigh.

He begins to reverse the process, a gradual rise out of the depths of calm.