i saw lon cheney walking with the queen

[hellzone]

Who: open to all!
What: The Aqours Spooky Get Yohane Magical Powers Halloween Extravaganza...which is a super extra way of saying a Halloween party. It's a Halloween party, y'all.
When: early October
Where: a local restaurant in Olympia
Warning(s): none!

The Halloween party is in the back room of a local, family style restaurant. What used to be a banquet hall is decorated with fake cobwebs, crepe paper, and garlands of pumpkins, ghosts, and cats. A lot of the decorations are hand-made, courtesy of Yoshiko and You. There's an open space in the middle for dancing and mingling, some food tables along one side of the room, and some games and entertainment on the other side. There's a table with various hats, animal ears, and crowns for people who didn't bring a costume. Most of them are made out of cardboard. There's a very beat-up boombox in the corner, obviously borrowed from somebody, playing the El Nysa version of hokey Halloween songs like "The Monster Mash" and "Flying Purple People Eater."

The food is fairly standard Halloween fair. There's a large bowl full of candy, as well as some pumpkin flavored breads and muffins. There's a large punch bowl of something that's green, but is really your bog-standard lime sherbet/lemon-lime soda combination. The oddest thing on the table is some jet black takoyaki, labeled "Tears of a Fallen Angel." The label does not tell you that these things are spicy as hell and flavored solely with Tabasco. There's enough space on the table to fit more food, should your character decide to contribute something that isn't 'way too much sugar' or 'something that will melt your tongue off.'

The Halloween games are simple enough. There's a 'pin the tail on the donkey' though you're pinning a broomstick to a witch. There's a large tub for bobbing for apples. There's also a table dedicated to touch and feel mystery boxes: you reach in blindly to touch what's inside. The labels say things like 'eyeballs' (they're really peeled grapes), 'worms' (they're really cold, cooked spaghetti), and 'hearts' (it's a peeled tomato). The party's going past the closing time of the restaurant, so enjoy some slightly spooky nonsense!

( ooc: feel free to make a starter and tag around! Even if your character didn't reply to Yoshiko's post, it's possible that they heard about the party from somewhere else or just came in from the street: Yoshiko isn't turning away anybody. )

Comments

i mean ren can also appreciate scaring the shit out of people, so. that's probably why

[thedarkbond]

Can you do that too...? [Ren doesn't even sound remotely perturbed by the implication, but he can at least gather from context that it's probably not very convenient even on the off chance it's possible, and he waves a hand.]

I would have thought you could still feel it going down, but still, having your head off is no excuse to go hungry anyway. [He winks and starts to wander off.] I'll be back in a minute.

[And with that he drifts over to the food table, picking up a plate and starting to take things from here and there. By the time he comes back, it's an eclectic selection, and...honestly, rather a lot of it is just various vaguely ghost-shaped foods with edible eyes of some form on them to complete the ghost look, like chocolate-dipped fruits and half sausages.]

[kikoku]

I'm not going to do it, but I could.
[He'll just stand here and wait. Halfway through he realizes he could have just gotten the food himself and used it as an excuse to escape further conversation. Oh well. When Ren returns, Law takes a moment to inspect the food before looking back up at the other man.]

... You seem to have some sort of theme here.
[He doesn't look especially impressed, but his expression seems like it's vaguely inscrutable most of the time anyway.]

[thedarkbond]

[Ren is completely unperturbed by the unimpressed look - if anything, it just makes his smile wider.] Oh? Well, it is Halloween, it's no fun if you don't make the food look spooky too, right?

[This isn't the food Ren actually made look somewhat creepy, but he didn't figure the glass shard cupcakes would be particularly convenient to eat for someone holding their head under one arm.]

Anyway, it means you can choose something you like, right? It's not like I got just sweet things or just savoury...

[kikoku]

I wouldn't know, this is my first time experiencing Halloween.
[He is going to eat though, not being very discriminating unless there's anything breadlike on the plate, which he will not eat.]

Frankly I'm surprised that so many seemed familiar with it, despite coming from different worlds.

[thedarkbond]

[The closest to anything breadlike on the plate is a cupcake with red icing and small devil horns, and the rest of it is a pretty eclectic mix. It all tastes like it's been well-made, though.

Ren tilts his head slightly at the mention of it being his first celebration of Halloween, though he does have somewhat of a point about the different worlds thing. With the hand not holding the plate, Ren taps his chin thoughtfully.]

I think a lot of people might have come from different versions of Earth, so that might be why...though even on Earth, certain countries celebrated it more than others. Still, it's the kind of holiday that doesn't need much explaining, right? Good food and scaring people~

[kikoku]

I suppose not. It's one I can understand the appeal of.
[Obviously. He's clearly not a party person, yet he's still come to this one because it's Halloween. He's quiet for a moment (while eating) as he processes this new information. He's not heard of a planet called Earth, and thinks it's weird to name a planet effectively dirt, but maybe it's more land than water, then?]

I'm not familiar with that planet, myself, though it must be a lot easier to get from one country to another there if Halloween has spread amongst most of them.
[It's hard to make cultural diffusion happen when a large chunk of your population lives amidst and/or separated by ocean currents that defy the laws of nature.]

[thedarkbond]

See? It's easy for everyone to join in. [Ren did always figure Halloween was one of the easier holidays to explain the appeal of to grumpy people, and this guy seems kind of like he fits that description, so he'll take this as some kind of confirmation.

Law isn't the first person he's met who comes from a planet rather different from his own, though, and Ren gives a faint hum of agreement, tapping his chin thoughtfully with his free hand.]

The countries there were still pretty far away from each other, but we had things called planes that we could use to fly between them really quickly. How did they usually do it where you come from...?

[He generally assumes boat just because that seems to be the logical conclusion for places where it's hard to get from one country to another, but maybe it's something else entirely.]

[kikoku]

[Ren is correct. Law is a hugely grumpy goth. That's why he's always got this dumb hat on the keep his eyes shadowed.]

People travel by boat; Big Blue is mostly islands. From my experience, cultures do tend to spread between islands in the four seas fairly easily, but the currents in the Grand Line make leisure travel difficult and so the countries there are far more self contained.
[He pauses, and then makes a face as if he'd been tricked into explaining so much about his home world.]

[thedarkbond]

[That face is a little bit funny, but Ren really is interested in hearing about other worlds, so he refrains from teasing Law about it (for now) in favour of trying to picture what that world must be like.]

Oh, so they're the kind of currents that might wreck a boat really easily...? I guess they used to have that problem sometimes in my world too, but it's harder to break metal boats, and that's mostly what gets used now.

[Of course, it's also possible that they do use metal boats and the currents are some kind of supernaturally powerful, but Ren's actually going with the more sensible conclusion for once.]

How many countries are there in the Grand Line, then...? [He'd think it would be difficult maintaining an economy on a self-contained island in a dangerous sea, so he's a little curious how many places have managed it.]

[kikoku]

Some of them are dangerous in that way, sure. Some of them are just very unpredictable and it's easy to get lost, and some of them might wind you up in the Calm Belt which is never a good place to be.
[With that name, you wouldn't think it'd be bad, but hey.]

For the record, my ship was mostly made out of metal. It was a submarine.
[So don't go thinking your metal boat technology is so unique, Ren!!!]

As far as the number of countries, I've no idea. No one's ever mapped the entirety of the Grand Line. I believe the world government contains about 170 allied countries, but that includes ones from the others seas, not just the Grand Line.

[thedarkbond]

Hmm, with a name like that, it makes you wonder... [Ren knows that dangerous things often have innocuous names, but it also just makes him more curious as to what the actual danger of the place is. Woes of being as interested in the dangerous and interesting as he is.

Ren looks interested at the mention of his ship being a submarine, though.] Oh, that sounds like it would've been cool...and that's more countries than I was expecting. Not quite as many as Earth, but it's pretty close. Though with that many, I'm also a little surprised nobody's found a better way than water travel to get from place to place...

[If they have submarines, they're obviously not as far back technology-wise as some other worlds he's heard talked about here, so he feels it's a fair thing to raise.]