sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] Saints & Sinners Masquerade

WHERE: Corn field next to the inn
WHEN: 31 October, all day and night
OPEN TO: ALL - MINGLE
WARNINGS: Please warn as appropriate in your subject lines
NOTES: Please make sure you have read and understand the event details! If you have questions, drop them here. RECOMMENDED BUT NOT REQUIRED: Put your SCRUBS COLOR in your OTA subject line for folks doing bingo. Time your OTA for the harvest feast, the masquerade, or both. Costume matches and details for folks who did not get matched are here.

This morning, our intrepid villagers awoke to a surprise of the nicer kind: A bundle of clothing left at the foot of their bed, tied with a bow. There is also a note: Put on your new outfit and join the festivities in the corn field next to the inn.

You may be thinking, what corn field next to the inn? The one that sprung up fully-mature overnight, of course.

In the middle of the field, villagers will find an autumn feast: Tables piled with harvest time food and drink, warm and rustic decorations, the day's sunshine fending off any chill in the air.

Tuck in and enjoy, villagers, but take note: Things often look different in the dark, and you might be one of them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Oh—" Karen pauses, twisting until she can spy the strand of silk, and then pulls her skirt around so that she can pluck it off and flick it away. It flutters to rest among the trampled stalks at their feet, and she pulls in a breath as she lets her dress fall back into place with a soft rustle of fabric.

"Thanks. I'm actually surprised there wasn't more, this outfit wasn't exactly made for walking through corn."

"I- think there's some in your hair, actually," he says, squinting a little despite the glasses thanks to low light.

"I've seen my sisters in stranger and far more impractical things." The joys of having a ballroom dancer and a cosplayer in the family. "The boots are a great decision." Corn snakes aren't venomous, but they still have fangs capable of biting feet that get too close.

"Alex Price, by the way. Pretty new, but really only this awkward because it's a party." The extra-dimensional stuff is really more his element, to be honest. And the corn snakes.

Instinctive fingers reach toward her head and then fall back to Karen's sides again with a little resigned slip of one hand. "You know, I'm not going to bother. Maybe it'll just blend in." Count that as an unexpected benefit of being blonde.

"Karen Page," she offers, and holds out a hand, only to softly laugh after. "I can never decide what feels more weird, here: Shaking or not shaking."

Alex takes her hand and shakes it with a polite level of firmness. "Alex Price. I spent enough time in academia to be used to formal greetings," he tells her. "But you're kind of right, they're- well, formal. Though maybe in that dress, it's-"

His gaze suddenly goes right over her shoulder, to movement among the corn stalks. "Uh. Hold on one second. And you might want to stand back. But this is gonna be really cool."

He's a field biologist at an outdoor party. This moment right here was an inevitability, and we all know it.

He disappears for a second back the way Karen came through the stalks, then off, rustling the corn as little as possible. When he comes back, he is quite confidently holding what looks like a snake... with leathery bat wings. "This is amazing. She must have come down looking for rodents. Though I bet they eat a lot of birds and insects, too," he says, with a sort of boyish excitement hidden under layers of dry professionalism. "You're a brave girl, getting this close to this many humans." Yeah, that part was addressed to the snake.

You know that person who always goes and makes friends with the dogs at parties? Meet the lizard version. Or mildly venomous snake version.

Any tentative belief that they two might actually share the concept of what is and isn't cool evaporates the moment Alex ducks back out of the corn. He has silk in his own hair now, although that hardly seems to matter in the moment, given he's holding something that looks like it flew right up out of Satan's lair.

Karen startles — How could she not? — but manages to resist the urge to begin stepping backwards. He has a handle on it, she can see that now, and there's an easy competence in his demeanor that speaks to experience — Maybe not with this particular specimen, but others like it.

So maybe not cool, precisely, but interesting? She can allow interesting. And better in Alex's hands than lurking in the corn, waiting to flap out at someone like herself.

"That's, um," Karen begins, with a quick cant of her head. "This is something you do a lot, I take it."

"Oh, yeah, don't worry, I'm a herpetoligst," he assures her. "And I've been doing wildlife rescue since I was a kid- wow, I think this guy's actually mammalian." He really can't help but keep getting distracted by the snake like bat in his hand. "He's definitely warm-blooded. Which is pretty fascinating since they are mildly venomous, or so I've read in the town hall records."

There is some unspoken apology in his posture, keeping the animal a bit closer to his own body, keeping its wings tucked in safely so it doesn't hurt itself struggling against him.

There are a lot of town records, particularly since Mark moved copies of everything to a public place where everyone can add to them, and Karen is one of the people who keeps them in order. Even now, she's obsessed with looking for patterns in the chaos where she might find them, but her focus has almost entirely been on the people in the village, not the wildlife they encounter. Having had her own dubious run-ins with native species, she realizes now she should have known better.

"So when you say venom, what are we talking about?" she asks, because that thing had literally been in the corn she had just been walking through.

Edited 2018-11-29 06:40 (UTC)

"Temporary blindness- though apparently there's some kind of echolocation side effect? I can't say I've experienced it myself, but now that I've caught one, I can hopefully study it a bit more up-close. I'd like to figure out if these guys and the crocodile-dogs are true mammals, or something more like synapsids. The fact that the snakebats are venomous is pretty fascinating, not really a trait you find in many mammals. Not unheard of, but definitely rare."

He's cradling the little creature easily enough that it seems calm in his hands, while also keeping exposed skin as far from the business end of it as he can.

"Wait— Echolocation?" Karen repeats, her eyebrows lifting. "Like seeing in the dark."

She's never really talked to Matt about how his powers worked, although she knows he could hear a pin drop five blocks away. If it was something like echolocation — Or hell, even if it wasn't — this could help him. It could be huge.

"How would a person like me get their hands on whatever it is that causes the blindness-echolocation combo from that guy there? The venom or whatever."

"Well, assuming it's produced in their fangs, I should be able to milk them for venom- but venomous mammals are pretty rare, I'll have to have a better look at him to be really sure." There's a lot of unspoken curiosity in his eyes- something very akin to a journalist's drive for a story.

"If I had a microscope and a halfway decent lab setup, I could tell you more, maybe even isolate what it is in the venom that causes it."

[MINGLE] Saints & Sinners Masquerade

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