sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] Saints & Sinners Masquerade

[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

"That's what it seems like." It felt more like a forced Halloween party but Wanda wasn't going to fight over semantics.

She didn't see the point in all this. It didn't test them in the usual sense though it did add an air of uneasiness to the gathering that hadn't been there before. "It's nice... in a way." Wanda had been here too long and little things like their clothes changing randomly didn't phase her anymore.

"You don't like it?"

"In a way?" Hawke glances at her curiously, not really arguing yet, more intrigued. Yes, it could be much worse than this, she's read some of the notes in the inn although she pretends she hasn't.

"No, no, this isn't ... it's not what I'm comfortable in. Not to mention that it's adding insult to injury that I don't have my real armor." It's important to her. She's exposed in this place. "This is an interesting little bit of magic. I've seen transformative magic before, but not quite like this. It's seamless. I wonder if just a flexing of muscles, a show off."

"I don't think our kidnappers have to show off." Not after the mystery of their arrival. "But I do think that they are testing us, both physically and mentally. It's all different and they're letting us know that even small frivolous things are out of our control."

Wanda curled her lips and looked down at her drink.

"I don't know. I know of only one person who's changed their clothes magically and they're a bit of show off." She's totally talking about Thor.

"Well they're just bastards, aren't they?" Hawke sighs and lifts her hands in a shrug. "Not that in the end I can really hold too much against them. I'm dead, so this is the only time I have left." She'll deal with ridiculous clothes and the like if it means she gets to breathe a little longer. Eventually she knows it's likely she'll go back, and then she'll hopefully be with the rest of her family. It isn't the worst option, and she doesn't fear death. But she's also not going to say no to the gift of a little more time.

Plus this place is certainly far from boring, and Hawke loves interesting things.

She laughs. "Oh? What's he or she like?"

Wanda tried not to smile but it didn't work. "He is a bit of a show off. His name is Thor and he goes by the God of Thunder. He swings around a large hammer and I think he enjoys the sound of his own voice." She didn't spend a lot of time working with Thor in the Avengers but she'd met him months ago in the village and has seen more than a few accounts of him to know him well.

Her smile tilted to a frown when she mentioned death. It didn't seem to upset Hawke so Wanda wasn't going to make a big deal of it but she wondered what that felt like.

Clint had all but sad that she wasn't going to make it at the end of the next big fight though Wanda had never asked for the details. She didn't really want to know what happened in her future.

"A god with a giant hammer." The jokes just start to roll into her head and she's not sure where to start. Hawke laughs. "Is he an actual god or is he just like most men and believes he's a god?" She doesn't know how one would even tell the difference between a god and a fake god. Probably power levels. A very powerful mage could possibly masquerade as one to people who didn't know better. Hawke really isn't certain, she herself stays far away from all religion related things back home.

"My best friend is an absolute show off and he loves the sound of his own voice. I am fairly certain given the chance he'd talk our enemies to death." Varric's words did hold power. And people loved his books. But Hawke knows he's lying a good percentage of the time and it goes right over their heads. She misses him more than she could frame into words.

Wanda's mouth curved into an amused smile. "Both, I think. God is a matter of opinion and view." It wasn't god with a capital G but when the Asgardian's first arrived on Earth, they were mistaken for God's merely because they held the powers of the elements. Magic that the Asgardian's called science. Wanda might have considered him god-like if she hadn't had the power of the mind stone infused into her cells. She understood the universe on a basic level and knew that everything was perceived depending on situation, view and experiences. Words like god are then shaped by those experiences.

"I have never found that to work." Her smile widened though her expression grew a little sadder as well. "My brother was like that too. He had the speed to talk the ear off our enemies." She missed him and while she didn't mean to talk in past tense, Wanda couldn't shake the habit. He was gone and hoping otherwise was a false hope, even here, in this world where time and universes didn't seem to matter.

"I'd like to see that work, talking an enemy to death, just once."

"Yes. Who is to say what is a god? A powerful creature far beyond us? A holy figure? It could go any way. I hope I meet this Thor at some point." Hawke might tease him relentlessly once she gets to know him. A god? Who says! Not one of her gods, and it was likely best. If this woman could be friends with him, he must not be that full of himself. Probably not a god if that was the case.

"It hasn't worked yet he'd say." Hawke picked up on the past tense and smiled with a slightly sad cast. Sympathetic for certain. "My brother talked a lot, but none of it was smooth. It was shitetalk." It has been a long time since Carver died before her eyes. He was so bloody young, that's the thing. One day she will have lived more years without him than with him and it was a depressing thought. She does remember him with love and teasing, like this. He was Bethany's twin, so their bond was broken in devastation. "My siblings were twins. The madness they'd get into ... especially at me!"

Wanda laughed and the sound surprised her. It was a sweet but rough laugh of someone who really didn't spend a lot of time laughing. "Yet is an important indicator." It reminded her of something that her brother would have said. "My brother was a smooth talker."

She paused.

"And he talked a lot." Though his speed had been a defining trait of his before Hydra's experiments. "My brother and I are twins." She tried not to talk in past tense but it was difficult. Peitro had been dead for years and Wanda had finally gotten used to him not being around.

"I can imagine the trouble." By imagining what Peitro used to do...

A pain twisted through Wanda's chest but she ignored it. She was tired of thinking about those she lost and wanted to think about the happy pieces of her life; even if it was only for the night.

Hawke laughed with her and then listened to what she was saying about her brother. It was painful, thinking of people who were lost, but also in her experience there were moments of fond memories that were very real. "Yeah, they were real trouble. Carver would convince Bethany to mess with me. She has magic." She rolled her eyes. "All types of wicked things. Snow in my bed, fire on my bum, wind burst so something smacked me in the head." Typical little sibling antics, as far as she was concerned, but she did always give them a hard time for it. As deserved!

"He died years ago. Sometimes it feels like yesterday, sometimes a lifetime ago." As the years went on and her concerns multiplied, Hawke had reasons to get distracted from such a huge loss. And it did hurt, to think of him now. "I doubt the type of stories he'd want me telling about him are what a little prick he could be." Hawke grinned and shook her head. "But he was brave and bold and stupidly loyal too."

She shrugged. "Sorry to sound like a downer, but I don't know, remembering him doesn't actually get me very down, so there's that. But I know it's weird, talking about the dead so freely."

It was hard to talk about her brother but it was also nice. She never wanted to forget him, even if it was a constant reminder that she was alone. "Peitro was like that too." Her mouth pulled into a wistful smile. "He was brave, bold, cocky and stupid. He would have done anything for me, give me anything." He was the other half of her and he was gone.

Wanda cleared her throat and took a sip of her drink. "Excuse me. He died a few years ago, saving a boy. He was a hero but I miss him." She never stopped missing him. "I keep hoping that it'll show up here." But she knew that he wouldn't.

She shook her head. "It's fine. It's nice to be able to talk about him again. I don't often have the chance too." They were very conflicting emotions.

Hawke may have intended this. If Wanda wanted to back off the subject she would, but she spent years struggling to say anything about Carver. Eventually the dam broke when she realized Bethany needed to talk about him, and as a family they traded stories and laughed and cried. She knew that kind of loss was easy to bottle up, and if Wanda wanted to tip toe into a conversation, long or short, about it, Hawke understood it.

"I'm sorry, love. It's closing in on a decade. It still hurts, but it does get easier to remember the good, at least." Hawke had a particular feeling of failure and heart break over Carver. Her mother blamed her for it, for not being fast enough, and it had been a brutal end. "When he died, we pointed out he died saving us, but my mother said she didn't want a hero, she wanted her son." And Hawke understood that to her very core. It was very noble, dying that way, and Hawke did it herself. But grief could be selfish too, for good reason.

"Would you like to talk more about him? I don't mind listening."

Wanda didn't expect it to ever stop hurting. A piece of her died with her brother and as his twin, she'd felt it. It wasn't just a metaphorical connection. They'd been linked and that link had snapped with a staggering force.

"I don't mind." Either way, she could ever forget her brother. "It's getting easier to remember that he's gone and I'm not alone." Wanda had family, though none of them were exactly related to her.

"I just miss him." Which was becoming a more comfortable and familiar feeling each day.

"I almost wish Bethany was here, if only to have someone to talk to about losing a twin. We haven't really run into another one, and she has never really spoken of it to me." It's very probable that she spoke to their mother, but Hawke herself was not always the easiest person to talk to about emotional things. At the moment she's tapping into her more empathic side, but when it came to here own grief, her own pain, she couldn't handle it well on the level of depth her sister needed.

"You're not alone, most certainly, surrounded by people here. Do you have friends here?" She had a feeling Wanda did. She seemed mostly comfortable with the situation and not as alarmed as Hawke had been.

"It's fine." Her expression remained soft and warm though no less pained than it had been. "I don't need to talk about it. I've accepted it, even if I don't like it, and I don't ever want to forget my brother." She looked out over the party and her smile widened. "I have a new family here and I'd rather focus on protecting them." Her two son's from another universe and all of the wonderful people she'd met during the last year and a half.

"I've been here for almost two years. I had disappeared for a few months but I know many of the people here." She'd lost people too but Wanda didn't want to focus on that. She was currently more broken up by Clint's disappearance than she was by her brother's death.

"That's why I came to this. To make sure that everyone was okay. It looks like this party is harmless." Which was a good thing. They needed something light and pleasant in an otherwise dark time. "I should be heading back home. I have a dog to fed but I'd like to speak again."

Hawke nods in understanding and thinks it's a very healthy way of handling the situation. Healthy responses to thing are not her forte. "Any time, darling, you take care of that pup and yourself."

[ooc: and wrap! they'll have to talk again :) ]

[ooc: yes totally! this thread was fun :3]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[MINGLE] Saints & Sinners Masquerade

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject