cityofhex | WEEK 02

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WEEK 02

With Halloween past, the weekend of November 5-6 brings the beginnings of holiday trappings, as businesses begin to put up lights and other decorations for Monday. Residential areas, too, begin to pick up on the trend; throughout the whole month there will be a slow but steady increase in front lawn decorations.

Interestingly, though some are close parallels to the Christmas decorations that those from Earth will be familiar with, many aren't quite right. Locals, if asked, talk about something called the Day of Lights as much as they do Christmas or any other holiday; it's easy to find out that the amber-yellow and blue lights common in shops are for this holiday, and that it takes place on the last night of autumn, before the solstice. Snowflakes and candles are the most common motifs.

Changelings seem especially into the Day of Lights, and it is a near-assurance that they will be picking up blue candles for it as the month goes on.

Weather forecast: In a word: dreary. Small showers through Monday and Tuesday grow into full rain throughout Wednesday, continuing on Thursday and as a light misting on Friday. The weekend looks clear of rain, but is still chilly and cloudy. There is still no frost, though it's expected by the end of the month; gardeners are moving potted plants inside and putting cover over the more fragile ones for winter.

Moon phase: The moon reaches a first quarter on Monday the seventh, and continues to grow throughout the week.

Employment Opportunity: Those who are of adult age in the city can get work collecting holiday donations for charity, or, for those more inclined to physical labor, a park in the residential district is putting up lights for a holiday attraction. Additionally, plenty of shops are hiring for the upcoming retail season.

Free lunch?: Though there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to Thanksgiving in Hex, food banks are brimming with holiday spirit right now, and in addition to their usual offerings, many are handing out warm lunches to those in need, usually soup or hot sandwiches, sometimes pizza. While those at any given food bank will side-eye someone who tries to come in more than once, it's easily possible to make a circuit of them and get quite a bit of food, especially if you're familiar with the bus system.

Photo finish: Hajime gets a mild of small publicity for his candid photos of celebrations throughout the city, and on Friday will get a call about a potential contract for photos of decorations throughout December. He also gets sent an email about a campus-sponsored holiday fashion show at the end of the month - something Ryoji will hear about mostly via various rumours among the students.

Fueling the Art: At a coffee shop on the fringes of the campus, an Art Student can be found most every morning, sipping a latte and working on sketches. The Coffeeshop Manager, a man in his late thirties with a pair of small sunglasses perched on his cheeks in spite of the grey weather, occasionally offers her tips. Those with a keen eye will notice that walls made of gears are a common motif in the art that hangs around the shop.

The Ides of Fall: Out on the Island The Summer Queen is called before her Autumn peer and taken to task for her unauthorized gathering. She leaves his court fuming quietly to herself, and later in the week Makoto will receive a message - "Watch the falling leaves, but don't go chasing them." Several others of the Summer Court get the same message.

Sweet Loot: On the morning of the tenth, Kitty will find a locket and a note in with her stashed clothes. The locket is full of orange glitter that seems to stick to the inside, and the outside is worked with leaves. The note simply says TREAT in letters that are all distinctly different. When Kitty uses a finger to apply the glitter to something, it leaves glowing orange marks that only she can see, unless someone else sees her apply them or she intentionally shows them to someone.

Richter and Corwin, meanwhile, will each find a piece of candy hanging from their doorknobs the same morning, tied on with a ribbon that trails glitter on any surface it touches. The candy is wrapped in clear plastic, and has a strange flavor neither will be able to place.

Right on Schedule: The trains in Hex are going nowhere fast, but they do seem to have changed routes, frequently passing alongside an area of the wall that they used to avoid. New Arrivals, as well as Hajime and anyone else who can see Infrastructure, will note strangely runed plates of metal under this section of track - plates which seem to be directly attached to the Wall via cables. Every time a train passes over them, the plates spark with bright green, though nothing about the train itself seems to change.

Through the Grapevine: Though Network Zero is usually considered a Hunter organization, plenty of supernaturals also make use of it to keep their eyes out for threats - and their eyes on each other. One or two of Hajime's photos of the changeling gathering is making the rounds, with the odd horned skulls in the bonfire circled in Photoshop, but perhaps more relevantly, there's a couple photos of Malin from a distance that have fallen into the grasp of a current meme ("Is this bat ok?") and three photos of men doing construction work on a building in the Sixth that seems innocuous until it's pointed out that most of the men are completely identical.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A kid. Great. He has no idea how to act around kids, trying to pull up memories of Kanon when she was little, but that only brings pain. He has trouble remembering a lot of that stuff now... so clearly the best course of action is to just sit down where he's most shielded and eat his food silently.

He notices her shove the napkin around and snatches it out from under the statue, hunching his shoulders a bit. That's his napkin, not hers. For a long few moments he doesn't respond, before inhaling sharply. Right. He has to at least not... snap at the kid. "What?"

She makes a face when he snatches the napkin and reaches out over the table, trying to grab it back from him.

"- You shouldn't rub that on your face."

See, she wants to learn more about this weird magical glitter, but there is a difference between smearing it on everything and smearing it on sentient beings. And she has no idea if it will rub off if he tries to wipe his mouth with it or something.

"Looks fine to me." He stares at it, but can't seem to see... anything wrong with it. ... Fine. He grabs one from another table setting and swaps it out, just leaving the old one on the table.

He does eye her a little... she's kind of young to be out here on her own, and he doesn't see anything that would indicate a Mask. As long as she doesn't try to take his food, it's fine. He bites into his hot dog, trying to keep the noise of his eating down a bit so he doesn't get stares again.

The napkin, once snatched back, will be folded so the paw print is on the inside and placed under the statue.

She breathes a sigh of relief when he doesn't ask questions and wonders if she should continue with her plan, watching him. He's... well, he eats like her. Just that he seems to try to eat more neatly and she feels like he doesn't quite know how to.

"It helps when you close your mouth and take smaller bites." Eärendil pointed that out to her when he tried to prepare her for tagging along with him in high society circles. She knows manners. She just considers them pointless most of the time. Worst part of living as a metahuman, really. Or well, one of them.

"I -" He notices his tone coming out sharp, and tries to relax. It's just a kid. Someone who probably has no idea just how high strung he is, and flipping out at someone her age is probably going to get him kicked out of here. He takes a breath and tries again, tone a touch more calm. ... But not by much.

"I didn't ask for manners advice. I just want to get my food and leave." Away from the stares, away from people, somewhere that he can run and not feel judgement. Maybe back to the Court, where someone will be willing to spar with him. He needs the distraction, needs something to remind him to fight.

"They're pointless, but you looked like you're trying to not stand out and get disapproving looks."

She shrugs and places her hands on her knees, dropping her head and lower body until they hang between her shoulders, the sides of her head touching her shoulders. Watching him like others would from a position with their heads on their folded arms on the table, half pointed interest, half sulking.

"And to not stand out among people you need manners." That's the only point that they have, really. Like why you should wear trousers even in the middle of the summer when it's too hot for any clothing.

Edited 2016-11-18 17:35 (UTC)

"... Hmph." He hunches his shoulders a bit, not liking how he's being stared at. She can't see past his Mask, can she? ... No, that'd be impossible. "A lot of people will stare at people for a lot of reasons. I don't really care if they don't like me."

"That's like saying that you like getting into trouble just because someone is having a bad day, is bored or wants to brag to his friends about being able to bully others."

She shrugs, though, and grabs the next hot dog, taking a bite before dropping her hands under the table to get some more glitter on her fingertip to draw with.

"... Trouble finds me anyway." He's been told he looks like that sort of person before. And besides, he seems to have had not great luck other than running into the Freehold. Maybe he used all of his up in Arcadia and the Hedge.

But it doesn't matter. He'll survive. He has to. There's no other options other than death or the one option he know he can't take.

"Then you should work on hiding better." Trouble finding you generally isn't good. You finding trouble, fine, but if it finds you she's observed one time too often that the one being found is insufficiently prepared. Or couldn't be prepared enough. Which, really, is fine if you are the trouble but not so much if you aren't.

She'll pull her hands back up after shutting the locket and pocketing it again, resting her left in her lap, and reach out for the figure of the saint that is currently facing away from Makoto, brushing her index finger over its face a few times until all the glitter has been transferred form her finger to the plastic surface. Only then does she drop her hand and pushes at the napkin it is placed on again as she did before, slowly turning the figure to face Makoto.

He saw her doing the thing, but the surface that is covered now shouldn't have been visible to him. She tilts her head to the side, regarding him curiously to see if it will show to at least this one other person now.

He huffs, not bothering to answer her comment, as he works on the green beans. They're kind of disgusting, but he's not going to turn down food. He does watch her as she pokes the saint in the face, and tilts his head slightly when she turns it to face him. Some kind of glowing paint?

"You're going to get in trouble if you paint over their figures."

So he can see it. That's... annoying. Does that mean she'll have to show people that she's painting things with this just so they see it?

Well, okay, it probably has its uses, if she wants to mark things in a way that only she will see, but those are practical.

"They'll not notice, probably." Which is disappointing. "Plus it looks better like this."

"It's kind of obvious. But whatever." He's not a judge of art. It doesn't really matter to him if she gets in trouble. If it was Kanon, sure, he'd care, but this is someone he doesn't know.

He chews on one of his string beans again, making a face but managing to choke it down. It's not meat, which is what he really wants more of, but he'll deal with it. He does poke the saint figure to turn it around to face her again.

"Yeah, but I think that it can only be seen by people who saw me apply it."

She probably shouldn't tell him this, she realizes belatedly, but if she's lucky he'll just figure that she being a kid and imagining adventures. Adults do that a lot if they have no reason to assume that she's not a normal kid.

"Because it's glitter."

Hopefully that sounds childish enough?

He raises an eyebrow. Some kind of glamour? Maybe she's not human... in which case he needs to be extra careful with his words.

"That's... weird." It is. Strange, unusual... it covers all forms of the word, really. He finally manages to get another few green beans down, leaving only two left. Disgusting. "Where did you find that?"

"In my things."

She pushes the saint over with a quick bat of her hand that is immediately pulled back again, making the figure fall on it's face, and then picks her hot dog back up.

Something of hers. "Did you make it?" He really doesn't care, but it feels like information that should be passed on into his Court, just in case.

"Why do you care?"

He seems very interested all of a sudden, at least compared to before. That's no good.

"Because it's strange." And strange is... worthy of note. "You're strange." At least, she seems weird.

"I'm not, you are." She sticks his tongue out at him and then narrows her eyes triumphantly and declares: "And you have to eat green beans and I don't."

"Because you got out of it somehow." Seriously, he wanted more than one hot dog, but they wouldn't give it to him and it wasn't worth getting in a fight over.

"Because I'm cuter than you."

You gotta know your strengths and weaknesses, and stuff. She doesn't actually use her child bonus consciously, but she knows that she has it and that it works like a charm in this place. It's plenty enough of a disadvantage in other situations.

He snorts at that, and picks at the bean. Maybe he should leave it... he really doesn't want it. "True, but I know someone cuter." Kanon's absolutely charming... even without using her abilities.

"So you have a girlfriend."

No guy calls another guy cute except for in insult, in her experience.

He actually chuckles a little bit at that. "No. She's my sister."

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