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cityofhex2016-11-16 10:32 pm
modmachine) wrote in cityofhex2016-11-16 10:32 pm
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.
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.
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"Fourteen." That... seems right, at least.
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...Okay, a few years off if she is going to school and things like that. People seem to become adults later when they do that.
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A surviving sibling that you know, anyway. Might well be that her mother had a litter before or after the one that she is the only survivor of - or at least that last one is something that she deduced from what Chantalle has told friends and family about how she found her little kitten.
She's ...never really met someone who had siblings that were this important to them, so he is making her curious.
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"It's worrying and good at the same time. You want to watch over them, make sure they're protected and safe, and you feel awful when you can't provide that. You have someone who relies on you, and who you want to keep happy. But when you see them smile... it's like the world lights up and everything seems all right for a moment. You keep going, just to make sure that you can clear the way to a better world that they can live in. You take risks just so they can have a good life. And you don't mind, because you care about them that much. You know it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't matter."
He opens his eyes again, letting out a sigh. Kanon...
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"Is that because you're a big brother or would you feel the same as a little brother?"
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...She makes a decision and reaches down into a hidden pocket of her coat, extracting a candy bar that is almost unmelted, pushing it over the table towards him.
"You should give this to her and tell her hi from another cute girl. So you'll have a reason to visit her even if she's busy with other people."
He doesn't know that he was an unwitting part of her little experiment with the glitter, but she still feels like she should return a favour for a favour, and he sounded a bit like he needs reasons to see his sister.
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'Free' is pretty much never really free, after all. Present setting excluded.
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"You already paid. I needed someone to try this," she taps the statue with a finger, "out on."
She does have some sense of justice, even if it's twisted and more than a little bit backwards in places.
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Not that her poking at this stuff will be over now, but this brought her a huge step forward. She just wonders what she should do with it, knowing that it won't be seen unless the other person sees her apply it.
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Still... "You probably shouldn't announce that kind of thing, though."
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She could have replied that she only announced it because he refused to take the candy bar, but that sounded like he knows something about the glitter.
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He's not going to, but... well.
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Tell me more about the kind of special thing that it is. But not here.
She isn't worried that he might try to take the thing from her, even if he tried she's fairly sure that she should be able to take him down or at least get away.
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"... I don't have anything I'm doing after this."
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She finishes her hot dog and jumps off her chair. No reason to wait around, right?
"Done?"
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"So are you special too, like that stuff?"
Not like her, she's a perfectly normal kid, look at her.
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She scrunches up her nose.
"You at least know something similar."
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He squares his shoulders, drawing himself up to his full height, a slight snarl in his voice. His expression turns cold, even as his anger is almost palpable as a strong heat. "If you break the rules, you pay the price anyway. Do not mess with anything you don't know, especially if you don't know the price. You will only hurt yourself and the ones who care about you."
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She wants to reply that at least that last bit - the ones to care about her - is no worry because none of them are here, but then... she's not sure how Tobias figures into that. "If anyone cares about me they can defend themselves pretty well. And," added with as much indignation as she can muster, "I'm not playing. I'm trying to figure this out. It's not breaking any rules to figure out what is mine." ...Even if she has no idea where it came from, which makes her hesitate a bit at the last words. Maybe she should try to figure out where the locket came from before figuring out what the stuff inside does.
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"How did you get it? Who gave it to you? What price did they name?"
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