Say When (A New Year's Brunch)

[eliotwaugh]

Eliot had been warned by various people that New Year's often brings some kind of supernatural mischief to Darrow, and this news had only made him more determined to stick to his plan. No power of god or man or eldritch entity place-spirit or army of fish people will prevent him from throwing a damn party. 

It made sense, really, and part of him wishes he'd done something like this before now. He needn't frame it as a sort of surrender to this imprisonment, but rather just indulging in something frivolous because, as far as his understanding of the metaphysics goes, none of this really counts. So why shouldn't he enjoy it? He's been here long enough to decorate the apartment some, and it really is a marvel the amount of things available through Nile. There's more comfortable furniture, potted plants, and a series of apothecary cabinets and display cases for magical components that give the whole place the air of some eccentric explorer's gallery of curiosities. 

He's even managed to get enough appliances that the little kitchen is decently functional, and has spent a few days stocking up and preparing for what he hopes will a successful brunch. He has enough eggs to feed an army. There will be copious crepes. There will be mimosas for days. 

Eliot's used to working through a wicked hangover this time of year, so he built that into consideration in his prep time. Thanks to the night's adventure, though, he spends his downtime sober and scrubbing mer-blood off of himself, and still feels a bit frazzled by the time the first guests arrive.

[It's time for brunch! Brunch is a state of mind, not an actual timeframe, so please feel free to have your pups show up whenever in the day, honestly. Tag in, tag around, chase the memory of merman horror away with a mimosa, air your grievances and dirty laundry in the neutral ground of Eliot's apartment. This is a safe space. For Drama.]

Comments

[formicine]

"Ugh, yeah, probably a good idea," she says, wrinkling her face at the memory.

"Blue," she replies, reaching to shake his hand firmly. "Blue Sargent. It's nice to meet you." His name sort of rings a bell, but she's not sure if it's because of him being mentioned by one of the other people she knows here, or if she knows of him somehow from something in her own world; usually she tries to sort of set aside pre-knowledge in this place, since it's generally not quite accurate anyway.

"We definitely saw some of those fish guys, but we skedaddled pretty quickly," she adds with a small smile. "I take it you were fighting for a while?"

[jackrackham]

"They just kept coming up out of the waves like overgrown sand crabs. Eliot did some magic to sharpen our swords, and that made it much quicker work." They'd gone on til morning, and by the end it had almost felt tedious, but no less strange and ultimately exhausting. After this, he would definitely like to go back to the apartment and sleep off the rest of the day. "But yes, for a while."

"You know," he says, nodding back towards the cabinet, "I don't think he minds anyone looking. Or if he does, I haven't seen him stop anyone yet." He lowers his head, hunching his shoulders a little further to direct her attention at an apothecary cabinet on the other side of the room covered in small drawers. "I looked in some of those. All twigs. Different kinds of twigs. Don't ask me what he uses them for. I hope for some kind of magic," His lips twist up into a barely restrained smirk. "otherwise he's a much stranger man than I'd initially thought."

[formicine]

Blue grimaces. Granted, she doesn't have a whole lot of experience with sand crabs, overgrown or not, since Henrietta is very much not the coastal area of Virginia, and although there are seafood restaurants that claim local catch, she's never really seen many here. But it sounds terrible, and she'd seen what the things looked like, and that's even worse.

She laughs when Jack nods at the cabinet covertly, and turns to look at where he's nodding, lips twitching into a smile, and holds up two fingers to indicate little twigs?. "I don't doubt Eliot has some ...quirks I'm, uh, unaware of, but I think those must be supplies."

"It all actually makes me feel a bit at home," she confesses, waving around. "My mother was a...well, a seer, a psychic. Our house where we lived with my aunts was full of all sorts of weird focal objects. And just things they picked up in some shop even though they were absolutely useless, because they looked cool," she adds with a wry little smile.

[jackrackham]

Jack nods to her unspoken question, his eyebrows raising in confirmation. He's sure too, about Eliot having a few hidden quirks. He's been a surprising man to get to know.

"There may be be some of that here, as well," he says, pointing out the vase filled with marbles with a brief smile. Even if some of the decor isn't required for Eliot's magic, it still makes this place feel like a reflection of Eliot's personality. Unusual, but charming nonetheless.

"Though I could be wrong." He gives the marbles a second assessing glance before returning his attention to Blue. "Magic as a reality is new to me. I can't imagine what it would be like growing up with it." He's not entirely sure what Blue even means by psychic (perhaps something to do with telling futures?), but he does wonder if her mother being psychic would mean that Blue also has those powers.

[formicine]

Blue smiles at his gesture to the vase, which looks like it could be off one of those moodboard sites, though very prettily so with the light refracting. It widens into a smirk when Jack points out that maybe they aren't just pretty. "Sometimes the most benign looking things are the most powerful," she says, "but usually, they're just benign."

"It's..." She hmms thoughtfully. "Sort of like growing up any other way, I think, it's not until later that you realize it isn't the same as everyone else's. I mean --" She makes an assessing face. "Obviously, I knew it wasn't normal, I was around other kids, but -- I was raised by my mother and my aunts and no men, all in one little house, and that's just to start with. Nothing about me was normal for Henrietta. I wouldn't have known what to do with being normal." She laughs softly. As a teenager, she'd made the most of it, blown it up into a look that's only faintly more subdued now. That's another thing she finds relatable about Eliot.

"For me, it was more annoying than anything, I think, at the time. I don't have the same abilities as my mother," she explains, "but when I'm around, I make them stronger. So I was dragged around to sit through all sorts of people visiting wanting to know their futures and I always wanted to be doing something else, of course."