[ closed-ish ] not till I can read by the moon am I going anywhere

[gramarye]

Who: Benji, Philomena, Shrieky, Wolfgang, guests maybe??
What: Slice of life.
When: Over the past few weeks, stuff can be backdated etc.
Where: Nawiedzonydom, Badside
Notes: Put up a subthread in here with maybe a description of your character's usual daily routine and/or any unusual happenings that may have occurred lately? Things other characters would have noticed about them? Weird habits etc? Then tag each other? Yes this is a good plan.
Warnings: None yet!

The house is a fairly large property and while it looks a bit frightening on the outside — Wolfgang never seems to get around to fixing that much, he always has a million other more pressing projects to distract him — it's turning out quite nicely. He's filled it with proper furniture, a working kitchen, even decorations, a lot of local art, some "donated" by his weirdo artsy friends. The yard is coming back to life from the long neglect it's suffered from before, but slowly, like it's shy.

There's a fence around the backyard now, high enough to keep the pets from jumping over. There's a rumour around town that the house is haunted, but that's probably because most of the people who live in it are a little eccentric.

Comments

[wontturntofoam]

Shrieky tends to rise with the sun, it's an old habit, but it means he's usually out of bed by six or seven in the summer, eight at the very latest. In the winter he'll sleep later of course, because pthh like he's going to get up when it's dark, that's just a terrible counter-intuitive plan. He's pretty lazy when it comes to getting dressed (because that's a horrible arduous task, and he needs to build up to it.) so until he knows he needs to go out, he'll hang around in a dressing gown (which is fastened probably about 50% of the time), or naked if he thinks everyone else is still in bed.

He doesn't really like the consistency of cereal, so he usually has toast for breakfast, and occasionally he courageously cooks food! If he does cook, then he pretty much automatically makes enough for everyone, because he lived in a commune before he came here and that's efficient use of gas. Normally if he's cooking he'll make bacon/sausages/eggs (although he will obligingly find alternatives to bacon and sausages if/when he figures out whether Wolfgang keeps kosher or not. BREAKFAST CHICKEN, WOLFGANG?). His favorite breakfast foods are waffles and pancakes, but he isn't entirely certain how to make batter, so he sticks with things that he can just put in a pan and cook.

If he's going out to work, he tries to set aside 35 minutes for getting dressed. Most days he doesn't need to take this long anymore, but it's still a struggle, and he can still get disheartened and grind to a halt half way through, so giving himself the extra time is helpful. If he isn't going out to work, he'll wear something easy to put on, skirts, sarongs, big baggy jumpers that he can pull over his head and figure out the sleeves on later, and maxi dresses, are all part of his lazin' around the house (and maybe covertly going to the grocery store in) wardrobe. If he knows he's going to be out for several hours, he'll wear trousers, even if he's not going to work. Because he doesn't want to be teased.

On non workdays, THUS COMMENCES the 'farting around the house' period of Shrieky's daily routine. He will start off by just kind of rolling around on the sofa for twenty minutes or so, reading the network to see if there's any opportunity to go pinch the cheeks of a new arrival or attend some kind of event. Once he's done with this, he'll do a lap of the house, to see what everyone else is doing and if he can interject himself into their fun activities. If someone isn't doing anything, he'll quickly suggest GROUP ACTIVITIES, such as going for a picnic in the back garden, making up a song together, or going on an L-Train journey to one of the parts of the city they don't go to often.

In the moat he spent a lot of time making up games to keep himself occupied, and he probably still does this in the house. Games like: 'pretend to be a statue and see how everyone else reacts' and 'SEARCH THE ROOMS OF MY FRIENDS' he sometimes comes up with games for multiple players (like hide and seek. which he TOTALLY INVENTED GUYS HE USED TO PLAY A ONE PLAYER VERSION OF IT WITH THE FISH >C) and he totally tries to rope other people into playing them with him.

Sometimes he just wants to lay around and think about things, and sometimes when he does this he is actually daydreaming about some completely improbable event and what it would be like if it happened. He talks to himself a bit when he does this, sometimes just verbalizing his thoughts, and sometimes playing out the various roles in the story he's making up, all by himself. He does get pretty embarrassed if he gets caught at it.

He prefers eating with others to eating alone, and he likes sitting outside when it's possible. He also has a bit of a sweet tooth, and there are a lot of foods he hasn't tried which he finds exciting as heck.

In the evenings he really doesn't like being alone, and will wander around the house interrupting what people are doing until someone lets him stay. He doesn't really care about filling his time with activities the way he does for the rest of the day, but he does try to actively ferret out company.

He combs his hair a hundred times before he goes to bed, and while he can technically stay up late if he wants too, he tends to start getting tired as soon as it begins to go dark. Because he has a finely tuned internal clock which obeys the daylight hours.

HE AND BENJI ARE PROBABLY STILL WORKING ON HIS NIGHTMARES.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang is absolutely willing to play hide and seek with Shrieky, because there is a large part of Wolfgang that is not properly adult, the part that also likes telling ghost stories and climbing trees. He should probably feel weird about it because they're both adults (as far as anyone knows), but it's more like a relief to be able to do things he likes without anyone looking at him oddly. He likes when Shrieky gets ideas like this and seems really unironically excited about them, completely unself-conscious about it. Wolfgang is self-conscious about everything.

This is in fact what they're doing right now. Wolfgang is it, because he's not allowed to be the hider anymore, because he is a filthy cheater. Safiya caught him at that once, figured out how he was doing it, and promptly beat him up to get him to stop, and they'd had to be pulled off each other because they started biting and pulling hair. They were five.

He's sitting cross-legged on the couch, hands serenely in his lap, his eyes closed and counting backwards from 100. "...69, 68, 67..."

He is still a filthy cheater because he totally just peeked.

[wontturntofoam]

Shrieky is not the best at hiding. He sometimes gets a little overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of hiding places in the house, in the world in general, but one hundred seconds is long enough for him to find somewhere, surely...

Eventually he decides that the PERFECT HIDING PLACE is the place where countless goats can be used as a distraction, so he creeps surreptitiously out, and makes a mad dash to hide in the goat shed before Wolfgang runs out of numbers and comes looking for him!

[gramarye]

"...42, 41, 40..."

The countless (two) goats, startled by Shrieky's sudden appearance, run behind the shed until one of them bravely comes to investigate him. Motek is the less headbutty of the two, but she still butts her face against his side and bleats, demanding to be cuddled. They are not very good at this game, turns out.

Meanwhile, still counting: "...25, 24, 23..."

[wontturntofoam]

Shrieky has a moment of indecision, before ducking into the goat hut, an crouching down in the corner, so that he is both out of sight, and close enough to the floor to begin lavishing quiet attention on Motek. Perhaps the countless goats (Shrieky's not great at counting okay) won't be a great distraction, but if he placates them with love, they might not give away his location either...

...Also, this way, even if he loses, he has still had some quality goat time.

[gramarye]

Motek is delighted by the attention and attempts to crawl into Shrieky's lap, her wee stubby tail wagging. These two are the neediest animals, they need constant reassurance of devotion or they start dramatically wilting.

"... 3, 2, 1. Ready or not -"

Wolfgang always makes a big deal out of looking around - this is partially because Shrieky is awfully large and thus his pool of potential hiding spots is a lot smaller than it would be if they were both, say, six, but also because that's how you play the game, okay. He wanders around the downstairs of the house, stopping at windows, peering into cabinets big enough to hold a person.

He wanders out into the backyard and pauses there, hands on his hips, mouth pursed, thoughtful. He taps his chin. Motek starts straining because she can totally see her mommy from here.

[wontturntofoam]

Shrieky peeks around the corner of the goat hut, trying to ascertain whether Wolfgang is out there and whether he's coming over here or not, before jerking his head back into the safety of the hut, when he spots his housemate standing ponderously at the head of the yard.

He scoops Motek into his arms, and quickly pours adoration on her in the form of petting and whispering what a lovely goat she is. He's cunningly trying to prevent her from going to demand a parental meeting with Wolfgang, and in doing so leading him right to Shrieky. He scoops his arms underneath her front legs, and rolls her onto her back on his lap, to give her a little goatish belly rub.

Hopefully Wolfgang hadn't seen him, and Motek would be quiet in her appreciation of his love...

[cestrumnocturnum]

A couple of weeks ago, Benji came home asking for help to bring a tank upstairs, one that a spider was due to live in. She'd been apologetic-- "I was thinking of getting a bird, or a plant..."-- but very taken with the idea of owning a tarantula. She'd been declared as 'Hannah'. Sometimes, the eight-legged pet is taken from the tank, but often goes unhandled, content to feed her grasshoppers and watch her navigate hills of dirt, branches, an upside down plant pot.

Her work hours are erratic, tailored to suit the needs of those she visits to tutor, which is sometimes in the early evening, sometimes on the weekends, sometimes in the morning and leaving her afternoon free. She brings books home from the library, invites Shrieky to sit down with her, shows passages that she likes in particular, tries to get him to enjoy reading more as he improves. Benji will wander Baedal, a lot, and take opportunities to nap; she sleeps more than most people, and probably for good reason.

Sometimes she will be moved to use the kitchen for more than just simple meals. Baking is more her area, although she has attempted to cook dinner for everyone before, something English and fishy and acrid that only the resident Mermaid liked, but she does better with desserts. Dense fruit slices with flaky pastry, pies and ganache, truffles made of chocolate and cookies rolled in dried coconut. Breads with spices to accompany the Middle Eastern meals Wolfgang might create. As the weather continues warmer, one can find sealed jugs of sangria in the fridge, using pale wines and mint leaves and lemon or lime slices clinging to the wet glass from the inside. Iced teas.

Despite the people she lives with, her wardrobe doesn't spontaneously become more exciting, almost more conscious of herself when surrounded by butterfly people. The exception is the inclusion of a silk robe that is a stunning shade of icy blue with embroidery, but didn't cost so much that she can't swan around in it over less exciting shirt and pants when she isn't going out anywhere. A dress was bought, sleek and black, and has since lived in her wardrobe.

She is used to communal living, and tidies if she can see it. She reads a lot to pass the time, outside and inside, in shared space as well as her room, freely coaxed into doing other things when asked or invited, whether it's a simple conversation or leaving the house to go somewhere. If she needs time to herself, she retreats to her room, usually in sudden fits of homesickness.

Then there are dreams. She makes a point not to invade the heads of her housemates in any regular fashion, but there are exceptions. The standardised attempts to lessen Shrieky's nightmares, but Philomena and Wolfgang may be visited as well, just to say 'hi' or smooth a rumpled dream, whether letting them know she is there or not. She can usually sense whether her presence is wanted; unwanted invasions may mean a note left beneath their door the next morning.

Sorry! :( - B

Dreams sometimes drive her out of sleep. She will be found downstairs, in the kitchen or outside, bare foot and drinking tea or wine or simply milk, sometimes frazzled, sometimes serene, sometimes not wholly there.

[gramarye]

Making this decision took a lot of thought. The idea of getting help, or just being helped, or not being alone — isn't this what he wanted? But wanting and having are two different things, and he tells himself it's not that he's afraid of the unknown, it's that nobody deserves to be subjected to what goes on when he sleeps. He has secrets he tells himself are important. He tells himself it's considerate. Someone could get hurt.

Someone else could get hurt.

So he does something on the roof, which is where he always goes to do magic, something that feels like the slow building pressure of diving into the deep sea. And after that, no dreams. He could call it a fence, but no, it's a wall around his head, so high it blocks out any sky entirely. It's invisible but still somehow there, somehow solid, and somehow at once both transparent and opaque. On the sides, you can see the imprints of his dream sometimes in the form of graffiti: nonsense words, a dead girl, a painted hole opening to the other side not actually there, a little boy with his face pressed against it, blowing on it and drawing shapes in the fog. They're gone afterwards, like the police come by to paint over them.

This was a few weeks ago.

He keeps odd hours, so it's not unusual for him to already be in the kitchen this early in the morning, having already knocked back half a glass of shitty box wine. It's still nearly dark outside, false dawn turning the sky into a pale grey that washes everything out. He looks up when he hears footsteps through the threshold, blinks bearily, then smiles wryly, like it takes his face a few seconds to keep up with his mind. To be fair, it is the asscrack of dawn. "You too?"

[cestrumnocturnum]

"Seems so."

She slows, when company makes itself known, but doesn't stop, meeting smile for smile, eyes still sleepy but made somewhat vibrant for it, electric blue encouraged from turquoise dressing gown. Not immediately joining Wolfgang at the table, Benji comes to stop at the fridge, opening it and doing the 'just woke up' stare into its innards, as if scrying for something or waiting for a sign as to what she wants out of it. That, and part of her is still back in bed, beyond bed, wistfully clinging to something that isn't here.

At first she hadn't been able to tell what Wolfgang had done; it's different to telepathy, or willpower. Draws to mind fogged glass, and Benji had slid away into some other dreamscape after only leaving the faint impression of her having been there, a flickering thought, absent and intangible. This hadn't been tonight.

Outside the nearest window, a particularly zealous bird chirps his or her joy for the coming dawn, eliciting a small sound of protest from Benji as she takes a glass for herself. "Don't judge me," is-- at the bird, not Wolfgang. What is to Wolfgang; "How're you?"

[gramarye]

Wolfgang groans and puts his head in his hands. Well, that would answer that, but he is being slightly comically exaggerated about it, because he's just complaining, not... actually sick or anything.

There is a cup of coffee sitting on the table in front of him, although given how he is, it could actually be his third or fourth. Either way, it's cold now, up until he touches the rim of it and it abruptly starts to steam again. He shifts, one hand over his face and covering one eye, the other dropping to the table, fingernails running between the grooves. "It's too early to live," he says, voice sleepy-hoarse and low because he's not sure who else is awake or asleep, including pets.

[cestrumnocturnum]

There's the sound of trickling fluid, Benji not bothering to remove the box of white from the fridge and she fills a water glass with a conservative helping, enough to make the road of going back to sleep a little smoother, she thinks. She grins at that answer, containing herself to that; being quiet, yes, for those that keep more normal schedules, including the cat and the dog. (The spider is fine.) It's also good, a belated, sleepy realisation, that Wolfgang is responding at all. That is never a total guarantee.

She sits down nearby, sort of feeling her way around the kitchen rather than trusting her still bleary attention span. "Bed after this," she says, words already muffled into glass as she takes a sip, wincing a little; strong taste for the morning, but. Coffee made warm again renews, too, its scent, and she tips a look to it over her own choice of beverage. "Are there cows to milk? Or. Other things people do at ridiculous hours."

[gramarye]

"Cows and other things..." He says this, pauses, and pulls a bit of a face. "Ah, sorry." He's pretty sure that's cow milk, at least. Pretty sure. Not that the weirdness of Baedal's fauna is a surprise, but probably not what one needs to be reminded of at this ungodly hour.

He slides his hand down his face, cups his chin and squints vaguely. "Sewers to fix, apparently." Which is what he should be doing in two hours when his shift starts, but honestly, he'll probably get halfway through getting ready, fall back asleep on the couch, and miss it. Again.

[cestrumnocturnum]

"That sounds like a terrible thing to deal with in the morning." Her tone is serene, gently sympathetic to Wolfgang's plight, although only in the way that hints at jobs, huh? "I just have, mm. Commuting. This afternoon. Gallmarch? It's literally--" Vague gesture that is probably facing the wrong direction. "--on the other side of everything. I have to take the train."

Which isn't a problem if she is with someone who she can latch to or get lost with, but she hasn't yet shaken off the nervousness of missing a stop somehow, or being unable to beat the crowd, or just. Being in the crowd in general. "I'm probably going to be late." Yes, well, especially if you think wine is a valid choice at this hour in order to sleep.

[gramarye]

"It's terrible to deal with at every hour." Wolfgang you're not funny, you are actually a huge dork. "The velociraptors are nocturnal, anyway. I wouldn't trade you, I hate going that far." The trains are not bad here, it's just kind of a big city, and thus a long trip -- he used to go out to Flag Hill a lot until Tanoreen opened. He still does sometimes, and it's still not a fun trip. He blinks, bleary still, rubs at his eye hard enough to see spots. "Work thing?"

[cestrumnocturnum]

"Yes. It's more difficult for her to go somewhere than it is for me," handwave, "and I don't want to bring people back here. I guess it's-- um, the job, it's not going awful enough to the point of comedy; I keep getting cases." Benji is bringing her drink up to sip, but then lowers it again, repeating a keyword in her mind that she'd dismissed but manages to resurface;

"Velociraptors?"

[gramarye]

"You can, you know, ah -- if it'd be easier for some of them. It's fine, I don't mind." He's not sure how the others feel about it, but he's okay with it. He spends so much time asleep, he probably wouldn't even notice.

"Mm. There are a bunch underground. Albino, they can't handle sunlight." He folds his arms on the table, leaning over, chin resting on top of them. "They're important to the ecosystem because they eat the sewer rats and landsharks, but." ... but they are fucking velociraptors!! Fuck this city.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang likes to have projects. He's always fixing something — fiddling with the sink, messing with squeaky cabinets, poking at appliances he probably shouldn't be given how often he nearly sets himself on fire. This kind of domesticity plainly makes him happy, and if anything breaks he will leap at the opportunity to learn how to fix it. Sometimes making it worse, at which point he ends up relying on magic to do it, but he prefers to work with his hands. Magic scares him less the more he learns to control it, but it's still unpredictable and chaotic.

He's on the roof a lot — there's a trap door in the hall with foldout stairs that leads up to it, and he's somehow managed to get a recliner and a beat-up old work table up there. He goes up there to smoke — comes back down mellow and hungry — or to do work, the creepy kind. Once he takes a saucepan from the kitchen up there, because he refuses to own anything that could be called "a cauldron."

The 19th is his birthday, he's pretty sure. He goes out drinking, comes back pretty drunk and makes a lopsided cake. He's twenty-two, and he acts happy, but there's a deep anxiety undercutting that beyond how anxious he normally is.

As far as food goes, everything he makes is spicy and rich and he cringes visibly whenever anyone says "exotic" because this was what he ate every day at home, why are people so weird here. He's pretty good at this — "my grandma said anyone old enough to wipe their..." Pause. "...nose is old enough to learn to cook," he explains if asked — but given how erratic his hours are he can't really be relied on to cook meals at regular times normal people eat at. He has his bike fixed finally and every Sunday he goes to the local farmer's market and comes back with bread and honey, which is his favourite. He doesn't eat much himself, picks at everything, gives it to the goats, forgets entirely.

He is extremely vain and it bothers him that people see him in a state less than absolutely pristine, but it's impossible to live with people and not be seen in a dressing gown with unbrushed hair, or having just woken up, or covered in grease from some project or other. He'll live. He spends a lot of free time reading, mostly boring nonfiction from which he takes a lot of notes, but in his room there's a small amount of books that are meant for children, buried underneath his physics and alchemy notes. He owns a copy of Where the Wild Things Are.

That Wolfgang is sick is something he takes pains to conceal, but he's not as discreet as he thinks he is. For one thing, he is constantly sleeping. Half the time he doesn't even make it to his room, but passes out on the couch, feet dangling over one side because he's too long for it, or in the backyard, or on the roof, or — once or twice — on the floor. Weird shit happens all the time when he sleeps; things moving, fixing themselves, doors shifting themselves around, ghosts plainly visible in broad daylight across the street that are gone when he wakes up.

Sometimes he sits very still, not moving, not responding to anything, for hours at a time. He is breathing and can be moved, but limply, like a puppet. He comes back from wherever he goes confused about the passage of time and unable to answer what he was doing. If he's still having seizures, he's not sure, because it happens when he's asleep. He wakes up feeling like he's been hit by a truck and his tongue is sore (his everything is sore), but he doesn't know what happened. There are a lot of times when he's not sure what happened, when it's suddenly a lot later than last he noticed. He'll stand on the edge of the roof staring at the ground hearing a voice in his head and feeling an urge that scares the shit out of him but every time he goes more than three days without an incident he assumes he's cured and everything is fine now and he doesn't need help he's fine.

He's constantly finding empty wine glasses in places he forgot he put them. He drinks a lot.