[ 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...