St. Peter In Chains: The Collection. [OPEN!]

[meanwhileback]

Who: Penelope Lane, her models, her muses, her admirers, the curious and the critics. ANYONE. EVERYONE. GET IN HERE!!
What: Penelope's long-awaited runway show! Finally!
Where: St. Peter In Chains, abandoned cathedralish church.
When: Friday, June 29th! Eveningtime. Show starts at 7pm and goes... well. Until everyone isn't there anymore, I guess!! For whatever reason.
Notes: IMPORTANT: There's going to be a bunch of subthreads for different parts of the night. Feel free to tag around in them as you want! I'd like fabulous things to happen here, people. Fabulous. Things.
EDIT: NOW WITH ADDED TERROR!! SEE LINK BELOW!!
Warnings: Scary things, NPC death, injuries... horrors!!

The venue has been done up quite well for the occasion, all things considered. The old pews that were still salvageable have been repurposed and rearranged to face the aisle down the center of the enormous main room, where a raised runway has been set up. Lighting and temporary walls, and even an audio system have been brought in and installed for the occasion, and the impressive wreathed columns have been dramatically lit from below to emphasize the height of the room.

All told, it looks like it cost absolute scads of money to renovate an abandoned space to this level of elegance; whether this is actually true or not is largely immaterial. As with so much of society, it's the appearance of the thing that matters most, not the reality of it. Perhaps that's a statement Penelope Lane is making intentionally. Everyone knows the designer is one of the most outspoken members of her cohort, after all, and not one to misrepresent herself.

And she is, tonight, for one, brief, shining moment, entirely in control. Take plenty of pictures; it won't last long.

AND NOW: THE REAL SHOW BEGINS

Comments

[cestrumnocturnum]

Adrenaline will give way to the throb of the cuts and scrapes on her palms, and already is; her nose wrinkles, more annoyed at the inconvenience of it than any pain or worry about damage. "It looks much worse than it is, when it gets everywhere--" But she isn't so distracted that she doesn't pick up on that tone in his voice. She understands, she thinks; for instance, she knows by now what the mark on Wolfgang's hand means, and she understands fearing the police.

"Shall we go? I can clean up a little at the station on the way, I'll be fine." If it was worse, she'd feel increasingly silly for insisting she have a chaperone of any kind, being older than her companion, having lived in a more volatile world than Baedal, but for the sake of some cuts, she can let her anxiety win out.

[gramarye]

"Yes." There's another moment of hesitation before he turns and starts to walk away. He feels like a stupid coward for walking away, but it's not his problem and nobody but himself expects him to try to fix everything in the world. No one's dead, there's nothing here that can't be taken care of by the people present.

And she says she's fine but maybe she's not. Hands are tricky like that.

"Sorry," he says, and it ends rather clipped as it occurs to him that it's not actually his fault a bunch of angry ghosts appeared out of nowhereand tried to murder everyone even though he's the one who invited them and he's. Doing that thing again, apologising for things that are literally outside of his control. He starts fidgeting instead.

[cestrumnocturnum]

It's a relief to be walking away, which Benji doesn't feel great about either, but neither would staying. She casts one last look backwards towards the chaos spilling from the inside out, then focuses on leaving, her hands clasped together as if to protect them somewhat, or conceal. They have antiseptic at home. Adhesive bandages. Some wine. The 'sorry' has her glancing up, uncertain as to its purpose, but smiles crookedly when no explanation is forthcoming and so filling in the answer.

"Me too. It was such a nice night up to a point."

[gramarye]

"The murder point." He stops at the train station, they'll have to wait, and - it's going to be crowded, it's them and roughly a billion other people all desperate to just go home already after that disaster. But there's not the same level of overarching fear and sadness and despair and anger over St Peter's itself, it helps to not feel... that.

"This city," he says, like he would laugh if it were funny. They're all fucked, there's no way out, and it's one major, life-threatening disaster after another until you die, apparently. He rubs his hands over his face and makes a frustrated noise. "Poor Penelope."

She scares the piss out of him, but he does sort of like her in spite of that, and this. Isn't great for her.

[cestrumnocturnum]

"Is it true, that even bad press is good press?"

The sentiment of this city is one she can echo in the form of a wordless sound of sympathetic agreement, except she's only scraping the surface of it. It's a combination of knowing how bad it could be, and not knowing how bad it is. Still, she has no compulsion to be its champion now; this was awful, and part of her exhaustion is from being terrified for the time it took to get out.

[gramarye]

He can't help it - he looks down at his hand, the one with the silver scar. He's always visible in the dark, stumbling down the stairs or coming in trying to be quiet at 3 in the morning. He's thinking that as much as he uses his quote-unquote friends, it's a mutual thing. He's an accessory that says fuck you mom and dad.

"Yes." He waves his other hand, the unmarked one, gets on the train and sits with his knees pulled up to his chest even though that's Not Proper and generally he cares a lot about that, following rules. He keeps glancing at her hands to make sure she's not going to bleed to death anytime soon, but he worries too much about everything anyway. "She'll be fine, it wasn't even her fault. Her name in all the papers, she'll like that."