nightlogs | XOXO ❅ VALENTINE'S EVENT

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XOXO ❅ VALENTINE'S EVENT

XOXO

One major problem with being the group that's responsible for solving all kinds of problems in the myth world is other myths can kind of be dicks about it. That's why, on Valentine's Day, Cupid shows up, quickly offloads his kid (the toddler Baby Cupid), and runs off to take care of spreading love on his holiday, with barely a how'd you do. He doesn't even say thank you.

To be fair, you can't fault him too much for only trusting the Guardians to babysit his kid in these dangerous and uncertain times, especially when children at risk against the fearlings.

Still, that means there's a giggling toddler, about 2-years-old in appearance, but maybe with the mental age of a 4 or 5 (he is definitely old enough to understand he's being naughty and deserving of a time out) flitting around the Pole causing all kinds of Valentine's related problems. Fortunately, the toddler has learned that he's not quite old enough to know the right times to help people fall in love (Adult Cupid just helps things along when they're already falling, or when they need help falling back in love, of course).

Instead, Baby C is doing what his father taught him to do and causing all kinds of tricks to try to get people to admit feelings that already exist or manufacturing ways for them to become closer to each other.

HONESTY ARROWS ♥ Baby Cupid isn't shooting magic arrows that cause anyone to develop feelings for each other but he sure is trying to make sure people talk about whatever feelings they have. Anyone hit will be compelled to blurt out various truths about themselves, their personal history, and their feelings to whoever is around them and will have difficulty stopping or drawing themselves away. In fact, if someone walks away they'll feel compelled to find someone else to confess to. The effect wears off anywhere between 5 minutes to a half hour.

TATTLETALE ROSES ♥ Vines of roses are now growing all over the Workshop. For those who are in love, they take the form of the face of the person they're in love with. The more they try to hide it or deny it from someone they're talking to, the more of them bloom with the person's face.

THORNY VINES OF CLOSENESS ♥ The rose vines have their own annoying purpose: bonding! For people that clearly need to become friends, fall in love, or fall deeper in love, thorny vines will wrap around both people, forcing them into a little cage together. The thorns fortunately won't poke them - they seem to be maneuvered in a way to just make sure there are no gaps to escape through. The vines are magically reinforced and can't be opened with any physical or magical means. After that, one of two things will happen:

1) A card will fall from the ceiling of the cage saying: Tell each other how you really feel about each other!!! This will happen if the cage thinks they need to affirm the status of their relationship, whether they need to admit they're in love, admit they've been bitten by the friend bug if they're reluctant to, or really need to talk about how much they mean to each other as friends. Only then will they be let out of the feelings shame corner.

2) If the two don't know each other, or both people could afford to get to know each other better multiple cards will drop from the ceiling with icebreaker questions, as if they're a bunch of new hires at an orientation.

How many will they have to answer before they're released? Who knows! But they have to answer them honestly or the cage won't open.

CANDY LONELY HEARTS ♥ People who are on the lonelier side and in need of support might find a candy heart on a random surface. The messages on them are on the platonic side (Like "You rock!" or "Shine on!") They'll feel compelled to eat them (even if they're on the floor). When they do, a glowing red thread will appear and tie itself around their finger. Briefly, in the air, the glowing string will form into letters that tell the person what they need to do to be release, whether it's telling someone they're lonely, asking for some kind of support, or admitting a vulnerability.

Then it'll whip out and grab someone else nearby, wrapping around their finger as well. Sometimes, two people might eat a candy at the same time and each have a string appear and they'll tie in the middle.

The strings are unbreakable, and they won't be set free until whoever ate a candy talks about their loneliness or vulnerable feelings - regardless of whether or not the other person is an eager listener.

OOC DETAILS
❅ Starters: You can make up your own wildcard effects, feel free! If you do, please consider posting it to the Wildcard comment below so others might be able to pick up the same effect as well if they like them.

❅ Multiple effects: Feel free to have characters slammed by as many of Baby C's traps in the same thread as you want. No reason someone can't have the worst luck and trip three Cupid traps at once or several of them in a row.

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[Boimler gives him a flat look.]

Conjecture.

[It's pretty easy to imagine something gross tastes like another gross thing. It was weird and gritty and coated his tongue in a weird way.]

I already tried breaking this thing before. Nothing works other than following the directions. What message did you get? Mine's always blah blah blah be vulnerable and make friends.

[He focuses on his tricorder. He already tried his phaser before but that didn't work. Maybe he missed something, though.]

The magic thing is new. Even when extremely weird phenomena happens in my world, it's quantifiable and still follows the laws of physics.

Just...weirdly.

[Absurd bullshit can still be scientifically studied.]

This stuff just apparently works at random. It has internal logic but the way it interacts with physics makes absolutely no sense at a fundamental level.

[He nods, appraising.]

That's a both. I'd say that's a right now and a later.

[He taps his other cheek.]

You missed a spot, though. C'mon, Timbo, you're usually so thorough about things.

[His comically exaggerated pout meant to say "my other cheek is lonely now, fix it."]

[ The explosion doesn’t make him scream: it makes him take this nonsense much more seriously, screw this nonsense. Seeing the sakura pink petals doesn’t make him less guarded. Tim’s fought plants and plant-powers a few too many times to delay shaking the petals off his face and his hair. ]

Get them off your face before you breathe something in.

[ If Boimler hasn’t started by the time Tim’s clean from the shoulders up, he’ll start dusting him off after snapping on a pair of rubber gloves from his belt, which he carries out of habit (he doesn’t trust the elves with hot glue). ]

You don’t know what they do, and we don’t need to be in more trouble.

[ They’re restrained; it’s probably magical in origin. It’s not great. Tim withdraws a knife from another compartment. ]

Trying the low tech option.

[ He folds the string around the knife and attempts to slice through it while holing the string steady in his other hand. The string cuts into his gloves like dental floss, and smooth jazz starts to play. ]

Edited 2024-03-04 23:45 (UTC)

I missed a lot of spots.

[ Said with a dangerous amount of cheek, as Tim shifts so that he’s kneeling on the window seat with his arms on Kon’s shoulders. He smirks his way into another kiss, right where Kon tapped. ]

On purpose, because we’d never get anything done if I kissed you as much as I wanted.

[ It’s not something that Tim would normally say - doesn’t mean it’s not true - but the words feel odd in his mouth, almost as an aftertaste. But rather than panic at the blurt, Tim will let it stand as a flirt. ]

I don’t know why I said that. I can’t spend the whole afternoon macking on you and hiding from Cupid. But I want to.

[ He brushes his lips against Kon’s jaw as a demonstration. ]

I can’t say anything stupid if my mouth’s busy, and I’m dreading the shovel talk Mrs. Kent is going to give me someday.

"Not alone. But self-sufficient."

Dan can't quite get past thinking that Bunny would be no happier in Dan's position, were the roles reversed - but to Dan, feeling a sense of dependence on others is inherently more threatening than it feels to others. He figures Bunny would hate feeling as vulnerable and helpless as Dan feels right now; he also doesn't think Bunny would feel that keen sense of danger Dan feels.

"I'm not supposed to be alive right now, you know. I wasn't supposed to make it this long." He was supposed to be dead by twenty-four at the latest. Usually he feels like he did die before then, and is just some sort of ghost play-acting at living, but he doesn't know how to articulate that in a way that won't stress Bunny out. "I didn't never plan ahead for this."

He settles into being held, absently stroking Bunny's chest. "How did you adjust to it, the idea of living forever?"

"Oh, this is some Slip of the Tongue bull- nonsense," Stacia says with an aggravated sigh. "This is way more fun when I'm doing it to other people. I'm going to have to be so careful talking."

Maybe she should get herself a whiteboard and a pen. The Yeti at least have to have chalk and chalkboards, right?

She pats Jake on the arm in commiseration.

"Yeah, I get that we've all got to find some way to survive the horrors," she says. "I'll be gentle when I smack you; you're only human."

"Pfft, please," Stacia says, waving her free hand. "Being trustworthy isn't about saying things, it's about the follow-through. There are people back home who would tell you that I've made choices that indicate that I'm not trustworthy." She grins. "One of them is perpetually annoyed that, in spite of him reaching that conclusion, he still trusts me with the safety of his children. It's incredibly funny, and he is so mad about it."

Sometimes you've just got to let people dislike you. Other times, it's worth it to make them like you against their better judgment. She counts Amigo de las Serpientes' good opinion of her among her greatest accomplishments. If she can get him to like her, she can endear herself to anyone in the Nation if she puts her mind to it.

"So yeah, I don't exactly expect you to trust me, sight-unseen," she says. "All the evidence you've got of my good intentions is the word of the Man in the Moon, and what reason do you have to trust him? I'm willing to put in the work to prove it, is all."

[ He can't see it, but he assumes. Tim assumes that's an ego boost, and he's walked into months of teasing and embarrassment. But he's going to draw the line at hair-ruffling. ]

A different Loki. He looked younger, doesn't mean that he was younger. He looked more Harry Styles.

[ Which was a not insignificant portion of the appeal. ]

Which was a not insignificant portion of the appeal.

The thought, meant to be an amused aside, somehow escaped. Dear god, why. ]

Please dispel it and let's stop talking about him before I incriminate myself.

[Loki leans over him, grinning.]

So I presumed. Well, now you know better than to eat strange candy you find lying around on a day of significance to mortals, hm?

[He motions with his hands and displays an array of the candies that have appeared.]

Which one was it? For reference purposes.

I feel obliged to ask, given the number of times I have been held responsible for the deeds of different Lokis.

[No hair ruffling, no touching at all. Though he is moving around Tim. He chuckles a little at the remark, though he quickly makes more confused noises.]

It appears that the effect has already triggered. You need not fear a change in behavior upon opening your eyes, though I am uncertain if I can change the enchantment at all at this point-

[He cuts off with a gasp. There was an impact in his back and now his chest is tingling. He whirls and catches a glimpse of a winged infant thumbing his nose before flying away.]

I will kill that menace!

I'll help you look for it.

[Henry pulls a bottle of choccy milk out of his pocket.]

Hold on, I need to make space in my inventory.

[Opens the lid. He's almost about to extend it to Tim but then it occurs to him:]

Think this is gonna attract them in some way?

[Kids love choccy milk.]

...It's not a Christmas tradition to fire guns in the air for you, I take it?

[It happens to be a thing in Serbian culture, but would you believe it from the mouth of a mercenary?]

If you got any suggestions I'm all ears, Pomander kid.

"I know you're trying to be a bitch but that's one of the kindest things I've been told all year, so joke's on you."

Great job, Jake. That'll show her.

"Knowing what I do about your mouth, I reckon we might could go a long time before we start talking poetry."

Dan's so comfortable flirting, and the only hesitation at all comes from the fact that he and Jaskier have to work together after this. Dan's used to hooking up and vanishing, not in sticking around for the aftermath of a romantic encounter, and while he feels like they have a mutual understanding that this is no-commitment fun, there's always the chance that he's misreading how much investment the other party has in the affair.

It isn't easy to be a proactive participant while this tied up, but Dan's flexible, and he manages to tweak his knee to press his thigh against Jaskier's backside to pull him in closer to Dan's torso.

I CRY OVER ROADKILL and I ONLY FEEL LIKE I'M ACTUALLY ALIVE WHEN MY FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT REFLEX IS IN ACTION.

"Do you have any poetry memorized?"

"Because gravity brings things downward." Dan, thankfully, is very good at not showing on his face or in his quiet, grating voice that he thinks Boimler's missing a critical fact so obvious that Dan feels thrown to have to mention it. He's doing his best to be respectful and open-minded as Boimler throws some religious silliness at him.

Really, it's not that different from other dogma about plagues of locusts or speaking in tongues; it requires faith in something that Dan finds just objectively insane. The idea that the Earth's a giant ball held together by some mystical sideways-gravity that also, somehow, tricked everyone into thinking they were standing upright even when they were upside down is ludicrous on its face.

"Do you think that's how it works in this world?" he asks, keeping his skepticism very suppressed.

"No, the Earth is pretty static. The Sun rotates. I'm pretty sure."

Dan figures anything Henry says is probably deeply incorrect, so he isn't about to take anything Henry says to heart.

"Space doesn't have an overall up or down so gravity brings things closer to the ground, wherever that ground is. It's more about attaching things to a surface but a surface is a surface, regardless of the shape it's on."

It takes his brain a little bit to catch up to the question.

"And as far as I can tell, yes. I've looked over everything online about NASA, about space exploration here, tons of available data from radio telescopes, footage of Earth from space, footage from the moon landings... it's all the same as back home."

He goes on, "And back home, where most of the history of space exploration is the same as it is here - the same so far, anyway - I've taken shuttles from the ground to the atmosphere of planets. Lots of times."

He nods.

"I've seen it. When you get high enough up, higher even than Mt. Everest, the view curves. And when you get even higher, even far enough away, it's a sphere. Every planet I've ever been to is a sphere. You can fly right around them and see it out of the viewscreen."

Dan bites down on gravity doesn't go sideways, because he knows better than to argue with faith. Boimler believes the objectively loopy idea that gravity doesn't pull things downwards, and Dan doesn't believe that any amount of logic can penetrate a sincerely-held, spiritual misconception. Boimler's convinced. He's a convert.

But Dan's looked at the horizon and he is well-aware that it's flat. He's been in tall buildings and on boats on the ocean and on vistas in the Rockies, and the horizon has always been flat. It's been one of the few comforting constants wherever Dan's gone, like the sun rising each day. The horizon is always flat.

(He can't wait to gossip about this with Bunny, who will definitely agree with him that the Earth isn't a weird ball with magic powers that pulls things sideways and upside down.)

"Where I'm from, they only pretended to go on the moon. Pretty sure it was a scam to get folks to give their tax dollars to another government money-laundering agency. Nassuh*, I think. It must could be different on your world."

*Dan isn't aware NASA is an acronym. Or what an acronym is. Or what NASA is.

Edited 2024-03-07 00:52 (UTC)

[Boba feels like he's going to burst with fear and frustration. He slams his fists against his thighs twice and tries to get in control of himself.

One deep breath. Two.

He's better than this. This kind of outburst is too childish for a bounty hunter.

Boba gives Tim a suspicious side glance.]

...Who's Kon?

[ Tim doesn't try to intervene and block the strikes on Lucky's thigh, but his eyes watch the physical chastisement with empathy that skirts pity. He knows what what it's like to yank himself back together like that. ]

Kon's my soulmate.

[ The response is so fast. Tim's eyes only start going wide at the rawness of that honesty - why would he say that? It's not an answer for 12 year olds. ]

He's my boyfriend, that is. He's one of the other new myths here.

[ Those corrections he doesn't stumble over. ]

Stacia raises a hand to hide her smile. It doesn't work, the smile is too wide to hide with any discretion.

"I'm not unfamiliar with the 'I guess I'll eat it?' school of thought," she says, fondly recalling her friend Ashfoot and the time he ate a lego on a trip to the mall. "Do Kemonogami regenerate teeth or did you have to go get dental care for that?"

"Apology accepted," Stacia says, a gracious victor accepting an honorable surrender. If he finds himself a compulsion candy, it won't be because of her. And she might even refrain from saying that she told him so.

"My experiences with holiday-themed trickery are that it's generally best to just roll with it," she says. "Tricksters gonna trickster, and letting them get under your skin just encourages them." She tugs gently on her Tim balloon. "This one doesn't bug me too much; I'm secure enough in my choices and who I am to let myself be vulnerable. Of course, it does help that I can turn into a giant monster if someone tries to take advantage of my good nature."

Stacia narrows her eyes at him, then transfers her glare to the ceiling.

"This is entrapment," she protests to the world at large before refocusing on Jake. "How dare you. I have enough annoying men in my life who are also sad wet kittens, I do not need more. Goddamnit."

Stupid empathy. Stupid burning rage about abuse and trauma and injustice. Stupid nurturing tendencies.

It's hard not to see Stacia is smiling behind that hand. Hah, okay...he has to admit there's something kind of funny about what he said. He's not humorless, just a tad cranky.

"They're still chipped. It's not that big of a deal, I got used to it. That was about six thousand years ago."

Garurumon casually reveals he's pretty old. Kemonogami have rather long lifespans!

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XOXO ❅ VALENTINE'S EVENT

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[mild conspiracy theories]

do u ever forget ur own character's age? boba is actually 12 years old

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