aterat | It's a Watts party! (Just don't tell him)

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It's a Watts party! (Just don't tell him)

Who; Aerith + YOU
What; Potluck party
Where; Gray building's downstairs common room
When; Sunday June 26th; after 4pm
Warnings; None

Aerith co-opted the common room of the gray building starting on Saturday when she began the process of decoration. The most important part of any decoration (especially for Watts) was the flowers and Aerith had put together a few center pieces for tables. Each flower that she'd chosen had symbolized friendship in some way and they were set up in the center of small tables that had been brought inside. Of course she wasn't the one that moved those tables, she had a trust bodyguard for things like that, but she did the decorating!

And the cooking! The main attraction was a pretzel bar in the center of the room. Please, thank Cloud for bringing it in and Jacob for making the pretzel rack at Aerith's request. The soft pretzels were premade and there were plenty for everyone who may come through to have several (if not more). In addition to that there were also several dipping sauces to choose from including cheese, caramel, cinnamon sugar, honey mustard, and a spicy ginger sauce with chili flakes (eat at your own risk).

A table next to it had Materia Xiaolongbao. Yellow is crab flavor, black is soybean, blue is pork, green is cilantro, and red is spicy shrimp. Next to those are tiny moogle sweet bean buns. They fit in the palm of your hand but some of the moogles look...a lot better than others. She did her best!

There was another table with a few drinks set up for people to grab including a materia bomb cocktail with a bit of alcohol and different flavored materia ice (peach, strawberry, and blueberry) and bright green bubble tea with pop bubbles in the bottom. The green tea is flavored like something very different than one might expect it to be, it's a bit bit bitter and yet also a bit sharp, almost biting. It's meant to be the flavor of wind, whatever that's supposed to be. The pop bubbles are extremely sour and explode in the mouth with the sourness. The drink is also somehow fizzy, don't ask how.

A third table was empty save for the friendship bouquet at it's center. There was a little handwritten note on the table saying:

Leave your dishes here! Complete with a heart.

Aerith herself can be found wandering around and paying close attention to the drink table, making sure to run back to the kitchen quickly to grab more drinks if they run low.

OOC: Feel free to use this log as an open thing for anyone to mingle and get to know each other. Characters are welcome even if they didn't bring a dish themselves, but the more dishes the better! Anyone is welcome to come even if they didn't know she was throwing this party, it'd be pretty obvious that there was something going on in the Gray Building and she'll be leaving the door open with a small table that has a friendship flower bouquet on it. Please have some fun!

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Mono carefully dragged another chair over next to the one Luna was sitting on before pulling himself up to sit on it next to her. Reading over the paper carefully, the boy had to shake his head a little. “No, I dunno how to make food and stuff. I helped Ignis bring the stuff he made from home, though.” He responded with a tiny shrug of his shoulders. He had liked being able to help with that much, at least. It made it feel like he had at least contributed in his own way to the whole ‘potluck’ thing. Not that he knew why they called it a potluck. It was a funny word.

“Did you bring stuff?” He asked, wondering if that was why she had asked him, and what she might have brought if she had. Mono would undoubtedly be quite impressed when he found out that all the baked breads on the table next to them had been made by her.

Luna bobbed her head in an excited nod before rising from her seat and grabbing Mono's hand to pull him back towards the table of food. She'd left her notebook on the chair she'd been occupying but wasn't worried since Mono was with her.

She pointed to the fruit bread, the sweet bread, and the turtle-shaped bread before pointing back at her chest. It wasn't a lot but she was very proud of what she had made and she wanted Mono to try it.

Hopefully, he'd like it.

She might have thought it wasn’t a lot, but it certainly was to Mono. The boy’s eyes lit up as he took in the sight. “Wow… You made all this?” He asked, arms spreading wide in a motion to suggest there was quite a lot more than he expected. Before his eyes fell on the turtle bread in particular. “Hey these look just like those turtle things at the park!” He beamed, having taken quite a liking to turtles after going to the park a few times. He liked to watch them sometimes when they were in the water. They seemed more chill than frogs.

Reaching out, he took one to get a better look at it, and to try. “They smell really good, fresh bread stuffs always smells really good though.” He added quickly, before trying to decide where to start eating it. That was the thing about bread that looked like stuff. It was so cute that it was hard to not feel a little bad… But he decided to bite into the side of the ‘shell/body’ part. A bright sound escaping him, “Yum!” The boy mumbled, turning back to her eagerly. “It tastes like it smells! Really good!”

Luna smiled when he noticed the turtle shape and nodded to let him know that he was right!

It had been because of Mono that she'd made the bread in a turtle shape though he might notice that the bread looked less turtle-like when diving further into the basket. Only the top layer of buns looked like turtles but she hadn't had the heart to throw away perfectly tasty bread.

She returned to her seat to grab the pad of paper and wrote for Mono to read. 'I am glad you like them! I'll learn to make more breads and bring them to you!' She wanted to find a place aside from the orphanage to bake the bread but once she does she'll be happy to experiment and make delicious breads for Mono.

'Are there flavors you like?'

Luckily, Mono’s views on her ability to make delicious turtle shaped bread weren’t going to be dampened by a few less turtle-like ones. He was honestly too absorbed in admiring the one he’d taken while he ate it. It was just so cute, and he had never seen anyone make something like it before. Not even Ignis had made something like this! So between that, and the fact that Luna had made it? It was very special in his opinion.

“Really?” He asked quietly as she write down that she was going to learn how to make more for him to try. That was really nice of her, and kind of exciting to think that maybe there were more kinds he hadn’t had! Which, unsurprisingly, tied into her next question that he noticed when he glanced back at the paper as he finished off the turtle bread.

“Um…” He tilted his little head, as only one thing came to mind immediately. “I like stuff with apples?” He started, trying to think if there were other flavours he liked more than others, his shoulders finally shrugging a bit awkwardly. “I’m still kinda figuring out what I like best aside from apples… There wasn’t really a lot of food that wasn’t mostly bad where I came from, so all this kinda stuff is new to me.” And being surrounded by not-rotten food was an experience, and when you had grown up not being picky, you didn’t tend to think much about what you liked best.

'I will make apple bread for you.'

She would make any type of bread that he liked but she'd also be happy to guess and try to create something just for him. Luna wanted to give Mono special things for being such a brave knight and she remembered reading that ladies often gave favors to knights that protected their honor.

She wasn't entirely sure what it meant but bread was like a favor? Right?

'I like making bread.' It was similar to her songs. It was a way for her to express herself when her voice remained silent.

“I didn’t even know there was apple bread!” He responded with a slightly excited, slightly awed tone. Considering how good the turtle bread was, he was sure that apple bread would be really good too. He didn’t know much about the idea of ladies giving favors to knights who protected them, and the child would continue to protect her regardless… She deserved to be protected, and with all the bad things he knew she’d been through, and what he knew could happen to kids like them? He didn’t want to take any chances of losing her like he lost his other friend.

But it was also nice to learn about what Luna liked to do. It was so different from what Six liked to do, after all… Or, well… he supposed he and Six both didn’t really know what they liked to do, so much as what they had to do. At least with Luna and a few other people around, he was starting to figure those things out.

He nodded finally at her explanation. “You’re really good at it! I don’t think I ever saw bead shaped like animals before, either.” And he couldn’t help but tilt his head slightly, as the subject of what she liked to do had him curious. “What other kinda stuff do you like to do, Luna?” Maybe he could make sure they could do stuff like that, since he didn’t know how to bake or play music… Because he was pretty sure that jumping on an oversized piano did not count as playing music.

The great thing about bread was that you could put anything in it. It didn't matter if it was sweet or savory, all the flavors worked and even if the texture sometimes didn't turn out right it always tasted amazing.

Luna settled back into her seat with her note pad on her lap. Mono's question was curious. She learned how to play music, dance and paint because she had too. It was expected of her from a young age and some noble children started even younger than Sole and Luna had. Baking was the first thing she did because she wanted too.

After thinking about it, Luna began to write. 'I know how to do a lot of things. I do not like them all. I do like to paint and see pretty things in the forest. I want to collect flowers and keep them forever but I don't know how. I think I like reading but it's hard sometimes. It'd rather someone tell me a story.'

She looked up and then added her own question.

'What about you?'

Mono read over what she was writing slowly, perhaps a little more slowly than her since sometimes (as she said) reading was hard. That kind of made sense, though. There was a lot of stuff he did that he didn’t necessarily do because he enjoyed, so much as he had do to it. The problem was, most things Mono did were things he had to do instead of things for fun. So her question, natural as it was to ask it in return, left the boy a little quiet for a moment as he tried to think of an answer… At least one of the things she said was kind of like something he did like now that he was in this world. “I dunno much stuff for fun, I guess… But I kinda like going to the park and forest to look at the neat stuff that lives there? Like watching the frogs and little fishes in the ponds.” At a distance, of course, not wanting to disturb them since he could never be sure if his presence would be upsetting for them in some way. Also, the boy tended to avoid birds, like ravens and crows, because he had some bad experiences with them. “I like climbing too, even if that’s more something I gotta do. It’s more fun now that I’m better at it sometimes.”

Rubbing some crumbs off his cheeks while he tried to think of other things that hopefully didn’t sound weird, Mono remembered another thing he had discovered here. “Someone taught me to play some games and stuff kids play here a while back? Like hopscotch.” Which wasn’t as scary in this world as it was in his, since apparently the porcelain bullies were playing that game wrong.

Luna listened politely watching Mono's features while listening to his words. It bothered her that he didn't know exactly what he liked but perhaps that was common. Children were young and learning, they had to try many things to find the things they liked the most.

She began to write more before he finished pausing at the end to add more to the script. The writing was neat when she turned it towards Mono to read but the last few lines were smaller and stuffed onto the page as an after thought.

'Let's try thing together. We can both find things that we like!'

'What is hopscotch? Can you teach me these games?'

Mono would be lying if he were to say that he wasn’t a little nervous about what the princess might think of his lack of of an answer compared to the others that some might give. He knew it was pretty weird, after all… But as she began writing out her response, his eyes lit up with relief. “Really? That would be great. I bet there’s lots of stuff that we could find to do.” It might be both fun and easier to learn what kind of things that they could do for fun if they worked together as a team instead of him continuing to wander around awkwardly, stumbling from one possible thing to the next!

The smaller script that followed got the boy’s attention pretty quickly, though. “Hopscotch is a fun game! At least it’s fun how they do it here. You draw these boxes on the ground with numbers in them… Like a path! And then you throw a rock and hop on each square up to the one your rock lands on. I could show you how to play it. Someone else here taught me the first year I was here.”

Luna grinned and nodded in response to Mono's question. She didn't know if it required a respond but she wanted to assure him that what she had written was true.

It was so easy not to believe in words but she was ready to show him that they could do this together. There was no reason for either of them to be alone. They could try all sorts of things and maybe even find more activities in the process. Even singular activities were more fun with company, there were many times that Luna had watched her brother learn to use a sword and enjoyed that time with him.

'Is it drawn on paper? How do you hop on them?'

She was very interested and wanted to learn to play.

Well, it definitely made the boy feel better to have the reassurance from his friend. And as she continued writing, asking her questions, he smiled a little more genuinely as the anxiety over not knowing a lot of stuff about fun settled. “You draw it on the ground. I usually find a stick to draw it in the dirt at the park. Then I saw some kids draw it on the sidewalks with chalk sometimes, too. But I can show you next time we go to the park!” Which was kind of an exciting idea. He hadn’t really played it much since the person who taught him left this world. It was way more fun when you had a friend, after all, so it hadn’t really made sense to play it alone.

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It's a Watts party! (Just don't tell him)

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