open | your baddest behavior

[cozen]

WHO: Alexandrie, Bastien, Byerly, and their captive audience
WHAT: Mandatory etiquette and dance lessons
WHEN: Justinian 15, 9:45
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: See the OOC post and IC announcement for more information! If you didn't sign up, you can still participate in Parts A and D, and just handwave the other two, without needing to sign up or get an assignment. If you want to do B and C, you can find your own dance partner/seating group OOC, or you can sign up now and we'll dole out new assignments if we get enough latecomers to do so. If you signed up and are missing from the lists when you shouldn't be, I'm sorry and please tell me!

disclaimer: event less fancy than pictured

Seating Assignments
— Table One: Gwenaëlle, Iorveth, Matthias, Athessa
— Table Two: Flint, Ilias, Darras, Med Seller, Yngvi
— Table Three: Julius, Thranduil, Anders, Brienne
— Table Four: Benedict, Colin, Valentine, Six, Derrica
— Table Five: Teren, Salvio, Bartimaeus, Osana
— Table Six: Freddie, Petrana, Kain, Merrill, Silver
— Table Seven: Yseult, Cosima, Steve, Inessa
— Table Eight: Sidony, Fifi, Nell, Fingon
— Table Nine: Thor, Nathaniel H., Solas, Skadi

Dance Partners
— Cosima & Nathaniel H.
— Athessa & Anders
— Teren & Flint
— Freddie & Bartimaeus
— Yseult & Darras
— Nell & Julius
— Merrill & Colin
— Skadi & Benedict
— Gwenaëlle & Solas
— Petrana & Salvio
— Osana & the Medicine Seller
— Sidony & Matthias
— Six & Thranduil
— Brienne & Valentine
— Fifi & Steve
— Thor & Fingon
— Ilias & Iorveth

Comments

table one.

[elegiaque]

Iorveth had said he wouldn't attend unless blazed out of his mind, and Gwenaëlle, who doesn't want to be here any more than he does but is slightly more prepared to acknowledge that it isn't a completely stupid fucking idea, had said—fine, and wrestled him into the fine white clothes she'd altered for him months ago when they were still sharing a bed. Including herself, she's dressed three quarters of the table she's sitting at, having both flung a dress at Athessa and then, considerately, made sure she could actually get into it.

(It's not very impressive that she mastered that high, it simply speaks to experience.)

Her own dress is a pretty, gauzy thing that she considers simple; she has, for the occasion, deigned to dig around under the bed for the wooden box where she kept the masques with too much sentimental attachment to sell or otherwise be rid of and produced a delicate moonstone-set thing that fastens into the high tumble of her curls. She certainly looks the part that she's never very skillfully played, but she also looks (for anyone more than glancingly familiar with her) in suspiciously good spirits for having been obliged to attend this.

Cheerfully, “What a fucking shitshow.”

[sulahnan]

If Athessa had been smart--or, more aptly if she'd done any prior planning--she would have pre-gamed the party in the same manner as Iorveth and Gwen. After all, every spare idle moment on scouting missions has been spent collecting elfroot and a specific violet cultivar of blood lotus for a concoction Athessa likes to call purple haze. It's an easy enough task because who is going to question an elf picking plants out of the dirt? Nobody, that's who. They just go about their business and let Athessa do the same, oblivious to the information being gathered alongside those weeds.

But she hadn't done any prior planning. She'd been ready to wander into the party in leggings and a loosely fitting and immodestly cut tunic, barefoot, and dirt-smudged before Gwen had seen fit to fix that particular faux pas before it happened.

So she's sat at the table with high society on one side and Matthias on the other, wearing yards of fabric that look about as hardy as a cracked eggshell and a little bit scared to move for fear of fucking it up.

"You said it," she agrees, adopting an accent fueled by discomfort.

It is, blessedly, not as offensive an approximation of an Orlesian accent as it could be.

[inkindled]

Matthias, who has eaten soup with his hands, is spending his idle thoughts wishing he'd known that the dressing requirement was as important as it seems to be. He would describe Gwenaëlle and Athessa somewhere between elegantly impossible and meringue, but fashionable--and how did Athessa end up looking so good as she does, it's unfair, and he's trying not to look at her--and Iorveth looks bloody good too, well-dressed, like a posh statue of white marble, and Matthias--

Well, he'd once stolen a fine tunic off a corpse on the battlefield, only needed a bit of mending and a wash, then had gotten too frightened of it and buried it behind his tent in the dead of night. So that's where he's starting from. He'd shown up for this well-scrubbed, at least, wearing clean and nearly-fitting clothes (too short at the cuffs, as usual). He's slumped in his chair, the very picture of poor posture, picking at a thread on the gray cote-hardie, which is near enough to a robe to make him feel both secure and insecure.

"I spent half a season eating with pigs once," he says to the table at large, all sullen and Free Marcher, "actual pigs. Not out of the same trough or anything--near enough. I'd go back and do it all over again if it'd get me out of this. What's so amusing about it?"

[aenseidhe]

Wrestled into fine white clothes, yes, but Gwenaelle didn't keep an eye on him long enough, because somewhere between her place and the banquet hall, he managed to equip every last item of weaponry he could manage to toss onto his person, and streaked some warpaint on just for the funsies, because this is his idea of showing up for a fun time at a fancy party.

That, and, Iorveth keeps stealing away for "bathroom breaks", coming back with these fine white clothes reeking of elfroot, because all pre-gaming requires commitment in-game. Does he acknowledge that there is value in this training? Yes. Does he think that he needs to be sitting here playing dress up and dead-eyeing people trying to get him worked up? Absolutely not. It's a damn good thing he's still blazed out of his mind, because there are far too many forks of varying sizes placed in front of him far too many hands he could be stabbing them into, but as he is, with his head in the clouds, the freedom fighter commando is too busy stacking toothpicks into little towers in front of his salad plate to care. Halleloo.

"Agreed. Pigs actually make decent company. They snuggle." And sometimes that's very important when it's fucking cold and you usually live in trees rather than, you know, houses. Look, they're very clean animals, okay, don't hate on pigs, that's all he's saying. Well, that, and: "The last time I willingly attended a function like this, it was from the rafters, and I left after making the banquet table center piece out of the viscount's decapitated head. Are you using that?"

Your dessert fork, Matthias. His toothpick fortress needs more interior support. Or something that would pass for a catapult.

[elegiaque]

“If you decapitate anyone and get blood on either of my dresses, I will take your other fucking eye, Iorveth,” but Gwenaëlle delivers it so placidly she presumably doesn't expect to actually have to make good on this threat. That doesn't mean she wouldn't try, if he got blood on her nice dresses. She's prepared to accept that the fine things she gives him may not stay that way, but she's protective of her own.

Nevermind that her first concern in the event of Iorveth beheading one of their compatriots should probably not be whether or not he makes a mess. She's relatively confident he's not going to, and that it wouldn't be anyone she liked or thought useful, anyway.

“And, for the record, the amusing thing about this is that it's very unlikely anyone is going to die for anything that happens tonight.”

Note that she doesn't say it's definitive they won't. Just unlikely.

[sulahnan]

Athessa leans forward, eyes glittering with interest and fixed on Iorveth.

"What did you use to decapitate him? Did you have to hack at it a lot, or was it easy?" She may have her own fair share of fighting experience, but most of it is of the non-lethal variety once you get out of the realm of animals and hunting. And even when thinking of the exceptions to that rule, she can't think of a time she's ever spent the time to behead someone. Stabbing, yes. Slicing, slashing, kicking off of high places, sure. She even somehow managed to divert a man's sword back into his own belly once, and jam it further home with a swift knee to the pommel.

"Did you crush the neck bones, or just go between them?" A perfectly reasonable conversation to be having at a pretend society dinner.

[inkindled]

Somewhat bewildered, caught between uncertainty and vague awe, Matthias hands over his fork. He's only half-conscious of doing so. Iorveth and Gwenaëlle are cool, very cool--it's not cool to brag about the murders you've done, that's beyond try-hard, even if it's true--and it's probably true, right, even if the way Gwenaëlle talks to him makes it sound like it won't happen--but then again, who hasn't done something, right, maybe not decapitating someone at a feast but something still, and if we all went around bragging about it no one could get a word in edgewise--but they're cool, so he's still listening.

And watching Athessa, who is very engaged. This is what she's into? All right. Matthias tries to adjust himself in his chair to also look cool. Folds his arms over his chest. Gwenaëlle is looking the blithest of their group, so he does his best to mimic her.

"Wish someone would nearly die, at least," he says, trying to sound blase and disaffected, "just to, you know. Lighten it all up. Decapitation is a bit dramatic, but something smaller. S'ppose we could fake it, maybe."