come_sailaway | JUNE EVENT: CAMP

JUNE EVENT: CAMP

early on June 10th, Friday's morning announcements end with a request for everyone going on the latest excursion to meet her in the atrium. she seems in noticeably better spirits than she had been last time, and she leads them cheerfully to the tender. once they are all aboard, and the door is securely shut, the interior fills with gas, and, perhaps, their last thought before they slip into unconsciousness is "oh shit, not again."

passengers wake up on a rickety old school bus, driving down a dirt road surrounded by woods. what is it that they notice first? that, no matter what they were wearing before, they are now wearing a camp t-shirt and legitimately horrifyingly short shorts? the overstuffed backpack between their knees? the words "take one down and pass it around" dying on their lips? the fact that Friday is absolutely driving the bus?

or, maybe the fact that it's already slowing down, pulling up in front of a massive wooden sign, saying:

CAMP AION

when they get out of the bus, Friday is the one to divide them up into their cabin groups, and she is the one to give the counselors their very official-looking clipboards and whistles. she explains that they are in charge, and that she will be back to pick them up in a week, and... very little else. she responds to nothing outside of whatever is on her unseen little script, and she gets back on the bus shortly after, leaving them there.

welcome to camp. let's make some summer memories!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

By day 5 he's no longer pretending to be a tree in the forest in hopes he gets killed by moss and rust. But he's still not happy about being here, and his disassociation and trauma about these shorts are making his reflexes way less impressive than normal.

So when an arrow comes thwinging across the field and into his leg he just stops and looks at it stupidly. It can't pierce his tungsten exterior so no damage done as it tumbles to the ground. But he's not really processing that right now.

He could pick it up, but that would mean his face is closer to those bright red crocs on his feet, and like hell is he going to do that.

"Sorry, Max," she calls. Honestly it was his fault, he shouldn't be over near the targets, but it's not like she really wanted to shoot the guy.

"Could you give it back? I think I've got it, I should be able to hit the target this time."

"Ah. Certainly."

Easy basic requests, he's got this. He may be at 90% power but he is definitely functioning like he's in power-save mode. He bends down to scoop up the arrow (a nice shiny view for anyone behind him given the shorts), heading over towards Darcy with none of the elegance he previously had. It's hard to walk in shoes like this when the bend in your foot is in a different place than humans.

"Practicing?"

"Thanks," she takes the arrow, "I'm sort of... just feeling it out, you know. Functional archery. I'm starting to work out the biomechanics of it."

She raises the bow again, fiddling for a moment to notch the arrow, and yanking back on the drawstring.

"I think it's just mostly in the shoulders."

Darcy is absolutely not going to hit that target.

He stands slightly behind her on the opposite side of the bow where he's not likely to be hit if she misses.

"I only know one person who's a decent archer, but I do think part of it is understanding the arc and how to aim. Not necessarily your shoulders."

Granted the archer he's speaking of is secretly a magical dragon or something, which is kind of cheating.

"You're aiming too low, the arrow will go in a parabola."

Darcy squints at the target, which up to this point had remained unpunctured by her sports science-babble. Judging by the scatter of her arrows, it probably was an issue with the angle and not how much force she was using. So she angles up higher, and this time manages to actually hit the target. Well off-centre, down to the lower right, but it's still a hit.

"Fuck yeah. Thanks, dude, I owe you one for that."

"You are welcome." He sounds pleased, like he actually might have helped, which is impressive given the state of his processing power right now.

And for the first time he actually looks at Darcy and she looks rough, "Have you been fighting in the past few days?"

Being sleep deprived isn't his first theory.

"I fucking wish I was. But no, it's just been... weirdly, weirdly quiet. It's put me on edge."

Surely they wouldn't go the whole camp without someone getting murdered.

"I hate this fucking camp. There's too much dirt."

"I too was expecting significantly more murder, and less t-shirts with forest graphics." And he also wants more murder. Why isn't he tearing through the forest with a machine gun right now? Why must he suffer?

"That's how I feel about the entire outdoors." He sighs, "But as much as I'd like to stay indoors I've been told to embrace the full camp experience."

He is monotone as can be.

Darcy snorts.

"I was kind of hoping to be fighting for my life against a lake monster about now. Something with like, fifty arms and teeth. I miss getting to fight things."

And then a noise of pained agreement.

"If you want, you can hide out in Cancer cabin. I think everyone else is off doing other things, and if anyone gives you shit for 'not embracing the experience' I can blow my whistle at them until they shut up."

"I hadn't considered a lake monster, but this does seem right for masked serial killers. Though as far as I know none have perished." Though, he hadn't been keeping track. Maybe half the camp is gone and he hasn't even noticed.

"Does that actually work? Blowing a whistle at someone I mean."

"Oh probably not. But it'll annoy the shit out of them. And anyone who's that big into the 'spirit' of the camp will have to respect my authority as a counselor."

Strong is the neck that bears the weight of the whistle.

"It's kind of great, I don't know what I would've done if I'd had to listen to some fucker the whole time I'm here. Probably stolen their whistle."

"My counselor is Fio, and I'm not sure anyone will take the whistle away from her. She seems to be enjoying it." For a child she's taking her duties very seriously. He's never seen someone so small shuffle paperwork with such authority.

"So is this a normal occurrence in your world? Not camping specifically, but this... situation? With counselors and various activities?"

He's aware of camping, and he's aware of cabins and of counselors. But he's never heard of the combination of them being a real thing outside of movies.

"Oh shit, if Fio's your counselor I can't do anything to overrule her authority. She's adorable."

Darcy hadn't noticed her whistle while they were making bracelets, but she also hadn't exactly been looking.

"I have literally no fucking idea. I've never been camping before and I'm pretty sure this is all an American thing."

"I do get the sense that if she wanted to take over, most people would allow it. Fortunately she seems to not be letting the power corrupt her." Though she might make him go on a scavenger hunt, which will test the limits of his patience following a human around.

"Ah, that explains why it's terrible."

"Honestly I kind of want to see what she'd do if power corrupted her. Kids are wild, they come up with weird shit."

If Fio ever crowns herself god-empress, Darcy's first in line to be Captain of her guard.

The comment gets a genuine laugh out of her, "Right? It's fucking terrible. Literally only in America would every step of this be able to happen."

"Do they? I've not interacted with many." Actually only Fio, Emma, and Claudia and they couldn't be more different from each other.

"Leave it to them to take living in the dirt and make it a purposeful adventure and then somehow make it even worse with rules and frivolous traditions. And that is before I remark on the outfits."

"Constantly. One time I had a kid interrupt a fencing lesson to tell me that the class were cows. Because they 'weren't dignified enough to be horses, but they were better than pigs'. I could not work out what the fuck she meant."

Children.

"Ugh- I mean it's bad enough that people want to go fuck around in the woods, but I already nearly got dragged into a fucking sing-along. Don't even get me fucking started on the outfits. They're twee and tacky and horrible. If we ever work out how to defeat the Captain, I'm forcing him to wear shorts these short for a week at sword-point. See how he fucking likes it."

He spends a few cycles also trying to figure out what that could possibly mean, "It may not mean anything, but it does have a certain poetry to it. In a surrealist way."

To him there's nothing dignified about horses, all animals are slightly gross to him, but pigs are definitely the dirtiest in his mind. So while he's not sure about cows, pigs are the lowest. Maybe the kid was onto something.

"Perfect. Force him to sing, wear these terrible outfits, and everyone on the ship gets a turn at being his counselor."

Darcy has no time for poetry or surrealism, and so cannot comment on it.

But she can snort at the idea of forcing the Captain to sing.

"Oh God, please. He wouldn't survive an hour of Stede being his counselor. He'd start crying blood by the third minute. I don't think I could even come up with anything worse than that. Other than maybe seeing how long I could blow a whistle in his ear. He doesn't have lungs, but maybe he has eardrums."

"If the substance inside his head is viscous then certain high pitched noises could disrupt it. Perhaps cause painful reverberations." That might be interesting, he'd never considered sound as a form of torture before, but it wouldn't be a bad idea.

"Has he even spoken to the Gentleman Pirate yet? I can't envision that going well at all."

"Skulduggery didn't say it was viscous, though- fuck, could you imagine? Planting the seeds of his own destruction," she rattles the whistle to indicate to it.

"He must have, the Captain was at a pirate meet and greet that Stede put on and he didn't get chased out. Don't know how it would have gone, though. Apparently not too badly."

She's presuming that inviting the Captain along was a cunning strategy to get him out in the open, and that Stede also actually knows who the Captain is. It's not a great assumption, and one born of loyalty more than an accurate gauge of Stede's ability.

"That seems like something someone overly confident would do, so we can't rule it out. He probably gave us the means to kill him on day one and we just don't know it." A pause as he thinks about what he just said, too bad he tossed his lei overboard.

"How has the pirating gone? I heard there were plans to mutiny?"

"We... haven't done a lot of pirating," she admits, "and if there was any plan for mutiny beyond 'hug the Captain until we die', I haven't heard it yet."

She gives him a look like 'as if I'm going to do that'.

"It's honestly mostly a social club for now. I don't know, maybe when we come up with a better plan we'll start mobilizing."

Though Darcy isn't exactly holding her breath. She likes and respects her Captains, but she can't help but feel like she's been benched. Sure, there's not a lot of stabbing that needs to be done at present, but surely they could find some other use for her.

"For the record, I do not want to participate in the 'hug the Captain until we die' plan." Not that he'd been invited, but he wants that to be known in advance.

"I see. Well at least it's something to do between these excursions. It can be rather monotonous on the ship, but that could be because I don't sleep."

JUNE EVENT: CAMP

CAMP AION

Archery

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