( open ) happy moonsgiving, everyone! (forward dated to 11/15)

[crocodilesmiles]

Date & Time: All Day, November 15th, 3313
Location: Focused centrally on the Moon Base Cafeteria.
Characters: Any and all!
Summary: It's a feast on the moon under the guise of being a new sort of Thanksgiving! Food, drink, merriment, food comas... lend a helping hand, fill a few plates of goodies, and meet friends new and old!
Warnings: None right now. Please PM this account should anything go beyond a "my grandmother is also reading this and that is okay" level of appropriate.
Notes: Tag in action or prose, and please specify a time of day, location, or activity your character is participating in! (Set-up, the feast, clean up, etc.) Feel free to offer multiple prompts, as your heart desires! Also, Collette is asking for people to write something they're thankful for on butchers paper on the wall before getting their first plate of food. This is 100% optional!

In the morning, the setting up begins. It's hard to say what's a morning versus what isn't on the moon, but using the lighting system as a sort of guide, those who offered to help set up the feast or continue on with the cooking will all be there bright and early.

After things are cleaned, the cooking continues on while further set up of plateware and silverware and hard to break glasses are left to those helping hands with a mind for arrangement details. The whole of one section has been converted into a sort of buffet-style lineup, waiting for the dishes to be complete and set at ready. All varieties of the usual dietary fare have been offered, some in greater quantities than others.

Then comes the time where people stopping by or trickling in aren't just turned around or co-opted into assisting; it's feast time, though not before an announcement that each person getting a plate of food must write at least one thing they're thankful for on a large sheet of butcher paper taped up to the wall. There's a variety of colored markers and pens provided, from someone's personal (and eclectic) collection. It's a soft price to pay for free food and plenty of it!

When the feasting has wound down, so begins the clean up. Tired, drunk, well fed, over fed, or simply content, people will be shuffled out or dragged into helping turn the cafeteria back into working, normal form. What decorations were added will need collecting (or stealing), plates and dishes and cooking implements and pots and pans will need washing, and floors a good sweeping and waterless mopping before things are all back in order. Leftovers, if there are any, will need to be placed in sealable containers and put into refrigeration.

And then, blissfully unaware of anything impending on the horizon, to bed, or different haunts, for the night.

Comments

[blondtactician]

At first, Armin simply says, "No." He eats more food, and thinks about the creatures, and thinks about titans and Earth and how very hungry he was as a refugee.

Family is a sore spot too. While he admires his parents' resolve to see the world outside the walls (if that was indeed what they left to do), it made the family house so lonely. While the food shortage might have kept any meal from being quite as opulent as this one, he would have liked to have time around the table like this, perhaps on his recently-passed birthday. Sharing time and food and laughing - all it just seems like such a warm, nice dream.

He's not bitter, though, because he's having a good time at this celebration, even if he doesn't really understand it.

"With the food shortage, and the war, there was a lot we didn't get to do. But this is nice. Thank you for arranging it."

[crocodilesmiles]

She has to swallow before answering. "No problem! You're welcome. Thanks for coming," she says, smiling, a bit of green stuck to one canine. It's the unfortunate consequence of conversing while eating!

Food gets stuck on teeth!

"I felt like we all needed an excuse to do something happy anyway. Or if not happy, then upbeat! We're going stir crazy having to operate out of the moon, I can't wait to get planetside again!"

[blondtactician]

"I also miss feeling the sky over my head," Armin admits reluctantly. Even though he's tried to steel his heart to the reality of this new base, he's just as unaccustomed to it as most everyone else. He'll be happy to be rid of this place and the hollow echo of his friend's laughter in the halls...

Armin clears his throat awkwardly. "Collette, you have a little - you have something in your teeth."

[crocodilesmiles]

"Have you been able to get out on a mission at all?" She knows hers helped, for more than the company and nostalgia. There'd been work involved, but it was easy enough, and she didn't even realize how she'd been falling into better habits about reliability and responsibility over the last year and then some. There wasn't room for slacking off 99% of the time.

Armin's alert has her blink, one hand setting down a fork and coming up to her mouth. "What?" How embarrassing! She laughs a little, asking the obvious question after running her tongue over the front tops of her teeth. "Where?"

Pulling her hand away, she smiles broadly, meant to showcase teeth for the next question: "Is it gone?"

Alas, it still clung to the corner of her canine tooth, smaller than before, but present.

[blondtactician]

"Not yet, Eren and I had been planning on going," Armin says quietly, like the force of his emotion admitting that is actively stifling him, burying him, pushing him so far down he can barely speak. He stares at the plate of food in front of him and really doesn't want any of it any more. No, it's too much.

"There's - there's still a little more, just on the tip there." Armin's voice cracks a little as he tries to keep his mood more in context with the situation.

[crocodilesmiles]

The past tense registers as she runs her tongue over the tooth in question again, feeling what's there. Her expression shifts, blinking her eyes at first, then looking vaguely sad. When she smiles for Armin, in that "here, examine my teeth way," she has a feeling she knows the answer, even if she hasn't been following the comings and goings the last week or so.

"When did he leave?"

[blondtactician]

"It's gone," Armin assures her softly. He's glad he no longer has to look at her, to look at anyone. He has a reputation for being sensitive: his closest friends never criticized it, not ever, but he's a soldier now, he needs to be strong.

"He went missing a few days ago. He wouldn't have gone on a mission without me. Not without telling me."

[crocodilesmiles]

"Thank you," she says, and she tries to look sympathetic without seeming a little sad. People losing people, even in an impermanent sense, isn't easy. She doesn't like seeing friends be down.

"He's back home then. That bites! I mean, I'd kind of liked to have seen him in a turkey coma!" Collette keeps her tone light, setting her fork down with the tines on her plate. "Hey, I'm sorry, Armin. He's your friend." She rests her hand on the table, palm side up, close to Armin. She's getting better about not assuming everyone's okay with being touched, or that it does anything close to reassure people who aren't like her. Making it more of an offer and invitation than an outright intrusion seems to help.

[blondtactician]

"I don't know what's going to happen to him. To either of us, or his sister, or any of our friends. That was easier when I could see his stupid, earnest face all the time."

Armin glances at her hand and sort of wants to take it, but he hardly knows her. If it were Eren or Mikasa, well, they spent plenty of nights in the old warehouse huddled up against each other for warmth, when they lost their homes. A little cuddling was not strange to any of them. But that feels like a lifetime ago.

He really regrets not being close to Eren every moment of the day, now. "My best friend," he clarifies, "We've known each other since we were little. HE and his sister... after they took my grandfather, we were the only family we had. Being brought here, it was the longest time I'd been away from him since we met."

Embarrassed at his own candor, Armin quickly takes a few bites and chews, slow and deliberate.

[crocodilesmiles]

Collette leaves her hand there for now, listening and absorbing what he's said. Her expression changes very little from that open, sympathetic, slightly worried face. She can admit to herself that certainty helps. Uncertainties are the ones that eat you up. Wondering how her brother will be in the aftermath of the war, if he'll ever know how she died. He'd care, she doesn't doubt that at all, but will there be monuments to the fallen in the Yeerk War? Will they believe a bunch of kids from the halls of the children's hospital sacrificed everything in a desperate gamble for the future of Earth?

They better. She believes they have to, though it's so abstract, thinking about the world you'll never see again.

Armin has to worry about the one he will see, about his family there, what will happen to them, how long they'll be safe, when that safety will be brutally ripped away.

"We never get to know the future for sure. I guess here, we can cheat a little, if people come from the same world but further down." It happens every so often, but... "At the same time, that's part of the mystery in living. It's not always nice, but it has hope built right in, because as long as you're alive or moving forward after something, you have a chance. So even if you don't know what's happening with your family, or what will, it won't be happening without you."

It's when you die that you know nothing is going to have a "next," not in the classic manner of thinking. Reincarnation doesn't mean preserving the attachments of one life in the same way, though you may find those souls again somewhere along the chain of lives and existence within the one. "I'm sorry that it feels worse with him gone. it's a lot easier when you have family around you, even -- kind of especially -- here."

Or else you make your own, for a lack of familiarity from home that dwells in your quiet moments when no one needs to know you're blindingly homesick for what you can never have. Collette can't, won't fixate on any of that. Thanksgiving, the idea of giving thanks, is built in so firmly as part of her way of existence that what she feels is the gladness of having any chance at all, meeting new people, making new friends, seeing new things in a world-wide adventure.

Even if it's started with another conscription into war.