exsiliumlogs | [OPEN] BABES IN TOYLAND

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[OPEN] BABES IN TOYLAND

Date & Time: December 20th, 2013
Location: New York City!!!
Characters: HOLIDAY SHOPPERS. Please note that with mod approval, any character is allowed to have joined the mob in front of the transporter, regardless of whether they responded to the network post advertising this event.
Summary: In a bid to conserve energy, over a dozen transports do all of their Christmas shopping at once. I hope you brought money!
Warnings: None for now!

All the transports are dropped into New York at 6:00, simultaneously but scattered. Coding the drop points for this mission was hell.

It turns out that the weather is actually fairly mild on this date; there is snow neither in the air nor in the ground. That isn't to say there's nothing of visual interest: All the lights of the city are on at this hour.

The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was lit back on December 4th.

Shop until you drop, Transports.

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6:05 - closed to Stephanie Brown

Here Kanaya is in the past; as common in Exsilium, she's holographically disguised as a hornless, fangless, non-glowing girl, with winter wear. A street vendor's scarf catches her eye first; she pulls out her wallet and approaches him. An argument breaks out, however. Apparently her yen are not the dollars specified on the sign of price.

7:30

The time has come to shop and Kanaya is right in the thick of it. She has a list which she sometimes pulls out her tablet to check. For the most part her navigation of the aisle's is mechanical, her gifts having been decided far in advance.

Sometimes, however, she stops and stares for several minutes at a time before making her selection, most notably in winterwear.

10:30

She's done it. She has shopped and now she has dropped. Here she is beside her bounty with an almost post-coital expression, letting snow accumulate in her hair with holographically inexplicable holes where her horns are and not even caring. A dozen boxes of various sizes (though only two are larger than a sheet of paper) lie on the concrete besides her along with half again as many bags.

[Steph has four things to do: buy Christmas presents, buy herself an outfit for the Borgia party, buy cookie supplies, and get her tattoo finished. The first two things are prioritized, so she spends most of her time in malls or in the stores lining the streets, slowly gaining more and more shopping bags.

The dress for herself ends up coming from the Ted Baker store on Fifth Avenue, after she spends way too much time trying on different dresses. Most of the presents come from LUSH, a few from Best Buy, and the rest from clothing or department stores. Later in the evening she picks up all the ingredients for the cookie baking at the end of the month, even if grocery shopping isn't half as fun as everything else.

It's more fun than sitting in a tattoo parlour, getting the bats on the nape of her neck finshed, although the end product of that is more than worth the pain.

Even later in the evening, she finds a spot near the tree, having acquired a gingerbread coffee with whipped cream on top, and just watches the crowd. Saul is with her for most of that part, but occasionally one of them wanders off to investigate something, leaving the other alone. Sometimes it's nice to feel like she's disppearing into the crowd, after the stress of the last few months.

At least the purple in the lower half of her hair makes her easy to spot in a crowd for people who know what they're looking for, and it seems like she's permanently attached to a cup of coffee.

She just misses Starbucks, okay?]

[Peter Parker isn't here because it's Christmas. That is a big part of it, but there's a nagging part of his brain that knows that Christmas isn't really Christmas without Aunt May and Gwen pushing him around and telling him his hair looks bad or wondering how he manages to convince them to let him wear oversized T-shirts because he's convinced he'll grow into them. That's the bittersweet part of ending up here, because as much as he wants to take a subway train down to Forest Hills ... the reality of it is that he'll lose all of his day looking for someone who doesn't exist. (It's too long of a trip, and Forest Hills, home it may be, isn't exactly that exciting to look at.)

The other downside to New York (on a list of downsides) is the lack of being able to swing around. Peter figures he could get away with it, but he knows the dangers of doing so. He can't go around talking about how this transport business is dangerous and just contradict himself. So he left the webs and the Spider-Get Up at home, knowing that he can't tempt himself. He has really terrible impulse control sometimes. Really terrible.

No Swinging Allowed leaves Peter just walking. He avoids Time Square at first (because he knows New York, and he knows he'll just regret it, no amount of homesickness can make him want to wander in there), and just walks around midtown, stopping by the Christmas tree, hitting a Starbucks and drinking a peppermint mocha, and generally circling and doing the same rounds repeatedly. He even wanders down inside of Rockefeller toward the subway entrances at one point, but lacking a Metro card (or desire to waste money on one) he doesn't go inside. He just listens to the sound of the trains.

Either way, he stops and immerses himself ... a lot. It's unlike Peter to play tourist, but he's allowed to, or so he tells himself. This is home. This is home, and really, that's what matters.]

[Who doesn't miss Starbucks? Peter's on his second peppermint mocha when he spots Stephanie in the crowd. He doesn't exactly know her that well, but they're here, and he's afraid of disrupting this place too much with his presence. (Which, for what it's worth, is an excuse and code for "he's too socially awkward to chat up strangers unless he's wearing his Spider-Man mask." It's just how he works.)]

Hey, having fun? [It's asked after he trots up to her and comes to stand alongside her. Peter, for his part, looks pretty cheerful. He can't really help it.]

[She turns when someone addresses her, recognizing him straight away and giving a bright smile, which probably answers his question.]

I am, yeah. [It's a chance to forget about all the bullshit or a little while, about Jesse and Dick and the war.] You look like you're enjoying yourself.

Well, New York helps. It's infectious here, or maybe I'm just glad to be home.

[It's a home, and he knows he has to be careful. Anything like "I never thought I'd see it again" might seem strange, and he's not interested in the very involved story he'll have to make up that doesn't involve his name on a gravestone. No, he's not interested in that.]

I haven't done much exactly, but it's good.

Going home makes things easier.

[There's something bittersweet in her smile, because unlike a lot of the Transports from Earth, she can't just go into the past and visit Gotham. The VR simulation she made helps, but it's not the real thing.

She doesn't let it bother her, though, just forces her smile a little brighter and holds up the bags in her hands.]

I've probably done enough shopping for about five people, so don't worry about not having done much.

Abbey's just content to look around and window shop, for the most part. This is her first time in New York City (or "New Volt," as monsters call it), and she's determined to make the most of it.

Unfortunately, she's very uncomfortable by all the stares and comments she's been receiving. After all, it isn't every day that humans see a tall, blue-skinned girl going through store aisles. She's growing a little bit weary of people asking if she needs medical help. She probably won't be staying in this store for much longer.

At present, she is holding up a purple pashmina to her neck and examining herself in front of a mirror. Hmm, not bad at all!

[a; cut bitches, get riches]

[The first order of business is money. This is not a particularly challenging business. Christopher may not have cash, but he has two pistolswords and an understanding of criminal underworlds. Half an hour and seventeen dead mafiosi later, you may notice Christopher walking out of a well-known mob HQ with dozens of credit cards in his pockets and blood on his weapons.

Before you speak to him, give him just a second to lick some blood off his blades. Yes, he is doing this right in the middle of a busy New York street. He'd worry about a passerby noticing what he's doing and freaking out or calling the cops, but he has been to New York before, and he knows: New Yorkers don't even care.]

[b; they sentenced me to twenty years of boredom]

[After checking to see if the Alveare is around (silly, when things like Mist Wall are absent, but he could always hope that Nebula had been crushed in the last eighty years and the Martillos were still running) Christopher starts his shopping spree.

A large city, with the promise that they'll be gone by the end of the day? This is how Christopher likes to approach a city.

So he shops with a different stolen credit card at each store, tossing it in the trash on his way out. The number of gifts he starts piling up, and at a certain point, he feels the need to go all GTA and steal a car just so he can have a place to put his purchases. If you come across him stealing a car, you probably can't deter him. But hey, he'll totally offer you a ride!]

Edited 2013-12-25 15:00 (UTC)

Though still holographically human, Kanaya is drawn to people she's pretty sure are members of her party, and she's got to find a scarf after antagonizing the street vendor with anachronistic money. Her reflection does not show up in the mirror, when she stands near Abbey.

"I think that works really well as an accent color on you."

[Heath loves being back in modern day where everything makes sense to him. He's beaming as he wanders around the city, occasionally vanishing into a store to pick up a present to add to the many bags he's already carrying.

He still hasn't got the most important present yet, something for Abbey. He doesn't know WHAT to get for her, only that it has to be PERFECT. And so, at some point in the day, he's wandering around Macy's looking as lost and confused as you would expect a teenage boy trying to shop for a teenage girl would look.

Help a guy out?]

[Facilier welcomed the lack of snow, and the opportunity to at least be in a city he recognises by name and pictures. He's never stepped foot out of New Orleans before the Transport pad picked him up, much less be in a city over nine decades past his own point in time. He figures this place out quickly enough, though. At their beating heart, most cities are the same, full of corrupt people living in various stages of denial over their corruption, where the rich live well and the poor are lucky to live at all. Same story, different book.

He's been wandering around, conning a few good people out of their hard earned money (dollar bills have become smaller, he's noted) when he turns a corner to see his good buddy Christopher exiting what looks to be a murder scene.]

Do ya'll even know where that's been?

[He's not showing a level of concern he probably should with a guy licking fresh blood off a knife, but he's fairly certain Christopher's starting to see through his carefully constructed persona, so he allows himself a little more freedom than usual]

Abbey isn't caught off guard when she sees clothes without a body showing up beside her in the mirror. She turns to face Kanaya and gives the vampire a small smile.

"Thank you, Kanaya." She puts the scarf off on and admires how it looks against her skin. "Is nice seeing monsters for once."

[Christopher grins at Facilier, his strange teeth standing out even more in the night.] Like all atoms, these have been in the stars. It feels like I consume the universe! Or at least these men's universes. Let's take a moment to mourn the disappearances of the universes I've put out.

[After getting rid of the excess blood with a practice shake of his weapons, they seem to disappear. He bows to Facilier.] Isn't it marvellous to be back in the land of the free?

"Same." She might not identify as strongly with the label as Heath and Abbey do - there's a tiny flinch in her face at the term so often used by normies as an insult. Still her feeling of solidarity is pretty strong. She points at the top of her head, where her horns would be. "I have to do a lot of custom tailoring when it comes to headwear. Let me know if you ever get any friends who need that."

[Johnny isn't much for Christmas, but he can't resist going to his home town only the year after he left it. He's just asking to get homesick. He had come to be tour guide for everyone, but they ended up scattered. In a city this big, finding his fellow Transports will be tough, but he'll be looking out for you. Otherwise, you might spot him in some stores or window shopping, looking over what seems to be high end men's winter clothes and thinking.

You may also find him sitting on a bench somewhere with a coffee in one hand and his spoils in a bad in the other, watching the world go by. Yeah, maybe he gets a little homesick sometimes. This is why he was avoiding coming to this time while making all of his supply runs.]

A
[ Not having much to spend is part of what speeds things along, and what he does have won’t go far in New York City. He’s done with that part in less than an hour.

And really that’s okay. As much as he’d wanted to do this, as much as he wants to make Christmas as nice as he can for the people who’ve made this place sometimes almost okay for him this trip is about something else too. He hasn’t been away from Exsilium in what feels like years. He hasn’t seen skyscrapers, touched gravel, felt real wind in his hair in forever.

Not being seen is part of the deal of being here. But it’s dark now, which makes it even easier to slip the mask out from his pocket and slip it on behind his ears. The rest of his costume is on under his clothes and that makes it even easier, stowing the civvies like old castoffs behind a dumpster. It feels good.

He’ll only take an hour, darting over some of the lower rooftops and before he scales one of the bigger skyscrapers, keeping his body angled into the shadows before he leaps off and swings down straight into the cold wind. Everything’s better from up here. The lights, the Rockefellar tree, even the noise of the cars and the faint carols drifting up from below.

It’s not quite home, but for now it’s close enough. ]

B
[ Or he’s used his last few dollars to pay his way onto an ice rink outside of a mall. The rented skates are new and clean and his bags are outside with his name stapled to the top (all wrapped together and shoved inside a nondescript paper sack). Some kids younger than he is are gathering around to watch while he practices his turns like they’re really great instead of just okay, so he takes a few more minutes to show them how to move just so like he’s really been doing it for years instead of just a few weeks. Then he’s breaking off to go darting through the cluster of adults, fast enough to be daring but not quite enough to knock anybody off their feet. It’s fun. ]

C
[ Already he’s dragging his feet a little on the way back, so much so he’s stalled in front of a coffee shop, eying up the sign advertising one of the sugary holiday drinks Alfred never lets him have back home. It’s one of those things that would make him feel just a little rebellious, and thinking about rebelling against Alfred at Christmas time makes his heart hurt, but it’s been almost a year after all. He’s a teenager now. Maybe Alfred would even let him have it if he asked nicely.

But still he’s waiting, hands tucked in his pockets while he studies the sign like it holds all the answers he’s looking for. ]

Edited 2013-12-26 04:57 (UTC)

Yeah, it certainly does. I'd rather be up there—[He points up.]—but they're absent a Spider-Man, probably, so that'd be strange. [He doesn't even bother to hush his voice, because he doubts anyone is listening in, and he's still trying to figure out where he's going with the whole Spider-Man thing. Going from zombies to mutiny to politics really involves a lot less punching on the normal transition of things, and he's aware of that.]

And shopping is good. I mean, you could be shopping upstate somewhere. That wouldn't be doing much.

Abbey will take a second to consider the offer. Which one of her friends might be in need of such headwear? She gives a very short laugh. "Ha. Maybe Deuce, if you are designing for boy monsters."

She makes mulling-it-over motions with her closed mouth, trying to imagine the meaning the name might have. Maybe he has double the appendages, like

Sollux? After a moment, amenably, "Yeah, I'm an equal opportunity seamstress."

[Jaime doesn't exactly look comfortable milling around Macy's and trying to figure out Christmas presents, but Heath stands out nevertheless. They've never spoken before, but he's seen the guy on the network here and there, and it's something of a relief to see another Transport trying to figure out tackling all of their Christmas shopping on one day during the busiest time of the year.

He catches his eye, a sympathetic cast to his features, and says,] Man, you look more lost than I do.

[Jaime probably shouldn't even be in the same area as Steph is while she's trying on dresses, but to be fair, he doesn't actually know where he is. At all. He knew he was in the right area for a little while, because he got a bunch of his shopping done, but he made a wrong turn somewhere down the line.

But he's got a tiny cup of tea from a place giving out free samples - it tastes moderately of flowers and he doesn't actually look like he's enjoying it all that much but hey, free - and he's happy enough to just be walking on an actual street. When he sees Steph through the window, he can't help but poke his head in to say hello.]

Hey, Steph! [he says, waving at her.] The dress looks nice!

[Is it actually a nice dress? He has no idea. He does not possess the skill of discerning taste. It is a dress, and it is on a pretty girl, therefore it is a nice dress.]

[Steph turns at the sound of her name, smiling when she sees Jaime.]

Thanks, Jaime. [She does a little twirl, as if to show off the dress, but her expression is playful. She doesn't expect a teenage boy to care much about dresses.] What're you doing in this part of town?

[She doubts he's buying expensive clothes for anyone for Christmas.]

[Christopher you are legitimately the craziest person he's ever met] ...I'm sure it's truly sad.

It's...something. Ain't quite the America I'm used to. [What with the billboards with moving pictures on them and everything WHAT IS UP WITH THAT?]

[As it should be.

But Christopher chuckles and shakes his head.] Nonsense. You have to focus on the feeling of it. Don't you sense that constant soul? Doesn't its constancy comfort you? This city rotted by the rain remains rotten in cold weather.

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[OPEN] BABES IN TOYLAND

Kanaya...

steph | open

Peter | OPEN

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7:30

Christopher | Open

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Heath | Open

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Johnny | OTA

Dick | open

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