Log:Spring Court Meeting: January 2018

Spring Court Meeting: January 2018
"Do you pole dance?"
Participants Lolly, Reggie, Czcibor, Etsy, Calm, Amber, Petra, Isolde	2018.01.15 The Spring Court meets for January.
Location The English Garden
The Spring meeting for January was being held at the English Garden so that they didn't have to track through the Hedge with the recent goings on. Not to mention that some of the Springs haven't gotten to visit this place. The interior is comfortably warm and there's been a fire built inside for those that want to warm themselves. There's been a spread of food set out on the dining table and drinks to go along with it. Isolde is off to the side in the kitchen putting some tupperware up for leftovers for those that are staying there in the upstairs, "Come on in and have a seat if you like. Get comfy." the Bright One smiles as people come in. VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRM The sound of a rather impressive engine roars up outside, preceding the appearance of one (1) mermaid, carried in the arms of one (1) dashing... well, waddling... otter. Apparently Etsy's feet are hurting her today, because the leather-jacket-clad Golden Standard has a tiny, delicate floof in his arms. Her hedgespun dress, looking rather like waves crashing over her body, spills over his arms, and her feet -- fins -- feet -- peek out from underneath the long hemline. "Hellos hellos hellos," Etsy greets, her arms looped around Reggie's scarf-clad neck. Of course he's got an aviator's scarf to go with his bomber jacket. Of course. Lolly looks at you. Sometimes Calm tries to put at least a little bit of a lid on her weirdness (or Wyrdness), but when she's coming to a Spring meeting it's not one of those occasions. That's why it is that when she sweeps in she looks like a void wrapped in blood-red cloth, and the way that it's pinned in place around her face and left to fall loose to her knees makes her look like some kind of celestial spectre. She turns her head to look around after entering, then fixes her nebulae eyes on Isolde and smiles a smile that's not visible in the emptiness of her face except in profile. "Thank you for the warm welcome," she says in an otherworldly voice. "What a lovely place you have here. I'm Calm." Having introduced herself to the hostess she turns toward her motley and says, "ah, good. I hoped more of us would be here. Regina did say she wasn't going to be able to make it, though. Something about a cookoff she couldn't miss." It takes a little while after Czcibor's parked his jeep before he makes it inside. In fact, Petra probably makes it in first. When the Captain finally does, it's with a green-and-white-haired girl in tow, an exasperated look, and a lot of glitter which he is steadfastly ignoring and which is legit all over the inside of his jeep now. "Hi," he calls out. "This is Lolly." He can be heard hissing under his breath, "There is no twelve-step program for it, no." Petra slips in quietly just before Czcibor and Lolly do, making little noise and hanging back once she's come in to wait for the others. Some Springs are more gregarious than others, and Petra is the quiet sort who tends to prefer to let other people do the talking. Once Czcibor and Lolly catch up, though, and Czcibor starts with introductions, she adds, "I'm Petra. Hello." Very wordy. The rumble of Amber's own vehicle as it pulls up outside is much closer to deep-throated purr than impressive roar, which is probably just the way she likes it. She's wrapped in a dark grey coat as she steps inside, but immediately works on shrugging out of it as she looks around with a slow smile. "I was worried people were going to hide from all the cold, here. Glad to see I was wrong." Coat now draped over one of her own arms, she heads for the table with drinks, though she's openly curious as she studies the faces she doesn't immediately recognize. Reggie deposits Etsy into a seat carefully, mindful of her dress and thereby her modesty. He tosses his scarf back over his shoulder, all devil may care, and promptly deposits his hands onto his hips to survey the place with a critical eye. He nods his head in approval with what he sees, and then offers the room a cheerful introduction, "Reginald H. S. Danger, at your service. This is my fiancee, Esther Swift." His smile is broad, geaming, and accompanied by a quiet but audible *ting*. In Petra's case it's also worth noting a couple of things about her voice: it's whispery, though surprisingly easy to hear even at a distance, and she has a German accent -- Austrian for people who are really good with accents. Reggie's is very, very British in contrast. Lolly is, easily, the most human person in the room, and while Etsy is a white-skinned lily, Lolly is quite distinctly a pale green one, with green-rooted white hair and a scalp inconveniently prone toward sprouting sweetly-scented sprays of lily of the valley. Hearing Czcibor, the more glitter-prone 'Captain' mutters a not-quiet-enough, spluttered, scaredy-cat, "W-well there should be!" and all but hides behind the taller tin man while shily watching the strangers, clothing buried beneath a fluffy down jacket beyond the fact that she is wearing black leggings and boots. Her own accent has a hint of Japanese. "Excepting I am called an Etsy because is an Esther Buckinghams of Autumns, and long ago times someone called me an Etsy and it did stick. Myselfs and a Calms and a Reginas are of an Adventure Time! motley, does have an exclamation point is very importants." Etsy fiddles with her dress just a bit, waves crashing down over her lap. And indeed, she does have a ring on the second knuckle of her left ring finger, though it's plain gold. Apparently she hasn't been taken shopping yet for a stone large enough to club an ogre with. The water lily -- as opposed to the lily of the valley -- has salt-crusted black hair with water lilies drifting on her black curls like they're resting on nighttime water. She has a Maine accent, though it drifts, having picked up Britishisms here and there. "And--" another sort of hissed 'hey!!' at the Lolly behind him, and then Czcibor straightens up again, standing next to Petra though thank you very much "--I'm Captain Kowal. Though I think I've met everyone here but Danger..." The tin man trails off, then starts laughing like he just got a joke. And maybe he did. But it might just have been one in his nerdy head. "Um -- either way, Isolde, Lolly was interested in meeting other members of Spring, and it's a bit difficult to get hold of more than one of us at a time, so I was hoping it'd be all right..." Obviously he's Polish. AKA 'some kind of Continental or maybe Eastern European or something'. Isolde gives a smile to Reggie and Etsy when they come in, "Hello." she waves. Then Calm is coming in and there's a smile to her as well, "Welcome Calm." she tells her. Then there's a look to the others that come in with Czcibor and there's a smile, "It's good to meet you, Petra and Lolly. We've heard about you." she tells the young woman as she looks to her and gives her a smile. Then there's an Amber coming in and there's a smile to her, "Amber, it's good to see you." she waves to her. She lets everyone get something to drink and snack on before she looks around, "We announced this place, but we haven't had a big party or anything yet. This is one of the Spring Safehouses. There are rooms upstairs where people can stay should they need long term or short term shelter. The gardens in the back cover a lot of the back of the property and there is a large pond for those of our Court that our dwellers of water or want to take a dip when it gets warmer." she smiles. "I do have a few questions that I'd like to ask pertaining to the workshops that are out back and what people would like to see in there." she tells them. Then Isolde is looking to Czcibor and Lolly, "Is she going to be alright?" she offers with a warm smile. Amber beams at Isolde, but waits until she's fixed herself up a drink before she turns and lifts it as if in toast to new arrivals. "Amber Watson, for those I haven't met. It's a pleasure." She takes a quick sip, then turns and saunters her way over toward claiming a seat someplace, draping her coat over the back of it before she settles with a contented little sigh. Calm watches all the new arrivals come in with a gaze that never blinks, just the steady regard of slowly spinning nebulae, and then she says in a warm voice, "it's good to see you again, Lolly. Captain Kowal." She gives him a small nod. Interesting that she seemed to think it important to greet Lolly first, perhaps? "And wonderful to meet all those of you who I haven't met before." She turns toward Isolde after making greetings and the like. "I'm afraid I don't have much talent for the sorts of things people would want to use workshops for. My skills are all in other areas. If there's some way I can help, let me know none the less." Lolly, it must be noted, stays on the side of Czcibor farthest from poor Calm, though she does (poorly) attempt not to be super obvious about it. When Isolde mentions that she has heard about her, the valley-lily straightens, frowns at Czcibor and firmly pokes his arm. At least in his human(ish) guise, that doesn't bruise her finger! "He did?" Worry over being talked about melts into interest (what was talked about!) melts into wariness (with a glance around the room) melts into a blip of hastily suppressed terror, emotion chasing emotion over expressive features. The terror, incidentally, is when Calm greets her. "Um." That's all Calm gets, at least for the first five or so seconds. After that, Lolly manages a hesitant, tentative lift of a hand and an uncurling of fingers in an uncertain wave. "Hi. Amber asked about you. She, um. She said you were a show-stealing bitch and she hoped you had drowned, but I, um, told her that was unkind." Blinkblink. "OH!" Green eyes flick to the Amber present here as she hastily assures, "Not you! One of my strippers." "Nice to meet you all," Petra says in her whispy voice, from where she's standing at Czcibor's side. Her eyes shift around between the various Springs who are present, their pale and muted colors shifting across the spectrum as the angle of the light on them changes. The unbroken pale white of her face flickers a bit as if in alarm, a ripple of a darkness that seems to mirror Calm's own, when the Darkling's gaze falls on the strange void-woman, and then it's gone and she's just horribly pallid again. "Fascinating," she says quietly, under her breath. Probably only Czcibor, maybe Lolly, and anyone with preternaturally sharp hearing is likely to pick it up. Amber blinks once, then lets out a rich, warm laugh, eyes literally flickering as if the flames that light their depths were also dancing in amusement. "It seemed a bit of a harsh assessment for me to have made and then forgotten, but I could have had a great deal more to drink than I expected, I suppose." She pauses, then adds, "Also, I don't /remember/ adding stripping to my resume, either. Maybe I should, though." She gives Lolly another reassuring grin, wiggling green-tinged fingers in her direction. "But we can talk about career changes later." Reggie's eyebrows shoot upwards at the 'bitch' pointed Calm's way, and remain there when he looks towards the woman in question. Then he's looking down at Esther, as though the eyebrow position were some manner of semaphore. "I missed strippers?" Isolde just looks between Lolly, Amber and Calm and then laughs, "Oh goodness. I thought there was going to be hair pulling or something commencing and we don't have any inflatable pools with Jell-O at the moment." she tells them. "So it would have been wasted." she claps her hands. "Boze moj," mutters Czcibor under his breath, reaching up to rub at the poked spot on his arm, then glowering at Lolly. "I told the Greenies why I had a glitter problem, and that you'd been healing your girls, since it's a nice thing for you to do for them. That's all." He glances quick, sidelong, at Petra's 'fascinating', and tracks it to Calm, then waves cheerily to Calm herself. "Hey, you too." Then his eyebrows lift at the otter in the aviator gear and he spreads his hands. "There are a lot of strippers at the Plank." His attention turns to Isolde and he shrugs sheepishly. "I'm... not... very good at making things." "In all fairness to your Amber, it was a rather accurate assessment," Calm replies as laughter rings in her voice. No, it doesn't seem like she's going to decide to be insulted. "I was being a show-stealing bitch, even if I wasn't doing it intentionally. Feel free to tell her that she's welcome to start a scene about it the next time I'm in there. It would be entertaining to see her try. I promise I wouldn't hurt her." Not that most mortals find it easy to start a scene with Calm. To Reggie she says, "there are always strippers at the Plank. I wonder how much drama I could cause by applying for a job there. Lolly, are you hiring?" With an IMMEDIATELY queasy look at the very thought, Lolly assures Amber, "You do NOT want to drink the grog at my club. You'd just never stop drinking, until your tastebuds burned off or ran away to hide..." The young woman considers Amber's figure as a transparent distraction from grog's medicinal properties, tilts her head (and swats away a spray of flowers when it flops onto her face), then asks a sotto voce, semi-discreet, "How are you with four inch heels, and are you phobic of glitter? Also do you break the fingers of people who grope your, um, assets? 'Cause that would be, um, a bad idea." Raising her voice again and shaking her head at Isolde, her cheeks flush a peculiar green-pink. "I'm sorry, um, ma'am?" The questioning note comes on the honourific, uncertain in its use. "I didn't mean to--" Waaaaaaaiiit a minute. Hold the phone. "Meep." Goggling at Calm with wide eyes, shocked, the barely twenty-something 'Captain' promptly claps her hands over her face and hunches down, shoulders shaking. Is she crying...? Thankfully, no. This relieving fact is made evident when her silent laughter grows strong enough for her to rock forward so hard she outright loses her balance and has to make a hasty grab at SOMEone for support. Likely Czcibor, given propinquity. "Oh, oh yes, you'd scare the whey out of me, but the girls, I just-- I'm imagining the looks on their faces if--" She dissolves into giggles. "You'd be even better at it than HE was!!" 'He' being Czcibor, from the look she tosses his way. Isolde's eyebrow wings up as the conversation takes a left turn into a junction she wasn't sure it was going to go into. She pours herself a scotch and sits down at the bar, "Well now. Does Captain Kowal pole dance when he's not in the hedge? Inquiring minds MUST know." she states like Rita Skeeter from the Quibbler. Then there's a look to Calm and a laugh, "Hey, if you get a job I'm totally coming over and sitting in back to see how pissed off they get. We could invite the Summers over for free Glamour buffet as well." she muses. "Calm is nakeds all the times at the house," points out Etsy, as if this is the important part of what Reggie may or may not have missed. "But I am the important nakeds." She wiggles her fingers at Amber in greeting, as if she'd just now realized that the succubus is here. Reggie is pretty distracting, as is Calm, let's be honest. "Well," Etsy opines, "Every dance of Captain's is a Pole dance!" Amber positively grins, and though her teeth aren't /actually/ sharp, they're white enough against the molten darkness of her skin to somehow imply a certain...edge. "Fantastic, and not at all. And now I'm intrigued, but...we can talk more later, when we're not derailing the meeting." She winks, then turns toward Isolde with an entirely too-innocent grin. "Sadly, any creating I do is of the wrong scale for a workshop as well, so...I don't have much in the way of practical I-would-use-them suggestions either." She catches Etsy's finger-wiggle then, her grin much less 'I'm not doing anything wrong!' as she waves back; given the way everyone sort of tumbled inside almost at once, she seems entirely unbothered by only getting in a proper across-the-room greeting now. Plenty of distractions going on. Woops, nope, there's Petra. Lolly is just starting to lose her balance, and suddenly there's a darkling sliding around Czcibor to gently catch her and help her stay upright. As unassuming as she is, most people who move that quickly, react that quickly, tend to be fairly dangerous in their own right. In this case, she just uses to be kind. There's a reason why her motley keeps her around. She just has a knack for coming to people's rescue, and it's not even the first time she's done so with Lolly. The smile she gives makes her already thin lips almost disapppear. "It's hard to even picture it, but now I want to see it." "Meetings don't have to be stuffy things. Getting together and talking to each other is just as good." Isolde tells Amber with a grin. "This house is a resource for us all. The Workshops will be here if anyone would like to learn to do a trade. Cutting wood, metal work or anything like that. It's a place to start. The kitchen is here if you are hungry. There's rooms upstairs if you are tired and need rest. Use the place it's here for the Court as a whole, whether you are part of the Freehold or not." she states to them. "Also, King Charlie O has some quests going on, so if you've not looked into them, please do and see if you can lend a hand on one. If you can't, don't feel bad about it." she tells them. Amazingly, none of this seems to bother Czcibor -- he even makes fingerguns at Etsy for her comment -- until Petra says she wants to see it. He slow-turns to slow-blink at her. "You probably really don't," he advises. "I mean you already know what I look like with my shirt off." He pauses, then bites his lip, considering his first night in town. "Actually, half of the Lost population of Fort Brunsett knows what I look like with my shirt off, shit." He waves a hand, then, and moves to try and limp as little as possible on his way to deposit himself into a seat (and get glitter on it). "I figure glitter is just part of my life now. Why shouldn't it be part of all of yours, too?" He nods. "Also, if anyone's interested in joining the Greenies, obviously, talk to Isolde; if anyone's interested in joining the Harvestmen, talk to me or Dielle-- Dielle's in charge of them. And there's a library here too, though mostly what it's got in it is medical texts and Star Trek novels, sorry." "I'm imagining the look on their face, yes," Calm replies, still laughing as she speaks. "It seems like it might be quite delicious. Anger, jealousy, maybe a strong desire to stab me with whatever sharp objects might be on hand." A glamour addict, thinking about what she might harvest from a situation like that. No surprise to anybody, most likely. The void sighs almost longingly, just thinking of it. The valley-lily casts Petra a grateful look for the assist, then flushes again and tosses Isolde a vaguely apologetic one. All the looks! "I'm sorry! I, um, I didn't mean to interrupt things." Lolly mimes zipping her lips, then claps a hand over her mouth to make sure it stays that way. She does, however, nod wordlessly to Calm. Oh yes. So much Glamour. "I should probably join the Greenies," Petra says, after finishing helping Lolly not fall on her face. "It's one way that I could help serve the Freehold. Whatever I can do to help its members stay safe, I will." It's a lot of words, considering how little she's said most of the time that she's been here. She'd rather not be drawing attention to herself, but sometimes you just have to volunteer. "I'm afraid conventional responsibilities and me do not mix well," Reggie laments, which rooting around in his jacket for his flask. He unscrews it and takes a quick nip before screwing it closed again and continuing, "I can heal and grow things. I can shoot straight and fly crooked. So I suppose I could technically work for both the Greenies and the Harvestmen, but it all sounds dreadfully boring. I imagine both frown on singular heroics and throwing yourself heedless of danger into the jaws of the enemy, and so on." That's it, folks, Etsy has made her singular joke for the evening. She fingerguns back at Czcibor, grinning broadly in a way she doesn't normally, and in a way that shows those piranha teeth of which she was once so self-conscious. She absently flips her fins the way some people would swing their feet. "Probablies would get a big frowns for doing things like I am not knowing maybe climbing up on aeroplanes to catch a lightnings all by yourselfs and then going on bombings all by selfs with only Billy Rays and not even any healers... " And they're not even married yet. Isolde gives a smile to Lolly, "You don't have to apologize, you're not interrupting anything." she tells her. "That's really all I wanted to touch on with things tonight. Mister Pook was busy elsewhere, but sends his illustrious regards." she tells the group. "As for the Greenies, just come and see me and we'll get you set up Petra." she offers to her. Then there's a smile to Reggie, "We sometimes throw ourselves into danger, but we aren't that dangerous, no." she shakes her head. "The Harvestmen, they might be." she tells him. Then she listens to Etsy talk to Reggie and there's a smile to her. Then she looks around the room, "Another thing to keep in mind for those sworn to the Freehold are Freehold positions, if you are interested in one, get in contact with Reginald Pook to talk to him about that." she states. "Other than that, thank you all for coming out tonight." she states with a smile. "I think that all sounds quite daring and heroic," Calm says with a smile in her voice, even if it's not visible on lips made of nothing but darkness. "Which is often a synonym for stupid and lucky, but it's also fun." Her slender shoulders rise under the draped crimson silk she wears. "Then again, I'm a Vizier, so I'll leave the daring-do to the experts and stick to offering whatever guidance I can give to whoever reigns." "Foolish and lucky, to be certain. But fortune favors the fool, I've found." Reggie takes it all in stride, giving Calm that big bright grin again to make it clear he takes it all as a compliment. "In any case, what I'm driving at is that members of the Sacred Band of the Golden Standard don't tend to gel well in formal groups. I wouldn't want to upset them by constantly being the squeaky wheel. Better to help them when they need it from the outside, than try to work on the inside and make them all miserable." Reggie pats Etsy on the shoulder twice and assures her, "I wore my seatbelt." "Danger's got the right of it," Czcibor says apologetically, "there may be a certain amount of adrenaline involved, but as a team-oriented organization, the Harvestmen do appreciate team efforts. Though you can certainly go off and do dangerous things on your own, so long as you let someone know first in order that we can send out a search party if you don't come back in a reasonable amount of time, but that might also be a style-cramp."