Halloween Party, Creepy But Nowhere Near Abandoned Mansion, Tuesday Night

[deathsmajesty]

After basically being dared to do it by Tony Stark (and putting in six weeks of renovations, bless Hannibal for the contractor), Liliana, dressed as an empress, hair pulled back in a profusion of curls by her angelic headpiece, was ready to throw her first Fandom party. Sure, it was for a holiday she didn't really understand, but she'd heard enough about it to make due: there was supposed to be candy and people were supposed to be in costume. Done. Everything else was just the same as a regular party, right?

Granted, the last party she'd hosted had actually been for a bunch of vampires and that had been seventy years ago on a completely different plane, but bah, details. You had food to eat, music to dance to, dark corners to sneak off to, and either enough witty people or enough alcohol to keep the conversation flowing. Liliana was hoping that there would be plenty of the former showing up, but just in case, she'd made sure to stock plenty of the latter.

Though her newly refurbished ballroom was actually very light and airy, she had done her best to recreate some of the spookiest elements she'd seen in her travels. The dancefloor was covered in about a foot of heavy fog that swirled and eddied with every movement. While most of the chandeliers were shrouded in fabric and false webbing, she personally found the main chandelier was decorated in something she much more unnerving. Black and red candles flickered about the room held by ghostly hands, dripping skulls, and the occasional elegant standing candelabra. One of the few concessions to magic she'd used tonight was to have the candles lit with tongues of false fire, which provided light but no heat. And they glowed blues and greens and purples, which was a nice effect. Red roses were placed upside down in vases, while more questionable arrangements sat in decorative vases. Out of deference to her guests' squeamishness sensibilities, all creepy critters, skeletons, and dead bodies were all cunningly crafted fakes, not a single real bone or drop of blood in the place.

Other than, of course, what her guests brought in with them. And should they leave with fewer of either than they'd come in with, well, that was hardly her fault. Probably.

Arrive and Mingle / Photos / Dark Corners [NFB] / Refreshments / Dance / Gardens / OOC

[Please hold for OCD up! Do the thing!]

Comments

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"Of course, of course," Steven assured her at the request to limit photos to the ballroom. Then he frowned with confusion, because he hadn't been outside yet. "The gardens are only gardens because you haven't taken care of them yet?"

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

"Oh, they're terribly wild and overgrown," Liliana explained. "I haven't gotten anyone in to landscape, yet. There's the remains of a maze, I think, and a broken down greenhouse, all of which I'm declaring atmospheric and intentional."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"I see," Steven said. "Well, perhaps I'll have a look later all the same. It's nice there's a place to get some fresh air if needed. Not that this isn't wonderful but sometimes - sometimes a little quiet can be nice as well. So cheers for that."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

Liliana gestured towards the open doors everyone had come in through. "They're there for whenever you fancy a turn," she said. "There's a lovely little pavilion that's lit up if you'd like a place to rest, and then the full gardens themselves if you'd rather stretch your legs, darling."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"Cheers," Steven said. "And you? Are you doing all right after - all of it?"

Steven knew mainly what Marc had passed along to him and Marc tended to skimp on details for the bottom line of things like "She's alive so she's fine."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

Well, he wasn't wrong. Ish. By this point, there was nothing wrong with her that hadn't already been!

"After all--ah." What did it say that her first thought had been about the past week's events and she had been very close to prattling excitedly on about blighting the Walmart? "I have fully recovered," she said. "The week afterwards was admittedly trying as I am not best pleased with feeling weak or helpless--" Which she'd absolutely been, but best of luck getting her to admit it "--but that passed and I recovered. I spent the last few days flitting about the Multiverse preparing for the party like nothing had ever been wrong."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

See? Marc would argue that this only proved that he summarized things just fine, thank you. Her being alive was the important part anyway, right?

As for the rest, it probably said a great deal about Fandom. On the plus side nothing had come up to get in the way of her having a nice party? (Not to jinx it...)

"That's good," Steven said. "Good to hear you're all better. I could - "

Steven started to say he could see some images of what Liliana had looked like when she'd landed on the beach, but then hesitated when he realized he couldn't say for certain if those images were accurate.

" - imagine how bad it must've been, falling from that height," Steven went with instead, since that felt safer. "Have you some sort of healing that helps? Marc and me, our suits take care of that for us. Dead handy."

Amazingly given that it was Steven, the pun was not intended.

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

"I do, yes, but it's not the kind of healing that comes without consequences," she said calmly. "Black mana is the enemy of both green and white, where the traditional healing magic lies. My best bet is laying in a stash of healing salves and artifacts that give me access to the mana to trigger them when I need them most."

Because otherwise, she was left harvesting the life energy of living beings around her. You know...trees...plants...animals...glowy aliens...

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

Steven nodded along as he listened, because he was trying to learn all about mana and the like. Not that it would ever be knowledge that he used personally, but it was always good to learn things about other people, especially things that mattered to them.

"We've medicine here as well," Steven said. "It's not magic, of course. But if you're talking about salves and the like could be worth looking into for options."

Say if Liliana's homeworld could really use some penicillin for example.

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

Liliana hadn't been back to her homeworld for two hundred years.

"Knife and herb healing," Liliana agreed. "No magic, just skill and the properties of the plants."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"Some say magic is just science that hasn't been figured out yet," Steven said. "Plants were considered magical until people understood how they actually helped with things like healing. Chemical makeup and the like. No real magic there in the end."

Unless you were Nell of course. Then the plants were probably magical regardless.

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

"I would have to first ask how you're defining science," Liliana said. "I mean, magic is magic, what would make it science?"

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"Where I'm from, usually if someone says scientific they mean quantifiable in some way," Steven said. "And magic is more - " Steven made a hand gesture to indicate the concept of vagueness " - unknown. It happens but no one knows why."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

"So magic could still be science if it broke the usual rules of reality, so long as how it had done so was explicable?" Liliana mused.

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"Something like that, yeah," Steven said. "Sort of the idea that magic can be knowable, we just haven't caught up to the ins and outs of it is all. Not yet."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

Liliana considered that. "I mean, I suppose, in that way, all magic would need to be a science," she said eventually. "After all, magic itself needs to follow rules, otherwise it would simply be chaos any time we tried to cast something. Like wild magic, almost, which is chaos, but using it is not unlike trying to get as much order out of it as possible before the chaos reasserts itself." She couldn't help but grin, this was exactly the kind of conversation that she loved. "At its heart, I suppose magic is taking a specific kind of energy and using your will to give it shape and form. But there are so many different rules and methods out there for how one goes about doing that."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

Steven enjoyed this sort of conversation as well. Especially since it was a good distraction from other things best not focused on during a party.

"Right," he said, glad for Liliana's wording. "And when you think about it what's a light bulb if not taking energy and giving it shape and form? Or, er, a candle for that matter? It's just that in my world more people understand how lights and candles work, not as many do spells and the like."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

"Ah, but lights and candles work on the same principles every time, correct?" Liliana said. "And work the same way for everybody. But magic certainly doesn't do so. Even if you took two black-aspected Planeswalkers, we wouldn't cast magic the same way, even though we're using the same mana to do so, our spells would be different, and a white mana user and someone without the spark at all wouldn't be able to do anything at all."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"It does seem that magic's much more complicated," Steven said. "And on our world sort of... secretive? Like we've only found out it exists fairly recently. And I think you have to have some sort of talent for it? Innate ability maybe? I couldn't go up to a Sorcerer Supreme and ask for lessons, for example."

Possibly get recruited to work with a special group with a cool name, but not get magic lessons.

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

"For us, the ability to use magic is innate as well," Liliana explained. "But neither my parents nor my siblings were mages. And being a Planeswalker is...vanishingly unlikely, and there's no genetic component or anything that can be pinned down at all. It doesn't follow any rules or laws or logic."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"How do you find out you're a Planeswalker then?" Steven asked. "I mean - if that's not a personal question."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

"Your first Planeswalk is always accidental," Liliana explained, matter-of-factly. "Usually something quite traumatic happens, most usually a threat to your life, along with the intense desire to get away. And your Planeswalker spark alights, and you tumble through the Blind Eternities, ending up somewhere else." She took a calm sip of her wine. "Of course, that's true of most races now. I believe the ancient dragons Planeswalk as a part of just what they are, but that's speculation."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"So you sort of blink and find yourself somewhere you might not recognize without knowing how you got there?" Steven asked.

Not that he could relate or anything.

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[deathsmajesty]

"A little more than a blink, but yes," Liliana said. "More like an eternity of falling compressed into a single moment, along with all of the panic and fear and horror you were feeling before. But then you're somewhere completely different and hopefully dressed for the weather, though your spark will never let you land somewhere that will actively kill you. One of the other Planeswalker abilities is that you immediately speak whatever languages appear on the plane, so you can always be understood, though things like slang and proper nouns and things for which we have no concepts will still trip us up. Reading, however," she sighed heavily. "Much slower. Hours to days, depending on the alphabet."

Re: (Eventually) Arrive and Mingle

[hasaknightjob]

"Oh that's handy," Steven said, a little envious. "I've woken up with people trying to kill me. The language thing is a bonus as well, isn't it? Shame about the reading though. But if you enjoy translation maybe it's not so bad?"