Fifth Floor Common Room; Sunday Evening [ 03/18 ].

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

Britta was not on the roof. It was a shocker, to be sure, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she was broke and totally out of both cigarettes and pot. She supposed she could go up and wait for someone and bum a smoke from them, but that seemed just pathetic.

So she was bumming in the common room instead, a bag of baby carrots in her lap and the remote control in her hand, as she flipped through the channels, looking for something interesting to watch. She wasn't expecting to find anything, and her steady commentary supported this fact.

"Crap," she said, changing the channel. "Crap. More crap. Capitalist crap. Ugh, misogynistic crap. Feminist crap. Crap. Crap. Crap."

"Ugh. Where's The Real World?"

One day, Britta might stop expecting it to still be 1997. One day.


[[ open common room is open. duh-doy! ]]

Comments

[willbethenight.livejournal.com]

"Hey, Britta," Bruce said. He was stopping by the common room on his way back to the dorms after a long day working in the cave. He had a functioning rebreather now. He would never have to worry about knockout gas ever again.

... Not that he had to deal with that often.

"TV not cooperating?"

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

Britta grunted a little bit, tempted to just turn the thing off, but then she'd have to actually read a book or something and...well...meh.

"I guess it's too much to ask to want the great mind control box to produce programming that's actually intellectually simulating," she muttered.

Then added, as an afterthought, "Hey, Bruce," with a lingering glance his way because between him and the TV, guess which one was more interesting to look at.

[willbethenight.livejournal.com]

... Mind control box. That was a description he didn't hear often. And that he didn't fully disagree with.

"I usually try to find the first documentary I can and hope for the best," Bruce said. They were almost always about crime, though. "It doesn't work too often, but it's better than a lot of other things you'll find."

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

Britta shrugged a little. "Seemed most of those were on this History channel, but it was all about World War II," she said. "I mean, interesting, sure, but I really don't think Nazis or the Holocaust are something I want to deal with when I've got a raging St. Patrick's Day hangover..."

[willbethenight.livejournal.com]

"Still?" Bruce asked. Since it was evening. "How much did you have to drink?"

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

Britta just kind of looked at Bruce for a moment.

"It's St. Patrick's Day," she reminded him. "It's, like, unpatriotic, or something, if it's not a lot. And that's what I had."

There was a faint wince of pain, and she quickly popped a carrot into her mouth. "A lot."

After a chew or two, she looked back over to Bruce. "Did you do anything exciting?" Was Wayne an Irish name? Probably not, but wasn't that one kid Nathan Irish? If hitching to NYC hadn't been such a good plan, she bet he could have probably partied hard. Unless he was Scottish. Whatever. Too much thinking going on.

[willbethenight.livejournal.com]

It was possible that Britta had some strange views on patriotism. But hopefully the day-long hangover would teach her something. "Not really. Hit a couple bars on the mainland, but I mostly laid low. Too bad I didn't catch you anywhere. It sounds like I missed a lot of fun."

He spent the day in a cave playing with oxygen distribution. He was a liar.

[wasthecuteone]

"Hey, um, whoever you are," Petra said to Britta when she popped into the common room. After watching a few channels flip past on the TV, she offered, "I think Bridal Death Match is on. Or at least a rerun."

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

"Hey...whoever you are," Britta offered back with uncertainty, because was that how you responded to that? It sounded good enough. "And what horrible, stereotypical-gender-role-reinforcement-sounding hell is Bridal Death Match?"

[wasthecuteone]

Petra paused halfway to the cabinets to check for snacks, so she could backtrack across the common room and actually look at Britta. "You're not Adina," she said, sounding disappointed, and perhaps a tinge accusatory. "You sound like Adina." How dare you not be Adina, Britta?

"Bridal Death Match is the popular Corporation^TM TV show about brides who cage fight each other in order to win the wedding of their dreams." Sometimes Petra talked a little like a promotional TV spot. It was a thing in her universe, and she usually didn't realize she was doing it. She didn't realize when she pronounced the ^TM, either.

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

"Who's Adina?" Britta asked, her uncertainty growing as she eyed the other girl speculatively. "And you're right, I'm not her. And that show sounds terrible. Cage fight each other for a wedding? If you're going to get out there and beat the snot out of some other girl, at least do it for something worth while and not something that only propagates the fact that you're a piece of property to be exchanged away in a show of patriarchal ownership of anything female, just so we can continue the farce that is matrimony and pop about even more children to contribute to the overgrown population that we're already fighting to sustain."

[wasthecuteone]

"Miss New Hampshire," Petra told her, like that was at all helpful. "And oh my God, you really do sound like her, that's so cute! I'm Petra West," she said. "I live down in 511?"

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

"Cute?" asked Britta, gawking at this Petra West for a moment. "There's nothing cute about centuries of subjecting women to objectification, submission, and basically imprisonment under the guise of religious, romantic, and societal ceremony."

She took a deep breath, to seethe a little, to ignore her St. Patrick's Day hangover headache, and to pout a bit, too.

"Britta Perry," she offered. "512."

[wasthecuteone]

"Oh my God, I have got to hook you two up--well, actually, no, the echo chamber would be kind of frightening," Petra said. "But come on, weddings are fun. There's cake. And the cage matches are great, because you have to be a badass to get all these ultrafeminine trappings. It's subversive."

[abitlowkey]

Someone had spent the past week as a fox. It couldn't have been something more clever or with thumbs to open things with. Oh noooo. That would have been far too much.

So, now he was celebrating being able to open doors. By searching for some of those violently orange cheese puffs.

"What is a Cupcake War?" It sounded delicious.

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

"Um," Britta considered the screen for a minute, where she had paused longer than others because someone with fancy hair said something about vegan. "I honestly have no idea."

But it looked delicious.

[abitlowkey]

Oh, Food Network.

"I find this vegan creature annoying. Will they perhaps bake her to cease the prattling of how unique she is?"

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

"Now that would be some poetic justice," said Britta, eyebrows lifting as she considered that morbid turn of events, and shook her head. "It's Cupcake Wars, not Cannibal Wars. I'm pretty sure that's, like, illegal. And gross."

[abitlowkey]

That was when the host decided to speak on the show. That... creature.

"What of him?"

[shestheworst.livejournal.com]

"Ultra gross," Britta decided after a moment. "You are what you eat. Would you want to be that?"

[wasthecuteone]

"They have to make cupcakes out of random stuff," Petra explained. "I think the trick is to not fall for, like, the pickled herring or whatever."

[abitlowkey]

"Pickled herring? In a cupcake?" Well. Now he knew what to give Volstagg when he next returned to Asgard.

[wasthecuteone]

"It could happen," Petra said solemnly, because pickled herring cupcakes were serious(ly awful) business. "Well. Probably not a vegan cupcake. So that's...one thing vegan cupcakes have to recommend them."

[abitlowkey]

"A vegan cupcake appears to involve talking in length about how unique the baker is. I see no further difference as of yet."

[wasthecuteone]

"Vegan means no animal products. So no eggs or butter or milk or...I don't know," Petra said. "Honey. Maybe processed sugar. It's like a whole big complicated thing."