fandomhighdorms | 4th Floor Common Room, Wednesday

Entry tags:

4th Floor Common Room, Wednesday

Uma had been sent flowers. Yeah, she'd gotten them hours ago, but she still didn't know why she'd gotten them. Or what to do with them. This was the first time she'd seen real flowers, never mind had any of her own.

Flowers needed...water, right? Yeah, that sounded good. She was just going to bang around the common room, looking for a cup or something big enough to hold her...stripey, purple flowers (what kind of flowers were they? Not-roses was the only guess she had) and hope that they didn't die while she looked for something appropriate to put them in.

How fast did flowers die, exactly? Why didn't school teach this kind of stuff?!

[Open! I have no work today!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Tip had gotten a bunch of flowers of her own today, and felt bad about not remembering to send any, herself, so she'd spent the morning in town buying a bunch of big boxes of chocolate, enough to leave one in each common room. Not the most personal of valentine's, sure, but it wasn't like she had a boyfriend or anything to spend the day with, anyway.

"Hey Uma," she greeted, setting a big heart-shaped box on the coffee table with a post-it reading "Happy V-day! ♥ ♥ ♥" in a messy scrawl. "Those are pretty! Who are they from?"

"Tip, hey," Uma said, momentarily forgetting to be gruff and feisty. She just didn't want the flowers to die, okay? They were pretty! "They're from Nathan, but I don't know why." Did people just do that around here? Give out flowers? In winter? "I'm looking for something to put them in. Like a big cup or whatever."

"Or a vase?" Tip suggested. She went over to help look through the cupboards. Surely a place that did flower deliveries every year would have random vases lying around. "He probably sent them because he wanted you to have something to make you feel special for Valentine's Day. That's today. It's a whole holiday about showing people you love them."

She'd had to explain Valentine's Day more than once before. She rather felt she was getting good at it.

"A vase," Uma repeated. "...You all have a special thing just for flowers to live in?"

She get around to having a special day just for love--ha!--in a moment. But first she was still boggling over the idea of having a special flower-cup.

"You'll find we have a special thing just for most stuff," Tip said. "Mostly so stores can sell them to people. Vases tend to hold more water than just a glass, and if they're tall and skinny, they hold the flowers up nice and tall." She shrugged. "But, I mean, so do bottles, if you don't want to be fancy."

"It's just weird," Uma said, giving a super-casual shrug. "We don't really have anything like that back home. The only flowers I've ever seen were on TV."

"You don't even get, like, flowering weeds?" Tip asked with a frown. "Or did the Autobahn stick you all on a totally barren rock?"

"The goblins can sorta raise some things, but for the most part, it's barren," Uma said with a shrug. "There's not a whole lot of space left for stuff to grow anyway. Maybe on some of the other islands? There are some stunted trees on those and that kind of skinny, stabby grass."

She'd always kind of figured that was normal and the only reason there was so many plants and flowers on the TV was because the antennas picked up royal propaganda channels.

". . . Stabby grass?" Not so much, no. Tip shook her head. "Well, flowers are pretty common around here. There's even a whole shop in town to sell them." Capitalism never stopped. "Giving them to someone is generally a sign that you like and appreciate them. Though I guess there's a whole field of passive aggressive flower giving, too. That's really probably not what yours are for, though."

"There's a whole store?" Uma asked, jaw dropping. "How do people buy so many flowers they need a whole store dedicated just to them? What do you do with them all?"

"Put them in specialized glasses and put them on shelves to look pretty," Tip said. "Or put them in our hair, pin them to clothes, make them into perfume. . . ."

"Perfume comes from flowers?" Uma asked and then immediately wished she hadn't. That was one of those questions that showed just how little she knew.

"And a bunch of other stuff," Tip said with a shrug. "I don't know the whole process or anything."

Uma just kept shaking her head. "That's more flowers than I thought--" She bit down on the rest of that, not wanting to sound stupid.

--Er.

"Who'd you get flowers from?" she asked instead.

Tip shrugged. "Friends, mostly. And the biggest flirt in school." That she'd noticed, anyway. "And my sword teacher. I think he's still trying to win me back after he was kind of a dick to me during the last big invasion."

Whoa. Back up. Say whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

"...Invasion?"

"Ohhhh crap. Has no one caught you up on all that?"

Admittedly, Uma had a lot of other stuff to get caught up on.

"No!" Yeah, Breq had mostly focused on 'You can eat this food, it's fine' which--fair. "Catch me up on all what?"

“Right.” Tip rubbed the back of her neck. “So about once a semester or so, something shows up and tries to kill everyone.”

"...Bullshit."

Because what other answer was there?

"Like what?"

Yeah, Tip wasn't going to argue with that assessment at all. She'd probably responded in about the same way, though without the, er, salty language.

"Last spring it was giant bunnies," she said, because she might as well start with the easy one. "And over the summer a hurricane threw a bunch of sharks at us. Literally. The summer I started here, a demigod of chaos showed up and turned people into ponies." And Tip into an orange, dammit, Discord. "And, um. Well, in the fall we get this . . . do you know what an 'apocalypse' is?"

It had happened for both of Tip's fall semesters. She could be forgiven for assuming that was what falls here always did.

"The end of the world," Uma said.

...She was raised among villains, remember? More than a few of them had been after the apocalypse.

"...How the hell you get from bunnies and sharks to demigods and the apocalypse?"

"Same way you get a who grew up in magic villain jail and one who grew up dealing with alien invasions, I guess," Tip said. "Island takes all kinds."

"Yeah, but...nothing happens on the Isle," Uma protested. "It's not like we get invaded by goblins one day--though they'd love that, little jerks--and then get a giant tsunami the next."

Though her mother would love that, too.

"It's always just the same thing."

"Oh, it almost never happens that quickly," Tip said. "Though . . . I figure invasions always come in groups. Like, back home we got invaded by the Boov and then invaded by the Gorg before the Boov had even left again."

(no subject)

refused2berescued - 2018-02-21 06:51 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

intotheout - 2018-02-21 20:08 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only