nebulochaotic | (no subject)

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WHO: OTA
WHAT: Eglaf Annual Earth Day Extravaganza
WHEN: Friday, April 17, 2020 - Sunday, April 19, 2020
WHERE: All over Historical Downtown Eglaf
WARNINGS: The whole premise of Friday's event is dub-con, so...you know. There's that. If you feel your thread should have content warnings on it, please say so in the soonest possible comment subject line.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got til it's gone?

Every year, the weekend before Earth Day, the city of Egalf has a three-day festival to celebrate centered largely in Historical Downtown. Eglaf was one of the first cities in Florida to pass Go Green laws and they're proud of their attempts as a city to reduce their carbon footprint. Each year, the line-up of events is about the same.

Friday night is a fundraising theme costume party, usually attended by any and all, featuring local celebrities and registered Displaced Supers along with raffles, meet and greets, autograph sessions, photo ops with Displaced Supers, local vendors, and more, located in Downtown Pride Hotel's ballrooms. This year's theme is "Getting In Touch with Nature." Party-goers will be turned away at the door if they're not in costume. No exceptions. Tickets can be purchased all week at the hotel or at the door. General admittance is $10 and admittance with dinner reservations is $25 per person. Group discounts are available; please call the front desk at Downtown Pride Hotel for details.

NOTE:This event is where things might get a little hinky this year. The portal being reawakened in January has been causing little issues around town, but the government mostly has this on lockdown. Unfortunately, it would appear that something new has made its way through. Earlier in the week, a small group of playful and mischievous fairies slipped through the portal. Learning of the Earth Day celebration and wanting very much to carry on its message, on Friday morning, locals and Supers alike might notice a sort of shimmer in the air. Spoiler alert: it's their version of fairy dust. Exposure to said fairy dust will have residents of Eglaf under the fairies' spell. They'll feel compelled to reduce, reuse, recycle, and be at the Earth Day fundraiser with bells on.

When the clock strikes eleven, though, that's when they'll decide to have a little more fun. Anyone still in their costume and within a five-mile radius of the hotel will believe themselves to actually be their costume or, in some cases, they will become their costume. So, if someone comes to the party dressed as a tree, they should be prepared to stand very still and be very silent while swaying in the wind for the hour during which the spell will take hold. This spell will last anywhere from 1 to 24 hours.

Saturday, there will be a parade featuring giant balloons, floats built by local businesses, and Displaced Super appearances. The parade will begin at 10:00 am and will follow the usual path down all of Main Street from Historical Downtown up to the upper east side before returning back to Historical Downtown. Typically, this parade runs two to three hours in its entirety. Then, Saturday evening will kick off the Earth Day Film Festival, where locals and Displaced Supers alike are invited to the Downtown Green, weather permitting (or the Oakdale Theater, if not) where the stage will be hidden behind a giant screen onto which Eglaf Community College short films will start things off at 7:00 pm and, by 9:00 pm, everything from nature documentaries to summer blockbuster films will be played back to back until the last movie is scheduled to end around 11:30 pm on Sunday night.

All concessions purchased at official events this weekend will go toward furthering technological advances toward making Eglaf run on clean energy.

Come one, come all! Have a great time!

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"Package anything the right way and people will buy it, Prim," he tells her, but other than that, he decides to leave it alone. As much as he knows he has a point, so does Prim, so he's willing to sort of concede in that way. "He seems like a good kid. Annoying, but I think most people are, so that's not really saying much," he says of Peter.

He listens with actual interest while he eats as Prim explains what it's like to go to school here instead of where she came from. It's not really an answer to his question the way he'd intended, but it's interesting to hear her muse on the differences between the two things she knows, now, all the same. "Do you like it?" he asks, still curious.

But then when she turns the question back on him, he looks down at his plate so that she won't see that when he smiles, it doesn't reach his eyes. "My father thought it was more important that we train for the Academy. He wanted us to save the world. So he programmed Mom to teach us." He looks up at her. "You don't want to hear about my childhood, Prim. It was pretty shitty."

"You don't think I'm annoying." Prim points out - letting the previous subject drop. She has definitely noticed the difference in the apartment since Peter had showed up, still she'd chosen thus far to let the two of them work things out themselves. She doesn't really want in between two people that she likes, and already cares about, honestly. So it's easier that way, truth be told. Still, Five does get annoyed by most people. And Prim wonders why she doesn't seem to edge into that area generally speaking. "I guess I'm just special?" She's never really been all that special before, really, but the question comes out anyway as she picks at her food, careful not to make a mess or waste.

And the answer to his question about her opinion is easy to give. "Yes, but I like other things that I do more - like working, and I miss some of the work I did as a healer back home." Prim is nothing if not honest, after all. No matter how bad home was she had found her calling and she was helping people. And even though she's helping animals here it's not exactly the same, but she can work up to it, she supposes. That's the plan, anyway.

As much as Five keeps telling her that his childhood was bad she still can't help but be curious, and not out of some morbid curiosity, but because she cares about him and wants to know him as much as she can. "I care about you so it makes me get curious and ask." Prim shares earnestly. "I don't want to make you uncomfortable, though, I just didn't realize you hadn't gone to school until you asked. I'm lucky that I've gotten to go to school as long as I have, a lot of people in District 12 drop out to work in the mines." She moves on, offering something from her own unpleasant past.

"You're like the only person I don't think is annoying, though, so..." he points out wryly, his mouth half-full and the half-chewed food only obscured from her line of sight by a hand covering his mouth when he speaks. "You're pretty special, yeah. Exactly."

If he's honest, it does surprise him a little that Prim prefers work to school. He'd have pegged her as the studious type given all the effort she puts in on her homework, even having gotten herself a tutor. He probably could've helped her if she asked, so long as she needed help with math. He's kind of shitty at everything else, but he's a goddamned genius with math. "What kind of stuff did you do back home that you can't do here?" he wonders aloud, polishing off the last of the Swedish meatballs and moving on to what looks like some sort of taco macaroni and cheese concoction. Whatever it is, it looks good, so what the hell?

His fork freezes midway from the plate to his mouth when Prim replies because it's so foreign, still, to hear those words in reference to himself. He and his siblings don't tell each other they care or that they love each other. Their father, he's convinced, was incapable of giving a shit and Mom was...mom. It's not unwelcome, but it's still foreign all the same.

So he shakes his head and gives her a wan smile. "It doesn't make me uncomfortable. I'm more worried about it making you uncomfortable, honestly. On the day I was born, 42 other babies were born, too, at exactly the same time, all around the world. None of the women who gave birth were pregnant until that moment. I have no goddamn clue how that works or what's going on with that, but...that's what my father said. In any case, he tried to adopt as many of the 43 as he could and he managed to get seven of us," he explains, keeping his voice lowered slightly. The Hargreeves family generally keeps their business close to the chest but she's just a kid and she's so goddamned earnest that he can't help thinking it won't hurt anything to tell her.

"So he adopted us but he never bothered to give us names. He numbered us. He never loved us. We were soldiers from the minute we were old enough to be trained. He pitted us against each other at every turn. At some point, I don't even remember when, he literally built a robot and programmed her to take care of us. So, essentially our mother was a robot. She gave us names but I didn't keep mine. I spent so long being 'Number Five' that the new name didn't feel right. Hell, even after she named us, he kept calling us by our numbers, anyway. Probably right up until the day he died; I'd bet money on it.

"Our entire lives, we trained to be superheroes. Then he sent us off on missions as soon as we were old enough. We were all over the news. He'd hold press conferences; parade us around like prized pigs. He scheduled every minute of every day. Mom home schooled us 'from 7:00 am to 12:00 pm, Monday through Friday,'" he recites, his voice dropping into a mocking impression of Reginald Hargreeves that's actually kind of accurate. "We were only allowed to have fun...from 12:00 pm to 12:30 pm on Saturdays. That was our allotted time for frivolity," he adds bitterly. Then he huffs a mirthless laugh. "Jesus Christ, I can't believe I still remember that..."

Prim gives her friend a smile - she'll take being special to him, and being one of the only people that he doesn't find annoying. She doesn't struggle with that, at all. She doesn't find people annoying, but knowing how significant that is to him it's touching, honestly. It's strange how attached she feels to Five just from living with him all this time, but she really does.

"I was already a healer - I stitched wounds and helped treat people alongside my mom. That's what I was doing when I died - trying to help people." Prim shares - there are some big differences between what it takes to be a doctor, or any sort of healer, here, though. There's a lot more education, a lot more stipulations. And even with the ability that she's still somewhat uncomfortable with on some level she's not quite there yet. It's been wanting to get back to that and not just relying on this ability that she has that fuels her search for education, actually. That is why and what she wants to work for and learn here.

Prim, though, follows suit - freezing as Five does, and staying that way as she listens to everything that he chooses to share to her. And she does her best not to feel any pity, not to pity him - she knows that he won't appreciate sympathy or pity for anything that he's gone through. Still, getting to hear about what he's been through and the sort of parent that he had, the circumstances that he came to be in, and that he was raised in, what he was forced into Prim can't help but frown. Her mother may have been absent, lost in hereslf for a fair period of her life, but she was never any of the things that Five describes his father as.

Prim doesn't remember her own father - the only things she knows about him are the things that Katniss chose to share, that she could share with how much it hurt...but even that is enough to knwo that what Five describes isn't what a father is supposed to do. "That doesn't make me uncomfortable - hearing about your past. I don't understand how 42 of you came to be that way - it's not the way that it works, but I mostly think that you deserved better. Everyone should have someone who cares." Primp moves her food around on her plate for a moment before admitting, albeit a bit begrudgingly. "Your father sounds like a terrible person."

She probably shouldn't ahve said that, but she couldn't help it.

He nods, thoughtfully. Yeah, she can't really do that here. At least not at her age and education level, not for the public at large, anyway. "Well, eventually the other shoe has to drop and the shit is going to hit the fan here," he replies matter-of-factly. "So maybe you can't do what you did at home for the public here, but the Displaced Supers that fight the good fight to put things right again might need you, so don't count yourself out completely, yet."

Maybe he isn't being fair by suggesting that nobody cared about them. Pogo probably did. Pogo's a bit much to try to explain, though. Number Five knows that some of them — mostly Diego, he suspects — like to think that Mom had enough feelings programmed into her to actually care about them, but an algorithm isn't an emotion. Grace functioned the way she functioned because that's literally what she was built to do and it might've been nice to have her tuck them in at night, give them kisses, and say she loved them, Five never really thought she had the capacity to actually feel it.

He means to point out to Prim that she just said she cares about hi, so technically he does have someone who cares, now. Though, when Prim finishes up, he nearly chokes on the food he's just shoveled into his mouth when she surprises a laugh out of him. Chewing quickly and swallowing, Number Five grins a little at her.

"Yeah, he was a miserable son of a bitch," he agrees. "And he died alone, like he deserved to, so...karma, I guess." He gives her leg a soft little kick under the table and shrugs. "It is what is. When I was thirteen, I wanted to try jumping through time instead of just through space and he wouldn't let me. He kept saying I wasn't ready but never did anything to help me get ready. So I got mad and did it anyway...and spent the next 45 years in the ruin that was left from the apocalypse alone. So, I only had to put up with him for thirteen years. I got off easier than the rest of them."

"I won't - I'd never...be able to stand aside, or ignore if someone were hurt and I could help, even if I don't feel sure or confident about this healing power yet." Prim shares, voicing something that she hasn't really said to anyone as of yet. This whole idea of powers is so new to her; Katniss was, of course, great with a bow and had some healing skill herelf, but she had no powers. There were no powers at home, so that has been an adjustment that Prim has otten used to with other people, even if she hasn't quite completed things full-circle with herself. She means what she says, though.

She would never stand aside while someone suffered or was hurt, even if she has a way to go to reach what she wants to be here.

She does find an apologetic look for Five, though, for causing him to nearly choke. "People like that push everyone away and put themselves there." Haymitch had certainly tried hard enough to do that to himself, in her opinion. And then there are people like President Snow. "Still, even if you only put up with him for 13 years the damage was done. I only lived 14 years in Panem and it made me into who I am now. During the next 45 years did you find people? Did you find friends?"

"I'll tell you what, kid, next time I get hurt, no matter how minor or major it might be, I'll let you practice. How's that sound?" he asks. If Five knows one thing, it's how important practice can be when trying to learn to control a superhuman ability. At least Prim's is clearly meant to help people. He can't help thinking that the ones he and his siblings have were all meant to hurt people if anything.

And isn't that the truth? Sometimes, Five forgets how young Prim really is because her soul is a lot older. She's like him, if he wasn't so goddamn cynical and angry all the time, actually. It's like looking into a mirror might feel if he hadn't had such a shitty life or if he had a fraction of Prim's enthusiasm.

Number Five shakes his head and takes another bite of food, talking through it with a hand covering his mouth. "Just Dolores, but I'm pretty sure she doesn't count," he says wryly. Then, because Prim doesn't know the whole story, he supplies, "she was a mannequin. ...she was half of a mannequin."

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