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Gobble Gobble!

Happy Thanksgiving

It's that time of year! Whether you're from the United States or have just seen it in movies, everyone knows that Americans take Thanksgiving very seriously. We consume copious amounts of food, watch a lot of football, and kick off the insane shopping season with Black Friday. It's also a time of family and togetherness, which is better for some than others. What sort of holiday will your muse have?

Directions
1. Comment with your character, series, preferences, etc.
2. Roll a number between 1-12 for a prompt.
3. Reply to others and play out the scenario!

Prompts
1. Not Home for the Holidays – You’re stuck on the other side of the world, or on a different world altogether. Do you mope about it or make the best of the occasion?

2. Road Trip – The snacks are packed and you’re ready to go to grandma’s house. But what happens when you lose GPS signal and get lost in the middle of nowhere or the car breaks down?

3. Stuck in the Airport – You’re snowed in and the hotels are full of fellow delayed passengers. Why don’t they make these chairs more comfortable for sleeping in?

4. Meeting the Family – It’s your first time meeting your significant other’s family, be they biological or chosen, and you’re nervous as hell about it.

5. Avoiding the Family – You’re obligated to go home for the holiday, but there’s only so much you can take of your family. Go for a walk, stop by the bar, whatever it takes for a little peace and quiet.

6. Friendsgiving – You’re spending the holiday with your chosen family. Are you hosting the event, or just bringing an extra bottle of wine?

7. The Dinner – What’s on the table? Is it set for two or twelve? Can you make it through the meal without someone causing drama?

8. Slaving Over a Hot Stove – Do you have to make the entire meal yourself or have you enlisted someone’s help with the mashed potatoes?

9. Burned the Turkey – Well, the main course is a little blackened. Time for Chinese food, or is it pizza this year?

10. Game Time - Football is a Thanksgiving tradition. Are you watching the game on TV, or out playing one of your own?

11. Thanksgiving Day Parade - Who doesn't love a good parade? Are you in it or just watching from the sideline?

12. Black Friday – Are you out fighting the crowds for the best deals? Or are you behind one of the counters, stuck in the annual retail holiday hell?

13. Write-in Option – Is there something we missed? Is there another scenario you want to play out, or would you like to roll the dice again? Go for it!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[I have a small pool of muses that I'd consider throwing at Oni, but I can't find any solid information past that she's a werewolf on her journal/profile - could you give me a tiny blurb of information on breed/tribe/age/whatever else seems important? I'm happy to start a thing, I just need more info to come up with a thing that might work.]

[You are not wrong, her account is a mess and I need to organize it. /grimace/ Oni's a homid/ahroun/silent strider, so, basically, a bad attitude on legs who never stays in one place for long. Her tribe hates vampires, and she wouldn't knowingly socialize with one, but I'm happy to keep her from ever finding out.]

[That shouldn't be a problem, I have a couple of other WoDs kicking around too.

I hope the following works for you: I sadly don't have any Garou on my roster who are Americans, so Thanksgiving just wouldn't happen for them, and from what you said I assume that Oni doesn't have a place to invite my character over to for Thanksgiving. I'd also really like to do prompt 2 or 4. So I was thinking what to do and decided to go with the spirit of Thanksgiving (family meeting, eating together, that kind of thing) and pick the next closest that one of my Garou would have. And since only one of them really has that kind of family... You get Finnish midsummer.

You said Oni travels a lot, so I figure she just ended up in Finland around midsummer for some reason, and my girl's pack invited her over for the week for some reason.

If you'd rather do a straightforward Thanksgiving thing, please don't hesitate to say so and we can figure out something else!]

Edited 2017-11-17 00:09 (UTC)

[It looks great to me! Nothing needs changing, I just won't be able to reply until later this evening. Please forgive my slowness!]

Edited 2017-11-17 04:21 (UTC)

[The upside about Finland in the summer is that it is comparatively warm; the downside is, of course, the shitloads of mosquitoes. The upside is that there is a lot of sunlight; the downside being that there is very little darkness, and even less of it the further up North you go.

The upside to midsummer in Finland is is that most people are in a good mood... and the downside to that is that the country pretty much shuts down for a week. Bye, we're going to the summer house, see you when the days grow shorter again.

It's not the best time for a visitor who'd sit around all by themselves, and somewhere along those lines Oni ended up in a run-down car going up the country all the way past the polar circle. The only reason why it isn't actually uncomfortable with six people in a five seater is that two of them have decided to lounge in the trunk instead, which means that the four people in the front have a sensible amount of space around them. Right now, it is fairly quiet, as most occupants of the car are napping or, in one case, reading a book. Outside, endless Finnish wilderness flies past, and the young woman at the steering wheel tries to give an explanation of the household they're going up to for midsummer.]

...they're all good people even if they're a bit weird, really. Also you know, in on stuff as far as Kinfolk goes.

Just don't mention the cat thing.

....I hope you don't mind cats. They're all pretty well behaved for cats, at least, or they were last time I was up there. No idea if they picked up more since I was there last.

[In the backseat, the twenty-something ginger metis looks up from his book and makes a brief comment in Gaelic, and Tuuli snorts.] Though as Colin just pointed out, chances are that they have indeed gotten at least one new one since last year. Eadni has a bit of a hoarding issue when it comes to cats.

Edited 2017-11-16 23:51 (UTC)

[Take away the language, the food, the culture, and however many hundreds of years of divergent history, and Finland isn't all that different from parts of Canada, is it? The summers are mild, the mosquitos are mutants, and the people are so jovial, it's borderline obnoxious. In all her travels, rarely does a foreign coutry feel this familiar-- This trip ought to be a slam dunk, a home run, or any other of a whole host of useless sports analogies, but, naturally, it is not.

Roaming all over creation is the easy part. One of the duties of a Silent Strider is to build bridges. To forge new friendships and alliances. Things she should be good at by now. But while Oni has been many things over the course of her life, no one's ever accused her of being a diplomat.

The nights are short as fuck, she's jet-lagged and feeling less than confident in her abilities. It's only the offer from a new acquaintance to visit her folks that manages to keep her from spiraling into self-sabotage. The gesture is as unexpected as it is genuinely touching... Once she considers (and rejects) the possibility that this might be a ploy on the part of the nearest Sept to keep an eye on her. She's already earned the reputation, overseas, of a Harbinger.

She tries to give her host her undivided attention, but Oni's so close to joining Tuuli's packmates in napping that her Theurge is in danger of the she-wolf using his shoulder for a pillow. Weird? she thinks, You've got two werewolves stashed in the trunk of your car. What could be weirder than that?]

I'm sure your folks are fine, and I'll do my best t'keep my big mouth shut about the... "Cat thing." [Why cats? Dogs she could understand. Dogs don't smother you in contempt ~~or sleep with your ex-husband before grass has the chance to grow over your grave~~.] H-how many cats are we talkin' about here? Like, if y'had t'put a number on 'em...

[To be fair, the trunk is quite spacious and has (tinted) windows, and the two Red Talons of the pack did actually want to travel there instead - as long as they lie down, it means that they can get out of their homid forms sooner. Which suits them quite well, really.

They'll just all have to hope that no cop decides to stop the car.]

Uh, last time I was there they had... five or six? [She drums her fingers on the steering wheel, thinking, and then nods.] Eadni tends to take one or two of them with her wherever she goes. It's just a... thing. [Which is really what the Garou part of the family regards it as. Fucking weird mage thing, just smile and nod and move along. Something about not being able to tell the cats and her soul apart? As mentioned, fucking weird mage thing.]

Oh, and you'll meet my aunt, probably. [...] Almost certainly, if you hit up the local Sept. Dead as it will be. [One of the reasons why her whole pack goes up, there's a bit of a careful trading of populations going on around midsummer to make sure that enough Garou are at least close by all Septs to be on call, so that they'll be guarded well enough during the time when those who still have families will go off to be with them all at the same time. It's slightly less of an issue with the northern Septs simply because the demographics skew more towards lupus than in the south, but it's still an issue. Even one of the last European true wilderness areas only has so many lupus these days.]

[Oni breathes a mental sigh of relief. Five or six cats is a little batshit insane, but it's not as bad as she was picturing-- Which was floor to ceiling cats, a house overflowing with cats. Six, maybe seven cats now, was... Managable, though the mental image of how you'd go about taking cats around town struck her as oddly funny. Did they use a leash? A harness? A cat stroller? Come on, people.]

Is she th'type of person t'refer to her pets as "My furry children?" [Because Oni didn't know that she could keep a straight face, if that were the case.]

Holdin' down th'fort, eh? [That's surely where Oni would have been, were it not for this invitation. She was an ahroun after all; There was always some part of her that was just itching for a fight. It'd be expected of her to lend the warder a hand. The she-wolf watched Tuuli's face in the rear-view mirror, thinking They pack 'em up young in these parts. Maybe she was older than she looked, but Tuuli didn't appear to be more than a few years older than Oni had been when she'd undergone her own First Change-- which Oni thought was Too Damn Young.] How'd you all get together?

[They're all young, even if one discounts the chronological ages of the non-homid members. Colin at 22 clocks in at the oldest, and while most of the pack is at least in their older teens, Milla's homid form doesn't look any older than 13. Which of course brings with it a whole host of issues.]

No, that's what she calls me. [She sniggers.] Apparently I was quite proud as a three-year old to have more hair than newborn kittens.

Well, me'n Colin met back in Ireland when I first changed, because I was brought to the Sept where he lived. We came across Bob a little while later, and then- [she falls quiet, watching the road without a word for a good minute, and then starts over new.]

Colin, Bob Laughs-at-the-Storm and me travelled with my aunt for a while before we split up and he stayed behind with his own tribe, and then at some point Ilka there, [she points to the lanky blond young man snoozing in the passenger seat] Colin, me and a few others founded a pack. Bob joined after a while. [She smiles briefly.] He'd always been invited.

...And then there was just us left, and we came up here and Milla... kind of happened. [That is a very brief summary of a very messy period of their pack history, but while she will answer questions if they are asked, she sees no point in laying them on a stranger just like that.]

Have you ever been part of a pack?

[Oni laughs along, with an amused shake of her dark head.

She glanced at Colin while Tuuli began to recall the tale of how they met. In her opinion, Fianna's were alright. She'd met only one other before: A lupus named Locke, who was mated to a Kitsune of all things. Oni gave the back of Ilka's slumbering head an assessing look; He seemed okay, and that left Bob and Milla, who must be the two wolves stretched out in back. That pregnant pause in the middle of Tuuli's explanation, and the parts she glossed over-- they all spoke volumes. Perhaps someone died, or was expelled from the pack? Oni didn't need to pry, She's been around long enough to know the score, experienced her fair share of heartache through her own pack.

Oni smirked. At her age, the question of whether or not she's been in a pack ought to be funny, but she was what'd you'd call a Lost Cub; She was late joining the garou nation, and then only reluctantly.] Heh. I'm in a pack right now. But when th'Sept says go make contact, you go make contact.

[Which was another way of saying Go be someone else's problem for awhile. She ticked off her fingers as she listed her packmates.] Let's see, I've got Han, a Bone Gnawer ragabash, and he's a professional pain in my ass. My theurge's name is Freyja, and she's a Black Fury.

[Again, she glanced at Tuuli in the rear view mirror, this time with a teasing grin.] My Philodox is also a Strider-- And don't worry, I know not all half-moon's are insufferable know-it-all's like he is. That leaves Ash... He's a Glasswalker.

[Tuuli raises an eyebrow at the description, assuming that there is at least slightly more behind the assignment than Oni says - the last time she heard a similar description, someone was pregnant from the wrong person, but as far as she can tell that is at least not the case here. Not that that means that it can't be the case. Just not likely. Gossip would probably follow that one.

Still, not her spot to comment, and thus she'll return the favour of not asking further.]

I don't think I've ever met that many Striders in one place, [she comments instead.] I was kind of under the impression that you liked to be alone. Or would that have been more coincidence?

And you probably wouldn't. [She grins a little ruefully, stretching her legs as best she can in the back seat. This is one of those few situations in which being of such short stature was actually a plus.] Two Striders in one place... Must seem as strange as a ten-fingered carpenter, but at times it's necessary.

Nasir is... He's better at certain things than I am. [And Oni would just die if he ever found out that she admitted to any such thing aloud.] It's just my luck that he's taken me under his wing for awhile.

[As for whether or not she preferred to be alone, well... That was a bit complicated. But how did she explain that trademark Silent Strider wanderlust?] We're twice-cursed. Stayin' in one place for too long gives our ghosts a chance t'catch up with us. I get antsy after awhile, especially in th'big cities-- They're just too damn crowded. But it's got nothin' t'do with the company I keep, and I can usually ignore it when I've got a job t'do.

I'd like t'settle down, someday. For awhile I thought I'd actually done it, but... [A gallic shrug; Oni stared morosely out of her window as the landscape sped past them.] Here we are.

[She has to chuckle at that.] You say that, but I'm a Stargazer in Europe. And until not too long ago, Central Europe. I guess there are quite a few ten-fingered carpenters around.

So this Nasir acts as your mentor? [Her own situation in that regard had always been a bit strange, mostly due to the safety issues that forced her family to never be far from each other for long in combination with the greater political issues concerning her tribe. By the time of her turning, the next Stargazer of her own auspice was just literally out of the borders and across the next country, and she couldn't travel there herself.

So that might be part of why she was sent here, then. That'd make sense.] And well, here's not the worst place to be. Very little city at least. And you can return to where your pack is in a while? [She's heard the term of 'home is where the heart is', but... Coming from parents that could not return to that home for over twenty years, and even now can only get close, that isn't necessarily a good sentence. Yes, family and friends are home, but when the land is in your bones, that just doesn't cut it.]

My gut-feelin' was that you'd done some ramblin' of your own, but I didn't want t'assume. [Especially since she always pictured them meditating on a yak's back in the Himalayas, or someplace equally remote, whenever anyone mentioned that tribe-- Which wasn't very often. I thought your tribe took their ball and went home with it was precisely the sort of thing she should NOT say to her host, and so Oni kept that thought to herself.] I guess you came out this way for family, eh?

In a manner of speakin', oui, I reckon he is. He's good at what he does, though, I'll give him that.

No, not bad at all. Actually, it reminds me a lot of my childhood home. Same bogs. Same hills. Same glacial lakes. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear this was Ontario... Until I ran into somebody who didn't speak English, that is.

Not outside of Europe. We've been meaning to go to the Americas to see if we can track down Bob's heritage some, but there's never been enough priority to that to really make us go.

...Okay, I actually was in the East for two hot seconds, but it didn't really stick. Father of my sister's kids decided to drag me along. [She shrugs.] I mean, not bad? Just, I already had them [she raises a hand form the steering wheel to gesture at the pack around her] by that point, and shit went down and I decided to come back.

Yeah, my family finally managed to move back up to Finland recently. Milla's actually from the area we're going to, just further up north. [She's carefully dodging a part of that question, but... it's not wrong. They did come to Finland, instead of going other places, because of the items she mentioned. That just wasn't the only reason.]

Well, most younger people here speak English, I think. Everyone in the house where we're going to does, except for the kids, and they're apt enough at talking with you even without a shared language. I think they were the first people to manage to properly communicate with Milla in her homid form. Which all things considering...

[She watches the landscape pass by for a bit, and then adds:] How'd you say is Ontaria different, then?

This was as much a social visit as a business proposition. Corax needed Garou tribe to assist and vice versa and so it made perfect sense in the mind of the the raven-haired willow of a woman that to press her advantage on the holiday of thankfulness and bounty. She had not arrived empty-handed outside the Silent Strider's domicile, with a bottle of full basket of peace offerings in arm. A white knuckled fist gently wrapped on the door three time and then she waited with a pleasant smile warming her very pale face.

She would try to resist calling her Sparkles.

First of all, if you were to ask Oni, she'd tell you that the Thanksgiving holiday was essentially colonial revisionist bullshit. And, secondly? In Canada, the holiday actually falls in October, though, after all this time, she's used to Americans insisting on wishing her a happy Thanksgiving in the wrong month.

Sometimes, when karma is feeling extra spiteful, they'll do it while wearing a Redskins jersey or a Braves cap. Why not, right?

So it is that the she-wolf is not nearly so inspired by the spirit of gratitude and bounty as the Corax might have guessed. Luckily for the were-raven, she thought to bring alcohol, and the bottle in her hands does a lot to pave the way for her.

"Come on in, I guess," she tells Robin, standing aside so the taller woman can get through the door, "I hope y'like Chinese food."

If you asked Robin, Thanksgiving was one in a list of holidays in which she was happy to celebrate. Autumn-time, good harvest, family, a time of plenty before the first frost of winter outstretched and choke the throat of the world in its icy grip.

Lucky the were-raven she had thought to bring more than alcohol in her little basket but she had wisely kept an offering on hand to sooth over typical mistrust and displeasure to see her. Still to be forearmed was to be prepared. A less than enthusiastic reception was still a reception and she had been invited to come in so she would. She gently touched the door-frame to stopping to removed her boots and leave them by the side of the door, before she would step inside with clean socked feet. Respecting other's domicile was very important.

"Love it," she cheerfully chirps unfazed by her reluctant hostess, "But I thought you might like to dine on something with a little more substance." She flicked up her brow still hugging the basked to her torso, warm mishmash of scents and flavors drifting up into the air, looking hopeful for a place to situate her offerings properly but lingering to allow Oni to show her the way. "I hope you don't mind? I always end up making too much." Robin was from a large family and never quite gotten the hang of cooking less or their absence around holidays, and Oni did have packmates. Two birds meet one stone.

Edited 2017-11-17 11:29 (UTC)

[ BRING IT ON! ]

[ November had no business being this cold.

Clary was pretty sure she had that thought every November, actually, but it didn't make it any less true. Fall was her favorite time for a reason--aside from the colors and the apples and the pumpkin spice creations, it was never so hot she started dripping sweat, and it wasn't supposed to be too cold.

But, cold or not, nothing was going to stop her from enjoying the Thanksgiving day parade. It was tradition, moo-fest that it was, and she was a sucker for tradition.

She stood up on the tips of her toes, hanging onto Simon's shoulder for balance as she looked over the heads of the crowd in front of her. ]

I should have taken Izzy's advice and worn heels!

[ Simon being taller did not share Clary's burden and could actually see the parade from where he stood. They did this every year no matter what, it was one of their many thanksgiving traditions and now this was probably the easiest one for them to keep doing, all things considered.]

There's not much going on right now, the JC Penny cart has the most awful decorations I swear they keep using the same gnome costumes since I was ten.

[ He turned his back to Clary and placed his arms behind his back, palms up. ]

Hop on, Fray or you're going to miss it.