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THE CHILDHOOD MEME

Childhood. That magical time between infancy and adulthood where you feel invincible. Where you haven't a care or responsibility in the world. It's a time where imagination runs wild and every day is a new adventure waiting to be had.

While there's plenty of fun out there in the world of adults, there's nothing that quite compares to the innocence of those early years. So, grab your juice box, your favorite toy and remember to be back before the streetlights come on.

HOW TO PLAY:

○ This meme is targeted toward the younger end of the age spectrum (15 and under), but that doesn't mean older characters aren't welcome. Does your character have a soft spot for children? Are they typically the type to be the babysitter? Or maybe they're the older sibling being dragged along to keep an eye on the younger one? Aging down is also an acceptable option, haven't we all wondered what our characters would have been like as kids?
○ Comment with your character, canon, preferences, and any other info you'd like to include.
○ Reply to others.
○ Thread and have fun!

1. PLAYGROUND/PARK : The spot where all the best childhood memories are made. Are you playing a game of tag? Are you hanging upside down on the jungle gym? Are you getting into trouble while your mom is catching up on the latest gossip?

2. SCHOOL : The place where 75% of your day is spent and lifelong friendships are forged. Maybe you're in art class, maybe you're at recess, or maybe you're on a school field trip. The possibilities are endless. Just don't be that kid eating paste.

3. MALL : For the kids on the older end of the spectrum. Whether you're at the arcade, whether you're meeting with friends, or whether your parents gave you twenty bucks to get out of their hair, you've got the entire shopping mall at your disposal.

4. CIRCUS : It's the greatest show on earth! Lion tamers! Acrobats! Elephants! Feats meant to stun and amaze you! Cotton candy the size of your head! Are you watching the show from the stands? Or is your family a part of the show?

5. THEME PARK/AMUSEMENT PARK : It's a classic vacation that's fun for the whole family. Are you the roller coaster type? Or are you the type to shy away from the thrill rides and stick to the carousel instead? Keep a hold of someone's hand, though, the only thing that can ruin a day is a lost child in the park.

6. FAIR/FESTIVAL/CARNIVAL : The theme park on a smaller scale. Sometimes the rides are a little shaky, but there's plenty of good deep fried foods and games to be played. Go out and win yourself a goldfish!

7. NEVERLAND : Yes, you read that right. Just like in Peter Pan, it's the magical place where no one has to ever grow up and adults aren't welcome. What kind of adventures will you get into? Remember, it only takes a little bit of fairy dust and good thoughts to fly.

8. WILDCARD : None of these work for you? Go ahead and created your own!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ 12 year old vampire here. Equally happy to play her as a human if that's preferred. ]

[Talia here grew up in a circus and was the only kid her age around. I'd love to play something maybe with her getting to know a friend? #4 and #6 would be easiest but I'm flexible.]

[ ota, crosscanon/media and ocs loved. slowposting!

he grew cooped up in a mansion on the howlett estate due to being extremely sickly and having a weak immune system, until the day his mutation manifested as he killed his birth father in rage. jimmy was chased out of society for being a monster and has been living in the forest with his half-brother and best friend, victor, ever since.

can easily au jimmy into a modern setting, so no need to stick to 1845 unless you want to play in that sandbox. ]

Edited 2018-09-05 23:08 (UTC)

A fever brings on grand hallucinations and strange dreams. Passing in and out of consciousness, reality intermingles with the fantastic; a dichotomy of constant confusion and acceptance. And is there any imagination greater than that of a child?

“I hate it when this happens,” Sighs the soft voice of a woman over a low-crackling fire. It almost sounds like it’s distorting her. A cool touch caresses the overheated skin of the boy lying under the heavy sheets, soft and gentle but possibly scalding to the one gripped by fever. “When they’re this young. It doesn’t seem fair.”

“You show your age when you show your sentiments,” Comes the more musing, more nonchalant voice of a male. “Among other things. Patience, Andrea.” Each syllable of ‘patience’ is annunciated with perfectly equal and unhurried weight.

“Yes, sir.”

A feverish child’s eyes can open and close on the dim room and behold two strangers - one a very young woman and the other an exceedingly old man. She is dark-skinned and wearing a nurse’s uniform - white collar, white bib, and white apron over a pale blue frock that goes down to her wrists. A little white cap sits upon her short, curly, shorn hair. He? He is as pale as a sheet and dressed all in black, save for his cravat and buttons. Those are pearl-colored and pearl. The nurse has since removed her hand, but she sits at the boy’s bedside.

A blink and she suddenly becomes a blur of a humanoid creature veiled in white, leaning back for where she’d once hovered over the boy’s face and turning towards the man. He is pacing slowly before the fire, the movement of his prominent nose like some sort of compass that takes in the features of the mantle and the walls all at the same time. In one hand, he holds a silver-headed cane and it clunks gently upon the wooden floor on occasion; the other hand holds a black doctor’s bag. The movement of his long, lean form throws strange shadows. A blink and his coat turns into the folded wing of a bird, a shift and it distorts into a single and wicked spider’s leg.

“Is he afraid of the dark? May I turn on the lantern for when he wakes?”

“He’s already awake. He’s already afraid.”

“Oh, good lord!”

“You didn’t think so a moment ago. Don’t panic… Introduce yourself.” The old man’s calm seems cool and dry (two things the boy very much isn’t) but his tone is a patient, authoritative one.

The woman, now very much a woman once more, turns towards the boy and for a moment looks visibly shaken before she takes a little breath and eases on a smile. It’s not an insincere one, just a nervous one.

“Hello,” She begins, softly, putting her dark hands in her lap over the blank apron. “My name is Andrea. There’s no need to be afraid - we’re here to help.”

Jimmy doesn't understand what's happening, and typically he's a very bright boy (that is, when he's not teetering on the edge of consciousness).

This is the second time he's gotten sick this month, and if he were to tally all the times he'd ever gotten sick ever, it would be one number in a veritable ocean of them.

But if he tallied all the times he'd seen the man in the cane, this would be the third, although this is the first time he's seen him this clearly-- not to mention this long, instead of in fleeting glances as his eyes fluttered open and closed when his sickness was particularly bad. Regardless, already he can hear Victor's groaning in the morning when Jimmy tells him he saw him again. Victor's not one for strange figures in the night, especially when he can't smell any trace of them (that Victor needed to smell things to believe in them was just another one of those funny things about him).

The woman at his side, though, is new. And as she is new, so too is the fact that he can hear the man in the room speaking along with her. He's never spoken before... or if he has, Jimmy didn't hear him.

"Who..." He coughs. Speaking is getting to be a problem, but it's early enough in the morning (and so unbelievably cold) that Jimmy expects speaking to come poorly. The fire's dead in its hearth too, he notices, but he doesn't want to go wake Father up to start it up again, even if he's chattering at the same time he sweats under his many, many blankets.

"Are you" -- cough, deep and wet and shivering in Jimmy's scrawny chest -- "doctors?"

That'd certainly explain why he always saw the man in black when things were especially bad. If Father had been the one bringing him in all this time, then there isn't cause for worry, is there?

But part of him feels it couldn't be that easy. As earlier stated, Jimmy's a bright boy.

He sniffs, trying to sit up, but the heaviness in his head beats the part of him that wants to be polite, making him retreat back onto the mattress and shut his eyes once more. "You both... I'm having trouble seeing you. M-Might be the fever."

[It's 1845. Texas is annexed and becomes a fully fledged state; a poem about a very talkative (and pretty negative) raven appears without much fanfare in the New York papers, written by a man from Boston; a massive fire started in — where else — a whale oil and candle manufacturing company cuts a trail of destruction across Lower Manhattan.

And Bigby Wolf has decided that he doesn't want to do this anymore.

If you asked him to describe when these feelings started, he wouldn't be able to tell you. Thinking about it realistically and honestly, he wonders if it's always been there since the moment that enchanted dagger cut into him and infected him with its magic, turning him into this...thing, this abomination halfway between animal and man.

No matter what Snow White and all the bureaucrats behind her say, he can't say he's human; he'd have better luck calling living for what it is — pretending — than wasting one more minute trying to fit in with everyone around him. But he can't quite call himself a wolf either. His thoughts don't feel like his own anymore, like a stranger has taken up residence in his head and refuses to go away, whispering confusing things that hurt his head and his heart, making him question everything he's ever known.

Right and wrong were never this complicated. If he can't even grasp what they mean anymore, how could he ever be sheriff, let alone a good one? The quick and dirty answer is he can't.

He doesn't tell anyone where he's going, not even Snow. Just leaving unannounced will spark a firestorm of questions, especially when (if) he comes back, but so will a straightforward answer. He'll cross that bridge when he gets to it. For now, he just wants to go as far away from the city as possible. Northward seems as good a direction as any, so that's where he heads, taking only as much with him as he can carry.

And for a while, it works. He finds more peace in one week living in the forest than he's had in one hundred and fifty years in that noisy, filthy city. This place isn't complex or loud or dirty. It exists far away from the city, from any settlement in fact, and doesn't come with the baggage humans carry. Unsurprisingly, Bigby could find himself getting used to it.

Until he finds the boy.

At first, he was content to leave the kid to his own business; he's weak, small, and Bigby isn't hungry or desperate enough to make prey out of him. The first time he sees him is at the entrance of a small cave, sleeping against a rock, reeking of hunger, thirst and the twitching anxiety that comes from lack of both. He doesn't know why he feels pity, especially since he's seen this kind of occurrence many times back in the Black Forest, just that he does. So while the boy sleeps, Bigby turns and heads deeper into the woods. The first doe he comes across, he kills. And then he drags the body back to the cave, neatly deposits it several feet away from the sleeping child, then leaves. It's intended to be a one-time courtesy, and if he can't make it after that, it's not because he wasn't offered a chance.

But one time turns into two turns into three, then four, until eventually, after a week of traveling back and forth between the cave and the parts of the forest where the deer plentiful, carrying something new in his mouth each time, Bigby starts to realize that he might have a problem. A 5'3, wide-eyed runt of a problem. With claws.

The morning after a particularly brutal storm, when the forest is still blanketed under a layer of mist and the sky is still dusky, Bigby drops his usual morning offering in front of the cave — a deer with its throat torn out — but instead of leaving, he hangs back. Crouched low in the underbrush in front of the cave, the massive wolf lies low, yellow eyes peering out at the opening for any signs of the boy.]

Edited 2018-09-06 06:34 (UTC)

[ Victor doesn't trust the deer that appear in the morning, but Victor doesn't trust anything that reeks of something stronger than he is. And as far as Jimmy can tell (his nose is sharp like Victor's, but he doesn't have even half the experience his brother has in recognising scents), that's precisely what the corpses have lingering around all the dead animal scent. Victor refuses to eat the offerings, but Jimmy is thankful for them; he's been terrible at hunting since they started, terrible at delivering the final, killing blow, which means that so far this mysterious, otherworldly occurrence has essentially been saving his life.

He knows it's bad to keep relying on it. Whoever (or whatever) is continuing to care for him from afar highly likely won't do it forever. Eventually he's going to have to "man up" like Victor tells him to and kill to feed himself. But Jimmy takes advantage of the deer while he can because he doesn't have a lick of excessive pride in him.

All he really has is fear and cold and nightmares, but there's not much you can do with that.

It's at the end of a storm that Jimmy presumes he's finally going to have to kill on his own. As plentiful as the offerings had been (one deer is a surprisingly huge amount of meat), Jimmy's appetite has changed since his claws appeared. He eats a lot more, for one thing, and he eats a lot raw. One deer looks big in theory, but he tends to finish it all by early afternoon, and living off plants and berries that are safe to eat doesn't seem to do it for him like it did before.

Victor is still sleeping, but Jimmy leaves the cave at the same time he always does in routine. That the air is heavier around him doesn't matter, but the fact the deer is still there-- a little more wet, a little more worse for wear-- has his eyes widening before he sinks to his knees.

His claws escape him to cut pieces he can hold in his hands, and he brings these up to his mouth so he can rip them with his teeth again before consuming. He might not be able to kill yet (not after Thomas Logan's death, not with the memory of the way his organs felt around Jimmy's claws clear in his head), but he's memorised the places he should cut and consume the way that Victor wanted him to.

It's only when the hunger starts to turn into a low rumble instead of a terrible, rolling screech that Jimmy looks around, as he always does just in case the one who'd given him the deer stayed. The atmosphere's too thick for his nose to help him, but at least his eyes are clear-seeing.

And at least they land on the yellow in the leaves.

It has him reeling back in surprise, of course. Jimmy isn't sure what that is, but it glows in the dim light of the morning. He brings one arm up to swipe at his mouth (a useless gesture, given it just compounds the dried blood already on his skin there), and then squints his eyes a little harder.

He's been in the forest long enough that talking no longer comes to him as first instinct. Instead, Jimmy tilts his head to the side.

This is one of the few things Jimmy can do that he knows Victor can't, although an argument could be made for Victor's patience being the reason for his failure. Point is, though, Jimmy finds that he can push his thoughts out-- no words, not really, but feelings, and he can get those feelings back. He's survived packs of wolves because of this, and moose that could have cut him down; Victor likes to take these obstacles down with his claws, but Jimmy likes speaking to them (even if it doesn't quite count).

Is it an animal? Is it the animal that's been helping him?

Jimmy pushes gratitude forward. He nods his head once.

His front teeth dig into his lip, awkward and shy. ]

[ tiny lonely little robot who has never had a friend her own "age," although I'm also deeply enamored with the actually-human!Alice AU too ]

(OoC: Totally canonblind, But I can certainly run with either idea if you’re okay with a magical girl!)

[ Interested in big sib/lil sib interactions and found family! Not necessarily with these prompts, but the theme of it. Would love to play Dirk as big bro dealing with actual responsibilities (stress, motherfucker), or as lil bro who somehow ends up with an actual big sib figure in his isolated little life. ]

[Not sure 100% if this is what this meme is going for, but I'd love to play an aged down Engineer! Preferrably from 8 - 15, etc. Whichever way I can play this guy as an obnoxious kid genius.

I'm also okay with playing him at his current age babysitting somebody, playing Uncle Engie, whatever. If you want your kid/teen character looked after by this obnoxiously Texan mercenary, ofc.]

[NGL I'm here mostly for teenage Buffy to get a bitty Dawn in her life way before the Monks did in S5, okay. Also here for all the found family, esp since Hank was likely whoring around before the divorce and she can do the overly protective big sis thing, or little that's cool too. ~~Even if it's not Tuesday.~~]

[Two options for this:

A young tiger cub, who was orphaned by her parents as a newborn, for unknown reasons

Or a teenage kung Fu master in training, after being adopted]

(ooc: Welcome to the Only Slightly Dead Moon Circus! See Miracle Max! Dread Pirate Roberts, ON FIRE! Then again, probably not. Get used to disappointment. Open to other prompts, too.)