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pumpkinhollow) wrote2024-07-21 01:43 pm
pumpkinhollow) wrote2024-07-21 01:43 pm
July Mini Event - Seaside Sway
Pumpkin Hollow Community Bulletin
It’s the end of July. Summer is peaking, hitting its stride. In the forest, frogs sing and fireflies dance through the night, and dragonflies go about their business in the sun. In town, farmers roll up their sleeves and young ladies swap out their many layers for breezy floral gowns. And on the beach, swimmers take to the sea for water at its warmest and young crabs climb up from the sun-drenched sand. Kora’s glory at its finest!For about a week now, a flier has been up on the community bulletin board. :
Midsummer Beach Festival!
Join us on July 21st and 22nd for our annual beach bash! Organized by the Temple of Sacred Roots in tandem with Town Hall, all townsfolk are invited to join in for seaside festivities in honor of the height of summer. Activities will include:
- Live music (Sign-ups for performers will be available at Empty Pockets Music Bar)
- Locally made strawberry wine from last summer’s strawberries
- Beach pit barbecues for lunch on both days
- A hot food banquet for dinner on the 21st
- A fish fry breakfast on the 22nd
- Paper lantern float
- Beach games
- Tents and bed rolls for beach camping
And, as promised, the festival opens up on the afternoon of July 21st, where the smell of barbecue rises up from Tawny Beach. Tables sit on wooden plinths to avoid sinking in the sand, bearing fresh summer fruit and drinks. Pork, fish, and lamb roast in a sand pit. Enchanted barrels covered in magic frost keep frozen treats like orange juice shaved ice and strawberry sorbet cold. A station for assembling little wood-and-paper floating lanterns can be seen off in the distance and Cormac and the Banshees are setting up for their opening set. Tents and bed rolls have been set up toward the Marina. Literally everything is decorated with thin golden coins on strands of twine, sea shells, and sea glass. In the center of it all, stones have been laid into the shape of a massive compass rose, whose center houses the makings of a bonfire.
Those who were here last year will recognize that this festival is much larger than last year’s, and was not preceded with desperate pleas from Town Hall for help providing food and decor. It speaks plainly to the health of the town now. Even with all that has been going on, the growing population and renewed sense of community and purpose have improved matters around the island considerably.
Near the tent area, a family of crabs (one red, one blue, and three purple) can be observed. The small purple ones are poking each other with sticks. The Limoncello has made port, and Royal and his crew are splitting helper duty with the staff of Town Hall, and are dancing and partying the rest of the time. All is as it should be. For once, there is no dangerous surprise lurking in the shadows.
So, what’s on your agenda? During the day, volleyball, swimming, and a game that involves throwing small fabric sacks of dry lentils into wooden hoops in the sand can be enjoyed, alongside a plethora of frozen treats. At night, food and wine and lemonade are served at the banquet tables and lively music plays on the temporary wooden stage for dancing by firelight. There is also the lantern float, which encourages participants to send a glowing lantern out on the water in honor of the lost and the distant, ending the first night in a moment of peaceful sobriety. You may also notice a charming stranger milling around, cozying up to Royal, and drinking after nightfall--- a woman with dark olive skin, raven hair that soaks up the firelight, and rum brown eyes who wears a billowing blue dress and (whenever she hasn’t placed it onto someone else’s head for fun) a wide-brimmed black hat.
Then, at night, camp on the beach under the stars or head home by additional lantern light. The festivities will continue until the following afternoon! Feel free to share your beach fit in the fashion show thread below, as well. Enjoy!
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"It's... going." Which is hardly a shining beacon of encouragement, as far as answers to that question go. "I mean, most of my friends from the ship are here. And my job's cool. Gerry's been teaching me book binding stuff. So you know. Plenty of talking."
Technically correct is the best kind of correct.
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"Plenty of pretending everything is fine, too, I'm sure. Fake it till you make it, isn't that what they say?" Who is they? He doesn't know.
"So, bookbinding, huh? Like it okay?"
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"I'm not faking it! All that stuff before—it's done now, it's over. The universe it happened in doesn't even exist anymore. I even avoided falling twice, which is a brand new record for Gwen Stacies everywhere. So I'm doing okay. All things considered."
And in many ways she is doing better for being here, rather than back there. Unfortunately no matter how many times she says so, it won't change the fact there's things she hasn't talked about that she should.
"And yeah, it's fun. I've always liked kind of retro stuff and I already did a bit of hand-sewing, so."
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Hey. Wait a damn minute.
"Retro? Since when are books retro?"
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"I mean, one: I'm from 2018, e-books and audiobooks exist. Two: I mostly mean the process of actually binding them all by hand, that's got to be old school even at your age, right?"
At this point the psychic damage is being deliberately inflicted. Gerry got it earlier, too.
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Luckily, Crichton is used to taking psychic damage at this point.
"All right, binding them ourselves might be old-fashioned even for me, but if you think that's a job, just try splicing together mixed tracks on a tape deck sometime."
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"Oh, I've done that!" She actually perks up visibly, more naturally. "My biggest collection of retro stuff was old audio gear, everything from CD players to tapes to records. I also experimented a couple times with making actual tapes of The Mary Janes' music for that analogue feel but it never really went anywhere."
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"Was that your band name? The Mary Janes'?"
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"Yep, that's us. We were called MURDER FACE for a bit but that didn't stick, the school didn't like it much. So we switched. Our leader singer goes by MJ, but her full name is Mary Jane, so..." that's what they picked.
Sometimes she wonders what MJ and the others made of her disappearance. She stormed off and then... never came back, not even to school.
"We were still kind of experimenting with our sound."
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Gwen sputters a laugh, "Oh, god. I mean— I think some people still call it that but also, no, my dad is literally a Police Captain. I had a hard enough time hiding my vigilantism, no way I was trying to hide doing weed on top of that."
Now once she'd left her dimension and kept hanging out in Hobie's dimension, with a punk in the 80s... well, look. She needed to chill out.
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"How'd you do it?"
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"What, hide it?" She speaks through a dry laugh, "With great difficulty. We'd cross paths out in the city all the time while he was on duty and I was suited up, so I'd have to put on a voice. And I kept track of police movements using an old radio of his I stole. I'd hide my suit and web-shooters in my drums where he wouldn't look. Plus being Captain kept him busy, even when we weren't at the same crime scenes; so he didn't always notice if I was out when I shouldn't be."
Sometimes he was busy enough she could leave the house for a whole night or longer and he wouldn't notice. Sometimes she slept on rooftops just to get away for a bit.
"The most complicated it ever got was this time Electro took out the city's power and I was swinging around trying to chase him down while dad, who I was constantly passing on my way, kept trying to call me to check-in on me. That was a chaotic night."
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It breaks his heart to hear the lengths she had to go to to conceal what she was doing. He can't imagine being so out of the loop with his own kid if he were ever that lucky, and the thought that it could still happen is a new flavor of terror he's yet to try until now. But that's something to examine later. (Or never.)
"Sounds like it. Must have been a lot of stress for you. Did you ever consider bringing him in on it?" A pause. "What am I saying? That's a stupid question. I'm sure you have. I guess I'm curious why you felt you couldn't?"
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"Well there was the small matter of him thinking Spider-Woman was a murderer, but even before that he was always very... by the book. Even with supervillains popping up he didn't like the idea of vigilantes. The cops could hardly do anything against most of the bigger threats I dealt with, but in his mind you need a badge or a rank to be out there fighting crime."
The only reason you can't accuse her of burying the lede is she opened with it, she just breezed right on by.
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"What on Earth gave him that idea?"
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"There was an— incident, early in my time doing Spider-Woman stuff. A kid turned himself into a giant monitor lizard and attacked Homecoming. I hit him too hard and he died, which turned him back into a normal looking kid, and... dad saw me over the body. Made assumptions."
She leaves out the part about it being her own best friend and also how it was actually a falling metal beam that killed him, not the hit itself. But otherwise that's the story.
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"Nope. Not at the time, anyway. No one knew I was Spider-Woman," except, apparently, Peter, who kept the secret for her without her even knowing, "so I just had to keep going. There's been people since, other Spiders and stuff. They usually get it at least a little."
She's trying to be very nonchalant about it, but it still haunts her even going on four years later.
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Gwen shrugs one shoulder. "...about four years, counting all time since I left home. It'd been nearly three when the other Spiders first picked me up."
cw: parental death
"What do you mean the other Spiders picked you up?"
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"It doesn't feel like a little time," and yet it also does, and doesn't, and... she shakes her head. "Remember that group I said I worked with, with the multiverse traversal bands? Them. They took me with them after cleaning up a mess in my universe. That's how I got my in."
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"Ah, so that's how you became a universe-jumping spider. Did you ever get to patch it up with your dad?"
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"Nope. Going back... wasn't really an option, for a lot of reasons. Even before the ship."
There was no guarantee her dad would behave any better, going back might kickstart the canon event that would eventually kill him, or she might have somehow stopped the canon event which to Miguel would be even worse... so, no, going back to patch things up was never an option.
"I knew it might be a long time before I could go home again as soon as I left. I'm... mostly okay with that, these days."
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good place to wrap?
yes! wrap