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all_inclusive2014-10-18 03:40 pm
concierge) wrote in all_inclusive2014-10-18 03:40 pm
All Hallows Haunt and All Must Have Fun
The fog had begun near the dusk hours, coating all the plants and flowers in the garden. It settled, heavy, and blanketed everything with a new cover that was only matched in mood by the graveyard that had unearthed itself from the grass and the moss. Names were etched on each gravestone, but the most unnerving part was that every few steps, if you stopped and listened very, very carefully, you might hear a knock of a human hand against hard wood. It was almost as if the dead were being called upwards.
The maze stood normal, but inside around the corners, there were things lurking and waiting.
Outside might have become frightening and gloomy, but the contrast to indoors was stark. Inside, carved pumpkins lit with candles turned the ballroom and restaurants into amber-lit abodes, costumed partygoers twirled to the music played by the band in the lobby (while the DJ had set up in the conservatory). Candy and small hors d'oeuvres circulated on the trays of immaculately clad waiters and though outside it was stormy, foggy, and spooky, inside was a delight of themed drinks, delicious food, and the manic and half-crazed mood of people in the midst of their fun.
The party for Halloween had begun.
And there was no telling when it might ever end.
The maze stood normal, but inside around the corners, there were things lurking and waiting.
Outside might have become frightening and gloomy, but the contrast to indoors was stark. Inside, carved pumpkins lit with candles turned the ballroom and restaurants into amber-lit abodes, costumed partygoers twirled to the music played by the band in the lobby (while the DJ had set up in the conservatory). Candy and small hors d'oeuvres circulated on the trays of immaculately clad waiters and though outside it was stormy, foggy, and spooky, inside was a delight of themed drinks, delicious food, and the manic and half-crazed mood of people in the midst of their fun.
The party for Halloween had begun.
And there was no telling when it might ever end.
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He raises his brow, inundated by the words which wash over him like the barrage of the cove on a stormy day, when the winds pick up and assault his beach with heavy waves. At least, it had, back when he'd owned property and his own affairs weren't so heavily mandated by a strange hotel in the middle of nowhere. "I'm afraid I don't understand half of what you're saying, by no means of rudeness but merely due to the fact that I'm not from a time that has these..." He twirls his hand, as if to elaborate. "...video games."
"And no, my name certainly isn't Lewis," he assures, offering a polite bow as he taps his walking stick twice on the ground beside him. He's dressed in his own clothing, having been reliable informed that it would be costume enough. "It's Gatsby."
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His manner, dress and his verbage speak toward the truth of his statement. He has no clue what a video game is. She's instantly interested in him because of that. Dawn reads a lot. Some of those things historical in nature. It's clearly something she's interested in.
"Gatsby. I'm Dawn. Summers. Dawn Summers." Most awkward of introductions. But Dawn has awkwardness on most days. "So you're from before electronics and stuff? What year?"
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"It was 1922 where I'm from. An auspicious year, I'd like to think. There was so much in the air," he reminisces, though it's not the year he wants to get back to. It's only another in the forward trudging of time away from meeting Daisy and knowing what his life has to look like.
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As it is, Gatsby's charm isn't lost on her. She soaks it in and it only serves to make her smile grow even brighter. It isn't often that people compliment Dawn. Much less handsome men. And even much less than that, a man with such a flare as what Gatsby has. He's so clearly out of his time, now that she's taking a moment to notice. It's a novelty to her.
"Well thank you. I don't mind taking a compliment when the one giving it seems so super-duper nice all around." Just look at this bloody Alice Liddel curtsy for you, Gatsby. Did people curtsy in 1922? Nope. But she just did. Because it seemed the thing to do. "1922 was totally a fun year. You had all the flapper dresses and gangster cars and... and..." She can't think of anything else cool at the moment. Instead she goes with something historical, which while most don't think it's cool, Dawn does. "And wasn't Yankee Stadium and the Lincoln Memorial built around that time? Cause... awesomeness. They're both still standing even after the year 2000."
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His smile is effusive and directed entirely at Dawn, his whole world narrowed down to pay attention to her. "I admit that I'm slightly at a disadvantage. 1922 is as far as I go and my time was spent on building up the great empire I possessed." He marvels at the cheerful timbre of his voice, given that his life could go down with any of the true tragedies in life, with an ending fit to line the pages of any classic novel. "You seem to know your history quite well!" he praises. "Are the 1920's a particular interest of yours? I have a friend who comes here, at times, Miss Jordan Baker, who might serve to give you some more information about the time. Perhaps even a trip!" he suggests, the wild hint of possibility lingering.
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She nods enthusiastically. "Oh yeah. I was great at history and english in school. Those were my favorite things to study. And when I was in college I studied the history of Latin with an emphasis in translation of ancient texts, which is really a dead language now... Latin. But you'd be surprised how many old texts are in Latin." Magic books, mainly. Dawn was helpful to her sister in that way. "Then I had to quit school. But I'm still into all that old stuff." Old stuff is totally a technical term.
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What he did was a perilous topic, craggy and cliff-like, with depths of secrets the likes of which had drowned Gatsby the last time they'd been unearthed. And yet, he still feels as though he isn't ready to expose and raw and unready truth. "I purchased a series of drugstores," he says affably. "It's a clever way to make money because everyone needs those sorts of small household items, and you can't ever stop the consumption of personal goods," he says, hiding the truth of the matter behind the gleaming lie.
"My personal interests lie more in the extravagant things. Fashion, sailing, business," he prattles on, speaking in rapid tones, as if the conversation depends on how quickly he can speak. "History, of course, is current to me, but ancient to you. I must look like a relic."
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Dawn actually likes that he speaks quickly and a lot. Not everyone can handle her own verbosity. But it seems that someone else who uses lots of words and strings them together quickly could understand her without her having to repeat herself or feel as if she said too much for the most part.
"You are so not a relic. I mean come on, sometimes I wish guys still cared about how they dressed if just for the eye candy." Yes, she just looked up up and down, Gatsby. Sorry about that. "Although now I realize you didn't take come as you aren't night all that seriously. You came to a Halloween party as you! That's cheating."
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"Now, you see, I don't consider it cheating at all," he replies warmly, strangely comforted by both the pattern of her speech and what she has to say. He's spent a lot of years of his life not paying attention, necessarily, to what people are saying unless it involves him. It's meant that he's missed a great deal of interesting people in his time. "After all, most people here are from a more modern time, so who's to say this isn't a costume? You only know it is because you've discovered my origins, but hardly anyone else is half as curious!"
"And now you've got me equally so. Tell me about Alice," he encourages. "I'm sure it will be far more interesting than anything I have to say."
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"I'll tell you what." She starts, her expression suddenly trained into something serious. It's so serious, in fact, in an exaggerated sort of way, that it's obvious that she's not really that serious at all. "I'll make you a deal. You smile a little more like you're at an actual party... and I'll keep the origin secret like a steel trap and nobody will know you came as yourself but me."
And he just opened the door for her to ramble about books and video games. Sorry, Gatsby. Only not really sorry. "Oh! I bet we could find a copy of the book here in the library somewhere. You have to read it. It's about this girl who wishes for something more to happen in her life. She follows a rabbit down the rabbit hole and ends up in a place called Wonderland where everything is crazy. Then after tons of craziness she wakes up and realizes that maybe her life is fine as it is without the crazy." Cliffs Notes, Dawn Summers version. You're welcome.
She pops one of the chocolates from the napkin on her hand in her mouth and makes sure to chew and swallow it before continuing. "Because wacky hijinks aren't always fun, you know? Sometimes they're dangerous." Sadly, Dawn is well acquainted with dangerous things. "So someone made this video game in the world of that book where when Alice returned home, she was talking about Wonderland and they thought she'd gone insane-o in the brain-o. So they put her in an asylum. But it turns out that it was all real cause Wonderland has fallen into chaos and she has to go back and save it. In the video game version Alice isn't just curious, she's also kind of a bad ass..." She gestures to her bloody dress with the bloody knife. "Hence the blood. Cause see? Bad ass!" The smile she gives him does not emote 'bad ass'.
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"I'm afraid you've gone a bit off topic, my dear," Gatsby says apologetically when her words begin to overwhelm him again. "I'm not sure what a video game might be." Though, he can glean enough from asylum to get the gist of what she's trying to say.
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"Oh! A video game is like... well it's like a movie where you can control the outcome. Like I would play Alice Liddel in the video game and use a controller to help get her through Wonderland and fight of monsters and meet up with the rabbit so he can tell her what to do." As far as explanations go, she thinks that's pretty good. But she still looks at him expectantly to see how she did.
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"It sounds fantastical," he says matter-of-factly, but that doesn't mean it isn't to be believed. After all, it's never in good taste to insult someone by implying their interests are silly or anything less. "And it sounds as though there's a great deal in the future that I must discover for myself, but I'm stuck in my ways." And in other ways, he's stuck in his own past. "Is it something you enjoy regularly?"
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"For awhile I was in college at Berkeley, but that fell through. Cause of... life shenanigans." A mixture of Dawn's bad choices and the supernatural that always infiltrates her life forced her back into the mix of her sister's crazy life. And she's never found her way back out of it after that. "Besides, some of the greatest minds of our time never went to college. Did you go to college?"
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Gatsby could tell this lie and allow it to burst and blossom like a flower, taking on life. Inevitably, though, that flower will wilt and die and his lie will be found out. They always are, aren't they? If he's learned anything, it's that he can't trust his lies to live forever, but they feel safe and they protect him and how can he ignore something like that. And so, instead of a lie, he offers a half-truth. "I completed some time at Oxford and Cambridge, after the war," he says, proud and ever prouder that there is truth in this. "Of course, my lessons were never from college, oh no, my dear. They came from the hard life lessons I endured," he says, tapping his nose. "And life can be a very good teacher, but also very cruel."
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To be fair, Dawn sometimes wishes she could do the college thing still. She wishes she could be normal and have a normal life. But the truth of the matter is that her life is filled with supernatural things and the plural of apocalypse to the point that she's had to accept that normal is never going to be her thing. She's learned to transcribe ancient languages from Giles and through her own hard work. She's learned to wield a sword, a crossbow and a stake from her sister, the Slayer. She's learned to run and hide when she can't win a fight from everyone. She's learned what little magic she knows from Willow. Life lessons.
"But when it gets cruel, which happens a lot, I like to give it a good kick in the shins." This is classic Dawn. Metaphorically kicking bad, evil things. "People underestimate the power of a good shin kick."