etrayalogs | [closed] household catch-all log

[The house feels empty. Unlived in. There are things in the rooms, but nothing that looks like it's ever been touched, or cared for, or broken out of carelessness or anger or shoddy craftmanship, nothing carefully repaired out of love or necessity. Nothing selected out of personal taste. There aren't even any marks on the floor until Scratch runs in, tracking dirt behind him and scuffing up the rugs.

She finds it deeply unsettling.

Her assigned family members will find her going through the house, surveying it with all the enthusiasm of a launderer surveying a pile of badly soiled clothes, while a scruffy white dog trots alongside her, surveying the place with the precise opposite level of enthusiasm: that of a dog with a lot of new things to smell.]

[Tokio is an awkward, gangly teenager on the taller side of average, who's currently kind of slinking through the house looking like he really doesn't belong here.]

Oh. Hi.

[Good intro there, Tokio.]

Are you... assigned to this house too?

[Scratch notices the boy before Shadowheart does, and immediately trots over to give him a sniff.

Shadowheart – dressed in armour, ornate spear strapped to her back, looking nothing like her assigned role of 'housespouse' – glances down at the note in her hand and then back up at the boy. This must be one of the people she's meant to pretend are her children.

She opts to answer his question by just saying her name.]

Shadowheart. And you are?

My given name is Tokio. I'll be working with you on this mission. Thank you for your patience, I'll do my best. [The formal introduction is a little bit stiff, and he bows slightly at the end of it.]

[and then...]

Is this your dog? [He holds out his hand to let the dog sniff.]

How formal of you. [Not at all what she'd expect from a teenager.

She nods as Scratch sniffs the boy's hand and then tries to lick it.]

He's called Scratch.

Hi Scratch. [Tokio lets himself be licked, and pets the dog on the head.] You look like a good boy.

[Scratch ruffs softly, acknowledging that he is, in fact, a very good boy. His tail starts wagging faster as he leans into the pets.]

I'm not your mother. [No point beating around the bush. Best to establish right out the gate that, whatever their assigned roles are, she has no intention of actually being a mother to this boy. Even if she wanted to, she wouldn't know how.]

Obviously. But we're supposed to play along with the idea when other people can see us if we don't want to fail the mission.

Yes. Well.

[She pauses awkwardly, wondering what 'playing along' might actually entail. Her only concept of motherhood comes from vague, none too pleasant memories of a woman who, suffice to say, was never especially maternal.

But she's not going to ask a teenage boy for advice on how to pretend to be someone's mother.]

Don't expect me to tie your shoes. Or anything like that. [Is that... something normal mothers do? She really hasn't got the faintest idea.]

[ Just the barest instructions on how to find this house, and Xingchen hopes he comes to the right place. The device vibrates just a little to tell him he's reached his latest destination, at least, as he steps through the threshold with a little bow of his head. Respect to the home as he steps higher than possibly necessary - habit.

Pausing to listen, the white bandage wrapped around his eyes hints to his blindness, but there's a gentleness to him regardless as the young man smiles at hearing the scurrying of canine feet. There's a sword strapped to his back and his Daoist robes are just as white as his blindfold.

Even though he's never been to this house before, he seems to have an uncanny awareness of what's in his path, enough to avoid just walking into things. This extends to people, and he turns after moving into another room and lifts his hands, cupping them before him and bows just a little. ]

Greetings. This daozhang is Xiao Xingchen.

Shadowheart.

[She watches the display of formality with curiosity.

When she was handed the paper implying that she would be playing 'mother' to two 'children,' she had pictured... well, children. This man looks young, but certainly not a child. It's a little difficult to tell beneath the blindfold, but he barely looks a few years younger than she does.]

You're older than I expected, given that the roles we're meant to be playing.

[At least that means, she hopes, he'll be able to care for himself. Perhaps her fears of being a terrible parent are unfounded, and she can simply mind her own business and let her 'children' care for themselves. That would probably be best for all of them.]

['Go on a date' should be a simple enough task. Sit at a table in a restaurant for an excruciating thirty to sixty minutes – she can't think of anything else a 'date' might entail – don't do or say anything to draw anybody's attention, and then return to their assigned house and don't think about it ever again. The problem is, of course, that it's Carver, and periodically she catches herself wondering who she'd like to see seated across from her, whether she'd want the sort of quiet life where eating a meal together in a restaurant counts as exciting, what she might want her future to look like...

A dangerous train of thought.

She's dressed for the occasion, and unarmed for once; she's trying to blend in. The dress is generic, it wouldn't look terribly out of place either here or in Baldur's Gate, but it is just low-cut enough to be considered daring for the housewife she's pretending to be.

As she frowns around the room, looking over the edge of her menu at the other patrons, something tugs at the tattered edges of her memory. Something about this is vaguely familiar to her.

She rolls her shoulders, her head wobbling back and forth for a moment as she tries to think of the correct sort of small talk for the occasion.]

How many of these happy couples do you suppose are faking it?

[ Too much of this is hateful. Carver sits awkwardly in a clean, new jacket. No gloves to protect his hands, no steel toed boots. Only a single knife tucked under his shirt as his gaze keeps drifting to check their corners, his back firmly to the wall. He can’t remember the last time he went on a date and realizes perhaps he never has, outside a few awkward, small town collisions when he was in high school. He and Riley never dared where people might see and even after, when there was no one left to care, they were both too broke and paranoid to dress up in a proper restaurant like this. And that was before the world broke the way it did.

That was then. And this is now. The whole thing makes him feel awkward and out of place; he’s certain that there are eyes on him; he hates the noise and all the corners he cannot possibly cover. He holds the menu to stop his hands from twitching, but it doesn’t really help.

Carver works his jaw. He doesn’t want to be here. He can’t imagine Shadowheart feels differently. ]

Does it matter?

[ It comes out flat, almost angry. But he’s with it enough to recognize that this isn’t about her, not really—she’s not like him, Carver knows, not yet. Maybe this is something she’d still try, back in her world that’s not quite broken yet. He can’t make himself begrudge that, not all the way.

His fingers twitch. He tries to modulate his tone, to at least sound like marginally less of a paranoid whack job who can’t stop checking their corners. ]

You look nice, [ Carver adds, because that’s what normal people say. It happens to be true, he thinks, though he doesn’t really notice these things anymore. She cleans up nice, looks more at ease in the moment than he does. ]

[He sounds about as miserable and frustrated as she feels. She can't help the faint bit of smugness she feels over being at least marginally better than him at concealing it.]

Was 'compliment your spouse' one of your tasks for the day?

[She's fairly certain she does look nice, but she's surprised to hear such a sentiment coming out of Carver's mouth.]

You're right, in any case. None of this matters beyond simply doing what's necessary to get through it.

They gave me a list, [ he replies, deadpan flat. The list feels like bullshit, but here they fucking are. It has to be done, no matter that it feels like bullshit. Pageantry serves a purpose even if he doesn't see it where it's aimed yet. ] There's a game here. No point in losing.

[She laughs aloud at that. Whether he's making a joke or not, she's not sure, but if he is she appreciates the dryness of the humour.]

I suppose I should thank the list-maker for your magnanimity, then.

[She glances over the menu again, trying to decide what looks good. And despite herself, she finds her thoughts straying where they shouldn't once more. She has no desire to be here, participating in this farce at the behest of her captor, but if this were real... If it weren't Carver sitting across from her, but someone taller, perhaps, with warm amber eyes and a mouth-watering array of muscles... If she were truly on her first ever date...]

What do you think you're going to get? [she asks with an earnestness that she almost immediately regrets.]

[closed] household catch-all log

arrival | open to the whole family

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Bow like icon, just...with blindfold. :3

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date night | closed to Carver

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