My fair faire

[sunflowerfields]

Who: Erryone
When: Day 170, right before leaving for Heartstone Manor
Where: The cookhouse
What: dinner and a show A crash course in table etiquette, and/or your chance to get your bad behavior out of your system.
Warnings: Watch your damn language.



With the threat of behave or die hanging over their heads, Hinawa is feeling very nervous. She's only tangentially familiar with the rules and regulations of formal dining and mingling, having only experienced it for the first time during the Celebration, and for the most part she's just a simple country gal. The last thing she wants is to get everyone in trouble because she used the wrong fork, and she can't help but feel like she's not the only one, so she comes up with a plan!

She only hopes it'll be enough.

[This is a mingle-ish! Jump on in!]

Comments

Taako | OTA!

[tacosgay]

Taako, having been a professional chef who's traveled and served people of all walks of life before, is actually surprisingly well-learned when it comes to table manners. When he cares enough to, he can actually hold himself with a surprising amount of poise, his motions graceful as he helps arrange the food that he and the other cooking staff have prepared. It seems his usual rudeness is entirely born out of apathy; he's entirely capable of coming across effortlessly elegant, at least until he opens his mouth. There are some things he just can't control.

The good news is that he manages to keep a pretty good cap on his attitude, at least for the most part; lord knows Hinawa's reminded him to mind his tongue often enough.

"Well? How is everything?" His tone is only lightly smug as he addresses the nearest guest; his hair is pulled up into an elegantly loose bun atop his head, his makeup for the night applied with care. He's eager to show off how fancy he can be.

[amusicaladventure]

"Stuffy and boring!" Ash said, affecting a look of infinite disdain. It didn't last, because a smile crept out a moment later. "At least that's what I keep telling myself. Actually, it's kind of fun watching everyone try to learn how to act and unsubtley fuming at all of this, but a real fancy dinner is supposed to be stuffy and boring, so I'm trying to practice."

[tacosgay]

Taako couldn't help but giggle at that, despite his attempts to be fancy.

"Yeah, that sounds about right," he said; though he did immediately follow it with, "Not to mention the whole 'if we're rude we might die' thing. I'm not crazy about all that, either."

[amusicaladventure]

"Hey, we signed up to hang around an ancient elder fae, that's exactly the sort of thing we should expect to have to deal with, right along with 'you may end up in hell' and 'by the way, here's a dimension that compromises your free will as a reward'." NOT THAT ASH WAS BITTER -- honestly, except for the last one, she wasn't bitter, having accepted the truth of the situation and well aware that it was worth what she'd gotten out of it. "I mean, we're totally doomed with this crowd, so this is going to turn into some jailbreak or something anyway, but we're still gonna try, right?"

[tacosgay]

"Let me just state for the record that it wasn't my choice to sign up for this," was Taako's immediate response; even though he had been thoroughly outed as having been forced into the carnival to repay a debt some time ago, he was always certain to point it out at every opportunity. As far as he was concerned, it was still an incredibly unfair punishment for such a minor "crime."

He frowned, leaning in closer over the table.

"As far as I'm concerned, the past few months of my life have all been one big attempt to not be killed by fae I know next to nothing about, so, really, this is just a day that ends in Y for me."

[amusicaladventure]

"Things you do without a choice are still things you do." Not many people knew that truth much better than catpeople, so she was still sympathetic nonetheless. "I think you're close to getting a good handle on fae, though. Truth is, I think you're better off treating them as forces of nature than anything else."

[tacosgay]

"Yeah, except I'm a wizard, so controlling the weather is totally a thing I'm capable of doing," he mumbled. "Or, uh, would be, if I knew certain spells. Anyway, my point is, the weather, I've got that shit on lock, theoretically, but fae? I tried controlling one of those once, and I'm pretty sure it ended up breaking every bone in my fuckin' torso."

[amusicaladventure]

"Sure, the localized weather for a fixed period of time," Ash said, unfazed by his claim. "Not on a global scale with absolute precision. We can get the Ringmaster pointed in a given direction for a little bit, but on the whole?"

Ash waved her hands from the air, front to back, like a storm front blowing through.

[sunflowerfields]

Hinawa is honestly thankful that Taako is here. She really only had a vague idea of what kind of meals to prepare, but meanwhile he seemed to know everything else they were supposed to be teaching the others.

"It's marvelous!" She exclaims, ignoring the smugness for the time being. "I don't know what we would've done without you."

[tacosgay]

"I mean... well, you would've had a dinner without food, for one thing," Taako answers with a doofy smirk on his face. Despite how dire the situation is, he still seems calm; honestly, this isn't even nearly the closest he's been to dying, or to danger in general.

Particularly not fae-based danger.

That aside, however... it really does feel good to cook for an occasion other than work, though he has recently developed more of an appreciation for his job in the carnival. He just wishes now that Lup could join him there. That would certainly liven things up.

"You know, uh... I don't think we've ever actually been introduced. You just kind of... made a fuss at me for swearing a couple of times, and then came to the cook house about this." He wags a finger at her. "That's not very well-mannered of... uh, either one of us, actually."

[espigeon]

A broad bird head with merry eyes and a perpetually smiling beak tilts at him. His eyes and some of his feathers are in the same blue as the more human part of Julien, but his voice is probably a better clue - not quite the same, it's got a better resonance and richness and certain consonants sound a little odd, but it's very very close.

"Just got here, man! Any suggestions? I'm taking my last chance to eat real food with this mouth before it's relegated to wherever they keep the menagerie. Which would be the best case scenario." Fine dining with this body seems troublesome. The best thing would be to give him a variety of small dishes, but he doesn't imagine the Prince will be accommodating.

His bird self only looks so much like his dæmon had. Ridiculous size difference aside, she'd been slim and narrow-headed, while he's just. Big. He looks like he'd have trouble fitting through a door. Julien's five-foot-five human self is broad shouldered but looks like a toothpick in comparison. Still, there's something there of that wide-spectrum amusement and interest.

[tacosgay]

Oh my god.

This is Taako's first time seeing Julien's bird body since their meeting at the kebab place, and it's jarring, to say the least. This is a big boy, and also feathery, and oh god, he hit on this bird in a kebab place, a lot.

It's very clear that he's taken Taako off guard, as, for a second, all he can do is pause and blink at him. All at once, it suddenly sinks in that he's being incredibly rude, and he blushes brightly and stammers as he tries to recover.

"I-- uh, y-yeah, I mean, uh, there are all sorts of things here-- what are you into?"

[espigeon]

That's it, that is the perfect shock reaction, rare and elevated. Julien's had a lot of experience with people noticing he's a bird ever since bird-ness happened maybe a year ago and has learned to find it amusing.

This body is actually so birdlike it doesn't even have a diaphragm and so he doesn't have the laughter reflex - if he ever laughs out loud it's deliberate. Instead his tail shakes briskly back and forth, and then he hooks his head down and to the side and buries his beak in the wrist of his wing, because he doesn't have the reflex to laugh with his mouth but he still has the cultural conditioning to cover it when trying to suppress laughter.

"Anything. Everything. I'm... I told you. Biggest you've ever seen, hopefully?" Yes, this is the perfect time to bring that up. "God I can't blame Julie now. I have horrible taste."