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10/02 06:12

✽ Silence lifts at six in the morning, and there is still quite a bit of time before classes start. Early risers who decide to return to school from the dorms cross the courtyard and open the double doors and—- something cold and wet drips down onto their head: old blood from the torso of a student(?) bound by rope and strung up above the doors to the courtyard, body burned black and cut in half at the waist.
The air is heavy, and the entire school smells of blood.

Hope... month...

✽ A large poster advertising the student store has been tacked up on the bulletin board. For October, store hours are now 6AM to 8PM Monday to Saturday, and noon to 4PM on Sundays. Outside of those hours, the shopkeeper is occasionally in the shop and will leave the door propped open if they are, but more often than not, the door is closed and there is no answer when knocking on the door. Laundry tokens can now be purchased at a reasonable price. The rock gacha machine is now located just outside the door so it can be played at any time. Please continue to spend your hard-eared points on plain boring normal rocks.
✽ In the dormitory, the construction paper covering the oil paintings start to soak through with blood, causing the papers to grow heavy and fall. The distorted faces in the paintings seem to be bleeding from their open wounds, the canvas wet to the touch and smelling of blood. Blood dripping down the walls and on the floor do not cause the dorms to change, nor do the splatters of blood seen on the glass over the star dormitory rooms occasionally throughout the month, as if it had rained blood in the darkness and silence of night, although no other evidence is seen elsewhere in the courtyard.
✽ The wisteria tree slowly continues to lose its petals, and the area roughly ten feet around the trunk of the tree has become completely dead and barren, leaving dry dirt underneath. Despite shedding its petals, new buds are becoming noticeable now too. The spider lilies that bloomed during the autumnal equinox remain, still covering the rest of the courtyard and extending into the forest surrounding the school. Outside, the air smells faintly metallic at all times.
✽ Occasionally throughout the month and increasing in frequency and intensity towards the end of the month, characters with 13 or more tallies will find themselves sensitive to sunlight and loud noises, prone to vertigo upon standing or turning too quickly, and suffering ice pick headaches throughout the day.
✽ Characters with 5 or less tallies will hear faint white noise during the normally silent hours of midnight to 6AM, but no other sound.
✽ The class roster on the bulletin board acknowledges class 1-D for leading the rest of the classes in rank, being the first to reach 100. All characters in first year classes and #-D classes will receive 500 merit points and will be able to exit out the front door to the school. They will be able to make it up to the front gate, but will find themselves growing lightheaded and about to pass out if they try to squeeze through the bars or climb over the gate itself. Please contact me privately if they would try to get out anyways.
✽ The void in the auditorium continues to grow, and (pending character interaction) by the end of the month will encompass the entire right wing of the first floor past the lockers, the home ec cooking room on the second floor, as well as the art club room on the third floor.

Exchange Program

✽ On October 11, students participating in the exchange program are given one pocket knife each and sent out the front doors, upon which they will find themselves in that canon location as if they had stepped out of any normal door in the area. For characters who visit their own canon's location, they will find all their friends and family alive and happy— except for the one person they are closest to, who will be absent. Nobody there will recognize your character or the person they are closest to, regarding both as complete strangers, as if neither have ever existed in the first place. But otherwise... think of it as canon good end, in contrast to elevator bad end.
✽ There is no bus to take them back to Yogen and they can stay as long as they'd like, even forever if they feel like it. If they wish to return to their real home, though, they would have to first return to Yogen and figure things out from there. The first time they open the pocket knife, they will find a piece of paper tucked between the blade and the handle reading "Use to return." If they use it on other people, that's the local law enforcement's business. In order to return to Yogen, perhaps remembering Natsume's presentation mentioning how they got there in the first place, they will have to use the knife on themselves, or otherwise die by happenstance or, eventually, old age. Two weeks after their return to school, they will find one additional tally on the inside of their wrist.
✽ In return, Yogen receives three exchange students: two familiar and one not.

OOC

✽ The first prompt leads into this month's mini-event, which is becoming a misnomer, maybe they should be called murder events instead.
✽ All students leaving on the exchange program will icly be gone for at least 10/11 - 10/17, although they will be able to return at any later date in October, at the player's discretion, regardless of how much time they experienced on their trip. Just like in the bad end elevator and the void school, nothing physical can be taken back from the exchange trip, but characters can at least drain their bank accounts eating good food and exploring town before coming back.
✽ The new exchange students are former npcs Kouji Seki and Chiaki Kudo, as well as a new student ???. They can be interacted with in their corresponding toplevels below, after 10/11.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[with love and green frosting. please.]

Are you going colorblind too?

Halloween is about the odd and the fantastiCAL.

( ....moving the cookies away from subaru >:/ rights lost )

How many are you maKING?

[don't call his pumpkins ugly!!! he's reaching over to take one anyway.]

I dunno. I'm sorta just doin it until I feel like stopping.

[craft therapy...]

I need enough to decorate the dorms and the fourth floor though, the right side. I'm gonna do a test of courage thing over there.

[where people have died]

( hmmm no he's smacking subaru's hand. he's the thief in this relationship. )

Where we literally just had people die last MONTH? You're as insensitive as the little bunNY.

Come on, it was a month ago! We can't live with grief forever, Natsume.

[it's insensitive and that is just how subaru is.]

Besides, I've had this planned out since I took Boss stargazing last month.

Do not tell me how to deal with my grief—

( he's standing up, he's taking his cookies with him. )

Unless you liked it when people told you how to deal with yours when your father went and died in that miserable little prison CELL?

[subaru flinches, bile rising to his throat and burning as he forces it back down -- grabs natsume too, to try and drag him back down.]

Natsume, stay. Please. I'm sorry, you're right, that was bad of me.

[he's not even snapping back at the comments about his dad.]

I can't tell you what to do, but I don't want it to be a place full of bad memories either. There's enough as-is with the fire that went on there. So it's just a little fun thing, and if no one shows then fine.

( natsume jerks to a stop, cookies sliding but staying on the tray, and he stares down at subaru, burning.

and slowly, he'll sit back down, food going far off to the side. )

As long as you don't try to use anyone's death there as a DRAW, then you'll probably have a few risk-taKERS.

[it's only once he's sure natsume won't leave him, feeling freshly sixteen again, before he lets the other go and goes back to make pumpkins. they really are ugly.]

No, never. They can think what they want, but I'm not gonna use it as a way to bring people in.

[not the way his father's death was sensationalized, drawing all to the akehoshi house to drown them in misery again and again and again and]

How can I make my pumpkins less ugly?

...You're trying too hard to make them look like pumpKINS.

( he takes some of the paper... a pencil too, to sketch one loosely. he isn't an amazing artist or anything, but pumpkins are just round with some ridges. )

Don't squish them down so much to get their HUMPS. They fall more naturally, like THIS... See? And now you'll have room for a face TOO.

[subaru leans on a hand and watches natsume draw, flicking back up to the other's face.]

Do you like my spiders?

You can't mess them UP.

( ...so they're fine. natsume's frustration and... hurt, subaru's able to tell it's that where anyone else might mistake it for just anger, is still present in the lines by his eyes, but it's fading. )

They'll look scarier if you give them abdomen though; they look like the soot sprites from that famous Miyazaki movie but with eight legs instead otherWISE. ( he takes the scissors, carefully cutting one of his pumpkin out; it's more like one of those oblong ones, gently sloping sides.

the next is rounder, but without the sharp angles that miniature pumpkins have with their ridges. ) Were you planning on cutting out faCES, or were you going to draw them ON? Or paste them, whateVER.

Draw. I think you can get more mileage out that way, and it's cuter too.

[even if they're supposed to be scary.

he watches the lines soften and know there's nothing he can really say that he hasn't said, nothing he can do to smooth them down to nothing. time will, like a river over the surface of a rough pebble. it just sucks, because he hates it when he hurts his friends, and he knows he does it more often than he likes.

... and then he'll take a pencil to sketch some faces, so it'll be easier to go over them with marker.]

Do you think I should make teru teru bouzu for hanging ghosts? I'll give 'em mean faces.

( tell him his cookies taste good when he eventually lets you have one. )

Only if it ensures a night without RAIN. ( would be nice to not wake up to seeing it in red on the skylight, before having to step out in the hallway and seeing the dripping paintings and then leaving to see the dying wisteria and tasting iron in the air.

he should ask kazuki if there's anything he can do. he puts it away for tonight. ) It'd be easier for you to make than paper ghosts at any RATE. You'd probably make them look too blobBY, like when someone with no understanding of what makes D*tto so appealing tries to draw IT.

( ... )

Sorry about bringing up your dadDY.

[oh, subaru is feeling that. as the person who sleeps closest to the skylight, he feels that.

and he's about to refute the legitimacy of his ghost drawings when natsume apologizes, mouth snapping shut and glancing aside at the other again. he always gets a certain way when it happens, a little tense and a little too focused on whatever it is he's doing, be it reading a person's mood or cutting out pumpkins.

it's been a while since natsume used his father as a slap in the face. but it was deserved, subaru thinks, so he leans against his friend, shoulder to shoulder.]

Sorry for basically telling you to get over it. I've had my fair share of those, so I know it sucks.

[a little inkling into his past, so rarely brought up and yet so often brushed upon. all the media reporters in the world couldn't cover the exact moments in his various places of stay, and so as known as the incident is as a whole... the details, the little things-- those are unknown, and if subaru has his way they'd remain that way.]

... I really didn't mean it that way, though. I do just wanna put some good memories up there, the way you and Trickstar and everyone else have filled my life with them.

...I know you didn't mean any HARM.

( but he barely has time to grieve, barely any time to reflect, before there's something else he has to focus on. that he feels like he has to. and maybe keeping busy is part of how he copes, not having to think about things, not having to deal with the holes in his life left by those he couldn't save.

maybe it's his own fault that he hasn't yet grieved properly. he won't let himself.

but it's different, hurts in a particular way, when a statement like "we can't live with grief forever" comes around. natsume meticulously cuts shapes and doesn't look at subaru. )

Though you shouldn't lump me in with the rest of THEM. I didn't do anything for YOU. I'm not the magician you needED.

( not then and not now. )

You were, though. And you still are.

[it's too sentimental and sappy to really get into; it's spoken quiet and with conviction, though, a sureness that goes beyond stubbornness.

natsume was his first friend. trickstar was the family he gained from it. chiaki was the first person he looked up to, and koga was the abrasive guy he felt a connection with. but subaru wouldn't have had a chance to meet four of these people if it hadn't been for natsume, would have never had a real conversation with hokuto before that day.]

I don't know, [grains of honesty, of himself, trickle out with every word, giving pieces of himself carefully even to this day,] if I'd still be me without you here.

[he's grounding. he's comfort and familiarity. subaru knows he can always bother natsume, and he'll get the same reactions he did back home -- back when they were alive. he's been able to spend more time around his friend here than he ever got to once they both had their separate agencies, and maybe he's taking advantage of that too much, but--

but natsume has always, always an important friend to him, and he always, always would be.]

( it's touching and sappy and sentimental still, and natsume feels the back of his neck warm. pleased to hear it, embarrassed that it was said. he moves onto making black cats instead, ones with little witch hats. )

You're an idiOT. Don't say such superfluous THINGS. ( but the heat isn't there, and he turns his face so subaru can't see the light reddening of his cheeks. his hair does well in hiding his ears. ) You would've still be you; you're not so easily molDED.

( it isn't even like natsume's been a guide or anything, either. but it isn't really about that, he guesses.

it's about home. not home, yumenosaki, but the type of home you find in other people, that natsume has refused to find himself but has, likely, stumbled into anyway. he doesn't think about it, every thought a bud threatening to bloom into several questioning flowers, but... )

[but it's like he's always asking -- just how much of yourself can you lose until you're not "you" anymore? if he and natsume had been switched, if subaru had so many months without him and natsume had come in instead, would he have been recognizable? or would he have been stripped away by the black hole that was this school, smaller and dimmer than natsume recalled?

he doesn't have to think about it though. because he wouldn't have become dim, he would've been put out completely; a sparkler lit and then falling into the bucket beneath in pieces. subaru had his mother, he had a dream. he had natsume, he had trickstar. he had anzu, he had chiaki. but he would have had none of that here.

... it's depressing. so he cuts it off, like a balloon freed from a weight, and lets himself laugh.]

Yeah~, you're right. ♪ [...cats.] Anyway, what're those for?

You can't have Halloween without a few black cats skulking aBOUT. It's said witches were able to turn into them TOO... That's why killing them was a popular activiTY, and why they remain a symbol of unluckiness toDAY.

But they're only ordinary CATS. ( snip snip snip ) Humans were monsters to label them anything ELSE.

( ... )

Do you actually care when you ask this type of THING, Mr. Skeptic?

Sure! I don't believe in superstitions like that, but I like hearing people talk about what they're into.

[it's nice! subaru sets his pumpkins aside and reaches for a cookie.]

Just like how I take fortunes from you every time you offer, even though I don't really believe in stuff like that.

[but still plays up begging for a good fortune and he believes in wishes on stars and whatnot]

( should he let subaru have a cookie after all of that.......

he can have one :/ but only because he's too busy cutting cats to stop him without stabbing him with scissors. the cookies are warm with cinnamon and nutmeg, hints of cardamom and vanilla... cozy. )

I'll start refusing YOU. ( he won't. natsume likes telling fortunes, even for people who don't believe in it. it's only when they start getting nasty about his work he doesn't agree with them. ) Anything else you'd like to KNOW?

( he loves ... halloween ... pws )

[yesssss... he's gonna enjoy his colorblind bat.]

If ghosts are the only thing I'm gonna be seeing as the days pass.

[because

he came back and now there are the more visible forms of ghosts ☆]

...You're only seeing them because the veil thins around this time of YEAR. Halloween, also known as All Hallow's Eve, is famous for that very THING, though it's hardly the only holiday that does IT.

( a small smile. )

At least the ones here are friendLY. ( but he's biased towards his gentle human-eating monster gardener friend and his adorable library ghost girl who steals fingernails as payment for overdue books. ) I'm glad more people get to see THEM.

[...]

Katsukon's a cool dude. I'm gonna try and meet that little ghost friend of yours too that you mentioned, the one in the library, even though I won't always be able to...

[................ library......................................

he's gonna quietly, thoughtfully eat his cookie.]

10/02 06:12

Hope... month...

Exchange Program

OOC

b for "my wife is a bitch and i love her"

b for bad subarus get no cookies

b for baby come back... you can blame it all on me

b for booboo the fool is you

i cant think of any more b defenses you win

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