gooseberryhigh | GALENTINE'S DAY

GALENTINE'S DAY

Who needs BOYS to have a good Valentine's Day? Literally no one, according to Miss Riley Mae, who has taken it upon herself to bring all you beautiful babes here for Galentine's Day. Come one, come all, to bitch about boys, gush about the dance, braid hair, rage, make sacrifices, makeout and pillow fight in your underwear—you know, normal girl party stuff.

The Grotto is pinked the hell out, a celebration of Riley's favorite color more than Valentine's Day, with lights and streamers and pink lip-shaped pillows inside the building for people to sit on. It's disgusting if you don't like the color pink. It's par for the course if you've met Riley before.

There's a table with booze off to the side that looks like, at one point in time, was intended to be something of a mimosa station until Riley realized she would have to get champagne from Logan and lost interest. There are still several champagne flutes and lots of juices, there's just a haphazard collection of other alcohols there instead of champagne. Which is obviously better.

The building is host to makeovers, kissing games, and, apparently board games, and y'all better get to partying before curfew! It is, regrettably, still a school night.

HOW THIS WORKS

There are games of Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven in their usual place, but I'm not rolling any matches for anyone. Kiss who you want! Take over the closet if you want! It's a party!

Riley will be doing makeup and nails! Or she'll just allow access to her extensive and slightly trashed nail and makeup kits if you want to do it yourself. I will try and do personalized responses to makeover requests, but you can also assume Riley is just MIA sometimes. It's a party and she's drinking.

The party will still end at 10:00 PM, just like a regular Grotto party. Someone carry Riley home. And someone else please clean up after.

PARTY PARTY PRINCESS

There are old sleepover classic board games going on inside the building, around the edges of any kissing games going on. Who cares if most of these girls are too young to be feeling nostalgic, don't you want to play?

Ursula de Luca got her mother to send Pretty Pretty Princess, and you can play too! Fill out the form, post it here, and see how you did. I will keep rolling as long as you want so everyone can get that coveted crown.

The rules for Pretty Pretty Princess are here, but you don't need to know them OOCly to play with us. You're just trying to get a full set of jewelry and a crown (but not the black ring!) before your friends, because the winner is a pretty pretty princess, and the losers are all ugly ugly urchins.

There are other games, too! Mall Madness, Dream Phone, something with a whole bunch of sugar packets, whatever you can think of! Riley got her older siblings to send some to her, but, as these are Stampers we're talking about, most of them do not have all their pieces or rules included. I will not RNG these and characters are encouraged to just make up their own rules and find a way to include drinking.

Don't you dare lose any of these plastic pieces of jewelry.

♥ BEFORE THE PARTY: The all important "what are you wearing?" section.

♥ DURING THE PARTY: Pop music is blasting, and there's no weird movie playing, but otherwise it's your standard Grotto party. But with No Boys Allowed. They'll just stink up the place.

KISSING GAMES: You don't need boys to play Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven, but these are a la carte. Make your own matches!

OTHER GAMES: Drinking games can go here, but let's play Pretty Pretty Princess.

MAKEOVERS: Take a seat on the stone steps outside and Riley will slap some makeup on you. If she happens to be around!

♥ AFTER THE PARTY: Did you stay and clean up? Or did anyone need to get carried home? Hope all the strong girls stayed relatively sober.

♥ OOC - Questions, comments, concerns!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Not expecting to be followed, Avery turns and looks up and around at Clem. Definitely not expecting that, either. Although they had several things in common - big things, too - Clem and Avery haven't had a proper conversation in person in a long time. Ever, really, that Avery can remember. It is Galentine's, though, and Avery pats the ground next to her, a clear indication that she's okay if Clem wants to sit.

"Not much. Just enjoying the fresh air, thinking, you know." She shrugs, waving around noncommittally. She had a lot to think about, and though she had been starkly refusing to think about those things and attempted to drink her way into forgetting about it all, her plan was resolutely failing.

"Nice shirt. Are you having fun?" She asks, brow raised at Clem. "I hope so." She adds, completely pointlessly, but she's rambling. "You work really hard, you deserve some fun. It's tough being Captain sometimes, huh? How's that with Ulysses? Bet it's even harder."

Clem sits down next to Avery, putting her sneakered feet onto the next step down so her knees are almost up to her chin.

"Thanks, it's got a pocket," she says, leaning back and sticking her hand into the wholly impractical, slightly-off-boob-center shirt pocket. She never keeps anything in there, because it wouldn't fit much more than a snack sized candy bar, and that would melt at boob temperatures. Maybe a single hair tie or a crib sheet for a transfig test.

She leans hers chin on her knees while Avery talks, occasionally considering interrupting her but ultimately just letting her ramble on. She seems pretty drunk. "When he's not being a pill it's not so bad," she says when the topic of Quayle comes up. "We actually agree on most things. Quidditch things," she amends quickly. They very super much do not agree on most real-life things.

"Nice." Anything with pockets was pretty awesome. Avery loved clothes, fashion, etc, but she still saw the practicality of having pockets. Maybe not boob pockets, because what would honestly fit in there? A pen, maybe, if you were kind of smaller chested? Which she was, so the pockets might actually not be terrible for her.

It's just now that she notices this is Clem and that they are talking, and she's sitting next to her like this is something they regularly do. Which they don't. Which Avery suddenly finds really unfortunate. The female Captains should stick together.

"That must be nice." She says, with the very much unsaid but very much implied tone of I wouldn't know what that's like. Avery, two years straight, has had contention on her team. Players who didn't respect her as a Captain. Did any other Captain have that trouble, implicitly? Was it because they didn't believe she deserved it or had cheated somehow? "You've got a really great team. Don't tell anyone I said that, I'll have a mutiny on my hands." Not that she didn't already.

"What brings you out here?"

"Yeah, if you don't tell Quayle I said he's not so bad," she agrees. She doesn't actually think he'd rub it in her face or anything - they know they're simpatico as far as running the team goes, and they both pride themselves on that fact. So they have something like a truce. But not enough of one that Clem's willing to put any arrows in his quiver.

As for why she's out here tonight, that's easy enough. "There's a party," she says, like it should be obvious. Just because she's got a boyfriend now doesn't mean she isn't fun anymore. Hence, shirt.

"Oh, I won't. Talking to an Ebonhide senior boy never ends well for me." Except the one time her and Ulysses had won a bonding activity last year. Not that it had ended great apart from that.

Avery laughed, shaking her head. "Not at the party, I meant outside, not inside. All the fun is in there." She tilted her head back as a sort of wave towards the Grotto. "Not that I mind the company." Sure added, definitely not wanting to start screwing up any conversations with the Ebonhide senior girls, too.

"You just gotta learn their language first," Clem says, because she's well-versed in Ebonhide Senior Boy. Even if she's not friends with all of them, she is close with them. It's kind of weird to her to think that she might not talk to some of them after she graduates.

Clem laughs, a low and throaty sound that she's always been a little self-conscious of. "Party goes where we go," she says. It's not like they're a world away from anyone else or anything, even if it can sometimes feel that way in the oppressive darkness of the woods (another thing she's familiar with, as an Ebonhide).

"Mmm, I don't know about that." Avery gave Clem a look that indicated she was clearly not buying it. "I talked to Casper and upset him. I talked to Wilde and someone tried to matchmake us with some stupid notes, and I talked to Iliya and he pretended he couldn't speak English." Ulysses and Cameron were her only Ebonhide conversations to date that hadn't gone badly. They weren't great, either, but they certainly weren't total fails like the rest had been.

The idea that the party went where they were made Avery smirk, and she nodded her head in seeming agreement. "Right, I like that. I mean, it probably goes where you go. I'm kind of a killjoy, and lately... don't feel that much fun, I guess." Avery always talked a lot, but it was much worse now that she was intoxicated.

"First of all," Clem says, holding her thumb up to count #1. "Casper's always grumpy, so that doesn't mean anything. Someone else sending a dumb love note isn't your fault, and Iliya's a fucking weirdo with social anxiety." That only gets her up to three on her finger count and she shakes her hand out as if to release the bad energy into the wild.

"You gotta stop being so hard on yourself," Clem says, both in reference to the boys and as a response to her comment about not feeling like fun. She doesn't have much else to say besides that, that self-blame can drag a person further down than any outside circumstances. She lives her life in a singularly unapologetic way, though, so she knows the idea is foreign to a lot of people "Stop taking things personal."

Avery scrunched up her face, but didn't comment. Casper was always grumpy, but she was sure if she had thought more carefully about her actions things might have been different. "I know the love letter thing wasn't my fault, I'm just mad about it. We were like, becoming friends, you know? He was going to teach me how to skateboard. Now everything is all weird." Which really sucked.

"I guess it didn't help that he acted like even the thought of dating me was disgusting." She added, which was really the part she was most upset about. "You know, I try. I try like really hard to be a good person. To be a good captain and friend and student. To... I don't know. Prove something, I guess. That I deserve what I have." It was so natural for some people, to just be who they were. "I think I've just been down this year, because Olivia didn't come back."

GALENTINE'S DAY

Avery & Clem

Avery & Clem

Avery & Clem

Avery & Clem

Avery & Clem

Avery & Clem

Avery & Clem

Avery & Clem

Avery & Clem