[[closed post: jormanen end denam danne näskelle*]]

[ravkanwitch]

There's something about Dark that reminds Nina of Fjerda – maybe it's the cold and the scarcity. She remembers working long shifts at the cannery in Elling when she was trying to maintain her cover. Everything in that town was worn down and washed out. Even the crystal whiteness of the Ice Court is a bit bland in her memory. While she loves the country of Fjerda itself, somehow (maybe it's Djerholm syndrome; that's a linguistics joke), it all makes her slightly glum. And that's when the brightly colored magazines in the library grabbed her attention. What better time to hold a "slumber party" than now, when the end to Dark is around the corner, but the prospect of winter is still lingering?

Her room has been set up for the party ever since the early afternoon. She pushed her furniture against the walls and moved all of her "stuff" out of the way. With the help of Dionysus and the aftermath of their pinball bet, she set up a spread of juice boxes, grapes, and some really strange but quite tasty Japanese grape gummies. He also provided the jelly for some almond butter and jelly squares that Luo Binghe helped to make – after she promised him that she would spend some quality time with him after the slumber party, of course.

She wasn't exactly sure how to decorate... Festive? Girly? Spooky? A little bit of everything? She hung up a few brightly colored streamers as well as some black streamers and then found all of the spare cushions and blankets in the empty rooms on her level of the mansion. The cushions are laid out on the ground for everyone to sit or lay on along with plenty of blankets on top. She did read that spooky stories are typical at a slumber party, so she's scattered a few decorative bones around the room for a spooky vibe... And then the final touch: she found three strings of fairy lights hidden away in a dusty closet and strung them around the ceiling of the room where they're sparkling away right now. Thankfully, there's been no restriction on that whole "electricity" thing. And then... the wait for the guests to arrive.

[[Let's try this slumber party post this way... For each stage of the evening, I'll post a top level Nina comment. Feel free to respond to whatever strikes your fancy and then interact with everyone else as needed! Hopefully we'll end up with multiple short threads!]]

*Be welcome and wait out the storm, in Fjerdan

Comments

[georgianosity]

Georgia feels herself go even redder. That's it!!! She's not a wilting violet, or a goosegog for that matter. She can outlez anyone here! With a poisonous look at Gideon—who should be loyal to Tally, hello?? are girls no better than boys these days????—she says, "I'll go first then."

[ravkanwitch]

Nina looks around the room -- and luckily, there's a glass bottle holding a few flowers from the greenhouse that have definitely seen better days. She tosses the flowers and dumps the water that's in the bottle, setting it down in the middle of the room.

"Great!" She says easily. "Everyone should come a little closer, so we're as close to equally spaced out as we can get."

[georgianosity]

Georgia is determined not to back down. She spins the bottle with a certain glamorous and mysterious air, even sexy one might say, if that one is Georgia. It spins for some time—she put all her field hockey muscle behind it—but it eventually slows, wobbling for what seems like an age before finally settling on... Gideon. Erlack!!!

[tallyyoungblood]

Spin the bottle is a totally popular activity with uglies, and a few pretty cliques, so Tally's able to calm any rising jealousy by reminding herself that this is normal, and it doesn't actually count. Mostly. Luckily, Tally's totally distracted and delighted by how clearly flustered Georgia is--it's a welcome contrast to her normal intimidating confidence.

She's looking forward to seeing how Georgia's face looks when she has to kiss Tress or something when the bottle lands on Gideon. Tally covers her mouth with her hand, not sure if she's repressing a laugh or a scream. She's sure this is making Georgia break one of her million friendship rules, or something, and also that Gideon is not going to enjoy kissing the girl who'd attacked her with Rusty eyeshadow. She wants to tell them that they don't have to do this, but the one thing they have in common is, well, commitment. She's never known either of them to back down from anything.

"It's fine," she says instead, wanting to reassure both of them. Then she feels like a total idiot for assuming either of them needed her permission. "I mean. Um." Her eyes flick between each of them in a panic.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon winks at Tally. She's honestly a little relieved this is the first match-up, cementing this as a silly game rather than the lead-in to some kind of orgy or something, even if it means her the second person she's ever kissed is someone who probably just got her braces off last week.

She leans forward, across the circle. "It's a good thing you femme'd me up," she tells Georgia. "Really nerfed me. Not sure you could handle me at my full power."

[georgianosity]

This is actually disturbingly similar to the last time Georgia played Truth or Dare!! Namely, when she got dared to kiss her mate's boyfriend (Dave the Laugh), which she refused to do, only for him to come across her in the kitchen later and say "you owe me a kiss, Sex Kitty" in that sooooo vair vair annoying Dave the Laughy way of his where his voice goes all kind of sexy and brain-melty, and then Georgia accidentally got to number six with him despite Robbie and Ellen. Which was maybe a bit uncool of her, but how can she be held responsible for her lips just sort of automatically puckering with no input from her brain?? And also it was technically still a dare!!!

Anyway, once again she has to snog someone her mate fancies, but this time it's in front of everyone, and she doesn't even want to. (Not that she even wanted to snog Dave.) She rolls her eyes at Gideon. "Number three max," she says and leans forward, half-closing her eyes.

[ninth_cavalier]

"What the fuck is a number three?" Gideon asks, and then doesn't give Georgia time to answer, kissing her on the mouth. It's not a perfunctory peck—that doesn't seem in the spirit of the game, and Gideon only gets called unsportsmanlike when she's doing something like driving a spike through a guy's foot in the middle of a duel—but it's absolutely nothing like the kisses she gives Tally, either. Their mouths undeniably touch, lips decidedly closed, and Gideon spends most of it being unpleasantly distracted by the sensation of sticky lipgloss against sticky lipgloss.

[ravkanwitch]

Nina purposefully says "oooooh" in an encouraging fashion as if she's watching a fighting match and a particularly good hit was just made, but it honestly looks awkward and a little uncomfortable.

[georgianosity]

It's actually not so bad. Not any worse than kissing Whelk Boy, anyway—less whelkiness—which doesn't seem right. Shouldn't Georgia be more disgusted by kissing a girl than kissing a boy, even if the boy is weird and a thicko? Does that mean unattractive lads are basically the same as girls to her, romance-wise? Or does it mean somewhere out there in the big blue yonder could be a Sex God girl who gives her jelloid legs????? Do lezzies have their own Whelk Boys among girldom that they're not really interested in either? Georgia's always assumed she's not a lesbian because she doesn't want to kiss her mates, but what if her mates are just not attractive in a girl-girl way? How does one know these things???

She must speak to Dave (who is the Hornmeister as well as The Laugh). He would know all these answers. But he's not here, and the closest equivalent to an expert on matters of luuuurve is Claudius from Hamlet!!!!

Georgia pulls back, wiping her mouth of leftover stickiness. From her extensive research, she knows lip gloss is meant to sort of melt into the snog, which is why it's the superior choice over lippy if you think there's a chance of snogging on the horizon. But admittedly, her research did not include double lip gloss. Blimey O'Reilly's trousers, there is so much more to the lesbian lifestyle than she knew.

[ravkanwitch]

"You're brave to go first," Nina tells Georgia, yet again unaware of the internal turmoil she's going through. Now she turns to Gideon. "What do you think? Want to go next or do you want to let someone new spin it?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon rubs the gloss from her mouth with the back of one hand—for the comfort of whoever she gets to kiss next, now that she knows how it feels—and reaches for the bottle. "Don't worry, there's plenty of me to go around." She gives the bottle a firm twirl, and watches as it spins, rapidly and then slowly. At first it looks like it's going to stop on Gu Xiang, but it slides just the slightest bit past her to point to Tress's left knee.

Gideon meets her eyes, eyebrows waggling, but there's a spark of real nervousness in her stomach, too. "Up for it, pirate queen?"

[sporesprouter]

Tress manages a little smile and nods. She's almost glad she wasn't bonded with the Midnight Essence for very long, or she'd be feeling a lot worse than she actually is. She'll have a bit of a headache later on and her lips are almost certainly still a bit chapped, but it's nothing to dissuade her. It's how the game is played, apparently.

"Ready when you are," she says, leaning forward.

[ninth_cavalier]

Full offense to Georgia, but Gideon's going to give this kiss a little more of her attention. She hitches forward and raises a hand to cup Tress' jaw, slotting their mouths together soft and slow.

[sporesprouter]

Outside of Charlie (or notably once, a lizard creature she briefly thought was Charlie, and the less time spent on that the better), she doesn't exactly have a wealth of kissing experience, and kissing Gideon the way she would kiss Charlie is very much off the table. Still, though, she also refuses to do an intentionally bad job. So she kisses Gideon back, soft and sweet, chapped lips and all.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon pulls back, eventually, and leans back on her hands. Her face feels a little hot. Right. Uh. She shakes herself and pastes on a sleazy grin. "Your turn. Unless you guys just want me to keep spinning—"

[sporesprouter]

"It's fine." She leans forward and takes hold of the bottle, spinning and watching as it circles, eventually slowing and stopping shortly before it moves past Nina.

"Well, there we go."

[ravkanwitch]

Nina lets out a small, dramatic gasp when the bottle lands on her. "It's about time! I've been pining after Tress for ages," she declares, giving Tress a wink to show that she's joking. She tosses her hair over one shoulder and lightly leans across the circle, letting Tress take the lead on the kiss.

[sporesprouter]

Tress smothers a laugh at Nina's comment before leaning in as well to give Nina a quite pleasant if remarkably chaste kiss.

[ravkanwitch]

After a couple seconds, Nina leans back and gives Tress a smile. "I suppose we're all lucky enough to go twice in a row," she says, giving the bottle a hefty spin. It circles around many times before it lands on -- Gu Xiang!

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon wolf-whistles. At Nina and Tress, or the prospect of Nina and Gu Xiang? Yes.

[thepurpledanger]

The moment the bottle stops spinning, an icy dread creeps over Gu Xiang like a river starting to freeze--a sluggish, slushy dread with a fast current beneath it.

If Ragnelle had never kissed her with Qi Yan's lips, she thinks her heart would be fluttering with excitement. Nina's so pretty and nice and scary; she would be a perfect person for a first kiss. And it wouldn't mean anything, anyway. It's just a game. She wouldn't expect anything. It'd be safe. It'd be fine.

But this isn't her first kiss now, and Gu Xiang is never going to get a first kiss again, because hers was stolen from her by someone she thought she could trust.

She can't let anyone see. She doesn't know how to grieve for this except with rage, and she doesn't want to wreck the slumber party with her rage. What they have here is special, and fragile, and new. It would be like stomping on a baby duck. She wants to protect all of these girls with every bone and muscle in her body.

So she puts on her cockiest smirk, leans back on her hands, and says, "Sure, come and get me."

[ravkanwitch]

Nina can sense that there might be something going on deep down inside, a sixth sense only borne of knowing people well enough to imitate them and fool them-- but Gu Xiang is good at hiding it. She gives her a hesitant, considering look for a second, enough time to back out of it if she wants, but the smirk doesn't fade. The kiss that she gives Gu Xiang is as gentle and sweet as she can possibly give.

[thepurpledanger]

Oh, no! Gentle and sweet is going to make those feelings come back!!! Gu Xiang tangles her hands in Nina's hair and dips her, kissing back fiercely.

[ravkanwitch]

Well, alright-- it takes a split second to recover from being dipped, but Nina matches the energy of the kiss quite easily. After a moment, she pulls back, just a touch breathless.

[thepurpledanger]

Gu Xiang emerges from the kiss as though from a battle, breathless herself, smug and triumphant. "So I just spin the bottle again, right?" she says