fandomtownies | Groovy Tunes, Sunday

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Groovy Tunes, Sunday

It was completely, utterly quiet in the Groovy Tunes today, to Jono's mild frustration. He'd come in thinking he would pull out his guitar, play for a while, maybe even do some writing, but he couldn't even get his footfalls to sound against the floor, never mind the sound of music itself. A quick glance around the room revealed signs that the Silence was back. Either that, or the squirrels had been making themselves more at home in the rafters than was their usual wont.

He supposed he ought to be grateful. If everything was silent today, then he couldn't hear whatever it was that the stereo had taken upon itself to try to play on repeat, today.

[OOC: Open!]

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"What do I need to know before buying a drum kit?" Octavia asked as she came into the store.

Or, as it turned out, she tried to. She made all the right shapes with her lips and her breath travelled all through the right path, and yet she couldn't hear her voice. So then she coughed, and that made no sound either.

So now she was standing at the door, frowning.

And Jono was glancing up at her, giving her a wry look of understanding, and then reaching his hand up to rap knuckles against the counter. Soundlessly.

Hey, Octavia. At least it wasn't just you?

Small blessings. Octavia huffed, annoyed by the inconvenience. She was familiar with communicating silently, but only in situations where it was part of executing a plan that had been agreed upon beforehand, and only involved simple signals.

The way she mouthed FANDOM and frowned hard was easy to parse, though.

//Fandom,// Jono agreed. Because shut up, Silence, telepathy wasn't an actual physical sound. //Afraid there's not much I can do for you that has anything to do with actually sampling sounds today, unless it can be hauled outside.//

Octavia flinched a little at his voice in her head. Not because it was an unfamiliar sensation - it really wasn't - but because it was such a stark contrast to the utter silence that it startled her.

She huffed a little, then mimed a pen and paper, raising her eyebrows.

Jono actually had the good grace to look faintly apologetic as he reached for a pen and picked up the small notebook he generally used for writing chord progressions out in. He held both out to her.

This is dumb, Octavia wrote, and showed it to him. That bit didn't really need a reply, though, so as soon as he'd seen it, she went back to writing another note.

We're going to buy a drum kit

As soon as she'd written it, she realized she should've probably written 'I'm' and not 'we're', because it wasn't very clear who the 'we' was, but, oh well.

Jono considered that note - and yes, the amusement was strong with the first part - and nodded a little at the second.

//Drum kits, we've got. Did you have anything in particular in mind, luv?//

Was going to ask that

Because she knew practically nothing about anything except the one set she'd actually played on so far.

Just basic one?

Please, like she was going to handwrite full sentences when she was trying to have a conversation.

Hey, Jono wasn't expecting Shakespeare, either. He nodded, and then stood and came around the counter, leading the way toward some basic beginner drum sets.

//These ones aren't bad if you just want something to work on your rhythm with, for a start. Bass drum, tom, floor tom, snare, and two cymbals- a brass crash-ride and a hi-hat.//

A beat.

//If that means anything t'you?//

Octavia shrugged, then made a pretty universally-understood signal for 'ehhh' with one of her hands, tilting it vaguely from side to side.

She knew a little, but she hadn't really been bothering to learn many of the terms.

Jono gave a little knowing nod, and then reached to turn the box around, showing off the photo of the drum set on the front.

//Something like this,// he offered. //We can, ah, take it outside and set it up if you want to see how it sounds?//

Nothing like setting up a drum kit on the cobblestones, right?

She'd done worse. Though with things that weren's really comparable, but still, objectively worse.

So, she shrugged. Why not, right?

Jono shrugged right back, and then crouched down to pick up the box, hefting it up and making his way toward the door with it.

//Worst case scenario, we spend time putting it together and then I get to put it away again, and you've got a better idea of what you want.//

Octavia cut ahead of him to get to the door first. Mostly so she could hold it open for him as he carried the box.

But also because the silence was starting to low-key freak her out. It was the lack of footsteps, it wasn't right.

Jono gave her a thankful nod as he stepped outside, the first steps against the cobblestones falling back into a somewhat more comfortable level of 'quiet,' rather than 'silent.'

He turned a glance toward her, gave a small nod, and then immediately settled in to start opening the box and set up the contents.

Octavia sighed as she stepped onto the street - and felt immediately better for it, because she could actually hear it.

"Okay, is that a new thing that happens?" she asked as she bent down to peer into the box. "Should I start expecting random but complete silence?"

"Nah, luv," Jono replied, shaking his head. "That's some of the local wildlife. Seems to like the music shop most of all, I haven't encountered it anywhere else. Makes its rounds every now and again, I'm not sure if it actually eats all the sound or just cancels it out, though."

"I'm almost sorry I asked," Octavia replied dryly, shaking her head. "Because that's the most Fandom thing I've heard all week."

Also she was herself, and so she was already wondering whether there would be any practical uses for an animal like that.

She picked up something she actually recognized from the box, which was also something she was pretty sure didn't need any assembly in itself. "Didn't run into it when I was still working here, and I think I'm okay with that."

"Really, I don't entirely blame you, there," Jono noted. "A little silence now and again, I appreciate, but that little blighter gets carried away with it, every time."

"And I'm pretty anti-silence, I guess."

She said that while nodding down at the drums. Even if maybe she wasn't exactly anti-silence, she was still very much pro-noise.

"There's silence, and then there's that unnatural nothingness," Jono noted, shrugging. "Takes some getting used to, I suppose."

Octavia was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You know, that was one of the weirdest things about coming down to Earth."

Had she actually told him about her background? She didn't really keep track of who knew and who didn't. Anyway, she was assembling the kit, not really looking up at him.

"How quiet it can get, down here."

Well, that earned a tilt of his head, right there. Jono didn't want to pry, but she'd volunteered that much. Nudging a little from there didn't seem like stepping out of bounds.

"That so? From a... different world? Or spend more time in space itself?"

"I was born on a space station."

Which was a much more complicated story than that made it out to be, but it also wasn't relevant to what she was saying right now.

She shrugged. "There was this constant hum of the engine and the ventilations systems, always in the background of everything. Never really noticed before it wasn't in my ears anymore."

Jono nodded a little. It made sense enough to him, anyway.

"I grew up in the city," he offered. "Not the same sounds, but the same expectation for that constant white noise. I think the only reason I can handle the island is because there's plenty of background chatter up here," he tapped the side of his head, "to make up for how I'm reasonably certain there isn't a siren or motorized vehicle on the whole bloody rock."

Octavia nodded back at him. "It's so quiet here."

She couldn't really imagine living in a city, because she couldn't really imagine living around so many people. But this was also ridiculous.

"I don't think we can even move into a house of our own," she added, "because at least in the building we're in you can kind of hear other people in the other apartments."

And she liked that, even though she'd woken up half in a panic to the sound of footsteps in the hallways several times in the early days. Childhood trauma rearing its ugly head.

"Small towns," Jono mused with a shake of his head. "I'm not entirely certain how anybody manages to live in them, but here we are. I suppose at least in the summertime you can get the air conditioning going, get a little bit more noise that way. Winter's quieter on so many more levels."

"Yeah, it's been weird being here during the winter," Octavia admitted. Even with two winters almost behind her now, it was still odd. "The snow mutes... so much of everything. We didn't really have that on the ground, where I came from."

"From somewhere warmer, then?" Jono reached out to pull one of the drums from the box, turning it over thoughtfully, mostly just for something to do with his hands. "In London, winter was usually rain. Which is its own sort of white noise."

"Mm," Octavia agreed, vaguely. "I think the nuclear apocalypse must've messed up the weather the same as it did everything else." Because she was sure they should've encountered a winter over their time on the ground, if it hadn't. "Ground's kind of a wasteland,but of forests."

Anyway, she looked up. "London's on another continent, right? Europe?"

She'd picked up a little present day Earth geography during her time her. It hadn't really mattered much, before.

"Europe, right," Jono confirmed with a nod of his head. "Across the Atlantic, there."

He gestured vaguely toward the water.

"Bit of a trek from here unless you use a portal. I miss it sometimes, though."

"What's it like?"

That was maybe a little softer than he - or most people, really - were used to hearing her sound like. But there was so much more life on this planet in this time than there was in hers.

Sometimes she got curious.

Possibly envious, too.

"London?" Jonothon's expression softened a little. "Well... it's got people. So many more people than the island. More people than Baltimore, by millions. Everywhere you look, there's life. Noise. Cars on streets, art, music," he shrugged, faintly amused. Maybe a bit whimsical. "Buildings set so close there's no room between them... some of it is a little reminiscent of here, actually. You look around and you get this... sense of it. Like it's been there forever, and maybe it'll be there forevermore. Like it's got history to it, and the minutes you spend walking those streets just barely scratch the surface of it all."

Octavia actually stopped her drum-shuffling while he spoke, and watched his face. Her own settled into something of a frown, but her expression was somehow open, too. Because sometimes she was just her own age, and trying to picture something like London.

And then it closed again, turned a little more neutral, impassive.

"Sounds nice," she said, flatter than she'd meant to.

"It's home," Jono replied, lifting a shoulder slightly. "I suppose it's one of those things I never did properly appreciate until I didn't live there anymore."

Now there was something Octavia couldn't really relate to.

So she just straightened up. "Looks like it's all there," she said, looking at the drums, all set up but sadly a little crookedly, thanks to the cobblestones underneath. "Hard to get it more even than that on a street like this."

Jono nodded a little, considering the cobblestones for a moment, and then holding up a finger and heading back inside for a minute.

He came out again with the notebook, and took a few moments to tear out a few sheets, folding them and nudging them under the parts that were most wobbly.

"There," he mused. "That ought to give it at least a little bit more support." He turned a glance her way. "Want to give it a go?"

Octavia shrugged instead of saying 'sure', because words were sometimes just unnecessary. Or because her mood had taken a strange tilt, the way it sometimes did.

But she moved, and she picked up the sticks from the box, and she sat down on the stool. For a few seconds, she chewed on the inside of her bottom lip - not like she was uncertain, but like she was thinking - before she reached out and gave the crash cymbal a tap.

And with that, she was off. Finding a rhythm that wasn't perfect, wasn't very elaborate, that didn't have much finesse and that was somewhat constrained by not wanting any part of the kit to topple over. But it was... hers, if nothing else. And no matter how far between her practice sessions had been, at least she seemed to have picked some things up.

Edited 2019-03-13 14:52 (UTC)

Jonothon nodded as he listened, standing back with his arms crossed over his chest. Finesse wasn't the most important thing in music, anyway. When music was good and visceral? That, he could get behind, too.

He waited a few, and then nodded a little.

"How's that feel for you?"

Ever since Octavia's feet had met the ground, it had pretty much felt like she'd exclusively lived in the visceral. It was no surprise her forays into music tended to reflect that, too.

"Alright," she said, pausing her playing. "Sounds a little different than I'm used to, but I'm pretty sure that's because we're outside." Acoustics was not a thing she knew a lot about, but she'd figured out that much. "Feels good."

Jonothon considered that for a moment.

"Could haul out the kit you usually use," he offered. "For the sake of comparison? But 'feels good' isn't a bad start, either.

Octavia shrugged.

"Probably wouldn't hurt to compare."

And it wasn't as if she had better things to be doing than assembling drum kits out in the street.

"Would give you some idea of how the different acoustics might actually be affecting the way this one sounds right now," he noted, turning toward the door again. "I won't be long."

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Groovy Tunes, Sunday

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