fandomtownies | Midnight Manor - Wednesday Evening

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Midnight Manor - Wednesday Evening - Living Room

After shenanigans, Kamala had headed straight home where she had prepped the living room for an evening of fun and frivolity.

Which really just meant popping popcorn and making sure there was a variety of cold beverages in the living room.

So now she was just sitting in her favorite shenanigan outfit and going through multiple streaming services trying to find the movie she wanted to watch.

"It should not be this hard to find a stupid movie about an ogre."

It really shouldn't.

[For the manor residents and guests

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"I couldn't even tell you what I had to do to earn this shirt," Eleanor admitted, pulling on it a little, but she smiled a little at the explanation and the apparent prestige she could earn just by...being here, apparently. "I think my memory's blocked it out for my own good."

As if she hadn't dealt with much, much worse than....well, surprisingly, fittingly, it had actually been the exact activity they'd been subjected to earlier that day! But after so many, Eleanor really didn't remember the details of which shirt always went with what shenanigan.

"Although those poor plants," she said, "if I'm the expert to turn to in the room."

Although she had gotten much better, and she had to admit, she was probably at least a step ahead of Kamala and Arden.

"How are your plants doing, by the way? That you picked up the other week?"

"So good!" Arden said, with really more pride than she should have considering she hadn't really had to do anything beyond 'hang them up.' "If you get a chance tonight, you should come up to my room and see them. I ended up putting them all in the line along the top of my balcony door and I really like the effect."

"Sure!" said Eleanor, maybe a little mystified, because even though she should know by now that this place was nothing like St. Brigid's, she also knew that she'd never really been the girl that other girls were eager to show cool things in their rooms to. "I'd love to see how you decided to do it! Maybe it'll give me some ideas, too."

St. Brigid's was also a place that apparently served tiny boxes of raisins for dessert, so Eleanor could safely be assured that it wasn't a place to be taking life lessons from.

"Is your room full of plants?" she asked. "Or are you going to start bringing some back? Oh! Or do you mean to decorate the store itself?"

Nuns, man. Of course they'd insist on serving the girls quite possibly the least enticing dried fruit around! Although sometimes they'd show up in cookies!

"No, I just have a few plants in mine," Eleanor shook her head slightly, "and I wouldn't want to mess up how Nell's got everything laid out in the store. But I might get some more. And I'm working on trying to figure out how I want to set up a greenhouse back home. I'm hoping my two plant classes this session really help with that, too, it's something I've been kind of putting off for too long."

But the way Kamala was so close with her family was reminding her of how she was the complete opposite with hers, and that she had a lot of work to do to earn her spot, especially after everything that had happened before coming here.

Yeah. Family sure was...complicated.

"Oooh, a greenhouse? What are you going to grow?" Arden asked.

"Mostly herbs and flowers and things," Eleanor explained, perhaps a little bit awkwardly, but that just had more to do with the monumental legacy looming over her shoulders with it more than anything else. There was a good chance that her grandmother's ghost had gone with house itself, but she always felt the specter of her looming over her shoulder with sour disapproval. "Things to make...well, calling them potions makes it sound kind of silly and fake, but that's basically what they are. My grandmother used to do that. Potions and curatives and lotions and salves, things like that, for the village where we lived. I...want to be able to do that some day, too. That's...kind of why I took the job at Plant Parenthood, really."

"Oh, like an apothecary!" Arden said. "Tonics and tisanes and teas, too."

...She was going to blame being on Stewart's raft this afternoon for that unanticipated bout of alliteration there.

"So do you wanna provide specifically for your home village?" she asked. "Or are you willing to apothecary anywhere?"

That was a charge that Stewart would no doubt happily accept.

"For wherever my family ends up settling," Eleanor answered, with a small nod, and she looked at Arden a little curiously for a moment before she added, with a small sigh, "That's sort of the whole point. My grandmother did it as sort of a...way to keep the peace, you know? A lot of people don't really like the idea of big bad monsters hiding in the woods, but if one of them is helping you relieve your gout or giving you something to help ward off unwanted attention, you can sleep a little bit easier at night."

Was that a slight twitch? Nah, probably nothing.

"So you're another person who knows what she wants to do afterwards," she said with a wry smile. "Kams is gonna go be a full-time superhero, and Lydia's a witch and Graham's a knight and Cal's gonna go back to the war as soon as he gets home...and I'm over here without a damn clue.

Oh, yeah, sure, nothing at all. No twitches here! Definitely none that Eleanor would notice, even with watching Arden with careful consideration as she was doing now.

But she did meet that wry smile with one of her own. "If it helps," she said, "I only figured mine out a little bit ago, and most of that's because my grandmother died, and I was really the only one to fill in the gap. You've got plenty of time to figure it out, though, and I'm sure you will."

Hopefully without having to go through all the terrible things Eleanor had to go through to get to hers, too.

"Oh, Eleanor, I'm so sorry," Arden said quietly. "That you lost your grandma, I mean."

She was assuming it wasn't the awful French one she'd heard about. "Are you doing okay?"

Look, Eleanor said 'a little bit ago.' Arden was taking that pretty literally. Like, within the last year.

At first, Eleanor felt a little confused by Arden's reaction, a little uncomfortable and uncertain if that was really the right response to have, but she didn't know what would have been. It had all been so complicated, and she lightly shook her head.

"I'm...fine," she said, which felt like a loaded lie of an answer, but, when it came to the simple fact of Persephone being dead, that was true enough. "It's...thank you. I...didn't really know her very well at all. I've..." Her frown deepened, feeling like this reaction, from her, was probably all wrong, should she be reacting differently? More upset about it? Needing a hug for comfort or to tearfully be too distraught to talk about it? "..never been very close with my family...I'm sorry, I...shouldn't be mentioning my grandmother's passing at a movie night, huh?"

Ugh, she was so bad at all of this.

"No, you're good, you're good," Arden said. "Families are complicated. And, I mean, you didn't come in here, distraught and sobbing about it - I mean, if you did, that would still be okay, because you'd be upset and we'd wanna help - but like...you're not trying to make tonight be about your or your grief or anything. You said a thing and I just assumed..." She trailed off. "Families are fucking complicated," she said again.

Eleanor sighed a little, and if a small envious glance managed to slip it's was in Kamala's direction, well....surely, no one could blame herm

"Yeah," she agreed, sounding suddenly very weary, "you can definitely say that again. And, like I said, it was a bit ago, before I even came here, so it's..."

She shook her head fiercely to stop herself.

"Enough about that," she said with a firm determination, not enough to quite slip into that voice accidentally, but it was a very near thing that she might not have even noticed, especially since Arden wasn't likely to press the issue even without Eleanor telling her not to. "How about the movie tonight? Have you seen this one?"

Arden saw that glance and followed it - and then glanced back to Eleanor and nodded ever so slightly. Yeah. She didn't blame you, Ellie. Shit, she understood complete--

Okay, she didn't understand Eleanor's version. But she had her own reasons that put her right there with the other woman.

But she was all too happy to swap conversational topics. "Nope! Not even once," she said. "So I guess it'll be us in the newbie seats. The best answer that I've gotten so far says there's a donkey and an ogre and they find true love." She grimaces a bit. "I can't tell if it's supposed to be progressive or transgressive, but either way it sounds weird."

"Seems like weird is just the thing for this crowd," Eleanor pointed out with a small smile, and still with that somewhat curious look at Arden. "Kamala mentioned something about a lot of fairy tales and other stories, and she seems to like it, too, so it's probably pretty good."

"Hey, if a donkey and an ogre wanna live happily ever after in a swamp or something, more power to them," Arden said, fundamentally misunderstanding the 'find true love' phrasing.

...Though the donkey does hook up with a dragon, so really was her interpretation all that off?

"What's up?" she asked, catching Eleanor's look.

"Hm?" asked Eleanor, with a new curious look at Arden, since she had already tucked those thoughts away and moved onto trying to figure out what to expect from the movie, so she shook her head. "Oh, nothing. Just thinking about how that might end up playing out."

And what allegories might be pulled from it. Obviously, she'd be the ogre...

"But I guess we'll find out soon enough."

Assuming she would even be able to focus on it at all, what with the shoulder touching and hand holding that would occur.

And Arden was going to dip out before it had barely started and go feel sorry for herself on the roof, so they would both end up failing to see Shrek!

Ah well. It just meant that there'd have to be a repeat movie night!

"Hey," she asked quietly, going to nudge Eleanor with a shoulder. "You having fun?"

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Midnight Manor - Wednesday Evening - Living Room

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