cursedrp | IC INTRO #1

IC INTRO #1

A Blood Offering

You wake up cozy in bed at the Saturn Motel. As you observe the room you may realize that it looks a little dated. Or, perhaps from your point of view the lamp and TV are wildly futuristic. Or, like Goldilocks, it may seem just right: close to the world you just left behind. Either way, you just had a very strange dream (see the arrival scenario) and now you're here. And you're not alone: there's a bed next to yours and someone else is waking up just like you are.

You can chat for a while if you like, but if you try to leave you'll find the door is firmly locked and no amount of kicking, punching, or hitting it with an object will do you any good. Instead, there's a letter on the nightstand which reads:

"Good morning and welcome to your new home!

You may be wondering why you're trapped in this room. Fear not, the door will open easily if you offer a bit of blood. More than a few drops but not enough to be a serious wound. A handprint's worth will do, let's say, and it only needs to come from one of you.

I'll let you sort that out yourselves. See you on the other side.

Sincerely,
The Mayor"

And indeed, a handprint's worth of blood pressed against the door will unlock it and let you out into the world. Do you volunteer your own blood? Do you take it from the other person by force? It's up to you! But there's no food in here, so you better figure it out eventually.

Roller Rink

As a celebration of your new lives here (and an apology for the whole blood offering thing - they were just testing something out, really) the Mayor has invited everyone to the Crazy Eight Roller Rink for a private, after-hours party.

Attendance isn't mandatory, but it is heavily encouraged so that you can meet your fellow Cursed and know who's in on the whole secret. It'll help you down the line at some point if your Curse gets out of control and you need someone to wrangle you.

As a reward, everyone who shows up and completes at least one lap around the roller rink (you must be wearing skates, but you can crawl the lap if you can't get the hang of them) will receive a free walkman with a mystery tape inside. The color, style, and mystery tape your character gets are up to you.

Mallrats

Everyone loves the mall! Right? Right! And this group of newcomers is lucky enough to be here for the White Pines Mall Grand Opening celebration! Feel free to walk around the mall and partake in sales galore, check out the attractions, or just get to know the layout of the place.

The Mayor has given everyone a gift card for $100 that can be used anywhere in the mall as long as they attend the Grand Opening.

They also strongly suggest that you familiarize yourself with the mall and its layout, just in case you ever get stuck there for a while and have to compete with others for food and resources. But that probably won't happen.

Extra Info

All the same guidelines from the TDM still apply. You can continue your TDM threads here or start new ones! And of course, you can start making your own prompts in the log or network communities at your leisure.

Our first event will be going up in about a week!

Please do not add character tags to any posts just yet, we'll add them to this post manually.

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It's not what Peter's used to either — it's quieter in every meaning of the word and, after the motel-door fiasco, a whole lot less eventful. There are no (space)cops chasing after him, no arguments with his team (no team at all, not that that's a particularly new deal), no galaxy-threatening ... threats knocking at his proverbial door.

On top of that, it's been a while since he's been stuck in one place — it's something that Peter always thinks he'd like to do: call it a day, settle day, maybe, like, have a family or something, but whenever he gets the opportunity, something happens; or it's off the back of something else happening and he hates it.

The last time was Earth — temporally relative to his own time, thankfully — and he'd still found himself climbing the walls. Earth has been a planet he's grown to have very mixed feelings on, a sentimentality that means he's never sure if he loves the planet or loathes it.

And though this — all of it — does a pretty grand impression of Earth, there's a not small part of Peter that thinks that this isn't actually Earth. Sure, he's enjoying it about as much as he'd enjoyed New York; and time-travel aside, rose-tinted glasses featuring childhood and nostalgia mean that Peter remembers the eighties as being way less shit than the motel is proving to be, but he's not sure how much of that is him hating the situation because of the situation, or if it's because of everything else.

Still, he's not about to turn down free food and free coffee.

Alec stands out courtesy of the black — tattoos? — covering his body, and though they don't feature anywhere near the top ten of 'strangest things Quill has ever seen', in the context of here, they're unusual. There's a moment where Peter considers sitting down at an empty table and enjoying his really flarking crap coffee by himself until he's in a ready state to formulate words and communicate with other humans, but apparently Alec is the only person in the cafe.

Peter's attention flickers momentarily towards the door that leads to the kitchen, to the presumable where of the wait-staff, but then Alec speaks and Peter looks back towards him. It's terrible, he says, and Peter makes a noise that's part-agreement and part-scoff: the coffee is awful but it is coffee and compared to the alternative, Peter'll take it.

"Yep," is his answer to Alec's statement, and he pulls out a chair to join him. There's a breath of a pause and Peter lifts a shoulder in a loose, dismissive shrug, gaze searching over the other tables for an empty, clean mug, then—

"I've drank worse."

"I hope it was free then too," Alec says like he halfway doesn't believe it could get much worse than this only mildly unpleasant coffee (because he's definitely been spoiled by access to the finer things in life), after shrugging to indicate Peter's got the correct idea when he looks in askance at the door to the kitchens. He could probably take it upon himself to improve the flavor by adding sugar or cream, but obviously he has to take it black, as was intended by whatever foul demon invented diner drip coffee. For all that the Institute cafeterias that Alec grew up eating at never had expensive offerings, there probably would have been full scale rioting amongst the perpetually rotating shifts of Shadowhunters if anyone had tried to serve anything but well-made and decently sourced coffee that actually tasted good plain.

Some day, Alec will have to get a dose of reality from outside his little bubble. Today is clearly not going to be that day.

For now, Alec just indicates the stack of clean, empty mugs on the counter that's not being manned with a jerk of his head as soon as he sets his own cup down. They're conveniently within arms reach of the chair that Peter just pulled up. Maybe they've become accustomed to listless loiterers here at the cafe, or something. "You new here?" One glance at Peter and he doesn't really fit in, either. He may not have weird tattoos, but he's got a way of carrying himself that screams that he ought to exist somewhere far outside tiny town America.

Maybe it's just the palpable boredom of someone as accustomed to chaos as Alec is (or much more-so, in all likelihood), maybe it's Maybelline. Either way, Alec scoots the carafe over towards him once he's got his mug.

Peter's very pointedly unfussy — it's not that he doesn't care as such, it's more that he tends to have other, bigger things to care about and one learns very quickly that it's difficult to be fussy in space, especially when aboard a small ship with a ragtag crew that doesn't command a whole lot of power in the galactic scheme of things.

Sure, there have been a few instances here and there where being Peter Quill comma Star-Lord has entitled him to something better than the space equivalent of diner coffee, but it's also swung vastly in the opposite direction more often than not.

"Free at point of service," he answers wryly, noting Alec's tone but deliberately skipping past it and refraining from commenting, though the corners of his lips do quirk upwards in a quick smile. It doesn't last long — he soon shifts his attention to the mug he'd picked off the thankfully nearby shelf, eyeing the bottom for a second and deciding that the dark stains of coffee past aren't that offensive, and pours himself a cup. The coffee's dark, dark brown and definitely burnt, but it's coffee and it'll do some degree of work in helping him feel more awake.

"—Mmm," is the vague affirmative noise Peter offers mid-sip in response to Alec's question. He doesn't need to return the question: it being asked is answer enough. "Not my first choice of vacation."

Edited 2022-09-06 22:18 (UTC)

"I'm not a 'vacation' kind of guy," Alec admits. That's probably part of the reason why, even though he's finally got time to himself and some space in which he's not feeling almost solely responsible for keeping all of New York City's supernatural population from killing each other and/or ending the world, he has not managed to relax even a little bit. The steady coffee intake isn't really helping in that area, either, of course, but still.

"I feel like I'm supposed to catch up on a bunch of movies or whatever," if only so he can stop staring blankly at Magnus every time he tries to drop a name or make a reference. He's always had the convenient excuse of being too busy to really give any mundane hobbies a chance, but he hasn't filled out a single piece of paperwork in days and he thinks he might actually lose his mind if he doesn't figure out a decent way to occupy the time aside from exercising in the worst clothes he's ever seen. But he doesn't even know where to start. Well, he knows where to start, he just likes complaining sometimes. "And now, they're not even out yet."

Is that ironic? It certainly feels ironic. Or maybe that's the caffeine jitters. Alec's fingers tap out an impatient rhythm against the side of his mug (mostly empty again, but not quite.) "So if you've got any good recommendations from this decade," the last two words are absolutely thrown out there like he thinks the 1980s are the stone ages, actually, "lay them on me."

Peter hasn't exactly managed to relax either, though he's very good at pretending he is relaxing — or at least, he is most of the time. He edges more towards neurotic than not, but in a world-weary kind of sense moreso than the world is ending kind of sense.

—And space and the Guardians and just life in general tends to prove enough of a distraction that it rarely matters anyway.

He's not sure how much he really cares that Alec isn't really a vacation kind of guy, at least not this side of finishing his coffee, but he listens whilst Alec continues and talks about what he feels like he ought to be doing, and then—

The question takes him by surprise, but not as much as the emphasis that Alec places on those two words and Peter's expression shifts — eyes widening, eyebrows darting up towards his hairline (or more accurately, disappearing somewhere beneath the fringe that desperately either needs cutting, styling, or both). It's not surprise, per se, but it is a kind of shocked resignation that (re)occurs every time the decade is brought up and Peter remembers that the eighties weren't, like, twenty years, they were — almost, thank you very much — forty.

"Why, because you think I grew up in this era?" He asks, unsure if it's a general question or if the implication is: hey, Quill, you old. There's a breath of a pause that Peter holds before exhaling audibly and waving a hand dismissively. "I was born in '85." A beat. "I don't remember much of the eighties."

He doesn't and he didn't really watch much from the time — he'd been more interested in books and space and music, then his mother had been killed and the rest, as they say, is history. Still—

"Star Wars?" He suggests. "Alien. Aliens." Another momentary pause — there were tv shows and movies that he'd enjoyed watching because he had been a Young Boy with Crushes, but he's not sure how much tall, dark and deadpan here would enjoy them in the same capacity. "—Beetlejuice."

That's it, that's his list of suggestions: Who's The Boss? probably hasn't stood the test of time.

Alec is halfway to saying something vaguely diplomatic—he'd grunted out an affirmation about being new here, but that doesn't necessarily mean (unlike Alec) he hasn't seen any movies since arriving—except then Peter moves on. Alright then. He's just going to let the implied accusation of oldness hang out there unchallenged, sorry Peter.

And he wasn't sure what sorts of movie titles he was expecting, mostly because he has approximately zero exposure to any pop culture (let alone the pop culture of the decade before he was born), but Star Wars and Alien (and Aliens? Alec does not yet know the difference) and especially Beetlejuice all sound very strange. He squints for a moment, trying to decipher if Peter is messing with him or actually trying to answer the question.

He eventually settles on hoping that the guy is too exhausted to try pranking a stranger, at least until after he's finished that first cup. (And honestly, after Alec sees 1980's Harrison Ford for the first time, their reasons might not be so different after all.)

"Are they all... space related?" Live a little, Alec. It's good to think outside the urban fantasy box every now and again.

Edited 2022-09-09 10:48 (UTC)

"Beetlejuice is a—." A what? Weird isn't entirely a genre of movie. "—comedy?" A lingering pause punctuated by the briefest of explanations—

"Look, I haven't lived on Earth for, like, twenty years. I barely know how to use the internet, let alone what movies are good."

For the moment, he doesn't elaborate on what he means by that — sure, he's spoken to enough people here from enough places that he knows that not everyone's from somewhere and somewhen that cosmic life is the norm, but he's not inclined to over-explain in case Alec is. Besides, he thinks, there's not really that much else to it.

So he moves on quickly, a flicker of movement in the corner of his eyes catching his attention. It's just ("just") the waitress re-emerging from the mysterious 'out back', apparently remembering that part of her job description is to be present for customers. Her appearance prompts Peter to ignore the concept of personal space and lean across the table to grab the laminated menu stood somewhat forlornly between red salt and pepper shakers.

"The others are set in space." He adds belatedly, his attention firmly fixed on the monumentally uninspiring menu. Lots of beige, Peter notes, but food is food and much like the coffee, he imagines it'll come with the distinction of being edible and little else.

He leans back in his chair and waves at the waitress, shoots her a smile and asks for toast, please, and then returns his focus to Alec. "But is that really what you feel like you should be doing after a multiversal kidnapping?" Either this manages to be a total non-event for Alec, which — fair, or else he's exceptionally good at compartmentalising.

Edited 2022-09-09 15:22 (UTC)

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IC INTRO #1

saturn cafe

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