Like classics, play aces

[mypartnerintime]

Who: Max and OPEN!
Where: The pool, the roof, the youth center, the destruction room, the music room
When: Last two weeks of April
Rating: Probably like G? PG?
Summary: Max does a bunch of stuff all by her lonesome, but all over, so you might just run into her!
The Story:

[The Pool]

It's around midnight that you might wander into the indoor pool area. Glowing blue patterns flow across the walls and ceiling as the underwater lights project the pool's ripples into the room, which is otherwise dim.

For now, Max is content to sit at the edge of the pool, hair soaked from her quick dip. Her legs move slowly beneath the surface, feet now and then breaking water, the soft splash upsetting the silence of the room. She's clearly lost in thought- staring at the pool, but obviously not seeing it, shoulders slumped into a relaxed (if not lazy) pose. Anyone entering the room is unlikely to rouse her, unless they're making a lot of noise.


[The Roof]

The night is quiet and dark, and cold, but Max is undeterred. Not only is she up on the roof at around eleven, but she somehow managed to lug up a telescope as well- no small feat given how sore she is (almost daily training does that to you, especially with Peggy as the instructor. Max swears what that woman wants is impossible sometimes). She's currently using the thing to look up at the sky. There's a small book next to her on constellations, and another booklet on how to use the telescope. She's not likely to find any use out of the former, however: the constellations are that of Earth.

Resting some way away is a messenger bag, a gray Polaroid camera peeking out from its open cover.


[The Youth Center]

In one corner of the Youth Center's arcade area, Max is frantically banging at the controls of an extremely old game. She looks like she's thoroughly enjoying herself, despite the fact that she leads her character to death several times.

"Oh come on!" she yelps as a floating green anvil slams into her character's stomach and flings him through a stone wall, leaving a person-shaped hole. Max gives the machine a little bang with her foot. At the same time she jabs impatiently at the buttons, restarting the game. "It was left that time?!"

These games were deliberately made to eat your time and money. Fortunately neither is a concern in Wonderland.


[The Destruction Room]

Along the hallway on the first floor, near room four, can be heard the sound of breaking plates. Max is inside what Mae once told her is the "destruction room". If someone were actually to open the door and peek inside, they'd find Max lazily pushing plates off the table so they shatter against the ground. Or even just pushing shards of broken china around with her foot. Or even just sitting in one of the chairs, listening to a bit of softly playing music.

In any situation, she starts as someone enters, turning quickly to look at them in surprise.

"H-hey," she stutters in greeting automatically, regardless of who she sees.


[The Music Room]

While Max tends to play guitar inside her own room, the better acoustics in the music room tempt her out now and then, so today she ends up practicing in there. Her own guitar is set to one side, replaced for now by an acoustic one hooked up to an amp- another benefit of the music room. (She'd be willing to have an amp in her own room, but she always worries it would bother the rooms near room seven on the third floor, who... well she barely even knows them. It's a little sad. Chloe used to live in room eight, and now there's a guy there that she's never really made the effort to talk to.)

She plays (quite proficiently) one of her favorite songs. And, more hesitantly, she sings quietly under her breath [not as good as the girl in the video, but it's in the same ballpark].

She stops singing if anyone enters, though they might catch the tail end of a note. In any case she nods at them with a smile, continuing to play, though more quietly.

Comments

[mypartnerintime]

"No, I didn't," Max says, genuine interest on her face as she continues to munch at her fries. "Although I guess I should have. Mine was a... spur of the moment thing. Now I don't know what to do with it."

She jerks her head toward the telescope.

"Can I defer to your expertise?"

[punful]

He chuckles a little, stepping up to look the telescope over. He doesn't recognize the brand, probably because Wonderland has a problem with name-brand things, but it looks brand new and relatively powerful. At a glance he can't tell if it's a refractor or a reflector scope.

"fair enough. you were talking recently about sorta...letting your interests branch out, or something like that."

Wonderland is a chance to try new things, certainly. In between all the horrible crap.

At the question he pauses a moment in surprise, then beams at her.

"i uh, i wouldn't call it expertise, but uh...i know my way around telescopes, i guess. and stars and such."

He gestures upward.

"they move around too much to make constellations, and none of them are really recognizable but uh...guess that's part of the fun. discovering a totally different sky every night."

They're not real, either, but they look pretty damn accurate, even through a telescope. They vary in color and size and brightness and have all the features that real stars should have.

[mypartnerintime]

"...Yeah, I thought so. Whole other dimension and all..." The disappointment in her voice is impossible to hide. She steps away as he examines the telescope, her shoulders drooping somewhat as she moves closer to the edge of the roof. "Guess it was too much to hope for the same constellations."

Is it wrong to look for comfort in such a small similarity to Earth?

She looks up at the stars. "It all makes you feel so... small."

The stars, yes. And Wonderland, too. It looms over them, gigantic, while they try to get on with their relatively small lives.

"Doesn't that scare you?"

[punful]

Sans peers through the scope and starts adjusting the focus, searching the sky for something good to look at.

"were you here for that event a few years back, where some of the stars fell? they were stuck in place before that. didn't move at all. kinda think it was even weirder that way."

He finds a pretty decent red giant and centers it in the field. Not too bad.

"nah. it's never really scared me. maybe it should, i dunno." He steps back to let her look through the scope. "stars and space and such, it's always been...like proof that there was more out there. more than just the underground. more than monsters and humans or the whole world. just kinda...made me feel like i was part of something, i guess."

That's a bit too real and emotional, though, so he chuckles faintly.

"anyway, never needed all of the cosmos just to feel small. can do that just fine on my own."

[mypartnerintime]

Max nods at his question, aware that he probably can't see her as he adjusts the telescope. The falling stars event. That was the day Chloe arrived.

She doesn't bother answering out loud, even as a tiny sigh escapes her. But she does approach to peer through the viewfinder (eyepiece is the right term, the manual said- but you call it viewfinder in cameras, and that's stuck in her brain).

"Must've been a big deal for you to arrive in Wonderland. After being stuck in the Underground." Like travelling to your very own other planet. "And you're not small, Sans. You've got a big sense of humor."

She pauses as she concentrates on the star.

"...So is this real, or... an illusion?"

[punful]

It all seems so long ago now. Finding out that the stars were fake, were just big glowing fake memories hung in the sky had been...disappointing. He's gotten over it since then. They're still more realistic than looking at shiny crystals in Waterfall.

"yeah. it...heh. not gonna like, i spent the first hour or so just kinda...freaking out a bit. and then i just couldn't stop staring at the sky. you know, i spent so much time thinking about the night sky, but uh...never really gave any thought to how it looked in the daytime. but, damn. we don't have that shade of blue underground."

His hoodie is close, but that doesn't really count.

[mypartnerintime]

She looks away from the eyepiece to flash him a small smile. "...I like the golds and oranges. Especially when the sunset catches the clouds." And the sky lights up as though in a gentle fire- powerful and serene all at once.

She focuses once again on the star, still trying to figure out what to make of it. It's beautiful... but she still can't tell if it's real. She's tempted to pan the telescope around and look at other stars, but she doesn't for fear of messing up whatever set-up Sans accomplished.

"Have you gotten around to naming any constellations?"

[punful]

His smile turns genuine and wistful.

"ah, yeah. sunsets. it never gets old. even in wonderland, each one is different."

He gives a contented sigh and looks skyward again. Not a bad night at all. The stars have moved into some interesting shapes. Some of the stars even look properly colorful, instead of all being uniform white. That's how it should be. Red giants, blue giants, all of it.

"for tonight? see that group of stars over there?"

He points off in the direction of the forest.

"see 'em? looks kinda like a bunny, yeah? i'm calling it the fluffy bunny."

[mypartnerintime]

She pulls away from the telescope to get a better view of where he's pointing. From where she's standing it looks like the stars should be named bunch of stars.

"You've got a really strong imagination." Still, she continues to consider the area he's pointing to. "Well I'll call your fluffy bunny and raise you... T-Rex chasing fluffy bunny."

She points off to a larger bunch of stars near Sans' original constellation, which looks nothing like a T-Rex, but hey, she's sure there's one in there.

[punful]

He bursts out laughing at that. Not his usual soft chuckling, but a genuine laugh.

"hehe, aw man, you know, i can kinda almost see it?"

The stars she's pointing at look more like some kind of weird, mutated tortoise to him, but tortoises and T-Rexes are both reptiles. At least he thinks so. Some of those stars could be big ol' teeth, at least.

"poor bunny. hopefully he's a fast one."

[mypartnerintime]

Max chuckles, more at his reaction than her joke. "The fastest."

The way the stars work here makes her think that the bunny and T-Rex will be out of view quickly anyway. She thinks- the mechanics of it still aren't totally clear to her.

"So... the sky changes every night," she says, confirming her understanding. "Which means it's more of a ceiling than actual outer-space, right? Kinda like we're inside a bubble."

[punful]

"lucky for fluffy bunny, then."

He watches the sky for a bit, trying to find another good one. The problem is that every night when he manages to find an actually interesting star--say a red giant or a binary system--it's gone the next night. It makes every night an entirely new journey. He spots a bright one hovering a few degrees over the ocean and points the telescope toward it.

"yeah...that's kinda how i think of it, too. as a bubble, i mean. it'd be nice if maybe it was a sorta...like a transparent bubble, and the stars we're seeing are what we can see on the outside. pretty sure bill the lizard put 'em up there, though, so. nothing doing. it's a nice thought, i guess."

He's used to not having real stars to look at, and he's also used to seeing the real stars for the first time several times over.

"in the underground, we've got this one section of caves that are real dark. and there are all these glowing crystals in the ceiling. monsters would pretend they were real stars and make wishes on them."

[mypartnerintime]

She takes her turn to stare through the telescope and observe the new star it's pointing at. It's not all that interesting- until she remembers that it's more than just a bright dot in the sky.

The scale of it makes her feel small. But in a good way- like she's part of something bigger. Something amazing.

She sighs as she leans away from the eyepiece. "Maybe one day you'll get to see real Earth stars. Like... not an event or something. I loved the sky in Oregon." She fiddles with the eyepiece idly. "It felt way better than just a nice thought." A wistful smile crosses her mouth as she looks at him. "I know we recently played this game, but if you had a wish...?"

[punful]

He glances over at her, debating for a moment whether to tell her that technically he has. He's seen the stars probably dozens of times now. He can imagine that once they get to the Surface, he makes a point of looking up at least once a night, every time there's no clouds. He has no way of knowing how many times he's seen the stars, because he doesn't remember them. Doesn't remember what they actually look like. Hell, maybe the night sky in Wonderland is completely inaccurate. The only thing he has to compare it to is the sky beyond the Citadel during Shepard's event, and the Wonderland skies before Bill changed them.

But he doesn't want to kill the mood.

"yeah. i hope so. always been kind of a dream of mine."

He likes dreams about as much as he likes wishes. Which is to say not at all.

He grins. "i'd wish for a lifetime supply of ketchup."