entrancelogs | + Chalk it to me!

Entry tags:

+ Chalk it to me! - Mingle Log +

Who: EVERYONE!
Where: Anywhere outside on Real Side, but mostly in the gardens!
When: 3/14-3/20
Rating: PG, warn if going higher than PG-13
Summary: Alice has invited everyone, Reals and Mirrors alike, to come color outside in the nice spring weather with magic chalk. Surely nothing could go wrong with that plan, right?
The Story:

Outside, the weather is absolutely beautiful. It's not too hot, but not too cold either, and no one would have ever realized there was snow on the ground yesterday if they hadn't been here to see it. The grass is green and everything is dry - no sign of melted snow anywhere at all. Flowers have begun to bloom and it truly looks as though it's been spring for some time already. The season has changed abruptly and now Wonderland's decided it's time for it to be nice out.

There are many paths through the gardens, the vendors, and the hedge maze that can be drawn on, but as Alice demonstrated in her post, there's no need at all to stick to pavement only. Even the air can be decorated with living drawings!

This is a log for people who want to come color outside or people who want to check out what others are doing out here. It isn't strictly to interact with Alice, but she'll be around and will have a top level.

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Mirror Lapis

[This Mirror, unlike the Real Thing, knows how to have fun, and would never turn her nose up at an awesome toy like magic chalk. It's great. Since it only gets the full oomph Realside, and that's where most of the people and all the partying is, she should really be over there. And she will! But like... even regular chalk is actually a pretty good novelty on the dreary grayscale Mirror side, do people not realize this? She wants to do some decorating while it's available. While a lot of that is kept to her own space, right now she's working on a more ambitious mural along a hallway. M'Lapis is actually a pretty decent artist, and appears to be creating some sort of alien landscape, a purple sky over rocky red land punctuated with the occasional... crater full of tentacles, looks like? Okay. It definitely stands out more on this side of the glass, especially when things are extra quiet here.

Until she runs out of chalk and now she has to make a foray Realside. Whoops. Out among the drawers and their equally lively drawings, M'Lapis doesn't call attention to herself, instead keeping an eye out for likely marks. She may be kind of on a mission, but the bigger goal is to have a good time doing it, so she wants to find people who look like fun and chat them up. Thus you may find her sidling up as you're hard at work, acting interested and easily impressed: "Ooooh, what're you making?"]

Real Lapis

[Real Lapis is, indeed, less likely to be getting out and having fun with something like this, although she sure does appreciate the break from Wonderland's other bullshit. Still, she can be found all around the outdoors as usual, and yeah, sometimes she does actually try out the chalk. Lapis seldom draws anything recognizable; deliberately pointless scribbles may undulate in the air nearby, or abstract forms can be seen shambling after her in whatever way they can figure out. At one point, sitting on the roof, she draws more clouds into the sky just to see if she can. (They're actually just hovering right above her, of course.)

One notable quirk, though: once Lapis learns how scene drawings work with this chalk, and thus that people can be trapped inside them, she does not like that part at all. Since she is the natural enemy of all things chalk, anytime she should come across what looks like anyone she even sorta knows in a picture, she won't hesitate to erase it -- if there's no better water source handy she can make do with her own wings. Of course, depending on the situation, this could be the rescue she intends, or she might actually just be ruining people's fun. Oh well. You had to come out of there sooner or later, right?]

[Let it be known that Peridot is not much of an artist beyond her abstract morps- oh sure, she can do technical drawings, but they're not really good for chalk, though she tried very hard- there is a half-finished Homeworld computer system somewhere on the grounds that was abandoned after the fifth time Peridot ran herself out of chalk trying to get all the details right.

Eventually, she sticks to her stick figures who are hovering around her like chalky servants. They cower in the face of Lapis destruction of a scene and as the persons "trapped" quickly exit grumpily, Peridot yells after them.]

YOU'RE WELCOME. [Look, she knows what Lapis's intent was... or she assumes she knows. Leave it to Peridot to stan for Lapis's misguided attempts to free all trapped persons.]

Edited 2019-03-20 19:48 (UTC)

[You're a bro, Peri. Between having the enabler egging her on and the fact that whoever-it-was wasn't even important enough to get a thread, Lapis is quite unconcerned with their reactions at this point, calmly returning the remaining water to the fountain. Other people can deal. Instead she turns back to Peridot, whose responses to things are much more worthwhile. But the cowering stick figures catch her eye.]

You still have those?

[It's not exactly judgmental because she's not that perturbed by the chalk constructs, all things considered; Lapis just doesn't really get it and is faintly surprised that those doodles made it this far.]

[Peridot doesn't make any move to shield them from the possibility that Lapis might accidentally drip on them, and shrugs.] Well, since they exist right now anyway, I thought it'd be nice to have a captive audience. And besides... It feels nice to feel responsible for bringing something into the world.

[She misses being a kindergartner okay.]

[Ah. For Lapis, of course, that makes her think of their life back on Earth, and she finds herself glancing out at the scenery around them. Beneath the chaotic silliness of magic chalk shenanigans everywhere, Wonderland's version of spring has arrived, hasn't it?]

It is getting to be that time of year. [Lapis hasn't forgotten that they spoke before of trying farming, again-slash-for-the-first-time; a lot has happened since then, but what else is new.] It's too bad this stuff probably wouldn't work for a tractor either.

[Peridot mentally measures the width of a closet with her hands, considering her own size.] How big of a tractor do we really need?

[She reacts to this before she reacts to the reality of what Lapis is saying- she hadn't forgotten about that conversation, but it still takes her a minute to realize that it could really happen.] Oh my stars. We could start farming right now! ...Well, once we get the proper equipment anyway. [She looks at her chalk servants.] They're not going to be any help, are they?

Probably not. [They seem overall pretty useless.] Let's stick to one step at a time, though. We don't even know what we're growing or where.

[This project is a lot less bittersweet than back when it was proposed, but it's still fairly weird for Lapis to find herself playing the expert. Back on Earth, obviously, Peridot did all the research, with Lapis there to occasionally contribute common sense or encourage the lack thereof depending on her tastes. Heck, she's not even that sure how necessary the tractor really is; its actual purpose always seemed a bit secondary to the fact that Peridot liked it. (Which IS also a very good purpose, but still.) Logistics have never been her department.

But someone has to do it. It'll make Peridot happy.]

We could grow anything! We could grow anywhere! [She throws her arms out and pivots in a circle. Her excitement has come out in full force and she jumps from one thought to the next like an errant butterfly.] Wonderland is ours to do with what we want. It's not like anyone is properly using most of it. And I really, really need this.

[The Black Garnet Project with Entrapta is great and all, but it's not the same as creating something out of nothing.]

[Well, that doesn't constitute a decision, let alone a plan, but Lapis doesn't disagree with it. Chaos and megalomania is a lot of how they do things, and ultimately she wouldn't have it any other way, as long as she can ensure that it goes well, for Peridot's sake. And they did fine the first time around with less experience, anyway.]

All right, all right. Do you still have some of those seeds from before?

I have all of them. I've just been waiting for the right time.

[And given she has had no idea when the right time would be until just now...] Ooh. Wait. Wait! I have an idea.

[She pushes past her chalk creations and frames a relatively chalk-free space with her fingers, drawing on her visual for how a "garden" should look through her mass consumption of media. It doesn't necessitate a scene given how she's sketching it out, so she ends up with a few rows of deeply unimpressive sunflowers and varying other plants drawn from memory but conveyed by someone who has a first grader's concept of right brain art. The result is a test run of how to properly space the planting, though it's clearly done from the perspective of a kindergartner- everything is way too far apart for normal plants.] I'm not sure about scale, but this is adequate spacing if you were growing Rubies.

[Oh, hey. That IS a good idea, and more appealing to Lapis than most applications of chalk shenans she's seen so far, to boot. Looking over Peridot's sketched plan, she dots in more semi-generic plants in the empty spaces.]

Plants can be closer together. A lot of them just keep growing upwards, like...

[In fact, this is a very good idea. Lapis steps back and, bending down to start, draws a corn stalk into existence -- quick and simplified, but life-sized.]

Like this.

Ooh. They must draw in less nutrients from the surrounding areas. [If you crammed gems that close together they'd just compete for nutrients or end up weird and off-color. This is fascinating to her.

She goes through and mimics Lapis's cornstalks and the chalk garden is now an unholy amalgam of flowers and corn, but by the moon goddess it's beautiful.] So. Once you have this much... then what? Do they do our bidding?

[..................................Oh right that.

Goddammit. It really should have occurred to Lapis to say something earlier, but apparently she actually has gotten used to the idea of plants, whereas she will never get used to Peridot being behind on things they both experienced. And yet that was the whole point of the exercise, wasn't it? That, and to make Peridot happy, which means she's now off to a terrible start. It shouldn't even be a huge deal, since it worked out the first time around, but right now it makes Lapis a little nervous.]

Uh, yeah, so... it turns out plants don't really do anything.

What? Really?

[Peridot finds that to be exceedingly bad math, considering how form and function are requirements for her enjoyment of things. Having something "just because" is still strange and foreign to her, but that's what the 'morps are. And that's what music is. A pattern created just for the feeling of bringing it to completion.

She opens her mouth to say something, closes it, hems and haws for a few moments, and then decides where she falls on it. This may be a different circumstance from the one she'll eventually learn this lesson from, but she trusts Lapis and Wonderland has taught her a lot about pointless novelty in the face of endless boredom.]

Well... It's still bringing something to life in a place where everything is manufactured and not under our control. [She touches the chalk petal of one awkward sunflower.] That's something.

[Okay! That's not bad. Relieved, Lapis hastens to add more of whatever might be vaguely helpful.]

I mean, humans eat them. There was this whole thing where we all gathered around to celebrate the grim inevitability of marriage...

[Do they need to recreate all that too? They don't have an Andy.]

And I guess there's Pumpkin, but that was something Steven did.

[Has she even mentioned Pumpkin yet, she's not sure. Lapis isn't even sure exactly what Steven did, except that in retrospect everyone should have been a whole lot more suspicious of his ridiculous power set, huh.]

[In vague terms, probably, though Peridot can't catalog all of Steven's weird powers in a meaningful way. She's never seen a quartz like him... which makes sense because he's a Diamond. Half a Diamond. Eugh.]

The humans here seem to be fond of bartering. Maybe we can trade what we grow for things.

[She doesn't know what things, but she's never really had anything she could barter with before and she likes the idea of it.]

Maybe.

[Do they want anything from the humans? Do the humans even really care? Lapis doesn't know where they get their food from around here really. The nostalgia, though, is strong. And the chalk garden is nice; Lapis is getting interested in that for its own sake now. She draws a tomato plant, and then a regular old pumpkin vine, and then she gives in and carefully draws Pumpkin.

...She does miss the little aberration -- albeit less so in Wonderland, where Claude seems to fill a similar role and in some ways was also there first. She misses all of this, and while things have improved on that front, reminiscing also means remembering that it's not all really resolved. Anyway, whatever it is that Steven did, there is probably no good to be had down the road of trying to recreate that here too. But Pumpkin is not a complicated creature, and the chalk simulacrum doesn't have to do much or last long. It yips and immediately begins bouncing excitedly at its people, and Lapis can't help but smile at that too.]

Oh my stars. [It's an instant infatuation with the pumpkin dog, like something she always knew in her heart she'd love, but she had just never seen before. She drops to her knees and the Pumpkin hops into her lap, yipping and snuggling and getting chalk dust all over her.]

Who would've thought earth vegetables would be this affectionate when they're given life.

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+ Chalk it to me! - Mingle Log +

Lapises, OTA, the usual spiel

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