ArchivedLogs:Packed and Ready

Packed and Ready
Dramatis Personae Jackson, Shelby, Ryan, Spencer
In Absentia	2013-02-09 Indoor snowballfight.
Location <NYC> 303 {Holland} - Village Lofts- East Village
This apartment is cheerful, in its way -- bright and airy, its floor plan open and a plethora of windows providing it with an abundance of light. The tiny entrance hall opens into a living room, small, though its sparse furniture and lack of clutter give it a more open feel. The decor is subdued and minimalist; black and white is the dominant theme, with occasional splashes of deep crimson to offset the monochrome. The couch and armchair are upholstered in black corduroy, the low wide coffee table central is black wood and glass-topped, and a few large pillowy beanbags provide additional seating by the large windows that dominate the back wall. Towards the back, a couple of doors lead off into bedrooms and bathroom, and to the right, the kitchen's tile is separated from the living room's dark hardwood floors by black countertops. Above the bedroom to one side, there is higher space; a ladder climbs up to a lofted area looking down on the living room. Standing in front of the partition between living and cooking area is a large fish tank: one lone Betta, blood-red, swims regally among several species of black and silver fish. A hallway beyond the kitchen leads further into the apartment. Another bathroom stands just into the hall and the farthest door leads to the apartment's final bedroom, the door usually kept shut to hold in the acrid fumes of turpentine and paints from within. Jackson's apartment is not as spotless, Saturday afternoon, as it is most days of the week. By the time he is returning from church-work-gym there is a healthy coating of snow, melted and un, scattered about the floor, and a healthily snow-coated beagle chasing a not-as-snow-coated Spencer around the living room. Or maybe Spencer's chasing the beagle? A window to the fire escape is open, providing ample evidence of where the snow has been collected from. Ryan is babysitting. In theory. In practice he is sprawled on the couch with a pillow over his head. Jax starts to shed his boots by the entryway, but, glancing around the chaos, thinks better of this futile prospect. All the better, really, because his entry is soon greeted by a PAF of snowball to his shoulder. Guess who spent several hours jamming with Ryan last night? That's right, Shelby did! Maybe that's why she looks as if she'd /like/ to be sprawled on the couch with a pillow over her head as she steps up to the apartment's door. Here it is, almost three in the afternoon, and the girl is covering a yawn with her fist while she uses the other to rap at the door. Knock knock knock! It lacks the typical force of her arrival announcements. "Hey! Jax family! S'me." "S'open!" Jax calls, cheerfully, "Better duck, though." This is because he has eschewed de-winterifying in favour of darting across to collect snowballs of his own from the fire escape. One is getting hurled right back at Spencer but there's another in his hands. Packed and READY. Duck? On the other side of the door, Shelby's eyebrows go all crooked as she considers this advice. Hesitantly, she grips the doorknob and pushes in--but only opens it a crack so she can peek inside to see why caution is warranted. "Uh, hey? Thought I'd come fix those skulls, Jim said you were pissed off about them." Which is blatant exaggeration but such is her modus operandi. "I, uh. Could come back later. Maybe." There's another pause, during which her face lights with a grin. "Fucker, if you hit me with that, it is /so on/." Jackson just /grins/ right back. He packs the snowball a little tighter. Spencer has disappeared back to the fire escape to stockpile. "You seen the foot-or-whatever out there, I think it's already /on/. Citywide. Can't escape it." "If that's how you wanna play it, dude." Shelby eases the door shut. About three seconds later, it bursts open so she can dive to hide behind the couch. As she enters the room, every image in the room animates--the skulls zip towards the ceiling where they circle like vultures looking for targets. "Holy cow," Jackson says this partly surprised and partly laughing, lunging onto the couch half on /top/ of Ryan (to the tune of a muffled groan of sleepy-hungover protest) to not throw so much as lean over the back of the couch and /drop/ his snowball over it. The skulls on the ceilings grow wings, perhaps to help with the carrionbird image. Obie takes shelter behind the couch, too, though mostly in order to wriggle up to Shelby with hopeful-eager thwaps of tail. Double-pronged assault! Shelby had not expected that snowballs would come from above and beagle from below, leaving her to curl up in a squeaky ball of cold and face-protecting. "Cheating!" she bellows. Poor Obie, he is ignored as she scrambles for new cover--shedding snow as she goes--and glances up. With line of sight secured, it's an easy feat to send one of the winged skulls towards Jax. Sure, it takes a roundabout way since it can't leave the surface but it's coming for him, toothy pink maw gaping like an especially cheerful metal album cover. "I've got beagle, cat, /and/ small boy, I can get you from /so many/ different directions." Even if Sprite has taken shelter high up in the loft well away from such undignified foolishness. "Ohgosh I'm gonna die." Jax scrambles back away -- to the wall, which isn't particularly /helpful/ by way of retreat. His threat is doubly ineffective given that Small Boy returns with armload of snowballs only to plop some of them down in front of Shelby with the command, "GET PA." It works to Jax's favor that Spence returns in that moment. If Shelby is scooping up snowballs, then her attention is off of the attacking skull--it freezes up there on the wall, about three feet away from his head. "On three!" she instructs the boy. "One, two!" But three is not called as she takes aim and /throws/, overcome with the novelty of indoors snowball fights actually being encouraged by the resident adults. Good thing she has no physical ability to speak of. "Hey, Ryan, get your ass up, dude! It's war!" "Ryan," Jax is affirming this, "I'm getting slaughtered here!" Spencer has a similar lack of skill but he has a lot of enthusiasm, and, at least, the living room isn't /that/ big. Jackson's flinch back against the wall doesn't dim his grin as the snowballs paf against his jacket. It's soon followed not by snowball but by pillow, sailing in the general direction of Spencer and Shelby as Ryan chucks it blindly off of his face and towards Noises. "Mrrf," is his answer to war. "Fuck y'all, I'm the Red Cross." Despite his pillowthrowing. Shelby is scooping up a second snowball when the pillow smacks her in the shoulder. Oh no he /din't/. "Hey!" she yelps. Foul play, foul play! "Get 'im, Spence," she urges her young compatriot to take out their primary target before rounding on the young man on the couch. Mentor or no, she has no compunctions about lobbing the snowball underhand at the easy target that he makes, doing for the head or neck area for maximum trickle down effect. "I said /up/." Ryan /yelps/ at this, sitting bolt upright only to be tackled by a flying Spencer, electing to interpret 'get 'im' as the /nearest/ target. Who is making chompy teeth at him, older-brother-style, despite his flagrant lack of sharp teeth. "Oh /god/ I've got a /growth/. Jax your house is plagued by sharks. I can't get up, I'm getting eaten!" Jax takes advantage of his assailants' distraction to scoop snow off the floor and chuck it back towards Shelby. "HAH. Y'know, the skulls are pretty awesome, really. S'just the colours." Shelby is saved from snow to the face only by a last minute duck, getting it all over shoulder and arm instead. She bends to scoop up the debris of past throws and darts towards Jax, bent on stuffing this chilly handful down his shirt. Hand to hand combat! "So I'll change 'em! Hold still," she commands. Maybe changing them is conditional upon him accepting an icy back. Jackson does not hold still. He wriggles. SQUIRMS. But given that he's largely occupied with trying to bend down and scoop up more snow he's not concentrating too /hard/ on getting away and so he /yelps/ at the touch of ice on his skin; the tattooed wings on his back wriggle and flex, too, with his squirming. He has a handful of half-melty snow, though, that he is MENACING Shelby with. "The blue's cool but how about purple instead of the pink? Purple and SILVER?" "Orange!" Spencer says, from where he's still kind of glomping onto Ryan's shoulder. "Your room's already got so much orange!" Jax protests. Shelby has shot her wad. Without another handful of snow, she's breathless, laughing and forced to resort to just holding off the return attack. "What, in here, with all the red? Dude, I thought you were an /artist/." Them's fighting words. "Orange'd be /so much better/," she adds, backing up Spencer's demand. "Nope. Purple," Jax insists. "Rich purple. Orange'll make it look like everything's on /fire/ in here. Or like Halloween, there's more black than red." Creeeep. PUSH. His hand is inching forward, aiming snowslush for her neck. "Bastian likes yellow," Spencer says helpfully. "Shane likes black." "There's already black!" Jax has now additionally grown an Obie, frisking around both his and Shelby's ankles. There's excitement going on! He's excited! "What/ever/," Shelby dismisses professional advice, like a boss. She'd have more to say but augh, slush! She beats a hasty retreat after swatting at Jax's wrist, slapping at the slushy bits that dropped on her from the jostling. "Time out!" Oh sure, when /she/ calls it. But she is hot and winded and needs to shed a few layers in spite of the danger of cold projectiles. "Y'know, I could do something different. Like...black tribal turtles and stuff, with their shells all different colors. Stained glass style, y'know? So you could have all of the colors." Jackson slumps back against the wall, sinking down to the wet floor to ruffle at Obie's ears as he catches his breath. "Stained glassy turtles, man, that'd be rad. Lots of colours. It does get a bit, uh, boring in here." "Think the management's gonna care?" Ryan asks, though he asks this with a crooked grin -- his /own/ apartment has had moooore than its share of Tampering With already by way of redecoration. And soundproofing. "Not if my rent check comes on time!" Jackson answers, a little too brightly. "Who doesn't love turtles, anyway?" Shelby drops jacket and sweatshirt, leaving her in a tank top. She chooses to drop to the floor opposite of Jax, leaning against her own wall. As she grins at those present, the skulls begin to stream down the ceiling towards the hand she sets to the surface. "I could take 'em down again if there's, like, an inspection or anything. Turtles this month, whales the next...you've got sharks here, may as well go with a theme, y'know? Bastian'd like it, yeah?" "Oh, yeah, the twins'd love it. Bastian has a thing for octopuses. Though tentacles kinda freak me out honestly." Jax can't help a slight shudder at this. "Tentacles are /cool/, I want tentacles," Spencer insists, stopping chewing on Ryan to watch Shelby, wide-eyed. "/That's/ cool! I want that, too." He might say this about every mutation he's ever encountered. "Yeah?" Mental note made. Yellow. Tentacles. Shelby will remember, though she's trying to be Super Casual about it. "I could give you tentacles if your dad says okay. But they wouldn't move or anything unless me or him was around," she informs the younger boy with a grin. The skulls have skittered up her arm, but for one. It lingers in her palm, and she gestures at it with a finger, warping its dimensions into something octopus-like. "/Really/? Taylor has tentacles, they're awesome." The look Spencer gives Jax is /totally/ a Dad, /can/ I? Look. "Sure, tentacle him. They're coming off again 'fore you gotta go back to school, though," Jax cautions. Spencer seems unbothered by this. He launches himself off the couch to make grabbyfingers towards Shelby's hand. "/Cool/ that's awesome, you're the awesom/est/." "I /am/ the awesomest," Shelby agrees, not a little smug. There's nothing quite like the adoration of a child to pump the ego of a not-quite-child. She reaches out to steady grabbyhand and presses her palm to his forearm. The octopus is transferred, all black, and pink, and blue, and cheerful. Once set, it begins to do the tentacle thing with plenty of tickly wriggling. "If you got some paint and paper, Jax, I can work on those turtles for you," she asides. "If Ryan doesn't think he's gonna need me for anything soon." Thirty seconds from cataloging Sebastian's likes, she is lifting teasing eyebrows at the musician. Spencer /squirms/, and grins, and laughs at the tickling, rubbing a hand against his arm. "That feels /weird/, cool!" Ryan is groping on the couch for another cushion. He's pulling it back over his head. "You're /all set/. Go forth. Decorate. Stay. Quiet." Jax smirks, at this, still ruffling at Obie. "Oh, sure. There's, uh, plenty of -- pretty much everything in my room." He waves his hand down the hall. "Paints, sketchpads. M'stocked. Go wild." Shelby's grin deepens at Spencer's giggling. She pushes up off of the floor and saunters on towards the indicated room. As she goes, the squirming of the octopus lessens and then gradually comes to a complete stop. "Sweet, yell when it's dinnertime!" Because, uh, she's invited, right? "Sure thing," Jackson calls back, though for the moment he's focused on wrestling Obie against the floor. Sure, she's invited. She will have to put up with hippie vegan food. That and raw meat is generally all that is available in his house. The twins don't bother with silly things like COOKING.