#ah crumbs there’s a typo there I need to change that when I’m back at my laptop

[flowering-darkness]

Okay now I’m thinking about Mario Party with the Ashen Wolves, because of Clara posting about it with her and the other Blue Lions

Yuri is meticulous about maximising his chances of winning - he’ll try to keep his usual smooth commentary going to disguise that he’s doing something unusual to guarantee himself bonus stars, so that no-one intercepts him (Catarina is good at spotting this, though). This can often lead to him stealing the win right at the end of the game. I’m not really sure why, but I feel like he would play as Luigi.

Balthus is the most likely to do something that screws him over if it’ll also hit someone else, like landing on an event space that causes everyone in a stretch of the board (himself included) to get moved or lose coins. He isn’t quite as strategic, but can often make the best of an unlucky situation.. which is useful considering how often he finds himself in them. I can see him playing as someone like Wario or DK.

Constance is DETERMINED to win by as far of a margin as she can, buying whatever items and even throwing group minigames if it will let her bring down first place - though this does sometimes lead to her own downfall if she lacks the ability to defend herself from others’ trouble. She absolutely plays Peach.

Hapi just lets the others fight amongst themselves and mostly does her own thing, which can sometimes lead to her coasting ahead and into victory if they all sabotage each other too much. I can see her playing as someone like Toad or Yoshi.

Catarina is the one who knows the boards best, so she can take fullest advantage of the events and layout (and is prone to going quiet when she’s planning something so no-one notices her do it). She keeps an eye on what everyone else is doing so that she can adapt her tactic accordingly, rather than going in with a set plan from the start. As she’s my self-insert, and I think I usually play as either Yoshi or Daisy in Mario Party, she would do the same.

..It all sounds like a horribly toxic gameplay experience when I word it this way, which was very much not my intention >w< we do all have fun, it’s just that all of us often have quite the potential to be devious in gameplay strategies. At the end of the day, though, it all comes down to the luck of the dice!

Hopefully this makes sense ^-^

[cynicalrainbows]

The Next Best Thing Chapter 12

In which Anne’s parents are Awful Nouveau-Riche and Cathy realises her skill at Scary Stories.

There’s pizza and birthday cake for supper when they’re called downstairs, flushed and ruffled from much entombing and raining down of curses. 

(They even managed to include Anne’s birthday present: the doll became the sacrifice, like in the story of Abraham and Isaac that they learned in R.E, except that no one replaces the doll with a sheep at the last minute.

It’s ok. The doll doesn’t seem to mind being a sacrifice. It doesn’t mess up her dress or her ringlets anyway.)

At home and at Catalina’s house at her old house, it’s tea but at Anne’s house, it’s supper. She knows not to call it tea because Anne’s Mum and Dad like to pretend that they don’t understand when people call it tea.

(Once, Anne says, Jane asked what time she should bring Anne and Kitty home for tea and Anne’s Mum made a big show of looking confused and told Jane that Of course they didn’t let the children drink TEA, Jane, oh goodness no…. Oh I’m so sorry, do you mean supper? and Jane had just sighed really big.)

Cathy wonders if she or Anne should have warned Anna about the tea/supper thing in case she gets it wrong and has to listen to Anne’s Mum doing her I’m Very Confused face...but it turns out to be ok because Anna calls it abendessen, and Anne’s Mum gets a funny look on her face, like she isn’t sure whether or not to correct her, and ends up not saying anything at all.

The pizza is delicious- real, proper pizza ordered from a pizza delivery place- not the frozen pizza that Catalina buys or the homemade pizza that they have as a treat sometimes, when she gets to help knead the dough herself and choose her own toppings. 

(She always makes her pizza into a face- with olives for eyes and a red pepper smiley mouth and pepperoni cheeks and a button mushroom nose, even though she doesn’t like peppers very much and she doesn’t like olives at all. 

She picks those parts off before she eats it. 

The very first time, she’d wondered for a moment in Catalina would be cross at the waste but when she’d asked to check, Catalina had just laughed and said that they could probably just about afford it and that if Cathy valued The Aesthetic that much, who was she to stand in the way of art? 

Which turned out to be a fancy way of saying that she didn’t mind.)

The birthday cake is even more exciting than the pizza: it has two tiers like a wedding cake, except it’s pink rather than white and there are little pink and white roses on the top rather than a bride and groom and Happy Birthday Ann written around the side.

Mary laughs and asks Anne’s Dad if he noticed that they missed off an E and Anne’s Dad tells her not to look at him, he didn’t order the bloody thing and Anne’s Mum goes pink and quickly says that it must have been a typo and then snaps at them both that it doesn’t matter, isn’t it still a beautiful cake?

(Anne whispers to Cathy that it doesn’t seem fair that grown ups can make all the spelling mistakes they want: why doesn’t it matter that the cake maker spelt her name wrong when she gets told off if she forgets about the secret E in Boleyn?

But she only says it quietly, so no one thinks she’s being Ungrateful.)

She and Anna and Anne’s Mum (who is holding her magazine open with her finger so she doesn’t lose her place) and Anne’s Dad (who is still wearing his suit and is drinking something dark brown from a fancy glass) and Mary (who is home from Group) and Baby Catherine (who is enthusiastically gumming a rusk) sing Happy Birthday to Anne while she blows out her candles and cuts the cake to make a wish.

(She doesn’t get to do more than the first cut though because Anne’s Mum is fussed about mess.)

Cathy makes sure to hold her cake fork in her left rather than her right hand when she’s eating her slice of birthday cake (she’s getting quite good at it now) and feels pleased with herself when she doesn’t drop even a single crumb. 

Anne is….less careful, but it’s her birthday, so her Mum only frowns at her a little bit and her Dad doesn’t notice at all because he’s looking at his phone.

Baby Catherine is a lot less careful and drops bits of rusk and crumbs of cake all over the carpet and Anne’s Mum sighs and frowns and then scolds Mary for letting the baby have CAKE and what were you thinking?

 Mary tells her it was only a tiny taste and to lay off her, it’s HER daughter, and Anne’s Mum snaps back that if it’s her daughter, maybe Mary should pay for her clothes and toys and nappies and food from her own pocket and how would she like that?  and they snap back and forth until Mary crossly whisks Baby Catherine away to clean her up.

Then Anne’s Dad says he needs to make a phone call and Anne’s Mum turns to them and asks if they wouldn’t like to go back upstairs to play now so that the grownups can have some peace and quiet even though they haven’t been downstairs all that long, and that’s it, the cake bit of the party is clearly over.

Anna looks a tiny bit surprised, and Anne looks a tiny bit disappointed (Cathy just feels relieved) …….but it’s alright really.

The pillow fort isn’t going to build itself, after all.

*

Making the fort is fun.

Climbing into the fort and playing that they’re Arctic Explorers in a blizzard is even more fun (especially when Anna’s Captain Oates decides he wants to come back into the tent after he’s left and she and Anne have to fight really hard to keep him outside in the snow)......and then Anne says they should do scary ghost stories.

Because it’s her sleepover and her birthday and everyone in sleepovers on tv tells ghost stories and so they should too.

This is….sort of a good idea.

It’s a good idea because it’s true that a proper sleepover needs ghost stories- they all agree on that.

It’s less of a good idea because… well, at first she thinks it’s a less-good idea because she doesn’t really know any proper ghost stories.

(Both her parents and Catalina have been very clear in letting her know that Ghosts- and monsters-under-the-bed and Vampires and Witches are all Just In Stories…..but they haven’t supplied her many of the stories themselves. Not ones that are scary enough to make them worthy of a sleepover anyway.)

Not only does she not know any real scary stories though, neither does Anne (as far as she knows) and so it’ll be just boring.

However it soon turns out- once the lights are turned off and they’re sitting in the pillow fort with their torches under their chins to make their faces all spooky- that actually Anne DOES know quite a few ghost stories.

At least, they’re not exactly ghost stories, more plots-of-horror-films-that-Mary-watches-and-Anne-Isn’t-Supposed-To-See….. but they work perfectly well even if they ARE more about zombies and men with chainsaws and big sharks than ghosts (and even though Anne has to make some of it up because she- unluckily for her- never gets to see more than a minute or two before Mary tells her to go and play.)

Anna knows stories too- stories that are old, stories that her Omi learnt from her Omi when she was a little, little girl. 

There’s the story of the maid who tricks a princess into being a goose girl and who gets rolled around the city in a spiked barrel as her punishment and now haunts the town every night- which makes them all wince- and the story of the peddler who is given a gun with seven bullets in by a man in a cloak who turns out to be the devil and who ends up shooting his wife by mistake and now haunts the forest- which makes them all sad.

And then Anne says it’s time for Cathy to tell a ghost story and she wonders what she could possibly say.

She has no idea how she’ll be able to match Anna’s devil-with-a-gun story, and certain she won’t be able to top Anne’s man-who-cuts-off-peoples-skin-and-wears-it anecdote.

She hasn’t seen any scary films herself at all- not even a bit of one because Catalina doesn’t watch those sorts of films, just old, old films that are all black and white, or serious grown up films where people do lots of looking out of rainy windows while sad music plays in the background.

Once or twice, out of curiosity, she’s tried picking something that looks scary and grown up from the dvd section of the library to see if she’ll be allowed it but Catalina just makes her put it back and choose something else.

(‘You wouldn’t like it, querida.’

Catalina has barely even looked at the dvd case and it makes her cross. 

‘I might. You don’t know I won’t like it.’

Catalina raises her eyebrows. ‘I can make a pretty good guess. Remember the detective program that you didn’t like because of the scary music? Well this would be even scarier than that. It would give you nightmares for sure.’

‘Maybe I LIKE having nightmares.’

‘Maybe you do but I don’t. Just choose something else please.’

‘Well I ONLY want this one.’ It’s a challenge but Catalina looks unimpressed.

‘Well I am more than ok with you getting nothing at all mija if that’s what you’d like.’ Catalina nonchalantly examines the case with a picture of a tiger in a sailboat on the front and puts it back. 

Annoyingly, Cathy knows she means it. ‘Now shall I pick out another dvd for myself or would you like to choose a different one?’

‘......A different one.’

‘Ah, I thought so.’

Grudgingly, she lets Catalina put the dvd case back on the shelf but it’s still frustrating.

It’s too hard to explain that what really made her hide her eyes and cover her ears from the detective program wasn’t really the scariness but how normal it was. 

Scary films, she thinks, should be Scary. And she doesn’t think she’d mind Scary Scary.

 What she doesn’t like are normal things that turn scary and remind you of all the bad things that could happen to you at any time at all.

But explaining that is too hard so she doesn’t even try.)

She wonders if Catalina would have changed her mind about the dvd if she knew she was leaving Cathy in such a position as she is now, the only person at the sleepover without a scary story to tell. 

(Maybe she’ll tell her tomorrow. She hopes Catalina feels bad about it when she tells her.)

Anna and Anne are starting to look a bit impatient now so she decides she’s just going to have to make something up.

She takes a deep breath.

‘Once upon a time-’

Anne giggles a bit- maybe because she’s using the fairy story beginning, maybe because she’s making her voice all spooky and different, maybe just from sheer nerves, but Cathy can’t tell which so she throws a stray cushion at Anne to make her be quiet and listen properly.

‘Once upon a time….there was a little girl. She lived with her Godmother in a big, big house. It had hundreds of rooms and ten floors and a big big garden….’

‘Was there a swimming pool?’

She wants to be annoyed at Anne for interrupting but she supposes it’s only fair considering that she interrupted Anne’s story about The Scary Murder Hotel to say that it was really the ladies fault she got stabbed in the shower and why didn’t she lock the door like a normal person?

‘No- Yes.’ She changes her mind. ‘She DID have a pool, and she could do the backstroke and dive and hold her breath underwater-’

Anne scowls (it’s still a point of contention between them that Cathy learned how to do the backstroke in swimming lessons first even though Anne has a nicer swimming costume.)

‘Bet she couldn’t really. Bet the dive was only once and she couldn’t do it again.’

Cathy is on the verge of asking Anne just whose story it is (and possibly adding that maybe the little girl could only manage to dive once but at least she didn’t cry when she got pushed fell off the floaty raft even though all that happened was getting a little bit of water up her nose like some people she could name…) but then Anna interrupts because she wants to hear what happens next.

‘Go on Cathy!’

‘Well, she lived in a big big house, anyway. She was allowed to play in every room except the attic. Every day she asked her Godmother if she could go into the attic and every day, her Godmother would say, maybe when you’re a bit older. 

And she would come up with reasons about why the little girl couldn’t go up there, like one day she’d say that the roof was leaking or that there were some presents she wasn’t allowed to see or that it was too cold. 

But the little girl didn’t really think that was really why. And every night when she was in bed, she could hear noises coming from the attic. And if she ever asked about it, her Godmother would say that it was the wind. 

But it didn’t sound like the wind. It sounded like-’ Cathy drums with the heel of her hand on the carpeted floor a few times and then makes her fingers all witchy and scratches them along the side of the fort.

‘One night, she decided that she couldn’t wait any longer to find out so she got out of bed really quietly and snuck up the stairs to the attic. On the first step, she heard a little voice in her head telling her to go back but she ignored it. When she was half way up, she heard a little voice telling her to go back to bed RIGHT NOW...but she ignored it. And when she got to the top step, she opened the door really slowly….’

Cathy pauses dramatically- she’s not really been paying attention to the other two while she’s been talking but they’re both staring at her, eyes wide. Anna is holding a pillow to her chest and Anne is biting the nail of her littlest finger.

I did that, she thinks. My story did that….

It feels exciting. It feels powerful.

‘She opened the door and saw...nothing.’ She lets her voice drop back to normal and Anna and Anna both relax. ‘It was just an ordinary boring attic….and she thought maybe her Godmother had been telling the truth the whole time, and she was just turning around to go back to bed when she felt….a hand….close around…..her wrist…’

She lets her words fall slowly until she gets to the last part, and then she grabs Anne’s bare wrist as she says it. 

Anne gasps and pushes her away and takes back her arm like she’s afraid of what Cathy might do to it; Anna puts the pillow over her face so only her eyes are peeking out.

‘The hand was all cold and thin….and the little girl was too scared to turn around. She heard a voice- just a little girl's voice- in her ear, and it said…’ 

She makes her voice all scratchy. ‘It’s my turn now. You’ve lived downstairs for all these years and your Godmother promised that one day, we were going to get to swap places and now you’re here so we will. 

The little girl tried to run but before she could, the other little girl had pulled off her dressing gown and put it on over her own raggedy dress, and she pushed the little girl down and she took a big needle and she sewed up the little girls mouth so she couldn’t even scream-’

Anne presses her lips together tightly.

 ‘The little girl lay there with her mouth all sewn up, and she watched as the attic girl escaped out of the door and shut it hard…. 

And then the little girl heard her go downstairs. And she tried and tried to open the door but she couldn’t, no matter how hard because it was locked up tight.

And after a while, she heard her Godmother coming into the hall and so she banged as hard as she could on the door, hoping she would hear her and come and rescue her and let her out…’

‘And then?’ Anna’s voice is nearly a whisper.

‘And then…’ Cathy took a deep breath. ‘Then she heard the other little attic girl saying What’s that funny noise? Can I go up to the attic today? 

And she heard her Godmother say That’s just the wind, come and have breakfast. Maybe you can go to the attic when you’re a little bit older. 

And it made her wonder if she’d be able to escape when the attic girl came up to see her….

But then she heard the little girl reply That’s ok. I don’t really want to go up there. I don’t ever want to go up there, not ever!

 And the attic girl and her Godmother walked away, and the little girl was left all alone. Forever. The end.’

There’s a long quiet after she finishes and she wonders if maybe she was wrong, if Anne and Anna don’t like her story after all….but then Anna lets out a shaky breath.

‘Wow Cathy, you’re really good at scary stories!’

‘Thank you.’

‘Did Catalina tell you that one?’ Anne asks and Cathy shakes her head. ‘No. I just….made it up.’

‘How? How? Teach me!’ 

‘I don’t know how-’

‘Please Cathy!’ Anne grips her arm like she wants to shake the stories out of Cathy for herself and Cathy pushes her off, giggling.

‘I don’t know how to!’

Anne subsides reluctantly. ‘It was SO scary! What happened to the little girl?’

‘Yes!’ Anna joins in. ‘What happened to her?’

They’re looking at her expectantly- it’s so strange to think that now, this little girl exists not just in her head but in Anna and Anne’s heads too, she exists now when five minutes ago she was just nothing at all.

She’s made something out of nothing- and although she’s written stories before, in school and just for fun, this feels different. This feels real.

It occurs to her that she could say anything- anything- and that would be The End….so she has to think for a minute before she asks (and this is quite clever she thinks really) if they want a Scary Ending or a Happy Ending.

(It’s like when Catalina asks if she wants truth or lies when she asks what Catalina did at work that day, and sometimes she says lies and sometimes she says truth.

When she says she wants lies, Catalina will tell her about the tiger that got in through the office window and how everybody but her ran away and how she had to fight it off with just the contents of her handbag until it fled, never to be seen again. 

Or she’ll talk about how she got lost on the way to work and as she walked and walked, the buildings around her got bigger and bigger and it was only when she came across a dandelion the size of an umbrella that she decided she should maybe turn back….

When she says she wants truth, Catalina will tell her about the new person who made a mistake and tried to blame it on her, and the annoying woman who talks about being on a diet and then goes and takes the last biscuit anyway, and the annoying man who listens to what she says and then repeats it and pretends it’s his idea and how much she’d like to throw something at him but of course I wouldn’t really querida because that would be very bad.

Whether she chooses truth or lies, it’s usually a good story anyway.)

Anne says Happy Ending just as Anna says Scary Ending, which is no help at all.

‘Tell us both!’

‘Yes, tell us both!’

She gives in, and tells them all about how the little girls Godmother noticed that the attic girl wasn’t wearing the same pajamas as her real daughter and went up and rescued her and unstitched her mouth and made the little attic girl say sorry and go and live with her neighbour who was going to have a baby the normal way but then decided that babies were too much trouble but that she’d still quite like a daughter anyway.

‘-and they all lived happily ever after.’

‘Was the little attic girl her sister?’ asks Anna and Cathy shakes her head.

‘She came with the house.’

‘Ohhhh.’ Anna nods understandingly. ‘Yes. The new house has some furniture Mutti didn’t like because it was ugly and Vati said that it came with the house and that we had to put up with it.’ She pauses. ‘I’m glad we didn’t get a creepy little girl too.’

‘You MIGHT have done!’ Anne bursts out. ‘Maybe you did and she’s in the attic and she’s waiting for you to go up-’

Anna shakes her head. ‘We don’t have an attic.’

‘Maybe she’s in the cellar!’

‘We don’t have a cellar either. Vati said houses with cellars and attics were too much trouble and if Mutti wanted either, she could be in charge of sorting them out when something went wrong and Mutti said there was no way she was doing that, so we just got a normal house.’

‘Oh.’ Anne looks stumped. ‘That’s a shame. Nowhere for the little attic girl to live just because your Daddy didn’t want a cellar.’

Anna says if Anne is so sorry for the little attic girl, maybe she can come and live in Anne’s attic instead and Anne squeals and says she better not even try, it’s not her fault Anna doesn’t have an attic.

‘Can we have the scary ending now Cathy?’ Anna asks (possibly to distract Anne from further scrutiny of her father’s potential disregard for the welfare for little attic girls) and Cathy nods.

‘The scary ending…..is that the little girl stayed up in the attic forever. She got hungrier and hungrier but she couldn’t eat anything because her mouth was all sewn up and no one was bringing her food anyway. So she died. All by herself and she never saw her Godmother again and no one noticed or was sad about it because they didn’t know.’

It’s not a very long ending but it’s the saddest, scariest ending Cathy can think of, and the others must agree because they just nod, like it makes sense that of course you can’t eat with a mouth all sewn up.

They’re thinking about it so hard that when there’s knock on the door, they all jump and Anne gives a little scream and Cathy grabs tight onto her hand….but it’s only Mary, telling them that Anne’s Mum says it’s time they went to bed.

Coming out of the pillow fort feels funny after all the stories- especially as the big light is still off and they have to shine their torches so Anne can find the switch by the door.

(She makes it across the room ok, no scary hands reach out to grab her or anything.)

(Not that they can see, anyway.)

At least things feel a bit more normal when the light is on- and finding pajamas and toothbrushes is at least a reassuringly prosaic distraction.

It also helps that she’s excited to show off the new pajamas Catalina brought her as a special treat- her old ones were just pink and purple plaid but her new ones are very cool and blue and have little otters and ‘Otterly Exhausted’ on them.

(Catalina says that’s a pun, which means getting words wrong on purpose to be funny. Cathy decides she likes puns but from the way Catalina rolls her eyes when she’s explaining it, she thinks Catalina might not feel the same way.)

(But it’s ok because Anne says that Jane likes puns a LOT.)

Anne’s pajamas are just plain green (although they’re made of special silky stuff) but Anna has pajamas patterned with little skulls and crossbones like a pirate.

 (Anna says they’re from the boys section because why should boys get the cool pajamas and Cathy and Anne agree that’s a very good point.)

The fort gets a bit demolished when they’re getting into bed to sleep because they need the pillows and blankets back, and Anna goes back to her bag for a minute and fishes out a slightly worn grey and white toy fluffy thing.

She tells them her Vati brought one for her and one for her sister when their old dog, Albrecht got put to sleep, even though Amelia was too little at the time to know what Put To Sleep meant. So her dog is Albrecht The Second.

Albrecht The Second barks and lollops around the remains of the fort until Anne’s stuffed dragon blows a plume of smoke and fire and scares him away… and then Anne turns to Cathy and says they need Tarka (who is important enough to have a whole book written about him) to throw water on the fire…

It makes her wish very much that she hadn’t left Tarka under her pillow at home for fear of looking like a baby. When Anne asks why she didn’t bring him, she just shrugs.

‘I forgot.’

‘Oh.’ Anne loses interest and makes Rothko dragon burrow under the duvet.

(Rothko dragon got his name from the big red painting on Anne’s living room wall because Anne’s Mum and Dad were having a fight about it the same day that Anne was trying to think of a name for him: Anne’s Dad kept shouting that it was a completely ridiculous waste of money and Anne’s Mum kept shouting back that it was an original Rothko Thomas, an original Rothko! Anne doesn’t care much about the Rothko painting- she says it’s looks like something someone even younger than Kitty could paint- but she does like Rothko dragon very, very much.)

Cathy tries to remind herself that not bringing Tarkar means she’s obviously very grown up and that’s a good thing….but it’s quite hard to do.

Anne says that one of them can have Kitty’s bed and one of them can have the camp bed and one of them can have Anne’s bed and that her Mum said it was up to them to decide, so she thinks they should draw straws for it like in Oliver Twist.

(This is, Cathy thinks, more that Anne likes the idea of drawing straws than really caring where anyone sleeps.)

In the end, Cathy ends up on the fold up bed, Anne has her own bed and Anna has Kitty’s. 

Anna asks, while they’re waiting for their turns in the bathroom, whether Cathy really minds being on the camp bed and does she want to swap and Cathy says it’s ok.

She feels a bit bad when Anna smiles at her like she’s being nice.

She isn’t sure if she should tell her that the real reason she doesn’t mind having the fold-up is because she knows from Anne that Kitty has started wetting her bed again after her visit to Edmund.

(Jane says that it’s nothing to worry about, it’s easily fixed, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest so please don’t cry Kitty-Kat, which is pretty much the opposite of what Anne’s Mum has to say on the subject. But then again, she and Jane often say opposite things and Anne and Kitty are mostly used to it by now.)

She decides not to tell Anna because Anna seems happy to have the proper bed anyway, but she also feels a tiny bit guilty that Anna thinks she’s being more nice than she is, so she lets Anna clean her teeth next.

Which sort of makes it fair.

They get into bed and turn off all the lights, apart from Anne’s lava lamp and their torches. It’s sort of exciting- to be somewhere new, for the real sleepover part to begin….but it’s also, for some reason, suddenly really quite easy to imagine little attic girls and scary hands grabbing at their wrists and people wearing skin and what it must feel like to be rolled around in a spiky barrel…..

When there’s another knock on the door, it makes them all jump….but it’s only Anne’s Mum, checking that they’re really in bed and reminding them to not touch the special soap in the bathroom.

There’s a little uncomfortable silence after she goes: Cathy can still feel her heart beating a bit faster under her pajama top and she can tell that Anne and Anna are feeling the same way (although they at least have a dragon and a dog for protection while Cathy has nothing at all.)

After a bit, Anna says that attic girls probably can’t knock on doors to make it less scary- and they all feel better for a moment.

Then Anne says that little attic girls probably don’t knock because they can just come straight in whenever they want to…...

And they go right back to being scared again.