maskormenacelogs | Winter Gala

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Winter Gala

WHO: Everyone
WHERE: Jeopardy
WHEN: Saturday, December 21 from 5:00 p.m. onward into the early morning hours of Sunday, December 22.
WHAT: The Winter Gala Fundraiser for Jeopardy Relief Efforts
WARNINGS: Please include any necessary warnings in your TLs.
NOTES: This post will serve as a catch-all for logs for the entire event (though you’re also welcome to post things elsewhere, of course).

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Well, mostly. In the wake of a near-apocalyptic event, the city of Jeopardy is in need. What started out as an idea to advertise Rikki Chadwick's burgeoning business, after a little more planning and nabbing some ideas from Kenzi's post, she and Rupert have reconfigured and rebranded their idea to focus less on her and more on the relief effort.

Characters will enter the venue after giving a small donation at the door and they will be greeted by a large room lit in blues, soft pinks, and purples. From the ceilings hang snowflakes made of glass. The centerpieces are also made of glass. Come to think of it, nearly all the decorations are made of glass. Except, that is, the mistletoe hanging from several of the rafters and archways. A buffet-style dinner will be served from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., at which point, the buffet tables and seating tables will be cleared away to make room for the makeshift stage for the DJ and a gigantic dance floor.

Drinks will be flowing, music will be playing, and people will be bidding on silent auctions to win everything from one of the centerpieces to a date with their favorite imPort and everything in between. So, eat, drink, and be merry until you can't stay awake any longer. Why not? It's all for a good cause, after all.

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Loki has just found himself another drink to enjoy when Jane finds him and he turns to her in a slow, measured way before greeting her with a benign smile.

Somehow that large helmet of his has shrunk down to a much more manageable, yet still golden headpiece over the time of his stay at the gala. Which at least means the horns on his head are only about half the size they were when he arrived.

"Why, good evening, Jane. Are you enjoying yourself?" He replies, entirely ignoring her question. But he is coming back to that over a little detour "It appears we get to spend some time together. I hope you look forward to that." She likely isn't, but that's the point.

Ha. Benign. That was a good one.

Though, she supposes, if she really wanted to get the upper hand on him for once, she probably should have been all sugary-sweet and that. But that would be playing his game.

“If we manage to not go at each other’s throats, we might,” she said. “Given your age, you should know something about the universe I haven’t come across before, and vice versa.”

"Oh, I am certain it will be very educational." He replies, still smiling and entirely ignoring her comment about them potentially attempting to murder one another. Or the small fact that he might, indeed, know a good few things she might be very interested in learning.

After taking a small sip from his drink, Loki casts a short look around "But today we are here to... Enjoy ourselves." And he looks back to her "I see even you found some time to dress in accordance to the occasion."

How educational was the question that had yet to be answered.

She narrowed her eyes a little bit. Oh, that was a dig if she heard one.

“Yes, well, it’s not like I am wholly uneducated in manners and etiquette. But before you go and enjoy yourself, I have one question: why did you bid on me?”

She doubted he would give her a straight answer, but it was worth a shot.

He simply gives her a long, unidentifiable look and lets that one linger. There is a faint smile on his face. But it is a smile that can easily mislead.

"Because I wanted to." Is the reply Jane gets after a few long moments before Loki takes half a step back, tipping his head up slightly at the same time.

"Now I have a question myself." And he holds out a single hand towards her, grinning a little "Do you dance?"

Jane eyes him critically, absolutely suspicious. She senses tomfoolery, mischief, mayhem, a plan that will have her either horribly embarrassed or absolutely humiliated.

“I suppose that is a good an answer as any.”

But then his question has him surprised. How the hell is she going to answer?

“Define dancing.”

It's the only answer she will be getting from him. He doesn't miss her surprise, and his grin widens a little.

"I don't think a verbal definition would do it justice, doctor. But I am willing to give you a physical one."

His tone suggests that her chance to decline has already left the event and is now waiting for her at her home with a bag of leftovers. Loki simply steps forward and reaches to take Jane's hand himself. Unless she resists and potentially makes a bit of a scene, she will have to dance with this Asgardian.

She has got to work on her poker face.

“Of course you would.”

When he takes her hand, she knows she can refuse and make a scene, but it would make a scene, and Rikki has worked too hard to have an incident ruin the evening. So, she doesn’t protest as he pulls her out to the dancefloor.

“You had better be a proper gentleman or I am going to make you float.”

Loki nearly snorted in response, only the twitch in his grin giving his reaction away as he leads the way and finally turns to Jane once they reach the designated area. He looks beyond bemused while reaching for Jane's other hand.

"Worry not. Unlike my brother, I did not sleep through most of our lessons on etiquette and attitude."

They may not have been the most fascinating lessons, but important ones nonetheless. At least Loki understood them as such. But at that time he still believed there still to be a chance for him to earn an equal treatment from Odin. Today he is painfully aware of how foolish he has been.

He gives Jane a brief nod "Shall we?"

“You have really got to stop comparing yourself to him,” she says with an eye roll. “You’re like apples and oranges.”

She sighs dramatically. She never had etiquette lessons and the like; manners were picked up strictly from observing adults and heeding when she had been told, “Don’t do that!” And maybe some online searches once that became a thing.

“Might as well. Lead the way.”

He doesn't respond right away, but takes a moment to consider the current music. A slow, rather tactful piece. Well, might be fun. He doesn't have to be told twice to take the lead and have them both on the dance floor. Being raised as a prince of Asgard of course came with the mandatory dancing lessons. Which he actually never minded.

And yet he rolls his eyes a little as he finally decides to give Jane a reply, which comes with a bit of a dramatic sigh.

"I lived for a thousand years being compared to my perfect brother. And told to work hard to be more like him. And suddenly I am being told to cease doing so myself. Why can't people just make up their minds?"

Does he sound bitter? Maybe. Even though he makes a good effort to not show it. He as himself just can't ever be good enough, can he?

As they go onto the dance floor, Jane is a little secretly relieved that it is a slower dance number and he seems to be confident in what to do. It will give her a chance to steel herself and mimic his actions some, disguising her lack of knowledge in this area.

“You have to consider the context. Asgard seems to dislike it when people stray from the cultural norms. On earth, we have whole countries built by people straying from the cultural norms they were initially raised in.”

Oh, Jane can tell he’s bitter. She’s known it for a long time.

It isn't difficult for Loki to settle them into the pace of the song and direct their movements along with the melody. Jane's words, however, earn her a short sigh, along with a roll of his eyes.

"I never strayed from our... Cultural norms. On the contrary. I did my best to fit in, but that didn't matter. It never had. Odin had decided my role the day he took me, I just didn't know it and foolishly played his game." His expression is grim, but his tone remains measured "I am certain he enjoyed watching me struggle pointlessly."

And to a good degree that struggle hasn't stopped. Not for him.

"And don't think I am not aware of humanities tendency to slaughter their own. Your kind makes very little sense when observed from the outside. You are even punishing people for matters that aren't considered a crime anywhere else in the galaxy."

Jane frowns as he goes further into detail and she can understand now why Thor annoyed and angered him so much. Even if Thor had deviated from the norms, she had a feeling that Odin would still favor him in some way.

“He seems to do that a lot. He didn’t seem to approve of me and we never even really met.”

For some ‘all father’, it seems like no one told him how conditional love was not a good parenting practice. For some ‘king’, it seems like no one told him how prejudice would bite him in the butt later on.

“Different cultures, different ideas of what is acceptable or not,” she says. “Though I think all civilizations have their hypocrisies.”

Deciding that he doesn't feel like discussing his adoptive father any further, Loki settles with giving a rather dramatic eyeroll at the second part of what Jane just said.

"In earnest. If humans still insist on treating other humans as criminals for what they feel, you really just should have let me just rule your planet." a bit of a playful jab, but with a serious issue for a background. An issue Loki at least hasn't encountered in this realm.

Loki needed to have an eye-roll contest and rig all of the bets. He would become a millionaire overnight.

Jane snorts at his comment. "Laws have gotten better, since people are pushing for those changes, but if you were going to actually be a good world leader, you sure picked a way to show it."

The Asgardian would have shrugged if they weren't dancing. As it is, he just slightly tilts his head to one side for a moment.

"A conquest is meant to display strength, doctor. The resulting rule is not bound to carry the same brutality."

“Then it says a lot about my world when that was not the norm, doesn’t it? At least historically. Brutality to maintain a newly conquered land sometimes lasts a while.”

Even if he brought up their current military strategies, many operations were meant to eliminate threats or fortify what was already established to preserve some status quo. She did not know enough about foreign military operations, or the operations of other groups under no such banner, to comment on them. She probably was a little incorrect about the historical norm as well, given that she was more knowledgeable in European warfare, than say, pre-colonial Polynesian or Native American views and practices.

"It confirms the opinion most other civilizations harbor about Midgard: That your realm has not really evolved far enough yet to consider interacting with it."

Which has been the general way Earth has been viewed so far - With Asgard for some reason protecting the other planet. More or less. Loki knows way too well just how much Odin truly cares for Midgard. Which is yet another reason Loki would argue why no one should question his rule.

“There’s also a joke that the reason why we haven’t come across any civilizations is because most of them destroy themselves before they can travel such distances.”

‘Civilized’ is such a loaded, complex word.

Of course, Earth is kind of backwater compared to the planets that had developed as far as they did. Maybe there was another universe out there where Loki did take over the Earth and proved everything he said to be true. Had to be better than Odin’s rule at least. He tended to fall asleep whenever it was ‘convenient’ and didn’t do much to address certain problems.

Like a number of infinity stones left around.

Loki chuckles mildly "You are expecting far too much war from the rest of the galaxy."

Of course there are always wars somewhere, but certainly not everywhere. Things are far from getting out of hand any time soon. Hopefully.

“It’s only one joke. There’s another that states other civilizations looked at us and passed. Pretty much like you have stated.”

There was an unsettling one that she heard of long ago: that they were either alone or they were not and both were equally terrifying.

But hopefully, things would remain in control, more or less.

“Perhaps you are expecting too little from us.”

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Winter Gala

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I AM CACKLING WITH GLEE

I would apologize, but I'm not sorry

haha as if i am sorry either

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