Cherry Blossoms are srs bzns guys

[trustycrowbar]

Who: Shen, Tsuruya, Gordon, Rosalia, Sherlock, Marisa, others that want to join in
What: Cherry-Blossom Hunting and picnic
When: Blooming season, some week in March
Where: Northwestern Woods

The copse of trees in the northwestern woods was quietly celebratory in the way that they often are on beautiful days. Sunlight dappled down between the leaves. Birds chirped and warbled. The wind could be heard gently hissing among the treetops above.

Nature's party was quickly crashed, however, as the very air in the center of the grove seemed to contract and then violently sneeze out a violent blue crackle of discharged entropy, along with several people in varying races, ages and stages of disorientation. The whole grove seems to give them the silent treatment, birds startled, timid woodland creatures scared off in a half-mile radius, even the wind is disrupted and silent. How DARE they show up and ruin the event...

For what it's worth, Gordon profoundly doesn't care. He stands and dusts himself off, trying to get the stray tachyons off or something. "That... was... AWESOME." He breaks into a wild grin and looks back at the innocent space of air that had just now violently thrown them into the woods, shouldering his backpack. "Good thing I asked about those teleportation pods in the labs! Who would've thought they'd actually work--oh hey, everyone with us?"

Comments

[not_good_not_wicked]

"I was totally there! Not my fault if you can't pay attention."

Sure she showed up at the last second just as everyone was getting ready to teleport without saying anything, but...

[life_is_megas_wonderful]

"Haha! Well, the more the merrier! Good thing I packed a spare lunchbox!" How did she -- oh well. "Anyway, lead on! I see anything nasty, and I'll scream and let you guys take care of it, okay? Hahahahaha!" She seems in pretty good cheer for someone who's out in the dangerous wilderness for the first time since she came to this place.

[nomen_est_numen]

"Oh, wonderful," Shen mutters, eyeing Marisa. It's clear he has little patience for something-deres. "Just try to be a little less rude and everything will be fine.

He spares a quick smile for Tsuruya, however. "I came armed. Monsters should be no trouble."

[solvings]

Right, now he's feeling much better. He checks his pockets in case he left something behind (like, say, a syringe so he can bring a blood sample home with him, or a gun he managed to buy somehow just in case) and breathes a sigh of relief when he's sure everything's there.

"As did I." Hopefully he gets to bring something from this trip.

[healeveryone]

"You guys came prepared, huh?" Rosalia shifts the basket of fruit she's carrying to her other arm, looking around for any sign of monsters she hopes aren't actually there. "I don't see anything right now, so I think we're okay. Let's go!"

[not_good_not_wicked]

Marisa set off through the woods in search of cherry trees. As they weren't quite sure where they were going, she chose a direction at random and followed a meandering path, keeping her eyes peeled.

This is a rather dramatic way of saying that Marisa wandered off without really paying attention to see if anyone was following her.

[solvings]

Sherlock's the next one to wander off, having quickly decided that he's not going to stand around. Unfortunately, he's taking his own way instead of just following Marisa.

...at least he has a gun?

[nomen_est_numen]

After a pause, looking back and forth between the two, Shen opts to accompany the least annoying of the two.

Making his way through the foliage behind Sherlock, he looks back at the others. "Well, come along, everyone. This path looks as good as any."

1/2 (Sorry this is late, guys.)

[trustycrowbar]

"The path is the most plausible--whoa whoa hey! Where do you think you're going? Majority wins and you're staying with the group, Witch Hazel!"

Guess who's been busy chasing down Marisa? If he has to haul her back by the collar, sure it'll be a little dehumanizing... but not as dehumanizing as being literally treated like meat by a monster. He doesn't even know her name yet, but he can already tell that this ditzy trick-or-treat reject is going to be bad news.

Let normal posting continue after comment 2/2, this is just Marisa's reaction

[not_good_not_wicked]

"Hey!"

She shook herself out of Gordon's grip, but went along with the group. "Yeah yeah, I'm comin' I'm comin'."

2/2

[trustycrowbar]

The path winds up and across a ridge, dotted with trees thick with the coarse green fuzz of early spring growth. The occasional explosion of a flowering white or yellow tree and red brush punctuates the scene. Every color but pink.

"Now that I think about it, it's a good thing none of us are allergic to this stuff." He mutters offhand as they pass a peculiar tree speckled with yellow and black flowers that flutter animatedly in the breeze. "Considering our immune systems and the fact that they may not actually be used to things from different... wh... wah... WAHCHOO!"

Looks like he spoke too soon. More notably the moment he sneezes, every flower on the tree above him seems to shudder strangely at once. Some of the group may be able to notice that those "flowers" have antennae and legs, just before a second loud sneeze sends the entire treeful of migrating butterflies EVERYWHERE.

[nomen_est_numen]

"Aaaack!"

Shen flaps and flails wildly for... about fifteen seconds. Once he realises they're only butterflies, however, he drops his wings and slouches, his expression bearing a mighty lineface. One butterfly lands on his feather crest, weighing the feather down until it hung in his line of sight. There's a beat before he takes a deep breath and blows a puff of air upward, sentding the butterfly fluttering away.

[life_is_megas_wonderful]

"Wow! Wow!! WOW!!!"

Tsuruya is laughing and dancing about as the butterflies all take to the air. "This is megas amazing! This trip is already turning out to be worth it! Look at all of them!" she shouts gleefully.

[solvings]

Sherlock, on the other hand, is trying to wave the butterflies off. Granted, they're lovely, and watching them take off is beautiful, but they're not why he'd chosen to tag along on this trip.

...though he has managed to catch one of them, somehow. Unfortunately he has to let it go, he doesn't have anything on him that could contain a butterfly for long.

"Are we finished with this yet?" he asks.

Spoilsport.

[healeveryone]

"Oh! Oh!" Rosalia laughs, whirling around and watching the butterflies scatter about. This really does remind her of home! "They're so beautiful, aren't they? I wish there were things like this in the city!"

She puts out her hand, hoping to catch one of the butterflies even if just for a second, but they just brush by her and keep on making their way towards the sky. Oh, that's okay - just the experience right now is enough.

[trustycrowbar]

Sherlock, upon holding one of the delicate things in his palm, may notice something about that butterfly. Its wings are... scalloped, in a way. Further, each curve breaks into smaller curves, and smaller... They have fractal wings. How the hell?

"Yeah, sure. Beautiful." Gordon sniffs, looking up at the chaotic rabble of yellow and black above him. "...hey... you guys smell something?"

Anyone who's spent some time in an oxygen-rich atmosphere would recognize the scent; it's ozone. That strange, fresh, ionized smell that occurs just before a--

"Is the sky getting darker, or is it just me?"

No. It's not just him. As the butterflies continue to fill the air, a powerful charge starts to build as causality collapses and forgoes the pollen scattering, the wildebeest sneezing, the stampede across the savannah, the river blockade, the minute change in the jet stream, the whole thing, and just goes right to the spontaneous lightning storm that you never saw coming. Dark stormclouds are already thick beyond the curtain of butterflies. There's a crash of thunder, very, VERY close.

[solvings]

He's never seen a butterfly like it before, certainly. He'd have wanted to bring it home for experiments, but alas. He'd forgotten to bring a handy container along.

"Well," he mutters, as thunder roars nearby, "that's the last time I trust the weather report." Not that he listens to it, anyway.

[life_is_megas_wonderful]

"Whuh oh! Guess it's true what they say about a butterfly flapping its wings. We'd better find cover guys!" says Tsuruya, looking up at the sky. She looks around for a suitable place. "So many trees around though..."

[trustycrowbar]

"Everybody stay low! This way!" Gordon barks with surprising authority over the crashes of lightning. The dark swirl of cloud cover isn't very wide; in fact they can easily reach the edge of it. The effects of quantum weather butterflies are, well... quantized like that. But the lightning was getting dense and starting to come dangerously close to filtering down through the branches and hitting people... and it was practically aiming at Shen.

It's nothing personal of course; it has everything to do with the fact that he's flying-type he has iron talons grounding him and he's loaded down with so many metal weapons--

"--waitaminute, SHEN! Your polearm! Stick it into the ground, it'll--" CRASHOOM! "It'll serve as a lightning rod!"

[nomen_est_numen]

He's already been narrowly missed, a tree taking the hit and splintering mightily. He can feel the ground and the air humming with a disturbing amount of energy, making his feathers stand on end and almost crackling along the metal on his feet.

He twitches, then draws the guan dao from inside his tail feathers and flips it round, driving the butt of the pole into the now damp earth. Three steps bring him far enough away from it that he can maybe pause for a moment, panting and twitching.

[healeveryone]

"Come on, let's go!" Rosalia looks around anxiously for anywhere they can go - but trees are supposed to be bad shelter from lightning, right? And there's no escaping the trees very soon...

Well, they had to do something. "Which way is the closest to town?" she asks the others hurriedly, still scanning the area for any signs of open space. "Maybe if we try to hurry back we can make it!"

[not_good_not_wicked]

Marisa held onto her hat as she followed everyone else towards anything that looked like safety. There was something frustrating about being completely at the mercy of such a random threat, but she would be damned before she let anyone see.

"Jeez, so much trouble from a buncha bugs. Is it like this everyone in Sirocco?"

[trustycrowbar]

"You want an optimistic answer, or the truthful one?" He grumbles, shepherding everyone out of the cloud cover. Shen's guan dao is the focus for a spectacular light display with the all those lightning bolts lashing down towards it. At least it's the metal taking the electrostatic beating and not them.

Safety in this sense is scrambling further down the path, not back, since it leads down the ridge. As soon as they exit to radius of the clouds, the startled butterflies start to settle again, and the tiny thunderhead above the tree slowly starts to deteriorate.

"...I think we're in the clear. I guess those things weren't so bad. They're just butterflies. I never expected they could do that, though. That was a shock." Beat. "Oh GOD, did I actually just say that?"

The path is steeper on the way down, and the path only there in a vague sense of the word. The ridge overlooks a small valley, set with a lake. Linked by a narrow bridge and set in an island in the center is... of all things, the red curvilinear roof of a small shrine amongst the greening vegetation. Still no sakura in sight, however.

Oh, Shen may want to get his weapon now. It's just where he'd left it under the tree... with a single butterfly resting on it. If Shen's careful he can sneak in and brush it off with no problem... though it may give him a tiny static jolt before fluttering off.

[nomen_est_numen]

There's a pause before Shen goes back to pick up his charred polearm. He approaches slowly, the scent of ozone is thick in his nostrils and he blinks on the smoke. Slowly he reaches out one wing. Pokes the butterfly sitting perched on the blade.

bzap.

"...."

He grabs the thing by its pole and stuffs it into his tail feathers, turns on one foot and stalks back along the path, muttering all the way.

[life_is_megas_wonderful]

"Well, you know what they say, causality and all that! Sure made for an awesome display at least, right?" She points at the shrine. "Oh! Hey, let's go take a look at that place! Not too deep, but it looks really neat!" she suggests cheerfully. "And hey, maybe it'll be a nice picnic shelter!"