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nochi-quinn · 1 year

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legend of vox machina watch party episodes 10-12: non-fungible thordak

"she's not having any of our shit tonight"

did matt get a haircut

"you're not leaving 'til 2 am, bitch"

"are you a vampire coven?" "if taliesin were here we could talk about it"

episode 10 act 4 part 3

"this is where we forgot to draw the city"

liam fangirling his own show

"OPE he lost his fingers"

"stop SPOILING. there's gonna be ACTION in the show."

"the tree piece in this game is really OP"

"shitty vox machina came in to ruin their Warhammer game"

"I forget which animals are fused with humans."

"shut UP matt"

"shout out - oh shit he's in the room"

"you slapped porkchops for like hours"

why does that sound like a euphemism

"I feel like that'd be it for me"

"matt mercer is mean!" "I didn't spend hours building those toothpick barricades for nothing!"

"that's why we named her pike"

"is there no basement? there is not"

bassment

I love how much they love their show. I know I was poking at liam earlier but it genuinely is so charming

"same arrow! that's called being responsible"

phil defending his poor herdsmen

"you guys are VIOLENT"

"TOP ROPE"

"spoilers!" maybe it'll be different on my screen

"and they were correct"

I FORGOT HE ONLY HAD ONE HITPOINT

recklegreweapomastah

"you sound like you've had your ass kicked" environmental storytelling

"there's a z-pack in there somewhere"

"zanror, needlessly hot" liam is fully horny on main tonight

"are they brothers like neptune and uranus were cousins"

"but I was born in canada"

"I actually had to shit myself for that line" "we all did"

"it's fun! and also disgusting!"

"let's not psychoanalyze me tonight"

"keyleth is the cutest" glad we're all in agreement

matt is all of us

"get a JOB leave him ALONE"

"she's bullying vax" "you're not wrong"

"he's doing the whole band" how else are you gonna get backstage

"we had to cut things from other episodes to get in 'at dawn we plan'" good

you are now Neutral with The Herd

release the underwear bible

"it is a square"

"you know what's weird? watching this scene with your kids"

"HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS" "it was very difficult"

"did you have to have a talk about bondage and safety?!"

"we have…DIFFERENT PARENTING STYLES"

COLOR SCRIPT COFFEE TABLE BOOK

GIMME

that's a cool band logo

oh NO

matt broke all over again

listen sometimes you just have to have a mental breakdown, it's good for your mental health

"we asked! we forgot."

"turkey vulture!"

"in a week we can talk about it. …something else bad will happen by then." my life for the past year and a half

sam: let me make this as awkward as possible so it can only get better from here

"you write a creepy thing and you feel guilty about it" "critical role"

the writers were on top of that one

"we talk all the time you guys"

"none of this should be happening"

"see, now chat's mad at you"

SAM

THAT was liam?!

I'm turning in my voice actor fan card

"you're gonna be the guy they hit"

the fact that he wasn't doing a low bass was why I didn't clock him tbh

"take that, vegeta"

EPISODE ELEVEN

"seventy-five!" "eighty-three!" "hike!"

OH the mugs!

samuel

"beautiful nonsense scene"

travis slapping sam's hand away from the edits

"what you did is bad!"

"THIS IS A GOOD SHOW"

"I'm sure it's fine"

"this is taliesin's front yard, actually"

"look what they did to my boy"

"campaign 4 reference, shh"

"kiss him, vax"

I looked up the show sam and liam referenced, it aired 92-93. I was 4.

umbrasyl listens to linkin park, it's canon

"he's a lot less menacing if you think of him as a whiny kid" there's a lot of that in that last fight

"award-winning awkwardness"

"ashley did not have to act here"

"I think taliesin wrote some of this bullshit"

"if you'd stop FEEDING THEM"

"cut my heart out" liam gets me

"blood pools are my kink"

"it's capri-sun, it's fine"

"it's a discotek at night"

"I've had this dream" I have been blessed to not have drowning dreams, if that changes now I'm fighting matt in the street

between the two of them liam and courtenay voiced half of new vegas

matt drop the raven queen lore

matt you have to tell sam's kids it's the law

"is it YOU?"

not the creepy cg mask

"he's just a little dork!" accurate

percy 100% would have been a train nerd

why did liam's mic pick up him knocking on his head so clearly

very cool that they built the trap in 3d

"this is basically a documentary"

"HO DAMN"

"he goes INVISIBLE?!"

phil with the list of the names

that, that "can't hit what you can't see" felt very adolescent to me

"some said longer, some said shorter" "we disregarded both!"

"the only episode this season where we end on a cliffhanger"

"episode 47 down"

travis I heard you echo that "duty"

remembering that liam went through all of this while dealing with his mother's death

matt: like comment and subscribe

"if you don't do it you'll turn into a squidface" "that's season 3"

"for some people that's a plus"

I don't know why I like the phrasing "deity version" so much

"there's love there!"

the way he says "conversations" means those two have definitely had at least one fistfight over canon

DARGINS

weasel dragon

Dragon Department

CEO of Dragons

I want "Dragon Team" on my resume

"because percy invented the metric system"

"it's canon now"

17 de Rolos

UMBRASSYL

"chat wants you to show - " "your muscles"

"I practice in the car so my neighbors don't call 911"

EPISODE TWELVE

hope devouwewer

"I want a pink dragon that spits out glitter"

"back inside that bad dragon" liam no

watch out for that treeeee

"but HOW THOUGH" sam gets me

"always bring a healer" stares at laura

"when the raven from the opening went by I fell out of the chair"

"you don't have to choose one" mica/percy/vax polycule

embiggened vestige

umbrasyl on 3G

"YOU'RE NOT MY DAD"

travis keeps catching himself from saying "d&d" and says "ttrpg"

"that's just liam just talking to me"

"kiss her you fool"

scanlan as paul rudd makes 100% sense and I hate it

"RUDE. UNNECCESARY. didn't have to do it and did it anyway"

vex can't feel vax bc gatshadow's made of lead

"ancient dragon, he can do what he wants"

"we had another ending in case we didn't get a season 3 where scanlan ran and everyone died" "whAT?"

"why would you DO THAT TO ME"

liam stop saying bad dragon

"ANIME YELL"

to make an omelette you have to crack a few scanlans

"that's a scrabble word"

"the theme….but slow"

"it's all hue lights"

wait WHAT

rewatches every previous yennen scene

"she could have written a letter" but the mail fraud

age has only done amazing things to cree summer's voice

"what porpoise"

"to go do Vegas"

"put it all on red"

"I'm putting it all into bitcoin"

"he's a cryptobro" "he IS the big bad!"

"you don't get the egg, but there's a code for each individual egg"

I made the poor decision to drink liquids during the watch party again

"that's that thing that I said!"

you know what it makes me think of lernie from hades

this is not a complaint

GOD I mentioned an artbook and now I want it so bad

thordak: talking mad shit for someone in thagomizer range

sketchy vax wings?!

sketchy vax wings!!

"it's not over for all you lefthanded people"

"my wife's a lefty and every morning I say the same thing"

"don't worry laura, you'll be something someday"

The Internets

where's that comic that always makes me cry with the AWNP lines over That Counterspell

matt dropped out of art school to be a rules lawyer

ghibli keyleth!!

cASSeteria

"now you've made me sad" "GOOD"

"fifteen seasons and a movie trilogy"

"he's the EP so he said he gets the killing blow"

"is that you writing" "he uses a typewriter"

"oh god I have to do this again"

#critical role #watch party #the legend of vox machina #crititag #liveblog #reaction post #spoilers #lovmtag

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trustafarian-theserialfiction · 4 years

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“trustafarian” part 16: girls from 8-11 stay up all night (and I can get a discount) April 4, 2016 10:22pm

The day of the big hoopla, Dan was already exhausted before they left Maison Rokkoku. Bruce had been in a panic through the end of March after hearing through the show-vine that Wrongbar of all places (even Dan was surprised) was gone-but-not-forgotten. After finding out it wasn’t a forever thing, and it’d be back sometimes, kind of, but not really, Bruce had gone on some kind of manic bender and dragged Dan and whoever else he could, to every event he got invited to, which was sometimes two or three venues within five blocks within one night. Or two or three places that were extremely far apart. Dan couldn’t remember much about any one place, let alone all of them. They had all had that characteristic humidity, the seasonings varying a bit place to place, depending: sweat and hair product, weed haze, beer and cigarettes, cat piss and patchouli and other weird smells including spilled moonshine. One night after several hours of watching Bruce throw himself around a tiny lightless room in the market, Dan had gone out for air and in the little alley he’d smelled hash-blunt smoke for the first time in his life, which made him feel profoundly underdeveloped in the opposite of the way his weedless life usually made him feel. Andreah had been there as well, with friends she didn’t seem to need to bring around for introductions. They all liked Bruce, though, and he seemed to know their names but spent the night in what Dan read as a chemically maxed-out fury. He seemed to think he’d done Dan a disservice by not bringing him to any of the parties he’d gone to that winter; it was an issue of how fast everything changed. And, specifically, he was upset about the fact that Dan had blinked and missed Wrongbar—what was next, Bassmentality? So this was them knocking-on-wood. Refusing to take T.O. for granted. Not letting good things pass them by. Jean-Paul seemed to gravitate toward Higher Grounds for respite oftentimes when their excursions put them nearby, but he came out with them every night and Dan was thankful. The club crawl had taken them through the great outdoors, even; they’d gone back to the ravine one night and had a youtube rave somewhere away from where people were sleeping. It had been green, terrifically green, everywhere new grass and leaves were coming in and the lighthazed-sky oculus over the oasis had dipcoated everything else that bluey-dusk palette. For a few minutes the green had been so bright against the dusky backgrounding he’d thought he’d somehow stupidly tried some of Bruce’s bottle of fluorescent-purple “rave juice” earlier and gotten so high he’d forgotten. When the green dimmed down with the nightfall he’d quickly realized that he’d have been much, much higher suddenly, if he was coming up on Bruce-portion-number-two, and he wasn’t. He’d then rightly chalked it up to being slightly high from all the laughs and the shawarma Jean-Paul had gotten him earlier; after he’d preemptively asked Bruce about an ipod dock/speaker set-up for the yearly flashmob bake-in at High Park, Bruce had done him two better and reemerged from his room with a nice compact vintage boombox with an aux cord as well as a two port usb lithium battery with an led party-light clipped in. And he’d insisted on bringing it and them with him, and VJing southward through the ravine (before streetcar hopping south to some hardcore shindig Mouse and Pete were excited about, some multiday fest). They’d stopped in to the Mediterranean-and-shawarma place at the Runnymeade intersection to eat, on their way out that night from the Maison. From there they’d walked up, over to Keele, and caught the St. Clair streetcar coreward from there with new transfer slips that had been left in a ziplock bag folded around a magnet stuck to the underside of the TTC shelter bench. Bruce said the magnetbags were all over the city and people even coordinated live in some codeword-heavy facebook group, to find good slips nearby when their stop didn’t have any or a bag had been removed. Apparently everyone in the city who rode transit knew to get transfers they didn’t need so they could cache them for people like Easter eggs, if not in the bags then just around the stop somewhere. Bruce had said some places on the east side had “set in stone” laundry-line spots and every day there’d be rows of papers like socks drying, folded over a nearby gate top or trash bin. Dan still hadn’t noticed any such spots but didn’t rule out simply having overlooked them for what they were, before. Like the weird door to the roof from Bruce’s room. He’d wished someone had thought to tell him before, so he hadn’t risked the sign-foretold fine at the station more times than necessary. That evening the giant spire downtown had blinked up at them, all the way up where they were.

Standing in the same spot as he had a few nights back (three or five, just after it had rained and while it was still really warm, before the weather had rewinterized sharply, obviously anticipating his ex’s arrival as warmly as he was), the looming antenna weirded him out today, as it had the time they’d been headed to the ravine. The last time he—they; the squad, such as it was tonight, with himself, Jean-Paul, and Bruce—had been out of the junction. It had snowed again overnight, since then. “It’s like something from Blade Runner,” he spoke without thinking, somehow hearing the thousands upon thousands of other times that charge had been made of the thing. He rolled his eyes at himself, expecting his comment to go over silently. He was leaning against the streetcar shelter wall absently circling the streetcar loop with his eyes. They were at the start of the line, and the sky was turning from lilac to coppery black. It was a cold, clear night. His breaths were back in front of him, a recurrent spectral inverted-shadow.

“I know,” Jean-Paul agreed. “That thing should only be in a movie-city, its really so ominous and alien, there’s nothing in Montreal like it.” He paused before correcting, “although they do have that giant electric cross.”

“Like at the funeral in Romeo Plus Juliet!” Bruce was high off his ass and smoking his first road joint in an attempt to summon the streetcar.

Jean-Paul continued like he hadn’t heard. “But that’s not aliens that’s Catholics, different beast.”

“OH MY GOD,” Bruce bellowed, and a couple of the few other people around on the corner in front of them looked over, unfazed but mildly interested. “That’s exactly what it is, it’s like war of the worlds! Do you guys know that war of the worlds prog record, Jeff Wayne is the guy?” Dan didn’t, and Jean-Paul shrugged so he figured not saying anything covered him too. “Oh snapple-cranapple, we should listen to that sometime this month.” Dan knew what war of the worlds was, he’d seen the Tom Cruise movie on TV. The comparison kind of fit, that was true; one, the tower was clearly made to let you know that the vista you were seeing was of-the-future but, two, maybe the future was kind of hinky in a hard to place, insectoid-seeming way. He didn’t know anywhere in Vic that wasn’t at sea level and the fourth floor condo he’d lived in, stood in the shadow of the only actual high-rise in Victoria (which had seen a lot of the last century before making it in to this one).

They got off the streetcar earlier than they had before, at an intersection with a pizzapizza at one corner. Here Jean-Paul made them wait inside while he went to a side door on the same building and let himself in somehow. He was back what seemed like a long time later, maybe ten minutes after Dan had started reading a free paper he’d fond on a table. Bruce had wandered off to smoke a joint across the street in the field before that and hadn’t come back. With his friend Elinor at his elbow Jean-Paul finally waved at him through the window and he came back outside, ready to complain.

“Where’s Bruce,” she beat him to the punch, seeming legitimately alarmed for some reason. It looked like she was gently wringing her hands, even. She had a sweet, shy kind of voice. Soft and high, like his ex’s singing voice (which was eerily different from her regular voice). Elinor sounded like Grimes when she talked, and kind of looked like her. She was dressed like some kind of post-apocalyptic punk doing a Blossom cosplay. A fair number of girls he saw around town seemed to, it was close to how Andre dressed but there were several key differences that placed them in distinct girl-genres in Dan’s mind. Andre was very granola but these girls looked like they were more granola. They looked like they farted granola. And then yelled at it for being there. This girl probably only looked like she could yell.

He shrugged and said “somewhere getting high. Higher.” He could tell already that she was one of those overly-invested, mother-hen mom-friend types his ex always thought were so perfect for a couple of months. He still didn’t know what it was about these mom-friend girls that had made his ex try to befriend a string of them, and he wasn’t sure what signalled time-up, each time, either. He got the sense that neither did the girls, or his ex. They usually both seemed upset at one another and walked away feeling equally mislead, but he wasn’t clear on what it was all about so he had no idea who had been right.

“Gotta get up, gotta get up, gotta get up,” Jean-Paul sort of mumbled musically to the air, and Dan could hear the 90’s dance even though he didn’t specifically know whatever song it was. It was that characteristic progression the notes had taken. Jean-Paul didn’t seem overly concerned about where Bruce could be. He was smoking a cigarette happily and had been pre-drinking weird medicinal-tasting craft cocktails in his apartment all evening, with Dan going one-for-two. The cocktails showed on his face by making it pink and pliant-looking.

“I’m gonna text,” she pulled out her phone, looking upset, and pounded some message to Bruce into it. Almost as soon as she put the phone away there was a shout from across the street, Bruce waving the lit square of his phone screen back and forth at them, deadcentre in the dim field.

Bruce boinged his way back to them hastily as they crossed the street to meet him, and got picked up by the deceptively strong hugging-arms of Elinor, who told him never to worry her like that. When she put him down again it was just as someone was leaving a box of crusts inside the pizzapizza, and Bruce hooted, scampering in to heist his next batch of munchies.

“Gross, crusts” was all Dan had to say about it.

“Gross, pizzapizza,” Jean-Paul and Elinor corrected in unison. They laughed together, and Dan could see that they were friends in way that Jean-Paul and Andre, for example, were not. It didn’t really make him like Elinor more, or maybe it did, he wasn’t sure.

They walked over to the ravine instead of streetcar hopping and again, Dan was admittedly impressed-upon by the sprawling view of the spire, the inland-sea of green around them, and by the ambivalent extremes of the oddly-knowing-and-poetic weather. On the trail Bruce told them something was afoot at the Circle K, which turned out to mean they were supposed to follow him to the gas station at the foot of the path they were on. This was where they’d been met by Andre and several of her friends who were also Bruce’s friends but didn’t seem to know Jean-Paul at all and didn’t know Elinor well but were very happy to see her. They seemed kind of creepy in some way to Dan, like they were too happy and too super-nice. He couldn’t tell what they were high on but assumed that whatever it was, it was their favourite. Or it was really agreeing with them, at least. They seemed very agreed-with. He didn’t know anyone who acted like that while high. They were seeming to him like hippies in a movie, but not exactly, more like evangelical baptists or something. He tried to better recall what he was thinking of, maybe that George Clooney movie O-Brother-Whateverthehell. It had been a while since he’d seen whateverthehell.

They all trooped from the Circle K onto the subway at Dupont (a station Dan had been through but not out in, which Bruce said was his personal favourite), and went down to Higher Grounds to put their heads together. And caffeinate over a pre-bake. Once they were ensconsed in the vape lounge and everyone Dan didn’t know was inhaling their own personal balloonbag of stabilizer, Dan realized he was feeling queasy.

“Like about-to-cross-the-graduation-stage queasy. Is there a--” there was a pharmacy nearby, he knew. But he had no idea what he could take that was non-drowsy but good for nausea so his next question died on the way.

“DUDE,” Bruce was all agog. Dan knew that face. He raised his eyebrows at it, asking it what the fuss was. Last time the fuss had been that the orange juice wasn’t orange juice. “Look around you!”

Dan scoffed. “I don’t want to fall asleep on my feet, I’m not captain weed-face,” he deflected onto his low tolerance, arguing with a stoner about whether weed was the solution to everything was pointless. One of the Andre-friends laughed like “captain weed-face” had been a really, really funny joke. Apparently in that universe, it was. Dan didn’t plan on visiting, regardless.

“You don’t need to be, that’s not what I’m packing!” Holding aloft a snapcase half full of pre-rolls and half full of baggied loose shake, he proceeded to convince Dan that this weed was exactly what he needed. It worked because he felt like hell. Falling asleep and missing everything wouldn’t be such a bad call. But supposedly this was high-cbd pure sativa, which Dan sort of approximately understood when he was told. He got that the near-absence of thc was supposed to help avoid the couchlock issue. And he got that Bruce had gotten it from a fan who worked at the ultra-fancy quasi-legal dispensary that had opened up a few blocks down Dundas from the Maison. He just didn’t expect any given drug someone was giving him to be all it was built up to be; years of “really great coke” had never seemed to amount to what he would have called really great highs.

It tasted different in an unexpected way, from the vape bag. Like honeyed woodpulp or something instead of pine sap. He felt something lift off his brain, like a layer of crud peeling off it and blowing away. This was followed in short order by a similar sensation accompanying his queasy feeling’s departure from his midsection. It was a pleasant relief, and he was surprised to be thanking Bruce, and Roscoe for having the lounge. Roscoe was supine on a lounger with his feet up, black unmarked cowboy boots crossed on an ottoman. He rocked the chair occasionally on its pillar base, his arms up behind him. He seemed to be trying to stretch something in his back out. He knew Bruce and Andre’s friends, and seemed to like them. Their names were Raven and Shay, but Dan still wasn’t sure which was which, they seemed to be a paired set. Neither of them looked like a raven. They were both dressed more or less Elinor, who was also trying to layer on a good high before going back out.

Finally Jean-Paul got a text that said the opener was on. The showcase was starting two hours late; they’d gotten down to the market expecting one hour later than the posted time plus fifteen minutes for the first act to warm up. It seemed best to show up after it had started, anyway. No pre-show showdown that way. They coated back up and trooped out the back, heading to the venue with the copyright infringement logo, which Dan saw was up on their exterior, glowing like it wasn’t a legal complaint waiting to happen. Maybe it wasn’t, maybe this was a licensed brand expansion, it was right in the middle of downtown Toronto. An ambiguous beacon, and Dan hoped it wasn’t an omen. Raven and Shay were making some kind of fuss about how the Banksy that had been nearby was gone finally, but it was unclear whether they did or didn’t like Banksy. It was pretty clear they didn’t like 8-11 and didn’t really want to go in. Neither did Elinor, she was doing the hands again, hanging back. The window of the place was full of a weird art installation of melting horned masks, lit with panic-inducing marshmallow peeps pink and yellow. There were little cards with text, but he didn’t saunter up to read. There were people there, smoking outside and talking loudly, and music could be heard from somewhere deep inside the building. The bass vibrated through the ground and everything else, but nothing of the music itself was coherent from where they were.

Jean-Paul was texting someone who came outside after a few minutes, complaining with feeling about the awol soundtech—this was the person who knew the person who was involved in hosting the event somehow. They were ushered inside through a maze of small rooms that were and were full of, the kind of hipster sculptural-conceptual art stuff his ex loved. Dan realized she was probably in heaven, as he followed Jean-Paul following his friend through the pitchblack entrance cave lit only by a tv playing a Warholian “weird footage” film, through several psychedelic rooms leading back to a staircase down to a basement from a grindhouse movie, which was full to the low, grizzled pipe-and-wiring rafters, with happy shiny people. Everyone looked very stylish, sort of like Andre and her friends, but glossier. He saw a lot of logos and brands, not so many stained or ripped or patched things. Glad to have found out about and used Jean-Paul's small washer and dryer, Dan realized they were the least fancy people there, in terms of the things his ex generally evaluated as fancy, but he really didn’t care. It felt like an accomplishment anyway, to be here, holding himself together. Holding down his new turf, it was supposed to be. Trying to get her to go away, so this wouldn’t keep happening—so she wouldn’t get attached to some appalling idea like moving to Toronto. Like making all new friends for him to run into and later be unfriended by.

Their posse squoze its way in to the periphery of the thick crowd, shoulder-to-shoulder with one another. Dan heard Bruce ask Raven-and-or-Shay if they were going to be okay and whichever it was yelled back that it was actually a great place to be on acid. The yell barely made it to him from three feet away, but he was focusing on hearing what they said. Acid, duh. So that was that mystery solved. He’d never done acid but didn’t really think this place or this crowd would have been in his top ten places to be on acid. It was enough like a visualization of a freaky trip as it was, which really seemed too intentional to have not been. The walls bristled with a thick, uninviting layer of some kind of calcification that was everywhere, and full of cobwebs.

The first set had ended as they were on the stairs, and despite people overflowing from the dancefloor into the linked circuit of downstairs house-of-frightenstein style alcoves, very little space had opened up while the mc queued up some canned music to time-fill. Dan was again glad he’d taken Bruce up on the weed, and scanned the crowd. People were sweating and looking restless but resolute about holding the floor.

He sighed, kind of glad of the press of people in the harsh yellow light of the maybe-go-outside-for-a-minute between-set lights. He didn’t see anyone he knew aside from who he was with, which meant his ex hadn’t brought anyone. He wasn’t sure who she would have brought, when he considered it. At his elbow Jean-Paul prodded him and when he tilted his head to show his attention was drawn, said “that guy at the mixer is Elinor’s friend.” The mc. Dan hadn’t clocked him as someone who would be in Elinor’s circle, but had looked at his outfit and decided he’d never feel like he, personally, looked like too much of a hipster, again. It was reassuring in a way. He was dressed like the opening sequence of rugrats had been left out overnight to form a puddingskin which had then been skimmed off and made into Hawaiian shirts, which he had decided to make into everything he was wearing. He had on one pair of Urkel glasses as a headband and one on his face, and Dan wasn’t sure either had real lenses. They might not have had lenses. He was wearing one dangling earring, which seemed to be a string of shorter dangly earrings stuck together. It looked like there was even a tiny figurine in the little flare cascade.

“He’s very...” hip, colourful, dressed-up, silly, visible, elaborate, contrived, “very 8-11.” Jean-Paul barked a HA and Dan was gratified that they seemed to agree.

“He’s sweet. Day job is teaching people tennis. The rent here is astronomical, and they got a C&D for the sign they’ve been sitting on. But it’s really something, what their collective is doing here.” Dan wondered how many tennis instructors it took to mismanage a venue. But he was impressed; these people were his age, presumably, like the little mc who had flittered away with people, leaving the floor-fillers to their own devices in the eye of the oubliette. Dan couldn’t have even started to consider an undertaking like leasing an event space and floating it for however long. It sounded like a nightmare. But the place was packed, at least. Then he wondered how many people were there gratis, like the seven person group he was in.

The floor had emptied a tiny bit, and Raven and Shay were now—by some agreement between them he’d missed—flowing out from around the squad into a gap at the centre of the floor. The two of them began to do a quarter-time interpretive dance to the fillermusic, clearing a wider and wider sphere of avoidance around them as tighter-wound attendees side-eyed them and decided it was time for air after all. About half as many as left, stood around with their space-price beers in hand, watching in amusement. If Dan hadn’t known the two of them were on acid, he’d probably have guessed quickly. They looked like melting puppets doing a two-sides-of-the-mirror pantomime intermittently. It didn’t look bad, but it was extremely uncomfortable in a vague way. Eventually Andre and Bruce joined them, picking up their flow. They weren’t bad either, and there were a couple hoots from onlookers. Jean-Paul tapped his elbow again, and gestured toward the entrance with his head. Dan nodded and the two were sort of conveyed via a sort of peristalsis through the twisting warren of parlors, out to the front where it was cold and dark in sharp contrast to the interior. Jean-Paul was smoking by the time they were on the sidewalk. Weirdly Dan could feel himself wanting to be back inside, instantly. He thought it was the cold until he spied a familiar shape with a sinking sensation of dread. It was his ex, standing with people, talking and people-watching casually. She looked a little stiff, like she was exercising a lot of self-control to seem like she was totally at-ease. He knew that was because she was. Suddenly he didn’t find running into her very intimidating, because he had, and she just looked like...the same uptight insecure weirdo he had known forever. When he tried to turn around more fully so that she couldn’t see him, it had the opposite effect and from over his shoulder he heard a noise, like she had noticed him.

“Oh, it’s you two,” she announced herself, breaking away from her people. Dan turned their way and saw them behind her, watching from where they were standing. They weren’t glaring or anything, no one was throwing bottles. “Long time no see,” she shrugged at them both, forming a triangle with them by the display window.

“Big night tonight,” Jean-Paul mentioned, acknowledging that she was there and why. He sounded very bored, but didn’t blow his cigarette smoke in her face, which Dan appreciated. He really didn’t want a scene. He hadn’t planned on talking to her at all, the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

“Ugh don’t make me think about it, I’m supposed to be in there right now.”

“You were supposed to be on hours ago,” Dan spoke up, but just carrying on the conversation like it wasn’t weird to be talking to her seemed really spineless, so he added, “long time, yeah.” He grimaced, feeling stupid. That was barely words.

“Oh, Dan, don’t be so—listen, I’m sorry,” she sounded troubled, and he believed her when she said she was sorry, but he was also annoyed suddenly by how she’d said it. He hadn’t even considered that she would apologize to him, it had seemed a lot like everyone wanted him to apologize to her for wasting her time and money and emotional energy and bla bla bla. “Look things ended, and it could have, it didn’t need to be. I shouldn’t have listened to that asshole, and I’m sorry I let him publish that, I was just—we were high and I was shit-talking, I forgot—I didn’t really think it was all on-record or whatever, after we started doing lines, and yeah. I guess that’s journalism. I’m sor—it’s my bad. Please don’t stay mad at me,” she concluded in a kind of wheedling tone. He heard Jean-Paul scoff out a puff of air from his nose, next to him. Suddenly suspicious, he looked at Wishelle closely; her skin looked washed out and too dry, wherever she hadn’t put makeup, and he could see that she’d had trouble because she’d decided to glue in extra long eyelashes and it had run into her liquid eyeliner-corrections time. No one else would ever have noticed, unless they’d seen her screaming at her reflection’s eyeliner for hours, a trillion times.

“Maybe I wont,” he finally shrugged. “Listen, good luck.” He kind of wanted to remind her that she was about to do something really stressful. She groaned theatrically and shifted where she stood, expelling some tension. Her outfit looked cute, dark matte tights sticking out from under her big coat, and it annoyed Dan to be wearing the shoes she liked. And the coat she’d picked. They still looked like a salt and pepper shaker set.

“See you inside?” she sounded fretful, but he wasn’t sure whether she wanted them to watch or not.

“We’ll be there,” Jean-Paul cut in decisively.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The two-track set Wishelle had put together went find, if sort of underwhelming. She’d done a sort of spooky-surfy musicbox-sounding plink-plink-plink kind of riff on some sort old doowop sounding base-track Dan didn’t recognize. There were distorted loops of a few samples of vocal sections, the one that was most decipherable was “we loved each other we just couldn’t get along.” It was about their breakup, hit like an epiphany. He wasn’t the only one who kept thinking about when they’d made music together when he did new work. Her own on-mic contributions were repetitions of the phrases sung in a way that sounded like she only knew English phonetically. It was fine, overall, but it was hardly thrilling or innovative. Not as many people came back in for the second opener, but it was crowded and she had a new logo printed the laptop plugged in to her big keyboard. Her music sounded really sad to Dan, melancholic even. It was pretty but he felt it draining him while he listened to it. It was a lot like the feeling he’d been trying to avoid when he’d said he didn’t want to get kushblasted before getting here.

They stuck around for the appearance of the headliner, who was another thing all together; candles on plinths were being lit around the spot in the centre of the audio equipment. Some dark synth longplay was on to keep people happy in the downtime. Seemed like a fire hazard to be setting up candles, from Dan’s point of view. Elinor and Jean-Paul were conferring about something under the general din; she at least had stopped looking worried about things. The others were still holding a circle of floor with their ritualistic looking modern ballet, but had been relegated to the absolute front of the crowd. They seemed happy to have started a mosh, such as it was.

Wishelle appeared again after ten or fifteen minutes, and seemed intent on watching the closing performance, but after standing in the throng for a minute, looked around impatiently, her gaze quickly locking with his, laserlike. We crossed the beams, he joked to himself, feeling sort of pathetic. She drifted his way and asked if he wanted to come upstairs and do a line of some really good coke she’d been linked up with, and for a second he missed her so much that he said sure. Or he missed coke, or having his life make sense to his mom, or something. Whatever he missed, missing it hit him like an icepick in that moment, and he chased her upstairs to try to get away from it. He wasn’t sure the others had seen him leave, but he had his phone and if necessary he could get on wifi somewhere and coordinate, or just go back to the Maison himself.

Upstairs in the staff bathroom (which seemed to be as much in use as the other toilet closet), they did the rest of her coke, which turned out to once again be coke Dan wouldn’t have called good. He felt worse immediately and said “I can’t believe you told that guy I had a trust fund, what the hell was that about?”

She seemed taken aback like she hadn’t been expecting bickering when she’d invited him to do coke with her in the bathroom, but she laughed. “That’s me. You’re not the trustfund kid, you’re the scammer.”

“What?”

She sighed, rolling her eyes cokeily, fishing around in the baggy for anything that might form a line of granules. “He was making fun of us both, he’s an asshole. Trustafarian scammer. As in, a scammer who targets trustafarians.” Oh. Dan his misread it. But then, so had Jean-Paul. This way was actually kind of better—at least it was only half a character assassination. He had never been scamming her. Probably that had been the Slackjaw guy projecting because he was scamming her, for a story at least, and assumed Dan was like him. Dan decided they probably had been fucking but that it really didn’t matter now anyway. “He introduced me to his friend who’s a producer but apparently I wasn’t supposed to do coke with his friend, so bla bla bla, you know?” They had definitely been fucking.

“What a fucking loser,” Dan smirked, meaning the guy and her as well, a little. To cover that part better he added “you already ditched him, right?” She loved ditching people.

“Obviously, with that man-bun hair? He was the worst. So pretentious and fake-woke.”

He laughed and said “NEXT,” as in bring-in-a-new-one, and she laughed because it was a thing they said to make eachother laugh, and then kissed him. It was unexpected and awkward, but most of their kisses had been awkward somehow.

“I need to go find—my friends,” he broke it off and stepped toward the door.

“He’s not going to—come on, stay a minute,” she was wheedling again, and it was patently unattractive. It took Dan a second to fixate on what she’d started to say, but the word “he” was like a hook, pulling his attention back to it.

“You’re just trying to make me stay in here.”

She lost her patience, he saw it happen. It was simultaneously when she stomped her little booted foot on the mangled linoleum and balled her fists. She’d never actually punched him but when she was mad she went into what he thought of as her cannonball form. “YEAH, NO SHIT.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, look—this is a surprise and I’m not really into it. I’m still--” recovering from when you dumped me because some asshole with stupid hair convinced you it was a good career move. Dan felt himself get angrier, the feeling propelled by the stimulant wave like mario doing a spring jump. “Hey, y’know what, fuck you,” and he started to open the door.

She reached past him and shut it with a bang, and the jarring noise clapped the edge off his frustration with her for a second, but he knew what this mood was, and he knew he’d be back to full frustration in a second. This was her fighting mood. “Please don’t run off,” she sounded annoyed but like she was trying to be calm. “You know I’m just—it’s the coke. You’re being mean, too. We’re both being assholes.” You’re being an asshole, he wanted to say. I’m just here. “I’m sorry I made things weird, I really want us to be friends.” Couldn’t’ve wanted that when we were a couple? he wanted to ask. What had changed, he asked himself. Everything, came the answer. He lived in Toronto now, and she didn’t. He was friends with the kind of people who were friends with the people she tried so hard to network with for work.

“I’m sure you do,” he said, wanting it to be mean. She looked hurt and angry and stepped away and he could tell he’d been mean successfully. He told her “this isn’t high-school anymore, grow up,” and left her in the bathroom. It felt like the most epic, savage burn on an ex anyone had ever gotten off. He walked away feeling amazing for about half the time it took to get back through the eddies of people in all the little antechambers. By the time he was in the main performance space, he felt kind of shitty. It was utterly black inside except for the candles and a few cell phones, and the maestro was at work. It was quite the production, in fact. Basically a one-man melodic metal band on a synth, with backing layering filled in by a loopstation. The music successfully engulfed him and took him out of himself, and when the house lights were starkly flipped back on afterward, he blinked, wondering who he had come in here looking for.

Jean-Paul was there, his hair a halo, unmistakable as always. Bruce and that contingent were all excitedly talking to the synth lord. It occurred to Dan that they had prior knowledge of the biggest name on the flyer, although he didn’t—it was probably why they’d shown up. He couldn’t image why else Andre would’ve agreed to, when he thought about it. He went to join Jean-Paul and Elinor along the wall, watching people leave. The whole last set had taken only as long as he’d been in the bathroom. He wasn’t sure how long that had been, now. It felt like it had been two minutes. He chewed the inside of his cheek gently, trying to keep his teeth busy.

“What was all that? You missed this Fragonard guy here,” Jean-Paul gestured with his chin toward the front. Bruce was bouncing around, they all looked like groupies. “It was very... heavy metal and reflective.”

“Yeah, uh. I. Saw the candles. Atmosphere.”

Elinor looked at him closely for what seemed like the first time, peering into his face. “You look like you want to leave,” she said, and he liked her.

“I do. I’m, I want to go. Back. Home,” he caught himself add on to the tumble of words. He felt like he’d done something sneaky or wrong—he realized he was feeling guilty, maybe for “relapsing” and not thinking about the others or wanting to tell them. They’d be worried if he did and were worried already because now he was acting different and looked weird. He tried not to make it worse by getting paranoid about it. Maybe it was because they were all there to back him up and he’d ditched them to go do drugs and ...relapse on his relationship. For as long as it took them to get on eachother’s nerves he had half been hoping she’d ask him to move back with her. His thoughts were choppy and it felt like he was getting wires crossed. “I think this place is getting to me.”

Jean-Paul looked like he was going to say something, his mouth opening for a second before he shut it again. He looked at Bruce and Andre and their friends instead, and told Elinor “you take Dan out, I’ll find out what they’re doing now,” before moving decisively to do so.

Elinor slid into the space Jean-Paul had left, looking at Dan still, in that careful, mom-friend way. “I wanted to go upstairs to find my friend and say goodnight,” her tone suggested he might like to go too, which he had just said was the case. He rolled his eyes and then felt like an ass. She was just being nice. Nodding with what felt like an insincere expression of some sort, he lead the way out because she hadn’t. Upstairs he broke off when she spotted Maximum Urkeldrive and went to the frontmost foyer before the main door, hovering in the dark next to the TV with the black and white footage, hoping his ex hadn’t stuck around after he’d gone downstairs. The others found him as a group, with the solo guy, Fragonard in tow. He and Bruce were yaking each other’s ears off about some dude named Shulgin. It didn’t sound like music talk.

They let the place as a tangle of walkers of talkers, and when Dan spotted his ex talking to the same people she’d been with earlier, he was thankful all over again for the camaraderie that had been tapped for him. He was so elated that for the rest of the walk north through Chinatown up to the a transfer-laden stop to hop from, he understood that cliche about walking on air. Even on the streetcar he felt like he wasn’t really touching anything around him, like he was being propelled through space because there was no resistance, not because he was sitting in something with powered motion. At the subway the group split up, and Elinor opted to go along with Bruce and the others. Dan assumed it was because they were more likely to need a nanny with them and so she was magnetically drawn to that side of the split. They all went off to some other party the music man wanted to go to in Scarborough. Bruce said Pete was there, and tried to beg Dan and Jean-Paul into coming along, but looked at their faces and seemed to catch some clue from whatever they looked like.

On the walk up from high park station, after a long, serious silence, Jean-Paul asked “so, how’d that go?”

Dan felt like it was a question he’d only have asked if he knew something about it from how Dan was acting, but it wasn’t like there was any way to confirm it if he just dodged around addressing it. “What, how’d what go? Tonight? I guess I got,” revenge? “closure,” he awkwardly jammed in, because it sounded mature. More mature than whatever they’d really gone down there for. His injured pride? It all seemed to corny in retrospect, and he wondered if he had, at last, managed to have one good coke high in his life after all. When he reflected in belated confusion on his cloud-9 stint, his elevated mood really only made sense in that context. Or maybe he was just in the valley now, and that was why he couldn’t figure out why a win had felt like a win.

“I found it all underwhelming, if I’m being honest,” Jean-Paul had a tone of arch sniffiness, and Dan laughed.

“Not the next Kate Bush, monsieur critic?”

“Hardly!” His loud scoff echoed off the dark, well-treed suburban enclave they were traversing. In the distance the city was quiet except for the occasional siren of the red-light running variety.

Dan started to laugh, but it caught, and instead he threw up into a hedge, some runny bile that seemed to be all he had left from the stew he’d made himself for lunch and eaten again for dinner. Suddenly feeling very miserable, he thought for a horrible few moments that he might start bawling there in the street, bent over a hedge, with his friend as an audience. He felt like he wanted to be done talking about his ex forever, but he didn’t know how to say that without sounding overly dramatic or caught up in the moment or some other stupid thing. It felt like she was there, like she’d piggybacked along with them because she wanted them to talk about her. Dan heard himself make an anguished sort of moan, the kind anyone might if they were suddenly violently ill.

“Okay there?” Jean-Paul’s hand on his back, the hand of a friend who has been right beside countless other early-morning street-puking fools, and been one many times besides. It made Dan feel a lot better about life in general, somehow. Not just that someone was there but the way Jean-Paul was there. He felt himself sag almost all to pieces, and let Jean-Paul walk them back to the groundfloor unit where it was warm and bright, and sit him down on the couch and make him tea. Jean-Paul made himself a hot toddy and the two of them talked about nothing for a while, until Dan fell asleep under the heavy silk afghan draped over the back of the sofa.

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