TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN

Oh hey bc I’m sick and I don’t see this around a lot, let’s talk boarding school AUs! Because yeah, college AUs are good start, but there’s a few fun details that make boarding schools stand out:

First of all, everything you read in fanfic about situational gayness is true. I’m serious. When you’re set up to live, work, and play at school (and usually with strict controls preventing you from leaving campus) you start to seek affection wherever you can find it. One of the reasons I didn’t realize I was bi for years was how completely normal it was for people to cuddle regardless of gender or sexual preference. Packs of completely straight-identified dudes and even dating het couples would curl up and do homework on the regular. Imagine how confusing it would be for your OTP if they first met bc they were cuddling in a puppy pile along with tons of other potential partners.

Not all boarding schools are for the rich. Some are reform schools. Some are organized around a specific topic, like science or the arts. Some exist simply because students are spread out too far to commute back and forth. My school was sponsored by the government, so the most I had to do was pay for supplies and a train ticket up there once a quarter. (Yes, just like Hogwarts.)

The true enemy is the staff. Not that bullying doesn’t still exist, but when you live together 24/7, a funny thing happens. You might not always like each other, but you quickly start to realize you have a common enemy - the adults in charge of this zoo. And when you have a common enemy, it’s easier to get along. 99% of our teenage spite was redirected from each other to the security guards who prevented us from innocently taking each other’s clothes off in the bushes, which meant we didn’t beat the shit out of each other so much.

Related, everyone becomes an exhibitionist. Similar to the confusing lines around being gay/straight/whatever, when you’re trapped at school you have no place to go to get it on. So when people do become involved, they either have to find a super secret hiding place (like a jammed elevator) or get used to banging next to three or four other couples at the one makeout spot with low visibility. (Which may change weekly, given the aforementioned staff. I remember one time watching a lazy security guard mount a giant headlight assembly on a pole, stand back, and sweep the high beam back and forth over a hillside. Half-naked couples scattered like rabbits.)

You will probably almost kill yourselves once a semester, but it will be okay as long as no one notices. Unless you’re at one of the mythical rich kid schools where idk, everyone has their own helicopter, you pretty much have to invent your own fun. My school had restrictions around tvs and video games because blah blah “being healthy”, so we also spent a lot of time outside trying to figure out what the fuck to do. Protip to staff: this is actually way less healthy than video games and computers, because bored teens can and will fucking destroy themselves by accident. Example: one trend we came up with was human versions of all board games, not just chess. This sounds kind of adorable and innocent, until the incident where we attempted Human Jenga. Protip to everyone else: DO NOT PLAY HUMAN JENGA. Even if you’re being very careful about stacking people, eventually the sheer weight of the stack will start to smother the people down below even if you thought their chest was clear. And if they can’t breathe, they can’t let you know they are dying. We almost lost the bottom row over that. (No staff ever found out.)

Prank wars are real, and they get out of hand. Again, when well-meaning adults force you to make your own fun: fun is prone to escalate. Food fights become whole dorm events; nerds get revenge by fucking with goddamn everyone. One time some friends and I got access to a guy’s computer, put a back door in it, took control of his machine remotely and convinced him he’d created an emergent AI. Another time I got line of sight to a window in a rival dorm and took down their computer every time someone started a paper. In retrospect these are all extremely dick moves but uh I was not always aligned good in high school.

My roommate had a boyfriend who learned how to climb gutter pipes for illicit visits at night

Also we played Assassins a lot on campus which required both stealth and intense paranoid

Another time I was sneaking to my girlfriend’s room after lights-out. My dorm counselor (different one from previous story) was still awake and her office was still wide open. She was sitting in a chair watching TV. Did I mention the chair was facing the door? So, I recalled all the stories about no sudden movements blend into the background etc. I creeped by pretty as you please without her even noticing that I was there. 

 A friend of mine became the equivalent of a mob boss. She had people who owed/did favors for her and she monopolized the ramen and soda industry within the dorms. 

Other games we played included full-sized versions of kid’s games – like little kid’s games. Think red rover and shit. Red rover is that one where you form two lines with everyone holding hands, and then each line takes turns calling somebody out and daring them to break the opposition’s hold. Fun fact: this game has a very different outcome when you are sixteen and not six. We had kids barreling into the other line so hard people got benched with injuries; sometimes you’d have that one stubborn bastard charging forward while dragging like four other guys along. Similarly, crack the whip is a really bad fucking idea when you are near-adult sized. And doing it on a downhill. Everyone joins hands in a line and then spins around really fucking fast, like those fire bars in Mario. Unlike the fire bars in Mario, humans are subjected to real life physics, which can and will cause the person on the end to become goddamn airborne. 

You can get a job, but they’re not going to pay you. Again with the ‘boarding school: not just for rich kids!’ – our school required everyone to work a certain number of hours per week, which counted toward room and board. When you weren’t in class, you might be cleaning the cafeteria or inventorying equipment or any other task that didn’t involve hardcore chemicals. Receiving your task was a lot like The Giver - you had a bit of choice, but mostly you had to rely on fate.

You can take ‘weird kid’ to a whole new level. Yeah, you don’t have money and the staff prevented you from escaping, but in some ways you had a hell of a lot of freedom. When you don’t have parents or any kind of reasonable adult to stop you, there is no reason you can’t wear your Star Trek cosplay to school every. single. day. Or your Victorian frilly nightgown. Or dare someone to flush a grapefruit down a toilet. One time some dudes got into a macho pissing contest over (of all things) who was better at fixing a toilet – so they got a goddamn grapefruit and flushed the whole shebang to see who could plunge it. Unsurprisingly, the answer was ‘no one’. The entire toilet had to be ripped out of the floor to fix their bizarre scheme.

Even the cool kids hang out at the grocery store. Seriously. We were fairly isolated (despite being near a city), so without transportation the most rebellious thing to do was…cut class and hang out at the grocery store?  In retrospect this was really dumb, especially when you can’t get jobs or money. Points to my roommate tho, who one time snuck out in the middle of class, went to buy a baguette of bread, shoved the whole thing down his big coat sleeve, and returned to class to eat it out of his wrist. Professor didn’t notice for goddamn twenty minutes.

“does this one spark joy?” she shouts at the restless audience, they boo in response

Fey: Very well. When you return home tonight, your mother will be in pristine health again. It will be like she never fell ill at all. Even the memory of her suffering will fade…

Human: Thank you so much. She means everything to me.

Fey: I know, I know. Let’s hope the price wasn’t too much for you after all… Only time will tell.

Human: So, when do we start?

Fey: …If I may ask you to elaborate?

Human: You said you wanted my firstborn.

Fey: Yes? And you agreed?

Human: Yeah, so, when do we start?

Fey:

Source

Video of Tama

^Nitama majestic, and below with Yontama

Yontama.

The shrine of Tama Daimyōjin (Great gracious deity Tama), next to the Kishi station where she worked.

I think I know what the Count meant.