#splat jam

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1. Whinter

"What about this one?" Vadelma asks. On the plate lie four small pastries, sample size for her teammates, little berries nestled in the center of the flaky dough and melted chocolate drizzled over top. Whinter tries his best to admire it for half of a second before he shoves the entire thing in his mouth.

"Mmhmph," he manages, white hair flopping in his eyes as he empathetically nods his approval. To his left, his teammates are just as absorbed in the taste testing as he is.

"What's in the middle?" Marian asks, studying the half of the pastry left in her hand. Logan has already finished his and is eyeing the plate on the counter with extras.

"Raspberry compote," Vadelma says, fiddling with the plate as she watches her teammate's reactions. "It's not too much? That's what I wasn't sure about, adding that but then also putting the berries on the top? And then the chocolate—"

"It's perfect," Marian says.

"I love it," Logan agrees. He has a smudge of chocolate on the corner of his mouth. Vadelma smiles like a sunbeam.

"Great!" She says, scurrying back to the counter. "You all can have the rest, then. I'll make a brand new batch for customers later." The plate with the leftovers has six pastries.

"In case your parents want to try," Vadelma says to Marian, placing two gingerly in her outstretched hands.

"For your dad," she hands one to Logan.

"And one for your mom, one each for your brothers," Vadelma continues, this time to Whinter. She gives him quick little wink as she hands him the last one. "I put extra chocolate on this one for Cloud. So don't let those pesky brothers of yours take it."

"Oh, I won't." Whinter tries to wink back, but he's not sure if he winks so much as blinks really fast with both eyes. Not like it really matters. He knows that Vadelma already knows how much it means to him.

2. Logan

"Ha!" Marian crows, triumphant from her kneeling position on the floor. She had started the race leaning back on Vadelma's legs, but as the match progressed she ended up hunched forward over her controller, focused on the racing game on the screen in front of her.

"There's still another lap," Logan points out on Marian's right. He's not exactly feeling the pressure of competition, considering Whinter still is figuring out what all the buttons on the controller do and Vadelma is perfectly content to stay in the middle of the pack. Logan zooms around a corner and takes a jump off to a shortcut on the race map, which lands him safely in front of Marian again.

"Wh—you can't do that!" Marian exclaims. "That's cheating."

Logan grins slyly. "It's strategizing. Not cheating. You can see the path break off, you just chose not to take it."

"I didn't know it was a shortcut. But fine," Marian huffs, leaning forward further as she concentrates. Logan hears Whinter snicker behind him. Marian would never be able to complain about Logan taking shortcuts if he called it strategy. He's pretty sure it would go against her entire team philosophy, even if right now they were just playing Mario Kart. Whatever! Didn't matter. He was still gonna win.

"Ooh, Vadelma got something," Whinter announces, and Logan hears Vadelma's telltale giggle behind him. It is not a comforting sound.

"What did—hey, no!" He yells, but it's too late. Vadelma launches the blue shell, and the beepbeepbeepbeep of the timer starts to play in his corner of the screen as his doom rapidly approaches. Marian cackles beside him.

Marian isn't too far behind him, and neither is the blue shell—so Logan slows down.

He times the move perfectly—just as Marian catches up to him, she realizes her mistake, and the blue shell comes crashing down on them both, Logan's kart spinning in the middle as Marian goes careening off the edge.

"Logan!!" She shrieks, as he crosses the finish line all alone and Whinter howls with laughter behind him.

"Oh dear," Vadelma says, her voice choked up like she's trying very, very hard not to laugh. She gives Marian a pat on the back as consolation. "Well, I tried my best, dear!"

Marian waves her hands around in the air as if trying to shoo the loss away. "No, no," she says, her cheeks red, a smile threatening to break its way onto her face. "You know what? It was a good strategy."

3. Vadelma

"Oh! And one last thing," Marian says, as Vadelma pours her captain a cup of lavender tea—another one—now almost an hour into this team meeting. She wishes she had brought the coffee pot over for herself. Honestly, Vadelma could listen to Marian talk all day about anything, but this supposedly "super quick" team meeting Marian called had devolved into a lecture about punctuality and new bottling plans and Vadelma's eyes were starting to droop.

"It's September 1st," Marian says, slapping her hands on the table as a form of punctuation, "So— it's almost Halloween."

Whinter lets out a long-suffering groan, thumping his head on the table. Logan pats him on the back. Marian narrows her eyes.

Very subtly, or so she hopes, Vadelma pushes the cup of tea a little closer in Marian's direction.

"You've been brainstorming costumes since July," Whinter grumbles. "What else is there to talk about?"

"I'm so glad you asked," Marian says, and pulls out her phone.

Vadelma peers over Marian's shoulder as she opens YouTube, and Marian scoots a bit closer and angles the screen towards Vadelma, looking pleased that her teammate is interested. The soft edges of her hair tickle Vadelma on the cheek.

Well, Vadelma is definitely interested. Maybe not in exactly what Marian is showing her on the screen, but it's fine. She watches anyways. The title of the video reads I Put a Spell on You.

"Um," Vadelma says, about a minute into the video. It looks like a dance number from an old Halloween movie.

"So... you want to do these costumes?" She asks. Please, just the costumes, she thinks.

"Well, yeah," Marian beams, passing her phone across the cafe table to Whinter and Logan so they can see what she's talking about. Marian takes a moment to adjust her glasses as they watch, and Vadelma and Logan exchange a look of barely concealed terror.

"Singing," Logan mouths. Vadelma widens her eyes in response and gives him a rapid shake of her head. She had the same thought.

"Marian." Logan says flatly. "What is this?"

"Hocus Pocus," Marian says, but the boys' faces remain blank. "The movie. That's the name of the movie? Hello?"

"Never heard of it," Whinter mumbles, still transfixed on the screen.

"That settles it," Marian says. "We'll do a team movie night so we can watch it. And then we can figure out who is going to be who."

Okay, a team movie night would be fun—

"And we can practice the dance some other time," Marian finishes. She takes a pleased sip of lavender tea.

Well, at least she didn't say singing. Probably. Vadelma will go along with it, and so will her teammates, because they all know how much it means to Marian.

"Like you said, it's almost Halloween," Vadelma says. "Would you like to get out the decorations?"

4. Marian

"Oh, no no," Marian says, feeling her cheeks flush darker by the second. "Don't sing. Please don't sing."

"But it's your birthday!" Whinter protests. "We have to sing."

"There's too many people in here!" Marian blusters. People in the cafe were already looking over when her teammates paraded out the cake Vadelma had made, no doubt having toiled over it for hours beforehand—at least Vadelma did. Marian is doubtful that Logan and Whinter had helped much beyond stealing fingerswipes of icing off the top of the cake while Vadelma swatted at them with the frosting pipe.

The mental image makes her grin for a moment before she's jerked back to the present, where her teammates, despite her protests, are now singing.

Happy birthday to you...

Happy birthday to you...

Everyone is looking over now, and to Marian's horror, other people are joining in.

Happy birthday, dear Marian,

Happy birthday to you!

Other cafe-goers clap as the song finishes, and Marian fights the urge to bury her face in her hands and laugh and strangle Vadelma and Whinter and Logan and cry with gratitude all at once.

"Thank you," she giggles, wondering if her face has ever been redder in her entire life. "You idiots."

"You're welcome, dear," Vadelma beams. "Try the cake!"

"We all worked very hard on it," Whinter says solemnly, and Vadelma must jab him in the back with her nails, because he lets out a yelp and Logan snickers at the spectacle.

The cake is beautiful. It has three layers and light blue icing slathered generously all over the top and sides, piped with darker blue waves that flow gracefully around the outside. There are rainbow sprinkles on top, which Marian guesses is the aforementioned hard work that Logan and Whinter said they put into it.

"The icing has lavender in it," Vadelma adds. "We thought you might need it."

Marian smiles like an idiot. She has the best teammates in the world, even if they embarrass her to death sometimes.

"I'll have some, but everyone else has to have some, too." she concedes. "This is way too big to eat by myself. Besides, it'll taste better if I can share it with all of you."