Welcome to Monday! I'm starting this week with the Lore Master's Deck from Story Engine. Confession: I have used this device before, so I have a decent idea of how it works and I am a big fan overall. I did a small draw for today, but know that it's possible for the clusters and webs to get quite extensive.
It's more of a vignette today, but I think there's some room to play. I may revisit it at some point.
Center event - Boom
Trait - remembered every year on the anniversary
Trait - notably silent or loud
Fallout - new word, expression, or idiom
Fallout - ban of a type of object (thread)
“Watch what you’re doing!” Mariannick shouted at her lab partner, who was letting the beaker start to overheat. “I swear, you’re just the type to fix a hem and blow off a leg.” She shook her head in disgust as she turned down the flame.
My partner and I exchanged looks. We were sharing a table with Mariannick and her partner, Ralph, and we were still trying to get to know her. She’d just moved to town a week before school started, so she hadn’t had much time to acclimate before we got going. She didn’t seem very interested in fitting in - in her words, she’d moved to “this sin-soaked monstrosity you call a city” because the schools were better, and she wanted to study a higher level of science than her small, rural school had access to.
“Uh, Mari,” I started, and she cut me off. “Mariannick. No nicknames. Y’all haven’t earned any yet.”
I tried again. “Right. Mariannick. I’m just curious about that expression you used - fix a hem and…”
“Fix a hem and blow off a leg,” she finished, flushing slightly. She ran her hand over her head, smoothing any strands of wavy brown hair that might have escaped her tight bun, and grimaced. “Sorry. That’s just something my mama always says. Says it’s something about the Boom back from when her mama was a kid, before the thread bans came into effect.” She looked up then, and glanced between me, my partner Eliza, and her partner, Ralph. The three of us had the same looks of confusion on our faces, and she seemed surprised. “Y’all know about the Boom, don’t you?”
The teacher got everyone’s attention. “Ten minutes left in class, everyone! Time to get cleaned up before the bell.” Obediently, we all took to our routines of scraping, wiping, washing, and drying, but I was eager to keep the conversation going. It was the most we’d gotten Mariannick to say since school started, and I didn’t want her to clam up now. “I kind of remember my grandmother mentioning something about a boom, but she never went into detail, and she never called it “the Boom” or anything,” I said conversationally.
“Really?” Mariannick made a surprised face as she scrubbed at a stubborn spot on the flask that had overheated. “I’d’ve thought everyone had known about that, but maybe the Boom didn’t get that far away from our town. Tell me,” she continued after she finished with the flask and moved on to wiping down her half of the table, “y’all have thread bans around here, right?”
Eliza shook her head. “I’ve never heard of any kind of bans on threads, and I do a lot of embroidery,” she commented, reaching into her backpack and pulling out a project bag. “Look, see? I’ve been working on this for my mom for her birthday, and I had to get some silk thread to do it. I’ve usually just used cotton, though.” She held up an embroidery hoop with the image of a peacock half-sewn on it in vibrant colors. Ralph and Mariannick craned their necks over the table to take a look, and Ralph nodded in that way of someone who doesn’t know what he’s looking about but wants to show some kind of approval.
“Eliza, it looks so good!” I squealed. “You’re so much better at this than I am. I do some cross stitch, but nothing this elaborate,” I explained, handing the hoop back to Eliza and looking up at Mariannick. The new girl, instead of looking impressed or even vaguely interested in Eliza’s work, looked horrified. Her hands came up to cover her mouth as she saw Eliza push the bobbins of thread back into the project back and stuff the hoop on top of it, then shove the whole thing back into her backpack. “Mariannick? Are you OK?”
“Do we need to go to the nurse?” Ralph said, sounding nervous. I’d known him since the second grade, and he was already showing the early signs of a crush on the new student. He’d let the flask boil over because he was too busy trying not to look like he was looking at Mariannick while watching her, and doing a bad job of it all around. His hand hovered around her shoulder, as though trying to figure out if he should try to comfort her.
“What in the hell are you doing?” she hollered, causing all of us to jump. The bell rang right at that moment, but the three of us froze as we watched her go from fearful to full of fury. “Do you not know how dangerous that is? And you’re just carrying it around on your back, like it’s nothing?” She threw her hands up in the air and looked to the sky like she was asking for patience from above. “You people, taking your lives into your own hands and you don’t even know it!” She grabbed her own bag and stormed out of the classroom, muttering under her breath the entire time.
“I like her,” Eliza said cheerfully. “She’s got moxie.”
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