The contest is winding down and the scores are being tallied, but Dr. Ranui’s Beatbot just keeps right on playing music, sparking or glitching a little all the while. It’s weird, the song the little droid is playing: kind of an earworm — it definitely slaps — and the more its sick beats go on, the harder they are to ignore and the louder they seem. It's difficult not to tap a foot along to the beat. Maybe wiggle a shoulder or hip.
And once that hip has been wiggled, it's hard to stop. Dr. Ranui is the first to succumb to the uncontrollable urge to bust a move, and in short order after that, Beatbot’s got everyone in attendance involuntarily cutting a rug. The musical robot soon gets its clamps on Dr. Ranui’s Megasonorofier — a magically amplified megaphone of his own invention — and starts blaring its beats across campus. Now no one is safe!
For the next four hours (from 3PM to 7PM, game time) Peckenpaugh is plagued by the urge to dance!
[Up to two students per player] may succumb to this musical curse. Victims may be infected by simply hearing the song. There is a chance to resist, but you must have great willpower! That said, this event is 100% opt-in. You are welcome to say your characters escaped unscathed.
As long as you hear the music (and there are few places on campus where you can’t by the time Beatbot has hit the megasonorofier), you’re susceptible to the urge to dance.
Even if you don’t know how to dance, you can’t help but move your body. Dance, my children! Dance badly!
[Character A] spends four straight hours doing the macarena. How are they not begging for death?
As soon as they hear Beatbot’s tunes, Laszlo and Armani become locked in an irresistible tango together!
Willow breaks out into, well, something, and kicks [Character E] in the butt accidentally!
Freya, wearing headphones, manages to save Magnolia from spending the next four hours pirouetting by slapping earmuffs on their head.
Even Ms. Altizer can’t save the day this time! It’s heroic 💯 Constanza who puts an end to Beatbot’s reign of terror with a particularly well-aimed Aguamenti. For their heroic actions, they earn 20 Points for their House.
Blissfully free for the afternoon, Mags dropped off her Hermeticism work and headed back out of Widgulch after a considering look at the pool. She could have taken a swim, considering it was halfway through the week and she already needed a break. Shrugging, she stepped outside and headed back towards the center of campus. No swim yet. She really wanted to get in another practice set in the music room before class tomorrow, and she could always hit the common room up after curfew set in.
The trickle of music that pretty much evolved into a blast slowed her down, amused. Who had gotten ahold of the Megasonorofier? That thing could be dangerous in the wrong hands. As far as she was concerned, that meant anyone with crappy taste in music.
This beat wasn't terrible, though. Catchy enough. She grinned, thinking she should detour and grab Freya and see if Yalldive was dancing now in addition to being a loudmouth. Amused at the thought, she did a pirouette as she walked, picturing it. That damn statue...
One pirouette turned into two, then three. At first, she laughed, low, forgetting how it made her dimple stand out and how she hated to show that. By the time her thought ended, she'd done two more. Ugh, she was no good at this, she was going to make herself dizzy.
And then she was dizzy, because she could not stop. "Shit!" she muttered, a bit queasy, her curse lost in the whirl of her hair. Her emotions went from perplexed to worried to pissed off, then back to really worried. She was going to be sick. Who the hell had cursed her now?
After their conversation about just how, exactly, the statue of Yalldive Peckenpaugh knew when to hurl her insults, Freya had wasted no time in hunting down a pair of earmuffs and a scarf to act as a blindfold. Okay, her equipment didn't exactly look scientific, but she was pretty sure it would still work... Wouldn't it?
At the last minute, she grabbed her headphones, figuring they might work better than earmuffs. Popping them on over her own ears, she flicked through tracks as she cut across the campus, wondering what music Yalldive would like to listen to most.
Even semi-distracted, Freya couldn't help noticing that everyone she passed was... dancing. (Well, some of it couldn't really be called dancing, unless you were feeling generous.) Before long, a whirling movement up ahead caught her eye. Was that Mags? Was she... pirouetting?
"Hey," Freya called out, "I thought it was the robots who were supposed to be dancing today?"
This truly was getting ridiculous. Mags couldn't see through her hair, stuck to her face ignobly, and she wondered if she might run into something. Or fall off a cliff, or into the lake. She wasn't really near the lake but at the rate she was going, she might end up there. Frankly, it would be a blessing, maybe she could stop dancing when she drowned.
I'd be the dancing drowned ghost of Peckinpaugh, she thought, not entirely bothered by the idea.
"Freya!" Just like her muttered curses, the name was partly muffled by her hair. "What robots?" Discarding that as not important, she yelled, "If these robots are the ones making me spin, I'm going to hurl on them." A bit more plaintatively, she added, "...help?"
Edited (a romantic dancing ghost) 2019-11-20 19:50 (UTC)
Realizing a moment too late that she wouldn't be able to hear Mags, Freya lifted one side of her headphones just in time to catch the end of her sentence -- along with a blast of music. Wow, that tune was catchy. Hips wiggling, toe tapping, Freya automatically started to bob her head -- and lost her grip on the headphones which snapped back into place.
The urge to dance immediately stopped. Hmm. It didn't take a genius to figure out what was happening here (although the how and why were still a delicious mystery to solve).
"Don't worry!" Freya held up the polar bear earmuffs in triumph. "I've got these!"
"What? You've got what?" She couldn't focus. How did ballerinas do this all the time? Or clowns. Or toddlers. Her head was getting muddled. Honestly, it was becoming kind of routine now, watching the blur that was now her life just spinning by.
She tried closing her eyes---noooo, nope nope, that was worse. Okay, she always saw dancers fix their gaze in one spot. She tried that. A little better. She still couldn't see what Freya had. "I'm pretty worried!" she managed, desperate.
Freya didn't want to risk lifting her headphones again, and wasn't the best at lip-reading even when the other person wasn't spinning around. But Mags' face, from what she could see of it under the tangle of her hair, looked pretty anxious.
Okay. No time to waste, then.
Trying to time it so she didn't get hit by an elbow or a knee, Freya darted forward with the earmuffs raised, ready to pull them down over the other girl's ears.
Mags saw Freya move out of the corner of her eye, and then she felt something....fuzzy? Something on her head. Freya was putting something on her head. Although it was hard to move her arms from their outstretched position, she flailed trying to reach up to whatever it was. She couldn't be sure if she whacked Freya in the process or if she managed to twirl into something else.
What the... Earmuffs. For a hot second, she doubted her mind, and then she doubted Freya's mind, because she clearly wasn't cold, she was--oh, duh, Magnolia, you idiot. She let Freya pull them down over her ears and prayed that this would work.
The music faded away, and just like that, Mags came twirling to a stop. Mostly. Momentum kept her turning a hair longer, her legs unsteady as if they were made of rubber. She stumbled in a crooked circle and then went down hard on her ass, the world still spinning.
"Oh, god, don't let me throw up," she gulped, fervently.
Freya did get smacked in the face by one of Mags' flailing arms, which smarted, but she figured it was a small price to pay for an act of heroism. (She would also be able to use this real-life experience in her next short story for Creative Writing Club, which was now going to feature a similarly dramatic scene.)
"Better?" she asked, then realized if she couldn't hear Mags, the opposite was probably true. Undeterred, Freya crouched down next to her and gave her a double thumbs up and a questioning smile. Mags looked pretty queasy, so Freya reached out to rub her back, figuring that if she'd misread the situation then Mags could just bat her away.
Summoning up an unconvincing smile, Mags lifted one hand to give an answering thumbs up, using her other hand to support herself. Taking deep breaths through her nose and out her mouth, she got the queasiness under control. The rubbing on her back helped, and her smile turned to grateful.
Of course, now they were at an impasse, because she couldn't read lips either, and she didn't want to chance that the music had not stopped (the earmuffs weren't soundproof, just enough to keep it indistinct). She gestured that she was going to stand up, so Freya could move back, and she managed to get to her feet. Feeling around in her pockets, she pulled out her journal and her wand.
Ooh, smart. Freya grinned and wrote back No problem!! with her customary amount of exclamation marks, and then added, You okay now? Those pirouttes looked impressive, but dizzying. Like Mags was a ballerina from a music box.
As she waited for Mags' reply, Freya couldn't help bouncing on her heels just the tiniest bit. Sure, she was concerned, but... she was also really keen to investigate The Mystery of the Cursed Music. (The Mystery of the Compelled Dancing? She'd brainstorm titles later.) And with the earmuffs meant for Yalldive now put to better use, it wasn't like Freya had anything else to do with her time.
(Okay, so there was that essay she had to finish... But this was clearly more important!)
Edited (NEXT TIME i'm inventing magical headphones that still let you hear other people) 2019-11-22 19:49 (UTC)
I'm dizzy as shit. Mags didn't add that she also wanted to hurl, because one, that was thankfully receding, and two, she didn't want to go into that much detail. Gratefully, she added, You are the bomb. Did I hit you? If so, I am so sorry. Scrawled quickly and inelegantly but she really only whacked people when she wanted to.
Something was certainly going on. She could still sense the music like the hairs standing up on her arms. She wondered if they would find a bunch of crazily dancing students when they headed in either direction. Chances were good. But they only had one set of earmuffs, and one set of headphones. Not good odds. Freya looked ready to find out. Should we go try and help anyone else?
Between classes, music reaches Jupiter's ears and it's not necessarily what she'd call her jam but as soon as she hears it she just can't help herself. "Oh, neat!" She starts to swing and shake to the beat, dropping her backpack on the floor behind her and grabbing for the nearest person — who happens to be her Kermiest Creekmore — and spins him out dramatically.
They immediately manage to bowl over a freshman and this is probably just the start of the mayhem. "Five points!" Jupiter tells Kermit as they start to dance.
"It looks great on you, bud!" Kermit shouts back to their freshman victim, shimmying back toward Jup. He backs into her with more velocity and enthusiasm than the situation really calls for, but this song is such a bop and he can't help himself.
"Joopy—" Kermie pauses here to execute a sloppy but spirited pirouette, "— do you think it's finally happening??"
She pulls him close, maybe a little manhandle-y in execution, but they're cheek to cheek now and cha-cha-ing up the hall. "Veeeery possible, Kermiest," Jupiter says. "Which it are you talkin' about?"
Everyone is dancing. The fact that Winter didn't notice it at first, on her way between classes with big headphones covering her ears, perhaps speaks to how odd this school can sometimes be. But eventually she does realize that maybe today isn't just Silly Walks Day.
She finds a nice plush chair in the Central Classrooms lobby and plops down, tucks her feet under her and gets comfy. Pistachios in hand, she watches the festivities with a mute mixture of horror and amusement, occasionally glancing at her phone to queue up another album — she's already puzzled out that this is some sort of auditory thing.
"Hey, that a soft shoe, or tap you're doing?" she asks the first person who gets close enough. Who knows if she'll even hear what they say back.
"Tap!" Felicity replies. Or at least it's her interpretation of tap. But seeing that Winter is wearing headphones -- and therefore might be auditorily impaired -- Felicity seizes the opportunity to communicate with her body.
In quick succession, Felicity "tells" Winter: disco pointing, body roll, YMCA, twerk. Then she waits excitedly for a reply, having returned to her base-line tap dance in the meantime.
Edited (big bless my big mess please) 2019-11-21 15:55 (UTC)
Winter watches this show, lips parted, brows up, a little awed and definitely speechless. Her first reaction is to scratch the corner of her jaw beneath her ear, looking on curiously as she tries to interpret this semi-interpretive choreography. Then, after a beat, she settles on applauding, politely enthusiastic.
"You're the best one I've seen so far," she says, a little louder than usual because of her headphones. "Are you...enjoying yourself?"
Felicity bows appreciatively at the compliment, but because her body refuses to ever stay still, the bow is followed in quick succession by three more bows... then four, then five, until she looks like a chicken pecking away at a line of delicious seeds.
"I think so!" comes Felicity's happy (but pained?) reply to Winter's question. "Dance with me!" she motions for the junior to join her. "Maybe something slow." Her heart is threatening to burst if she doesn't find a way to calm down a bit.
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peckenpaugh2019-11-20 12:02 pm
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: SOMETHING WENT WRONG
And once that hip has been wiggled, it's hard to stop. Dr. Ranui is the first to succumb to the uncontrollable urge to bust a move, and in short order after that, Beatbot’s got everyone in attendance involuntarily cutting a rug. The musical robot soon gets its clamps on Dr. Ranui’s Megasonorofier — a magically amplified megaphone of his own invention — and starts blaring its beats across campus. Now no one is safe!
Use this header to scene during the dance mayhem!
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: VOLUNTEER SLOTS
As soon as they hear Beatbot’s tunes, Laszlo and Armani become locked in an irresistible tango together!
Willow breaks out into, well, something, and kicks [Character E] in the butt accidentally!
Freya, wearing headphones, manages to save Magnolia from spending the next four hours pirouetting by slapping earmuffs on their head.
Even Ms. Altizer can’t save the day this time! It’s heroic 💯 Constanza who puts an end to Beatbot’s reign of terror with a particularly well-aimed Aguamenti. For their heroic actions, they earn 20 Points for their House.
COMMENT UNDER THE OOC HEADER TO CLAIM A SPOT
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
The trickle of music that pretty much evolved into a blast slowed her down, amused. Who had gotten ahold of the Megasonorofier? That thing could be dangerous in the wrong hands. As far as she was concerned, that meant anyone with crappy taste in music.
This beat wasn't terrible, though. Catchy enough. She grinned, thinking she should detour and grab Freya and see if Yalldive was dancing now in addition to being a loudmouth. Amused at the thought, she did a pirouette as she walked, picturing it. That damn statue...
One pirouette turned into two, then three. At first, she laughed, low, forgetting how it made her dimple stand out and how she hated to show that. By the time her thought ended, she'd done two more. Ugh, she was no good at this, she was going to make herself dizzy.
And then she was dizzy, because she could not stop. "Shit!" she muttered, a bit queasy, her curse lost in the whirl of her hair. Her emotions went from perplexed to worried to pissed off, then back to really worried. She was going to be sick. Who the hell had cursed her now?
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
At the last minute, she grabbed her headphones, figuring they might work better than earmuffs. Popping them on over her own ears, she flicked through tracks as she cut across the campus, wondering what music Yalldive would like to listen to most.
Even semi-distracted, Freya couldn't help noticing that everyone she passed was... dancing. (Well, some of it couldn't really be called dancing, unless you were feeling generous.) Before long, a whirling movement up ahead caught her eye. Was that Mags? Was she... pirouetting?
"Hey," Freya called out, "I thought it was the robots who were supposed to be dancing today?"
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
I'd be the dancing drowned ghost of Peckinpaugh, she thought, not entirely bothered by the idea.
"Freya!" Just like her muttered curses, the name was partly muffled by her hair. "What robots?" Discarding that as not important, she yelled, "If these robots are the ones making me spin, I'm going to hurl on them." A bit more plaintatively, she added, "...help?"
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
The urge to dance immediately stopped. Hmm. It didn't take a genius to figure out what was happening here (although the how and why were still a delicious mystery to solve).
"Don't worry!" Freya held up the polar bear earmuffs in triumph. "I've got these!"
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
She tried closing her eyes---noooo, nope nope, that was worse. Okay, she always saw dancers fix their gaze in one spot. She tried that. A little better. She still couldn't see what Freya had. "I'm pretty worried!" she managed, desperate.
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
Okay. No time to waste, then.
Trying to time it so she didn't get hit by an elbow or a knee, Freya darted forward with the earmuffs raised, ready to pull them down over the other girl's ears.
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
What the... Earmuffs. For a hot second, she doubted her mind, and then she doubted Freya's mind, because she clearly wasn't cold, she was--oh, duh, Magnolia, you idiot. She let Freya pull them down over her ears and prayed that this would work.
The music faded away, and just like that, Mags came twirling to a stop. Mostly. Momentum kept her turning a hair longer, her legs unsteady as if they were made of rubber. She stumbled in a crooked circle and then went down hard on her ass, the world still spinning.
"Oh, god, don't let me throw up," she gulped, fervently.
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
"Better?" she asked, then realized if she couldn't hear Mags, the opposite was probably true. Undeterred, Freya crouched down next to her and gave her a double thumbs up and a questioning smile. Mags looked pretty queasy, so Freya reached out to rub her back, figuring that if she'd misread the situation then Mags could just bat her away.
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
Of course, now they were at an impasse, because she couldn't read lips either, and she didn't want to chance that the music had not stopped (the earmuffs weren't soundproof, just enough to keep it indistinct). She gestured that she was going to stand up, so Freya could move back, and she managed to get to her feet. Feeling around in her pockets, she pulled out her journal and her wand.
Thank you, she wrote in a warded entry to Freya.
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
As she waited for Mags' reply, Freya couldn't help bouncing on her heels just the tiniest bit. Sure, she was concerned, but... she was also really keen to investigate The Mystery of the Cursed Music. (The Mystery of the Compelled Dancing? She'd brainstorm titles later.) And with the earmuffs meant for Yalldive now put to better use, it wasn't like Freya had anything else to do with her time.
(Okay, so there was that essay she had to finish... But this was clearly more important!)
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Mags and Freya
Something was certainly going on. She could still sense the music like the hairs standing up on her arms. She wondered if they would find a bunch of crazily dancing students when they headed in either direction. Chances were good. But they only had one set of earmuffs, and one set of headphones. Not good odds. Freya looked ready to find out. Should we go try and help anyone else?
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Kermie & Jup in the Hall
They immediately manage to bowl over a freshman and this is probably just the start of the mayhem. "Five points!" Jupiter tells Kermit as they start to dance.
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Kermie & Jup in the Hall
"Joopy—" Kermie pauses here to execute a sloppy but spirited pirouette, "— do you think it's finally happening??"
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Kermie & Jup in the Hall
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Winter Watches (Open)
She finds a nice plush chair in the Central Classrooms lobby and plops down, tucks her feet under her and gets comfy. Pistachios in hand, she watches the festivities with a mute mixture of horror and amusement, occasionally glancing at her phone to queue up another album — she's already puzzled out that this is some sort of auditory thing.
"Hey, that a soft shoe, or tap you're doing?" she asks the first person who gets close enough. Who knows if she'll even hear what they say back.
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Winter Watches Felicity
In quick succession, Felicity "tells" Winter: disco pointing, body roll, YMCA, twerk. Then she waits excitedly for a reply, having returned to her base-line tap dance in the meantime.
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Winter Watches Felicity
"You're the best one I've seen so far," she says, a little louder than usual because of her headphones. "Are you...enjoying yourself?"
FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR: Winter Watches Felicity
"I think so!" comes Felicity's happy (but pained?) reply to Winter's question. "Dance with me!" she motions for the junior to join her. "Maybe something slow." Her heart is threatening to burst if she doesn't find a way to calm down a bit.