Scene #9404: Band Name Pending!!

Owner	Pose
Tamiel Luxis	Tamiel's instructions brought the bandmates through a cave, lit by pale-blue burning torches, fenced off into paths..."Follow the signs," Tamiel has said, and signs there were; scrawled with paint on planks of old wood, VINETA - > . "Jump into the pool with no reflection...It helps your stomach, if you close your eyes." And eventually, the arrow did indeed point V The liquid shone in the lanternlight, but the shimmer of light on its surface was opaque. It was an ominous gate, even among warpgates, but those that shut their eyes and wandered in... ...Would feel the brush of wind on their skin, the murmur of crowds tugging at their eyes. The sudden thinness of the air. They found themselves standingin the middle of a sundered, obsidian-black archway. The broken pieces of it hung in the air, as if clinging to the memory of the shape that it used to be. Behind them, the warpgate existed as a jagged crag of light, of a color that existed stubbornly beyond articulation, like something seen in a dream. A grim white-gray speckled monument greets everyone stepping through, fenced off by a thin ropy fence to create distance, existing to articulate a barrier rather than enforce it. IN MEMORY OF SOULS LOST IN THE SIEGE OF VINETA MAY HEAVEN SING THEIR TRIUMPH MAY HEAVEN GRIEVE THEIR LOSS In smaller text, taking up much more of the monument, are names. There are many.
Tamiel Luxis	They're standing in a small clearing, here, with short grass, and the scorched, jagged remains of broken foundations, broken sometimes by age...sometimes by violence. Its sanctity was disturbed, somewhat, but the slow coming and going of people through the portal, and a small enclosed box near the only exit, handing out small pamphlets and checking to see if anyone coming through was suffering from a sudden onset of the bends. Vineta herself doesn't look much like a city of angels, at first glance. In fact, there aren't really any angels to be seen. The first people they see on the street, hanging clothes from lines atop windowsils, are human...Or at least, not angels. Her streets are dense, and winding, streets too narrow for a car--barely even wide enough for bikes--with buildings several stories high. A family bakery, here, with a second floor where its owners lived. Its an anachronistic alloy of worlds--a city plucked from its own, absent supplies, left to draw from all those around it. Here, solar panals line the top of a roof. There, glowing flowers hang from pots, sold by an old woman as a source of light. 'Lovely decoration, and something to comfort you in the dark...Take one for a sweetheart, dears? You'll help an old biddy spoil her grandchildren, won't you?' There--a young girl with a holographic visor over her face at a stall waving eagerly at the elites, loudly promising custom playbricks--'Practically a smartphone! Better! See for yourself!'-- compatible with Vineta's cell tower. It's a storm of sights and smells and people, all of them eager to sell something to the elites. All the guidance that Tamiel had given them here, was to meet her near the 'Air Ferry.' Whether it's sitting down with a pamphlet, prior preparations, or bargaining with one of the cutthroat vendors for a scrap of information without walking away with a full loave of bread, Tamiel is easy to spot, but no one else in the town seems to think her being there is that remarkable. She's sitting, half-crouched on a roof, in plain view, in a tie-dye tank-top, dark leggings and shorts, with a case carried in her left hand. Her wings seem tense, a moment, as she counts the various bend members, only to breathe a sigh of relief when she sees all of them are accounted for. Tamiel raises her hand in a beckoning wave, drawing them to a square, with checkerboard stone pavement. "I hope you didn't get too lost," she jumped down, fidgeting with her keychain before she even got to touch the ground. "Our gate was easiest one to access, we're too far away from anywhere that could pick you up quicker..."
Hibiki Tachibana	"Um..." By the time Hibiki shows up to be beckoned off to the square - dressed as ever in her usual tanktop-jacket-shorts-boots combo - she's carrying a small bouquet of flowers... and several packaged loaves of Vinetan bread. And a brand new bag. And some form of cloth that's been haphazardly half-tossed over her shoulders given her hands are somewhat full right now. She looks maybe a little shellshocked, or like she's still catching up to the current moment. "...Not lost, no. I just... uh. Does /everyone/ here try to sell something or another...? Kinda caught me by surprise..." Now that she's come to a stop, with a wallet a bit lighter in exchange for helping a grandmother in need (along with a half-dozen others), she works on organizing all of her gotten gains to set them on a nearby bench in the square so as to not accidentally misplaced anything, which would be very easy. Even that bag sounds like it has who-knows-what-else in it. "I can't say I knew what to be expectin', but maybe not quite this... Vineta is really something." While she talks, her focus shifts to their surroundings, taking in the sights. Maybe looking for the eponymous 'Air Ferry'. "...Will it be okay to do stuff here? It won't be, like... a public disturbance or anything, would it?" She doesn't seem to think her shopping spree is anything notable compared to that, apparently.
Odette Raskins	Getting into the cave is probably the easiest part of this whole band thing Odette's experience so far. Sure, she might not feel particularly great about just hurling herself into a weird pool, but it's still easier than everything she had to go through just to get the drumset currently strapped to her back here in the first place. "M-my stomach? It's not like we're going to have to swallow any of it, right...?" She asks, looking over at her companions before shrugging lightly and drawing in all that air. She hesitates briefly, closes her eyes, then hops right on in! And then she immediately opens her eyes when she feels that shift in the air, only allowing herself to breathe a heavy sigh of relief at seeing something recognizable as words in front of her. "Siege...? O-oh. This... Was this some kind of warzone before?" Reading the names, ODette gets through about a third of them before forcing herself to step away, looking just a little bummed from thinking about that too much when she probably didn't need to. It did succeed in keeping her from fretting too much about the strange air-lightening sensation earlier, at least, and it's easier to not think about anything that's going on when she arrives in Vineta. Unfortunately for her wallet, Odette is elementally weak to tugging at the heartstrings. She's got flowers, street meats, a weird brick, bread, some keychains, mysterious nuts,... At least she can use her drumset like a weirdly shaped carrying surface. "Hey, Miss Tamiel! Hey, Hibiki. Aah... Not too lost, just a little.. Er. Wallet lightened." She admits with an awkward chuckle, finally realizing a good half of her purchases were food. "They're way more aggressive than the folks I've seen in Elibe, for sure..." While Hibiki asks a relevant question about public disturbances, Odette seems content to just set her kit down to take a breather. Today, she's dressed in a distinctly summer-to-fall combo that doesn't really scream drummer at all, consisting of a sleeveless yellow top with a long green skirt that somehow feels like something her mother should be wearing instead. "Are we just going to do this here, or are we... Ah. Moving somewhere else?"
Regulus	Regulus promised to obtain instruments. That is, she promised to obtain instruments for Odette, herself, and Hibiki as Tamiel already had an instrument but everybody else .. didn't. Hibiki apparently could SING (sort of??) so Regulus has spent time slowly gathering (stealing) instruments to bring to this practice session. Regulus is unable to carry all that stuff on her own. Two guitars? Sure. A DRUM SET? Maybe not. so she needed a dolly too and more relevantly she needed to smuggle everything into the suitcase so she could later smuggle it out and since a staircase is required to get everything up well let's just say she got the guitars and dolly early and got the drum set on the way over. When you can be invisible it's actually very easy to steal. She'll just say she busked for it if Sonetto asks... Either way, the first indication that she arrived is the presence of a dolly with a drumset on it rolling along towards the group by itself before Regulus materializes, a pair of guitar cases slung over her shoulder. APPLe appears shortly thereafter, holding folders full of sheet music. "Hahh... You better... Transport all this stuff... yourselves next time... Hahhh... Gonna sit for a minute, we can into the tunes in a bit... Need to catch...my breath..." She unshoulders the guitars and flops onto the pavement, lying down right then and there. "Tried to...music... Hibibibiki and I should have the tougher...hooffh....Odette easiest..."
Tamiel Luxis	She blinked, when Regulus slipped out of the air. Stared at the dolly for a moment, and then, biting down on her lip, gently coaxed 'up' with her hand. Her shadow climbed off of the ground, taking hold of the dolly. Another shadow took hold of the guitars. Tamiel looked a little embarrassed, at how easy it was... There. Down the street. Up the road...An ornithopter with glassy wings flew overhead. A station with trollys ferreyed people from floating island to floating island via trollys with glittery undersides...But Tamiel urged the party into a little building on the side. It was cozy, bordering on claustrophobic. A wood building, in a place where every square foot of space came at premium, to be used and abused as far as they could push it. There was abstract, colorful art on the walls, and a patterned carpet that would have been in fashion thirty years ago. They were ushered into room 27-A... "I'm glad that everyone is here," she admitted. "I was afraid...Well! Some angels are better at picking up prayers than others. There's this kid who, whenever someone is missing for a game, or a meeting...Tries to push his way in." "Well..." She hesitates. "...He's not a BAD kid. But. He tries to turn anything he can push into a homebrew second edition DnD game...It's REALLY awkward..." The room they get is...Well, it's small. But Regulus, with her keen knowledge of rock and roll and recording in general, will recognize it as acoustically sound...And with walls that can keep sound out, and in. In the corner... ...There was another small pile of drums, that Tamiel had rented. "...I guess we should have been clearer about who'd bring them...? Sorry."
Hibiki Tachibana	"Hey, you two... ...uh, are you okay, Regulus...!?" Despite the shopping spree that both her and Odette underwent, it looks like the biggest burden belonged to a certain someone else... She'd normally offer to haul along the instruments in her place, but Tamiel thankfully has it, leaving Hibiki to only have to worry about her own things. On they go into the building, at which point, she can't help but really notice the lack of space, between this and the width of the streets earlier. "I guess I'm getting an idea of why everything is sort've built up vertical..." "...Wait, turn things into what?" Please don't ever inform Hibiki Tachibana about tabletop version differences. It'll hurt her a lot more than it'll hurt you. Regardless, size aside, she seems to also have some approval for the room-- or maybe she's just not the type to mind much either way. Of course, her gaze also lingers on the drumset already present. "... ..." Clearing her throat loudly as she sets her belongings off to the side, she pitches in some aid. "Well, better to have spares on hand than to have to go out to get 'em after all. It'd be a disaster of one of the drums broke open and we had to cut it short 'cause of that." "And yeah. What Regulus said. I went to a music school, so I know a thing or two, even if I'm not a pro or anything. Taking on the tougher end of things is okay by me." She pauses, drifting back to her usual quieter and more reserved way of speaking after a moment, scratching her cheek. "...To be honest, I've still never been in a band. Or, uh... even thought about it. I've got a friend who's a popular singer and everything, but I never really saw it as a thing for me..."
Odette Raskins	Seeing a dolly rolling in her general direction, Odette glances around a few times at first to see if anyone's chasing it. "Did someone lose a-" And then she promptly yelps as Regulus and APPLe show up out of nowhere, nearly tripping over her own drumset in her flight-reaction scramble to not get hit by anything suddenly appearing in front of her. "M-Miss Regulus? Mister APPLe?" Oh, right. They could turn invisible, couldn't they? Breathing another slow sigh of relief, Odette settles down into an awkward squat besides Regulus, then sarts rummaging around in her bag. It's a messenger bag today, so it doesn't have all her surgery tools and meds in it, but it still has room for drinks! "Here, drink up. Um... Slowly, though. Don't want to choke or anything, okay?" She offers bottles of water to Regulus and APPLe, definitely having no ulterior motives about seeing how the latter would even handle a drink. With Tamiel handling the heavy lifting, she can focus instead on making sure they can get to the music zone safely with their two drumsets! And that becomes three drumsets, once Odette comes in with her own and spots the set Tamiel had brought as well. "Heh... Y-yeah, that's true. I mean, I don't think I'll break any of these open on purpose, but the one I brought did get bounced around a little on the way here." She's trying really hard not to think about the clown's involvement in all this. "I've only watched some performers do music on the stations. E-everything else has been.. Er. You know, backing tracks rather than the show itself, but... Petra said I had good rhythm that one time." Odette declares proudly, conveniently leaving out the context of that statement while she takes out some drum sticks that look kind of plasticky. "So.. Er. Where do we start with this band stuff, anyway? Do we have to think about names yet, or uniforms, or maybe..." Odette pauses, looking over at Regulus as the only DJ she knows of. "A-are groupies something we have to worry about yet?"
Regulus	''I guess we should have been clearer about who'd bring them...? Sorry.'' "Wh..wait...You already got your own?..." Regulus thinks of all the stealth missions she had to conduct. "But I said I'd go fetch them... I said so..." Her voice pitches upward in a whine. "You said you played violin so I figured you had one, and I figured Hibiki and Odette would need me to get the instruments... It took me so many trips back and forth to move them all...I had to figure out where to get a dolly nearby..." She siiiiiiiiiiighs and flops back down on the floor. Somehow, the kowledge that all that work was completely uneccessary makes it worse. But she tries to cheer her up, "Well...at least that means you're all serious about this!" She says, mostly to convince herself to get over the fact that what's done is done and she can't exactly undo all the effort she did. "Alright, so. Odette! Drums are actually tougher, but I know my way around a drumset so I can help you figure out the notation. It's simpler in some ways than stringed instruments but more complicated in others but the important thing, the real real important thing Odette is to have a good sense of rhythm. Drums are all about timing and drum notation is all about what drum you're hitting and what technique you're using with the drums, okay?... You did remember to get drumsticks right? Yeah?" From her position on the floor it's actually a little tough for her to just take a look and see. rShe looks over between Tamiel and Hibiki, "And if you need help tuning your instruments, I brought a guitar tuner as well in case you needed help, but if you need help tuning the drums or violin I can help with that today, and uh the day of too! Yeah. I mean, I'm not expecting you all to be experts with one practice sesh! So..." Groaning, she sits herself up. Three drumsets. Woof, Regulus thinks. It's even worse than she thought. SHe almost falls back down on her back in response to that. "I'm fine, I'm fine...! I just needed to rest." She assures Hibiki. Amongst all the stuff Regulus brought along are a pair of amps but there isn't exactly an outlet here. Electric guitars need...electricity! "Not sure we can properly practice here without a place to plug the amps in." Regulus explains. "We won't hear the sound right but uh we don't need electricity for the violin or the drums. So we can either move to a place with electricity or we can just rely on Hibiki and I being the most experienced to not really worry about how the guitars sound right now. Might actually be best since we really want to help Odette and Tamiel today!" She is a little more knowledgeable on tabletop these days but she doesn't really want to get into it right now. She'll just ask Tamiel about it later. ''But I never really saw it as a thing for me.'' "Well maybe being in a band will be more fun for you than being up front as the singer." Regulus suggests. "But we're not trying to be a professional right now, we're just trying to have fun and bond as members of the Watch and prove to all the haters that music's got power mhm mhm mhm!" Wait that last one's new. Maybe she's a little achey whiney over what Lilian said. She'll take a water from Odette or a Dr. Pepper if she has one. Either way she takes several long gulps.
Regulus	"I think we should just see where we're at and then Hibibbles and I can help you and Tamtam. We gotta feel our sound before we can feel out a name and style!" And with that said she starts handing out the sheet music. As threatened, Hibiki and Regulus have harder music in general to deal with whereas she kept things pretty simple for Odette and, to a lesser extent, Tamiel. "Normally opening asks for like seven songs but I don't think we can learn seven in a month so I just wrote two."
Odette Raskins	"He tries to turn anything he can push into a homebrew second edition DnD game..." "Th.. That shouldn't be an issue here, right? I mean, it's a band session." Odette chuckles lightly as she tries to massage away some of Tamiel's and Hibiki's worries on that end. "Being able to turn that into a Dandy session would be real impressive..."
Tamiel Luxis	"Sorry..." Tamiel wilted a little at Regulus' obvious distress at the excess drum sets. "You said you were having trouble, so I thought I'd just..." She made a vague gesture toward the drum sets. Everything in the room had a sort of hand-me-down texture. A sofa plucked from someone's donations. The standees that Tamiel had dragged out had seen some love, and one of them drooped down, threatening to spill papers across the floor unless set up juuuust right. "We're not too old fashioned, you know...?" Tamiel says, as her shadow drags the sofa a foot to the side way, revealing a plug in the wall. "Electricity can be a little intermitent, sometimes, but we still have it..." "Being able to turn that into a Dandy session would be real impressive..." A moment's consternation flits across Tamiels face, before she decides she must have misheard. "I'm not saying it'd work." A sigh. "But he'd still try. And he's really bad at taking no for an answer... 'I came all this way to help...Give it a chance...Come on...'" "He's a kid." She shrugged, about someone obsessed with a game released almost thirty years ago. She collects the sheet music, taking the squeakest stand for herself to spare everyone else the trouble of dealing with it, and unpacks her violin from its case. "It's been a while," she warned, even as she gently plucked the strings of her violin. This string, that string...She gradually tuned each by ear. She pulled out the bow from her case. She rested it against her chin. And she played a quick, reverberating tune. "...I think I can do this..." She murmured, looking over the sheets. "I spent about a decade learning the violin, when I was little...I haven't practiced too much, but, I still remember..."
Hibiki Tachibana	"Oh, thanks," Hibiki offers to Regulus in terms of both the guitar tuner, and also the sheet music handed over to her, which she peruses over briefly. Hibiki did, in fact, do a lot of her schooling at Lydian Private Music Academy. Despite however she appears - or what she says - she's not half bad when it comes to piano, violin, guitar, wind-based instruments. Poring over this isn't a lot different. Almost on a delay, "...Hibibbles...?" Shaking that off, she takes both the paper and her assigned guitar over to one of the standees, so she can go over it while also focusing on tuning the instrument up. There's enough focus in it that her words seem almost offhanded as she murmurs to the others, "Two songs... yeah, that should be fine for the time we've got. It doesn't gotta be perfect," she tries to say in mention of Tamiel not having practiced. "Honestly, it'll probably be a while before we sound any good. Like Regulus said, we should see where we are first, before anything else." She purses her lips, a little of the way through. "...Been a while since I've actually done this too, now that I'm really thinking about it... playing anything at all."
Odette Raskins	"Sorry..." Odette does at least look and feel genuinely bad when Regulus' efforts prove to be less than necessary, and she even gives her a light pat on the shoulder to try and reassure her somehow. She promptly clams up as Regulus starts speaking about drum rhythm, listening closely like a good little student that has no idea what she's getting herself into. "I see... Okay! O-oh yeah, I remember hearing something about ones and twos but I'm actually hitting it three times when I say that? A-and something about-oh. Yeah, I've them right here." That's something she can try to reassure Regulus with, too. Odette raises the pair of sticks, and then she twirls them around in her hand deftly several times in a row before smoothly sliding them both back into her palm. She's totally practiced that part before ever practicing with the drum set itself. Like the room, the drums... No, the set Odette brought looks far worse than hand-me-down. At best, it's just old. There's water stains on the top, little chipped pieces and jury-rigged repairs to the legs that look like someone just welded metal to keep it standing, and the whole thing smells faintly of baked goods and rust. Somehow, Odette didn't get tetanus carrying this thing with her. "Do we need electricity that bad? If we need a generator to help..." She narrows her eyes in thought. "It might be easier to explain than the drum kit if I can find a restored one in a storage bay. Oh, but getting it through that pool might be tricky." Oh, wait, Tamiel's revealing a proper plug! That eases Odette's mind a little more. "And he's really bad at taking no for an answer..." "He's a kid." "Aw. Yeah, that's... That'd be pretty hard to say no to. Maybe some of us could find him outside of here and help him get it out of his system so he doesn't... Er. Interrupt other people's stuff." Odette suggests, clearly not knowing what she's volunteering herself for. "How bad could it be?" And then it's time to take a look at the sheet music! Odette takes a long hard look at hers, blinking slowly while her mind struggles to process any of those symbols. She recognizes them as musical something or anothers, but the lines? The dips? The numbers? "Is that in seconds?" She asks aloud, giving her drumsticks another twirl while giving the drums some experimental taps. True to her word, Odette has no idea what she's doing, mostly just tapping away to listen for the different sounds so she can guess at which ones to hit later. "This is super new to me, but... It's feeling pretty exciting already." She speaks more quietly than usual, cheeks burning a bit suddenly as she keeps her gaze fixed on the drum set in front of her. "There wasn't really anyone else around my age back home, so this is all just... Really new? Um. I-I guess what I want to say is... Er. Thanks?" Odette chuckles awkwardly as she looks up from the drums towards Hibiki, Tamiel, and Regulus. "I mean.. .Um. Thank you. For this. Even if we don't do this professionally ever, I.. I still want to learn it right to keep up."
Regulus	"It's fine, it's fine." Regulus mumbles. "Better too many drums ... than not enough drums?" Regulus takes a moment to tune her guitar by ear and then tune Odette's drum set, a process that involves adjusting the tension rods around the drum, the drum making noises with each quarter twist of the dial. Regulus doesn't seem too worried about ''teaching'' this to Odette, focusing on handling it for her first. She can go over it with her if they have time, but it's best to start with playing in her experience teaching which is to say she has no experiencing teaching but she does have experience getting a bunch of people ready to play music in a hurry. It's how it goes a lot of the time with her. AFter that she plugs the amp to her guitar in just to get it ready and adjusts some dials on that before looking back to Odette, "Okay, so--you shoudl have another sheet--yeah here it is." She places it forward on top. "I labeled each of them here. Each line the note is on represents a different drum you'll be hitting. This first is the bass drum, above that the floor tom, then here is the tom drums 1, 2, and 3," She points each one out. "Snare drum here. Ride cymbal there with the closed hi-hat there. Open hi hat. Hi-hat with the pedal, and the crash symbol." She pauses and adds, "I put it on your sheet music too do you need me to point out which is which?" She asks, a bit breathlessly. When it comes to music, Regulus puts a lot more effort than she does in anything else. She'll go over the details any number of times Odette wants but will eventually return to her own guitar and play through a few practice chords. "A decade? If you've played a decade, you must be pretty decent at least!"I hope you aren't just being hard on yourself out of habit." ''Hibibbles?'' "Trying it out Hibibi!" Regulus says. "A Chief Watchwoman's gotta have a marvy nickname to match!" "Everything should be quarter and half notes. That means a quarter of a beat and a half of a beat." Regulus asides to Odette. "That should provide the pacing for your drumming." ''Er. Thanks?'' Regulus smiles, "Hey you're the one who decided to show up, Odie. Don't worry about getting everything right in the first try, you'll get it with practice."
Odette Raskins	Luckily for Regulus, Odette's actually quite quick on the uptake! Mostly. Tuning's going to be out for at least a little while, but she does learn the different names of the drum parts and the notes on the sheet fairly quickly. She even taps on the different parts every now and then while (correctly) murmuring the names to herself, drlling those into her memory to make sure she doesn't forget which one is which later. "Bass, floor, 1, 2, 3, snare... Hat, cymbal, hat open... Oh, three hats. Okay, closed..." She nods quickly at being asked for a repeat, but not before offering Regulus another bottle of water. She needs her teacher properly hydrated, after all! "If we need nicknames... Oh, Hibibbles is good. Hibibi..." Odette repeats after Tamiel and Regulus, murmuring Hibiki's nicknames a few times before giggling lightly to herself. "Some kind of rare Hibibi...? Mm, that might be too close to her name. Easy to mishear as the regular one, you know?" "Hibibbles." Odette repeats again after tapping on her drum set some more, trying to nail down the idea of a beat in her head without any backing music to go with it. She's pretty consistent! "Hibibbles, Tamtam, and... Regs? Gulus? There's gotta be something better than that." She strokes her chin lightly at being called Odie, scrunching her nose a moment later. "That's a little on the nose, too... Er. Wait, do people still use that around here?"