Butler's Orchard, Germantown, MD (Saturday afternoon)

[revengenotebook]

"So--" Paris said, waving her hand at the hundreds of sugar-ed up children, thousands of pumpkins, and a long line for cider and doughnuts, --welcome to a corn festival thing."

She shrugged. "We get strange around Halloween, I guess."

[OOC: For the green gem!]

Comments

[era_two_triangle]

Peridot nodded her agreement, and then, sounding slightly disgruntled about it, she grumbled, "And humans keep assuming I'm a child. I'm older than they are!"

By thousands of years!

[revengenotebook]

"Well, yes," Paris said, "but I'm not sure they'll believe you. Humans can be pretty willfully stupid."

[era_two_triangle]

"Breq says I should start kicking them when they get that way," Peridot replied, conveniently leaving out the part where Breq had said that because Peridot had been complaining about Paris, back when they had first met at the welcome picnic. "I might have to start giving that a try."

[revengenotebook]

Well, sometimes Paris deserved to be kicked, too, really.

"Well, if you do kick them, make sure you have another little kid to blame it on," Paris said. "I'm not dealing with some helicopter parent blaming your behavior on me."

[era_two_triangle]

Peridot considered that momentarily, and then started looking around for what on Earth it was Paris was talking about, now.

"Which one is the helicopter?"

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"What?" Paris asked, then laughed. "Sorry, it's a phrase about parents who hover too closely. They don't want their little darlings to get hurt."

[era_two_triangle]

Peridot squinted at the crowd at large, still half convinced she was going to see somebody actually hovering, and then shook her head a little and looked back at Paris.

"We never had anything like that on Homeworld."

Possibly because Gems didn't have parents. Or children.

[revengenotebook]

"It's a fairly recent thing here," Paris said. "Waaaay too much parental involvement, if you ask me."

Her parents had never been involved. That's what they paid Nanny for.

[era_two_triangle]

"We never really had parents on Homeworld either," Peridot noted, shrugging. "People tell me they're here to teach their offspring how to survive in the world, but..."

She looked pointedly torward a pair of kids who were screaming and stampeding through the corn.

"... They seem like they can handle themselves, to me."

You know, if volume was any indication.

[revengenotebook]

"Once you can use the restroom and make yourself cereal, you're pretty self-sufficient," Paris agreed.

[era_two_triangle]

"Well, then why don't parents just release them into the wild by the time they reach this size?"

Let them run free with the wolves and the bears, as nature intended!

[revengenotebook]

"Pretty sure that's what public schools are," Paris said.

[era_two_triangle]

There was a long pause after that before Peridot ventured, "Which kind of school are we at, again?"

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"Private," Paris assured her. "They're much better."

[era_two_triangle]

"In what way?"

Did public schools get sharks dropped on them more often?

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"We don't have nearly this much shrieking, for one thing," Paris said.

[era_two_triangle]

"I think that mostly depends on whether or not you have Deadpool as a teacher," Peridot noted after a moment's pause.

[revengenotebook]

"That's the one in the full body stocking, not the bathrobe, right?" Paris checked.

[era_two_triangle]

Peridot was not going to ask what a bathrobe was. Or a stocking, for that matter.

"The one in the red?"

That seemed easier.

[revengenotebook]

"Yeah, he seems really weird, even on our school's scale of weird. What does he teach?" Paris asked.

[era_two_triangle]

"When I was in his classes, he taught things like that pocket monster game for the cell phone," that Peridot still played, shut up, there was a holiday event on and she wanted to get all the new ghost types. "And then another class on," and this required a wiggle of her fingers, "magical healing crystals."

Spoiler: They had not been magical or healing.

[revengenotebook]

"How do those even count as classes?" Paris shouted to the sky.

[era_two_triangle]

Peridot just gestured at Paris at that shouting.

"See? Things get loud when he's involved!"

[revengenotebook]

"That's because his existence offends me," Paris said, nodding.

[era_two_triangle]

"Then perhaps he was actually supposed to be teaching in a," Peridot paused for a second to make certain she had the term right, "public school, instead?"