summerdude | I Turn, Um... Uh... Sixteen? For The Tenth? Time???? [open post]

It's Magnus's birthday and he is a man with a surplus of plans. And many, many plastic recorders.

He's still a little overstimulated from the birthday party Galahad got Claudius to throw for the two of them — he loves all his friends, but that was a lot of people in one space, most of whom were also feeling many, many things about their visitors — and so it's been a quiet few days. Sunny is still a little subdued, so they've been having muted hangouts in the mornings; Galahad, also overstimulated from their birthday party, has fortunately been on Magnus's wavelength about just sailing around aimlessly on the Big Banana with many snacks and very little conversation during their daily hangs for the past few days. He drags himself to sword practice with Lancelot once or twice, has his weekly dinner at Hanguang-jun's, spends a great solo afternoon cleaning out Little John's cave in case anyone else wants to use it at some point, and lets Alex tease him into wrestling and, um, other stuff after dinner basically every night.

But on this, the twenty-sixth anniversary of Magnus's actual birth, most of his energy has returned to him. He's made birthday dinner plans with just his immediate family (and also Alex and Hanguang-jun) at their house for the evening. He's had his liveliest morning of the week. And with his newly regained energy he's found critical supplies for his afternoon: a roll of duct tape, several trash bags, eight recorders, a handful of hollow pens, and a dream. He's sitting cross-legged in the middle of the Mansion's lawn, a look of grave concentration on his face, as he makes little holes in a bag, duct tapes two recorders and one pen here and there, and then seals it all up.

And then he takes a deep breath, fits his mouth to the hollow pen, and blows the bag up. When he places it under his arm and squeezes, he's gratified to find that his makeshift bagpipes work perfectly. And he still has supplies for a couple more!

I know everyone is still busy with visitor's day so feel free to take your time on this one... but I would love to ultimately have a ton of Chaos Thread Opportunities.

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"Um, yeah??? Aren't you guys friends? He loves fighting."

"Well," Crowley begins. That's a story and a half. He thinks that they are friends and there's definitely been a certain level of added camaraderie between everyone who cares about Sunny, after the business with Count Olaf -- but still, there's nothing more hilarious than an irritated Lan Wangji. Crowley also thinks that secretly, deep down inside, very deep down, Lan Wangji actually has fun being an asshole to him as well. "You know, we're usually doing more peaceful¹ things. Drinking, reading poetry, writing a Burn Book, hiring st-- er, I mean... stalkers."

¹Read: Dictated by Claudius.

"A Burn Book???? Like in Mean Girls?" That's a movie that came out when Magnus was in pre-Kindergarten, for anyone playing along at home who wants to feel old.

Crowley points at him. "Exactly. Like in Mean Girls. Except we had to, er, persuade him to join us, so I told him it was an old folklore."

"Um... what old folklore?"

"不礼貌的女孩," Crowley says. How did he remember that? Who knows.

"Um," says Magnus, with deepest eloquence. "What?"

"The name," he explains, as if it's obvious.

"No, but like, what?"

"The name of the folk tale. About a young woman who attends a school where everyone else is terrible to her."

"Oh. A real folk tale that you didn't make up?"

"No, a fake folk tale based off a real movie that Claudius and I pretended was real -- the folk tale, not the movie -- to sell Lan Wangji on the idea of a burn book." It's all pretty simple, really.

"Oh." That makes sense! "Why didn't you say so in the first place?"

Crowley frowns. "I did say it in the first place."

"You didn't say it was fake and that you pretended it was real!"

"No, I said the name in the first place."

"Okay, well, I don't know every name in the world," Magnus says. "I mean, I know a lot. I probably know at least ten thousand. But there's a lot more."

"Well, it's not an actual name," Crowley tells him. "Not the name of one of the Mean Girls, at least. It's just the name of the folk tale. The fake name. That I made up."

The name sounded like gibberish to Magnus, which is part of the problem. He's not sure why. Usually he can understand at least the individual words other people say. "I know it wasn't the name of one of the Mean Girls.

That's because Crowley's terrible-Mandarin-the-hard-way somehow overrides the translation system. "Anyway," he says. "We drank some cosmopolitans and burned some books."

"Hanguang-jun drank cosmopolitans????" Magnus asks, thoroughly befuddled by this. "Wait, you burned literal books?"

"He didn't drink anything," Crowley replies, because clearly the "we" signifies him and Claudius. "But we did burn the book at the end. That's, er, why it's called the Burn Book." Kids these days. You basically have to spoon feed them the whole story.

"That's not what they did in Mean Girls."

"Well, it's what we did here," Crowley says, with a certain sense of finality.

"Huh. Well, okay then."

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