Incident Christmas

The gathering was going well. Everybody was well dressed, standing around, chatting happily and enjoying the food and drink set out for them.

Chris moved into the center of the room, and cleared his throat to get the attention of those present.

"I'm glad to see you all made it. Well, the year is over at last, and Christmas is upon us. The year certainly has been interesting, with many different characters coming and going from our threads. Some of these people were more than welcome, and others were not so well received. But each made his mark, and will be remembered."

He paused for a second, then continued.

"Incident hasn't been progressing as quickly these past few weeks, so I'm glad to see that some of you have turned up to celebrate with us. Hopefully the next year will be just as productive as this past one, and just as fun."

"But that's enough from me. If anyone has anything to add, you're more than welcome to have your say. Or you can just relax, and enjoy the festivities."

There was a tree at one side of the room, decorated nicely, with a pile of presents lying underneath it.

Chris moved back into the crowd, and went to talk to Martin.

"Heh, I wrote that in about five minutes. I suppose if they don't like the speech, I can use that excuse to cover up. If they do like it, I can feel even better knowing that it only took five minutes to write. Reminds me of debating, really."

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So, the scene is a christmas party. Come in, enjoy, chat with each other, give a speech if you'd like. Once the guests are settled, we could hand out some presents to each other. I guess we could propose toasts at some point too, that's Christmas-like.

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Nora looked around. She knew everyone in the room- not well, of course. She didn't think that you could come to know a person simply by observing their fighting at a distance.

She didn't really know why she had come. She only really knew Chris, but evidently he knew most of the assembled people.

She had arrived late- just in time to hear the speech. She went to the side of the room to get a drink, and observed the situation for a while. She watched to see who was who, and who was talking to who. She looked at the circles and where they were, and where they extended to. She had learnt that social circles usually extended farther than it at first seemed- a group of several people might actually include someone standing across the room. She didn't want to disturb the pattern. She didn't want to be noticed.

After a few minutes of observing and listening, she felt that she knew how everything stood.

She moved around the room, keeping to the edges and close as she could, avoiding disturbance and the centre of the room. She didn't want people to think that she was going to speak.

She stopped beside Chris and Martin.

" Hi."

The circumstances were strange. Nora felt out of place.

"A lot of it is like debating", Martin said, then paused, trying to think of something to back up the statement.
"The. uh. It's important to communicate, and teamwork matters." he improvised. "The successful threads were the ones with a team line."

Axle bursts into the room, tripping over the cat...

Martin grinned at the new arrival.
"Hey, wasn't sure you'd make it. In one piece. It's changed a bit since the old days, huh?"

Chris smiled at Nora as she approached the group.

"Hi Nora"

It was kind of funny. Going over his older comments in previous threads, Chris realised how much his writing style had changed over the course of the year. His older comments were strangely reminiscent of Seathia, only without the spelling mistakes. However, he had managed to keep his double spaces intact, and was really quite proud of that, despite constant Badgering (Mushroom, Mushroom) from other members of the board.

"So, how do you think the year has been?"

Nora's opinion was always something that interested him.

Tiberius Frost put down his toast. He felt that he'd missed something. Nobody else had toast, and he was a little worried that if he tried something he might get laughed at or attacked with unusual and interesting weapons. The last thing he wanted was several battle cruisers to arrive at the Christmas party. Knowing (from experience) that this was quite a possibility, Frost decided to keep quiet.
After all, he was a guy who lived in a cardboard box in an alley.

Tiberius decided that it was time to pay attention.

As he'd already looked around the round, there was little need to do so again. Among the familiar faces stood several people from other threads. They had already posted so Frost decided not to bother typing out their names in full. He walked over to the active group for some conversation.

"How are we all?" he asked, which was not a greeting that he often used. Perhaps because usually when he met these people the idea was to attack them with swords and pizza boxes.

"By the way, I hear talk of lots of people being here? Did you pay them to come along to make Incident seem more popular than it really is?" Deciding that his spelling sucked (yea, never mind) and that all that sounded a tad pessimistic, he added "Axle, it's been a while. Must congratulate you, I believe that you were the culprit responsible for the bomb in The Mall."

Quote:

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Originally posted by Axle:
and then something dramatic happened! THERE WAS AN EXPLOTSION IN THE MALL!
<font color="#f7f7f7"><font size="1">[ January 30, 2003 03:29 AM: Message edited by: Axle ]</font></font>

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Frost had a thought. He glanced quickly around, wondering if Portia Fraser was here.

<font color="#f7f7f7" size="1">[ December 24, 2003 08:45 PM: Message edited by: Tiberius Frost. ]</font>

How had the year been? It had been good, she felt. Not surprisingly well- perhaps a better description of the year would be 'as expected'.

" I think that this year has been good." She half-laughed at herself. " Such a bland way of summing up the year, isn't it- 'good.' I suppose that it is the kind of thing that is too big to summarise into one sentence."

She always went like this around the end of the year- introspected and kind of annoying in the character generalisations that she made. She could only look so deep without having discovered everything, and once she reached that point, the mind of Nora had to romanticise in order to keep itself occupied.

She smiled brightly- introspection tended to make her terribly gloomy.

" I don't really like to think about summing up the year. I always start out happy, and the more I think about it, the more unhappy I become. And there really isn't much of a point."

She sucked absently on a finger she had cut while scraping the edges of a condensed milk tin.

" Sorry. I get a little gloomy around this time of year. So I take it that you're fairly pleased with the way things have gone?"

"Reasonably pleased. I tend to be optimistic about these things. Well, I'm optimistic at the moment because Seathia, Clarke and James Winters have disappeared, and because Axle has come back. If things are good, then I'm happy. I think that's a fair way to live".

Chris realised he hadn't actually answered the question. He supposed it didn't matter. He had mixed feelings about the year, the board had tended to go from highs to lows. Even from the beginning this was how it had been. He was happy knowing that he had played a part in the board's Resurrection somewhere in the middle of the year.

Chris thought about his character's evolution. He started off by drugging some girl and dumping her in his boot. Then he evolved to shooting people and beating them up, then probably something else before finally becoming an angsty teenager who went to a party and was laughed at.

Great fun.

However, one thing had eluded him all year. Maybe if he'd progressed his main thread more, something would have happened. But he doubted it.

<font color="#f7f7f7" size="1">[ December 27, 2003 05:35 AM: Message edited by: Chris Wesley ]</font>

Tiberius pulled up a chair. He considered leaving the party. Then he listened a bit to what the others had to say.

He too, thought about his character evolution. He first posted in ooc, he thought, I think, something... as a guy called "Bane of Chaos", because he hadn't thought of a name yet. His post was just abuse. Martin got excited about a new person, and told him not to go to the mall. But the threads were quite long in those days, and he only got round to reading the mall. So he posted there under the title "The Anonymous One". That was fun. He broke all the rules, which at the time were unspoken.
After Chris' restart he turned into Tiberius Frost, but was more serious, and insisted on being referred to as "Frost". Now he was even on a first-name basis with himself. Ah well...
Then came "The Alley, and it's sequel, "Starbucks, which was ruined by people copying him, playing their crappy music. The only good thing that came out of it was Clarke Anderson passing out on the floor in a large puddle of blood. He'd liked that. 'I wonder what happened to that Alley? Haven't been there in a while...', he thought quietly. There were several other Alleys after that, he believed.

[Writer's block]

He could't remember what happened after that. Oh yea, there was a desert, and the Castor and Pollox thing. What was up with that? There was a sci-fi thread that somehow died, Clarke Anderson vanished, possibly with a poof. (Rufus joke)

Lots of other people vanished, he ended up going to a party where Chris upset Nora or something, then the party didn't exist anymore, so he reduced to posting erotica on Incident. Well, that about sums it up.

He had plenty of regrets, but most of them involved so many threads not being finished, because people stopped posting. He wondered what happened to Martin. He noticed Martin was at the party, near him, but had stopped talking. In fact, Frost hadn't said a word himself in this entire post. Everyone was being very antisocial and he felt that he probaly shouldn't have posted here at all. But it was too late now, because he'd written all this, and he was going to make damn sure that somebody else read it.

"So..." he announced.

<font color="#f7f7f7" size="1">[ January 09, 2004 05:48 PM: Message edited by: Tiberius Frost. ]</font>

"I agree totally," said Martin, having no idea what Tiberius had been thinking.

Perhaps that it was time to end the 'Christmas Party' so everyone had time to rest before the New Year's one. But it might have been too late for that.