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"They almost put me in DoSAT! Then they decided not to. Something about 'danger to fellow agents,' or whatever." He shrugged.

Thoth, meanwhile, was staring intently at Alex, trying to discern why he had such an affect on Derik.

"Yeah, sure. I get it. Obviously... the cons outweight the pros," she said, although there was a little hint of disappointment in her voice.

"So, what did we miss?" Matt asked, looking at his partner, who quickly grinned at him.

"We've decided we don't want to explode dear ol' Charlotte."

Dax rolled her eyes. "Nah, I'd rather just stay here if it's all the same to you. Say, have you got any other Halloween traditions or anything? Where I came from, there was a harvest festival every year, but from what I understand that's closer to, uh... Thanksgiving, I think it was called?"

Zeke lifted off his shoulder and flew over to Jenni, chirping happily.

Alex turned to Tom. "Alex Dives, DoSAT," he said, and jerked a thumb at the fire-lizard. "And the little guy is Zeke. He's generally pretty friendly, but he'll bite your fingers if they smell good."

Zeke turned his head to Derik, eyes whirling with shades of green and blue.

"Okay, good," she said. "There might have been something I could do, but the red tape alone would've been a challenge."

When Alex arrived, Derik took one look at him and froze in place like a hunted animal. His mood had been lightened somewhat by the cleansing act of commiserating with a brother-in-spirit, but it abruptly blackened. He said nothing.

"Alex," Jenni greeted him. "They started it, not me."

"And I saw enough of trick-or-treating when i was a kid to be happy with it. Try it as much as you want, I'm fine being here, I won't get bored."

"Not even for showing two poors rookies the ropes of Halloween?" Richard said.

"Knock a door. Say 'Trick or treat' to the person opening. Collect candies. Avoid too much tricking in this place. Enjoy yourselves. If you fail that, you weren't ready for that dangerous mission anyways, and no mentor will help you."

He tried a piece of the fried drink. Then he grabbed his Coke, and began gulping furiously. "That... that was worse than I expected."

Thoth turned to Jenni. "No, I am not. For those of us who survived the ritual, it did, in fact, serve its purpose. I am stable."

"And a great relief it is to the rest of us, too," said Tom, finally recovered. He turned to the newcomer. "Ah! 'Allo! Who're you?"

A blond boy dressed as a dragon rider, accompanied by a blue fire-lizard perched on his shoulder, approached, munching on one of the same green fritters. "This is supposed to be a party, not a therapy session." Alex shoved the rest of the pastry in his mouth, cheeks bulging, and he held up his fingers for Zeke to lick.

Dax looped her arm through Marina's. "We're not gonna leave you out! That'd just be rude! If you don't want to do the tricksy stuff, got any other ideas in mind?"

Hey PPC board if anyone remembers me I'm finally writing again after over a year of creative comatose...

decided it'd be a good idea to try and write a play manuscript for the first time ever lol...

any suggestions? not sure how i felt about 6/9's romance... lol

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gmmSEwYY-iCxmSH0E3u-h3XjTmd2T-5ys6R6Zc6LyFY/edit?usp=sharing

Gall broke hers open and made a revolted face at the gooey, neon green innards. "Ugh, it looks like Fellrazer's poop."

Her being her, she didn't hesitate to put it in her mouth anyway. Derik was right behind her, and they reacted with near-identical sour faces.

"It's so sweet... gack." Derik coughed on the acidic lime fumes in his throat. "Why?"

Gall laughed. "Oh, gods, what is this even supposed to be? It's so gross! Forget what I said earlier; you have to try this." She thrust a greenish fritter at Tom.

Despite being momentarily distracted by the others' antics, Jenni had kept most of her attention on Thoth, and now she spoke up. "Do you still worry about... the flesh-change?" It was a term she was uncomfortable having on her tongue, evoking nightmarish Akira-esque images even without context. She knew the power of names, and agreed that this was one best invoked as little as possible. Yet she had to ask. "Are you afraid that could still happen to you?" This was a two-pronged concern: one for the man himself, one for everyone around him.

"Thank you," he said.

Tom turned to look at Gall, his face displaying a horrified expression. "They fried Ecto Cooler? Good god, that's horrifying. What will they do next? Dip Doritos in Mountain Dew?"

The lament was Celtic in flavor, each high, mournful note unspooling with aching slowness from the throat of the man singing:

The tears I feel today
I’ll wait to shed tomorrow,
Though I’ll not sleep this night
Nor find surcease from sorrow.
My eyes must keep their sight;
I dare not be tear-blinded.
I must be free to speak
Not choked with grief, clear-minded.
My tongue cannot betray
The anguish that I know.
||: I’ll keep my tears till later;
But my grief will never go. :||

Derik could rarely bring himself to sing anymore, but he still had a clear, near-perfect upper register. Even off-kilter as he was now, with his sound further disturbed by the ambient Halloween music in the room, it was an uncommon soul that could fail to be moved by it. Even Gall listened quietly, her expression slack.

"For your brothers," said Derik. "For Skepnadth. And for us." He looked around and chuckled. "Normally someone would offer a toast at this point, but I'm already toasted!"

Gall rewarded him for the terrible joke with a punch on the shoulder. "You maniac. Eat your, uh, I think that blob thing is 'Fried Ecto Cooler'."

For the moment, Jenni stood quietly, contemplating.

(( "Song for Petiron," from the Pern album Sunset's Gold. Derik may have taken it just a hair faster than the recording. Oh, and yes, fried Ecto Cooler is a real thing. Don't ask me how, but I heard of it on Brad Tries at some point.

(( ∗checks off RP Goal: Get Derik to Sing∗ Woot.))

"Halloween isn't as big in France as it can be in say, America, so I never gave it an actual try as far as I remember. Dunno how big it is here in HQ, but... Willing to give it a try? If so, dibs on candies with red berries flavor or caramel."

"You'll do it without me, then," Marina said. "I got more than enough of that back home. Comparing inadequate disguises to the real deals far funnier for me now... When Halloween isn't a just a job night. I'll continue to enjoy that party."

"Alright, then. I won't be sorry." He shrugged, and turned to Thoth. "Do you want to tell her?"

Thoth shrugged. "She will find out sooner or later if she really wants to, anyways." He turned to the nurse. "The fifteenth legion's story is not a happy one, and our doom was neither quick nor painless. We were accused of sorcery, the Wolves sent to our world to bring us back. As to whether the judgement were just... that is not for me to say."

"The orders were changed, telling the Wolves to destroy us. Our own primarch found the judgement just. He did not inform us of what was coming, lowered our defenses." He looked down again. "We tried to fight back. At first, it went well. But they had brought the Sisters of Silence with them. And as the battle wore one... more and more of my brothers succumbed to our defects."

"They called it the flesh-change. A menace accentuated by our psychic talents. Those who succumbed became... something I'd rather not think about. Death was preferable. And as our city burned and our brethren and citizens lay slaughtered in the streets... our primarch made a pact to save us. A pact that gave us our lives, and but cost us our pride and our freedom. We were taken to a new world, our powers amplified - and we had become servants of the Architect of Fate, choice or no."

Thoth looked down. "As the flesh-change grew worse... a group of us made an attempt to fix it. They failed, the ritual going horrifyingly awry. Most of our number were turned to dust, their souls fractured and trapped within their armor, becoming little more than mindless automatons, doomed to eternal torment." He looked back up, still seemingly distant. "I saw my brothers fall around me, cursed to a fate worse than death. A fate I myself narrowly escaped. That is what happened to me."

"Dunno—we never had anything like this back home, so I'm not really sure what to expect. I've heard all about trick-or-treating; is this what you meant when you were talking about tricks?"

Derik swung around to glare at Tom. "Don't be sorry." He sneered the word. "Nobody be sorry for me."

"I'm not!" Gall chirped.

Jenni shot her an angry look, but this went ignored.

"Thank you," Derik said profoundly, flourishing an arm in imitation of a bow to his partner. "That's what I like about you. You're rude, and annoying, and selfish—but you're not sorry. And you brought me food. ... What is this?" He held up something that looked like a cocktail wiener, but its sauce had somehow been turned a noxious shade of green.

"Um, I think the sign said 'Alien Guts'? Gimme one." The two of them bent over the plate.

Jenni shook her head, gave a sniff to clear her sinuses, and took a step toward Tom and Thoth. She couldn't help but observe the Astartes' withdrawn silence, and the nurse knew trauma when she saw it. Her work was never done. "Hey, big fella." She gently rapped a knuckle against the back of his armored hand. "You want a turn in the sharing circle?"

"Well, that will need investigating, but this does not seem like an appropriate time." There was, after all, some sort of party going on.

He pulled out a small notebook and opened it up to a page near the back, which was almost entirely black from the various notes that had been written there. "Halloween - World One sources?" he wrote somewhat diagonally (but surprisingly neatly, for diagonal text) near the margin.

"We were, after all, doing, ... uh, doing, going ... why are we here, anyhow? It had something to do with candy, I think." he said, having gotten a bit sidetracked by the whole discussion.

The trick is not to hide to the exposition, it's to make it enjoyable. Heck, if you're writing in first person, you can have a character straight-up explain to the audience. The Dresden Files does this all the time, and it might get annoying, but it doesn't because 1) The exposition is largely kept very brief, and 2) it is absolutely dripping with personality: this isn't the writer telling you a thing, this is Harry explaining his world.

"And actually, playing up with the tune could be something really interesting to do, so maybe you could try that?. In any case, I'll be sure to be there if there is really such thing for winter, and nothing stops you from giving it a shot at this moment," Richard said. He then began to look around. "Anyways, why don't we look for something interesting to do? Come on, it's Halloween, tricks are part of the fun. Or failing that, well something else!"

Marina shrugged slightly before looking at Dax, "Well, you heard him. Any idea?"

The Eddingses loved doing this, using a fake historical account as a prologue. The Belgariad starts with what's basically a religious story; each book of the Tamuli starts with a scholarly study of the events you're reading about. Heck, Tolkien does it, too, name-dropping King Elessar in his discussion of the Red Book.

What they do is to introduce you to the world and its background without having a character say it to another character. If the Prologue can tell us that Middle-earth is 'Earth but long ago and with elves', then Frodo doesn't need to have a conversation about it with Gandalf. ("Gosh, Gandalf, I do wish you'd tell me that old tale about how the world was created, I always so love to hear it...")

Another example is Brandon Sanderson (again!); each of the Mistborn books has false-document quotes at the head of every chapter. They let him feed in the backstory that everyone in the world already knows, while at the same time using it as a storytelling device and subverting it (by casting the setting's myths as a diary, I seem to recall).

The trick to doing this successfully is to use your false-document (or any other form of exposition) not just as exposition, but as part of the story. Check out the opening of Serenity (y'know, the Firefly movie), which manages to recap the relevant backstory from the series as part of the introduction of the villain. If you have a mentor to deliver information, make her teaching style relevant to the plot - the Wonder Woman movie gives us its founding myth as a bedtime story for Diana, which builds her relationship with her mother, feeds into her motivations, and - through what she is and isn't told - helps to establish both conflict and the plot of the film.

And for the love of all that's fictional, never do what some comic books do and have your hero yell "I'm trying to use my laser vision to stop you, but your forcefield is making you immune to it -- how?!". Trust your audience.

hS

"Gods and demons... Derik, I'm sorry. We've all lost friends, but... I couldn't imagine..." He trailed off.

Thoth merely stood silently. His focus didn't seem to be on the world around him, or anywhere close.

"Just morph my vocal cords to that of a siren, and then everyone's falling all over themselves to say how great I am." She grinned unabashedly. "Maybe they'll have it at this year's winter holidays party."

But she allowed Matt to lead her back to the others.

Charlotte had a very concerned look on her face."I dunno, Izzy. I'd love to try it, but not that much... It would be interesting, yeah, but I don't really want to risk it."