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"Katchoo here. Don't know what you want, but that's what voicemail is for, right?"

[Disclaimer: In creating this journal, the author has assumed the identity of a fictional person for use in the role-playing game fandomhigh, for the sole purpose of entertainment, without intending to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud either the person who created the fictional person, or any reader of this content. The author does not purport to be the creator of the fictional person, or to be affiliated with the creator, or with any person or entity with an interest in the fictional person. The author does not intend to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud that person by use of their artwork.]

This layover had been inconvenient at best, infuriating at worst, until Katchoo felt her phone buzz in her pocket. She let the call ring through to voicemail, too busy arguing with the cosplay freak who'd gotten up in her face (or more precisely, whose face she'd gotten up into) to derail her yelling just yet.

When she finally listened to the message, she regretted the ever-loving shit out of not picking up.

"Oh, Jesus," she muttered once she'd retreated to a corner of the shop. "Oh, frikkin' crap on a goddamn stick."

[OOC: For Francine if she wishes, or texts/calls if anyone else wishes!]

Ordinarily Katchoo was . . . let's just say really not favorably inclined toward unexpected visitors, but she couldn't say no to the question when she and Francine had gotten the call from Tara; she had a bit of a soft spot toward the kid, and besides that could relate well enough to what she was going through. (Also a factor for consideration: Francine wouldn't have said no, either, and Katchoo wouldn't fight her on this.)

Luckily the semester didn't start up again for another week and students were only just starting to trickle back onto campus, so things were still fairly quiet, and the coffee shop across the street from their dorm wasn't packed with the kind of crowd that usually ended up with Katchoo bellowing in a way that made the racket in there the opposite of better. No, today there were only a few writer-looking types hunched over computers at corner tables and the occasional business person wandering in and out for a latte, and no sign of Casey.

Which would not keep Katchoo from warily watching the door for any sign of overly perky aerobics instructors, once she'd found a table big enough for the three of them.

[OOC: For Francine and Tara, and of course NFB for distance.]

Katchoo had, by some twist of fate or sick joke on the part of the universe, managed to completely miss seeing Francine at all since she'd woken up this morning, and wasn't even aware Francine was at the reunion; she hadn't exactly gone out of her way to ask. She left her current phone number with Francine's mother whenever she moved or changed phones, but that had, for the better part of the last couple of decades, been the extent of her contact with her erstwhile best friend.

She'd spent the day wandering the island, checking out her old haunts and taking time out every now and then to field a call from Rosa and make arrangements for her latest gallery showing, and it was well after dark by the time she made it down to the beach.

Katchoo didn't set foot on beaches much these days, living in Santa Fe as she did, and they were tied up in some bittersweet memories for her. Not that it stopped her from taking a moment to just stand there, looking out across the reflection of moonlight on the waves, and thinking back. She might be mellower now than she'd been in her high school days, but she hadn't broken the habit of brooding yet, and wasn't about to start now.

[OOC: For one, la. Re PB, yes, I think I'm hilarious and

thatsamilkshake encouraged me.]

Yeah, you try living in the same not-that-big room as someone you'd had a nasty fight with not all that long ago; it wasn't all that fun, especially if you were like Katchoo and had a tendency to let these things simmer.

. . . if you were Katchoo, you also had a tendency to work these things out through painting. That explained the oil-based chaos strewn all around one side of the room (much to Clocky's indignation, but then again Clocky was always indignant in her view) and the sketchbooks and various paraphernalia scattered across her desk. Sure, painting people -- certain people, anyway -- was still a touchy subject, but she had a visual memory, and sketches, and was working from that.

With a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, naturally.

From the rough staccato whisk of her brushes against the canvas, it was pretty obvious that she wasn't in the best of moods, but hey -- welcome to her last couple of weeks that way.

[OOC: Open for phone calls and that girl what lives there with her. Also, I must share Terry Moore's latest toongirls-as-superheroes sketch because it amuses me.]

"I can't feel my feet anymore. How much longer?"

"We just started! I haven't even finished the charcoal sketch. You're whining again."

"'Cause I've been sitting here so long half my body's asleep. My butt's asleep. I might as well be sitting on a rump roast!"

"If you can't feel your rump roast, it doesn't hurt, so what're ya complaining about?"

"It's cold, that's what. I'm also freezing my half-naked butt off!"

"Oh please; a quarter naked at best. Now if I could get you to take off that robe..."

"Oh God, is that the door?"

[Some dialogue folded, spindled and mutilated from Strangers in Paradise Vol. 3, Issue 19 and (later) Vol. 1, Issue 1. Continues within! Warning for Fight of the Century Round #451, long-forgotten Parents Weekend guests, and Katchoo's idea of art critique. I've also made a little space for the ~~cheese slices~~ peanut gallery.]

Katchoo was never going to know who in the pantheon of your choice they'd managed to piss off and please at the same time, but whatever mishap had landed them in Camelot for several weeks had also managed to get them to St. Louis a week before classes started.

Which was just barely enough time to get de-time-lagged and . . . okay, to call it 'unpacked' would be a lie the size of the stacks of boxes and clothes that still weren't anywhere near their designated places. (Katchoo's stuff wasn't, anyway.) At least her class schedule was pinned up on the bulletin board?

As for Katchoo herself, she wasn't in the room at the moment, but wait for it -- that was the rattle of her key in the room door, which shouldn't be that hard to open except she was balancing a drink tray of mochas from the coffeeshop across the street (score one for living on the edge of campus).

Oh, and there was the BANG of the door opening.

"Holy$(*#!Francineyouwillneverbelievewhatjusthappened."

[OOC: For that girl. Yeah, that one. No, not you.]

Everything that needed to be packed was packed, everything that needed to be shipped out had been, and pulling that off had been some kind of giant frikkin' miracle but the point was, it was done, just a few straggling bags and a few dozen errant dustbunnies and bits of debris left behind. (And probably a disgusting amount of nicotine residue in the walls, but.) This was it, then, two years in Fandom done and something with a disturbing resemblance to a normal high school graduate's future ahead of them.

. . . and lingering. No need to flee the place like hell.

Both of them. Who woulda thunk it, when they first got here? Katchoo sure as hell wouldn't have, with all the crap she was trying to outrun and the skeletons she'd been trying to keep in the closet. So maybe there was enough room in her cynicism for optimism, too. Just a touch of it. No getting carried away here.

Because really, their future looked pretty damn good from here, and all that crap was behind her, and who (by which we meant from Katchoo's past) cared what two girls from Fandom did, anyway?

[OOC: Katchoo and Francine's actual last post in Fandom. WAH. Some minor OCD up, post is open (see OOC thread for availability details), and if you want to have gotten notice from one of the toongirls, you did.

ETA: . . . yeah, the door's open, too. I keep forgetting to specify these things -- thanks,

kestrelswolf. -_-]

The last time Katchoo had stayed in any one place long enough to acquire this much stuff, she'd ended up running away to leave it all behind, and not regretting it.

Mostly.

Well, she did somewhat miss the stuff; the people she'd left behind, who had caught up to her once already, were a different story.

Anyway, the point was that this was a #($!ton of stuff to go through, packing was a daunting prospect, throwing any of it out was more difficult in practice than in theory, and mostly Katchoo just looked at all of it and wondered if she could just leave the room for five minutes and come back to find it all packed away thanks to some convenient and well-timed quirk of Fandom.

. . . her cigarette breaks weren't an attempt to test that theory, just long bad habit, but she was curious anyway, every time she got back.

God. How was she supposed to get all of this packed up and shipped off in the next day or so, anyway? Clocky, wheeling around the piles of things and occasionally letting out a scolding beep, wasn't a damn bit of help that way.

[OOC: Not her last post in Fandom, but I feel like doing something with her today. Open door, open post, may be slowish but SP is nommable, right? Right.]

The closet door burst open to the sound of with no small amount of noise, and a young man with wild, sticky-uppy hair ran into the room flailing his arms and yelling, "WAKE UP WAKE UP IT'S TIME TO WAKE --"

And got a sight of the still-empty bed, and the room's continued lack of occupants.

Clocky sighed, slumped his shoulders, and kicked at the base of the dresser. "Oh. Right. Stupid Comic-Con."

What was a sentient alarm clock to do with no one to wake up? Rummage through the dresser for a pack of Katchoo's cigarettes, sit in the window, and spend all day in a sulky haze of smoke, of course.

Again.

[OOC: Establishy, NFI, purely gratuitous. This post is

thatsamilkshake's idea entirely, and Clocky being Milo Cawthorne from Power Rangers RPM is the fault of

longislandiceme, who said he had to kave sticky-uppy hair so I stole her wording too.]

The big Bitterwoman presentation wasn't until 1 PM, but at 10:30 AM they were still halfway back a long, snaking line that hadn't moved since 9:45. Katchoo kept stepping away from the line to smoke, despite the dirty looks and pointed throat-clearing from other congoers nearby (flipping them off was a convenient enough response) mostly to give her something to do while they were waiting. And waiting. Geez.

The nervous look she'd gotten from the balding, bespectacled, timid artist-looking guy as he hurried past had been amusing, but come on now. She was going to spend all day in this line at this rate, and Artists' Alley in the exhibit hall was calling her name, dammit.

And somewhere nearby, some ditz (blonde, she'd guess) would not frikkin' shut up.

Never mind the SyFy disasterporn movie that had screened late last night. Mount Choovanski was really close to exploding.

On the scale of positive-versus-negative, so far the hotel was hovering firmly around the area of neutral. On the plus side: the shower was fantastic, the bed was amazingly comfortable, the view of the harbor was gorgeous. On the minus side: the closet door didn't shut properly, the internet in their room wasn't working, and there was this mysterious damp spot on the carpet that she didn't want to know about.

And she couldn't smoke out on the balcony.

She was leaning out over the balcony railing, though, fingers drumming impatiently, staring down into the courtyard at the fountain near the pool . . .

"A whale getting an enema? Okay then."

[OOC:

divinesurfchick originally said it.

thatsamilkshake made me do it.]

It was not a morning in which waking up, much less getting out of bed, held any appeal whatsoever for Katchoo. Neither was about to happen at the moment, not when staying curled up with Francine was an option.

Which is what she was, lost in a pleasant sleepy haze completely free of dreams -- no clocks, no crazy cartoon versions of herself, no inexplicably hostile chipmunks, no fog, no storms in Hawaii. It was rare, and it was nice, and she was going to enjoy the hell out of it while it lasted.

[OOC: For that girl in bed with her, and NFB.]

Another day of work down, another day closer to graduation, and ~~would that she knew better~~ it wasn't as if there was anyone coming to see her graduate; anyone who might make that list, who wasn't already here, was dead.

Cheerful.

There was, however, the matter of Francine's family making an appearance, and certain things they didn't know about, and whether they should even know -- which wasn't Katchoo's call as much as she had an opinion on the matter.

All of this, pretty much, amounted to Katchoo standing in the middle of the room with Clocky circling her feet (pushing random empty soda cans and bits of Katchoo-strewn debris around with indignant beeps) as she . . . contemplated the pushed-together beds.

Yeah, that could be a problem.

[OOC: For that girl what lives there with her, but open beforehand, why not?]

If you were shocked, scandalized, perplexed, or any form of thrown off whatsoever by seeing that name on an email header in your inbox, Katchoo wouldn't blame you at all. She wouldn't tell you she didn't blame you, either, but for the same reasons that would contribute to your thrown-off-ness.

Whatever. See, this was just proof of what she would do for Francine's sake.

To: FH Student Body (excluding Francine Peters)
From: Katina Choovanski
Subject: ( Francine's Birthday )

[OOC: Feel free to reply or not, and if you want to volunteer to help set up, I won't mind at all! Also, yes, all four of my students have reason to go. Go ahead and laugh at me; I am.]

So one minute there'd been an attempt at actually, finally sucking it up, saying 'the hell with it,' and kissing Francine until she couldn't breathe as a prelude to other things that . . . would have a definite impact on breathing.

And then she'd been small, and fuzzy, with floppy ears, and NOT ADORABLE, DAMMIT.

Katchoo had been keeping up quite the mental rant about this in her head ever since it had happened, but being a bunny she couldn't exactly express it in her usual oh-so-charming way. Chewing on things, maybe, vented some of the frustration but she had a lot more of that built up than this tiny lapine form should have room to hold.

. . . that rant was still going, no matter how comfortable she was at the particular moment.

[OOC: For that girl. NOT YOU, RAVEN. ETA: This post might be kinda NWS now. WHAT?]

Look, it had been years since Katchoo had lived in Chicago. You'd think she'd be getting acclimated to Fandom weather by now, but Houston to Los Angeles to Hana, Hawaii left enough of an impression that the necessity of staying indoors in winter still chafed.

Because of course that was the only reason she'd be sitting on her bed, slouched against the wall, frustrated and slightly irritable and taking occasional breaks from wearing out pencils in her sketchbook to flick small paper balls at Clocky, right?

Or glance warily at her phone, as if daring it to beep at her with voicemail again so she could have an excuse to throw it out the window, right?

Right.

[OOC: Not so much with the open. For the roomie/BFFpersonthing, up early BECAUSE I CAN SO THERE.]

As far as Christmas presents went, this one was -- something utterly unprintable, if you asked Katchoo to put it into words. She was not at all inclined to disagree with Francine's evaluation that Arthur was, indeed, a crazy person for doing this for them.

She'd had a constant refrain of this is crazy this is crazy this is crazy running through her head the entire trip here (portal travel, whatever, it was still enough time to cram in a lot of that refrain) that had only gotten louder when they'd arrived at the hotel, throw in a nice counterpoint while they waited to check in, and add drums on the way to the room. Fumbling with the keycard was probably even in rhythm with that mental music loop.

But here they were, in a resort hotel in Curacao, with the door to the room swinging open, and really Katchoo thought she'd be pretty nonchalant about it after a lot of the amenities she'd seen, but --

"Holy frikkin' crap."

[OOC: For that girl who's here with her. Duh.]

Katchoo had been all but abducted from the radio station by, of all things, aggressively attacking holiday baked goods. Well, not attacking exactly, but the small army of fruitcakes had been in no way about to leave her alone, and now she got to add "frogmarched through the streets away from the radio station by a horde of that Christmas gift nobody wants" to her list of bizarre life experiences.

She got away from the fruitcakes eventually, but now she was holed up in what you could generously call a small cramped cave, fending them off with a long stick, hoping they'd just go the hell away soon. Emphasis on hoping; little bastards were persistent, and she was freezing.

By the time they finally did give up, or just disappear (frikkin' Fandom), she was so horribly cramped it took a long time to extricate herself from her hiding place, a long time to work out the cramps so she could actually walk, and a lot of creative swearing all through the process. And she had to work in -- according to the time on her watch when she checked it in the flickering firelight of her Zippo -- six hours.

Fan-frikkin'-tastic.

[OOC: Establishy. Mwahahaha.]

You could accuse Katchoo of trying to look the part, what with the leather jacket and cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth to go with the new boots, except that she'd had the jacket forever and the cigarette was pretty much an accessory for her.

She'd argue that all of those things went well with the rented motorcycle she was surveying now.

"Still can't believe I'm doing this," she muttered, picking up one of the helmets (she hadn't been able to get a pink one for Arthur, sadly) and trying it on.

Teaching Arthur how to ride a motorcycle. Yeah, this was gonna go great.

[OOC: For that prince guy, and a roomiebffpersonthing and wizard should they want to ~~ogle~~ ~~watch~~ ogle. Also some SP.]