The museum reopens [Mingle]

[ourearth]

Date:14-03-19
Characters: Open!
Note: Like all welcome mingles, this is a SoL free-for-all mingle meant to get new characters involved by centering around something relevant to them. This one has the special addition of two NPCs wandering around in the backround so your character can encounter them, if you’d like. Without further ado, please welcome Felicity Sirrell!

---

The clean-up efforts after the tsunami are well underway. The streets have been cleaned, the debris on public and private property has mostly been removed, and while much still stands to be renovated or replaced, Mossgate and Tarwich look more or less like they always do once again.

What better time to have a little event? More precisely, what better time to reopen with a bang. Which is what the town museum on the end of the High Street is doing. Like most houses on that street, the building got hit by the tsunami, but it got lucky insofar as it got only hit by the tail end of it and much of the collections had been evacuated anyway due to the building work in the aftermath of the bomb threat last year. Plus the tsunami did not hit the public library part of the museum, so all the books remained unharmed.

Which is why the museum can reopen now, looking all fresh and… well, not new, but a bit better than before with renovated bathrooms and a new coffee machine in the cafeteria.

And also a special exhibit. It’s been advertised all over town for the last few weeks: The library is reopening, and there will be a temporary exhibit about Bible Errata!

A whole room in the museum has been dedicated to this, showcasing a few original books and having posters and informational material around them and many other examples of failed typesettings and misprints of the Bible that are funny or amusing. It features, among other things, the Book of Kells (in which Matthew 10:34b should read "I came not to send peace, but the sword". However rather than "gladium" which means "sword", Kells has "gaudium" meaning "joy". Rendering the verse: "I came not [only] to send peace, but [also] joy"), the Manchester Edition (in which the heading on Chapter 3 of Leviticus and the first verse has "bees" rather than "beeves" (plural of beef) so that it reads: "How the peace offerings must be of bees, sheep, lambs and goats") and various misprintings of the King James Bible.

The special pride of…. Okay, maybe not the museum, but at least the local gay clubs, which have actually run a fundraiser or two to bring that specific Bible here, is the "Affinity Bible" from 1927, which contains a table of family affinities that includes the line "A man may not marry his grandmother's wife."

On the day the exhibit opens, the cafeteria serves special amounts of cake on top of their usual fare of coffee, tea and scones. There’s a tombola (because why not do fundraising where you can?). And obviously there are speeches at some point, a children’s choir sings, and everyone of distinction drops by to be seen, say a thing, and show appreciation of the reopening.

Comments

ota

[saveournpcs]

Later into the afternoon, a man who may look familiar to some is wandering the museum. He doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in the new exhibit, and rather just studies the museum itself: The walls, the rooms in general, the security, and at times the staff.

He also carries around a big, fat, fluffy grey cat that in his arms that he keeps stroking. For some reason the cat does not seem to mind at all being lugged around like this, and watches the people around them with the haughtiest air about it that a cat can muster. Which is impressively haughty, really.

[vernal_miss]

The fact that a man is walking around the reopening of the museum with a feline in his arms catches the attention of the girl far more than exhibits. Enough in fact that she strays from her family to follow him and watch. He is looking right at the people who work here at the museum, yet he is not being told to take the cat outside. Then she realizes, he likely carried it in with him right alongside the other people in attendance.

Well, simply staring at the man will not likely give her an answer. Nel walks up to stand just in front and to one side of the man as she looks at the pompous cat curiously, then up to the bald man, “Excuse me, sir? Why did you bring your cat?” Cats knock things over. She knows this is fact, and a museum has very expensive things to knock over.

[saveournpcs]

"He is a part of the right aesthetic, no?" The cat yawns in his arms and seems to study Nel intently. "A mood, one may say."

[vernal_miss]

Nel looks right back at the cat for a few seconds then tries to imitate a cat herself as she closes her eyes in a long blink for a couple seconds solid. Looking up to the man after, confusion edges in as she asks for clarification, “Uh...which aesthetic?” She understands the term at the very least given her siblings influence, but she cannot nail down the mood that the man is attempting to project.

[saveournpcs]

"Ah..." he takes a step back towards the chair the guard normally sits in, signposted 'only for staff', and sits down, placing the cat on his lap which frees up his arms. Not that he then does much with them, for the moment they only rest on top of the cat. "What do you think, little girl?"

[vernal_miss]

Lingering behind a few seconds as she watches him settle into the chair, Nel steps after him to look at the way he is seated with the cat in the chair and his hands resting on the cat. Head tilting to one side, she reads something quite different from what other people might, "Well, you look like the man in that one painting by a lady named Cecilia...Beaux I think? Though you don't have a mustache like him. He was a university president! Is that it?"

[spaghettimonster]

Out of a sense of local pride - and the convenient ability to simply walk to this museum from the flat - Russell loiters around the museum for a few hours. There was plenty to see, between the restored collections and the excellent new exhibit; the Affinity Bible is good for an appreciative grin.

What isn't, though, is the moment when he recognizes that familiar man. Last time he'd strangely smiled just before an odd double echo struck Russell and Stone alike, almost as though the man had caused it... and rumor had, he'd been around a few times since.

Russell doesn't immediately confront him, but stares a little too intently, trying to figure out what he's up to this time.

[saveournpcs]

The man doesn't pay him any attention, but the cat that he's carrying around does, staring back at Russell, its tail swishing idly.

[spaghettimonster]

If, as a few of them suspect, this man was involved in messing with the bomb and somehow arranging the coal prank... He's probably secretly Numbered, and keeping his presence on the network quiet. He could already know Russell's face.

In for a penny, then...

"Do you... talk?" Russell whispers to the cat, half expecting it to nod back at him. Most of his animal-sitting experience is with dogs, since cats are more trusted to tend to themselves - so he doesn't know if the cat's as suspicious as the man, or this is ordinary cat staring.

[saveournpcs]

The cat doesn't respond, but the man heard Russell's voice and slowly turns around to look at him.

"Cats are not supposed to talk," he explains with an odd uneven rhythm to his voice.

[spaghettimonster]

"Er." Between stagework and his increased customer service experience, Russell knows how to make himself smile even when he's really, really not feeling it.

Especially when the person he's talking to is why he's not feeling it. "They... aren't... But I like to check, anyway."

[scarsolderthanyou]

Sam knows that scent. He was reluctant to bother with this museum trip, being in kind of a funk today, but now he's glad he did. He catches the scent on the breeze and immediately starts tracking it, hunting down its source.

The cat surprises him a little, but not enough to make him back off.

"Look who it is," he comments, voice droll, coming up beside him.

[saveournpcs]

"Oh, am I that famous now?" The main raises an eyebrow, looking a bit puzzled in a very petulant way.

[scarsolderthanyou]

"To me you are. I never forget a face, and last time I saw yours it was fleeing a bomb site," Sam says, quite casually. Of course, it's more the scent than the face, and now he's noticing just what little details the police sketch artist got wrong. Maybe he can snap a picture with his phone somehow. He's gotten better at that, given the help of grandkids and potential necessities that come up with being Numbered.

[saveournpcs]

"Oh no, you are a man with a good memory."

There is no specific tone to his words, strictly, rather a lack of any specific emotion. He's just stating it like it really needs to be stated.

[scarsolderthanyou]

"And you're a mystery," Sam counters. Since he does tend to prefer to be direct, he starts with: "Who are you?"

[dragoonrouge]

Sadie had been having a lovely day, her and Ben had used the museum reopening as an excuse to go out on a date, and she would have continued to have had a lovely day if she hadn't noticed the very quiet purring of a cat. Which was when she spotted him across the room.

Sadie freezes, staring wide-eyed at the bombsite man, her heart beating fast in her chest as her ears fold right back against her skill underneath the knitted beanie she was wearing. What on earth was he doing here?!

[saveournpcs]

Well, right now he's just petting his cat and studying the wall in between two exhibits. The cat, meanwhile, is staring back at Sadie, its tail swishing idly.

[dragoonrouge]

Sadie stares at the cat and ever so slowly... Takes a step back. And another. And another. In fact, Sadie was making good progress on backing out of the room without panicking further until the back of her boots hit the base of a display cabinet with a loud 'thwack'. Glancing behind her and then glancing back towards the man, Sadie is doing an excellent impression of a deer in the headlights.

[saveournpcs]

The cat purrs. And then yawns and jumps out of the man's arms to slowly wander over towards Sadie.

[dragoonrouge]

This is probably the first time in Sadie's life that she hasn't wanted to pet a cat but, with the crowds that move through the exhibit now blocking her escape, Sadie has no choice but to remain in place as the cat gets closer.

"Good kitty," Sadie holds out a shaking hand for the cat.

[lovedramamoron]

Jimmy had arrived in Mossgate well after the bomb incident. While he had been warned by several people that there had been someone suspicious at the site, he had never seen a picture of him.

"Hey," he calls out. "Is it really okay to bring a cat in here?"

He didn't know the laws about things like that here, but somehow he didn't think museums here would welcome people bringing their pets in any more than they did in America.

[saveournpcs]

The man turns around, gives Jimmy a derisive look, and then shifts the cat onto only one arm to raise his now freed hand and tap a finger against his lower lip.

"Naturally.

And you consider yourself to be what, exactly?"

[lovedramamoron]

Announcing that he was a writer didn't really seem to be the thing to do here.

"I'm someone who likes books," he says at last.

[saveournpcs]

The man slightly raises a corner of his mouth. "Which gives you any right to give orders in this place how, exactly?"