tsailatte

[tsailatte]

Yuchen looked back and forth between her and Dracula. And, then, he did again. And, then, he stared long and hard at Dracula, brow furrowed in deep thought, before finally, finally settling his gaze on her. “Yeah, I don't like him, he's giving me the creeps,” he said, utterly casual, as he attempted to rub the melted paint off his palm and onto the legs of his sweatpants. He hadn't exactly dressed for company, having expected this to just be a quick hop outside. Now, the truth was that Yuchen had never liked this Dracula statue. He'd cried the day his father brought him home, back when he was only six years of age. Yuchen's capacity for memory was pretty average but even he could vividly the first month or so of Dracula's residence and the way he'd make himself stare at the ground as he entered the shop, just in case he made accidental eye contact. It seemed a shame that Dracula had gone almost twenty years relatively unscathed, save for the vague signs of rain and sun damage, but Yuchen could not claim to have ever liked this old hunk of plastic enough to mourn the loss.

“You wouldn't know someone who'd want a gross old melted Drac, would ya?” Yuchen asked, although he already knew the answer. Who in their right mind would want something like that? “'Cause otherwise, I'm probably gonna have to drag him to the dump, and I can't drive.” A beat. Yuchen cocked his head to the side. “And I also dunno where that is.” If ever you need to ask an Anchorage local for directions, just make absolutely certain you don't ask Yuchen: he'd get lost in his own bedsheets if he weren't paying enough attention. He did consider, on top of all this, that maybe everyone else would have bigger things to worry about right now than gooey old vampires. He looked about himself, scanning the other buildings for signs of damage beyond the scorch marks and the thick coatings of soot. “You said you heard about the fire,” said Yuchen, scratching his cheekbone with his finger, “So, have you seen the rest of Rabbit Creek?” He winced. “Is it pretty bad?”

It wasn't even noon yet and Alice had already gotten into an argument with her boss, lost that argument, and then she'd gone on an impromptu "coffee run" that was still going on, two hours later. The argument, in question, was about the front page of the Daily Diem with the mugshots of Ava, Mindy, and Bronx. Naturally, Alice knew she was going to lose the argument but she couldn't help herself. Did it make a tantalizing, scandalous front page? Yes, obviously. But she knew two out of those three people in the mugshots and one of them was her family and she just knew that Ava didn't do this. Perhaps she couldn't be as sure about Mindy--she didn't know them that well--but odds are that if Ava was being set up, so was Mindy.

Alice did in fact go on a coffee run, even though she'd already had enough caffeine for the entire office. However, she knew herself and she knew her brain--it was going to race, caffeine or no caffeine, so she might as well give her brain a boost, right? She'd just showed up to the Coffin Club, trying to scout out the place. She was looking for signs of arson, though she wasn't too hopeful. After all, the police and the fire department had already been here. Still, it was better than sitting in a stuffy office. Hey, you heard about the fire, right? The man's voice startled her, she'd been so lost in thought. "Uh.. Yeah, I did hear about that." Honestly, she didn't really want to deal with anyone right now; though at the same time, a distraction would probably be helpful. Looking at the sad, melted Dracula, Alice gave it a long look and said "Well... I mean, yeah, it's a little melty but you could argue that that only makes it look more menacing... Kind of."

[tsailatte]

𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙲𝙻𝙾𝙲𝙺 𝚂𝚃𝚁𝙸𝙺𝙴𝚂 …

 happy 24th birthday dearest YUCHEN TSAI  ,

come drop your presents & send wishes if you may                             find out more about character birthdays here !

[tsailatte]

WHERE: rabbit creek, just outside dracula's coffin club WHEN: 18th june, late morning WHO: anyone! ( @anchoragestarters ) CAP: none for now

Somehow, Yuchen Tsai had slept through a fire. He'd woken up in the living space above the shop, completely none the wiser until he'd opened his bedroom window and caught sight of the scorched exterior of the building next door. Now that he was stood outside, staring hopelessly up at the Coffin Club's façade, he could see that it had faced the very same fate. Slumping his shoulders, Yuchen whistled and said, 'Oof, Bà's not gonna like this." The Coffin Club had, after all, been his father's passion project, forced into Yuchen's less than willing hands when his parents up and moved back home. "At least it's only the outside...? And maybe insurance will cover it?" It wasn't clear whose reassurance he wanted; Yuchen was very much in the habit of talking to himself.

But when a passer-by did happen to float past, Yuchen was quick to move, side-stepping into their path so suddenly that they'd have no choice but to stop directly in front of him or crash right into him. That wasn't by design, he just really hadn't thought this one through. "Hey, you heard about the fire, right?" he asked, a sheepish grin tugging at his lips. "Because I kinda got a problem on my hands." Yuchen lifted his arm, a finger pointed at a plastic statue of a man, dressed in a black coat with red lining, whose face and one half of his body had been horribly disfigured in some sort of...melting incident. "I need to do something with ol' Dracula here." He stepped up to the statue and gave it a good smack for emphasis, before immediately snatching hand away. Kinda sticky. Ew. "Think you could help?"

[tsailatte]

Yuchen's eyes snapped to the spilt lemonade and he stared in silence for just a few moments. Then, out from his mouth bubbled an eruption of laughter and he fell back on the grass. Maybe it was just the adrenaline of having landed flat on his face finally rushing to meet him but he felt positively giddy. Just as quickly though, he shot up to his feet and dashed over to where she stood with the shoe. “Yeah, yeah, I'm great, don't worry about me,” he beamed, “I trip up all the time anyway. I'm just lucky it was on the grass this time, it broke my fall pretty well!”

With a grateful nod, he accepted the shoe and got to work shoving it back on, yet again failing to untie the laces first. Just narrowly, he managed to avoid falling over once again but, thankfully, his balance was regained and his feet were equally be-shoed. “It wasn't us,” he said, lifting a finger before his lips in a shushing motion. “It was the shoe. Can't blame us for its actions, right?” Her apology, however, wiped that smile away and he shook his head vigorously. “What, no way, I tripped over you! If you think about it, I basically kicked you. And then I ate dirt but, like, literally, which is gross. Nobody needs to see that. I mean, jeez, I didn't ask if you're okay!” A pause, for breath. “Wait, you are okay, right?”

Once witnessing the stranger face-plant and swallow a mouthful of dirt, guilt inflamed in her stomach. Always, she'd engaged in the habit of losing oneself in a world constructed entirely in her lonesome within the closed dimensions of her mind, and in silence she scorned herself for allowing that to negatively impact another. She could no longer place blame on the plethora of painkillers she was situated on, as that river had run drier than the Mojave about a week and a half ago. She was safely placed back upon the soil of the earth from her temporary residence in the heavens and now she paid the price for not reacclimating sooner. "... You're good, though?" she felt the compulsion to ask despite being thrown by him maintaining a chipper disposition. "Um... Oh! Over there!" A sprightly thing, Marisol bounded ahead and located the rogue shoe that'd been discarded beside a spilled bottle of someone's forgotten lemonade. "We don't have to tell them it was us," she said bashfully as she offered the shoe. "Sorry, again. I feel like I owe you. I could've taken your leg clean off."

[tsailatte]

Yuchen was about as good as sitting doing nothing all day as a greyhound and often found respite in burning off this excess energy with a run in the park, especially when the weather was good outside. However, unlike a sighthound, he was no good at watching where he was going and, before he'd even realised, he found himself tripping over a pair of legs and barrelling head-first into the grass. When Yuchen's head stopped spinning and he was once again aware of himself, he was shocked to find he'd somehow gained a mouth full of grass and lost an entire shoe. The latter was entirely his own fault. He'd didn't put too much effort into tying his laces properly and, in fact, often used shortcuts like shoving his pretied shoes straight onto his feet and just expecting them to stay secure. Yuchen spat out what he could off the grass and wiped his lips on his sleeve for good measure before flashing her a bright grin, laughter bubbling behind it. “I must've been going real fast, I didn't see you at all” he beamed, before whipping his head in enough directions one after the other to make any sensible person. “I think my whole shoe came undone. Just flew off like whoosh. You see where it went?”

time + place: june 12, nearby park CAP 0/4 @anchoragestarters

Summer was when life prospered for Marisol. Well, it'd done so for every year since she was sixteen, at least—muddied memories of life before adoption hadn't counted—but this year her life had been upended and nothing was sure to be the same, not even work. And work had remained consistent ever since she'd snagged gigs at both The Ivy and the Raven House. It was a peculiar feeling; like she was suspended in limbo. To help combat a thought spiral, she ventured out of the trailer park for the first time since her incident and embarked on a short journey to the park. Baby steps, right? There was nowhere else her psychiatrist would love to see her; outdoors, breathing in fresh air, basking in the sun and absorbing all the vitamins it offered. She'd made herself a home in the grass, having splayed out a blanket for maximum comfort, her arms crossed behind her head as she hummed along to a song playing from her earbuds. It wasn't until she felt a pair of feet snag on her legs that her eyes snapped open and she sat up on her elbows. "Whoa! Sorry, my bad," she apologized at once. "I didn't know I was so incognito! Are you all good? Need a bandaid? Shoes tied? I think your laces came undone."

[tsailatte]

Yuchen had been in the process of staring down his own reflection, as though tearing his gaze away for even a moment would drain him of every last drop of the bold confidence that had brought him here in the first place. A good idea only ever seemed like a good idea until you approached the point of no return. Yuchen wasn't usually one to doubt his own convictions but that was largely because he never left enough time to think them over. Waiting in this chair had left him with nothing but time. He nodded along to Ava's each and every word, both because he was very determined to look as though he was paying full attention (which he was, of course, but he'd been told he had a habit of looking as though his mind was elsewhere) and because he really wanted to take it to heart. "I want pink hair", he said, very abruptly, briefly squeezing his eyes closed as he finally turned away from the mirror. "Like, really pink. I had super orange hair, right, and I liked that so I wanna do something extreme like that again. You think I'd suit that?" The words came out in a tumble, but clearly enough to avoid becoming a tangled-up jumble, but anybody who had spent more than five minutes with Yuchen was likely used to the breakneck speed at which he seemed to function. The change itself had less to do with Pride and more to do with this being when Yuchen had remembered to book the appointment-- if anything, as a business owner, he should have been taking advantage of the busy streets the art crawl would likely demand but...well, he wasn't an especially savvy business owner. (Nor was he really the owner, so much as he was the person left in charge of the Coffin Club.) Regardless, a big change was always exciting and he knew Ava could make it work. "But I didn't really think too much about the actual shade and stuff so I'm cool leaving that up to your judgement?"

( coyote hair salon, june 1, mid-day ) @anchoragestarters

Assessing the client in her chair, carefully studying the way that their hair naturally framed and fell around their face, the blonde beamed at the customer through her station's mirror, bright bulbs illuminating them both in an angelic glow. "So, are we thinking something funky and new for Pride? Or just the usual for you?" Ava questioned with a mischievous grin, a spark in her brown eyes at the idea of getting to make her client feel as beautiful as possible, even if it meant ushering them outside of their comfort zone. It was what she enjoyed the most about her line of work, getting to help the people that came into the salon feel as authentically themselves as possible. And it certainly helped that she'd had a change of luck as of late. The Adler family was not without their occasional petty squabbles, but things between Ava and her siblings remained largely peaceful, the volcanic outbursts of their youth firmly in the past. Not to mention, she was finally seeing someone that didn't seem deterred by the depth and intensity of her affections and general personality. Maybe it was too soon to tell whether or not it would last, but it was a reason to be hopeful about the future for once, instead of feeling stuck in her own ennui and self-pity.

"What you wanna do with your hair is totally up to you, but you know I'm always gonna nudge you to switch things up either way. So, what'll it be?"

[tsailatte]

yangyang // gimme your new album!

[tsailatte]

“Heh, there's already a rule against me running,” Yuchen beamed, his voice full of unearned pride. “My dad added it years ago 'cause I kept tripping up and knocking stuff of displays and stuff.” Here, he looked off towards a non-specific corner of the shop and furrowed his brow. “I think it actually might've been the only rule.” Maybe that wasn't a rule any more-- when his parents left the store in his hands, it was probably his responsibility to make the rules, his own rules for what was now his own shop, and he'd run around plenty and he hadn't even thought about it once until Esteban brought it up so maybe it didn't even count as a rule any more anyway and, and, and...

It was a pretty lucky thing Yuchen had a friend like Esteban to help him out because, on his own, he'd likely never get out his own head long enough to fix this mess. In fact, the light's wiring had already been messed up for a couple of months before he finally asked Esteban to help, all because he kept forgetting to ask. Yuchen's mind was always in a hundred places at once and he had seemingly no awareness of his surroundings at the best of times. “I actually dunno where the lamp's from,” he admitted, sheepishly. “It came from, like, a garage sale or a market or something. My dad liked to get stuff second-hand 'cause he probably thought he'd find something haunted.” The sudden chills, however, were something Yuchen had gotten used to, even though he hadn't quite figured out what caused them. It had been this way for as long as he could remember; his mother used to scold him for messing with the AC, even though he'd never once touched it and, at that age, wouldn't even know how to change anything, but she'd insisted that it only ever happened when Yuchen was hanging around the shop. “I think the cold just gets in somehow,” he said. “Probably through the floorboards. Maybe through the roof.”

Yuchen shook his head, utterly resolute. “Nahuh, no way,” he said, “If Mothman's real and he shows up here, I'm not gonna help anyone who wants to try and catch him. We gotta leave the poor guy alone.” But, alas, Yuchen's curiosity had been piqued and, clambering onto his knees, he leaned forward with both palms flat against the glossy black surface of the painted floorboards. “Even if it's not Mothman and it's just some weird animal, d'you think we could find something if we went looking?” he asked, eyes wide. “Not saying we gotta do that but we don't have to catch anything either. Wouldn't it be real cool if we got photo or something? Like the Bigfoot guy but, y'know, not a scam.”

Were you looking at me the whole time 'cause, like, I could've run into it any time? Perplexity contorted his features, but upon racking his brain for any alternatives, he couldn't come up with a better argument against it than that. Longanimity was a virtue of theirs, thus the sheet of disappointment passed over them as quickly as the slapstick of the lamp hitting the floor. Now, Esteban was refocusing on how to clean up the mess without adding to it, or sweeping glass under one of the fixtures designated as HAUNTED, accidentally. "I did blink, but I didn't know you were The Flash. Maybe you need to add a rule where you don't run in your own store," he suggested as he took the broom and dustpan, kneeling down in the shroud of glass and beginning to regroup the shattered bulb and metal pins that would've held it in place. The ashen scowl returned tenfold when he peered up at the stand. The ghost-shaped shade was a fallen soldier a few feet away from them, thankfully in tact, but without the companion of a matching stand to accompany it through peril. "Why don't I take it home with me and see if I can get a look at it in the garage? Maybe I can find some parts to put in a whole new... electrical fixture and get it running. That might go better than fixing it in-house. You know, unless it's those cheap lampshades from Giant, they really are unique to every lamp, they have to fit the bulb just right and if you've got those weird ones like this lamp —"

A big thumbs down non-verbally appended their sentence, resuming their task. After a pause, they cast a glance over their shoulder and around the store. "Is it just me, or is it freezing here now?" Or is it because he was closer to the floor than before? The soft jingling of shards hitting the dustpan padded the eerie silence that had blanketed the storefront. After it was all collected, he took reprieve to button up the denim jacket fully, bracing the cold front inside the Coffin Club. "So — are you going to start selling big bug nets now? I think Mothman's taking a vacation right here in Anchorage. Me and Farah visited that place once, and it was like, real quiet downtown when we were walking at night, but the weirdest part was that you couldn't sit in some of the chairs in the hotel lobby. Oh, and it started hailing out of nowhere. No rain." Esteban hadn't given a deal of thought to the paranormal, cryptids, or their belief in the creatures currently burning through the sleepless town. "I'm not going to be going bug hunting," a hand laid over their chest in a vow, "You and me have bowling on Saturday. And I don't think I was cut out to be chasing after big moths like a Scooby Doo montage — oh, maybe you should sell a ton of moth balls."

[tsailatte]

Yuchen had been sat over by the cash register, perched up on the counter to get a good view of Esteban at work – he counted himself pretty lucky he had such a handy friend to help him out with stuff like this, given that Yuchen he was generally much better at breaking things. Upon seeing the lamp light up the shop's dim interior, he'd jumped down from the counter with an open-jawed gawk of a grin and dashed over to see for himself. Somewhere in that time, he could swear he'd seen a shape, a indiscernible blur of a thing, almost like a shadow come to life, rush past to beat him to his mark but, as he drew to a halt and blinked against the lamp's glow, he figured it was just the black spots that came with being blinded by the light. It was not as though he had any time to interrogate that thought any further, as any notions he might have had were shattered by the sound of the lamp crashing to the ground. With a yelp, Yuchen jumped back and away from the minefield of broken glass. “How did I---?” he started. For a moment, he'd been taken aback by the accusation but, upon further thought, he couldn't think of any better explanation. He didn't remember touching it but he was pretty clumsy and he had been pretty dizzy just now. “Well, were you looking at me the whole time 'cause, like, I could've run into it any time? Maybe you blinked at the wrong moment?”

He hesitated a moment before making a grab for the group, as though convinced that one wrong move might result in him somehow breaking that too. It didn't seem like it made much sense but, hey, there were plenty of things that didn't make sense, especially in this town. Not that Yuchen had ever paid too much attention to the town's various mysteries. It turned out that all the years of practice he'd put into not listening during boring classes or his mother's lectures had served him well after all. Handing the broom to Esteban, he finally crouched down to get a better look at the damage done to the lamp. He was no expert but he had...opinions. “Yeah, I think this thing's gone straight to Lamp Heaven,” Yuchen frowned. “Like, not just the bulb but all the bits that hold the bulb in look like they've snapped. I guess the universe really doesn't want me to use this lamp.” He slumped backwards onto his ass, now sitting on the floor but still a just safe enough distance from the broken glass. “This sucks, I really like that lampshade. And you did all that fixing for nothing.”

@tsailatte ; dracula's coffin club, after dusk

The lamp had been a tall order for the evening, if he knew what the hell that phrase meant. Anything with electrical wiring was more complex than the average appliance or material thing, and yet, a distant cousin of the vehicles he worked on just about every weekday. Through trial and error, Esteban had managed to put the Coffin Club's floor lamp back together, the light switch amplecting the ability to luminate the dim space again. A shade in hand in the likeness of a ghost to doll it up, Yuchen's passing figure gave him a two-second notice as it seemingly creeaaaaked forward and his confectionery orbs widened as he outstretched a hand, followed by a futile protest, "Wait, wait, wait —" His hand siphoned the air around them instead of the stem of the floor lamp and teeth were grit together as it collided with the floor, a PSHHHT of glass erupting volcanically at the feet of the pair of friends. It took an additional five seconds to process the tragedy culminating so soon after its resuscitation, the mechanic's hands in his shaggy brunette hair as he stared at the mess. Then, he turned to Yuchen, pointing to the floor and gesturing frantically. "How — Hey, how did you do that? I didn't even see you touch it, but —" Well, it must have been him. Why would a ghost haunt a ghost hunting shop? Looking down at the state of pitiful lamp, a grimace tautened his molars together, a hand cupping the nape of his neck. "Shit, I'm thinking it's a goner now. You got a broom?"

[tsailatte]

Despite the hour, Yuchen was not on his way home from work. It was pretty difficult, in fact, to walk home from work when you lived there. Instead, he often liked to use this time of day, after he'd closed up the shop but before night had fully reared its drowsy head, to wander. He'd been in Anchorage for most of his life now and that ought to have been long enough for him to know these streets like the back of his hand, to walk freely without watching his step. So, then, why had two problems presented themselves? First, he was in a part of town he didn't actually know that well and secondly, perhaps more pressingly, he'd just crashed head first into another body and been blasted in the face by a pile of stray pieces of paper. There was a short delay before Yuchen's daydreams and reality clicked neatly together but, when they did, he all but dove after the fluttering sheets of paper, almost going head over heels as he grabbed at them. “Huh?” he said, turning to the owner of these sheets. “Oh, hey, you and me both.” Here, he flashed a grin bright enough to rival the humble glow of the streetlights illuminating the pavement. “I tried to rescue as many of these as I could,” said Yuchen, holding out a fistful of sheets. “Sorry they're a little, uh, crumpled.”

open starter: @anchoragestarters cap: none! date & location: early march, around town

there were many irons in the fire, if one couldn't tell by the very appearance of one boo jonghyeon. he'd gotten just slightly ahead of himself, absorbed in his work for the entire duration of the day, and now he was left to simply kick himself for not planning better ahead of time. you see, schedules were extremely important to the keyboardist, always followed diligently ( instances like today were rare ) – with it being thrown off, he was left feeling thoroughly of his depth. not to mention the contemned fact that the sun had set, and he had no way of contacting his bandmates... fuck. he'd left the theatre some time ago, set out towards delilah's, bag slung over his shoulders and a binder of sheet music held to his chest, cheeks rosy from the frigid air. the weather was far from ideal for numerous reasons, one of them being the pain and stiffness that the cold brought his leg; he really could not get home soon enough. however, the approach was derailed, quite abruptly, at that, as he collided with another body, not enough attention being given to what was in front of him. in the bat of an eye, he was on his ass, landing on the ice with an oof!, papers flying everywhere, as if they were particles of a blizzard themselves. curse his balance issues, and the snow. what a miserable night. “ mianhae, ” he voiced, “ i'm sorry. i wasn't looking... ”

[tsailatte]

[tsailatte]