[Club] Calligraphy Club

[Asta]

With classes finally over, it was time to pay a visit to one of the clubs she had signed up for. Not in the mood for physical activity just yet, Lilly decided that the Calligraphy Club would be her first stop. It took a little while to find the club room, but after a little searching she had located the door and now stood upon its threshold. Here goes.

Lilly opened the door and stepped inside.

"Hello?"

[Mysticsage]

Opening the door Lily is meet with a small classroom. Stacks and stacks of blank paper were there to greet you.  Behind the largest stack that was more like a wall four people popped their head around to look at her.

?Oh good there?s our fourth member!? Said a seemingly bubbly girl with large reflective glasses that almost seemed too big for her face. She is only about a head taller then you with light red hair.

?Phoebe a senior, and I suppose leader of this weird kind of writing club. Sorry we had a vote before you arrived.?

Pointing at the others, in order, ?This is Helen a freshmen,?

A short girl with braided brown hair and green eyes. She seemed rather sicly and frail but smiled at you warmly despite her pale complexion.

?And this is Tristan a sophomore? You have seen Tristan a couple of times. Normally he could be found on his roller blades sweeping down the town sidewalks without a helmet.  A bit of a daredevil and you had him in a couple classes before. Unlike Luke however you have had absolutely no reason to interact before.

[Asta]

Lilly took a moment to marvel at the almost absurd amount of paper stacked around the room, and then committed the names of the other club members to memory. Phoebe... Helen... Tristan.

Lilly gave a wave and smiled gently like always, taking silent note of Helen's apparently delicate constitution. A sisterly urge inside her almost compelled her to say something, but she pushed it aside as not to be rude.

"Nice to meet you all."

Lilly adjusted her glasses slightly.

"Out of curiosity, which type of calligraphy do we practice here Phoebe-senpai?"

The unfamiliar word tumbled out of Lilly's mouth before she realized that she said it. Senpai? What...?

[Mysticsage]

Phoebe and the others seemed to take absolutely no notice of the unusual slip of the tongue, not even a blink or a strange look at all.

Simply Phoebe continues to answer your question, ?Well based off of this letter that was on the desk along with all these papers. At the moment we are supposed to write as we like so long as we don?t use normal print or computers.?

?They gave us these? said Tristan bringing out four inkwells and fountain pens, ?I wonder what kind of ideas got in the old fart?s head to think up this club??

?We were talking before you came that maybe till we get the hang of this we could treat it like a writing club. Like short stories or poems." chimed in helen

?If were really gonna do this I?m just sticking to Haiku?s?

?We can all do what we like for now. Until we figure something out at least.? Said phoebe slightly ignoring the last remark like she had your comment. "The question is how do we clear enough space so that we can sit somewhere besides the floor??

[Asta]

Lilly looked around the room at the stacks of papers and put a hand to her chin in thought.

"If you don't mind my suggestion, we could consider placing these stacks on the floor along the wall. We could also organize them by quality of paper."

[spoiler]I'm assuming of course that there is room on the floor for that to happen.[/spoiler]

Lilly was interested in the prospect of actually doing some calligraphy, having read about it before in a handful of different books. It seemed though that she might be the only one actually somewhat familiar with the practice. Oh well, it's best to focus on the task at hand.

[Mysticsage]

You all try your best to move the paper the best you could but their were so many stacks that placing them on the floor simply made it imposiblr to move around whithout causing an avalanche even halfway through.

"Well that idea was a bust, huffed Trisitan in the end you all did infact end up sitting on the floor in a sloopy circle towards the font of the class. Using books from yout bags as make shift writing surfaces.

None of you had even tried to move the insanely placed tower of paper that sat there. It looked like a gentle breeze would send it crashing down.

As the others chat menially you glance around the room and let out a sigh. This was not the type of club you had been expecting you wanted to practice the art of writing. As you continued to muse things over a slight tinge of blue caught your eye at the top of that absurd pile of printer paper.

As you open your mouth to warn everyone of the impending collapse it's already to late you are all white washed with papers. In amongst the mess you feel something heavier slide its way into your lap along with all the papers. There was also no butterfly in sight, was it your imagination?

As everyone stood, you shuffled through the papers to find a book with a note attached to it. "For the caligraphy club".

Ah crap now we're going to have to deal with this crap.

"It's not a problem Tristan, a stack like this we can gather into smaller piles and shove them against the wall and still have room to sit on the floor." Said Phoebe looking around at the mess. The book you found caught her eye however and she stopped.

"What you got there lily can I see?" Handing her the book all four of you gathered around  her as she flipped through the pages.

It was a Japanese calligraphy book with drawings ranging in difficulty.

"So this is what the club was about." Breathed Helen

"It's worth giving it a shot," the other to nodded in agreement and you were severely confused as the others began clearing a space to sit.

It was like something flipped a switch in their heads and the room causing your hair to stand on end. Something imperceptibly small had just drastically shifted you just didn't know what.

[Spoiler]Will add color later [/spoiler]

[Asta]

There's that weirdness again.

Lilly was glad the book had fallen into her lap, and it was good that the other members of the club seemed to have found some direction. However, it was still strange that they seemed to switch gears so quickly, and what was with that butterfly she thought she saw earlier?

"So, how should we go about doing this?"

Setting the strangeness aside, she was ready to start practicing.

[Mysticsage]

"Well I suppose we just start practicing and see if anyone has a talent for it." said Phoebe as everyone sat down on the floor once again.

As everyone began practicing and cursing at bad attempts at copying even the most basic of designs. Crumpled pieces of papers began to circle everyone as the failed attempts began to pile up. The worst by far was the hand cramps no one was used to using pens like this and often just ended up with a smudged mess more then anything resembling the pictures. Tristan especially seemed to get frutated often cursing under his breath while Helen simply stuck out her tongue in concentration. The sky began to turn orange when your hand was really starting to get tyred and eveyones backs were beginning to hurt from sitting on the floor without support for so long.

"I think we're done for the night" said Phoebe finally as she ran out of ink.
"We accomplished nothing the entire time!" whined Helen as Tristan just grunted from the pain.

[Asta]

The afternoon wore on, and the piles of crumpled failures piled up. Everyone else had begun to express their great displeasure with their repeated failures, and Lilly's hand was cramping fiercely. However, not one to give up on things so easily, she had persevered until she was at last out of ink. Lilly rubbed her hand, and smiled encouragingly.

"Well, it has been said that nothing worth doing in life is easy. I'm sure with enough practice, we can get it down. I think I was getting the hang of it towards the end there. How about the rest of you?"

Lilly turned her crude little scribing around for everyone to see. She really did feel she was getting the hang of it, and wanted to see how everyone else was stacking up. It wasn't that she wanted to feel superior though, she was hoping her example might inspire the others.

(Lilly's attempt in spoiler.)
[spoiler][/spoiler]

"If what I was reading was right, I'm pretty sure that's a Japanese equivalent to my floral namesake."

[Mysticsage]

The only one who seemed to have anything similar was Phoebe with her own final attempt, everyone else had nothing in particular Tristan who simply began sweeping up his attempts before anyone else can see them. Phoebe was rather proud of her creation and folded it placing it in her book bag.

"Good job, Lily!"

"We'll all get better as we keep going!" said Helen meekly as she helped Tristan clean. She smiled lightly at all of them her nature making them all smile even though Tristan wants to play like he doesn't care.

"Right, then I think that's enough today!", said Phoebe looking at the clock "Our next meeting will be this thurday so keep up with the practice till then."

[Asta]

All in all, it had been a good first day as a member of the Calligraphy Club, and Lilly was looking forward to improving her skill over the coming school year. She packed her things away neatly in her bag.

"Thursday, got it."

While she tidied up, Lilly lost herself in her thoughts. Despite the positive outcome of the club meeting, she couldn't shake the oddities that had occurred. The sudden change in the focus of her club mates, and the glimpse of blue she had seen before the stack of paper fell.

It almost looked like a butterfly. Weird.

Her things finally put away, it was time to leave. Lilly made for the door, waited to see if there was anything more to be discussed, and bid farewell to the others.

[Mysticsage]

Tuesday September 10th

[spoiler]Calligraphy Club meets every tuesday, thursday,[/spoiler]

It has been two weeks since you started attending the clubs and that disturbing incident with the basketball club member, and you have noticed a large number of changes even in that time. All four of you have improved a to a noticeable degree in regards to your general ability to create nice looking pieces of calligraphy. The entire group creates any where from 2-10 pieces per meeting per person. The two that have improved the most have been Phoebe and Tristan by far; Tristan especially has seemingly worked twice as hard even though he has still behind Phoebe. Helen has quickly fallen behind everyone seemingly lacking any kind of artistic eye yet she is not allowing herself to become discouraged.

As you enter the clubroom you see everyone sitting on the floor on top off his or her legs. It was a trend started by Tristan one day and everyone else had followed suit. Even though you had figured out a way to organize the constant overflow of blank paper in the room so that there were empty desks it now just felt weird to do it any place but the floor.

Hey Lily-chan glad you could make it! called Phoebe from where she sat. You could swear that phoebe?s glass?s got more and more reflective every time you saw her almost to the point where you couldn?t see her eyes behind them. Tristan nodded at you as well and you had to admit that as the days passed he seemed to be falling more and more into some strange skater punk image. His hair while still blond was getting shaggier and shaggier every time you saw him. You eye also kept gravitating to the small stud metallic earing he got last week which seemed a little bit out of his standoffish nature. Only Helen seemed relatively unchanged if not a little more sickly and pale.

[spoiler]Please note that from this point forward any confrontational decision will begin a conversation battle or CB requiring rolls[/spoiler]

[Asta]

"Heya!" Lilly returned the greeting with a smile and placed her bag in an open spot along the wall. She took a seat next to Helen and prepared a little workspace for herself. It had been a while since the event involving that boy, and she was doing her best to take the whole thing in stride. Her calligraphy had improved over the last two weeks as well, and she was taking a considerable amount of pride in it. Some of the others however didn't have quite the same aptitude.

"So how is everyone today?" she said with a smile.

[Mysticsage]

"Good!" Helen said before going into a fit of coughs. It took her a second to compose herself. The changes in the seasons was apparently always a tough time for her. " A lot of people have transferred into my class so it's been a lot livelier recently, which is always nice!"

"Livelier is one way to put it all right," Tristan scoffed with a smirk as he bent over a price was making. "We're being packed in the classrooms like sardines and the teachers don't even know what to do with us all. I've been contemplating skipping class everyday this week just to get some air."

"The administration is in talks to figure out something I'm sure.

All I know if they don't do something soon there gonna have an uprising on their hands.

These kind of conversation seemed to be becoming the usual fodder for when you all practiced. At first it was about the cafeteria shutting down, then the fact that some of their parents lost their jobs, and now, the sudden increase in transfer students. The strangest thing was that no one besides you ever seemed to wonder why this was happening in the first place. And when you ask anyone about it they simply do not have an answer. Just another oddity to add to the list along with the sudden yet subtle changes occurring in some people in school.

[Asta]

Lilly set up her workspace to begin practice and continued to make light conversation.

"It certainly isn't an ideal situation, that's for sure." The new arrangements at school had foisted on the student body had been annoying indeed, but there wasn't much that could be done about it so she carried on in silent but begrudging acceptance.

Lilly pushed back her sleeve and hovered the brush over the paper while she contemplated what to write.

"So what are you guys working on today?"