open post: in a slightly hazy lounge

[peaklordshen]

After a few false starts, Shen Qingqiu has found a proper place to test out Crowley's BL pollen vape pen.

He posts up in one of the lounges, close enough to the bar that anyone leaving there might find him. He's still in his braid and loose robes - no one else had noticeably started dressing gayer¹ when they took the stuff, intentional or not, so neither will he. He also brings snacks,² and the next book in the Blood at Dusk series, Moonless Midnight, in case it takes a while to kick in, or a while for anyone to come along to prove it has, anyway. If no one finds him here he will go looking, but roaming the Mansion's halls newly homosexual feels like a much more risky prospect than just staying put and seeing what happens.

He arrays himself on a couch, feet tucked up under him (although this might not be immediately apparent due to the robes), Crowley's pen tucked behind one ear so he can make more notes now that he has a glimmer of a chance that Binghe will forgive him,³ and takes a drag on the vape.

He coughs. It's smoke, not pollen—the blooms must be dried and then burned, like with tobacco—and has an odd, kind of greenish flavor. Not unpleasant, but not pleasant, either. He expected it to taste of, like. Cherry blossom, or something. Pink rather than green. Shit, maybe he is a little homophobic.

He takes another drag, and lets the smoke out of his mouth slowly this time, watching it curl up to the ceiling.

By the time anyone finds him, he will be staring unblinking at the opposite wall, book open on his lap to the third page of the first chapter.

[Threads with Sagramore and Luo Binghe are NSFW.]

¹ Please explain what you mean by this, Shen Qingqiu. I'll wait.
² Crowley did tell him to.
³ After he confirms that the pollen works. And goes to find Binghe. And kisses him. And— well. Maybe. After. He can raise the book club idea again?

Comments

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu waves a hand. "Yeah," he says. "I want to kiss a man,¹ so I had to become gay to do it."

¹ He doesn't know what Magnus thinks of Binghe, so he's going to try and be vague about exactly who. We'll see how long this lasts.

[summerdude]

Magnus considers this for a while. "Interesting," he decides. "I did it the other way around."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qinqqiu puzzles through this. "You became gay so you would want to kiss a man?" That simultaneously feels exactly like what he said and also like it's somehow more dishonest. At least Shen Qingqiu's wanting came first. Well—his wanting to want came first, because—and this is hard to remind himself while he's gay—straight Shen Qingqiu doesn't want to kiss Binghe. But then, so must have Magnus', or why become gay about it?

[summerdude]

"No, I mean, a guy kissed me and it made me gay," Magnus says, laughing. "Bi? Pan? Whatever. Into dudes." Alex kissing him had been like... unblocking a faucet, or something. Afterward he'd started realizing just how many good-looking men there were.

(Okay, so when he told Samirah about being into Alex-as-a-dude, she had laughed at him and told him he was clearly also into Amir, and then he understood the truth of her claim. And then all of Floor 19 -- including Alex -- started rushing to point out other, similar instances. Same difference.)

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu frowns. "That can happen?" If that could happen, why hadn't it happened to him?

[summerdude]

"Yeah!" Magnus enthuses. "Like, a cute guy plants one on you and you're like, whoa, I didn't expect that, do I feel some way about it? And then you realize the way you feel is 'yes.'"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu swallows. "I think," he says, "I mostly felt, help."

[summerdude]

"What flavor of 'help,' though?" Magnus asks. It can't be the really bad one, right? If Shen Qingqiu is trying to, uh, become gay?

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu doesn't, really, want to analyze how he'd felt in that moment, when Binghe's lips had touched his with such tenderness. It doesn't matter how he'd felt, only what he'd done, and being sure to never do it again.

But he doesn't have the same master over his brain he normally does, right now, and he finds himself thinking about it anyway. "Like," he says, slowly, "when you're handed something impossible, something—objectively wonderful but way too much too fast, and you know it's not for you, really, and you don't know what you would do with it if it were. That—that kind of 'help'."

[summerdude]

"Dude, I feel like that all the time," Magnus says. "Do you, um. Want to talk about it?"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu gives him a look, half unimpressed, half pleading. "Aren't we already talking about it?"

[summerdude]

"I mean, like, specifically," Magnus says. "Talk about it on purpose. I don't know, man, isn't it good manners to check in about this sort of thing?" He regards Shen Qingqiu for a moment. "Like I said, I feel like that all the time. Not about becoming gay, I got on board really fast with that one because, like, obviously! Dudes! But becoming an einherji and stuff?" He shrugs. "Mostly my philosophy is to just go with it. Can't go backwards so might as well go all in, you know?"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu is not actually sure you can't go backwards, but then, he's older and wiser than Magnus, even if he feels as awkward as a teen about all of this stuff. "Currently I'm kind of trying to, um. Dip my toes?"

[summerdude]

Magnus considers this, too. "You know what they say," he says. "You get used to the water a lot more quickly if you jump straight in. Same thing for being an einherji." You get used to being death and semi-invincible pretty quickly the second time you die, after all! "Same thing for kissing dudes."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu frowns, a little. "Okay, wait," he says. "This metaphor is getting confused. Because I am jumping straight in, because jumping in implies you can get out again, you actually, like, have to, but what you're saying, is, like, the best way to learn to swim is to have already been a fish, and I'm not, and I can't."

[summerdude]

Magnus frowns. He doesn't think he's getting a contact high, but he is getting confused. "No, I'm saying you jump in and then you turn into a fish once you're in the water." He scratches his head for a moment, then explains: "In my opinion if you want to kiss a dude, you're probably into kissing dudes on some level. So you should keep doing it. And if it's overwhelming, you can take time, but sometimes it's easier to take it as a foregone conclusion and keep at it. Does that make sense?"

[peaklordshen]

"Not really," says Shen Qingqiu, "but thanks anyway. I think you just have, like, the turning-into-fish gene and I don't." He props his head in his hand. "It's like cultivation. Ostensibly everyone can learn to turn into a fish, but some people get started too late, and the kissing never, like," he waves a hand. "Takes."

[summerdude]

"And this, um, plant," Magnus says, trying to treat the situation with as much gravity as Shen Qingqiu is. "Is it working?

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu nods, embarrassed. "Um, conclusively, I'd say."¹ Categorically, even, with Claudius. Which makes Shen Qingqiu realize—Magnus is from 2015. He brightens. "Hey," he says, "do you like Pokemon?"

¹ Magnus has caught him between his encounter with Sagramore and his encounter with Binghe.

[summerdude]

So Shen Qingqiu is just going through it, then. "Okay," Magnus says. "If you wanna talk about it after your, um, plant stops working, though, I can do that. And -- yeah, I do; you know Pokemon?"

[peaklordshen]

"I love Pokemon," says Shen Qingqiu, with vast relief not to be talking about being gay anymore. He reaches into his sleeve, fumbling around for a minute, and pulls out the Gameboy he'd been given on kiddification plot day. "Look what I found."

[summerdude]

"Dude," Magnus says, glancing at the Gameboy. He'd never had one -- or if he had, he'd been a kid at the time and lost it over the years. "You play that thing? Where you're from?"

[peaklordshen]

Oh, right, he'd been trying to keep up the wise cultivator persona in front of this kid. The reasons why, though, evade him, and anyway they pale in comparison to the excitement of being able to talk about Pokemon with someone who actually knows what he's talking about in more than vague terms (sorry, Nightingale).

"Yeah," he says. "I mean--I didn't have one in the world I was just in, before this, but I'm from Earth originally. Shanghai."

[summerdude]

"Oh," Magnus says, laser-focused on this new information. "You traveled to other worlds, too, huh? Is that why--" he gestures to indicate the clothes. "Is that something, um, expected of you?"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu huffs. "Expected is one way to put it," he says. "I guess it's accurate now. Forced onto me would better describe it at first." By the System, obviously. Being free of the OOC lock is relatively recent for him.