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The lobby of the Serverwide home is alight with life and wonder, Christmas spirit thick in the air. Very rarely is there ever enough time to coordinate their respective sleeping patterns to even get this many people together, excluding the few that are still missing, most of them out celebrating with their own families.
Their Server is tight-knit, but they still haves lives outside of it, they're allowed to.
Nonetheless, no Christmas preparations had really been done — save for maybe buying everything they need for the holiday, there's nothing prepared. The tree isn't decorated. It's something that the Server had wanted to do all together, and they'd ended up having to wait until Christmas day, when everyone's schedule allocated.
"I think it looks fine," Miwu groans, their moth-sized body resting on one of the shelves, directly across from the tree. "You've been working on it for two bloody hours, come on now,"
"It looks awful!" Nat whines, pulling off half of the ornaments, the fragile things gathered in a massive pile on the floor. The tree is already covered with garland and lights, of which they had to replace twice, in various colors and patterns. The tree itself is fine, a normal evergreen for the season, but...
It has been two hours, and it seems like someone is dead set on getting it perfect, to the point where there are pine needles all over the floor and it smells very pungently of nature. Some of the branches are snapped in a couple places, or missing too many pine needles to even be considered alive, from ornaments being yanked off and moved around so frequently.
"Toby, it's okay! I think it looks good!" Vinnie comforts slightly, sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor next to the pile of ornaments, fiddling with one of the plastic ones. It's one of the cutesy ones, the design messy and silly, but it's a sentimental thing to keep it.
Even if it does look kinda ugly.
Obsidian is sitting next to Vinnie, staring at the tree with an almost sideways look, as if trying to understand something about it. Half of the lights in the back of the tree are turned off, one of the bulbs broken, the tree spun around. They just shrug and turn back to placing hooks in the ornaments, the ones that don't already have them built in. Vinnie hands them a couple more of the little metal pieces they use to bend into the hook shape as they begin to try and barter with Nat.
"Come on, it's okay. Let's take a break and come back to it!" Vinnie suggests, a general sound of agreement echoing, but the genuine distress about the tree is beginning to turn the mood a little sour.
"..fine! Fine. I'll.. start on the baking. You guys can finish it up, please, I can't bear to look at my hanging work." Nat mourns the loss of their work on the tree, just a little bit, but they're more eager to start baking — they've only got a couple hours before everyone is here and ready to go, so they need to hurry it up a little.
"Yippee! Okay, go go go, come on," Ben seems ever-eager to get away from the stupid Christmas tree, dragging past them into the kitchen. Maybe just so they can bake together, maybe so Ben can steal some of their samples, who knows. At least it gets the tree a little break so the smell of pure, putrid sap can filter out a bit.
Miwu sighs, almost exasperatedly, their metallic wings unfurling from behind them and carrying them off to.. somewhere, who the fuck knows.
Ben leads the way, and Nat follows closely behind, dragging their feet (and equally heavy, massive fucking battle axe tail) across the floor, past the kitchen table, and straight into the kitchen.
Sitting at the table is another group of people, waiting for the festivities to start (and maybe for food), a deck of cards spread out between them. It's not really clear what they're playing — some version of poker? — but they're having fun anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Tadrin is dealing, somehow the most reliable of the group, the only one who won't deal biased cards. The deck looks a little small, especially considering they're only dealing for five, but whatever — they're usually missing a couple cards from each deck around here. Someone keeps eating them all.
They sit in a weird order, Mineboy on the far left, then Fangy, then Emerald, followed by Medi, and then Pyxis on the far right. The table is just barely round enough for that to be manageable, all of them sitting a good two feet away from eachother, considering the table is meant for a twenty-something house party — and they had all been advised against ruining the decorations or organization of the table, lest the face the wrath of the organizer.
(Nat keeps a good eye on them from the kitchen. Any chair moved even slightly out of place solicits a glare.)
The last card in the lineup is placed upright, and there's a cheer from the far end of the table, where Emerald is sitting. The layout of the cards is the Seven of Clubs, the Five of Clubs, the King of Diamonds, the Six of Clubs, and the Seven of Hearts. Somehow, everyone had been convinced to go all in.
It's inexplicable how the game turns out this way — usually, gambling inside the Server house was absolute chaos, unorganized fighting — but it's calm, except for Emerald's unfaltering excitement.
"Three of a kind!" Emerald lays out his cards, the Seven of Hearts and a Two of Spades. He looks almost triumphant, and a groan comes from Mineboy, who drops his hand.
"I'm fucked, good game," he comments, laying his cards face down instead of face up. Tadrin sweeps them off the table, placing them in a small discard pile, waiting to collect the other cards.
Fangy doesn't move to drop theirs, and neither does Pyxis or Medi, all of them almost frozen. It's not really easy to tell what any of them are thinking, not until Fangy's hand twitches and they suddenly slam down their cards, the table shaking. Their hair falls slightly out of their bun, the pink strands falling in front of their face as they look around with an almost evil glare.
"And I," they laugh, a maniacal, crazed sound (probably from playing too much poker), "have a Straight! Which, traditionally, beats three of a kind!"
Tadrin glances off the table at a large guide book open on the chair next to him. His finger drags across one of the lines before he says, "Fangy's right," and Emerald erupts with a groan.
"Come on! I was so close to winning!" he whines, slumping over in his chair, his hand now abandoned on the edge of the table. Their metal arm slides off of the edge of the wood, leaving slight gouges in the newly-varnished material, something that he will certainly have to pay for later. But for now, he's more focused on his poker loss, annoyed at Fangy's boasting behavior.
It certainly doesn't last for long, as Medi throws in his hand, laughing. "I have a flush," he comments, and he does. His cards land face up, two Clubs cards, making five with the same suit. Fangy's expression falters for a moment before it falls entirely, and he falls onto his knees dramatically, mourning his Poker loss.
Medi doesn't have the gall to look triumphant, knowing that someone still hasn't placed down their cards.
He glances over to Pyxis, who's cards cover the lower half of their face, but the glint in their eyes is uncanny.
Pyxis doesn't flip the cards, placing the faces down on the table, Tadrin raising a brow as if to ask what the cards are. There's a long, tense moment of silence, before someone breaks that silence.
Mineboy, ever bold, asks the one question scratching at all of their minds.
"What are your cards, Local?"
She stares Mineboy down, as if looking straight through his soul, before flipping the cards — slowly, away from the eyes of the rest of the table.
The two little cards, large suits and large numbers to accommodate for everyone in the house, flutter onto the table, landing right next to the five laid out cards that Tadrin had placed on the table just moments prior.
Seven of Hearts, Ace of Diamonds.
"Full house," she laughs, leaned back in her chair. Her shark tail swings around the leg of the chair, knocking into Medi's, who yelps and swipes his chips over to her without a second thought.
The entire table is tense before Tadrin shrugs. "Local wins," he declares, forcing the rest of the people at the table to swipe their chips over to her. Her piles are stacked nearly to the ceiling, all five players finally having to declare that Pyxis has won, drawing away from the table.
Not without having to clean off the Poker set, though.
Abel swipes the cleaned up set off the table to bring it to the closet, followed closely by Gnarpy and Mincy, who are.. arguing, over something. Maybe. He's not really sure, the set clanking in his hands. It's heavy to carry and annoying, he's not sure why they haven't upgraded and just bought a proper poker set yet. They're missing half the damn cards in the thing, anyway.
"I think your opinion sucks." Gnarpy complains, meddling Mincy about some sort of weird video game (with a blue hedgehog? Maybe? He thought he'd caught that clip in their earlier conversation), her finger sticking directly in Mincy's face. The other backs away with an "ew!", though jokingly.
"I can't believe I'm standing next to a certified HATER," Mincy scoffs, turning their head away, pretending to wipe at tears on their face. "And I thought we were MARRIED!"
Gnarpy's face falls, but it's easy to tell that it's a joke. Their silly relationship was always something like that, a joking marriage between them, constant "executions" and "divorces". It's a nice banter to have around the house, when everything is just too quiet, when Pyxis and Miwu are arguing or there just aren't enough people around.
Their banter continues as Abel fights to find a place in the games closet for the poker set, fiddling with boxes of Monopoly to try and get it to stay still. A couple more things fall out at their feet, and they grumble frustratedly, trying to simply force everything in there.
Snowy approaches from the left hallway with a mug of hot chocolate, sipping on the half-empty cup, spotting the group and Abel's predicament. He places the mug on the floor before reaching down and grabbing all the fallen games, ushering Abel out of the way by a couple inches and magically stuffing everything inside the closet.
It, somehow, holds. Abel looks impressed, closing the closet door easily and giving Snowy a high-five.
They really needed to organize that stupid closet, but —
A toy car goes flying by Abel's head, Gnarpy shrieking playfully, ducking away from it. It ricochets down the hall, and before any of them can give a call of warning, it flies straight down and... nails Nova right in the forehead.
She groans and clutches at the injured area, tumbling to her knees, and falling face-first on the floor. It's a gentle fall, but nonetheless it is one, and there are gasps of utter surprise and shock.
"You've KILLED HER!" Gnarpy cries from behind Abel, and he sighs, rubbing at his temples.
He's forming a headache already, even as Nova stands back up and joins the silly argument, pretending to be a widowed, mourning ghost. Their voices form a normally welcome cacophony, but today is very loud.
As chaos unfurls in the main hallway, some of the inhabitants settle down on the couch, most notably Cuddlez, Dan, and Katie. There's a couple others scattered around, some doing some last-minute present wrapping out of the eyes of their gift-receiver, but none that primarily sit in the living room.
It's quieter in here, the doors closed to give some illusion of calmness this early in the morning. It's nine-am, Eastern Standard Time, and the house is alight with energy. A little relaxing together doesn't do them any harm, especially as Cuddlez rambles on and on, some random show playing on the TV — it's an absolutely awful, disgusting romcom that they insist on watching around the holiday season.
The lady on screen swoons again, saying something about beautiful Christmas miracles and men are so hot, and Cuddlez groans excessively, continuing to excitedly drone on about all of the inconsistencies.
There's vague noises of agreement from her partners, or sometimes extra commentary, or a prompting on a question, but it's nice and quiet and homey.
..Until Nat comes barreling in, carrying about thirty different wrapped presents in a large bag that they unceremoniously throw onto the floor. The boxes tumble out, some of the papers splitting at the edges, each box having a crude name sharpie'd onto the top. The wrapping paper is rainbow and bright and eye-splitting, and they take a deep breath before calling to the entire population of the house
"GIFTS UNDER THE TREE!" he calls, shrieking throughout the entire house, a vague cacophony resonating back to him. "I DON'T CARE IF THEY'RE WRAPPED OR NOT! YOU HAD SIX WEEKS TO WRAP THEM, PUT EM UNDER!"
Various people come in and drop more piles of presents beneath the tree, each section having a designated person for it to make gift unwrapping a little easier. It hadn't been that way for a couple of years now, and they'd figured out some kind of system, each person writing names of who the gift was meant to go to on top. There's not enough space for all of them to have their own section, so some are grouped together, like the couples or the various siblings. The system works well enough, somehow.
The tree seems to have been decorated between the two hours it took Nat to bake all the stuff currently cooling in the kitchen (their speedy oven is helping a ton), and it's apparently satisfactory. Nat doesn't complain and nobody seems to notice the difference. The lights on the back of the tree are lit, too, the broken bulb finally replaced. It's almost perfect, if not for the couple people who run in and slap a name on top of an unwrapped box, calling it good enough.
They're a perfect form of chaos, something that is absolutely unorganized to a T, but it's the way they always work. It's simplistic, they're used to it, it's nice.
The rest of the house makes their way in slowly but surely, each dropping off presents as they do so, and the latest guests of the morning walk in synchronously, each Guest taking a similar spot on the floor next to the couch. Each dons the number 814, and they're quiet, like usual — though it's a nice quiet compared to the absolute hell of the morning. They, of course, drop off their various gifts at the places around the tree for them, though they do so in perfect choreography.
It's a display, but it's something you get used to.
All of their gifts are wrapped in Miata-themed wrapping paper.
Everybody eventually finds a place to sit, or stand, or float (in Miwu's case specifically), and Nat stands triumphantly at the head of it all, just in front of the tree. Once he finally counts everyone and seems satisfied of the organization, he turns to the crowd, his tail swishing slightly.
"We will open presents," he pants, out of breath from having to call everyone over, his voice a little unstable, "after food! I just made a ton of desserts, and other foods, and I planned around all of your dietary restrictions, you will eat my fucking cooking. Please and thank you."
"But what about-" someone pipes up, but there is no argument, the glare leveled at the crowd very obviously against any argument. The tension is thick in the air, although not stressfully so, but it could be cut with a knife.
There is a moment of silence. Nat makes direct eye contact with most of the crowd, drowning the air from the audience.
The tension suddenly bursts, and movement begins instead.
Then most of the group stands and bolts to the table, with the exception of the few that flied or walked in sync, all taking their designated seats. Plates are already set out dishes are being brought from the kitchen one after another, Ben taking a helping role in bringing things out. There's a variety of dishes, many of which are from different cultural species, laid out along the table. It's a lot, especially to make in two hours, but there is just something about baking which this house has always had a supernatural knack for.
Everyone grabs something from the table, whether it just be some sort of weird Jell-O and meat combination (some weirdo requested it, wonder who) or an actual dish that had taken a bit to put together, everyone is eating. Happy and content, on Christmas morning, just before opening gifts so nobody is hungry.
That is, until the first peanut is thrown across the table.
It clanks against Emerald's head, and he stares at the fallen food for a moment.
There is utter, deep silence, as if the abyss had just swallowed the table whole.
"Emerald, no," Nat murmurs, his eyes narrowing, trying to pray that the cyborg's mischievous glint would go away.
There are no Christmas miracles here.
"FOOD FIGHT!" someone proclaims, but it is far too quiet against the loud SMACK as a plate hits the wall, and a fork goes flying. The plates are shatter proof, thank everything that is holy, but the walls are not immune to damage. The fork embeds itself in the plaster, and the table breaks out into a pure battlefield.
Various things are thrown, silverware embedded into the table and walls and floor and chairs, lemon staining the tablecloth, wine sloshed along the floor; a handful of people are trying to contain the disaster, going around to clean things up as they go, but there is no containing this.
Nebula holds their mug of hot chocolate in their hands, looking out at the chaos that unfolds at the table, standing just outside the dining room to free themselves of the splash zone.
These people are fucking weird, they think briefly, taking a sip of the hot chocolate, but damn they can make good hot cocoa.