Just Roll With It || Marching Band AU

Graduation Band - Food

As the band bus pulls to a halt, the kids in the seats lurch forward.  Ander stands from his front seat again, and clapped twice, getting the band's attention.  Everyone slowly stopped talking and looked up to where he stood.  They listened intently as he instructed to wait in line for the buffet, grab a seat, and eat before anyone goes to the small arcade attached to the building.  As he dismissed them everyone jolted into action.  People grabbed their things and pushed through the thin aisles.  

After waiting in line and picking out their pizza people sat in the booths with their cliques.  Some particular members of the band entertained the idea of a contest to see who could eat the most pizza.  Mountain brought up the idea to Olgart, Chirp and Ugarth first, but when Olgart said "You wanna bet?" after being told he couldn't win, Sylnan was involved.  Betting was something he was particularly good at.  Chirp reminded Mountain that he could not, in fact, eat food, and said he would keep track and watch out for cheating.  They all started with a plate of five slices, and the plan was that if they needed more, racing to the buffet was part of the challenge.  With a count down by chirp, the contest commenced.

Ander was in the back of the line.  After getting his food he sat at a table with Katherine, a human flutist with long curly hair, Oriana, the previously mentioned tiefling french horn, and his niece, Velrisa.  They sat and ate together.  The group reminisced on past band years and past events in personal life.  The conversation they had evolved into talking about the coming year and the excitement and fear for the future of their band.

The first group to go to the arcade consisted of Br'aad, Taxi, Redd and Quinn. They look around at the games and all played a few.  Quinn tried to win a prize out of a Tetris like game while Taxi and Br'aad played a game of Mario kart where you sat in a chair and drove with a wheel and a gas petal on the floor.  After they got bored with those, however they noticed that Redd was on one machine and all went to see what he was doing.  It's a claw machine, and unlike the other two claw machines in the building, it was known by the kids that have been in band years prior as not being rigged.  Redd had never been to this pizza place, being an exchange student, but his new friends in the band had spoken about it.  Every year at graduation band there is an animal drawn from it and it becomes the unofficial mascot of the bad for the rest of the year.  Last year it was a squeaky toy.  A bright pink penguin that they named Po Hung Mai after a restaurant that the band members always ate at after winning competitions.  Redd wanted to be the one to get it out of the machine so that he could be the one to have the social power of owning it, so he had already begun to try and win against the machine.  He grabbed a hawk plush up, but right before it was going to drop down the chute, it fell out of the claw.  

"If I can get the frog, then it's mine.  Screw band tradition.  I'm naming him Greg," Redd said to his friends with a smile.  And that he did.  The round, soft frog plush fell through the chute and he picked it up.  He sat it on his shoulder and put in another copper piece and tried to pick another.

"Get the mouse!" Br'aad said, pointing at a roughly made plush in the corner.

"It's not that easy.  I have to get the ones in the middle,"  Redd explained. He tried to get a small snake from the middle, but it slipped out of the hook before it was gotten.  Maybe a snake wasn't the easiest thing to grab.

"That's a rat, not a mouse,"  Taxi said, standing to the side of the machine. 

"I got it." Hilltree croaked from behind the group.  He seemed to appear out of nowhere but inserts a copper piece into the machine.  He moves the nob around even though he isn't tall enough to see into the glass window and as he presses the button, the arm goes down and miraculously grabs the stuffed rat from the corner perfectly.  Br'aad reaches down to grab it, but Hilltree swats his hand away and takes it himself. "I'll give it to ya for 4 copper."

"What? But you only used one!" Br'aad argued.

"Guess it's mine," Hilltree shrugged and turned to walk away.

"I'll give you three."

"Deal." He tossed the stuffed rat to Br'aad after he handed him the copper.  

As the eating contest came to a close Ugarth had been the clear victor.  It simply isn't possible for two a dwarf or a half elf to eat as much as a half orc.  The group collectively decided it was time for the arcade, and to the arcade they walked.  As they walked in they saw the crowd around the claw machine and decided to see if the new mascot had been drawn.

"Sylnan, look!" Br'aad showed his older brother the rat.  

"What's its name?" Taxi asked.

Br'aad's mind blanked. "What do you think?"

Redd gasped. "Ratticus."

Everyone in the group laughed, and agreed that that wouldn't work.

"What about Tibsy?" Taxi suggested.

"I like it," Sylnan said to which everyone agreed.  People continued playing arcade games and eating pizza until Ander told everyone to get back to the bus.  

On the bus after everyone settled in their seats, Ander got everyone's attention with the signature double clap. "Alright,  as some of you have noticed, there is a lot more time left before we need to be back for graduation, so I've planned a little surprise back at the school"

Talk among the students broke out about their new mascot Tibsy and the surprise that was coming back at the school.  People guessed what it was as the bus started and pulled out of the parking lot.