Quarantine Day 0

Avery Schreave would forever remember his eighteenth birthday as the day that everything went to shit.

There he was, having a good time, drinking his rum and coke (legality be damned, he was the prince) while the band played his favorite songs, and then it just had to go and get ruined by his sister and her slideshow featuring all his most embarrassing baby pictures.

"Thank you, Addy, that's enough," Avery grumbled as he took his tipsy sister by the arm and steered her away from the podium. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do about the picture of him buck-naked in the bathtub, screaming his head off because he had thrown his rubber duck overboard. Addison looked completely unashamed, her head held high with pride as she let her brother steer her to her table.

"I think you looked cute," she said, reaching up to pinch his flushed cheek. Though Addison was three years his senior, sometimes Avery felt like he was the older sibling.

"Where's Li Jun?" Avery asked, looking around the room for his sister's fiancé so he could take Addison off his hands. Li Jun had a knack for escaping these kinds of events, mostly because he was too proud to admit he couldn't tie a bowtie. If only Avery could use such excuses...

"Dunno," Addison shrugged, unbothered. "Said he was running late."

That meant Li Jun wasn't coming at all. The bowtie strikes again! His absence was also probably why Addison had started drinking so much, and so heavily. She never did well when Li Jun stood her up. She was like an octopus: constantly clinging to something or someone. Remove the base to which she clings and you have a loose octopus ready to make embarrassing slideshows of a brother she could barely tolerate sober.

"I dunno why you're mad at me," Addison pouted, looking quite upset. "I worked reallllly hard on those pictures!"

"You showed my bare, infantile ass to the entire ballroom, Addy. Now, instead of remembering tonight as the best night of my adult life, I have to remember it as the night my sister embarrassed me in front of a room filled with important world leaders."

"Come on, three more of those - " she pointed to his rum and coke - "and you'll forget all about your baby butt. Cute baby bubble butt..."

"Can you please stop," Avery pleaded, his face getting even redder.

"Is everything alright Your Highness?" a passing waiter asked, a tray of crab cakes balanced in one hand. "Is there anything I can get you?"

Avery looked toward the waiter to see that his and Addison's spat had attracted some attention. Including their mother's.

Queen Deirdre and King Henry sat off to the side of the ballroom, quietly enjoying the festivities. They were not a lively couple, but if the right song played, Avery knew his father would get up and ask his mother for her hand and they would dance gracefully across the ballroom floor. More and more often these days, however, even if the right song played Queen Deirdre would not be up to a dance. Too tiresome, she would say. These old bones can't carry me like they once did. She was forty-five, but that didn't stop the aches and pains she tried her best to smile through.

She leaned forward in her throne, concern etched into her ever-placid face. She looked beautiful tonight: her hair all done up and wearing one of her favorite party dresses. Avery hated to ruin one of her good moods.

"We're fine, thank you," Avery said, dismissing the waiter his mother had no doubt sent their way. She visibly relaxed in her seat when she saw Avery compose himself - the threat of a tantrum averted - returning to her usual smiling at the crowd.

Avery looked back at Addison, a little less irate now that the moment had passed. "If I leave you here, will you be alright?"

"Don't worry about me, I'll be juuuuuust fine," Addison sing-songed, reaching for a drink that wasn't her own left unattended by some other partygoer. She took a long slurp off of the straw, not worried about the previous owner's lipstick marks. Disgusting. Avery had to walk away before he gagged.

His first stop was to the bar for another rum and coke. His second stop was to track down that waiter with the crab cakes. And his third stop...well...there had to be someone in this room he could party with!

It was hard for Avery's eyes not to circle back to his parents. Some advisor leaned down close to the king's ear, whispering something that had Henry's face draining to the color of paper. He got up from his throne and swiftly exited the ballroom. Avery wanted to follow, wanted to know what had upset his father so much, but got caught up in a storm of champagne and floral.

"Your Highness!" a high-pitched voice exclaimed, pulling him into a hug that smelled like the inside of a florist, too cloying and sweet. "It's so good to see you again!"

Avery knew that voice. It was never good to see the owner of that voice.

"Nice to see you too, Cameron."

Cameron Garcia was the loudest, most obnoxious socialite in Angeles. Even her fellow socialites couldn't stand her; they just kept inviting her to things because societal rules dictated that since she was the richest and the most influential in the group to which she belonged, she must hold a place at all functions. Which included Avery's birthday ball. Because once upon a time when they were babies, his mother and her mother were friends-ish and so they played in the foyers of each other's houses while their mothers talked about whatever it was mothers talked about. Avery and Cameron hadn't been close in years. Why royals had to adhere to societal rules and invite people they didn't even like nor know anymore was beyond Avery. They were royals. They made the rules.

Still, Avery couldn't very well tell her to get lost and ruin his image as a perfect gentleman before it even was established. So, he forced a smile and pretended to listen to whatever garbage was falling past Cameron's bubblegum pink glossed lips.

"I cannot believe your parents sprang for all this! They are so good to you! You must feel so lucky."

Avery did feel lucky. He felt lucky to have parents who loved him as much as his did, who spoiled him with a ball large enough to rival any other, who gave him a mountain of presents he had yet to open but could not wait to unwrap. He was the luckiest boy in the world. However, because admitting all that would not be cool, Avery settled for shrug.

"Yeah, they're alright," he said, looking out at the room full of partygoers. He didn't know more than half of the people in attendance; the guest list was dictated by societal rules, not by him. Still, everyone looked like they were having a good time. No one was pointing and laughing at him, so maybe he would survive the baby photo fiasco.

"Alright?" Cameron's voice went up an octave. "This is freaking amazing! You don't even know how good you have it. For my eighteenth birthday the only thing I said I wanted was a Porsche, but did I get a Porsche? Noooooo I got a Maserati. And not even half the people I invited attended my gala. It wasn't even at the Ritz! The audacity. I tried to get Mommy and Daddy to ask the King and Queen if we could rent out the ballroom, but - "

Avery tuned Cameron out. After a while, her entitled rants all sounded the same. He vaguely remembered throwing her birthday invitation in the trash.

Avery was just about to make an excuse to flee Cameron's presence when a large, heavy hand landed on his shoulder. Avery turned around to face his father, grim-faced and older than Avery had ever seen him. Cameron faded away, her bowing and babbling reduced to background noise as Avery gave his father his full attention.

"You need to see this," was all King Henry said, scaring the shit out of Avery. Had he done something wrong? Had something happened with his mother? Had his father uncovered the stash of playboys he had hidden under the loose floorboard of his closet?

King Henry remained stoic and silent as they exited the ballroom. Avery had no idea where they were going, walking the familiar halls through the palace. It wasn't until he recognized the paintings on the wall and the familiar placard on the door that he realized his father had taken him to his office. They weren't the only ones there. A whole group of council members crowded around the TV mounted on the far wall. Their faces were a mix of dread and fear. One woman was crying.

"What's going on?"

"Watch."

His father grabbed the remote from his desk and turned up the volume, the crowd of council members parting so that the King and Prince could have the best view.

It was the news, the banners across the top and bottom of the screen blaring words in bright red, all capital letters screaming out their importance. Too bad Avery was dyslexic. He would have to wait to hear what the announcer had to say. What required no translation was the footage being streamed. Avery had seen pictures like this in his history textbooks when he learned about the bombings during World War II: a large mushroom cloud of dust and debris covering a desolated patch of land. It was a grim sight, not at all the kind of cheery video he wanted to see on his birthday. But it had to be some kind of joke. From what he could unscramble of the headlines, that mushroom cloud was in Waverly.

"The missile touched down just shy of the Waverly-Hansport border moments ago, covering the area in a dense layer of debris. It's hard to say what the cloud contains or how many casualties were caused upon impact. We only have this video for context."

The next bit of footage featured someone Avery recognized: President Zhang Wei of New Asia. He was a severe man, balding, with a towering pencil-thin frame. He never found anything funny and never found anything pleasing, especially Illéa. Tensions between New Asia and Illéa had been skyrocketing over the past year for reasons Avery's father refused to tell him. King Henry always said 'you're too young to get involved in these things' and shoved Avery back to his own office to file taxes or read citizen's petitions. Easy things. Not international affairs things.

Not war things.

President Zhang Wei sounded angry. Avery didn't understand a word of New Asian and the translation at the bottom of the screen moved too fast for him to read. But the crying woman wept a little louder. The lines on the faces of those around him grew a little deeper. His father's greying temple throbbed a little more noticeably.

The footage flipped back to the news anchor. He looked just as grim as everyone in the room. From behind him, the live stream of the mushroom cloud swallowed the sun.

"There is no mistaking it folks," he said, fear lining a voice that Avery knew was used to peddling cheer. "New Asia has just declared war with Illéa."

King Henry flipped off the television. Everyone was quiet. No one knew what to do, what to say. So they waited for their king.

"I want the palace on lockdown. No one comes or goes until we figure out our next steps."

There were murmurs of 'yes, Your Majesty' and 'right away, Your Majesty' before the council members scurried off to their respective posts, heads bent and eyes trained on the ground to keep from showing their distress. That left Avery floundering in the middle of his father's office, head spinning as he tried to process what had just happened.

"Dad, what's going on?" There was a whiny edge to his voice that his father hated, but Avery couldn't filter it out between the sheer terror rocking through his barely-adult body.

"New Asia has just dropped a biochemical warhead on us. Whatever's in it is coming our way, and as Schreave men, we have an obligation to be the ones to tackle this crisis head on," King Henry said, too focused on being a king to comfort Avery as a father. His tone was no-nonsense, dead serious. "This whole nation is going under quarantine."

Quarantine. Great.

Happy birthday to him.


Surprise!

Now, I know what you may be thinking: "Ruby, you have another gargantuan project going on right now that you update slow as molasses, how can you possibly take on another one?" I'm here to tell you that I have been INSPIRED - both by current events and by anj - and that this story is so fundamentally different than Heart that I'm confident I can manage it. My intention is not to offend anyone affected by the current coronavirus quarantine, but I do think with all the chaos out there in the world right now, we could use a little distraction and a few laughs in the face of all this absurdity.

For this story I will take 15 characters. There are NO RULES to submitting a character to this SYOC. I don't care who they are, where they're from, how old they are, what gender they identify as, if they're poor or rich. You can submit princes, princesses, lords, ladies, council members, members of the press, politicians, celebrities, athletes, performers, servants, guards, and more! It doesn't matter. They just have to have a valid reason for attending Prince Avery's birthday ball. (The only caveat is that you cannot submit members of the Illéan royal family, obviously)

And please, don't feel like you have to submit a girl or guy between the ages of 15-19 in order to have a chance at getting any screen time in this SYOC. This is NOT A SELECTION. While romance may happen between ANY of the characters, it is not the point of the story to get the prince hitched (honestly, the prince is a whiny little shit on purpose; he's not supposed to be likable and attractive). I want to see a wide range of ages/genders/sexualities/personalities/etc...The more diverse the cast, the more fun and chaos can ensue!

I will do my best to actively update my profile page as the submissions get accepted so that everyone can see the cast. And that way hopefully I don't get a dozen princesses or a dozen rich kids or a dozen pro athletes. You get what I'm saying. It's always okay to shoot me a message and ask what's been taken or what I'm lacking before investing a ton of energy into a character I already have four of :)

The submission form is posted on my profile page. You can contact me via PM or the Selection discord with any questions. Please give me a grace period of 24 hours to respond to any communications because I work in a hospital and we don't take corona breaks. Thanks!