Dec 1, Marius

She's been planning it for weeks, and by the time December 1st finally rolls around, Raven is practically giddy with it. There are a lot of things she loves about Darrow, but Kagura had been her favourite thing by far last year, and she's been waiting impatiently for the reopening all year. Last year, she hadn't gotten the chance to try out the ski slopes, and that's something she intends on rectifying immediately. She knows that Lincoln and Octavia would likely join her without much hesitation - Octavia, especially - but she's got somebody else in mind.

Raven sends Marius a message a week beforehand instructing him to keep the day free, but that's about all she tells him. The rest she intends to be a surprise, even if he'll perhaps regret trusting her later. She tells him to pack warm and meet her at the train station, where she's got bags packed and a bright grin on her face. He'd promised to go skiing with her last year, and maybe it's twelve months late, but she's decided she's still holding him to it.

The station is busy, filled with people who have apparently had much the same idea. She knows Kagura gets ridiculously busy quickly, but she didn't have the patience to wait until things might have quieted down a little. Besides, the atmosphere of everyone bundled up against the cold and waiting excitedly for the train is nice.

"I hope you brought a few of your ridiculous scarves," she tells him when he arrives, beaming at him. Without waiting for him to question it, she points upwards towards the mountains, unable to keep the secret in any longer. "Kagura's open again and if I remember rightly, someone promised me they'd come skiing with me."

Early December, Bodhi

She doesn't know how she ended up here, exactly. Raven remembers walking down the street, remembers feeling her stomach rumble and deciding she should eat, but everything from that point on seems like something out of a fever dream. The place is called The Enchanted Forest of Pizza, and that probably should have been her first clue that things weren't going to be normal. She'd made the mistake of hesitating outside, the lure of pizza overriding her better common sense.

There'd been nothing remotely appetising on the menu she'd glanced at - everything seems to be some weird horrible combination of ingredients that should never go together let alone be on a pizza - but a waiter had grabbed her arm and pulled her inside talking excitedly before she could protest. Now, she's being watched by a handful of creepy terracotta gnomes with jaunty Santa hats as he pulls her through the strangest looking restaurant she's ever seen, seating her at a table that already has a man sitting at it.

"This one's taken--" she protests uselessly, but the waiter is already talking over the top of her, announcing the specials loudly and with a smile that she's pretty sure is going to cause his face to crack.

If nothing else, the gnomes have definitely made her forget she had any appetite at all, and Raven looks at the guy across from her helplessly. She recognises him, remembers him washing up on the beach months ago, looking like hell. Now he just looks as bewildered as she does. "Bodhi, right?" she asks, ignoring the waiter who's still powering on determinedly, almost robotic. "I'd apologise for crashing your table but I don't think I had a choice in the matter."