Event Private Finished Starting With an Advantage

Zare had never participated in anything even close to a Secret Santa before, and he had been feeling a little bit lost. Really, he probably should have shopped immediately once he'd gotten his assignment, but instead he'd... well, left it to the last minute.

But that was fine. The list had included magic and the supernatural, and Zare was all about that.

Or a bit more accurately, his school had been all about that.

So Zare had gone right ahead and engaged in the time honored tradition of regifting, digging around in what few possessions he still had until he found something suitable.

An endless notebook made sense, right? At first glance it was pretty thin--no more than fifty pages--but the more you wrote in it, the bigger it would get. Zare had seen people just use the one single notebook for all of their classes, even if it meant the notebook would be downright gigantic.

He'd wrapped it up in some snowflake print wrapping paper, tucked it under his arm, and headed down to the meeting point in the courtyard at the appropriate time. Maybe, if he was lucky, he'd actually get something good out of it.

Some gifts were easily disguised: the journal he'd wrapped up could have been damn near anything from a glance. It could have been a normal book, it could have been a video game, it could have been a box of chocolates...

On the other hand, some gifts were fairly obvious.

The moment Zare laid his eyes on his partner (Alby, if the note could be trusted), his brain rifled through the very short list of objects that were that long and that thin and came up with the most obvious answer: fishing rod. There was the strange protrusion that he assumed was a handle (Zare absolutely didn't know the terms), the way the tip was free to bend...

If it wasn't a fishing rod, he'd have been genuinely surprised.

Zare hopped up on his feet, towering to his full height and looking down at Alby. Alby was... small. Maybe he was average sized for a human (Zare was struggling a bit with the concept of average human size, because the island had so much variety), but Zare was a solid seven feet tall, and that put him a good foot and a half over Alby.

He sort of thought the kid might have been approximately his sort of age in human terms, but that too was hard to tell.

"That's me," he said, bearing his teeth in a gesture that was hard to read as anything other than threatening, even if it didn't last. "Got your gift right here." He didn't waste any time, holding the wrapped journal out for Alby to take as his eyes fell to the unmistakably fishing rod shaped package Alby was carrying.

"Alby Ohara," Zare said, although he didn't say it quite right—not enough of a gap between the O and the hara—but it wasn't an entirely wrong, and at the very least it wasn't a bad attempt for someone who'd likely never heard the name before.

"Zare," he said, and then realized abruptly that Zare wasn't his only name, and his family name would probably be expected. "Blakesley." Plus, the Blakes were a thing again, and it would probably look suspicious if he didn't identify himself.

He reached up, dragging a single sharp claw through the wrapping paper like it was a pair of scissors, slicing neatly through the side of the paper to reveal... a fishing rod. Of course it was a fishing rod, but the corner of his mouth quirked up in amusement just the same.

"Makes sense," he said. "Never tried it, but fishing might be nice. Fresh meat. Lots of variety. Plus, we're on an island and all that." It wasn't the sort of thing he'd have thought about, but it made sense.

"You should open mine."

"Seems like a decent gift to me," Zare said. He couldn't entirely follow why someone would be worried about that, but then that was just him: he wasn't worried about Alby not liking his gift at all.

"It's magic," Zare said after a moment's consideration about whether or not he should let it be a surprise. "It keeps getting bigger if you write more in it." He was a tad too right-then oriented to miss out on Alby's enjoyment about his gift, which he knew, without question, that Alby would enjoy.

How could he not? It fit the criteria perfectly, after all.

Oh dear. Zare almost felt bad about how insanely excited Alby seemed to get. He was practically bouncing in his seat, literally hugging it.

Which Zare supposed meant it was a pretty good gift, even if he'd pulled it almost out of a hat. Which meant Zare considered his part done.

And he was about to leave—really, he was—when a memory sort of wiggled its way into his brain.

"Hold on," he said suddenly. "You aren't a senior, are you?" He just looked so young... but then, almost all humans did. Venomaw grew extremely quickly, and they didn't do that spend twenty years getting slowly bigger stuff.