The two Bluetooth speakers were battling for dominance, without consideration for any audio-sensoral concerns of the queasier attendees. Two of the three Ashes had arrived. An indoor game of Catch-The-JBL’s increasing velocities terrified any home residents aware of the tender fragility of a good set of venetian blinds, while also generating an effect of rhythmic seemingly rising and falling volume which gradually almost bodily sickened any present audio engineers. Celice accepted a hit of a portable marijuana dispenser shaped like a chopstick with 3 lights that never really seemed to her to stop blinking. All 6 fluid ounces of a Kool-Aid Jammer unceremoniously burst due to mounting pressures from the unaware behind of Valentine, whose ass had recently made such an unprecedented and genuinely impressive leap forward in both size and shape that it had been commented upon to a thoroughly uninterested party by Jasper F to be “rapidly making him reconsider his stance on ethical non-monogamy.”

A heated discussion occurs on the front porch between Alain and Shard on patheticness, about whether donating money to someone who had previously stolen from you or sending a fourth message in a row to someone who had ignored (or maybe just not seen?) the last three you had sent was worse, but perhaps against your better judgement, sending it (the text) anyway was, but it (the discussion) was swiftly reaching a fever pitch. Comments were exchanged about one another’s need for a “professional opinion” on snarkily uttered self-statements to the effect of oneself having “been doing just fine in regards to relationships, thank you very much.”

Serenity reaches her sixteenth consecutive minute of asking innocent seat-dwellers to move so that she could please look for her phone. Someone screams about how an unidentified asshole had left the upstairs bathroom’s door closed after concluding their use of it. Nobody’s head turns. There is an air of lethargy over the dance floor so intense that an empath is forced to call a Lyft. A third Ash knocks on the back door, and goes unanswered while Malen tries for an astonishing 120 seconds to make their way to open it, gives up, and retreats to a beanbag chair. Carsyn is asked by Latuda for his Venmo username to pay up on an inadvisable bet he had just lost on the quantity of tattoos belonging to the left arm of the next person through the front door, and replies by asking if CashApp would be OK. Celice is accosted by someone she cannot recall ever having seen before in her entire twenty one years of life, and sanctimoniously asked if they can “talk this whole thing through outside.”

Valentine is trying to pull Shard inside to do a shot with her so she doesn’t feel the distressing effects of being seen drinking alone, which Alain is having none of, himself wanting rather more to get “this tenderqueer” to admit that maybe it’s “not always their ex’s fault that they only had two weeks to move out before the locks were getting changed” and to “maybe try dropping the soft boy act” for even a fraction of a second. The two Bluetooth speakers have reached the unlikely singularity of playing different verses of the same emo song. The remote-controlled LED strips change from bright yellow to navy, making everyone look a bit more like an infant who’s running low on spare oxygen, and causing Serenity to burst into tears when no one mentions how much nicer her hair looks now that she’d just gotten back from adding a blonde streak to it in the bathroom, which is considered internally by Jasper F to be a rather lucky break, as he runs over and begins comforting her with a rather forward palm on the small of her back.