“Fuck.”
The heir apparent to the Once-ler fortune rubbed at the back of his neck, subtly checking and rechecking that his mask was tied on tight. He appreciated his Dad’s effort to make things a little more interesting by incorporating the masquerade theme, but it hadn’t quite worked out the way the youngest Hernández had hoped it would.
Aside from being forced to wear sleeves of all things, his Dad’s parties were always painfully uncomfortable thanks to the No Sunglasses rule. Plans to evade this rule via exploiting the masquerade motif with careful mask selection had crashed, and burned, and then exploded, and then for good measure burned a little more. Apparently masquerade masks were nothing like Halloween masks, and they did little to hide his eyes. It took a bit of desperate arting and crafting to find fabric he could still see through and then attach it to the inside of his golden mask, but the Greed-ler-in-training was pleased that he was, at least so far, getting away with his dastardly misdeeds. The family hadn’t requested that he remove his alterations, and the party goers hadn’t mentioned it at all. As long as the mask stayed on, then maybe this party wouldn’t be as bad as the rest.
Dipping his head and politely greeting guests as they passed, he made his way towards the buffet tables. It had already been an hour or more, and he was getting tired of standing in the same goddamn spot and shaking hand after hand of high powered attendees. If he tried to welcome every single guest personally he’d be there for three days. He’d heard whisperings that the estimated attendance for this year was edging towards fifteen thousand. Good thing his Dad always rented out an entire event center.
Even better that he always got the best caterer in town.
The lights, the decorations, the two giant Christmas trees on either side of the entrance, and the mix of carols and top 40′s pumping from the speakers all paled in comparison to the five-foot chocolate fountain that had a certain Mr. Hernández’s name on it. Preston could handle the schmoozing for a while. His brother was better at it than he ever was.
