(no subject)

[onlyimmune]

Who| Ellie and OPEN
What| Ellie is just trying to survive but that's kind of hard when you're starving.
Where| Wandering around
When| Catch-all for everything from the cornucopia through the second week.
Warnings/Notes| language, for sure. will update if anything else.


Ellie was starving.

It wasn't the first time she had starved, of course, and it was very unlikely to be the last. It was just the first time she had starved without anything she could really do about it.

She was pretty good with plants - knew better than to eat things she wasn't absolutely sure wasn't poisonous - and she didn't recognize any of the plants. So she'd made do with the rotten apples - digging out the rotten bits with her fingers and eating around the rest. It wasn't good, and she'd thrown up once, but any food was good food, at this point.

It simply wasn't going to last.

So she went hunting.

Not literally, of course. She was armed only with a piece of wood, and she'd done nothing but run from the wildlife and the creepy moving forest. No. She was hunting for supplies. She was hunting for people.

People she could steal from.

No way that could go wrong, right?

Comments

[paidinbeer]

There was the none-to-subtle crunching of plantlife under massive feet as Orc brute forced his way through the forest. A spear in one hand and a case of beer in his other, he had a bag slung over his shoulder bulging with what was left of his bounty from the cornucopia. That was not much really food wise...but it was more then nothing. He was saving that bottle of ranch dressing for a special occasion as strange as it sounded.

He was in a good buzzed state thanks to the beer but even that was dwindling to his last few cans and he would be sad to see it go. At least the capitol made good strong beer so he wouldn't need to drink the whole case to get buzzed.

Oblivious to anyone being nearby Orc was currently on the hunt for familiar faces. Howard in particular. After the last arena separated them he thought it would be the friendly thing to do to find his best friend and try to keep him out of trouble.

And so he lumbered on, over six feet of rock and drunken teenager.

[onlyimmune]

Ellie heard Orc long before she saw him. Long, long before. It was kind of impossible not to.

She climbed a tree, immediately, at first. She didn't know what the sound was, after all, and she didn't trust anything in this place. But as she waited, perched like a cat up on a branch, she saw him come into view, lumbering by--

And he had a bag.

She noticed the beer, of course, but immediately discounted it. She was starving - alcohol was the last thing she needed or wanted. That bag, though. Maybe there was food inside it...

She opened her lips to call out to him but suddenly shut her mouth. He'd been clumsy and kind enough, when she'd met him, but that wasn't here. And hadn't he said that he'd become the way he had because he'd killed a girl before?

She drew a breath, watching him silently as he passed under her, weighing her options. But finally starvation won out.

She didn't have to get close, right?

"Hey- Orc! Orc!"

[paidinbeer]

Orc stopped and looked around slowly, unsure of where the voice had come from or if he'd even heard it to begin with. He'd heard more then a few strange noises in the arena and arena's before this one that turned out to be something he wasn't expecting.

"Hello?" He asked cautiously scanning the area again not thinking to look up.

[onlyimmune]

"Up here!" She calls from the branches of the trees, letting an arm dangle down to wave at him. "It's Ellie!"

[therealrufio]

The Summoner is starving as well. His apples didn't last long, as he'd tried using them for bait. So now he shouldn't be hard to spot as he's been digging in the soft dirt and around trees with his claws looking for insects to eat. Desperation has over taken subtlety and he has left a long swatch of debarked trees and dug holes in his quest to find enough to sustain himself.

Which may be a losing battle, he's already thinned and shirtless, having used the last tatters of what he was wearing to try and bandage the stumps where he once had wings. He's too busy with his digging to hear anyone approach.

[onlyimmune]

Ellie didn't stay in one place. Not for long, anyway. She kept on the move as much as possible, and kept her eyes and ears open for any chance of food.

She was distracted, though, just as she was walking towards Summoner's position, when a giant fat drop of rain fell from the sky and landed smack on her forehead. She looked up and swore quietly to herself. Rain. Great. Just what she needed.

She was still looking at the sky when she stepped around a tree and suddenly Summoner was in front of her.

She'd forgot the horns, and nearly jumped out of her skin when she first saw him, before her brain remembered that yes - trolls were people - not monsters.

"Holy fuck-" She said, "You scared the crap out of me." She didn't even think twice about him being a threat - he didn't look any more armed than she was, and she knew he was alright.

[therealrufio]

He startled as soon as she spoke, too concerned with the task at hand to be on the lookout for other people. He was too close to the tree he had been digging in to turn around quickly, so his horns smacked into it when he tried.

"Ow! I think you get me too. Are you okay?"

He sat back and rubbed his head where his horn started to ache.

[onlyimmune]

"Christ," She mutters, wincing as his horns smack into the tree. That really, really looked like it hurt.

"I'm fine, you know, besides the whole starving and waiting for someone to kill me thing. What the fuck are you doing?"

[hit_girl_mindy]

Fuck. She had come late, too late. They'd already taken what could be grabbed, and she'd been up shit's creek. So this meant doing just about everything but thinking about food, even as her stomach gurgled and complained, and she had to close her eyes and temper herself.

Because there was plenty, PLENTY to be angry about. Thrown from one bad situation into a worse one. Fighting to help someone who didn't care about it one way or the other. Stinking from the heat and making sure not to take anything from this place, because sh tried just a little bit of water and got sick all over the place.

The LAST thing she needed was to have more of a reason to lose fluids. How long could someone survive without food again? She could barely bother to think about it.

What she could do, however, was survive. So she did that, moving on, only stopping to rest, which she did now.

[onlyimmune]

She was trying to get some sleep. Generally she tried around dawn and dusk, curled up in a tree. She moved around at night, hoping to find a camp of people where they slept, but that was easier said than done these days. So Ellie was up in the branches when the snap of a twig below her startled her awake.

She froze, gripping the branch before she looked down.

A girl.

Younger than her, and she'd never even seen her before - but one thing was sure, she didn't have anything on her. No food, no weapons that she could spot. (Though that didn't always mean someone was completely unarmed.)

But the fact of the matter was that Ellie had always lived in a world of adults, so she had a strange and automatic reaction with people younger than her. They were rare, and unlikely to be enemies.

She could use some help right now, and it looked like the girl wandering the forest below her could use some too.

So she quietly crawled down her branch and slipped out of the tree to the forest floor.

[hit_girl_mindy]

She heard the light thud and started, turning around quickly. OK, she was pretty doomed, not having a weapon, and if her opponent had a long ranged, she was done already. So she hit the floor quick, turning her head slightly to see who was trying to get the drop on her.

Mindy raised her head to see who was there and saw a girl: older girl, but not by much, and looked just as bedraggled as she was.

"Sorry man," she said, raising her hands, laughing at the situation. "I got nothing right now."

[misscabernet]

Julie's near-insane intent on dragging every damn thing she'd gotten out of that fucking Cornucopia meant she moved slow as hell. She got caught in storms. Drenched. Thank god the bag was water-proof, or she'd have a couple of boxes of liquid eggs and a useless firestarter.

She'd learned from last Arena. She was hoarding. The first thing to go was the milk -- it'd spoil fast in the humidity, and it'd never stay inside an empty stomach if she ran out of food. It barely stayed inside her as it was.

She'd had the great idea of saving the stuff that would keep: the peanut butter, the cereal. She'd tried what she thought was an apple, only to spit it up an hour later. She ended up shaking and shivering for an entire day.

So. Peanut butter and beer was a queen's feast at this point. She made sure to only lift the bottle of booze with her real arm. Even after a week, the fake limb taking over where one of the aliens had lost her other arm? Pretty fucking weird. Still had no idea how it worked, and she didn't want to think about it. Attached nerves and, hell, she had enough nightmares as it was. Just meant she couldn't trust herself with a gun. If she ever found one.

[onlyimmune]

Ellie was soaked to the bone, shivering despite the heat. She could barely hear, or see, and was doing her best just to find an overhang or a hollow tree to shove herself into and hope that there was no wildlife in there as well.

It was just her luck that she came across Julie first.

She froze the moment she saw her - or, more importantly, saw her supplies. She ducked immediately behind the tree, gripping the sodden bark as she peered around the trunk. Finally. Finally, finally, finally.

Now she just had to come up with a plan...

[misscabernet]

The bow was another story. She'd tested the string, made sure the arm wasn't stronger than her real one so it wouldn't snap. She was paranoid as hell after last Arena. She wasn't starving this time.

After a fingerful of peanut butter, she stopped. As thick and wet as the foliage was here, she was still a damn blonde stuck in the middle of a green forest. She tucked herself under leaves as much as she could, but she stuck out.

And. Okay. She might have been trying to draw just the wrong person in. She knew she felt like a queen now, but the food wouldn't last.

She straightened up as she heard. Something. It could've been a brush of leaves or the crunch of green under feet. Julie has made sure to train herself to be paranoid. She grabbed one of her arrows and held it tight, the shaft slick under the wet all over her hands. "Go ahead and come out. I'm not in the mood."

If no one was there (or she got an axe to the head), then she was just an asshole. No big deal.

Week 2 after Perry

[shambler]

R wanders away from the aftermath of Perry Kelvin AKA "The Boy Who Isn't Quite as Dead as He's Supposed to Be", down a jaw and missing it even days later. He stumbles away dripping black blood, a few strings of shriveled flesh hanging down from the remnants of his mouth. Which way was he going? Whatever plan he had flew out the window when he ran into a boy who, by all rights, should've been even more dead than he was. R staggers along in a daze. Bump into trees. Right self. Trip on some roots. Get back up. Keep walking. Try not to think about the hunger that's there, despite Julie and Maximus and Joan.

Because he doesn't have enough of a mouth left to groan like a proper zombie, R settles for shuffling. He shuffles loudly to make up for the jaw thing, the remains of what might've been a sleeping bag rattling behind him obviously full of supplies that have survived better than the bag itself.

It's like a big Here I Am sign for anyone tracking him.

[onlyimmune]

It was only the lack of groaning that didn't send Ellie into an immediate, nightmarish panic. She was very, very accustomed to the sound of a shuffling, groaning infected, had been dreaming about it every time she slept. Kept waking up with a start as they closed in on her.

Alone.

Not for the first time did she wake up with a sharp, intense feeling of loss. But she kept it to herself. Joel wasn't here.

She'd lost everyone. Again.

When she woke this time, to the shuffling, she froze so fast and immediately that she might have been cast in stone - eyes wide open and staring upwards. Once she could pinpoint exactly where the sound was coming from she carefully, and quietly, uncurled herself from her space in the hollow of a tree and looked out.

R.

She recognized him instantly and relaxed slightly. He was still a threat (though she was having a hard time rationalizing that to herself, whatever he warned her), but--

That bag. She sucked in a breath, watching him from behind she couldn't see his missing jaw.

"R?" She called out, softly. Carefully. "R, that you?"

[shambler]

Huh? R hadn't even realized there was someone out there with him, the knots in the tree roots and branches so large and filled with shadow they could easily hold a person, on second thought. It took another moment, too-long for Living standards, for R to consider the voice and realize he recognized it after all. Ellie. The girl with stories of the fungi Infected.

He slowly turned around to face Ellie with the sleeping bag clanking full of cans behind him. The bad news was he had blood still caked on his face. The good news was it was all his, black and almost like drying tar in consistency. A hole gaped where there should've been a jaw and a chin with only a few strings of withered flesh hanging down. It was the kind of wound that should've bled out one of her Infected.

"Rggh," R said. Tried to say. More like he forced the sound out the back of his throat. Don't even ask him what he was trying to say at this point, because he had no idea either.

He stayed where he'd stopped, the vines already starting to inch around his ankles now that he'd stop moving, staring right at Ellie and wondering what one Dead boy could do for her today.

Week one!

[polyturtle]

There was prey, and there were hunters. And then there was Donatello.

The moment he spotted her, he decided to stalk her. And stalk her he did, for a good while. Just far enough away that he wouldn't be spotted, using shadows and scenery to his advantage. Especially the foliage - in this place, it was quite easy to be green, thank you very much.

Now, of course, he wondered whether to put her out of her misery now, or later. She might put up, she might not. But from her stalking, he knew she didn't have weapons or much else to attack him with - something in his favor, if it turned out she was good at martial arts.

Now there was just one question.

Did she suspect anything?

[onlyimmune]

Ellie had lived her whole life with a natural instinct toward survival. You had to, in a world where not only the infected but even strange humans wanted to kill and sometimes eat you. So though she didn't notice anything at first, a growing awareness that there was something watching her was growing.

She was careful not to look around her - there wasn't much she could do if someone was following her, after all, but as soon as she came to a tree with a branch low enough she could reach, she climbed up into it without any warning at all.

Always best to have the high ground, even when you didn't know what you were dealing with.

[polyturtle]

Don saw it, and very quietly managed to get beneath some shrubs as she turned her head. Indeed, he had half a mind to sneak towards one of the trees and then make a choice then. She certainly had some instinct for feeling out her instincts, for dissecting the surroundings. He had to give her that, at least.

[celebrityskinned]

Venus isn't sure what she's going to do with a damn case of beer. Yes, a calorie is a calorie, but she knows full well she can't really hold her liquor yet, and she doubts she can be as effortlessly poised drunk as she tries to be on camera. It's bad enough worrying that she drools and farts when she sleeps.

So she's decided that, for the moment, the case of beer will make fitting bait, sitting atop a bear trap covered in leaves. She tried to cover it in mud, but after a while working it noticed that the grains of dirt jammed the spring.

And she hides in the tall grass, watching, imagining herself some sort of lioness. She's pulled her hair back into pigtails to keep it out of her face, but a stubborn lock, made winding by the humidity, keeps tickling her lower lip, like a bird dipping its beak to water. The only sound she makes as she watches her trap is the occasional puff of air as she blows it away.

She stops doing even that when she hears footsteps approaching - not loud ones, but the ruffage around them makes silence impossible.

[onlyimmune]

Beer.

She saw it long before she came close to it - the case an obvious jarring different among the green. She froze as soon as she saw it - some fifteen yards away.

Beer.

She wrinkles her nose, staring at it. She doesn't particularly want it. She'd never really gotten used to alcohol, given how rare it was, and she knew on an empty stomach it was much more likely to be a massive impairment than anything helpful. On the other hand, maybe if she had something she could trade food for...

She approached slowly, completely distrustful (who would just leave a case of beer there?). She grabbed the first branch she could find, long and heavy, just in case. She didn't see any body around (she didn't know that the bodies were taken away), so she guessed that it wasn't left there by someone who had died.

Maybe it was empty...?

[celebrityskinned]

Venus wiggles her shoulders like a wildcat preparing to pounce, but the truth is that she isn't sure whether to go for this one. On the one hand, at some point the kid's going to die anyway, on the other hand...

People really don't like to sponsor kid-killers. Besides, for all she knows she could get a hard time for dispensing alcohol to minors, she thinks to herself, and she steps up out of the grass.

"Don't touch that, I only got one trap and I'm not wasting it on your skinny ass."

[earthborn]

One person could be stealthy, pass through the forest with limited interference. Two, maybe. Three or four was a stretch, but with the regular rainfall and the unknown quantity of the local wildlife, it wasn't impossible.

It wasn't likely, not with the group they had, not with the traveling they were doing. There was no point in trying to train now what took a hell of a lot longer than a few days to master, so Shepard had compromised. You don't walk together, you don't present a target, and more often than not in this idiocy of a cagematch, the attacker will presume you to be alone, or at least undefended. Any advantage in a storm, or...was that how it went?

Shepard had food, plenty of it, and a makeshift pack fashioned from the tent she'd picked up at the Cornucopia. She had water and beer and friends that she could trust along with allies of a more dubious nature.

And she was leaving a relatively obvious trail, because at some point it was coming down to killing, and hiding wouldn't change that. Out of everyone else present, she'd rather it be her, and Shepard was prepared.

[onlyimmune]

She picked up on the trial long before she saw who was making it. Perhaps if she did, if she knew Shepard by reputation, she would have steered well clear. But she didn't know the woman and didn't know of her, so when she finally caught sight of her up ahead, she didn't know just how much trouble she could be getting into.

Just someone with supplies.

Supplies.

So she followed. As quietly as she could, of course, though her hunger was starting to make her clumsy. And desperate.