thearena | Yabba Dabba Nooooo [open]

Entry tags:

Yabba Dabba Nooooo [open]

Who| Guy Crood
What| Guy's Introduction to the Arena. Forecast: Terror with periodic showers of extreme anxiety
Where| I'm going to say he's somewhere around the northwest of the island
When| Second week, I think?
Warnings/Notes| Guy's new and twitchy, so watch out.

"I don't - I don't understand! What do you mean a battle to the death? Are you crazy?!"

The last thing Guy remembered before waking up on a hard bed...thing in a strange shelter (a cave maybe?) had been settling down for the night with the rest of the family. (In a sleep pile, of course.) The place where the Croods had been camped out was hilly and not far from the sea, so the cool night breezes coming in from the ocean had made sleeping all cuddled together rather comfortable and no one in the family could ever pass up a good sleep pile when conditions allowed it. They hadn't even bothered with a fire. There were few wild animals daring enough to tangle with a jungle cat the size of Chunky, or their owl-bear Lu, and their scent alone usually kept most predators away.

That was where he'd been last, curled up next to Eep, his daughter sleeping on his chest, Belt curled around his head, in a jumble of limbs with the rest of the family. All of them had been wrapped up protectively in his father's - in Grug's - arms. The last thing he'd seen was the endless swath of stars above them, their light sharp and beautiful, and the last thing he'd heard was the soft rustling of grasses as the wind swept over the hill.

The next thing he knew, he'd woken up here - wherever here was - alone. No daughter in his arms, no mate curled up next to him, no family to be found when surely they would've woken up if someone had snatched him up in the night.

Then again, Guy still wasn't sure how he'd wound up snatched without waking up himself. All he knew was that he was here, being dragged by people wearing some strange hard...something (were they people at all?) down a tunnel, one that looked far too neatly carved to be natural. The faceless beings dragging him around looked like bug-people, like they were humans with carapaces. (Humbugs? Insectumans?)

"Hey! Hey hey hey hey hey!" he cried out in a thin voice as some of them started pulling off his clothes. Somehow every "hey" was an entirely different pitch. "Hands off! Hands off! Get your creepy bug hands off!"

He thrashed against the hold they had on him. "And give me back that knife! That was my father's!"

Kicking didn't seem to do much good. Whatever they were, they were strong, and before long they'd forced him into unfamiliar clothing and shoes, made of no animal skins Guy had ever seen before.

"Who are you people?!"

Guy felt something pinch his arm and saw one of them withdrawing some kind of long...needle. He let out a terrified yelp as he was shoved onto a round stone. Then he started to rise through a long tube, another tunnel, into a place with open sky.

"What have you done with my family? Where's my daughter?" He pounded his fists against the side of the tube, and screamed again, "Where's my daughter?!"

But the bug-men were gone from view and then he was above ground in the middle of a vast, untamed wilderness, muggy and wet, unlike any he'd ever seen -

"Why did you take me inside a cave somewhere just to shove me back outside again?" Guy yelled at the stone platform he'd risen up on, perplexed, holding out his arms as if to say 'What gives?' What, they'd kidnapped him to move him maybe a mile?

Wait, no, this wasn't like any of the forests of home. It wasn't bright enough. There were no vividly colored plants in rainbow colors, completely overpowering the green, no girelephants grazing nearby, no albatroceroses flying lazily through the air. It was very green but compared to just about every forest he'd ever seen in his life, this place was dim. And those bug-people... He'd never seen anything like them in the old world nor had he'd seen anything like them in Tomorrow.

Where were the hills? Where was the sea? And most importantly of all: Where was his family? His breathing started to come more quickly and catch in his throat as he looked around at an unfamiliar landscape. The strangers' words started to sink in:

You will be competing with the other Tributes in a battle to the death. There will only be one survivor.

There were other people here then. Other people that had probably been grabbed from who knew where, shoved into this place, and told the exact same thing. Before he even realized he was doing it, Guy started to run, but before he got very far he stopped himself, slowing back down to a trot.

It was difficult to. Sometimes, when he was in a panic, Belt was the one that had to smack him out of it, but Belt wasn't here right now. He had to do it for himself.

Just like he used to. Before Belt. When the nights were always dark and his stomach was empty more often than it was full.

"No. No no no. You know how it works," he muttered to himself, waving an arm. "Stop. Stop."

He checked his waist to see if they'd left anything at all that he could use, but his knife, his flint and spark stone, his pouch, all of it was gone. They'd even taken his shell necklace and leather hair tie. He had nothing but the bone bracelet on his wrist.

The moment he realized they hadn't taken that, he let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Okay so maybe it wasn't a knife but his bracelet matched the bracelet on Eep's wrist, that had the same carvings of a warthog and a tiger joyfully chasing each other's tails. There was a ring attached to it, with smaller rings attached to that, bound together with a strip of leather. He pulled that strip extra taught with his teeth. Now was not the time for it to rattle.

After briefly glancing at the carvings on the bracelet again, centering himself, he looked up at the strange new world around him and took a few deep breaths.

"Okay," he said quietly to himself in huffed breath. "Okay, Guy, you've been here before. Maybe not with quite so many people trying to kill you buuut with everything else trying to. You know what to do."

Then he started to move off through the underbrush, quickly but also carefully and - above all else - quietly, his eyes and ears open for threats - and open for anything useful he could find. Especially flint. In situations like this, flint was your friend.

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He backed away, slowly, careful about his footing, making sure he wasn't backing into anything - or anyone - without taking his eyes off her. He seemed to be quite practiced in using his peripheral vision to be aware of his enviroment.

She now had enough distance between them that if he tried to attack her, she'd have time to get out her knife or even run for it.

"Sorry about the knife thing. I'm new here," he said, sounding more like someone who was apologizing for being late to class rather than someone holding a knife in her direction. "This isn't my first life-or-death situation but it's kind of my first forced battle to the death."

She stepped away from the tree, and lowered her hands.

"I understand," she said, her voice soft. "This is my second. In case it helps, I haven't killed anyone in either one, and I don't intend to start."

She tilted her head a little, curious.

"Did they tell you anything? My first arena, they just told me it was a fight to the death before they put me out there."

"That's all they said." Everything about her screamed that she was gentle. From her actual words, to her posture, to the tone of her voice. He wasn't always the best at reading people but the more open they were with their body language the easier it was.

And it made him want to talk to her. "But I've run into a few people and I learned more from one of them. He was pretty helpful. Not that I really gave him much of a choice."

He added, "I gotta say, the people here are really making it hard for me to kill them. So far, none of them have tried to kill me and it's getting a little frustrating."

Because he couldn't die. Even though he didn't want to kill, he knew he could because he had in the past, and he knew he would because he couldn't die. But they really ought to be making it easier for him, since he didn't want to do it.

After a second, he realized that sounded a touch homicidal and he really didn't want to give the wrong impression. Even after being adopted by the Croods, he still had his moments of not realizing how something inside his head would sound outside.

"I don't want to hurt anyone - and I haven't so far - but I was with my family," he blurted out. "I was sleeping with my family. My mate was right next to me and my daughter - she was - she was sleeping on my chest."

He patted his chest with his free hand, briefly letting it rest over his heart, and now the harshness that had been over his face like a second skin tore like the rind of an overripe fruit, showing something different underneath, something far more dangerous: a parent's fear for their child.

"If they got me, they had to have at least moved them, and I have to - I have to find them. Or at least make sure they're not here."

He had to live long enough to do that. And since he knew how to kill and was willing to, people really needed to be more obliging and start making it easier on his conscience.

Edited 2013-11-05 05:46 (UTC)

"Oh," she said softly, her voice gentle and sympathetic. She took a step closer, a subconscious movement. He was worried about his daughter. She wanted to help him somehow, even if all she could do was comfort him.

"You need to know a couple things," she said. "First, when you die here in the arena? They bring you back to life in the Capitol."

"He said that. That they're - they can do things. Things people shouldn't be able to do. Steal people from different worlds, kill them, bring them back to life. I know that. I - I can deal with all that, I can deal with killing, I can deal with dying, and if I have to kill, I'll try my best to be kind. I know that sounds like it doesn't matter but in this, with what they want us to do, it matters here more than anywhere."

He went on, "Does anyone know if they've - if they've kidnapped any of their family members? Or hurt the people around them when they kidnapped them? Has anyone said anything like that?"

If their captors hadn't told anyone "fight or we kill your family" if no one remembered loved ones around them being hurt when they were grabbed, maybe they had a special way of just spiriting them to this place that meant anyone else was safely left behind.

Edited 2013-11-05 06:10 (UTC)

He asked about family members, and Joan felt a twist of sadness. She missed Sherlock. She cared about the Sherlock here, of course, but it wasn't the same. He wasn't him. He wasn't hers. But him not being here was good. She didn't want him to go through all this, and if he were here, they could use him against her, and her against him.

"I haven't heard of anyone who remembers exactly how they were taken," she said, "so I don't think anyone knows how that happens. But...I do know of at least one instance of them bringing someone they care about here specifically to threaten them. Keep them in line."

Edited (realized I left something out...) 2013-11-06 01:14 (UTC)

That was not what he wanted to hear.

"No no no no no!" he cried out, his free hand moving to tug on his hair.

No, that was not what he wanted to hear.

The thing about losing one family and getting another was that he didn't know if he could handle it a second time. It was not something he feared in his day to day life because living afraid wasn't living, but when presented with that possibility, it become the worst fear he'd ever known, would ever know.

"What do you mean, 'in line.' What do they want us to do?"

She took another step toward him. It probably wasn't the best of ideas, since he was freaking out and still had a knife. But he was freaking out, and Joan couldn't just stand there without trying to help.

"Hey. You need to calm down. Your family isn't here. For all you know, they'll never be here. Of all the people I know here? There's only a couple of them who have had people they know brought here. So for the moment, you have nothing to worry about other than your own survival. Okay?"

She took a breath. Unless she was really misreading this, this man wouldn't understand "television" and "cameras."

"All this...this is a show. There are people watching us. You can't see them, but they can see you. The reason they want us to kill each other is so they can watch. Because they think it's fun. And the better the story, the more fun they have. Apparently, sometimes one of the reasons they've brought certain people in is to make the story better."

She'd wondered if that's the reason they'd brought her, if there was reason at all.

Joan, don't you know that people love seeing a compassionate person caught up in tumultuous violence and horror? Tragically beautiful.

Guy immediately started looking around, not understanding what she meant. He was clearly trying to keep her in his peripheral vision as he did.

"Where? Where are they? I - I don't see anyone." He turned back to her, his expression utterly horrified. "How - how could they think watching this is fun? I don't - I don't understand."

People were violent in his world on occasion. Violent and aggressive and brutal. He'd had rare encounters with other humans in all the time he'd wandered, and some weren't violent but a horrifying handful were.

And that was why Guy knew how to use a knife.

Look at his family even! Adoption via kidnapping.

But that was for food, that was because something new was in their territory, that was because of fear. It was all about survival. It was senseless but it was the very senselessness of it that made it forgivable in Guy's eyes. Some people didn't know any other way and some let fear rule their lives.

Calculated cruelty was new to him. Even the Bogs, when they'd kidnapped him and treated him terribly, had seen him as a tool in their survival. And even they had seen the light when someone took the time to show them.

"What are they?" Guy asked in a hushed voice. "Are they - are they spirits? Gods?"

They could watch things when they weren't around, steal people from other worlds, bring people back from the dead...

"...or are they just normal, horrible people who've made things so advanced they seem like magic?"

He wasn't an idiot. Anything more advanced seemed like magic if you didn't know what it was. That was why Eep and her family had initially thought his making fire meant he'd captured the sun.

She knew enough to know that she could not fully understand the depths of his confusion and fear. But she grabbed onto that last thing he said.

"Yes. Exactly. They are normal, horrible people. And what they're doing? Is trying to make you a horrible person just like them. They're pulling all of our strings, trying to make us kill each other so they can get their kicks from it. I won't do it, because that's not the person I am, and I refuse to let them make me change to suit their agenda. And you don't have to change, either."

Guy's mouth quirked in a way that showed he was confused.

"It's not really changing that much," he admitted. "I've killed people before. To survive. And it's not like they were bad people, they were just scared. They attacked because they thought I was a threat."

Just because a caveman had attacked him, it didn't mean he forgot the sound of his family weeping as he'd run away after stabbing him. It didn't mean he forgot that they had only attacked because he was someone new and strange and scary in their territory.

"Scared people doing what they need to because horrible people are making them do it to survive aren't changing. It'd only be changing if they started to enjoy it. Or," he added lightly, gesturing with the knife as he spoke, making it wobble back and forth animatedly, "if they stared kidnapping other people, and making other people kill each other, and watched them for fun, and brought them back from the dead to do it all over again. If they changed into that it'd be changing. But nothing they make us do out of desperation changes what we are, not if they're making us do it."

He shrugged a little one-shouldered shrug and he still sounded confused as he spoke, as if he didn't understand why she'd told him he didn't have to change. He spoke as if it was all very simple.

Because to him, it was.

The shame wasn't theirs to bear.

"That just shows what they are. We could all kill each other time and time again and that's their ugliness coming out."

Edited 2013-11-06 05:57 (UTC)

He'd taken the spear, when he went looking for her. He left John at the camp (awake and alert) after Joan hadn't returned in the time that he expected her to. He was on edge and on guard and expecting to find her in a sticky situation.

Even if Sherlock wasn't incredibly good at tracking (and he wasn't) he would have found them. Even in the dense forest he could hear voices - and once he'd picked out Joan's he'd made a beeline for them, though he'd stopped to listen a little while ago.

However, he'd just about had enough.

Philosophy was never his strong suit (boring, boring, boring) but there were enough indicators that whoever Joan was talking to maybe wasn't necessarily the safest person to be around in the world. So he lowered his spear in what he hoped was a relatively threatening way, if a defensive one, and stepped into their eyeline.

"Joan," He said, his voice perfectly even and calm. "Made a friend?"

The noise he made at the sight of Sherlock was a somewhat unintelligible, nervous, "Nnnghuh." Then he side-stepped with a cartoonish flail of his arms and darted behind a tree. In fact, not only did he dart behind a tree, he darted behind a tree that was back in the treeline a little bit so that it would've been difficult for anything tossed in a straight line to hit him.

That was because spears were primarily for throwing.

Peeking out from behind the tree, Guy could only stare at Sherlock in awe.

"You are one freakishly tall man."

Guy wasn't exactly short at 5'7" but having hit more than twenty summers that was about as tall as he was ever going to get. The man with the spear was possibly taller than Grug and the effect was even more noticeable given how much slimmer he was.

He tried to measure it out with his hand. "At least a fifth of a Guy taller than me." Yes, he measured things in units of his own height. Don't ask.

"No wait." He tried again. "Actually now that I'm farther away, it's harder to tell, but you're way, way too tall."

Edited 2013-11-07 07:38 (UTC)

Joan gave Sherlock an annoyed look. She totally had this. The guy wasn't going to stab her, she wasn't a threat. Although she did mentally concede that Sherlock having that spear did make it less likely that the strange man would attack Joan.

Still. She had this. He totally didn't need to be so dismissive.

"He's new. I was giving him the run-down." She frowned, turned her head back toward the man who now cowered behind a tree. "What's your name?"

Sherlock frowned as Guy rambled about his height of all things, but turned his attention to Joan instead as she spoke, carefully walking over to join her though he relaxed the spear slightly.

"Oh good. Introductions. How fun."

He made sure to stand far enough from Joan so she couldn't just hit him for that.

Guy's eyebrows furrowed. Well hello, Mr. Cranky.

So maybe they were all in a death match and that was something to be cranky about, and maybe he was standing here with a knife held out towards the new guy's unarmed friend, and maybe he had every reason to be put-offish and distrustful...

There was supposed to be a 'but' in there but Guy couldn't find it when he realized that Cranky Scarily Tall Man had every reason to be cranky.

Despite the sarcasm, he didn't seem keen on impaling him just yet, so Guy came out from behind the tree just a bit now that Sherlock had relaxed the spear slightly, though he didn't stray far from it. Since he was there with a weapon, the nomad looked around to make sure no one else was coming, though he was careful to keep the two in his peripheral vision as he did it. He also thought to look up. (You never knew who or what was in the trees.)

Sherlock now had a better glimpse of him now. Average height, though somewhat short for a man fully grown, skin tanned as if he hardly spent a day in the shade and smudged just a bit with dust that seemed to have been smudged there for quite some time, different from the mud he'd gotten on himself in this place. One of his pant legs was torn, and there was a small strip of cloth there, wrapped around it as if he'd been injured. It was done rather neatly, as if it was done by someone experienced with bandaging wounds. Around the other, his shirt was tied to his leg with vines and it looked soaked and somewhat wrinkled and stretched, as if he'd been squeezing it out repeatedly.

The lack of shirt left his torso visible and his body was stained in brown-red stripes and it looked more like the kind of staining that came of a plant or dye rather than something smeared on. His hair was partly bleached from the sun and looked like it had never been combed in the man's life.

The knife in his hand was made of flint and the bracelet around his wrist, carved with a design of a warthog and a tiger chasing each other's tails was made of bone. Curiously, there was a ring attached to it, one with other rings dangling from it, though those were tied together with a leather strip to not make noise. A little bone rattle.

Guy looked back to Joan. "Guy. Guy Crood. What's your name?" he asked. He nodded over to Sherlock. "And yours, Scarily Tall Man?"

He added, pointing, "That's a really nice spear, by the way."

The way he said it seemed less covetous and more as if he admired the craftsmanship, as if he thought Sherlock had made it himself.

Edited 2013-11-09 00:30 (UTC)

She glared at Sherlock at his response. Knowing names would change them from strangers to acquaintances, and the more you knew about somebody as a person, the less likely you were to kill them.

Judging from the distance he kept from her, though, he probably knew all that already and was just being a jerk.

"Guy. Nice to meet you, despite the circumstances. I'm Joan Watson. This is Sherlock."

She gave Sherlock a tight, narrow eyed smile.

"Sherlock Holmes," he elaborated, "Originally the 21st century, not that I imagine that has any meaning to you." He smiled, sharp and crisp. An exact date for Guy was impossible to place, but he had an estimate- none of the modern pre-civilization societies on his earth were of probable European descent, after all.

He raised the spear along with an eyebrow. "Yes. You would know."

"Sherlock," Guy said, wrapping his tongue around the name like someone working through taffy. It was obvious he thought it sounded alien. At least Joan's first name was one syllable.

Guy raised an eyebrow at Sherlock's comment.

"Of course I would know," he said, with a hint of a 'duh' in his voice, as if wondering why Sherlock had commented on it. "If I didn't know anything about spears, why would I compliment yours?"

Sherlock seemed to ignore the comment completely, glancing at Joan.

"Weapons may be my area, but prehistory is not. Still, paleolithic? At a guess? Apparently I will have to do a great deal more research, back in the Capitol, if they insist on throwing all of earth's history at us."

Guy looked at Sherlock as he said things Guy didn't understand in the least, raised an eyebrow, then looked back at Joan.

'Paleolithic?' 'Prehistory?'

Behind his hand, in a very loud stage whisper, he said, "I don't know why, but I think he's making up words."

"That would be my guess," she responded to Sherlock. "But I'm hardly an expert. And before you ask, no, humans didn't live at the same time as dinosaurs. Well. Not until now."

She turned back to Guy. "Paleolithic means 'age of stone,' a period of human history when people used stone tools instead of metal ones. Basically, we're from a time in your future. Way, way in the future."

"I knew that," he snapped, even though he probably didn't, but he felt stupid for having to have it pointed out to him.

"Likely at least 10,000 years into your future," Sherlock said, showing off what he did know about the subject, before gesturing around. "And this is the future for us, by at least a century or so."

Guy could only seem to stand there for a minute, opening and closing his mouth. There were a lot of questions he wanted to ask. 'What's metal?' for instance. Or 'If I'm from the past, how would you know if it's the past?' Which might have eventually led to a follow up of 'What's archaelogy?'

He finally settled on rubbing the stubble of his chin curiously, leaning against the tree and crossing his arms, the knife still hanging limp in his one hand.

"The weird gray guy with horns said they brought us from all different worlds and he had to be right since I've never seen anyone that looks like him before. So technically, rather than being from the past, doesn't that mean I'm from a world that, because people appeared later or because we've been slower to grow, we're just 10,000 years earlier in development and how we live just superfically resembles a period of time in your worlds?"

He rubbed his chin again.

"Because nobody said anything about the people who brought us here also being able to go to yesterdays and tomorrows. Can they do that?"

If they could, they were even more horrifying.

Joan blinked and rocked back a little. She had been assuming that Guy was...well, the way she imagined a caveman to be. In short, not that bright. And yet here he was talking about high level, philosophical, many worlds theory things.

"Um. I mean...there are people here who seem to be from the past, and from the future. Our past and our future, at least. But there are also different realities from the same time." She gestured to Sherlock, but didn't explain, because that would have been way too involved. "So I don't know."

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