thearena | Yabba Dabba Nooooo [open]

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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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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."

Sherlock waved a vague hand, not as surprised as Joan to find that Guy had some semblance of intelligence (beyond, of course, being consistently surprised that everyone in the world wasn't an idiot except for him). Intelligence and cultural development was not an equal concept. The human brain had stopped evolving before the paleolithic, after all.

And, well, Guy just gave him an opening to talk his ear off.

"Beyond the trolls; the grue, Some; and a hand full of others, most tributes come from worlds or dimensions close enough to our own to not make enough difference to warrant. Differences end up superficial at best - history and human development are rarely touched. So yes, while it is hypothetical that perhaps your world saw the paleolithic era later, and you could hypothetically come from the same time period as us, or have absolutely no connection to our timeline, the result is the same. Joan and I are not from the same world, but the deductive reasoning remains, as it does with you. Unless you are about to tell me that you also understand what a steam engine is. The fact that they are able to pull from different time periods is fact - we have a gladiator handy to prove that, John's already verified that his history is extremely close the the Roman history from our world."

Edited 2013-11-20 04:16 (UTC)

"Soooo...what you're saying is it's possibly them traveling through times but also possibly the worlds they pull people from are different but superficially match times in other worlds' pasts. And it could still be either/or but functionally it means I'm just like people from your past anyway."

He paused.

"Which is basically what she just said. And basically what I just said. Only in way more words. Okay, got it."

Except that didn't sit well with him.

"Except what if I'm not from your past? What if I'm not from your past and my present is a little different from your past? You shouldn't just assume it's functionally the same just because I seem like something from a past that sounds like it's way too far in the past for you to even know anything solid about, anyway. Especially if turns out we're in the same present and it's an entirely different world and the way people live in it might be its own unique..." He waved vaguely with his hand. "...thing. Like, did the people in your past do bear-owl racing for fun? Or, I don't know, listen to rock music?"

Guy couldn't take credit for rock music, that was all Grug. It basically consisted of hitting rocks on other rocks rhythmically in a way that was fun to jump around to.

In any case, Sherlock had just given Guy his own chance to talk their ears off. Now that he'd gotten Guy going with the philosophy and trying to figure out the universe, he wasn't going to stop anytime soon. At least not unless someone else stopped him.

Edited 2013-11-20 04:52 (UTC)

Joan stopped him.

"Look, it doesn't really matter. You're right, your time is long enough ago that even us knowing you were from it wouldn't tell us anything useful. And if you're from a different world entirely? It still doesn't tell us anything useful. It might be interesting to find out about our worlds once we're back in the Capitol, but right now it's not going to keep us not dead."

Sherlock's lips were already parted with a retort, but Joan had hit upon the best possible way to shut him up: telling him it didn't matter. And being right. Because this was quickly crossing into philosophy territory, and, for the moment, he really didn't care.

So, he sucked in a breath and nodded tightly.

"Yes. Well. Precisely." He said as he cleared his throat.

Guy just rolled his shoulders in a loose little shrug, and moved slightly behind the tree again, peeking out almost shyly.

"Sorry, I have a habit of questioning everything and surviving it at the same time. Usually because the life-threatening things that need to be survived happen a lot where I'm from." Another shrug. "I'm a good many-tasker."

Apparently his language's concept of "multitasker" translated a little oddly.

"And, you know, I'm trying to understand. But I'll take a look and makes sure we're still alone." With that, he tucked his knife in his belt and started to climb the tree he was standing next to, though he was cautious enough to make sure he was climbing the side facing away from them. He scurried up it faster than most people would have been capable, not even using branches at times, just jamming his fingers in the bark of the tree.

"The whole view, though," he said as he climbed, hardly out of breath. "The whole view's important."

He peered around carefully, trying to make out any movement in the underbrush.

"And if you have assumptions about what I am, what I'm capable of, about the past you think I'm from, other people might." He peered around a branch at them with a gaze that was just a little sharper than before. "Knowing what people like you might expect of me, about what they might assume I'm capable of, might not help you, but it might help keep me not dead."

He briefly stopped, dangling from a branch with one hand, feet still against the tree trunk, and nodded to Joan. "Like you seemed almost surprised I understood some of that stuff with the different worlds and about ideas with time. It was almost like you were surprised I was smart. Are there going to be other people that see the stripes and the messy hair and the stone weapons and think I'm not smart, too? Because I can definitely work with that."

He started climbing again.

He could see the possibilities there. Ugh ugh, growl a little, throw a rock, make himself seem as if he's just trying to bash his way through a fight, run away as if he's afraid of losing but not so fast he actually gets away, lead the person chasing him into a trap...

Not that he'd do it to anyone innocent but for this even to work, for it to be a battle to the death more than once (since Signless said it wasn't his first time) that meant there had to be killers. There had to be predators hunting the people like Joan that didn't seem to want to kill. There had to be people willing to kill the ones whose instinctual response to a distressed person was to try to calm them down and give them kindness.

The idea of that left a bad taste in his mouth. There were only a few reasons that it was okay to kill another person. 1) Self defense. Especially if you'd tried to talk your way out of the situation. 2) If they were trying to steal your food or water when you'd starve or die of thirst without, which fell under self defense. 3) Defending someone else. And then there was 4) Out of mercy. If someone was already dying or in so much pain they wanted to be dead.

Being told "you have to kill, there can be only one survivor" and then doing it was not self defense. Not when people were apparently not killing and coming back to life anyway. Joan seemed to be talking with experience, Signless said people died and came back...

No one had to really be that brutal, did they? And what if everyone banded together to not be brutal? What if the ones that were savage were killed and only those who weren't were left? What kind of "game" would their kidnappers have on their hands then? What if they tried to work together rather than let themselves be danced around like toys?

Even if that wouldn't work, didn't the people who didn't want to fight deserve to die on their own terms? Shouldn't the ones that killed indiscriminately deserve to be hunted down for it? Rather than dying at the hands of other people tossed into this wilderness, their kidnappers should be the ones to get their hands bloody if the people who didn't want to fight had to die.

As he perched there in the branches, he went quiet for a moment, to listen for anyone possibly approaching, using the height he was now at to look around a bit, just to make sure they hadn't been approached while talking.

Edited 2013-11-22 06:02 (UTC)

Joan felt bad about making an assumption like that about someone she didn't know. In this case, it was tantamount to racism.

"You're right, I didn't expect you to be...intellectually sophisticated. I'm sorry."

"Any chance you had of them thinking you were less intelligent just evaporated - at least after this arena," Sherlock pointed out, calling up into the tree.

"Everything here is broadcast. Every word we speak, every decision we make, they are all watched and dissected. You might be able to use it to your advantage now, however unlikely, but once we are back in the capitol - once in another game, everyone will know who and what you really are."

Or, at least, the who and the what you wanted the world to see.

"Trust me, if you'd grown up - mostly alone - somewhere where you sometimes found yourself staring down two boulders' worth of charging batodile and the only way you could save yourself from very pointy teeth was by thinking up a way to use vines, rocks, and maybe a stick to build a trap - in thirty seconds or less - you'd be intellectually sophisticated, too," Guy said to Joan with a wry raise of his eyebrow. His tone was gentle, though, as if he didn't hold the assumption against her.

He really didn't. Not now that she'd apologized. Not when she'd been so kind.

"Or you'd be dead. I guess." He shrugged. "People survive by strength, smarts, or numbers where I'm from. I'm not tossing-boulders strong and I lived what you might call a-" His face twitched oddly, and his eyes went a little wide, as if he was trying to make something bad sound less negative "-a solitary existence. Lots of solitude."

He nodded to himself as if to say, 'Good job, self, for how you worded that. Have a mental banana.'

"Anyway, I wish I'd known the eyes could do that or I'd have played dumb. I thought they were just watching us now. But you're right, I can at least play dumb this time."

He nodded to himself again. With one last look around, he started to climb down from the tree.

"Hopefully you'll be better at adapting to being constantly watched than I've been." Joan was still struggling with pretending to be anything other than herself on an extended basis.

He bit back saying 'they aren't eyes' because it really didn't matter what they were - intellectually sophisticated or not, explaining advanced technology when you didn't have it on hand to demonstrate wasn't going to be sufficient to understanding.

He watched as Guy climbed down, only glancing over to Joan once. She reminded him of John so much sometimes that it nearly hurt.

He hadn't exactly been good at being watched either. Though you think he'd be used to it, after his brother. (Well that thought had come utterly unbidden. How long had it been since he'd thought about his brother?)

"You'll see the extent of it soon enough. Everything it edited, of course, so who knows - perhaps the story they wish to tell the capitol of you is a brainless barbarian. If you play it up, it may go to your favour, but don't count on it. Our stories are more to their whims than ours."

Guy dangled from a low branch and landed steadily on the ground. Then he picked up his spear from where he'd left it leaning against the tree.

"No, they're not. Well, yes, they can make them whatever they want to make them into for themselves, but generally speaking, they're not."

He tried to think of a way to make it clearer. Sometimes he had trouble with this, with finding the words for what was inside and dragging it outside. Too much time alone. Too much time making up his own words for ideas and beliefs that other people had words for.

He looked to Joan.

"What I'm trying to say is that it doesn't matter if they watch you and it doesn't matter what ways they twist that story about you for themselves as long as however they twist it makes them want to keep you alive. It doesn't change the one you have right here."

He tapped his temple.

"You made one where instead of trying to hurt someone who was scared and - and alone. You tried to make them less afraid. You made a story where you have friends that - " He nodded towards Sherlock "- that want to protect you. That's your story. The real one, anyway."

He shrugged.

"So trick them into believing whatever one you need or want them to believe. That one can be the one you tell, not the one you live."

"I'm usually not one to front like that."

It was a lie, but one that even she wasn't entirely aware of.

"Hopefully the people in the Capitol think my story is one to cheer for. Not everyone likes the vicious killers."

Even though most of them probably do.

Sherlock rolled his eyes visibly, watching Guy go well past his point and back into some kind of touchy-feely philosophy.

"Well, perhaps you'll have a better idea of what I mean when you are more acquainted with the concept of video editing," He said mildly, looking over at Joan. He'd had quite enough of hypothetical stories.

Most of the time he could forget about the fact that he existed as books in other people's universes.

"Joan, I think it would be best if we turned our story back to camp, if you're quite done."

Yabba Dabba Nooooo [open]

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