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Who| Joel, Ellie, anyone else!
What| Joel shows up and gets tossed into the ring. Let's see how he does!
Where| I can put him just about anywhere in the museum you need - he'll be scoping the place out.
When| Mid-Week 1
Warnings/Notes| Joel is a highly suspicious dude and may assume anyone he meets is hostile until proven otherwise. This means he might punch first and ask questions later! I'll update this if anything else comes up.

Finally, please specify if you would like to meet Joel before he finds Ellie or after - if before, he'll be on his own, really worried about his baby girl, and slightly more prone to violence. If AFTER, you will probably get Joel and Ellie (two for the price of one!), and a lower chance of Joel trying to throttle you immediately.

"Put your hands in the air!" "She's not breathin'."

He woke with a start, phantom pain in his head and surrounded by - military? They were clearly military, but not any military he was familiar with. When they grabbed him, all sense went out of his head - normally, Joel would go quietly, because struggling tended to get people shot, but all he could think, all he could remember, was Ellie, her body so still. She's not breathin'.

"Where is she?" he demanded, over and over, landing a few punches but never able to break free. The pajamas they made him wear, the explanation given, all barely registered as he had only one thought in his head - find Ellie now. "What the hell did you bastards do to her?" he demanded yet again, attempting to yank his arm free when they came at him with a needle. Still, nothing. His shouts and struggles were in vain, and the next thing he knew, he was... in a parking garage?

With no one around to confront, and the knowledge that he was here to kill, or be killed, Joel quickly shoved his feelings to one side, dropping low and seeking a stairwell to climb to higher ground - it would take him a bit to realize the only way up was via elevators that actually still worked. They were far too slow and noisy for Joel's taste, but it became obvious that they were his only option, and he needed to get to higher ground, if he was going to find anything. Especially Ellie.

Joel moved quickly, quietly, and with one singular purpose: find the girl, and get the hell out of here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Venus knows what the movement, the flash of black hair she can see from the corner of her eyes is, without actually having to think about it - it came from the direction of the cafe, and unless someone's come in through a window, only Kankri is over there. Furthermore, she knows he hasn't been sleeping well, and is surprised he stayed down and still as long as he did. Irritation flashes over her face that he didn't stay put, but she doesn't say any of that out loud.

Just like that, Venus moves to place herself between Joel and Kankri, protecting him with her body. It means a step forward, within range if Joel wants to take a swing at her. "He's with me. I told you it was secure, I didn't tell you I was alone."

She dares Joel with her eyes to challenge her on that fact, before calling over her shoulder, "come on out, kiddo."

For a moment, Kankri thinks he has deeply hecked up, as both of the strangers start going to defensive postures. But then Venus steps in, talking them down. He supposes he can't blame people for being on edge, with death announcements starting to filter through the PA system.

He bites his lip with his blunt teeth, but then straightens his posture and comes out from behind the skeleton. "I just wanted to see if you ran into trouble. Or friends," he says to Venus, knowing she told him to stay put and fully expecting to be scolded. Then he glances to the two new humans. Both of them look unfamiliar to him, but that isn't saying much with him being so new.

"Um, hello."

Ellie lets out a hard breath and relaxes. No curly horns. Not one of the trolls she was warned about, and any friend of Venus' is a friend of hers.

"Yeah, sorry. Should have figured."

She raised a hand toward Kankri. "Hey. Don't worry, we're friends."

Edited 2014-01-26 21:41 (UTC)

Joel, on the other hand, has not yet seen anyone who looked anything but perfectly human on this little adventure, and no one - not even Ellie - has thought to warn him about it.

So the sight of - well, a thing that is clearly not a regular person makes his eyes go wide with shock and a startled hiss of breath leave him.

"What the hell is that?" he exclaims, grabbing Ellie to pull her away from it, regardless of her and Venus's reactions.

"Excuse me?"

Venus' face turns red and her fists clench so hard her knuckles pale.

Foolishly, after a few months in the Capitol, after a few months in a human body instead of the mutant body that marked her an outcast, an abomination, a target - foolishly, she forgot how much it hurt to have it pointed out. It comes flooding back.

Doesn't matter that he was talking about Kankri and not her. It's the attitude, the attitude that anything different or strange was bad, that kept her from finishing school, kept her relatives kicking her around because having a mutant in the house was scaring the neighbors, that led her to deciding that the only way to avoid homelessness was to join a twenty-first century freak show.

She was lucky she could make money off of being a freak, a genetic monstrosity. That's all. Lucky.

Oh my god, what is that thing?

Are you even human? I mean, really, do you even count anymore?

You fucking freak! Get out of my house!

She's human now, what her life would have been so much easier if she'd always been. But nearly a decade of discrimination for her genes is imprinted so deep into her that it feels like a second skeleton (nearly as much as it would for her race, her gender...).

She brings a hand forward and grabs Joel's pajamas around the collar. "Take that back. Now."

Hearing himself being referred to like you would some kind of wild animal stings, and Kankri's all set to rip the stranger a new one over it. But then Venus steps in and does it for him. It's so gratifying to be defended, an unfamiliar situation.

But.

Venus is injured, and this stranger has a weight advantage on her, and the fewer fights they get in the better. So he steps forward and tugs on Venus's arm. "It's all right. I mean, I certainly don't appreciate being called a 'that,' but I suppose I had expected everyone to be familiar with...well. He didn't know, please calm down."

He looks over at Joel. "There's no need to be so alarmed, I mean you no harm. Even if I did, I doubt I could cause any. My name-" and okay, maybe he's a little tart with that remark, "-is Kankri. As for what I am, that's simple enough. I'm a troll. However, I'm given to understand that to humans, that word means something a bit...different. Some sort of folklore, or something. Suffice it to say that it isn't only your own species that our captors find, ah, 'entertaining.'"

He tugs Venus's arm again, looking to Ellie pleadingly for help breaking up the adults.

Edited 2014-01-26 23:06 (UTC)

Well, fucking great, Ellie thinks to herself as she rips her arm out of Joel's grip and staggers between him and Venus.

"Joel!" She snaps, glaring at him, putting an arm up to keep Venus from him. "He's just a kid, alright? Calm the fuck down."

She turned to Venus and Kankri extremely apologetically. "It's not the same back home. Anything there that doesn't look human is pretty much guaranteed to kill you dead. He didn't know any better."

Unexpected is an understatement, when it comes to Venus's reaction. As far as Joel is concerned, he asked a very straightforward, simple question, shocked by the strange appearance of whatever it was that approached. He's never seen anything like it before, after all, not walking, talking, in real life.

Frankly, he thinks it's very reasonable. He could've attacked it on sight.

He yanks himself away from Venus with a scowl, only half-listening to Kankri and Ellie - enough to get that the troll is, apparently, pretty goddamn articulate for being not at all human. And that Ellie is apologizing for him.

He didn't know any better. Jesus Christ, when did he start being the kid in this relationship?

He backs away, throwing his hands up as though to wash them of this whole situation. He simply does not have it in him to deal with this right now. "I'm too old for this shit," he says gruffly. It has been a long fucking day.

Venus backs off, but she looks like a cornered animal. If she had hackles to raise, they would still be up, and her lips are curled into something very close to a snarl.

"Where I come from, people who look strange get beaten to death with rocks in the street. Just for being different." She leaves it there. No need to explain that she didn't always look human either.

What was it Tike said? Black and a mutant...that's like black with a little extra black thrown in.

She reaches back and pushes Kankri's hand off her arm, then squeezes his hand.

Kankri squeezes her hand back, very gently. "I think we're all more than a little tense here," he says. "In this kind of situation, it's only natural. So, now that we've gotten that out of our systems, let's start over. Hello, I'm Kankri. Venus has been looking out for me."

He smiles at Ellie. "I don't believe I caught your name, miss."

"Ellie," She says, looking extremely apologetic. "Good to meet you, Kankri. I'm glad someone has got Venus' back."

She shoots a glance at Venus, wants to tell her that she was was on a hit list too, back home. Not because she looked strange, but because she was strange.

That she could actually understand why people would want her dead.

But she didn't want to say it, not here in front of a stranger, not here in front of Joel, not for the cameras. So she tucked it away in her chest for later.

"This is, uh, Joel," She said, flashing a look back at him and looking as cornered as Venus did but for much different reasons. "He's uh..." She faltered, there, trying to explain what Joel meant to her was a whole other can of worms. So she didn't bother. "... yeah. He took care of me back home, and I owe him a lot, so. It'd be great if we keep maybe not stab each other."

Where I come from, Joel thinks, but pointedly doesn't say, kids get shot in the street for no reason at all. Tell your sob story to someone else.

His arms cross over his chest - it's not a friendly gesture, by any means, but it at least says I'm not pulling a weapon. The troll... thing... whatever... is obviously not hostile, despite the startling appearance. It's Venus that Joel has his eye on. Even injured, he recognizes that protectiveness.

"Nobody's gettin' stabbed," he says gruffly. He keeps within arm's reach of Ellie, though, his posture making it clear that if he thinks she's in danger, he'll step in as necessary.

Venus relaxes a little. A little. "I'm not going to stab anyone. Give me a little credit."

She crosses her arms too, fingers drumming over his bicep. "I'm a little short on account of broken ribs."

Kankri pats her Venus's arm gently before scooting away a few inches. "Pleased to meet you both, circumstances notwithstanding," he says with a little nod.

He pulls out half of a very dry cinnamon roll from his pocket, nibbling at it delicately. Might as well occupy himself as Venus and her friends (or friend at least) get caught up, now that the awkward introduction is out of the way.

Ellie hasn't really relaxed at all, though she's at least fairly sure now that Joel was listening to her, and Venus seemed a little more relaxed.

"Broken ribs?" She asked, looking worried. She knew Venus was beat up, she hadn't realised how bad. "You going to be alright?"

Well, at least the troll seems to eat food and not people. That's a big point in his favor. His focus swivels back to Venus pretty quick, though, as he mentally files away her injuries. "How'd it happen?"

Because knowing who or what beat her up could be valuable information.

"Some bitch put me through a car window, and then one of my roommates took initiative and decided to kick my chest in." Venus shrugs one shoulder and picks at her stale cinnamon roll. "Not everyone here is as cute and cuddly as we are."

She takes a seat on the edge of a diorama. "But I'll be okay. I'm tough. Have a little faith in a sister."

Kankri sits next to Venus, letting her handle the talking. If she's friends with Ellie then she should be doing the talking now that things have calmed down, right?

He sets a napkin and a danish on Venus's lap, then hands another to Ellie, and finally offers Joel a croissant. Stale, but better than nothing. And surely Venus can't object to him sharing with her friends.

"She's doing better than she was when I initially found her," he observes as he nibbles his pastry. "It wasn't a pretty sight. But we've been all right since then."

"Hey, I have plenty of faith. Faith is my middle name." It was only a little sarcastic. She blinked when Kankri offered her a danish, but offered him a smile as she took it, only giving it a brief sniff before biting into it.

Yeah, this kid was okay.

"Well at least it must have made for good television," She adds, still a little sarcastic, but she's relaxing. "I'm sure being thrown through a car window made the highlight reel for a week."

Sharing food was, for Joel, a pretty big gesture of trust. One didn't share one's food with others lightly where he came from, that was for sure. Food was scarce enough, so caring about someone enough to share what little there was - that was a big deal.

He watched Ellie's reaction closely, then sniffed at his own croissant. He still wasn't quite sure what to make of all these pastries - he hardly noticed how stale they were, mostly because he hadn't had anything like them in a very, very long time.

He'd forgotten how much he liked them.

He looked up, almost nervously, at Ellie's words. He knew they were being filmed constantly - she'd told him, of course. But the thought was still really disconcerting. "Highlight reel," he said, almost contemptuously. The whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth, croissant notwithstanding.

Venus rolls the danish around in her hand. She doesn't seem especially hungry. Her appetite's been lackluster lately, but she doesn't want Kankri to fuss, so she takes a few nibbles of that and the cinnamon roll.

"Probably." She gives Ellie a smile. "I'm getting loaded down in Sponsor gifts. I must be doing something right."

Kankri is eyeing Venus a touch suspiciously; he's noticed she's only picking at her food, and there will definitely be fussing once they're alone again. For now he sits down beside her, trying not to look around for the cameras he's just been reminded are there.

"I forget, sometimes," he mutters. "That it's only entertainment for them. I don't know how this can be so...so meaningless to someone."

Ellie only shrugged - she didn't get half of the things that the Capitol did, and television was entirely new to her otherwise. She hadn't gotten to watch the games live, last time, had only seen the highlight reels.

She'd been almost the last to die, after all.

"I don't know. They say a lot of bullshit about it, but it seems to be important to them. Takes up a lot of their fucking time, anyway."

She wasn't really aware that things like The Sopranos used to, as well.

Joel made a disdainful kind of snort. "Bored, rich assholes," he said. He'd known the type, back before the outbreak, anyway. Most of them didn't seem to have survived the infection, at least, but there were always the soldiers, too. The ones on duty inside the QZ, with itchy trigger fingers, excited at the prospect of putting down the Fireflies and other agitators, then got bored when things were too quiet.

Bored soldiers were dangerous soldiers.

These bored people just preferred not to do the killing themselves, apparently.

"Probably got tired of watchin' the fake stuff."

"It's not meaningless. It's something they can believe in."

Venus knows she's in the minority in this conversation, but she finds herself protective not of the system, which she's come to sour on, but of the idea. Of taking meaning through the vicarious lives of others.

When she was a little girl, sometimes it was all that would get her through. And sometimes it wasn't enough and she'd wake up in the hospital.

"The people watching aren't the ones who pull the strings to make this happen. They're just watching a fairytale with real props, as far as they're concerned."

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