But In All Chaos, There Is Calculation [Closed]

[celebrityskinned]

WHO| Venus and Mouse, Venus and Jean and Kankri
WHERE| Anywhere in the museum
WHEN| Towards the end of week 3
WHAT| Venus tries to accelerate the end of the Arena by killing off strangers.
WARNINGS| Death, mental illness (dissociative), some description of gore

Venus doesn't have time to feel alone. Or rather, she has all the time in the world, but she's moving too slowly to hold on to the back of such a powerful emotion. Time sprawls out in languid hours tucked into the minutes before her. Everything is slow motion, especially her.

She's well-aware she looks like a monster from a horror movie now. The slash across her face is blood-crusted, purple and pink with unhealed gore. Her limp is impossible to hide, but the worst part is how disconnected she is. When she looks in the mirror, it's as if she's inside herself behind glass. There's a deadness in her eyes of someone not quite attached to the mortal plane at the moment.

The waterways of her mind whip and twist through rapids and eddies, pool in swamps and mires, plunges over waterfalls she never reaches the bottoms of. Knowing she isn't okay isn't enough to pull her back to the surface.

But she's aware that the only way to get her medicine is to kill for it, and she knows the only way to keep Kankri safe is to guide him. It's with the twin aims of murder and rescue that she ventures deep into the organs of the museum, dressed in hot pink sweatpants from the giftshop and a sweater with the her own name emblazoned over the front. She'd have to be dead to forget how to brand herself.

She thinks she agonizes more over the act of killing now that she's sick than she ever did while stable. The knife is heavy in her hand. Kankri's absence is a void at her side. She only wants to push past her bodily constraints long enough to ensure a victory for someone worthwhile, and then she can figure it out from there.

Comments

MOUSE

[celebrityskinned]

[pointandclickme]

Food. Food had suddenly become an issue. Not that it hadn't, technically speaking, been one while camping in the planetarium. But Mouse was used to getting by on little or less, so the few supplies they had had done fine. More than fine, really, so used to he was the lumpy glump on the Neb that stale pastries and gallons of sugar had been nothing short of Christmas dinner.

Now? Now he was remembering how much it blew to not have a home base. It meant not having a supplies stash, just carrying everything all the time. Not, in all honesty, that any of the food he had stumbled across recently seemed that appealing at the moment. Ever since that last tussle he was feeling...odd.

As he made his way to the gift store, Mouse tried to shake the feeling. Dude had probably given him some horrible super flu with that bite. Just what he needed in this place.

[celebrityskinned]

Maybe, if Venus could see Mouse and the state he's in, a bit wobbly and pale, she'd believe she was doing him a favor. In truth, she can't tell what he looks like, only that he isn't one of her allies, so her motivation can't be shrouded in the delusion of nobility.

She's on the second floor landing when Mouse heads down the stairwell looking for the door to the floor with the giftshop. Someone died in the elevator earlier, and the corpse-cleaning robot got stranded after the lift left without it. Venus has been killing time sitting with it, poking at it and watching it whirr around and bump into walls, letting it examine the leg that she's cast across the edge of the stairs so it doesn't fall.

She lets it keep whirring when she hears the footsteps. The sound of the robot will cover the steps she takes to crouch in wait, to drag her injured leg out of the light and into the dry darkness here.

[pointandclickme]

He hears the whirling, but doesn't think much of it. It seemed to be getting progressively harder to think of much of anything outside of his stomach, actually. Something he would have spent more time and worry on if, again, there wasn't the hunger issue. He doesn't even know what he's craving, just hopes the gift shop will have it.

He pauses just outside the stairway door as he reached the floor, rolling one oddly stiff shoulder than the other as he tries- and fails- to focus up.

Man, he hates this place a little more every moment.

[celebrityskinned]

The robot stops for a moment, having found nothing.

She holds her breath, and the cloak of darkness in the stairwell falls like a curtain between them. She's so close she can hear him breathing. She can hear the pop in his shoulder when he rolls it. Can see the only light, shining from two floors above, glinting off the sclera of his eye.

That's when she moves. A whuff of air escapes her lungs as she bends over and grabs the robot, and she twists as if hoisting a gigantic discus at Mouse's face, with enough force to smash in a car window.

[pointandclickme]

He tried to get a What? out. He really did. But the combination of no time and the growing reluctance of his vocal cords to make words today cut it off totally. So there were no dramatic last words, no grand posturing or tell them I said something!. There was just a short, cut off gasp as the machine made contact.

And Mouse hit the ground, head bouncing against the unforgiving surface.

[celebrityskinned]

It's not enough. Without a cannon to signal when she can stop, Venus has to certify that Mouse is dead. That he isn't going to wake to a hell of broken bones and brain damage.

She lifts the robot over her head and brings it down again and again and again, until blood and bits of bone spatter the stairs and dribble down the rails. The splintering and smacking sounds echo up the stairwell like yells inside a throat.

When she's done, she's covered in gore. She sets the robot aside, taking a deep breath. Mouse's head is a splatter with a a hemisphere or bone lolling against the floor. She doesn't have eyes to close.

She takes off her hoodie. She drapes it over him and straightens it, pats him.

"Wake up in the Capitol, man." She presses a button on the robot and it starts to clear up the mess.