Lyle Norg (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
atippleoftransparency) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thearena2014-02-09 11:17 pm
atippleoftransparency) wrote in thearena2014-02-09 11:17 pm
Entry tags:
Ah-Heet Dees-Pless!
Who| Brainy and Lyle, Lyle and YOU
What| Mourning a fallen foe. PLUS: hunting for vegan-friendly food
Where| Sixth floor, sixth floor cafe
When| Week three, post-volcano eruption
Warnings/Notes| Translated and untranslated swearing
Part the first, locked to Brainy
The door to the stairwell slammed open and a singed, many-legged form stumbled out onto the floor. Lyle had one of Brainy's arms across his shoulders and one of his own around Brainy's waist, half-dragging the Coluan to the negotiable safety of a forest of wax legs. He didn't quite collapse in a heap, too much long-embedded training to do that, but grife did he want to. He was tired, he was hungry, and he'd just had to flee a sprocking volcano and sprocking liquid nitrogen. Had he stood next to a sign warning that the volcano was going to blow at some point and not known because he couldn't read a sprocking thing here?
Lyle made a mental note to spare a moment or two to feel sorry for himself later, right now he and Brainy were in new territory and needed to be on the alert.
"You okay?"
---
Part the second, open to anyone
Sprock the Coluans. Sprock them and their sprocking genetic engineering that was making Lyle's life so much more difficult.
It wasn't that he was happy to eat cooked animal flesh, or really anything produced by an animal, but at least he could if he had to (unless he shared whatever quirk of the genetic code that had left Cos throwing up or otherwise uncomfortably expelling most of the stuff he'd eaten in the past). Brainy couldn't. So Brainy hadn't.
Lyle's fantasies about tearing the Capitol down around the ears of its citizens had begun to feature major injuries in addition to the complete and utter ruin of everything they held dear. Not for everyone, just the people in charge, and nothing that they couldn't recover from with medical treatment. Long-term, intensive medical treatment and physical therapy. And even then, they wouldn't ever be quite the same.
There seemed to be cafes on every floor, though the loss of the third floor's cafeteria was a major blow. And this late in the game, it was probably stripped bare. Still, Lyle had to look, just in case. He'd waited until night, when the light from the windows overhead had dimmed to something that wouldn't make him and his black pajamas stand out like a Talokian on Summer World, and sneaked his way toward the cafe, pausing at the cover of every second wax figure to check around him for observers.
Forget sprocking the Coluans. Sprock the whole sprocking Capitol for doing this to them.
What| Mourning a fallen foe. PLUS: hunting for vegan-friendly food
Where| Sixth floor, sixth floor cafe
When| Week three, post-volcano eruption
Warnings/Notes| Translated and untranslated swearing
Part the first, locked to Brainy
The door to the stairwell slammed open and a singed, many-legged form stumbled out onto the floor. Lyle had one of Brainy's arms across his shoulders and one of his own around Brainy's waist, half-dragging the Coluan to the negotiable safety of a forest of wax legs. He didn't quite collapse in a heap, too much long-embedded training to do that, but grife did he want to. He was tired, he was hungry, and he'd just had to flee a sprocking volcano and sprocking liquid nitrogen. Had he stood next to a sign warning that the volcano was going to blow at some point and not known because he couldn't read a sprocking thing here?
Lyle made a mental note to spare a moment or two to feel sorry for himself later, right now he and Brainy were in new territory and needed to be on the alert.
"You okay?"
---
Part the second, open to anyone
Sprock the Coluans. Sprock them and their sprocking genetic engineering that was making Lyle's life so much more difficult.
It wasn't that he was happy to eat cooked animal flesh, or really anything produced by an animal, but at least he could if he had to (unless he shared whatever quirk of the genetic code that had left Cos throwing up or otherwise uncomfortably expelling most of the stuff he'd eaten in the past). Brainy couldn't. So Brainy hadn't.
Lyle's fantasies about tearing the Capitol down around the ears of its citizens had begun to feature major injuries in addition to the complete and utter ruin of everything they held dear. Not for everyone, just the people in charge, and nothing that they couldn't recover from with medical treatment. Long-term, intensive medical treatment and physical therapy. And even then, they wouldn't ever be quite the same.
There seemed to be cafes on every floor, though the loss of the third floor's cafeteria was a major blow. And this late in the game, it was probably stripped bare. Still, Lyle had to look, just in case. He'd waited until night, when the light from the windows overhead had dimmed to something that wouldn't make him and his black pajamas stand out like a Talokian on Summer World, and sneaked his way toward the cafe, pausing at the cover of every second wax figure to check around him for observers.
Forget sprocking the Coluans. Sprock the whole sprocking Capitol for doing this to them.
no subject
Brainy certainly didn't enjoy the sight, not when he had an throbbing head ache that made it difficult to enjoy anything.
"Brilliant survival tactic, Norg, let's secure something everyone will want to brutally murder us to get their hands on."
He covered his eyes with his hands, trying to stop himself from getting irritable. It wasn't easy at the moment but over the years he'd at least tried to temper it around his friends.
"You seem to be suffering under the illusion that there's a way to survive these encounters - or even fulfill our basic needs throughout them. There's not. Even when we do, the clock will be ticking until there's less food and water and safe shelter and they'll actively destroy our sources of it to force us to fight. Sometimes the very nature of the arena will kill us; when I was looking at old footage of previous arenas I saw one where our fellow Tributes all slowly succumbed to radiation poisoning. Are we to invest our time procuring proper radiation shielding sources, too?"
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"I'm suffering under an illusion? That's a funny thing to say when you're suffering under the illusion that resignation to your inevitable death is remotely useful. Or entertaining."
Entertaining. That was the point, Brainy, that was key. They both knew they were going to die in here unless the Legion showed up and tore the whole place down, but dying in here didn't have to mean what James' or Gim's or Jan's deaths had meant. It could be what Tinya's and Garth's deaths had been -- genuine deaths, horrifically traumatic, but not the end. But they had to be entertaining. They had to convince these awful squajs that it would be worth whatever the cost was to bring them back to life for another round.
They wanted to see them fight to survive. Lying down and waiting for death wasn't going to do them any good.
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He was clearly irritated and still clearly trying to suppress it.
"What I'm asserting is that it needs a different approach than most survival situations would. Food and water are not the same level priority as they would normally be and actually securing a food source long term might not be worth the investment and risk you're suggesting."
He added, almost reproachfully, "Lyle."
Theatricality was key. They'd be better off starving faster but creating entertaining villainous situations as they did it than focusing purely on survival and having people kill them because they'd try to hunker down where the resources were somewhere.
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"If we have something people want, then we have bait for traps," he countered, though he could see Brainy's point. He didn't like it, he didn't like starving and watching Brainy starve at any speed, but he saw his point. "And you also pass out at fewer inopportune moments, which is less inconvenient for me."
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His hand was still over Lyle's sleeve which was still over his eyes.
He was a little less dizzy, though, so he lifted his legs off of Lyle's shoulders and just kept his knees up.
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"You recover," he said. "I'll keep watch. If that's okay with you, Boss-Man."
Yeah, now he was just giving you nass, Brainy.
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"I'm going to demote you for your insubordination. You're getting demoted to substitute Legionnaire. In fact, I'm inventing a substitute Legion just to have something to demote you to. Your job in our organization is pickpocketing, general vagabonding, and being one of the henchmen that can't seem to properly shoot anything they aim at."
You don't get to be a proper villain anymore, Lyle.
"As such, you keeping watch is perfectly fine with me, you substitute."
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Somehow, no matter what time he set it at it was always burned.
Although the fact they had a new brand of it (from a new world) from a different world every other week and the cooking appliances were constantly in stages of overuse and degradation probably didn't help.
(To Brainy's great annoyance, it seemed like half the upkeep he was doing on the ship sometimes was fixing the cooking appliances.)
Still, the observant could make sure the popcorn was never burned.
"Making the refreshments is a minion job requirement, Lyle, and you lack the aptitude for it. It's going to hold you back from promotion."
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Well, he could make an edible meal if Tenzil hadn't banned him from the food prep area. He erroneously believed Lyle responsible for the Unidentified Stain. Lyle maintained his innocence, but the ban (like the Stain) remained in place. The only reason it hadn't been cleared up immediately was that Imra had out-right refused to use her telepathy to "determine anything regarding stains and boys".
Ugh, they should stop talking about food.
"I keep the fire extinguishers in tip-top shape."
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It was unintentional, him stumbling on the same joke Lyle told to Joan without them having worked out the backstory. Unintentional, but convenient.
It was also not surprising when "as a legionnaire, you must give crap to every other Legionnaire constantly" had almost been voted into the official code of conduct. (As a way of giving crap to Cosmic Boy, incidentally, and initially proposed by Livewire, naturally.)
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Lyle shot Brainy a smug look. "And I repeat my statement about the fire extinguishers, which is something that really should be a minion's job."
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He wiggled his fingers for a moment trying to remember what exactly they'd used in the 20th and 21st centuries for fire detection systems because that would be the funniest thing to say. In fact, he remembered laughing at first and then, after realizing he was serious, pulling a face when Max Mercury had told them they'd need replacing.
His brain just did not feel like cooperating for a nanosecond to spit the word out, though. What did they call primitive power cells again?
"- the batteries. You'll have to check the nickel oxyhydroxide batteries. They'll blink red when they're starting to lose their capacity to hold powe -" He broke off into a laugh. "- ba ha haa."
He held a hand over his face, shoulders shaking slightly.
"I couldn't finish that with a straight face - but we actually had those when we at the Sanctuary, you know. At Happy Harbor." Lyle had heard almost all the stories about Happy Harbor and the adventures the time-tossed Legionnaires'd had thre. "They blinked the little light when they needed their primitive power cells changed." He tapped his thumb and forefinger together to show a light blinking. "That was what we were reduced to working with during that whole debacle."
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"I can hand you stuff in the lab," he continued, back on the original topic. "I do that anyway, too."
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