Ah-Heet Dees-Pless!

[atippleoftransparency]

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.

Comments

[googledox]

Whoops, maybe he should have told Lyle about the sign.

Regardless, it happened, they weren't dead yet, and they'd had to make that run for the Cafeteria anyway, given their deplorable lack of food stores.

It was over now and all they had to show for it as a few minor cold and heat burns, but it could have been worse.

But naturally, the run had left Brainy exhausted. Like most Coluans, he had a fast metabolism because the Coluan brain burned through calories like no other species'. It was even worse for him because of his twelfth level intellect. He'd resorted to shutting several tracks of consciousnesses down completely in the hopes it would conserve some energy. They were all fairly useless at the moment anyway; all his thoughts were dull and sluggish.

Unlike Lyle, he dropped to the floor because he had to, because his legs were simply too weak to hold him up. He knew it wasn't safe but as he slipped out of Lyle's grip, he was a little too wobbly to care, folding over so that his head thudded onto the floor in front of him.

"That depends on the definition of 'okay' as based on the parameters of our current circumstances," he gasped out. "Because if okay is defined as actually being okay, then no, I'm not okay, I'm going to pass out if I don't eat soon. If okay means 'not fatally injured or otherwise about to die in the next five minutes'--" He gave a wobbly thumbs up without lifting his head from the ground.

[halfa_hero]

As it turns out, there's already someone in the sixth floor cafe, rifling through what's left of the food.

As Danny does so, he keeps his crowbar close, checking behind him every so often.

Its the confrontation we've kept not having!

[polyturtle]

Oh, well. He hadn't been expecting expecting people at the cafe.

The sixth floor had been a slight godsend, with what few supplies he felt he was able to take, the few times he'd managed to get to it. Now, however, there was trouble. People. Other Tributes. Hopefully, he could get in and out without too much trouble, but on the other hand, the darned acoustics of the Arena were making his attempts at stealth mostly useless.

But, hey, it had to work this time...right?