On My Knees, Saying Prayers in the Streetlight [Open]

[nunpunching]

WHO| Punchy and open.
WHAT| Punchy wanders around and finds a pharmacy, dissects a walker.
WHEN| Before Hellrena, week one.
WHERE| Near the town green.
WARNINGS| None.

Punchy hasn't eaten in nearly a week. His body, though used to somehow pulling nutrition out of a diet of nothing but gummi worms and sports drinks, is running on fumes. He feels his skin starting to get tight over his cheekbones and his lips starting to chap, and what's worse, he's feeling unfocused. It's a strange and unpleasant feeling for someone who can sit down and hammer out a computer program overnight; it's the way he felt back in class, as if nothing is interesting and nothing matters.

Of course, given that he's in a death Arena, feeling detached and listless isn't exactly a proper response to the circumstances.

He's set up his hideout inside an old pharmacy, one that would no longer be deemed fit to sell drugs due to the sheer amount of mildew sprawling out over every surface. He'd hoped to find candy, but the mints and lollipops he found practically crumbled to pastel-covered dust in his hands. He really only comes here to sleep during the day, catching quick catnaps and escaping from the more suffocating part of the heat.

At night, he goes out and kills these weird machinations the Capitol has put here, these walkers and insects. He has burns all over his hands from one of the giant spiders, but he's dragged a walker back to the pharmacy and is trying to take it apart, to see if there's a machine inside. How does it hunt with no eyes, no nose? If it has a sensor beacon, it could be used to find his allies.

He's hunched over this stinking, hideous corpse and so enraptured with his study that he wouldn't even notice someone coming in.

Comments

[dotsanddashes]

The one who DOES come in is used to not being noticed when she enters a place - but then, she usually finds herself blinking into places unceremoniously without walking there first, and this is not that. She approaches, board with nails in the end slung over her shoulder - not in attack stance.

She does not know this person, but he appears to be doing research. She can get behind that.

"...Peculiar creatures." It's dispensed quietly, curtly. She reaches up with her free hand to tuck a stray wisp of ginger hair behind her ear.

"Found anything?"

[nunpunching]

Punchy startles as she enters, and it occurs to him that a few months ago that wouldn't have been his response. The difference is, of course, that he's been tortured and silenced since then. Even if he feels okay, there's a certain carefree attitude that may have been quashed forever.

He doesn't want to mourn that, and so he banishes that thought.

"Shit's all organic. I can't work with this." He raises his eyebrows. The woman is his type, by which he means she's female. "You a scientist, boo?"

[dotsanddashes]

...Boo?

Visibly bristling, Rosalind lifts her chin in a proud fashion, choosing not to dignify the unwarranted pet name with a response.

"Quantum physicist. Still, one must dabble in other fields from time to time." Dropping to her knees, she leans down for a closer look at the dismantled creature, wrinkling her nose at the odor.

"I take it you're in a more...mechanical field, then?"

[nunpunching]

"Shit, that's some intense stuff. You must be big pimpin' in the academic fields."

He doesn't pick up on Rosalind bristling even a little. Punchy's life has largely been spent in a haze of obliviousness, for better or for worse (usually for worse). He wipes his hands on his pants, leaving smears of walker blood across the fabric.

"Computers. I'm a fucking gangsta on the code, you know?"

[dotsanddashes]

It's a good thing that Rosalind has come from being everywhen and everywhere, otherwise - as a woman from the 1910s - she would have absolutely no clue what that meant.

But she did know what it meant, and...well, it was a form of respect, as silly a way as it was to phrase it. She sighed a little, keeping her eyes on the dissected creature for now, hair falling a little into her face.

"I see. Well, in that, you would have me beat. Contemporary machines like that are a touch beyond me. I haven't had the chance to learn yet."

[formersurgeon]

A pharmacy is a surefire draw for Joan, of course. It seems unlikely that there would be medicines inside still, but not entirely out of the realm of possibility. She figured it was more likely that it might still have bandages, maybe antiseptic, things she could use to put together a half decent first aid kit. It didn't surprise her that someone else was in the pharmacy already, so she was cautious as she entered, and didn't drop her guard until she saw it was Punchy.

"Hey," she said softly, hoping not to scare him. "It's me, Joan."

[nunpunching]

"Joan!" Punchy stands up so fast he nearly smacks his head on a low-hanging lamp. It's covered in dust, and easy to miss given that the lightbulb itself doesn't work at all.

In an instant he's giving her a hug, despite the grime on his hands and forearms (and he might apologize for that later, if it's outright pointed out to him). "I was worried you got ganked in this mist shit."

[formersurgeon]

She hugs him back, tightly, not caring at all how grimy his hands and arms are. She's relieved to see him, too.

"I'm fine," she assures him. "I've managed to keep away from all the things so far."

She pulls back a little, lifts a hand to gently touch his head where he smacked it against the lamp. "Are you okay?"

[nunpunching]

"I'm stayin' breezy, Joanie." Aside from looking piqued from not eating and barely sleeping, he looks alright. No evident injuries besides some typical scrapes on his knees from bumbling around in the fog. The blood on him is from the walker, not his own.

"Been going out of my head a little with no one else around, though. Shit's isolating out here. Lonely."

He isn't a person who likes to be kept to himself. His fantasies of grandeur can only sustain him so long.

[shenunigans]

So far, Dave has had it a little better. He didn't get off to a great start, but once he'd properly grouped together with Elsa, they'd made a pretty good team. He'd been lucky enough to get sponsor gifts, fuck if he knows why. He really hasn't done a hell of a lot to deserve them, other than spend entirely too much time worrying about whether he can actually protect Elsa once they encounter some real trouble. Something a little harder to take down than the massive insects. The least he can do for a time like that is prepare, right? And prepare he shall. He's been having a poke around the stores and buildings when he thinks he can chance it, not wanting to spend too long away from Elsa or delve too deep into the buildings and uncover something nasty. The basic plan is to keep moving and try to gather anything useful.

So, when he passes the pharmacy, he figures there might be something useful. Despite his efforts to be subtle, he's whistling the opening tune to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air softly to himself. He figures if anyone wants to sneak attack him, he can pretend he's all naive and unaware so he can sneak attack them right back or something. His whistling remains steady as he peruses the shelves, but it's not long until he hears the sound of someone else in the Pharmacy. Approaching the sounds quietly, he keeps whistling until he's close enough to get a look at what he's doing, causing his song to go off pitch in surprise.

"Shit man, that's nasty. I hope you don't plan on barbequing that bitch."

[nunpunching]

Punchy jumps when he hears Dave enter whistling, and immediately feels a flush run up his cheeks (only one of which has freckles - the other, up until recently, was the canvas for an unfortunate tattoo which has since been removed, and is oddly unblemished in comparison). He gets up and looks the kid up and down; skinnier than him for certain, and not exactly walking in like he's about to ambush someone.

"You think it'd make good jerky?" I mean, it's a little weird to eat something that looks so humanoid, but Punchy's already up to his elbows in gore and to be honest, he's halfway to eating his own jacket. It's possible that walker tastes a little better than waterproof fabric. As such, when he looks up at Dave he's dead serious.

"That Fresh Prince?"

[shenunigans]

It does strike Dave's attention, given his own freckles. He briefly wonders if there's some sort of Stylist conspiracy to unfreckle tributes, maybe this guy escaped half way through. It doesn't seem like the time to ask, mostly because he's taking a very hands on approach to the thing he has in front of him, he doesn't want to accidentally piss him off.

So he'll just proceed as casually as ever, shrugging his shoulders and raising a brow as he considers it. "I dunno if it'd make a good anything, to be honest." The guy must be hungry if he's considering it, though. He thinks about the sponsor gifts he and Elsa managed to pull together and he wonders how much charity is too much charity. He barely knows the guy, should he be going around offering everyone food? He isn't exactly the Oprah of ration packs here.

..But he knows the goddamn Prince. "I figured he might set the scene for me." He moves his hands up to straighten the top of his jacket in one short, sharp movement. Like he's trying to channel the fresh, nineties moves for absolutely no good reason. "You from Earth? More importantly, America?"

[nunpunching]

"You's just being uncreative."

Punchy realizes that Dave's only a kid from the depth, or lack thereof, of his voice. He raises his eyebrows, feeling a little pit open up in his stomach that he's been starting to think of middle schoolers as viable threats. Punchy's not the most self-aware human being on the planet, but he'd have to be entirely stupid not to feel the way the Arenas have been pressing in on and reforming his worldview.

Which is a bit of a terrible feeling, really.

"Sure. I'm from the Dirty South, yo." He cocks his head over to the side, reaching over and wiping walker gore off his hands with a moldy towel that's probably as likely to spread disease as the monster corpse on the floor. "You sound pretty damn American too, homes. What's your ZIP?"

[khiluz]

Fíli's days are little more than looking for his brother, still while he does that he searches through whatever places he can find looking for food or weapons, water too perhaps - though he is not very hopeful on that front. Frankly he is not hopeful on any of it, but he must try at least.

It is thinking of these kinds of supplies that he steps into the next building as he has into all the others before, the concept of a pharmacy practically lost on him. What reaches him first is not any noise, but the rotting stench that wafts through the air.

Lifting a heavy wrench in his hand, the closest he has to a weapon on him at the moment, he walks around the counter to find the young man hunched over the corpse of the creature, and with a frown and a moment's pause, he recognizes him. "Punchy. What are you doing?"

[nunpunching]

"Fili!" Punchy rises up from where he's hunched over the dead walker, all covered with gore that makes him look rather upsetting. There's a splatter of blackish blood across his white teeth and his wide grin.

Granted, he and Fili didn't get started off on the best foot, but Punchy's used to sweeping the linguistic tension under the rug. He'd be a very lonely boy if he didn't.

"I'm, ah..." He scratches the back of his head, managing to get the gore in his hair. God, he wishes that this place had a shower. As a teenage boy, he's not all that unused to going a few days without a shower, but between the dead walker and the humidity here, he's becoming outright rank.

[khiluz]

For a moment Fíli does no more than stare from the boy to the dead walker on the floor, then back up to him, his eyes settling on the stains of dark blood everywhere. They linger in his teeth and hands, and it takes him a moment to even make some sense of it.

He does not know if he is right, of course, but the thought alone makes his stomach clench almost painfully.

"You should not be eating them," he tries to sound even, but the tone slips through the cracks nonetheless. "It may very well kill you faster than anything else out there will."

[nunpunching]

"Starvation's already doing a number on me, homes." Punchy shrugs. "I figure if I fry it up I'll kill all the bacteria, right?"

That's how cooking works, right? Punchy wipes his hands and gestures for Fili to sit down on a stool.

"You find your bro?"

[soldieronwards]

Of course, even if Punchy were paying perfect attention to his surroundings, it might be difficult for him to see the latest arrival. That's because Bucky noticed before entering the place that someone else seemed to have set up shop there, and so he's taking all due precautions in entering. He scales the exterior walls, searches for a weak and shadowed spot on the rooftop, and slowly chips away at the ceiling. When he silently drops in through the sagging structure to a dark corner, he's virtually silent.

For a few minutes, he's cast aside human thoughts and become his training--despite the fact that the very thing that brings him here to a pharmacy is quite human.

Back in what he and the other Avengers have claimed as their base of operations, Natasha is starting to seem ill. It's a long shot, but he has to check every place he might find help.

For now, though, he's immediately distracted by the stench the moment he slips inside the building. He tenses up, circles behind Punchy, but--for the life of him, he can't make sense of what the other guy's doing.

So finally he breaks the silence. "Don't freak out, kid, but you aren't alone. Tell me what the hell you're up to here?"

[nunpunching]

Thankfully, Punchy has never been the type of person to freak out. Even now, in the Arena after his 'punishment' by the Capitol, his highest form of panic is just to startle slightly and relax, which is what he does. He has nightmares to this day of what the Peacekeepers did to him, but he's kept the worst of it outside his waking hours.

He stands up, noticing that this guy (who snuck in like a fuckin' ninja) is in as good of shape as he is, if not a little better.

"Yo."

Well, it's greeting enough, isn't it? Gets the point across rather clearly. I come in peace, I hope you do too. Punchy holds his hands up in a friendly gestures, even though they're dribbling cold walker blood down his forearms. "This ain't blood from any homies, just the monster I got here. I'm dissecting. I guess that's the sciencey term for looting a mutt body for tech."

He chews the corner of his tongue, then glances at the medicine boxes and bottles in the aisles. "You come here looking for chewy?"

[soldieronwards]

"You know, I'm not so sure that a deathmatch arena is a good place to run science experiments." Bucky's tone is dry, but the look he's giving Punchy is thoughtful. He doesn't press that subject further at the moment, though. Instead he just keeps a little bit of a distance--more because of the smell than any worries about his safety.

He's pretty sure he can take this kid, after all.

"I'm guessing you mean medicine by that." He sighs a little. "Yeah. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, exactly, but I gotta try. Someone I need to watch out for seems like she's getting sick. It's probably something horrible that nothing can be done about, but like hell I can just leave it at that."

[nunpunching]

"Ain't an experiment. If I get a tracker out of this, I could be rallying up my homies, rescuing peeps who need it.

Even after all this time, Punchy believes in going out into the Arena to save people. To help. At the very least, to protect the weaker people from the predators that slink around with knives in their sleeves.

Punchy sighs back and shakes his head. "I understand. I ain't got shit here, though. All the bottles is empty and the water pipes don't work."

[aboveangrybees]

Yesterday, he passed by the pharmacy, not having the time to stop there and examine the building for anything useful, but today, Steve makes time to go by there specifically. Searching for food or other useful items, he looks further and further back into the building as he finds nothing.

It's the smell that catches him, making him come to a fast halt. He knows the smell is only going to get worse going further in, but Steve has to know the source, making his way further back with his crowbar and makeshift shield in hand.

What he wasn't expecting to come across the scene he has.

He quietly clears his throat to announce himself before speaking. "Hope you're not planning to eat that, kid. The indigestion would be killer," the humor in his voice is very dry.

[nunpunching]

By now, enough people have come by and startled Punchy that he's keeping an eye out for anyone entering. He rigged up a little string at the door that tugs a piece of metal reflecting light, and he notices it flash across the floor as Steve enters. He glances over as Steve clears his throat, taking in the sight of a guy built like a brick shithouse and with one of those chiseled good-guy faces. Steve Rogers looks like he belongs, carved in marble, in a hall of heroes. Punchy puffs up a little bit, like a cat meeting a strange animal.

Unfortunately, Punchy isn't the best at picking up on humor unless it's spelled out to him, and so he doesn't laugh so much as look a little confused as he gets up and wipes sweat off his brow with a grime-covered hand. It doesn't keep him from looking like an axe-murderer, given that he's only succeeded in smearing his bangs up with the walker's blood. Oops.

"Why, is these motherfuckers poison?" Because that'll be hella inconvenient - this dead walker is the closest thing Punchy's got set up for a meal for the last week. "Anyway, I'm busting this shit open looking for whatev's it's using to track Tributes. Homie's got no nose or eyes, so either he's got a tracker or great ears."

There is a twisted logic to the madness.

[aboveangrybees]

Steve's eyebrow inches up, but he doesn't look otherwise phased by the language. The slang is familiar only because of movies he's recently watched, but it's his first time hearing homie in person, so it's more than than the swearing that gets his eyebrow to go up.

"It could be edible," he gives a little shrug, "but I'll leave that for you to figure out," he has no intention of personally finding out. He looks at the creature on the ground.

"Could be using sonar, though the fog effects how sound travels." He gives a small pause of thought, a couple ideas to popping up in his head based on animals he's read about or devices he's used. "Maybe they can sense heat, in this fog we'd stick out like sour thumbs."

[nunpunching]

"Shit, I didn't even consider that." Punchy grimaces. He's been tearing up the inner ear, which hasn't exactly been pleasant work, even though it's kept him busy. He doesn't like meat, doesn't like biology. His home is in technology, especially software. "That idea? That idea's harshing my bean."

He shakes his head and sighs, leaning against the counter in front of a cash register. He looks over at Steve, and almost subconsciously straightens up a little.

"Who's you, anyway?"