thearena | a conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids [OPEN]

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a conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids [OPEN]

WHO| Carlos and anyone who comes across him while he's tripping hard! Specifically Thor, Susannah, and Clara, but anyone's welcome!
WHAT| He drank the water and now he's convinced portals are opening all over the mall. He has to get to the bottom of this!
WHEN| Week 5
WHERE| All over the mall.
WARNINGS/NOTES| If you want to try to kill him, shoot me a PM! I'm going to have him survive, but if you want to work out a fight scene I'm down.

Carlos wanders the mall with a plastic toy in his hand. Actually, wanders is not entirely accurate. It's more like he's hurrying from place to place, staring intently at one section of wall before something else catches his attention and he darts over to it. He's waving the plastic toy back and forth over sections of wall, over pieces of furniture, over windows and doors and even people he comes across, muttering very seriously to himself.

He pulls a tape recorder out of his lab coat pocket and starts to speak into it. The words are more slurred than he thinks they are.

"Arena 11, week six, day three. I am no closer to finding out where the vortexes lead. I tried throwing a box of popcorn into one a few minutes ago, but I didn't learn anything. It just disappeared. I don't dare step into one of them myself, because of course you never step into a strange and mysterious portal without determining where it leads first, but so far nothing has come through from the other side that might give me a clue about their nature. Luckily, I found some scientific instruments I hadn't noticed before in the shop where Cecil and I are staying, and I've been able to take some readings, but I don't have anything conclusive yet.

But don't worry. I'm a scientist, and this is a very scientific phenomenon. I won't stop until I've gotten to the bottom of this."

He doesn't sound worried. Actually? Carlos seems pretty happy.

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Susannah isn't sure what Carlos is doing in the Scarlet Fields of Can'Ka no Rey, but she imagines it must be very scientific. Maybe he's here to study the Tower. Maybe he can take her to Tower. She never got to go before. She'd left before they reached all the roses. But she's got to the end of the roses now. She just needs to make it the rest of the way through.

"Carlos," she says, "Carlos. Carlos, honey, down here."

"Susannah?"

Carlos glances around, then winces as a wave of nausea washes over him. It's a moment before it passes, but when he opens his eyes again, he sees her. He blinks until she comes into focus.

"Susannah!" He totters over to her as fast as he can, dropping down to a crouch next to her. "Are you all right?"

His head feels foggy, but not as bad as it was an hour ago. Carlos is clearheaded enough to be concerned for Susannah.

"Of course I'm all right," she says. "I think maybe I'm catchin' a cold, maybe a little tired, but a little thing like that's not gonna kill me, sugar. We're almost there. Almost to the Tower. Can't you see it?"

She points toward something only she can see in the direction of the ice rink. "Can you take me there? The road's disappeared and Roland took the cart away with him and I-- I can't get my stumps to go where I want 'em properly. Just follow the Beam."

Edited 2014-09-25 01:02 (UTC)

For the second time this Arena, seeing Carlos fills Thor with immense relief and, unfortunately, guilt. He's glad to see he's remained safe for so long in the wake of losing so many people. He knows it's inevitable, it's a pill he needs to swallow every day. He can't possibly help everyone, to do so would doom them, but the guilt he feels from being useless burns like emotional indigestion.

Yet, he can't help lighting up with a smile when Carlos seems so fervently focused on science. That is until he approaches and it becomes increasingly apparent that something isn't quite right with him. Particularly when he wanders over and begins to wave what looks to be a toy over Thor's chest.

"Vortexes?" There's a word that pings his interest, but he holds out a hand to steady Carlos by his shoulder anyway.

Carlos looks in the direction of the ice rink, pulling his glasses a few inches down his nose for good measure.

"No," he admits, bemused. "I...I can't see it. That doesn't mean it isn't there," he clarifies quickly, "there are a lot of things that are there but can't be seen, just like there are things you can see that aren't real -- but I can't see a Beam, either."

"Beep, beep, beepbeepbeep," Carlos mutters under his breath as he waves the little plastic microphone across Thor's torso, as if he hadn't even heard the question. He looks up at Thor with a very serious expression. "Oh, no. The danger meter's going crazy," he informs Thor with gravity. "It looks like--"

Then, Carlos's shoulders hunch, and his head tucks, and he starts to shake. "It looks like you're really dangerous," he stammers out, and the source of the shaking becomes clear: Carlos is caught in a fit of uncontrollable laughter.

Edited 2014-09-25 14:03 (UTC)

This is definitely stretching beyond the usual, enthusiastic interest in science. Of course, Thor doesn't completely scratch the possibility that Carlos is being deliberately foolish, but it doesn't seem in his character to jest about science. A brow quirks then furrows, unsure how to react when he starts laughing in a manner most unbecoming for their situation.

"Not to you, I'm not." He retorts in a low voice, amusement and uncertainty colouring the edges of his tone, though he does his best to sound stern. "What ails you, Carlos? It's not like you to be so.." Weird. Wait, that isn't entirely true. A better word.. "Exuberant." He finishes, hoping that the joke becomes clear to him soon.

"You can't see the Beams," Susannah explains. "Not really. They're invisible. They hold everything together, but you can't see them, just the way they act on the world. The way the clouds flow along them. The way the trees grow, the way the birds fly, the way our shadows fall. 'All things serve the beam,' Roland's said." Her voice takes on a melancholy tone. "He's gone. Disappeared into his Tower."

Carlos is still shaking, clutching his own stomach, as he tries to reply. "Nothing ails me," he says through gales of laughter, waving the 'danger meter' at Thor. "I'm fine. At least, I will be fine, as soon as I get to the bottom of these mysterious vortexes that have appeared all over the mall."

He gets a hold of himself, then peers at Thor suspiciously.

"You wouldn't have anything to do with them, would you...?"

"The great coils of the universe unwinding," Carlos says slowly. It doesn't really have anything to do with what she's saying, but her words make him think of it.

...now where had he heard that before?

Oh well, it didn't matter.

You'll have to get his attention back to the task at hand, Susannah; Carlos has spaced out, thinking about laws of nature and how they're really just patterns, and how calling them laws is human folly, and how can so many contradictions exist in the same universe?

"Less coils," she says, "and more spokes. Spokes on a wheel, with the Tower the axle the whole universe revolves around. Maybe all the universes." Her voice gets dreamy. "The tower, the rose, Mr Stephen King... all the same. Where all things meet."

She blinks and shakes her head and tugs on his pant legs. "Carlos. Carry me."

(Her handicapped shopping cart lies dented, overturned, and inert about twenty feet behind them.)

He blinks, then looks down at her.

"...okay," he says. Because why wouldn't he? Why wouldn't he take Susannah where she needed to go? He was a scientist, and scientists helped people.

So it is with conviction that Carlos bends down and picks her up. He carries her across his chest, with one arm hooked under her arms and around her back and the other wrapped around the top of her thighs.

"Which way?"

Yes, yes, he is definitely a scientist. He is the very best of scientists. "There," she says, and points in the direction of the ice rink, which is of course where the Tower lies, surrounded by singing roses. She can hear their song.

Faint, right now. But she's sure it'll be louder when she gets closer.

Edited 2014-09-27 02:45 (UTC)

Dutifully, Carlos totters in that direction. The going will be slow: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is malnourished and working toxins out of its system.

"So what does Stephen King have to do with it?" Carlos asks. "You mentioned him, right?"

"Him?" Susannah blinks. "That son of a bitch wrote me. Wrote you too, maybe, for all I can tell. Is Night Vale the kind of place he'd write? Is Panem? I wouldn't know, the man was after my time. I've never read more than a page or two of him in my life. But I'm in his magnum opus. The pure gold baby that melts into a shriek. He almost died before he could finish us. It's not that I'm bitter, except of course I'm bitter, we went through a lot to keep that damn man alive long enough to drop that deus ex machina in Dandelo's bathroom."

She's delirious, right? She can't have just babbled that she's a character in a Stephen King novel, can she?

Edited 2014-09-27 19:28 (UTC)

Carlos stumbles -- stumbles, but doesn't fall.

"What?" he says, feeling like his thoughts are coming through a fog. "Susannah -- did you just tell me that you think you're a character from a book by Stephen King?"

Edited 2014-09-29 18:08 (UTC)

She clutches tight to him as he stumbles. "I don't think it, Carlos," she says, but any relief he might feel from this statement is destined to be short, because, "I know it. And it's books, evidently. He writes a little and then stops."

Carlos's eyes widen as his hazy brain tries to process this.

Tries, and succeeds.

"....fascinating," he breathes. "How did you find out? It must have taken very compelling evidence to convince you of something that world-changing."

"From Roland," she says. "And he talked to the man himself. He'd gone to Maine '77 to save a foolish book collector who didn't really deserve it, him and Eddie--my late husband," she specifies, "not Panem's Eddie--and they went to talk to Stephen King after, because our friend Pere Callahan was looking at one of the book collector's books, Something's Lot, and found himself in it."

Susannah has absolutely no reason to lie to him, Carlos thinks, and he knows she's not insane, so it stood to reason that she was telling the truth. Still, all other possibilities had to be exhausted before he believed something like that completely.

"Uh-huh," Carlos said slowly. "You're sure he didn't base the book on you somehow? I'm just saying, it's important to know which came first, you or the book."

Thor is almost willing to drop it as a joke when Carlos continues to laugh, he even laughs uncomfortably himself and hopes that Carlos pulls himself back from the joke. Alas, it becomes less and less likely that this could be so simple.

"Not that I know of." It's not an answer most would give, but Thor can never be too sure about vortexes around his person. "Why don't you show me one of these vortexes, Carlos?" He feels like that will really solidify whether this is a joke, a delusion or something very serious.

Carlos, your definition of sanity is either very flexible, very Night Valean, or both, because you're talking to a woman with legit multiple personalities. But she'd appreciate your faith in her if she knew you were thinking such kind things about her mental health.

"He didn't base it on us," Susannah says, "not how you're thinkin', honey, he wrote it and things-- things fell into place how he wrote. Co-op City was in the Bronx in his world, but he thought it was in Brooklyn and so in the New York I come from it is in Brooklyn." At least, she was almost positive she was from the same New York as Eddie and Jake. "And-- and he left us a note. And a poem. Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came. My first thought was, he lied in every word," she quotes. "That bit was about Dandelo. He made Roland laugh. Roland never laughs."

Carlos isn't exactly what most people would call sane either. They're both a little nuts.

"So let me get this straight. People from one world went to another world, where they met Stephen King and found out that they were characters from one of his books?"

It sounds crazy. But so did how science worked in Carlos's world. He's not disbelieving her.

"Show you?" Carlos laughs again, shaking his head in disbelief. "Thor, there's one right there!"

He points (with the danger meter) to the window of the nearest shop. Jagged broken glass frames a completely ordinary hole, and in addition to the shop's merchandise display, there are a couple of small items lying just inside of it. A potted plant, a t-shirt, a pair of sunglasses -- all of them must have been thrown through the hole in the glass.

There is nothing vortex-like about it.

"It's a classic portal through time or space. I can't tell which, yet, since I haven't tried stepping through myself. Everyone knows you don't do that. You can't just walk into a mysterious portal without testing it extensively first. Besides, everything I've thrown in has disappeared, so there's a very high probability that I will disappear, too."

Edited 2014-10-02 16:56 (UTC)

"Mmhm. And I'm not even sure if it was a very good book. The man didn't quite seem the literature type--more the popular fiction."

She leans forward more as they get closer to the destroyed ice rink, as if she can see something Carlos can't. "Eddie," she murmurs. "Only one of him. That's good, right? Eddie and my momma and daddy and there's the Pere, there's Bert, there's so many of them, I can see their faces in a shimmer of light, oh Carlos. They're singing, Carlos, they're singing with the roses."

Alright. Thor thinks they have crossed the borders of humor at this point. He gives Carlos a worried glance before he follows his line of vision toward the supposed portal, looking back to him with a furrowed brow.

"There is nothing there, Carlos. Your eyes deceive you." He says sternly, no time for this tomfoolery, even if Carlos isn't aware of it. He feels like the easiest way to nip this in the bud is to stride forward before Carlos can stop him. He gives him a pointed look, slipping a hand carefully through the hole in the window so he can grab the sunglasses that hang off a nearby rack. He pulls them back through and holds them out with a raised brow. He can't help reflecting on the vortex he and Jane found back in Svartalfheim. At least this time this isn't the portal of Jane Went on a Date Without You, this is the portal of Something is Wrong With Carlos.

"Perhaps you should sit down." Just a suggestion.

Edited 2014-10-03 13:00 (UTC)

Carlos still doesn't see it.

But just because he doesn't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.

He staggers forward -- the Arena has weakened him, and he's not sure how much farther he can go -- but he's determined to get her to where she wants to go. They're not far now. He can make it to the ice rink, can't he? He has to.

Stephen King wrote Susannah. Carlos hadn't read any of Stephen King's books (actually, he had never read any books) so he had never heard of her, but the possibility makes him wonder. Do the beams exist only because Stephen King imagined them? Does Susannah exist only because someone imagined her?

Did someone imagine him?

The idea feels Carlos with deep existential dread.

"Susannah...what if we're all imagined? What if all of this is just falling into place because someone is imagining it? If that's true, then nothing is real, and that would be the most scientific fact of all."

"No, don't!" Carlos cries, stumbling after Thor. "You don't know what's in there!" Carlos is truly distressed: he has seen some terrible things happen to people who go only partially through portals, like age a thousand years in a single second and go screaming mad.

He stares at Thor's hand with horror, clapping a hand to his mouth.

"Your hand--!"

God knows what it is Carlos is seeing, but it isn't pretty. He starts to fumble in the pocket of his lab coat, looking for his tape recorder. Even through his horror, the drive to do science cannot be suppressed: Thor bravely stuck his hand through the portal, and it was Carlos's duty to make sure that sacrifice was not vain.

Luckily, they're almost there. "Carlos, honey," she says, "that might or might not be true that we're all imagined and not just my--" the chip shifts the High Speech word, ka-tet to imperfectly translated English, "my adventuring party and those French fellows, but that doesn't mean we aren't real in at least some essential. I might have come from the mind of Mr King, but I live and breathe and so do you. Panem is real to us."

He holds her to his chest a little tighter and thinks that over.

"I don't feel unreal," he murmurs. Then, a thought strikes him. "...what makes feeling real, anyway? Feelings can't be quantified, but we accept that they exist, because we feel them." He's rambling now, staggering forward onto the ice rink, not bothering with skates. "I might or might not be real, but my feelings are, because feeling something means that feeling is real."

He's not going to get much farther on this ice.

That's all right. They're just at the spot where Roland lay dying less than a full week before. Susannah tugs on his shirt. "We're here, honey. You go any further and we'll run into the wall. Just gimme a moment to work the door..."

She reaches toward the tower only she can see, to open the door... but it won't budge. It's locked. "It's locked," she says out loud. "Carlos, it's locked. The Tower's barred to us."

She feels like crying suddenly, but blinks back tears. "Carlos. Will you let me down and sit a spell with me? If we can't get in the Tower, at least we can sit in its shadow."

Her chest feels heavy. Has been feeling heavy, like she's had a cold.

Carlos can't think of anything better to do, and maybe if he stays here long enough, he can study this Tower only Susannah can see. So, he sets her down onto the ice as gently as he can and sits next to her.

He pulls a small plastic microphone from his pocket and starts waving it around.

"I'm picking up energy," he says. "Energy from where you said the Tower was. It must be there, Susannah -- I just can't see it." He waves the microphone around a little more, then stops over Susannah. His eyes widen.

"...but your energy is lower than it should be. Susannah, are you all right?"

For a moment, Thor feels genuinely guilty for making Carlos so distressed, but it's a good measure of his mental state. He lets his arm fall to his side as Carlos panics and runs toward him, but he spares a glance down at it when the man fumbles around in front of him.

"Carlos. You are not well." He claps both of his hands on his shoulders, giving him a little jostle when he does. "Come, we will sit inside the store, you will gather your bearings." It isn't even an offer or a question, he's guiding the scientist toward the shop to try and sit him down inside.

Carlos lets himself be marched in the direction of the store, offering no resistance. He's got his "tape recorder" out now -- a little black cardboard box -- and begins to speak in a voice that he forces to be steady.

"I have new data on the portals. Thor, he -- he stuck his hand into one before I could stop him. He retrieved the probe I sent through a few minutes ago, but his hand is ancient now, withered, like it aged a hundred years in the span of a few seconds. Thank goodness they restore us to our original physical states when the Capitol revives us, or Thor would be stuck with only one good hand forever. It's not an impossible injury to learn to live with but for a warrior like him? I imagine it would be very difficult."

Once they're in the store, Thor will push Carlos down by his shoulders so he sits on one of the chairs provided. He is bewildered by the fact that the man continues to talk and shows no signs of relenting his little imaginary crisis.

"My hand is fine." He murmurs, mostly to himself to shake off the residual paranoia Carlos is giving him. He places a hand on his forehead, trying to tell whether his temperature is strange before talking over him loudly. "When did you first begin to see portals, Carlos? What did you do before then?"

Carlos sways a little just before he sits: there's that dizziness again, that nausea. He grips the edges of the chair tightly for a few moments, closing his eyes, waiting for it to pass.

"I," he begins unsteadily, opening his eyes to look worriedly at Thor, "I was with Cecil. We were on the third floor. I'd just come back with food and water, and we were talking, and suddenly, right there in front of me, a vortex opened."

Thor reaches out quickly to grab his shoulders, debating whether to place him onto the floor instead. He thinks first he will make it comfortable for him, so once he seems steady he will go about tossing shirts and various other soft clothing items on the ground.

He pauses at the mentions of food and water, furrowing his brow as he considers it. "Perhaps it is a poison." He muses out loud, not sure if Carlos will make sense of it. He tries not to make his worry too apparent as he moves to hoist the scientist out of his chair and sits him on the pile of clothing he has amassed. "You will have to sweat it out, whatever it is." He says grimly. "I will stay here with you."

"Yes. Staying here is a very good idea. Don't try to go through any of those portals. You saw what it did to your--"

Carlos blinks, and suddenly realizes he's sitting on a pile of shirts. His face turns puzzled.

"--when did I end up on the floor?"

And just like that, she starts to cough. Lord, no wonder if feels like she's got a cold, there's definitely gunk in her lungs.

"Feelin' a mite sickly," she confesses. "Hope it's not contagious."

She coughs more. Ends up turning her head to hack up something slimy onto the ice. Ugh.

Afterward, she leans against him. Closes her eyes. "Maybe I'll just stay here. It's not a bad place to die."

She coughs again, with a sudden violence that dazzles her. "I should-- I should give you my gun."

"You don't have to do that," Carlos protests, ignoring the disgusting coughing. He has seen so, so much worse. "I mean -- I don't like using guns. I'm not sure I ever actually have. But if you want me to hold onto it just so that no one else who's more likely to use it picks it up, I -- I can," he goes on.

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a conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids [OPEN]

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