Ellis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shiftingurbulls) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thearena2015-02-15 01:05 pm
shiftingurbulls) wrote in thearena2015-02-15 01:05 pm
Entry tags:
Vantage Points [semi-open]
Who| Ellis and the Walking Dead group or anyone who passes by
What| Meeting fellow zombie-apocalypse survivors
Where| Around the caves and glaciers
When| Week 3 before the Guido Suit massacre
Warnings/Notes| Language, talk of Gore...usual business
Ellis had to admit, the sponsors were kind to him to get him all warmed up and armed. Granted it wasn't a rifle like Nick and it was terribly lonely to wait for him to come back from whatever he was doing. He'd told the man to rest for a day in their cave, there wasn't that much need to hunt or defend themselves. Nick, this isn't Georgia, we don't have medkits lying around for us to find. Lay down an' recover, okay? But like hell Suits listened to him. He barely did back home!
Beth implied there were more survivors out there from his home state (halleluyah!) and Ellis knew that as soon as Lt. Raine gained a weapon, he'd be more than fine on his own. So the mechanic grabbed the nearest rock and scratched on the wall a message for Nick to find if the gambler came back before he did:
"LEFT FOR SUPPLIES, BE BACK SOON."
With that, bundled up and the small pocket knife on tow, Ellis set out to explore the Arena again now that the cats were gone.
A. Cave Story
The caves around this land had proven to be a challenge for the ever-curious man to explore and forage in. There was evidence of other people living in there, more experienced Tributes in the art of putting the best and bloodiest show the Capitol could see. All El could get out of these were scraps he could either consume or build trinkets to beat the boredom. Every time the mechanic ran into a campsite, he'd slow down his paces, avoid making unnecessary sounds as to not cause a fight. For all his boisterous acting, survival usually trumped his itch to say hello to anyone he met. Not everyone was as friendly as he was, Nick reminded him so many times back home.
"Hello?" Ellis called out inside, making sure he was close enough to the exit to make a quick getaway. Anyone returning his greeting would see him raise his weapon first before he relaxed.
B. Self-Imposed Challenge
"Okay, tha's impressive," El whispered under his breath as he admired the glacial majesty before him. He felt so tiny and insignificant against the massive structure. Naturally, he said to himself, "I'm gonna climb it." How he survived the Green Flu outbreak is sometimes a mystery. The thing about glaciers is the sheer difficulty that comes with trying to get footing without the proper shoe wear as the mechanic soon found out after a few unsuccessful tries at crossing the river to get to it. "Fuckin' hell," he hissed under his breath before giving up, "Coulda made for a good vantage point."
So the next best thing were the trees, something he had more experience in. It was how he kept whatever meager supplies he could find safe from any slippery hands. He was young and flexible enough to make his way up the branches. Anyone looking up will see a grinning idiot ready to say hello or pounce and get their supplies then disappear into the wilderness if they proved to be untrustworthy. Though Ellis had a fatal flaw in his plan: he wouldn't kill the target. These were thinking people, and he refused to commit murder.
What| Meeting fellow zombie-apocalypse survivors
Where| Around the caves and glaciers
When| Week 3 before the Guido Suit massacre
Warnings/Notes| Language, talk of Gore...usual business
Ellis had to admit, the sponsors were kind to him to get him all warmed up and armed. Granted it wasn't a rifle like Nick and it was terribly lonely to wait for him to come back from whatever he was doing. He'd told the man to rest for a day in their cave, there wasn't that much need to hunt or defend themselves. Nick, this isn't Georgia, we don't have medkits lying around for us to find. Lay down an' recover, okay? But like hell Suits listened to him. He barely did back home!
Beth implied there were more survivors out there from his home state (halleluyah!) and Ellis knew that as soon as Lt. Raine gained a weapon, he'd be more than fine on his own. So the mechanic grabbed the nearest rock and scratched on the wall a message for Nick to find if the gambler came back before he did:
"LEFT FOR SUPPLIES, BE BACK SOON."
With that, bundled up and the small pocket knife on tow, Ellis set out to explore the Arena again now that the cats were gone.
A. Cave Story
The caves around this land had proven to be a challenge for the ever-curious man to explore and forage in. There was evidence of other people living in there, more experienced Tributes in the art of putting the best and bloodiest show the Capitol could see. All El could get out of these were scraps he could either consume or build trinkets to beat the boredom. Every time the mechanic ran into a campsite, he'd slow down his paces, avoid making unnecessary sounds as to not cause a fight. For all his boisterous acting, survival usually trumped his itch to say hello to anyone he met. Not everyone was as friendly as he was, Nick reminded him so many times back home.
"Hello?" Ellis called out inside, making sure he was close enough to the exit to make a quick getaway. Anyone returning his greeting would see him raise his weapon first before he relaxed.
B. Self-Imposed Challenge
"Okay, tha's impressive," El whispered under his breath as he admired the glacial majesty before him. He felt so tiny and insignificant against the massive structure. Naturally, he said to himself, "I'm gonna climb it." How he survived the Green Flu outbreak is sometimes a mystery. The thing about glaciers is the sheer difficulty that comes with trying to get footing without the proper shoe wear as the mechanic soon found out after a few unsuccessful tries at crossing the river to get to it. "Fuckin' hell," he hissed under his breath before giving up, "Coulda made for a good vantage point."
So the next best thing were the trees, something he had more experience in. It was how he kept whatever meager supplies he could find safe from any slippery hands. He was young and flexible enough to make his way up the branches. Anyone looking up will see a grinning idiot ready to say hello or pounce and get their supplies then disappear into the wilderness if they proved to be untrustworthy. Though Ellis had a fatal flaw in his plan: he wouldn't kill the target. These were thinking people, and he refused to commit murder.
a (hope this works)
So when someone’s voice bounces off the cave walls, a muted echo, Luke snaps to attention and is up on his feet with a branch-spear in hand, every line of his body tightening. But he doesn’t move to engage the stranger yet. There’s a bend in the tunnel ahead, enough that Luke can’t see who might be of a mind to come their way – though with any luck maybe the man would reconsider.
Because, before the bend and not all too far from the cave’s mouth, is the first of two rudimentary snow-and-sharpened-pike fences they’ve erected which have since frozen solid. Nothing that an adult of average height couldn’t very carefully cross if he or she meant to. It was really only a deterrent marking ownership of the space – and that being the case he’s inclined to think only the most desperate, morbidly curious, or bloodthirsty of tributes would take one look at it and keep pressing forward. But they'd hear an intruder coming at least, the cave floor around the first fence being littered with layers of thinner, dead branches just waiting to snap underfoot.
Luke steps over the second barrier separating their living space from the rest of the cave, listening quietly. His pulse racing in his throat.
"Hey," He calls back, his voice firm but not unfriendly. "Cave's taken."
It does!
"Don't worry! I got my own, sir!" El responded, unaware of possible dangers. What sensible man doesn't respond to a friendly hello? Friendly as in not having a gun to his face. "We're kinda like neighbors! Thought I'd drop by if y'all needed any help?"
The degree of sincerity behind said question was measurable, "I know it's a murder fer all but it don't mean we all hafta shoot thy neighbor if you know what I mean."
no subject
“Awful nice a’ you,” Luke offers from out of sight, a healthy skepticism tingeing his voice. Then: 'M'comin' over."
It’s always a pleasant surprise, meeting someone else who preferred trading words to wounds -- if the stranger is to be taken as an honest man. He might very well be. But it’s too soon to make that call, too soon to allow relief to wash over him and surrender to the exhaustion of keeping his guard raised nearly every waking moment. So he edges around the curve and making his approach with his spear firm in his grip, no fear and uncertainty in the way he carries himself. Only an animal-like, wary readiness, every muscle in his body cocked for counterattack as the man comes into view.
A young looking fellow. Able-bodied.
Luke holds his gaze steady, his breath misting pale in the air. The pocket knife's glinting edge immediately catches his eye and it doesn’t escape him that there might be more in the way of weapons tucked under his coat.
no subject
"Hate t' havin' jus' busted in but if we stand a chance, I might as well help ya," he offered, "Name's Ellis, wha's yers?" He wore his optimism like armor, that hope of things getting better to prevent any sanity slippage. But his run in the Green Flu planted in him the seeds of inevitability. He knew he wouldn't die of old age.
no subject
Luke comes to a stop a foot from the barrier, his expression cautiously neutral and the bloodied point of his branch-spear angled downwards. Outside the arenas, where the threat of bodily harm was low so long as he kept his head down and chose his words and his company carefully, the guy's approach wouldn't put him on the defensive. But the circumstances are very different here and he strikes him as too eager, too friendly for him to let it go unquestioned.
"We're doin’ fine, thank you." He says in a calm, quietly authoritative voice, one that, while unaggressive, leaves no room for any wheedling attempts at persuasion. "If we need anythin', I'll let you know." He adds. Politely, but unwilling to feed into any expectations he may have.
"I'm Luke." A thoughtful frown creases his brow. "You on your own out there?"
no subject
"For now...I'm with this guy named Nick. He's a surly guy but he's a Survivor too! From New Orleans!" El answered with a little more gusto, unaware that his Nick had created quite the reputation among others. "He told me to watch over stuff but...he hasn't come back for a while." In other words, he's quite alone and he has no idea of what was happening.
no subject
“Survivor?” He zeroes in on it with a quizzical lift of a brow. An interesting choice of word, that, and one that certainly sounded hell of a lot better than tribute, with all the implications of being a sacrificial offering attached. Lambs to the slaughter, Carver’s gravelly rasp echoes through his memory, dripping smug satisfaction.
no subject
Blunt and to the point, that was the mechanic's strongest trait aside from hope. "You look like you saw everything there is to see in th' world." But compared to Luke's world, his was a veritable walk in the park. The virus that infected El's home still had a chance of being cured. "We're all survivors at some point in our lives, right?"
no subject
He purses his lips, his gaze softer around the edges with a sympathy the world hasn’t yet beaten out of him -- and there’s a darkness in his eyes that ages him far more than his twenty-seven years.
Everyone finds a way to cope. Some surround themselves - wall themselves in - with delusions and lose themselves in them, others put a bright smile on their face while crumbling inside. Some cried and some cut, some pointed fingers and raised fists, and others yet sat too quiet and too still, strangling what little hope was left inside them in the hopes of killing the pain they carried with them from one day into the next.
What sort of man is Ellis?
“...Not everythin’,” Luke says, lowly, with a shake of his head. He knows of the evils that thrive in a lawless world. He knows of torture and rape, cannibalism and murder - the threats facing every man, woman, and child still alive, still breathing, awake or asleep. But he hasn’t known all the goodness that could exist, never seized every chance he had before they up and vanished and the world he knew was lost, and he's beginning to think they’ll never come back. The future is bleaker than it is brighter. And it has been for a long time.
“Whaddya mean ‘fought through’, I mean, ‘cause you’re makin’ it sound like it’s done an’ over with for y’all.”
no subject
Ellis was a man who wasn't afraid of death, that one day, out of the blue, he'd be taken away. Maybe a Tank pummeled his organs into irreparable paste and he'd quietly ask for someone to put him out of his misery. Or he'd fall off a building, get his head cut off by a stray shard of glass. He'd be surprised if he went in his sleep, almost disappointed.
But he also genuinely believed in the good that still existed in people. Virgil had provided El and his group the rarest sight in their world: a man who was ferrying survivors in his boat knowing the risks. Coach, Rochelle and Nick could've left at any moment but they didn't. He'd seen the chance of a way out and he held onto that hope as his lifeline. So yeah, Ellis was a cheerful man even through the horrors he'd seen, he accepted he wouldn't live past forty. And he was okay with this lot in life.
As a token of his peaceful intentions, Ellis took out his small knife and placed it on the cave floor.
no subject
No one knows where it came from, or how it came to be, but it was there, milky-eyed and possessed by mindless hunger, milling around the haunts of the living like just a sad drunk with nowhere to be. Then from one came two, four, eight. And by the time the pale light of dawn broke over the horizon there had been a small mob of them. Rioters, the news reports had called them. Something one could change channels from and forget about too easily. But long after TVs were switched off they were still out there and they were spreading, spilling out every which way from distant cities and trickling into small towns and neighbourhoods. Into yours. Until one morning you woke up and the TV had gone dead and they were there, clawing and thumping at your door and their rotting faces smearing the windows, things once your neighbours, your friends. Things destroying everything you knew and loved, tearing bloody chunks out of screaming brothers and sisters, moms and dads. Cursing them with a bite or a scratch that’d slowly turn them against you.
So many of them had strained their ears for word of a cure, for a quick fix, told themselves that surely the government had an answer. Surely God, if no one else. But they waited and waited and no medicine came, no men rolling in in tanks and clearly delineated quarantine zones and ration distribution. No miracles. God left them to their fate. And as time wore on, days bleeding into weeks that bled into months, that desperate hope they clung onto was leeched out of them little by little until most of them were hollowed out and hadn’t the energy left to pour into keeping dreams of lost causes alive, their needs and priorities shifting towards more important things. They needed food and water. Needed rags to staunch oozing wounds and meds to fight infections and dullen pain. They needed the strength to find the will and a reason to keep forging onwards. Dealing with the fallout of a disaster they might never learn the cause of was their reality now.
Well, it was, before Panem.
Luke studies Ellis carefully as the man bends to set the knife down in an unexpected show of vulnerability, eyes trained on his hands. But they don't reach under his jacket for something unseen and Luke realizes that there's an incredible amount of faith being placed in him here. The same Ellis seems to place in the existence of a cure and in the officials who have promised it. And sometimes that faith is rewarded.
"You'd best hold onto that knife," Luke shifts his weight. "'cause there's more than jus' Tributes you're gonna have to worry about."
no subject
He took his time picking up the knife before he asked, "Did anyone from your group get injured? I haven't seen many people in these caves...an' there are huge-ass cats that are raisin' hell." Now to the more pressing question, "I'm wanderin' because my fr-" use another word, El, "travelin' partner, he's out there an' got mauled."
A hauntingly similar situation arose from Philadelphia, where patients were not so much drunks but enraged and tearing each other apart. If there was a cruel mercy, is that kids never really made it far in the Green Flu; the last El read up on was a 98% kill rate on those younger than 15. To see children like Beth in the Arena disturbed the mechanic but they were a comfort.
no subject
And had he not had been hauled back to shelter, stripped of his drenched clothes, and all efforts been made to keep him from drifting quietly into death, he knows he wouldn’t have been here to have this conversation. He's one of the lucky few granted a second chance at life -- but he knows this luck won't hold forever.
He blinks slowly, surfacing from his thoughts.
“M'sorry ‘bout your friend.” Luke says after a long moment, his voice a low, soft thing, toneless. It hangs heavily in the air, a seemingly unfinished thought. But nothing else comes.
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"It's all right, he's a stubborn asshole an' he made it through thanks to me," El spat out, annoyed to hell and back that Nick, the diva of his group, had been so risky.
no subject
He tries to forget what came after, what left a stronger impression on him than the fear of being reduced to shreds of bloodied meat between the teeth of a beast that existed billions of years ago. He's used to running, to the threat of having his flesh hungrily stripped off his bones in no particular hurry.
It's the all-consuming stillness, the deathly calm of the lake. It's his lungs burning for air with a too-familiar urgency while hammering at the ice from beneath it, trapped, the lake so fiercely cold it hurts to the bone. It's wanting to scream but being unable to, it's fighting for life as it's being ripped from him, struggling and fading away alone and so far away from everyone and everything he ever loved that shakes him. And it always will.
no subject
If Ellis had known about the ice, he'd be a little less blunt about the questions that he'd been asking Luke for. Silence terrified him, made his brain act weird in putting sounds that weren't there. To die drowning in a frozen lake...it was one of the worst ways to go.
But the way the mechanic spoke the words you're still here were more than just assess the facts, but to encourage Luke. To make him realize that he was still in the competition as El was.
no subject
"Your people're gonna be lookin' for you," He says, evenly. And though his gaze isn't sharp enough to be penetrating it makes a point of never leaving Ellis' face.
no subject
He still smiled, but at least he knew now that not everything his Nick told him about the others was completely true. And that cheer? Completely sincere. As he began the walk back outside, he was sure he saw a buck outside. El wasn't out of it, and if anyone came at him with intent to kill, he'd demonstrate exactly how he earned the "privilege" of being in the Arena.
no subject
“Thank you." He answers, unsmiling and careful.
His gaze steadily follows Ellis out the cave and he waits for him to disappear from his field of vision before turning back and making for the warmth of the fire with a furrowed brow, thoughts swarming his mind.