thearena | God give a little love; bring me back a dog in the next life

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God give a little love; bring me back a dog in the next life

Who| Daywalker Initiate and YOU
What| Pros of Troll zombies: lazy fuckers are solar-powered and sleep all night. Cons: Trolls were already deadly.
Where| All around the arena.
When| Following the Cave bloodbath, going on to ????
WARNINGS| Probably eating people. Gore.

He's just another corpse in the night, laying perfectly still. But the Capitol doesn't take him.

The sun goes up and he's pulled like its most darling puppet. Worn and broken, but loved enough to rise. His head hangs lopsided and the stump-peg that used to be his leg drags along. There's not a thought, not a bit of pain, only a hunger deep in his gut that claws and screams from within, the most sound he's apt to process.

His breath is a rasp through his fangs. His paint, while still on, is mostly smeared. His eyes glow bright in the shadow, the indigo washed out to pale grey, and the gold sclera turned to a day-glow yellow. The blood is dried and frozen upon his front, the indigo crusting to something black.

Every so often a growl slips out faint, along with a twitch and hiss. His claws rake along tree and stone. The stump causes problems, brings him to fall. He'll linger upon then snow, moaning and keening with illness. Until sudden sound bring his head to snap to alertness.

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Sandy honestly thought she had a good chance this time. Plenty of clothes, still some food on hand. Sure Phil had died but at this point wasn't it a forgone conclusion that most of her friends were going to die?

She cursed herself for thinking that the moment she saw him.

It took less then a second to see there was something wrong. A few more moments and she could take a guess at what that something was. She'd seen it before. She'd died from it before.

"H-hey...It's me. Sister of Sand?" She tested the waters just to see if maybe the worse case scenario wasn't what was happening here. Slowly she shrugged off her backpack. If he was what she thought he was...she'd have to put him down. None of her other friends would have wanted an undead version of themselves running around.

Then again...the Initiate was probably the craziest friend she had.

He stares blindly ahead. That flat rasp keeps on going. Then, all sudden, there's yet more a terrible clicking under sopping half-frozen flesh. A growl rolls over his tongue, as slowly, he begins to rise.

He sways, eyes focusing upon what prey has come. He takes one lurching step forward. In his throat the growls turn on into clicks.

He lurches forward another step, peg leg dragging.

Well at least he's as slow as the other zombies.

She makes a slow circle around him trying to get behind him. It'll be easier that way. A six inch hunting knife is in her hand and she briefly considers using her backpack as a shield. But he might break the bottles. So it sits to the side with two picnic baskets hanging off it. One empty, one full.

she thinks grimly back to the first time she had seen a zombie. It was a man named Javert who had saved her life in her first arena. She'd lost track of him after that arena but in the second arena she was in she'd found him again shambling along a mindless corpse.

It had chilled her to the bone.

This was more...disappointing. She had hoped Initiate would do better. He was built for an arena like this, or so she'd thought. But apparently zombie infection doesn't play favorites.

Moving closer she sizes him up and realizes with dismay that he's too tall for her to get to his head without something to climb on. She'll have to knock him down first.

He stays a swaying corpse. She steps closer and closer. She makes one of the greatest mistakes as can be make against him.

She underestimates.

All at once, his jaws open wide, and from him, a deafening shriek sounds. He pounces forward, claws outstretched.

A sharp gasp of breath, he's faster then she anticipated!

Tumbling to the ground she pitches forward barely avoids those claws and gets a face full of snow and dirt for her troubles. Scrambling to right herself she spins about slashing haphazardly in case he can turn around as fast as she can.

It lands upon the ground knees hitting hard. Her slashes go on ineffectual, troll's skin being tougher than human's, and the dead having no response none either way to pain. But the daywalker notices being touched, it smells blood fresh upon her and it wants.

It snarls again reaching forward to slash, then once more trying to rise up. The peg drags, slowing it down, but not by much.

She's fast enough to avoid the slash, but the same mud and snow that cushioned her fall is now shifting under her feet and she tumbles backwards landing on her butt. Again she windmills in a clumsy desperation to get up but her legs tremble like a newborn deer. This isn't going to be as easy as she'd hoped!

He was faster then she expected, maybe even fast enough she couldn't outrun him. Which left her only the option of actually killing him to escape.

Thank goodness she was dressed in layers. Even though she had blood on her coat and rips in the sleeves the only easily exposed flesh was her face.

The daywalker slides along on the same snow as Sandy, but it doesn't seem to truly notice, continue to scrabble and scramble for that living flesh and blood.

But she's not running now. Happiness is beyond him now, but this registers somehow positive.

He keeps on clawing, until finally going for a pounce, a leap on forward.

She makes a calculated strike, driving her knife up for his face as he pounces at her. Unfortunately she misjudged the speed and angle of his fall so instead of plunging into his brain the blade is aimed at his jaw.

With a shriek she tumbled to the ground pinned under the weight of him. She's kicking, screaming, throwing all of her strength into the struggle to pull free.

The blade sinks in deep, missing the tongue by barest bit. It clicks all wrong in his teeth for mere fact that it's not no blood or meat. The Initiate's tongue pokes at it and is caused to bleed for the effort, that indigo near-black now spilling over his lips.

But no pain registers even then. Not when she kicks neither.

His corpse is still strong, even if not strong as he was. If the daywalker can't bite, tearing will have to do. And the flesh is like water through the claws.

Her scream would cut through the forest for at least a mile.

As padded as her layers of clothing were, it turned out they were no match for his claws. They shredded like paper. But the real scream came from when one of his slashes cut across her face leaving deep gashes in her cheeks and eyes. She felt a searing pain in her eyes and realized that he had blinded her. For how long was anyone's guess but each time she tried to open her eyes all she saw was red and it sent pain through her skull.

Keeping her eyes clamped tightly shut she lashed out in a desperate panic. Feet, hands, grabbing fistfuls of mud, trying to find something on his face to grab and pull so she might have a chance of getting him off.

But the odds were quickly falling out of Sandy's favor as a pool of red blood began to grow around her and the fabric of her clothes grew dark and sticky.

The blood spreads and flows free, a thing that's held fascination well before his death most recent. The daywalker's jaws clamp on and struggle against the blade shoved there. More indigo spills to fall upon the mess of red Sandy's become.

There's no register of guilt or anything at all as Sandy is rendered blind. The cloth and kinfe interfere both with any chance of biting. Instead just enough dexterity is manage to bring the blood up to the mouth, like a man thirsty from desert walking. It's not enough, but something comes of it; the kinfe twists and is pushed out, cut a glasgow smile up the one side of the daywalker's face.

Black, red, and indigo. Perhaps she's lucky to be blinded from this. Perhaps the knife will fall just so conveniently as to save her.

Somewhere in the mess of screaming and blood and horrible noises that the daywalker is making, Sandy registers the sound of something falling to the ground near her. It's a wet slap against the mud and she thanks whatever god might still listen that it didn't land silently in the snow.

Perhaps it was adrenaline clearing her senses or perhaps it was luck that her hand stretched out and grasped the thing. Her luck ran out as her fingers gripped the blade and she felt it slice into her flesh. No time to appreciate that however as she could feel rancid breath and the weight of death upon her.

She had grown familiar with the sensation of dying. It was different every time but one thing remained the same. Cassandra Marko always went out screaming, kicking and struggling as much as she could.

She swung blindly towards the sound of the beast and hoped it would land true.

Always a fighter. It'd be one of the many things what made the Initiate proud. His best girl always stone strong.

He never wanted to be the one to hurt her. But then, he never wanted to be one to hurt a whole motherfucking lot of people. And he always ended up being the one what did. Maybe the world ought to have learned from that.

The daywalker lunges forward, jaws finally free. That glasgow smile stretches wide and the teeth open wider until there's a crack of dislocation. The knife sinks into its flesh and guts just that little bit. But the daywalker's teeth have already sunk deep in the poor girl's neck. There won't be no more screams.

Strangely enough, Nick hasn't really encountered any of the few people he'd managed to meet before being thrown into this shitfest. Maybe it's a good thing, all things considered. He probably wouldn't kill the people who helped his sorry ass on his first day, but he wasn't exactly making promises.

He doesn't see Initiate at all when he's wandering through the forest hunting, but the sounds around like any animal he's ever heard before. If he didn't know better, he'd say they sound an awful lot like the heavy breathing and moaning of the infected. But they aren't here. He knows that. They don't repeat that shit, the guy told him that.

Nick grips his gun tighter, turning slowly as he tries to seek out the source of the sound before it gets the better of him.

The Initiate wouldn't have lied, he'd have been pretty disappointed to be run through after all that. Wasn't much, just some joking and even a mention of acting good-- setting up room for possibilities in the future. But even still, while he maybe wouldn't hold Nick to it so much, it would've sucked to have trollish actings turned back on him after all that time.

But the Initiate's only there in technicality. It's Nick who's got the unfriendly reminder to be faced.

The daywalker stops it's keening. It starts shift and rise up, indigo blood too dried up by now to spill like it did at first. The peg leg drags but it isn't in no hurry. And then those Yellow eyes turn in Nick's direction.

It's really one of those get it before it gets you situations, not that Nick is aware of the fact that it's Initiate he's hearing. This is a game of truce and murder tag that he is not interested in playing.

The sound of the peg leg dragging over the ground draws Nick's attention in the right direction. He's cussing himself out something fierce in his head, but he won't yield. He's taken on worse and won, but it's really fucking offputting that the yellow eyes are the most prominent thing here.

"If you're another tiger I swear to god." He hisses under his breath, squinting as he tries to get a better look at whatever is approaching while stepping back all the while. Clarity dawns on him finally and his eyes widen some, head cocking curiously to the side. "Is that you- uh- Initiative? Cut it out, you're freaking me out."

What was once indigo set in gold, is now a washed out grey. He stares blankly and the words wash over, meaningless even down to the incorrect name. The Initiate's head tilts, just a little too unnatural to be a deliberate show of confusion.

It breathes deep, sighing. The hunger claws, the most alive bit of it. The daywalker's blackened lips pull up to show off those long fangs. All the remaining synapses fire off to move the Initiate's muscles without him, push those fingers into spread out claws.

The noise that rips from his throat is so shrill it's near-deafening. The daywalker lunges forward with a wide swipe at Nick.

Everything clicks into place pretty quickly now that Nick is getting a better look at the situation. He's seen enough infected to know the signs, it's practically emblazoned on Initiate's forehead at this point. It's only his words back in the Capitol that hold him back at this point, the promise that the Capitol doesn't repeat this kind of shit.

It's that thought that has him lagging, but he doesn't delay further. When Initiate screams, he's preparing to move. He throws himself away from the swipe as best he can, but it makes him stumble when he does. "Not today, asshole." He turns on Initiate, raising his gun and firing it as quickly as he can. It means the aim is shoddy, but he'll do anything to slow the guy down at this point.

There's no room for such things as frustration in his shut-down thinkpan. It's all mental dialogue has been cancelled out but for the most vague senses of 'yes' and 'no'. A good thing and a bad.

The daywalker doesn't react much to the miss but for another rasp that doesn't make it into a snarl. The bullet that blows back its shoulder is as close into the bad category as it can get, not for the pain signal that doesn't come, but for how it causes the daywalker to stumble and slide with that peg leg.

Time lost to the prey's escape.

By this point in time during the arena, Terezi isn't all that surprised to find herself worn down from the constant vigilance and fear. She's tired, and that tiredness goes bone-deep. It's even worse with such a brief lull between the arenas. They barely had time to wind down from that awful bout in space before being thrown into this new mayhem. Whatever impression she had of the new Head Gamemaker before, she's wishing all sorts of horrible things on him now.

The sun is just starting to come up. With it comes some much needed warmth. It's safer to sleep during the day and move about at night. Night brings the colder temperatures, and she knows better than to hole up and cease movement. People are apt to freeze to death like that.

She's just about to make her ascent into the treetops--pines this time, not her usual but still viable--when she hears a vaguely familiar noise. It's not a noise that she's heard often before or even recently... not since leaving Alternia. The hairs prick in fear on the back of her neck, but the fact remains that it's always better to know what's out here than to take a guess and hope you know how to avoid it.

Carefully, she creeps towards the noise, backpack secured tightly to her back just in case she needs to make a run for it.

He's part-kneeling upon the forest floor, the stump leg splayed at an odd angle, like he tripped upon it and then simply didn't find it in him to get back up. The upper body gets to rocking and keening and moaning.

The daywalker stops all at once, head lifting, looking around. Then slowly the Initiate's body starts to rise up again, claws gripping a nearby try as the peg leg is dragged.

The daywalker hobbles forward, then stops again, turning to see new arrival at last. Those yellow eyes find red.

She freezes when those yellow eyes meet hers. She can't see them, but she smells them watching her. She smells the scent of blood and decay. Worst of all, she smells the familiar troll underneath. At first, she doesn't think to run. She stands there, her mind trying to make sense of the creature before her.

It's Kurloz, but it's not Kurloz. Her chest hurts, and her stomach feels sick with dread. She's never had to deal with daywalkers before. Taking to the trees as she did, she rarely encountered them; and any lingering corpses were quickly devoured by the forest creatures. To find one now--to find Kurloz as one... For a moment, she doesn't know what to do.

Slowly, she begins to take a few steps back.

Those steps are met, the last few remaining synapses firing to order his body on, tell it to go after and follow. It sniffs and inhales and wheezes with what's been found.

One step. Two. Three.

The Initiate's body stands there and sways for a long moment. Then everything shifts.

The daywalker screams in voice unearthly, unalive. Quickly, it starts lurching forward.

The scream startles Terezi into action. She gives a jump, one last look of terror, and she takes off running. She doesn't imagine that the...thing that used to be Kurloz will be far behind.

Quickly, she falls back on what she learned as a wriggler. Daywalkers were dangerous. They came out during the day, and they didn't sleep. They didn't tire. They only ate, and they only needed to eat. They were terrifying and dangerous creatures with an unstoppable fixation on one thing and one thing only: fresh meat.

A good deal of that she knows--hopes--is just myth. Meant to scare other trolls into dealing with daywalkers before they rose from the sands. Even so, many didn't.

One of the few sure-fire ways to disable a daywalker was to dismantle him, or to remove the head if nothing else. At the moment, Terezi's not sure that a knife will do the trick. A sword would be better, if they would only take pity on her and send her one.

Frantically, Terezi finds a pine tree with a few low branches and begins to scramble up. She doesn't trust her ability to outrun, let along outmatch, this thing on the ground.

Unfortunately pity didn't seem to be much of a thing with the gamemakers. Not for either of them.

The daywalker gets close, hunger building with each dragging lurch closure, like anticipation and desperation are even things it can fathom. It stumbles and trips every so often, and that costs the prey.

Up into the trees she goes and the daywalker gives another ineffectual shriek. It growls and snarls and claws at the base but this particular bit of climbing is a little beyond it's ability. It doesn't stop no time soon though. strips are torn from the bark in all the effort and every little while, it almost seems to put two and two together enough to try to climb. It doesn't get far.

The daywalker's peg-leg gives at one point and it doesn't get up. Head bowed, the Daywalker simply sits there. It's a while then, all silence but for that wheezing breath, then the moaning returns, the keening of a miserable unshakeable ill. The daywalker sways and rocks.

The panicked terror begins to taper off when Terezi realizes that she's safe--for the moment. The daywalker (Kurloz, it's Kurloz...) doesn't have the mobility to climb up into the tree. She rests back against the trunk, trying to steady her breath and her heart. The fear seeps away slowly, replaced bit by bit with the painful acknowledgement that her matesprit is down there, making those horrible noises.

If she had anything in her stomach, she wouldn't anymore. She doesn't know when or how or why this happened... But she can't leave him like that. It's too cruel. And if his body was animate here, did that mean he wasn't back in the Capitol? No, she definitely couldn't leave him now. She couldn't risk it.

But what could she do? The most lethal thing in her backpack was a knife. Against the...creature waiting at the bottom of her tree, it could barely be called a weapon. She sits there for a while, shivering a little in bitter cold. Gradually, her ears pick up the lazy creak of the tree in the wintery wind, her attention shifting towards the sound. About ten feet below her is a thick limb, crack halfway through either from the cold or the wind or both.

Carefully, she swings herself down to the branch. It creaks loudly under her weight, and she grabs onto a higher branch, just in case it gives before she means to. Leaning out, she judges the angle and the distance. This...might work. She hopes it does. She doesn't have a whole lot of options.

Taking a deep breath, she jumps up, trying to drop as much weight onto the branch as she can muster when she comes back down. The branch creaks again, mingled with splintering noises. Another jump, and another, and finally the limb separates with a splitting crack. Terezi feels her arms jerk as her grip on the branch above catches her and leaves her hanging, while the branch goes crashing through the limbs below towards the daywalker.

The rustling is heard and the daywalker's ears flick and twitch. The moaning halts to become that hoarse gasping. All signs that whether its attention is wanted or not, it is paying attention. It is listening.

Those eyes are blank where that mottled grey-indigo is, even with the brighter yellow glow that surrounds them and threatens to wash them off further. They don't focus, but somehow they still see. They're fixing up at the source of the sound and shuffle, not blinking a bit.

She's getting closer. He growls with the anticipation in him that isn't even truly that with all feeling stripped away.

He starts to rise, not enough intelligence left in the thinkpan to work this problem out. Not until it comes crashing down. Another shriek builds in the throat only to be silenced with a sharp crack of bone and wood alike, splintering, and the crumple of the body that follows.

If she gets close enough now, she might be able to smell that dark missing bit of flesh in the Initiate's arm, where he was bit. She could also note the gaping hole in his chest, with the broken bones exposed there, as for the axe's later entry. Even older is where part of his leg has been messily hacked and then more neatly sewn up, a peg leg made from wood and attached on the end with torn fabric. The fallen branch has great purple-black scrape upon his face, some of the bone there now caved. Somehow, even when he survives long in the arenas, he manages to wind up a mess of damage.

Terezi flinches at the cracking sounds, her stomach turning at the damage that the tree branch caused. Her arms hurt from the continued grip, so she lets go and drops to a lower branch. Once her balance is steady, she carefully picks her way down the tree towards the ground, listening for any sounds of movement. The body is crumpled under the branch, but she doesn't want to take any chances.

The only way to make sure that a daywalker doesn't rise again is to dismantle the body. She doesn't have the resources to build a fire quickly, so her next thought is to the knife in her pack. It wouldn't work as a weapon, but maybe for this...

She's only a few feet off the ground when she stops to sniff at the body. The last thing she needs is to be mauled for not making sure that it's really subdued.

The body doesn't move from where it has fallen. The eyelids have closed over the blank gaze. The fingers twitch on occasion but nothing more.

The thinkpan has been thoroughly rattled, and whatever gets daywalkers walking has been too. This corpse isn't going anywhere. At least not for a while.

It takes a few more minutes and a cautious approach with a procured stick before Terezi has the courage to nudge the creature with her own foot. There's no movement that she can discern--aside from the fingers twitching now and again. It nearly makes her jump at first, but she's grown a little more used to it by now.

That tree branch won't keep him in place for very long. Maybe he's unconscious, whatever that counts for when dealing with daywalkers. But she knows well enough that he'll get up again eventually. She has to disable him for good.

The knife comes out, and it feels even smaller in her hands than she originally thought. This is not a tool for removing heads, but it's the only tool that she has on hand. With a grimace, she sets the knife against his neck, and for a moment her hand doesn't move. He smells... not peaceful, but almost normal--for a dead troll. This feels too much like desecrating her matesprit's corpse. Her thoughts flick back to the gifts they were given earlier in the arena and the time they had spent enjoying them with each others. It twists like a knife in her heart.

But she knows that if Kurloz was here now to watch her do this... He would tell her to do it. Because if that daywalker rose again, it wouldn't be a pleasant thing for either of them.

She tries to keep that in mind as her hand moves, casting the first of a series of cuts through the daywalker's throat. The flesh separates easily. The muscle is a little harder. The bone won't be cut by a knife alone, she'll have to wrench the bits of spine apart herself... But she keeps going, keeping her matesprit in her thoughts.

Daywalkers don't feel pain. The feel enough to know they're being touched, that food is in reach. They know when something is obstructing their means of getting meal. Unconciousness, whatever that counts for among daywalkers, is the only thing stopping this one from recognizing the knife in it's throat.

The Initiate would want her to keep going. The Initiate would show her how, hands lain overtop of Terezi's, guiding her along, giving time for her to stop if she needed to. He'd tell stories of his first times with these creatures, the things gone right-- for as much as they could with all this-- and the things gone wrong but came of later humor from hindsight. He'd intwine his fingers with hers all indigo coated and lay a kiss upon her head.

He'd tell her, "DOING GREAT, MY SEER SISTER." And, "Thank you, my heart's keeper."

The head comes free at last. The twitching fingers cease. At last, a canon sounds.

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God give a little love; bring me back a dog in the next life

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