OTA thread for disease, sickness and confusion on Friday Night

[ruffntumblenut]

Who: Anyone in the arena
Where: Across the Arena
When: 8:00 P.M sharp Friday Night
What: Random symptoms cropping up all over the arena?
Warnings: Sick People, probably some violence, message me if any warnings should be added.
Notes:  This is just a general catch-all so you don't have to be tagging Ruffnut. Just put where your character is in the subject line.

In the arena there was a feeling of isolation even though you knew that invisibly, hundreds upon thousands, maybe even millions of people were watching you eat, sleep, fight, suffer, cry and eventually die. So of course there's no way the tributes could know that what took place that evening wasn't just a Gamemaker trick meant to make things harder for them.

The symptoms didn't even wash across the arena like a wave traveling from one end to the other. Instead, spontaneously and apropros of nothing in particular every single tribute was suddenly struck with a sign of illness or malady. 

Was this another challenge of some sort like the bells in the belfry or the roses in the forest? What if anything could be done to cure the tributes of their individual troubles?

If nothing else, it would make for some compelling footage to watch on television come the morning.

Comments

[atouchofka]

"Roads? Aye. Vast and networked." Mind you, what Alain considers a road, Nux might not. Alain, after all, comes from a place where the closest things to cars are rusted wrecks centuries old, and where travel is by horse or by foot. To him, the largely-pedestrian streets of the Capitol are still unthinkably heavily trafficked, and broader and better-paved than any but the biggest streets before the fall of Gilead.

[shiny_and_chrome]

Roads are roads: The wasteland didn't exactly have lanes or pavement or anything. Just plenty of routes to drive.

"That sounds better than here." Then again, just about anything does? "And cars? I mean, there have to be cars." Seriously. Even after the end of the world...there were cars!!

[atouchofka]

"Cars," Alain repeats slowly, rather dumbly. Even without the headache and nausea and all-around unsteadiness, the Capitol is still so unfamiliar to him that it would take a while - and that's without mentioning the fact that he hears car as ka, and is baffled by a moment by how Nux can speak the High Speech but he can't. It's a good thirty seconds before the light dawns. "Oh! The carriages, like trains without engines? Are they what you speak of, these cars?"

[shiny_and_chrome]

...wut? Nux is just going to blink, dumbfounded just for a minute (don't worry, it'll pass!) by the fact that this guy doesn't seem to know what a car is. A CAR!!

"Yeah. Sort of. You know. Engines. Driving. Roads." He makes a sketchy 'driving' thing with his hands, like he's grabbing a steering wheel.

[atouchofka]

He knows what an engine is, at least. There are a few of the Old Ones' machines that still work, though they're mostly in Farson's hands, and he's seen the broken-down old engine sheds that still litter the wastelands. But Nux's gesture makes no sense at all to him.

"Aye." He rubs his head again, wishing like hell for some rest and something to take away this bedamned headache. "We don't have them, were I'm from. We use horses where we can, and walk where we can't."

[shiny_and_chrome]

Well, sure, Nux isn't likely to win any games of charades. But he is a really good driver, and he knows steering. Maybe demonstrating the downshift was a bit much, though....

"What's a horse? I mean, I know horsepower, but...how do you ride that except in a car?" Seriously. Do you just straddle engines or something?

[atouchofka]

Alain blinks at him, headache almost forgotten for the moment. "...Your land has no horses? Not even mutie ones?" Even the Outer Baronies and the wastelands beyond have horses, even if many of them have extra legs or tumours or their skins inside-out. "They... they're animals, larger than a man, four-legged and fast. We ride on their backs."

[shiny_and_chrome]

"....no?" He's pretty sure he knows stuff. But then again, he didn't know a 'tree' when he saw one. "I mean, I've never seen one. Not even sure what one would look like." So that's the same as 'no' right?

"I've never seen anything larger than a man that wasn't a machine."

[atouchofka]

He looks at Nux long and hard, even through the bursting lights of his migraine. At last, he says slowly, "Then you will doubtless be more at home in the city than I am. All the machines I have known are old and broken-down, or else in the hands of our enemies."

It occurs to him that perhaps he should be more circumspect, especially with someone who looks halfway to being a slow mutant himself (between the pallor and the tumours, Nux really does seem like a more articulate version of the bedraggled humanoids who roam like beasts in Alain's homeworld). Then again, so long as he goes on speaking in generalities, what harm can it do? He's edgy about admitting it, but having some companionship that doesn't bring out the same complicated feelings as Roland is oddly comforting, even if they can only have this conversation because they're too ill to kill each other.

"What you speak of sounds like a time long ago to us. Centuries past, after the fall of the Old Ones. But their machines are long fallen into disrepair, all decayed and broken-down."

[shiny_and_chrome]

"Oh there's lots of stuff we can't fix. But the things we can," even sitting on the stairs, he can puff his chest up with pride. "I can fix." He's pretty sure he can fix anything.

He leans closer because, wow. That's...wow. "Your past? So the Immortan was one of your Old Ones?" He was, well, pretty old!

[atouchofka]

"I don't know," Alain says, after a moment. "Mayhap? Though we'd have no way of knowing. The Old Ones and their way of life were destroyed many and many a year ago, even before the time of the Eld. Centuries, at least. We don't know their names or their ways, just the skeletons of what they left behind."

[shiny_and_chrome]

"Wow." That's like heavy stuff, man, and he'd need a minute to take it all in, even if it didn't feel like his brain was trying to invert itself. "So, like, we could be in your ancient history, before time." Did that mean the Immortan didn't save them all?

Right, this is why he doesn't like thinking, because that's kind of unsettling to think about.

[atouchofka]

"Or you could be in another world entirely," Alain says, as if it's nothing. After all, even before he came here and was given incontrovertible proof, his is a culture that's always held a belief in other worlds and realities.

The worst of his migraine feels as if it might be passing. He tries to get to his feet, but abortively, his eyes closing again as he collapses back onto the stairs.

[shiny_and_chrome]

"Yeah but...there's only supposed to be Valhalla. And it doesn't sound like you're from there." Not that this place is Valhalla. Then again, that may be because he's not worthy of it.

"'oi, friend!" He lunges forward as the other man seems to fall backward. He may be sick, but he still has reflexes. And he's kind of forgotten the whole 'get away from the guy because you make him sick with your...you ness' thing.

[atouchofka]

Alain puts a hand out, signalling as best he can that he's all right, even as he clutches the side of his head and lands a little too heavily on the stone step. The wave of dizziness takes a moment to pass, but he, too, has good reflexes.

Swallowing down his nausea, he takes a deep breath in through his nose. "Cry pardon. Overstretching myself."

[shiny_and_chrome]

Yeah, whoops. Hey, good intentions, at least?

Nah, that's probably not a good excuse. "Is there, uh. I mean, should I go?" Nux jerks a thumb up, the only way he could go, because he's figuring the last thing the other guy wants is to have Nux walk right past him.

[atouchofka]

Alain shrugs one shoulder, the most movement he can summon up. After a moment: "Not if you'd rather not. I didn't come to push you out." Then again, he hadn't really intended to sit here this long. He'd been hoping the headache would pass enough for him to leave by now, and is fairly sure that, if it was a natural one, it would have.