The victims have been bled, red velvet lines the black box

[homicidium]

Who| Wednesday and Nux / Wenesday and open!
What| Helping Nux with his neck pain / Exploring the now almost empty Arena
Where| Dungeons, around
When| Week 5
Warnings/Notes| beheading, weird kid

A. Dungeons (for Nux)
Wednesday's made something of a home in the dungeons, surrounded by the pleasantly familiar torture devices and creepy sounds. She'd stolen a pillow from upstairs at one point, and now has the rack set up as her bed. It's mostly safe, as the vast majority of Tributes don't want much to do with this part of the castle, and it's rife with hiding places for when people choose to venture down.

She has a tidy cache of supplies hidden in the iron maiden, all sent by a JC4, and she doesn't know who that is, but she appreciates the thought all the same. The thought, the food, and the knife, mostly.

When she discovered the guillotine, she'd been excited, but it was useless with no one to execute, not even one of her dolls. She took a watermelon from the feast and named it Robespierre before chopping it in half and eating it, but it wasn't that fun afterward, and she'd taken to entertaining herself with the other torture implements.

Now, she stands, looking at it, then wipes off some of the dried watermelon crusted around the neckpiece.

B. In the village and forest
When Wednesday receives the mask and flowers, she's delighted, because really, it can only mean one thing -- there's going to be a plague.

She's always wanted to see one in person.

Still wearing her wings, Wednesday dons her mask, and affixes one of the posies to each end of her braids, having heard about flowers in these places, that sometimes they're meaningful. She doesn't care for the smell, but she figures she might as well use them.

Walking through the village at dusk with her pitchfork and knife, she's disappointed to find that the dead and pestilent seems to be all animals and crops, that there aren't bodies lying around to poke at. Between the lack of other Tributes and the plague killing off everything else, she quickly gets bored, which leads her to the forest, where at least there's a chance of a monster or something fun.

Comments

This is sort of like kicking a puppy

[shiny_and_chrome]

Nux is exploring the dungeon, because, well, it's better than being outside. All those...tree things. Yeah, they're still spooky, sorry.

He's figuring he's got to find something useful down here. And he's DETERMINED to find a vehicle. They just have to have one here. He just hasn't found it yet. So now, he's going to find it. So there.

He's moving more slowly than before, because hey, he's not going to crash into stuff this time, and also, yeah, he's feeling a little woozily. But he's got it under control, in fact, he even sees the little girl before he walks into her.

"What's with this place and all these girls?!"

Okay, body more or less under control; mouth, maybe not so much.

[homicidium]

He speaks and Wednesday looks over at him, one hand resting on the frame of the guillotine. She frowns, because she's not sure what that means, about there being girls, but it's not something she's overly concerned with.

"Did you come to play with me?" she asks, instinctively tapping into the defense of being cute rather than herself. Her weapons are here but not at hand, and this odd, silvery man is too close for her to be truly safe, to reach them in time. Her eyes are big as she looks up at him.

[shiny_and_chrome]

Nux has met more girls here than he thought existed in the entire world. It's weird, okay? And he can't kill girls because that's wrong.

Especially little girls. That seems like...double wrong or something.

"I. Uh. Not... I was looking for...?" Wait, is he going to upset her if he doesn't?

[homicidium]

Her face falls, and she folds her hands in front of herself sadly. Somehow, even her pigtails seem to go limp. "Well, that's okay. My toy doesn't work anyway. So I guess we couldn't play even if you wanted to."

She touches the side of the guillotine, the wooden beam that raises upward, but she looks down at the feet, where one of the legs is splintered and tottery, just because everything in this place seems to be old.

"See? It's broken down there."

[shiny_and_chrome]

Wait, no, don't do that with your face! It looks super sad. He looks for a moment out the door he'd come in, and then stepped further into the room, because he can't just, you know, walk away.

"I could, I don't know. I could take a look at it? I'm pretty good at fixing, er, things." Well, engines, mostly, but he could try, he figures, bending where she's pointing. "Here?"

[homicidium]

"Thank you."

Wednesday lets her voice sound wobbly, lets tears fill her eyes. It's pretty easy to cry if she thinks hard enough about the time she was given a pink tutu to wear in her kindergarten ballet recital. Mother dyed it black, but it was still upsetting at the time.

"It's broken there, and where these two pieces come together." She moves the upper side of the neckpiece, which is slightly off-track from when she shoved the watermelon together. "I think it could be fixed, if you could see the track inside from the right place."

[shiny_and_chrome]

"Don't thank me: haven't done anything yet." Except get down on one knee

Oh, no. Don't cry. No crying. Seriously, Nux can't handle that. From anyone but least of all a girl.

"In here?" He leans forward, looking where she's pointing. He has no idea what this thing is--it's certainly not something you use to repair cars so...he's without a clue. It looks like there's a track here for...something, and it kind of smells like fruit...?

[homicidium]

The effect is complete when she blinks out two big tears as she nods, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand and sniffling. "Uh-huh, in there. Those two bits should close all the way, see?"

She swipes at her face again, then looks at him curiously. "Would it help if you could look up at it? I can move this..."

A few steps away, there's a plank of wood, raised up, and she pushes it to the other side of the guillotine, grunting with effort as she moves it. When she's done, it resembles nothing so much as a stationary creeper.

[shiny_and_chrome]

Right now, Nux is thinking that if he doesn't fix this, she's probably going to cry even more. That's not a good feeling.

Right. No, he can do this right. He's always been able to fix things. He can figure this out. It's just, you know, pressure. "Yeah, yeah It might. Just trying to figure out what...this...." What it's all for. Yeah, he still can't figure it out.

[homicidium]

"It's part of a game," she supplies helpfully. "We have it at home, it's called Dipping Handkerchiefs. You can't play without this, it's the most important part. It's called a Louisette."

Wednesday shifts a little, making it look idle and childish when she's really positioning herself carefully. More sniffles and a whimper help disguise her movements, and she wrings one pigtail.

"It's my favorite game of all."

I feel so bad for him LOL

[shiny_and_chrome]

"Game?" He's half listening, trying to figure out what this thing is. "We had games, in the Citadel. At least we did as pups, you know? Mostly aiming, like practicing for lances." That was sort of the same, right? He's just making, you know, friendly conversation.

"Well," And his voice is a little muffled from the position, "Maybe you can teach me how to play it."

[homicidium]

There's a brief moment where Wednesday considers what he means by "citadel", and then decides he must be from Cairo, because she doesn't think they let people who look like this into military college. It doesn't matter anyway.

"I'll teach you." There's no real fixing the rickety leg without new wood, but the neckpiece is easily popped back into place, once he figures the angle. She waits patiently until he finishes, and gives him a demure, sincere-looking smile that's almost painful for her.

"All you have to do is rest your neck here," she tells him, patting the dip in the wood on the lower piece. "Then you close your eyes and count to ten like hide and seek."

[shiny_and_chrome]

"That'd be cool. Maybe I can teach you one of ours, too." See, sharing! He can share.

And the smile is much better. Yeah, see? He's totally getting this. He offers one of his own, on his scarred lips.

"Here? Okay." He settles against it, closing his eyes. "Seems simple enough." Just lie here and count. Got it.

[homicidium]

Wednesday keeps the smile on her face, aching as it is, until his eyes close. Then she lets her face settle back into its natural state, placid and flat, and locks the upper neck piece down. It slides nicely on its track now.

"Now just count to ten. That's all you have to do."

[shiny_and_chrome]

He's a little, well...that feels a little weird, that thing on his neck. But hey, it's a game. He can play a game.

"Yeah, I know. One. Two. Three...."

[homicidium]

For just a second, Wednesday questions whether she should feel bad about this. After all, this isn't a member of her family or someone that she actively dislikes -- this is just a man who happened to walk through the door.

But then she thinks about getting to see how long his head will react, and she grips the rope, pulling sharply and letting the blade sail down.

"Ten."

[shiny_and_chrome]

If she feels bad about anything in the future, maybe the fact that she's given Nux a complex about little girls.

Right now, though, he's just concentrating on counting.

Until he hears that sound and..."AAAAAA--" Yeah, the scream gets cut off, but it's continuing on IN HIS MIND.

[homicidium]

His body slumps away from the guillotine, and his head falls to the floor, rolling slightly before Wednesday can grab it and examine it. She's delighted to see his eyes dart around for a few seconds, his cheek twitching, but then he's gone from his head even when she pokes at his spinal cord, and he ceases to be anything she cares to entertain herself with.

She places his head delicately upon a shelf, next to several other inanimate objects she's mutilated, then takes a seat on the Judas chair, where she promptly falls into a nap, her cheek resting on her arms folded over armrest.