thearena | (no subject)

Who: Emily Prentiss, OPEN
When: A few days after the cornucopia.
Where: Around E-12, top of the waterfall

She was far from an optimist - she fully expected that she wasn't going to make it out of here alive. If anything, she was an existentialist and this was a situation so existential it couldn't have been written better by Sartre himself. She was in her element, in that for once, her fate had never seemed so completely in her hands. It didn't make her happy, per se, but she looked for the silver lining.

She hadn't seen hide nor hair of anyone else in days. Maybe it was time to make herself a little more accessable; still not seeking the others out, but even she was starting to get bored. So bored, in fact that she'd had to take up a hobby. The hours in her day were mostly spent finding what edible plants she could - she wanted to make her Cornucopia scroungings last as long as possible - even if she hadn't seen enough wildlife to make hunting seem worthwhile. The rest she divided up between cleaning herself at the lakeside and finding a new shelter for the night. It left a lot of hours to be filled.

When she would spend time with her grandfather on the mountain, he'd been very skilled at whittling. She'd tried to learn, but she had never been quite as good as he was. He always liked to carve lions because he said the spirit of a lion lived inside her.

Seeing as she had a knife, a lot of time, and easy access to drift wood, she thought she'd try her hand at it again. Maybe some of the viewers were fans of crappy art.

But it only abated the feeling of restlessness for so long. She didn't want to move too far up the mountain for she still felt her initial reasoning held true. But she needed to move. She wanted to reach the top of the waterfall before nightfall - the quieter waters might attract more wildlife which would make her feel a lot better about food, at least.

The climb was rather perilous, full of skree and slippery rocks; and, as it turns out, ant hills. She nearly fell down the incline when she first realized she'd set her hand smack dab in the middle of a hill full of really pissed off ants. But she was a federal agent, she'd spent many years training not to react to pain in dangerous situations. So she just gritted her teeth and kept on climbing until she had a sure footing to shake them off and squeal like a little girl.

She stripped off her clothes and dove into the river to relieve the poison's effects...and then she reflected on whether that was a smart idea. Sure, if someone came upon her, she'd be forced to fight or flee, naked as a jaybird. But then again, if she was going to die anyway, at least she'd have a little shock value in it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Well, you must be from my future. I mean...what year are you from?"

If woman were allowed in law enforcement, but they still had the same guidelines...this place struck Lottie as something out of those new fangled books about people on the moon, but it wasn't the future for her, not at all.

But Emily here...she seemed to line up right.

Emily actually had to stop to think about that one for a split second. Then she realized how idiotic that must make her seem and her cheeks tinged red a little. "It all runs together a little after Paris," she offered in explanation of her hesitation. "I 'died' in March of 2011," she mumbled, doing the math, "And was in hiding for seven months..."

She looked up to meet the woman's eyes, "I guess they got me in early 2012... Why?" She paused, brows knitting, "What year did you think it was?"

"Oh my!"

Lottie put a hand to her cheek, mouth dropping open into a surprised O.

"Well isn't that something...I am from 1926!"

Emily pressed her palms against her eyes for a long moment, as if it might make the world make sense. Thinking about this actually made her brain hurt.

"I...I have no idea how to respond to that."

Lottie, on the other hand, was excited.

She had already been plucked into a strange world and made to fight to the death. She might as well find out what the world turned into.

"So woman can join...can police like that?"

"In fact, a woman is responsible for over-seeing my unit. She's a horrible bitch, but that's beside the point..."

Emily looked a little sheepish - she tended not to hold her tongue if she wasn't thinking. Some people found the off-putting.

Lottie's mouth dropped open into an O...before she let out a small giggle. It was a brazen thing to say, but talking to this woman...well, she felt very brazen.

"That is just fascinating ! My Daddy, bless his soul, but he doesn't even like to know I hear those types of stories!"

"I guess you'd be in luck, then...because between CIA undercover, FBI, and general horribly behaved globe-trotter teenager, I've got enough stories to make a sailor blush."

She wasn't exaggerating, either - in forty years or so, she'd managed quite the repertoire of hair-raising stories.

Lottie's face lit up as she heard that. Oh how she wished they were some where else. They could sit in her gazebo out back and drink lemonade and just tell stories all day.

But instead they were waist deep in freezing water and were suppose to be killing each other.

Everything about life was terrible, and it hit Lottie in a wave that made her lower lip tremble.

"Ah...I'm sorry." She said, pressing her hand to her eyes.

Emily tilted her head, her face gently sympathetic. "Don't be. If there's one thing I'm used to, it's being around crying people. I can't say I'm very skilled at comforting, though." She paused, pursing her lips together. "And usually it's because someone else died."

She sighed heavily, staring off into space, fingers tracing her scar. "Don't worry, it doesn't hurt that bad. It does at first...but then there's a big flood of endorphins and you just sort of drift off."

Lottie looks over at her, before her eyes widen, realizing what Emily means. Or at least, what she thinks she means.

"...dying?"

She nodded, forgetting that it sometimes freaks people out. After a moment of silent thought, she snapped back to reality.

"I mean...it was only for maybe a minute or two before they restarted my heart."

"What happened? How did they restart it?" She moved a little closer. Not too close. But she wanted to know everything this woman had to say about the future.

Emily couldn't help but laugh, in a rather macabre way. She supposed it she hadn't lived it, it would've seemed like something straight of the latest thriller movie.

"I was stabbed through the gut by my ex-lover/internationally wanted IRA terrorist/CIA undercover mission target." (God, how fucked up must that sound?) "I bled out on the way to the hospital and coded in the ambulance."

It still seemed so surreal to hear it described, as if she were describing something that had happened to someone else.

"The paramedics defibrillated - I mean, electrically shocked my heart into working again...but I was still unconscious for a month or so. They had to do a hysterectomy."

She stopped herself mid-sentence. Sometimes she had a tendency to share too much when she got lost in thought.

"Oh my." She said, putting a hand to her cheek. All of that just sounded fascinating. Even if she didn't know what half of those things were.

"So...so maybe it won't be so bad." Her mind went back to the fact that, some time soon...she...she was going to die.

"There are much worse things that could happen..." As bleak as it sounded, it was true. "Dying is easy, living's hard."

That, weirdly, made Lottie feel a little better.

"T-thank you. For that I mean. It's an awfully scary thought."

Emily attempted a faint smile - what she hoped was reassuring.

"Everyone has to die sometime... You can do it when you're old and decrepit or you can do it young, in a blaze of glory, and take down some evil as you go. That's always been my philosophy."

Lottie didn't know what evil they could take down here. They all seemed to be just about as big a victim as the other.

She did know she didn't want to hurt Emily. Or be hurt by her. And with this line of conversation, she was very aware of the fact they should be. Hurting each other.

"I think I need to get back...it was...it was really wonderful talking to you." She hoped Emily knew how truly she meant that.