thearena | (no subject)

They don’t give R any chances sneak a nip in. The muzzle comes off and when he lunges at the closest Living, heady with the smell, R instead finds himself trying to eat glass instead of that arm he’d been eyeing the whole trip. Sucks, but hey, it happens.

R’s mouth smears against the glass, leaving a dirty streak as he stares at the guard on the other side who is way more competent than he would’ve thought. The zombie pulls back in surprise as the platform under him starts going up…and away from the first meal he would’ve had in days. With Julie he hadn’t eaten. For some reason he didn’t felt like it. But with her gone, with that emptiness inside growing as he made his way back to the airport, now the urge is back like it never left. It’s another reminder things are going back to Before.

The zombie comes up near the Cornucopia bundled in the parka he doesn’t even need, the glasses sliding off his nose and eventually plopping into the snow. White glares into R’s face. It burns and sears and he thinks dimly he doesn’t like it. After awhile he forgets it hurts. Instead he decides I want to walk after a moment swaying in place, trying to remember how to work his body when he can barely see. It’s the barely-there tang in the air that finally propels him off the platform and into the snow. R thuds down with a dead man’s weight, rights himself, and swings toward the smell.

Blood, but no bodies. No scraps either. Talk about picked clean: he’s never seen such a clean kill-site before. It’s a little freaky.

“Huh.” R heaves a disappointed sigh.

Stiffness from the cold sets in as R picks a direction and starts to put one foot in front of the other, his legs going at it, robotic . It beats standing around. Not that he can’t do that too – he’s a pro at it like any other Dead – but today he doesn’t want sit there thinking of Julie’s face closing off to him. It doesn't take longer than a few hours before he's good and lost and back where he's started, just in time to see another shape standing against the snow.

He raises his arm. The "hi" gets caught in his throat but whatever. Close enough.

Edited 2013-02-10 00:35 (UTC)

It's something like instinct that makes Atticus sniff the air when he spots the other person, but he doesn't smell...anything. Which is another something to file away with the cold thing for thinking about later.

He doesn't say hi or even raise his hand. He'd like to think that whoever this is doesn't want to kill him anymore than he wants to kill them, but he's still got that whole Highlander thing in his head telling him that pretty much anyone around him is going to be looking to start the Quickening on him.

Still, on the off chance that they aren't looking to slice off his head, it probably couldn't hurt to have an ally here? So he stays, though he's crouched a little like he's ready to run at any moment.

Whoever they are, they aren't running around screaming or trying to shoot him, so that's a plus. R takes that as a good sign. They can work from there.

He shuffles to get closer to this...guy? Girl? Hard to tell with all the clothes on and with the snow starting to whip around in his face, he's having a hard time telling from smell alone. Even passing the old blood, R can't even catch that anymore and his returning hunger sinks back down to sulk in the corner. He can deal with that. Trying to mow his way through a parka doesn't seem like it's worth the effort anyway. R just hopes there isn't a gun hiding in there as he comes close enough for the other guy/girl/whatever to see his face.

"Nice..." Good God, it's even harder to talk when your lips are two seconds away from being frozen over. Makes a zombie start to wish he didn't have lips in the first place. Maybe the Bonies had something going there. R keeps trucking. "Nice weather. You...new?"

Edited 2013-02-10 02:16 (UTC)

Oh, god. This guy is...looking like crap and making small talk. Small talk in a death game arena. Atticus actually laughs, the sound coming out half as a snort.

"Um...yeah. You?"

The laugh that comes out makes R lean forward slightly, like he'd want to take a chunk out of the new guy just to make sure he's as alive as he sounds. He can't deny it's tempting. Somehow he manages to remember how to hold a conversation. This is the part where he's supposed to say he's good or...something aside from lurching at his jugular.

"Surv - " Oops, too many syllables at once. "Sur-viving. Dead?"

R's proud of that one as he points at the creepily clean kill-site at the base of the Cornucopia, the new snow whiting chunks of it out, like he's not totally Dead himself. Smooth. Real smooth. This has to be what being a secret agent feels like. Still, he'd like to know what happened here. Being Living, R expects this new guy to have all the answers like where all the bodies went. All that stuff.

It takes Atticus a moment to work out what he's being asked, and he looks around the area quickly, once again surprised that he didn't smell all this blood, even in the snow. "I...um...I don't know. I just got here."

Looking around again, it occurs to him that they're pretty much completely vulnerable where they are. "We should...probably get of the open, you know?"

Great, he gets the new guy. It dawns on R that Newbie here hasn't figured out he's a zombie. There's weird feeling swelling in his ribcage when when he realizes he's going to get away with his disguise. It's not often he's run - okay, maybe not run - around with a human at this close range. The zombie bobs his head up and down.

"Okay," he grunts and comes a little closer. There's a crunch under foot as he steps on his polarized sunglasses. He raises his arm again to point north. "Let's find the...others."

R remains vague on what he means by "others". Privately he hopes there might be another Dead hive around here. He could use a bit of familiarity. Until then, he wouldn't mind some company, even if R has no idea how long Newbie here will be around.

Atticus just figures he's been here a while and has frostbite really bad or something. Plus, zombies. That's a little much for him to swallow, even now.

"I'm not so sure that's a good idea? I mean, if everybody's looking to kill each other, finding the rest of them probably isn't for the best."

R wants to sigh: good thing his lips are too frost-covered for anything but a thoughtful rasp to come out. Isn't that kinda the point? The Living kill the Dead if the Dead don't get there first. Maybe he's talking about what they were talking about earlier, something about a Panem and fighting each other to the death, these "Hunger Games". R admitted hadn't paid that much attention when he was being shuttled to the platform - he was too busy eyeing that guard's arm like it was a Big Mac.

"Then where?" R puzzles over this human. "We stay here?"

Good job, you're confusing the zombie, Atticus. You and your silly concerns for your safety.

Oh, great. This guy was, like, delirious or something. Maybe he'd been out here a really long time. "No, we've gotta get to safety," Atticus insists, turning toward some trees. "Cover. Somewhere we can't be easily seen."

I mean, come on. Didn't this guy ever play video games?

"Then we...?" He shrugs. Without Julie to tell him to cut it out, R's shrugs are back in full force. It looks like a nice private spot to eat, but if there are other Living out there, R's pretty sure they'll come running if he's screaming with R's hands in his guts. Funnily enough he hadn't thought about this when he was just another member of a horde. "We make a plan. Stop others?"

There you go. Totally not suspicious. Maybe he was an (out of work) actor in his past life.

R is riding high, convinced he's pulled the wool over this guy's eyes the longer he keeps this up. He even feels confident enough to reach out, grab Newb's elbow, and start pulling him toward the cover, as if they're two humans scurrying for a fox hole to jump head first in.

Edited 2013-02-10 04:33 (UTC)

"Yeah, sure," Atticus says, nodding. Mostly he just wanted to get out of the open. What they did then, well, they could cross that bridge, etc.,etc.

He pulls his arm away from this guy's grip, though. "Are you...gonna be okay?" he asks as they head for the trees.

The zombie's arm dropped, even if every instinct told him to grab, dig his fingers and never let go.

"Sure. Just...hungry," R says with another one of those no-big-deal shrugs. They make slow progress to the cover, R using the minutes spent trudging through the snow to think up anything else he should be saying. He turns to Newbie and taps his chest with his hand. "R. You?"

He stares expectantly at the other Tribute.

Atticus is pretty tempted to say, 'Jane,' but he resists. Now he's wondering what sort of people they have in this game. Are they all going to be a little crazy?

"Atticus. Um...nice to meet you, I guess?"

They aren't going as quickly as he'd like, but he's not about to leave this guy alone here just because he's a bit slow. Just when he thinks of asking if they can maybe pick up the pace a little, he feels the snow start to slide out from under his feet, and before he can warn R about it, he's sliding down an steep incline with a yelp.

Talk about a crazy name. R doubts he can manage without mangling it to pieces.

Luckily the ground giving away underneath their feet saves him the trouble.

R doesn't think to try to grab onto anything, the zombie pitched into the chasm right after Atticus. The sun flashes once as he tumbles head over heels and then it's gone. Darkness and white and snow. The next thing he knows, he's landing with thud and his arm twisted the wrong direction like it's trying to do a halfway decent pretzel impression. R gathers himself up, his head popping out of the snowdrift as he tries to figure out where they are now. Down, obviously. At least it's not as blinding in here as it was out there.

"At - Atti," R cuts himself off, frustrated. Living and their names! He makes a real effort not to groan it out like he wants to. "At-ticus?"

The zombie starts to get up, oblivious to his bones shifting or the broken arm kinda just flopping at his side. If Atticus was freshly killed in the fall, R thinks he's fair game at that point. He strikes R as a nice enough guy. Seems a bummer to kill him right off the bat.

Atticus ends up half-buried in the snow, but on the bright side, he doesn't feel nearly as cold as he had before. He thinks maybe it's because the chasm walls block the wind. He also smells something...off, and wonders if there's a dead animal nearby.

When he pulls himself out of the drift, he turns to R and frowns. "Fuck...are you okay, man? Your arm..."

He's got some scrapes and bruises himself, but nothing too serious.

R freezes for a moment. Think fast. He's done it before.

"Uh," he says intelligently. He blurts the first thing that comes to mind. "Only...a sprain."

He's been dead long enough that R wouldn't know the difference between what a break and a sprain looks like even if it hit him in the face. Hopefully that did the trick. With the sun no longer reflecting off the snow, he can see Atticus way better now, enough that he can definitely tell from the way he moves that he's 100% Living. R takes a step and then another toward him without realizing it. Now he can catch something, that electric Living smell, starting to waft off Atticus, and...something else. Funky. Something he's never smelled before and this is from a guy who's shoved his nose into way more organs than he can count.

In retrospect, it probably should've tipped him off.

"Yeah, that is so not a sprain," Atticus says. As R moves closer that smell gets stronger, wafting toward him, and Atticus takes an instinctive step back. "Do you smell...?"

He looks from R's face to his arm and takes another sniff of the air. He's searching for something under the dead smell, something that should belong to R, but he doesn't find it.

"Jesus," he blurts out. "You're dead."

"It's not?" R echoes, feeling pretty stupid.

He doesn't get a chance to come up with a different lie as Atticus takes another sniff. R can almost see the exact moment the realization dawns on the Tribute's face. Here we go, R sighs, pumping himself up for what's next. And ding-ding-ding, there it is, the whole "dude, you're totally a walking corpse" thing as if this was all news to him. His corpse is already moving on its own, R feeling like he's along for the ride. What will most likely happen is he will hunt down Atticus until he's too tired to move, kill him, and go for the brain like clockwork...or the other guy will luck out and R will be double-dead. Without Julie here, R finds it hard to care that it's a 50-50 chance.

The zombie doesn't try to argue with Atticus. Instead his lurch speeds up as he throws himself at the other Tribute, his blackened lips pulled back in a snarl. Sorry, buddy. You did seem pretty cool in R's book.

Atticus scrambles backward as R moves forward. He's about to say something, anything, to calm the guy down. Maybe say he doesn't mind that R is dead, won't hold it against him or anything. It's not like he has any room to talk, after all.

But before he can get any words out, he feels his skin heating up, a fire building in his belly and spreading out to all his limbs. His amber eyes start to get brighter and brighter until it looks like they're glowing. His bones start to contort, fur sprouting over his body. In moments, there's a black wolf standing in a pool of Atticus' clothes, eyes flashing bright in the dim light of the crevasse, snarling at the corpse moving toward him.

Atticus pulling a wolf out of his pocket is new. So new, in fact, that R's face twists into a confused cross between a snarl and a gape like he can't make up his mind which one to go with. It's almost enough to make him stop the attack, if his body wasn't going on auto-pilot and he's riding shotgun.

There's no battle cry, nothing to pump him up like a human does. R doesn't yell. The only thing that comes out is a groan dragging itself up out of his ribcage, a sound that normally would draw in other zombies. No other Dead come. It's just him flying solo.

R doesn't let that stop him. He kicks up snow as he suddenly pushes himself forward and grabs for the wolf's black head.

Atticus is just as surprised as R is. He's never changed like this before. He's never actually changed outside of a full moon. It hardly matters though. At this point, instinct takes over entirely.

He twists away from the grasping hand a moment and then lunges at his attacker, snapping jaws aiming for the arm in question, meaning to incapacitate the grabbing abilities.

A normal person with any shred of self-preservation would've shied away, tried to bring up their other arm to block the jaws from closing in because Jesus Christ it's a wolf. Funny thing about being Dead: you lose that instinctive oh-shit reaction. It's easy for Atticus's fangs to close in on R's arm above the crook of his elbow, even easier to puncture through the parka's down and start tearing into dead skin and muscle because R isn't trying to fight him off. The zombie doesn't help things by trying to twist toward the wolf, letting Atticus get a better hold on his arm.

He reaches with his other hand, grabs a handful of black fur and starts pulling himself even closer, ignoring the arm.

R tells himself that he's never had a wolf/man/thing before. For all he knows, this won't just end up with him coughing up hairballs and feeling hungry all over again. He might even get some interesting memories from Atticus.

The zombie continues to try to drag himself closer, his mouth wide, as the arm in Atticus's jaws begins to tear off and hangs by shreds of ligaments and mangled parka, only seconds away from coming off completely.

Edited 2013-02-11 06:25 (UTC)

Atticus was rather expecting an oh-shit reaction. Not that he'd done this much, but instincts told him that he should get a fight. And apparently it isn't even enough to get this guy to stop with the trying to get a hold of him thing. Still, Atticus tells himself if he can get that arm the rest of the way off, this dead thing will leave him alone. He gives a mighty shake of his head and manages to tear the arm off, parka and all.

And then he twists his whole body to get out of the grip of the other arm.

The arm rips off with a disgusting squish, black oozing up out of the puncture wounds, and goes spiraling off into the back of the crevasse. It thuds against the wall. R jolts forward as his balance is thrown off, the zombie sliding even closer than he was before. He hangs onto the wolf like it’s going out of style. The stump where his arm used to be flails around like he’s still trying to use it to grab onto Atticus, which, in his mind, he is. Now R has a big fist of black fur, enough to drag himself close and bury his face into the other Tribute.

Okay. Yeah. So biting into a wolf isn’t working like R thought it would. All he gets is a mouthful of fur and R’s even trying to gnaw away for all he’s worth, too. Doing it with a horde would be easy, but with Atticus squirming and snarling in his arms like a wild thing, R finds out holding on at all is harder than it looks. It feels like he’s freshly dead all over again, trying to learn the ropes. It’s when he struggles to push the wolf down to the ground that R’s hold slips…

As soon as R's hold slips, Atticus is squirming out of it. Part of him wants to stay and tear this creature to shreds, but there is still a small, rational area of his brain that tells him he should run, that whatever this thing is is not something he wants to fight. (Possibly, this is holdover from his extensive knowledge of zombie-related games/literature from his human life telling him he has no way to take off this guy's head, really.)

He snarls and snaps at R just a moment before he is taking off at a run, thoughtlessly leaving his clothes behind.

Oh, wait, R has this aftera - wait, no, no he doesn't. His fingers slip, he's left with fur all over his tongue and stuck between his teeth, and as if to get a parting shot in, Atticus gets one more bite in before he wriggles free. R falls forward into the snow, his hand still clawing for the other Tribute. When he looks up, he catches a glimpse of a black tail and then Atticus is gone.

That could've gone a lot better.

(no subject)

Newbie and newbie Tributes? :D

:D

sob sorry, typos

lol, it's cool.

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