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Who| The Signless and YOU!
What| The Signless is forced into exploring by the fireworks, and comes across some of his fellow players.
Where| Adventureland
When| Just after the Fireworks
Warnings/Notes| None that I can think of! Will add if any come up. I'm starting in prose, but I'm comfortable with either prose or actionspam and will write to match you!

The Signless pressed his back against the huge fake tree, trying to calm his thundering bloodpusher. The last of the flashes from the fireworks had died off a few minutes before but that panic hadn't yet. There was something in him that simply didn't take well to bright projectiles from the sky, something that remembered a hail of meteors from a past life and endless flaming arrows from the current one. He closed his yellow and red eyes, breathed in, breathed out. He would be fine. They'd forced him to move when he'd had every intention of sitting right where they'd dropped him, but even if they could make him move they couldn't make him fight.

He sank down into a sitting position against the base of the tree and began to tug off the leather boots they'd forced him into. After spending his whole life walking over all sorts of uncomfortable terrain with bare feet they frankly weren't necessary, and he'd found as he ran from the fireworks that they'd been more of a hindrance than a help. He couldn't grip, couldn't really feel the ground under him. At least they'd dressed him in black, even if it didn't have the usual defiant red ornamentation he liked. In the current darkness, and with his gray skin, he blended in fairly well against everything else.

Except for the fact that, what with wrestling with the damn boots, he was moving against an otherwise deadly still backdrop.

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A small, horned figure darted through the abandoned park.

Volanz didn't wait to find out what the explosions were before he started to run, and probably wouldn't have stayed in place even if he knew they weren't aimed at him. He coiled the wire around his shoulder and booked it along the broad thoroughfare that had led him into this place from the cornucopia. He'd duck through somewhere and stay there until it stopped. It had to be something meant to attack the tributes, nothing about this place was not for attacking the tributes.

The tree would be good enough shelter. It would at least be something to be under, as opposed to out in the open like he'd been on the swamp shore.

This was a flawless plan until he noticed someone else was there.

"Shit!" He swore reflexively, stumbling on the curb in his hurry to change direction. Pain flared through the rat bites on his right leg as he tripped, which still hadn't shown much sign of healing.

He was already scrambling to his feet again, but had certainly made a great deal of noise.

The Signless forgot about the boots for a moment, pressing back up against the tree as he watched the other figure approach, swear, stumble, fall. He pushed himself up, stomping his foot on the ground to force it back into the boot so that he didn't trip too, and approached the other troll (it had to be a troll, it had horns, unlike the aliens that had dressed him).

"Shh, shh, no, I'm not going to hurt you." He reached out toward Volanz's arm in an attempt to help him up, and then thought better of it when he realized it might be taken as an attempt to overpower him. So instead he just wound up kind of awkwardly hovering next to him.

"That's what everyone has been saying!" Volanz replied, a bit more snappishly than he'd meant to. The stress of the last few weeks was weighing heavy on him. He was up, and took a few steps back with knees bent preparing to bolt again.

"And I'm sorry if I sound mad, because I kind of am! I'm sick of nothing making sense!"

He quivered a little, discovering he couldn't stop the words now. "I'm supposed to be fighting because they said so and everyone's supposed to die but one person, and I guess that one person gets to live but it doesn't work if people keep trying to help me!"

Volanz was honestly amazed that he'd made it this far. Nobody'd wounded him yet, besides the rat muttations at the tea party. No one had hunted him out and stabbed him to death.

But it was going to happen sometime.

Now if that didn't sound just like Empire doctrine, the Signless didn't know what did.

"It's alright to be angry or scared," he says gently, trying to seem as non-threatening as possible since this boy is clearly already on edge. "This is an awful situation. And you're right, it won't work if people help each other. That's the idea. If no one fights, if no one agrees to hurt each other, then no one has to die at all." He knows it sounds crazy, and will sound extra-crazy to a young lowblood in this of all situations. The Signless, though, has never been one to give up his convictions just because it's situationally beneficial.

"But they do fight!" Volanz replied stubbornly. "I mean, that would be great if it worked, but that's not what happens! I haven't met one yet I guess, but I saw a guy who got his eye ripped out by some person!"

He paused. Something clicked together in his head that the adrenaline hadn't let him place until that moment.

"Why are you even talking like that? You're a troll, you should understand!"

He's also bigger, fully grown, old enough to have survived inspection and culling. Nobody talks like that and lives.

The Signless flinched at hearing about the person whose eye was ripped out. It wasn't really surprising to him, not with how how he knew highbloods and those like them to be (and he was certain that whoever put him in this situation was like them). It did drive home though that things here were indeed a bit more dire than his situation on Alternia.

The narrative was the same, though.

"I do understand. I promise to you, I do. I've lived my whole life in danger of being murdered simply for daring to disagree. It's easier to bow to what they expect of you, to sink to their level because at their level you might survive. I understand that, and I think it's a horrible necessity for far too many. But I also think it's better perhaps to die for what you know is right than do what's wrong but easy. You don't have to agree. Most don't."

But some did. He always managed to touch one person, and one person was all it took for his ideas to spread. He had a feeling that the people involved in this deathmatch needed those ideas as much as the trolls back home.

Volanz shook his head, putting more distance between himself and the stranger. He opened his mouth to speak, had to stop to swallow, then tried again.

"Look. Not to make you mad or anything, because I don't want that at all, but this is crazy!" Not that anything he'd been doing since coming to this place wasn't crazy, but the idea of trying to resist the people who had the power to put them here was even more hopeless than just surviving to begin with.

He shivered.

"Maybe you're ready to die for something. I'm not." He didn't mean to spit the words, he didn't mean to feel suddenly desperately angry and helpless, but he did all the same.

Like it mattered. He was going to die anyway and the inevitability of it felt like the weight of a world bearing down on his skull.

"And that's alright. That's perfectly understandable." He held out his hands in a placating gesture. This was going very badly, certainly far worse than he'd meant it to.

"It is crazy, a little. No one wants to die. But I've seen -- I just know something better is possible." It sounded a little lame, he knew. "And this is the way I know to go about making it happen. So I won't hurt you. That's all. If you wanted to kill me now to get one step closer to survival, you probably could."

It was clearly a trap. Clearly. From Volanz's perspective.

"No. I'd lose."

He started backing off.

"I always lose."

The kid sounded calmer and more sure of that than he had anything else in this bizarre conversation.

And with that, he ran. It would be best to find somewhere new to hide by daybreak, before any of the others were out hunting properly. Somewhere dark, if he could.

Volanz let himself sink back down into survival mode. It was familiar, and much better than considering frightening unknowns offered by a crazy person.

Welp. The Signless sighed as he watched Volanz disappear into the dark. He honestly hoped he lasted, and that if -- when -- he died, it was relatively quick. That was really the best one could hope for in a place like this.

Howard doesn't dare call out for his allies. He's stumbling along alone in Adventureland, trying to find shelter. His injured leg is screaming and the backpack straps are cutting into the barely-healed wounds on his back. His mutilated face has has some of the injuries opened back up, and blood is dribbling down his mouth and onto the Disneyland sweater he stole.

He's breathing heavy when he finally stops by the animatronic lions at the Jungle Cruise. He crouches in the dark and gingerly wipes blood from his mouth onto his sleeve. He doesn't know where Wyatt, R and Julie went. He's about to get up and start to go looking when he sees someone else, someone rummaging around our wrestling something, only a few yards away.

He stays very still, but surely his heavy panting must be giving his position away.

It does. Signless stops fiddling with the boot long enough to really listen, years of nights spent with ears trained on any little sound helping him pinpoint them here. Sure enough, there's ragged breathing not far from him. He turns his head, searching for a moment and quickly pinpointing the hunched figure. Thank goodness for being nocturnal and able to see in the dark.

Of course, with that breathing and what little he can see, it's likely this person is hurt. If he approaches, he'll either be in no danger at all, or in more because of startling a panicked and desperate creature.

"Hello?" he ventures, deciding for the moment to keep some distance between them.

Edited 2013-04-14 06:20 (UTC)

The first thing Howard thinks is that Signless doesn't sound like a psycho. Psychos don't ask hello, they say it. They make themselves sound like they're confident in what's happening so you trust them, or so you're afraid of what happens if you don't trust them. Usually. Not always, but usually.

Howard's level of fear on a scale of one to ten is still about a fourteen.

"Hello?" He finds his knife in his pocket but doesn't draw it out. No need to escalate the situation. "Don't - don't come any closer, okay? I don't want no trouble."

It's too dark to see who he's talking to. That only makes it scarier.

"Neither do I," the Signless assures him, and goes back to tugging at his boot. With a bit of work it comes off and he starts on the other one. "You're hurt. Even if I didn't abhor violence it would be unfair to attack you in your condition." As if the sort of people who didn't abhor violence would still care enough to be fair. It's the thought that counts, at least.

"What just happened -- is that sort of thing usual? Should I expect it to happen again?" He means the fireworks, and he hopes the answer is no. He doesn't want to think about what it might feel like to be hit by one, and the bright lights and loud shrieking noises make him uneasy in a deep, primal sort of way.

"Most people don't give a shit about fair," Howard says, echoing the Signless's thoughts. He looks out at the night sky, the stars the only source of light - and Howard knows they're probably fake. Some of the smoke from the fireworks still obscures patches of sky, like someone trying to erase over ink.

"I don't know. The last arena was on a glacier, and whenever things went on for too long without killing pieces would break off. But I haven't seen the fireworks before."

He feels a surge of sympathy for the Signless. Howard came in partway through his first Arena - it's not easy, to come in in media res.

"The last--"

The Signless frowns. If this is deathmatch, and everyone but one person has to die, and he can assume everyone is brought in the way he was brought in with barely any preamble, then how does this person know what the last one was like... unless he won it?

"How do you know what the previous one was like? Did you survive it?"

He decides not to think at all about the fact that this has happened more than once and is being talked about like it might happen regularly.

"Do I look like a winner?" Howard's voice cracks a little, the puberty leaking through. "Do I sound like a winner?"

He tries not to whimper as he puts weight on his injured leg.

"They televise this stuff, and they make you do it again and again and again."

Something is definitely not clicking here. The Signless's frown deepens. He finally manages to yank off his other boot and sets it aside with a soft fwump.

"But then how... Are you saying we can't actually die? I mean, that we die and then come back, to be killed again? For the amusement of whoever brought us here?"

And alright, now he sounds a little angry. One death, he could comprehend. One horrible fight for one's life and then death and with death release. That's cruel and disgusting but not much more so than what he's used to from the Empire. But this? Forcing people to kill, and to die, and to remember that pain and then do it again, isn't something he can quite wrap his head around yet. He knew he wasn't dealing with the Alternian Empire when he got here, but this is still far and away more than he's come to expect from hyper-violent societies.

"Yeah, that's, uh, pretty much the skinny of it."

There' a quaver in Howard's voice, a distinct wobble of fear that gives way to an affected deadness, as if he's trying too hard not to care. Not to be scared when he's terrified.

But there's none of the outrage that the Signless feels. Howard's resigned to a life in this rat race. In some sick way he's even grateful, because it's better than it could be.

"I mean, not everyone comes back. Plenty of people die for good."

The Signless hears that quiver and it reminds him that maybe now isn't the time to get righteously furious.

"I'm honestly not sure which is worse."

He's silent for a long moment, and then the question he didn't want to let himself ask bursts from his mouth all at once.

"If you survive, is there any possible way to go back? I have... there are things I need to do. People I ought to be helping."

He knows the answer is probably no. He knows the Disciple and the Psiioniic and the Dolorosa will carry on just fine without him, with the Disciple's writings to aid them. It still makes him feel sick to think they'll think he's abandoned them.

"No, but honestly I haven't really looked into it."

Howard would be loath to go back to his home. At least there's food and electricity and running water in the Capitol. Howard's eyes are adjusting to the dark now, and he can tell that the person across from him isn't exactly human. It's not as if that bothers him, but it means that Howard doesn't know how much of a threat he is.

"Look, are you some kind of hero type or something?"

The Signless laughs, not unpleasantly.

"No, no. I wouldn't call myself a hero. A rebel, maybe. A dangerous heretic, officially."

Really, he doesn't see anything particularly heroic about what he's doing -- was doing, before he was suddenly here. What's at all heroic about basic troll decency? About wanting and fighting for rights that ought to be universal?

"I just do what I believe to be right. Often, what's right is helping others."

"Sounds like the same thing to me." To Howard, doing what's 'right' is a luxury, an ideal that cannot be part of the status quo. "Heroes here end up dead. Word of advice, you ditch that idea."

In Howard's opinion, he's being charitable, downright benevolent here. He's giving advice that could keep Signless alive, something that's outright detrimental to Howard in a death match.

He stands up entirely, though he keeps the weight off his hurt leg. He doesn't cut an imposing figure, scrawny and only just scraping five feet tall.

Everything hurt. Her arm hurt when it had been burned by fireworks, her feet hurt from running bare footed from explosions over scorching ground, she had lost the remainder of her food, she was thirsty and this was stupid.

She saw the figure and began swinging her rock filled shoes, creeping closer, knife pointed at him.

It... what was that. "Do you be a monster or an alien?"

The Signless stopped fussing with his boot and looked up when Pruna spoke. He instantly flattened his back against the tree when he saw the blade; she looked young, but when even young trolls could be deadly that meant absolutely nothing. Just because she was an alien -- pink skin, no horns, it was still so jarring -- didn't mean he shouldn't treat her and her knife as every bit as dangerous as they might be in more adult hands. Besides, who knew? She might be an adult of her species.

Aliens were weird.

"I suppose to you I'm an alien, though you're just as alien to me in all fairness. I'm at troll, from Alternia." He eyed the knife. "Please put that down."

"You do no be looking like the last alien I did be meeting." She wrinkled her nose, "And you do no be looking like no troll I have ever been seeing."

Even if she'd only seen a troll once, and it had been dead. But it had also been significantly... taller than this one. And trolls were monsters... and couldn't talk.

"If I do be putting it down you could be killing me."

"I wouldn't," he says, shaking his head for extra emphasis, but he knows she likely won't believe him. He can't really blame her, what with the situation they're in. Still, he holds up his hands, fingers splayed. "No weapons, see?"

She continued glaring but lowered the weapon, a tiny bit. Not putting it away. "I will no be stabbing you." She promised.

At that, he relaxed, letting his hands fall back to his sides.

"It's much appreciated."

He knew that, eventually, he'd be killed, the moment someone decided to stab first and talk second. His best chance to live was to avoid other tributes altogether, but in an enclosed space there was only so long one could keep running and hiding. Running and hiding without an open wound would make surviving for longer that much easier, though.

"What was the other alien you met like?" he asked, to change the subject from stabbing and because he was honestly curious. If the person she had met wasn't a troll, that brought the species count in this place up to three, and how strange was that?

"Well she did be bigger than you and purple and looked like a horse, but had a tail that looked like... like a bug. And she did be having four eyes and two of them did be spinning round which I think would be being very useful."

She kept her knife down low.

"I imagine it would be. Being able to see is always helpful. I only have two eyes, but I can see in the dark, which I think is just as good."

He tried to sound friendly and encouraging. She seemed... well, nice, even with the knife and the strange accent and the being an alien.

"You can be seeing in the dark?" She was jealous of that as well, all she could see of him was his general shape, his horns.

"Oh, yes. We trolls -- I don't know what kind of trolls you've seen before, if they're nothing like me -- but the kind of troll I am is generally awake only at night, so we can see in the dark. You can't?"

Wow. Aliens really were weird. And super interesting.

"No. I can no be, though I do be being awake at night a lot." She wrinkled her nose.

"I imagine it's hard to sleep, here."

You know. Since sleeping might make it easier for someone else to put a knife in your back.

"You know, if you wanted to stay with me, we could take turns keeping watch so the other could sleep."

If the other aliens here were diurnal, he couldn't afford to be caught sleeping when most of them were active. Besides, it wasn't like he wasn't used to keeping odd hours.

Pruna nodded, it really was. But she was suspicious, "You do be expecting me to be trusting you?"

He shrugged with one shoulder.

"I believe in treating others as I would want to be treated. I trust that you won't stab me, so I should hope that you trust me not to harm you in return. I'd have nothing to gain by killing you but a guilty conscience that I neither want or need."

Treating others as he wanted to be treated... She wrinkled her nose, aliens were weird. The girl didn't even understand what that meant, how she wanted to be treated... She would be treated however those around her saw fit and she would defend herself if they wanted to hurt her.

And he trusted her not to stab him, part of her wanted to just to prove him wrong. But the promise of sleep was more tempting. She could always stab him tomorrow. "Okay, but you be sleeping first, and I will be waking you up in two hours."

Well. It had been his idea, he supposed that was fair. If she wound up stabbing him anyway while he slept it would be a valuable lesson for if he encountered her again -- assuming he survived.

"Alright. If anything happens, wake me up sooner." And preferably not with a knife in the eye.

This, at least, was familiar. He settled back against the tree, pulling his cloak a little more closely around him (thank goodness the outfit they'd given him had one).

She nodded and walked a few paces through, knife out, shoes held in her spare hand. She might not be able to see in the dark but her eyes were recovering from the fireworks and her dark vision slowly adjusted, she stood still and silent.

Two hours later she shook his arm. "You do be waking up now."

For a split second the Signless was disoriented -- Were there bluebloods? Why was it dark, had he overslept? -- but then everything came back in one big rush. He let out a small groan and opened his eyes, instantly awake and back in a place he'd rather not be.

"Thank you."

He pushed himself to his feet, ran a hand through his hair (which had absolutely no effect except getting it out of his eyes, given it was already awfully messy).

"Your turn."

"... You do be welcome." She wrinkled her nose and nodded before sitting down and curling into a ball, her knife still clutched in her hand like a normal child would hold a teddy bear.

The night was, thankfully, uneventful. For the first time, the Signless got to witness a sunrise that wasn't quite so volatile as the ones on Alternia-- no hordes of rising undead, no threat of instant blindness, amazing. It would almost be pretty, if not for the extenuating circumstances.

He gently set his hand on Pruna's shoulder and shook.

"It's morning. Wake up."

Pruna woke up with a start, her knife at her side and ready, she blinked in the sunlight. "You did be supposed to be waking me up in two hours."

"Ah, well, you looked so peaceful, and no one came by, and you seemed to need it a lot more than me anyway. Besides, it's only been a little longer than that, it's no big loss."

It had, after all, been about six AM when she'd handed watch over to him. Unless hours for her species were a different length of time, he suddenly realized, and felt rather foolish. Aliens. Weird.

She wrinkled her nose, "Well if you do be getting tired and be being eaten by monsters it do be being your own fault."

Brendan's there. He's quiet, and he's sure. The fireworks had driven him away but he quickly scaled a tree once they ceased, looking more than a little haggard. What little food he had was pretty much gone, and his stomach growling worse and worse, he wanted nothing more than to avoid absolutely anyone he could.

It was the black cloak--Brendan wanted it for camouflage, and the only reason he saw it was because he heard rustling when he stopped to take off his shoe.

It was perfect--all he needed was to swoop down and hit him with the plank of wood he'd grabbed from Frontierland. knock him out, kill him--it didn't matter. All that did matter was that he could grab that cloak.

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