I never knew daylight could be so violent [OPEN]

[saisamour]

Who| Marius, Nepeta, Lindsey, Ian, and OPEN!
What| YOU get free food, and YOU get free food, EVERYONE gets free food! Encounter options available under the cut.
Where| Arena 2
When| Week 3
Warnings/Notes| Hunting, thoughts on suicide, Pontmercying

➳ Hunting for elk!
Even Marius cannot remain oblivious with the sky's abrupt changes from dark to light, and for the first few hours he attempts to make a rough estimate of the length of daytime and nighttime. Around two to three hours each, perhaps? It's not exactly the most precise, he is aware, but it is enough for him to devise his plans around it.

That is to say, if he had any plans.

He forces himself to swallow, mouth and throat dry as he trudges through the desert heat, lips chapping and Romeo costume that is now caked in dried mud sticking to his skin. He's not quite planned lasting this long in the arena, and he's honestly confused and more than a little lost. What is he to do now?

A low bark that lasts for several seconds echoes throughout the area then, almost seemingly in response to his thoughts. He crouches low, crossbow in hand, and peers from his slightly elevated spot of land to find a lone elk trotting slowly across the sand. It comes to a stop, ears twitching, then bows its head to graze on a tuft of browning ricegrass.

There's a brief moment wherein Marius considers simply leaving the elk to be. Why would he harm it when he has no need for its meat, when he intends to die? But then he remembers the other people in the Arena, and maybe it's his own little rebellion against the Capitol's games but he refuses to play their killing game. Instead of destroying them, will help his fellow Tributes survive. His father would have done the same, he thinks. Cosette may have wanted it of him.

So he raises his crossbow and takes aim for the elk's lungs, brow furrowed in concentration and eyes narrowed to slits.


➳ Getting a sponsor bag
The cold penetrates to his very bones and Marius huddles involuntarily against his sleeping bag as a shiver wracks his body. He shifts a little, intending to crawl into the bag, but a moment of hopelessness and depression strikes him suddenly then, and all he manages to do is to stare at it blankly.

What is the point to all this struggle? He could simply allow the cold to take him. He will merely return to the Capitol anyway, if he dies. Or perhaps another Arena? He hasn't the faintest idea of what's running through the Gamemakers's minds. Perhaps he doesn't care. He just wants this to end, right here and now. To die so that he could at least glimpse again the face of his beloved Cosette in the moment between the last traces of consciousness and temporary death. To look into her eyes and feel her hand against his cheek before darkness consumes him.

He does not even notice the descending bag until it's right before him, and he blinks and raises his hands for it to land on. He unwraps it to find some water bottles, enough to last him for two days. His head tilts slightly as an almost quizzical look crosses his face, as if he doesn't really know what to do with it.

Perhaps he could pass it on to someone who needs it more, should he encounter them.

Comments

[saisamour]

Marius let out a gasp, eyes bulging, as soon as the elk collapsed and revealed the man behind it. He scrambled to his feet and pointed the crossbow to the ground, raising his free hand up in a sign of surrender.

He sucked in a deep breath and took a tentative step forward. He was not entirely certain whether the man was out to kill him; it seemed that he had been after the elk too, however.

"Peace," he called out, keeping a level tone. "I am not here to fight."

[hartless_cowboy]

Lindsey turned the scythe towards the other man, but his eyes widened in surprise when he saw the guy point the weapon down. He wasn't going to kill him then, and Lindsey suppose he could lower his scythe too.

At the offer for peace, the non-Batman hesitated, then called back out, "Neither am I... The creature's big enough to share."

That was an offer of truce, kind of, as long as the other man didn't mind sharing his meat.

[saisamour]

Relief flooded Marius when the man lowered his scythe; he did not intend to fight anyone, if he could help it, and the man seemed sincere enough.

He was not particularly averse to sharing, either. "Then we can, if you wish it." Not mentioning the fact that he would also willingly surrender more than half of the elk, whether the man requested it or not.

And though his stance relaxed he remained where he stood, waiting for a sign from the man that it was acceptable to approach.

[hartless_cowboy]

Realizing that the other man was waiting for him, Lindsey made an all encompassing wave down to the dead Elk. "If we don't cut this up soon, it's going to waste in the sun."

Giving the other man another glance, more prominently towards that crossbow in a wary look, Lindsey took a swing of his scythe and hacked into the creature. It was easier than sawing at it with a folding knife, they could do that after he severed its limbs and chopped it into manageable albeit bloody pieces.

[saisamour]

Marius winced involuntarily at the swing; he would have been in a trance if he were in battle, been able to block all the gore and unpleasant visions, but as he was not, the sight of the elk's blood spattering across the desert sand caused him to feel a little sick in the gut.

Nonetheless, he steeled himself and strode towards the man, bow still in hand but kept pointed to the ground. Quite honestly, he did not foresee an encounter like this, so he stopped a few feet before the carcass and stood there awkwardly for a moment.

"Is there anything I can do to assist?"

[hartless_cowboy]

Lindsey spared the man a glance as he wiped some of the sweat off his brows. A dark outfit in the sweltering heat of the desert sun was a dangerous thing, and he was already at the end of his supply of fluids from his cornucopia trip.

"Do you have a knife?" He asked, looking at the copied carcass. The torso was still intact, more or less, and it reeked gutting and cleaning, as well as skin and fur stripped from the meat.

[saisamour]

"I do not." Marius Pontmercy, ladies and gentlemen.

He did scan the area, however, as he suggested, "But perhaps I can find us a sharp enough piece of rock."

Honestly, he wasn't entirely sure a rock could do the trick, but he wasn't very well-versed in the actual skinning and cleaning of meat from after the hunt, and that seemed the only possible solution.

[hartless_cowboy]

Lindsey's look became even more dubious, but he looked down at the pieces of elk and hell with it, he wasn't going to clean the whole thing himself. If the guy tried to make a move against him, Lindsey will just have to make sure he kill him first.

Digging into his belt, he pulled out one of the throwing knives he had taken from the Cornucopia. It wasn't ideal, but he wasn't giving up his folding knives either.

He stabbed it directly into the torso of the dead animal. "Use that," he told him.

[saisamour]

He jumped a little at the stab; that wasn't exactly a sight or a sound that a wealthy young man from Paris was used to seeing, not even one who had voluntarily plunged himself into poverty. It was pretty barbaric, really.

But he wasn't about to complain. He had resolved to help anyone he can, after all. Perhaps in stark contrast to the doubt in the other man's thoughts Marius had now put his full trust in the stranger and set his bow down onto the ground, then wrapped a hand around the dagger's handle and set his free one against the elk's hide to support himself as he yanked it back out.

"You will have to instruct me, monsieur." His voice had a hint of shyness in it, and his eyes remained on the carcass. "I'm afraid I have little knowledge of what to do next."

[hartless_cowboy]

Lindsey was tempted to ask how did the other guy last this long into the game, but that seemed rude even during under the current circumstances. Instead, he pointed to the pieces of meat that wasn't the torso, such as the legs.

"Fine, just strip the skin from those. That shouldn't be hard."

Seeing the crossbow get lowered helped Lindsey breathe a pent up sigh of relief he didn't know he held. For once, Lindsey felt generous enough to not take this advantageous time and attack the other man. "We're going to have to somehow cook the meat."

[saisamour]

With a nod and a short hum to express his understanding, he went to what he hoped was the correct manner of skinning the animal. (Note: it... actually was, this time around, as he cut through the hide and started to pull back on the skin, although he still was doing a somewhat amateur job at it, if his awkward stance and his scrunched up face was any indication.)

As he paused to wipe the sweat off his brow, again completely oblivious to the sigh of relief from his companion, he said, in a tone that sounded like he had just remembered it, "I have some materials to start a fire that I have yet to use."

[hartless_cowboy]

Lindsey paused in his own nasty job of cleaning out the carcass, steaming mess of entrails getting thrown out to the desert because they had no way of cleaning it, and looked to the man.

"Do you have anything to burn too?" They would need that if they wanted to build a fire, and animal skin, while ignitable, didn't exactly work as efficient fuel. He looked around for anything they could use and it seemed like there might be a copse of something in the distance. Too far to tell though.

[saisamour]

Marius clearly did not think this through.

He shook his head at the response, and then followed the other man's line of sight, and squinted as he spotted the... thing on the ground. He certainly hoped it was not a human corpse.

And when he glanced back at the man there was the slightest hint of guilt in his eyes now, as a result of feeling rather useless, aside from the part where he actually managed to kill the elk without blotching it. "Would you want me to fetch it?"

[hartless_cowboy]

"Yeah, unless you want to burn anything off yourself." And before Marius could even suggest it, Lindsey seemed to pulled back a bit. "You're not burning anything from mine." It was hot right now, practically boiling and he was dressed in his tattered black batman outfit, but it got cold out here at night and he needed that to not freeze to death.

"Go on, I'm not going to steal the thing while you go investigate." He made a face as his bloody hands dug out more elk entrails. He was soaked in blood up to his elbows.

[saisamour]

"I will not accuse you of it."

He said that in earnest as he stood up, crossbow in one hand in case he encountered any potential threats on his way. The blood on Lindsay's arms caught his attention for a brief moment and he forced his eyes away; now was not the time to be reminded of the barricades. (Likely there will be no proper time.)

He trudged towards the object and, once he arrived at its location, noted that it was a carcass of some form of small animal, slightly rotting but still enough, he supposed, for fuel. He grunted as he took hold of one of its legs and dragged it back, before he spotted from the corner of his eye a patch of drying sagebrush. He set the carcass back on the ground as he walked towards it and gathered as much as he could in his other hand, then returned to the carcass and hauled it the rest of the way back.

"Here." He was slightly panting as he dropped the fuel and tinder a few feet nearby, and wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his arm as he glanced at the elk to see whether there was anything else to do to clean it.

[hartless_cowboy]

Lindsey's nose wrinkled slightly when he saw his temporary ally return with the brush and the carrion, thanking the baking desert for the fact that the animal hadn't rotted. It had been chewed on by other scavengers, but there was no rotting and no wet sick smells, although he doubted he could smell anything aside from the blood of the elk that seemed to have coated everything.

"Great, that looks good. You get that burning and... we can start grilling some of these strips on them."

It may be noticed then that Lindsey had skinned the animal of a large piece of fur and used it as a grotesque blanket of sorts, fur side down, to set down stripped pieces of meat off the sand. He continued sawing at the carcass of the hacked up animal.