thearena | The Greatest Betrayal

Who| Volanz and OPEN
What| How long does it take Volanz to figure out that nothing is edible? Let's find out!
Where| Up a tree in the central jungles.
When| Day three. Or night three. YOU DECIDE!
Warnings/Notes| Nothing to start with. Miserable, sick, hungry alien kid who's definitely more afraid of you than you are of him.

Food wasn't supposed to do this to you. It just wasn't. Volanz had been pretty confident to start with, even considering how much he hated being surrounded by forest. At least it was full of living things, surely he'd be able to eat until something or someone else finally killed him? Food was so important, how could it just betray him like this?

Then again, it was probably just because he was still crap at figuring out which alien trees gave edible fruit. This one he was resting in clearly didn't, and neither had the last two. Hunger was beginning to gnaw in his belly, which hadn't held anything he'd put in it besides water since stepping off his platform.

Volanz felt a horrible wrenching in his digestive coil, leaned against the trunk of the tree, and dry heaved. It broke off into futile coughing and he groaned, his throat burned and his muscles were sore as he tried to expel something that wasn't even there anymore. How long was this going to go on for? When he finally did find viable food would he even be able to keep it down? Even worse, he was getting thirsty and he'd have to brave the forest floor again for water soon.

...Not that he had reason to fear that. But it felt unnatural down there, and all the experience Volanz had told him that large predators preferred the ground. After the incident with the slumberbeast that had led to his first death, he intended to take no chances.

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Well, he's not lunging at her, at least. He doesn't seem like he's going anywhere else for the moment, either. If anything, he seems rather timid. If Terezi had to wager a guess, she'd peg him as a lowblood of some kind. But that doesn't really matter here.

"Taking edibility for granted is the quickest way to get yourself killed out here," she points out. "If this is how you've always done it, then you must be lucky that it took you this long to get sick." The way he says that, though, she has to wonder how many arenas he's been in. As far as she could tell, she's never met him before. Maybe he meant back home?

"What's your name? Did you just get here?"

"I know," Volanz says, cringing a little. "But I mean, usually it works out? You sort of just see what the animals are eating and most of the time those things are okay for you too. Even here." Blugh, his mouth and throat are so dry.

"But I mean... not like here here but the whole not-home-thing that is going on." He waves a hand in an effort to clarify the idea, but it doesn't really do much.

"I'm Volanz? I was here for one time and then I was kind of eaten by a beast. But I guess I'm back now. Who're you?"

She hasn't attacked. Good. He can spare some thoughts for how much of a pain it's going to be to go find water.

She sort of gets what he's saying... She's been dealing with translating round-about juggalo-speak enough that a little rambling is nothing. So, his clarification doesn't fly completely over her head.

"I'm Terezi. I've been here since before the last arena, but you haven't been hanging around. I would have noticed." In that, he's not a troll that she recognized either personally or by association. It's a little weird, but she honestly thought that the must have been pulling from SGRUB-related trolls at first. Obvious not, if this one's here.

"I'm actually pretty okay at not being noticed, when I try at it?" Volanz said. "But I wasn't here for a while. I'm not all that sure where I was or why, either? I just don't remember."

Volanz hooks a hand around the back of his neck, a habitual motion that somehow makes him feel a little more secure. He privately wonders what he's done wrong that made the Capitol do... whatever it was that they did. Maybe he upset them. A few theories have been knocking frenziedly around between his horns when he's not busy panicking over more immediate situations, like his empty stomach.

"I'm not super good at any of these arena type things that we're supposed to do, if you ask me? I kind of think maybe they did it because I'm basically not all that interesting. Mostly."

"They're probably right! You definitely don't seem that interesting." She has to say, his timidity is sort of off-putting. He's the sort of lowblood that a lot of highbloods would love to kick around. Not her, of course, but she certainly knows a few.

"I could kill you," she informs him casually, though whether that's an offer or a threat or just a fact, she doesn't make that clear. She's still trying to figure out for herself just when and how she wants to start living up to this bloodbath--if at all.

"I doubt you have the skills to last very long in this arena anyway, let alone make it to the end."

Volanz nods along with Terezi's assessment of his boringness, and her ability to kill him. At the offer to actually do it though, he shakes his head.

"I'd, well, rather do the being alive thing for as long as I can? I mean it pretty much sucks a lot and is horrible in like twelve different ways, okay, but I don't want to die again so soon."

"It kind of hurts a lot."

Not to mention that Volanz can't imagine dying willingly. It just goes completely against every fiber of his being to lie down and die. Lie down and be stomped on and treated like dirt, perhaps, but even beneath his sense of social propriety and lack of self-importance there beats a vital drive to keep breathing, to keep thinking and pumping blood and functioning that not even fear of pain and suffering can quell.

Edited (tense agreement oops) 2013-11-02 00:57 (UTC)

"Wow, really? Dying hurts? I never would have imagined." The flatness of her tone would be difficult for anyone but a deaf person to miss. Still, he doesn't want to die, and Terezi's not in the mood yet to challenge his survival skills.

"If you're that intent on not dying, you should probably stop eating the plant-life. I don't know about the animals, but there's nothing edible here of the green and leafy variety."

Volanz sighs. There he goes again, saying things that are obvious/dumb/otherwise scorn-worthy. He supposes that means he's still talking normally, at least. Nothing toxic's mucking with his sponge yet.

Perhaps another person would reply with something sarcastic or cutting about how they'd already figured that out thanks, girl troll Sherlock, but Volanz doesn't have the spine for it.

Instead, he says, "...Yeah, I was gonna give up after this one. It's just plants are way easier cause they don't move or bite. Biting's another part of how I died last time."

It's probably better that Volanz didn't try to snark back at her. Not that she would have done anything, but it would have become abundantly clear who was the more verbally gifted in this conversation. Right after she buried him in a trench of sarcasm.

Instead, he gets something a little more skeptical.

"...On what Alternia did you grow up. I am pretty sure that there were carnivorous plants out in my forest, or else I must have had some long-standing hallucination. Either way, I wouldn't write that option out completely. Just because they haven't moved yet doesn't mean that they won't."

The Greatest Betrayal

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