thearena | Arena 14: A Grimm Age

Arena 14: A Grimm Age

The morning breaks to a familiar routine for most of you. Bright and early the Tributes are roused by their escorts and stylists, escorted from their rooms and to the waiting hovercraft. The flight takes them a few hours out from the Capitol and after landing they are escorted quickly into an underground complex to be prepped. Tributes will find to their dismay that their outfits are a little less practical and a little more costume this time around, the ratio of which depends entirely on the whims of their stylist. Peacekeepers will appear almost immediately after they've finished dressing to put them in the waiting launch tubes.

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They rise up from the ground and -- phew, what's that smell? The Tribute's look around them to see a full-on medieval village, constructed entirely from wood and thatch. There are empty pens that might have once held pigs and chickens attached to the houses and a well is visible down the street. What commands attention though is what's in the centre of the village square where the Tribute's are standing; a pyre built around a tall wooden stake. Those who look amongst the piles of twigs and wood will see the gleam of weapons, as well as backpacks containing survival supplies. This is your Cornucopia, Tributes.

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Anyone who tries to look further afield, over the roofs of the houses, will see the main feature of this arena looming above them. The castle stands tall and forbidding, a monstrous sized building of stone with flags bearing the emblem of the Capitol flying from its parapets. From here, if they squint, they can see the drawbridge is down and the portcullis is open. For now.

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A triumphant sounding of trumpets is what signals this arena's beginning and with it those Tribute's with powers may feel a sudden tingling in their bones, a rush of energy as those powers are restored to them. Any with constantly active abilities will find a light illuminates immediately over their head, signalling that something about this powered arena is going to be a little different from the last. For those who try to use their powers right off the bat... well, they'll be in for a nasty shock.

[[OOC: A mod reminder that this arena is designed to punish Tribute's for using powers. If your character will attempt to use powers at any time in week 1 of the arena it needs to be reported here to be RNG'd by the mods for chances of success or injury.

There will be a thread on Death Roll posts for subsequent weeks power usage to be reported.]]

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Alain isn't the only one who knows when to quit - except Roland hasn't quit, not yet. It's only that his goals have shifted. Weapons aren't the thing first on his mind just now. Cuthbert had been hurt in the cornucopia too, in his last arena. Hadn't he? Roland can't remember, and has no time to dwell on how little he likes the fact. He sprints for Alain, dodging around tributes who are, for the most part, too busy trying to survive themselves to mind him.

"Alain! For god's sake, for your father's sake, come on, come... There. Quick. Be quick." Most of this, after Alain's name, is muttered, breathless, though there's enough clamour behind them that most would hardly notice anything up to and including a shout. Roland moves in close as he speaks, one arm going tight around Alain's waist and he tries to turn them, making for the nearest little building. Looks like a house, and if he's lucky he'll be right, but he isn't going to bother to check until it's alright to take his eyes off of his friend.

Won't be able to open the door, either. Kick it open with his foot, that'll do. If it doesn't take the thing off its hinges. "Where do you hurt? Tell me now, worst first, list it off for me."

It only occurs to him then that touching someone who's had electricity running through them can be dangerous. Or is it safe once it's done? Obviously it is, Roland's right here and unharmed - more or less -

Roland pulls his thoughts back into order. Focuses on Alain's face. His eyes. That's the most important thing now, whether he's alert, aware. Check his eyes.

Alain blinks, trying to shake off the dazed, otherworldly sense that's come over him. "Leg," he says, making himself focus on Roland, and lets himself be moved, gritting his teeth as he tries to put weight on the damaged leg. "Hands, burned. Chest feels..." Tight, aching. That was a lot of strain to put on a heart, and although he'll recover before too long, he's still reeling from it. He limps into the cottage, leaning heavily on his dinh, his round face drawn taut with pain and effort. "You took hurt, too. I felt it." Can still feel it, on the edge of his consciousness, for his Touch is back and with Roland so close, their pain is merging oddly in his mind.

Still, he smiles a little, laughing low in his throat. Maybe it's the detached, dizzy sense still swirling in his mind after the lightning struck, or maybe just the ebb and flow of adrenaline, but he laughs. "A fine pair of gunslingers we are," he says, reaching back to close the door behind them. "Cort must be rolling in his grave."

Roland makes a surprised noise, unused to hearing a name like that from a mouth that isn't his, but pushes that out of his mind just as he's pushing out every other unnecessary thought. "Sit. Bed looks solid enough. Um, what do we- Weapons. Hands. That'll have to wait, there's nothing for burns here. Leg first."

The words are a string of muttering, half to himself - and yes, a little tight with pain, although Roland does not think to either confirm nor deny Alain's observation, and does not think to note that Alain's got his Touch back. Priorities.

His right arm begins to lift, meaning to help Alain lower himself onto the bed. It doesn't get very far.

"Can you sit on your own?" he asks, once that noise that'd just come out of his mouth has been cut off and locked away. "Without jarring anything worse?"

"I can sit," Alain confirms, taking note even through his dizziness of that pained sound and what caused it. It takes more effort than he'd like to pull himself away from Roland and onto the bed, almost falling the last couple of inches. He has to catch himself on his hands, and that wakes them up, the numb ache of the burns turning into something sharp-edged and vicious. But it saves him from jarring his leg, and that's the important thing.

When the pain's settled a little, he looks up at Roland. "Ro'. I'm alright. I've taken worse hurts before." Though if the burns stop him using his hands, that's going to be a serious handicap. He'll have to hope they can find something to soothe it with. "We can splint the leg. There's plenty of wood around here, and these bedamned ribbons might as well serve some purpose. What happened to your arm?"

"But you've never taken anything like this in an arena." Roland stares at Alain's face for a moment, jaw tight. He takes a breath, then turns away. Wood to splint the leg, that's one of the reasons he'd come in here. Plenty of that in a little house like this. He walks over to a chair and, leaning to one side to better hold his right arm close, takes the back of the chair in his other hand and starts kicking at the thing until it's broken down. If he wakes up in the Capitol, waiting for Alain to wake up too only to find that he won't-

No use thinking about that now. It's doing no good. He gives an especially vicious stomp to two bits of wood before pausing the noise to speak. "As to my arm, something fell on the back of it." No, he isn't hesitating before disclosing this next bit. Why would you think that?

"...As I was reaching out to you. Cort would have my ass were he here, think you're right." His laugh then is more of one than he's given since coming to Panem, maybe. Still less than a laugh should be, breathy and formless. "Would be worth it. Least then one of us'd have kept his wits about him."

He squats, right hand dragging awkwardly over the floor as his left finds two likely looking pieces of wood. "What the hell happened to you, Alain? I only saw once it started. How much can you tell me?"

Alain considers for a moment, then shakes his head slowly. "I don't know," he says honestly. His head is still spinning, but he's starting to steady himself. As he thinks, he leans down, fumbling with his burnt hands to unwind the ribbons from his calves. His voice, when he does speak, is slow and thoughtful. "I was running for the pyre. And my... my Touch came back. Or I realised it was back, rather. So I reached out, thought to see what we were dealing with. To find you, too, though that was easy enough." Roland's mind is, after all, almost as familiar to him as his own, and age hasn't entirely killed that familiarity, or the bond of khef between them. "Then something else. Bright and hard and aimed. The lightning. I felt it called down, tried to dodge." He looks down at his burned hands, raw and blistering. "Made a mess of it. My leg broke, I think, when it struck with such force. And the burns, of course."

He lacks some of the calm detachment of giving a report. It's hard to draw the facts together into something simple and understandable, when his mind is still swimming, his nerves jangled. Still, he manages to keep himself steady and rattle off the facts without too much trouble. He looks up at Roland with a thin little smile. Even under these circumstances, it's good to hear Roland laugh.

"Too much hesitation. It's what always used to get my jesses tangled when we were hawking, do you remember? Seems I didn't kick the habit after all." A wan, self-deprecating smile. "Will you let me take a look at your shoulder? If it's dislocated, might be I can help get it back in place."

He listens close, tucking a few long bits of wood in the sash around his waist and standing, looking around for something to cut the ribbon with. There's a knife on the table nearby - rusted, but maybe sharp enough.

"I don't think you did hesitate. Doesn't sound like it, even though neither of us made it to the, the pyre." It's a hard word to say, because it's a hard image to think on. The structure of that cornucopia had been a surprise, although one he'd been quickly distracted from. It isn't as though he hasn't seen one or two pyres since the one in Hambry all that time ago, but having Alain's young face in front of him brings all those old times back a little easier. He shakes his head, shaking it off.

"You said it felt called," he continues, kneeling in front of Alain's leg and beginning to inspect it. "Tell me about that. And then you can take a look at my shoulder, though I'm not sure it's a dislocation that's taken it. Guess it's worth a look."

Alain frowns deeply, feeling an echo of that difficulty and knowing its source. To his shame, it hadn't occurred to him just how much the pyre might affect Roland. He hadn't seen Susan burn. Only Roland had, through the glass.

He chews thoughtfully on his lip, an idle habit he's always had, and looks down at Roland as he starts to carefully work the ribbons loose from the burnt skin on his hands. Shakes off the thought of Hambry, bites back the pain from his leg (which is burnt as well as bruised and broken, with a large star-shaped entry wound where the lightning hit the back of his calf), and tries to focus.

"It wasn't natural lightning," he says to start with, although he knows that's fairly obvious. Natural lightning doesn't come out of a blue sky, even if anything in this place was natural in the first place. "I don't know what it was. But there was intent with it. It was..." He hesitates, frowning. "...Not meant to kill. Not shying away from it, either. Mechanical. Drawn to me when I reached out. It reacted."

Roland nods, starting to gently feel at different spots on the leg to get a better idea of just what's wrong with it. "Then I wouldn't reach out. Is your Touch still there, working? Don't test it if you're not sure."

He leans back, frowning. Knowing what kind of splint is needed, that's easy enough with one hand. But building it with one? "Sorry for it, but I'll need you to help me with this. Need to leave here as soon as possible, find somewhere with the right sort of herbs for those burns."

He thinks a moment. There are other things he wants from this room, but none of them that can't wait. "Maybe you ought to look at my shoulder first. Then we'll build that splint, and find somewhere safer."

The bed, though old, takes his weight next to Alain's well enough. Hard to draw the clothes aside so Alain can get a good look. It's the vest that's the problem. Even with only the coat pulled aside, though, it's easy to see the lump sticking up from Roland's shoulder, one that moves a little when he shifts himself, trying to find an angle that lets his hand dangle off the side of the bed. His jaw is a little tight, his breathing deliberately steady.

"It's still there," Alain confirms. He doesn't have to think too hard to know that. He felt incomplete without the Touch, and now he doesn't. The world is back to all its dimensions and flow, no longer stuck solid and immovable in just three. He can feel Roland's mind brushing against his, and, when he moves to investigate the injury, it isn't just with his eyes or his fingers, but with that other sense as well.

Not that he needs more than a quick look to have an idea what's wrong, though it never hurts to be thorough. He pulls back after a moment, sighing. "Jamie might be able to do something with it," he says at last, using the unburnt backs of his fingers to tweezer Roland's vest back into place, "but I can't. It's separated. I guess it'd heal given time, but..." He shrugs. They don't have time.

Clearing his throat, he pulls away and shifts his leg into a better position with a little grunt. "We might be able to fashion a sling?" he suggests, looking around at the little house.

On Jamie's name, Roland gives Alain a distinctly odd look, almost a disturbed one. Here's another name he hasn't heard in years and years, must be, hasn't thought of in some time, and he has to take a moment to slot Jamie into the portion of his mind which is 'now'. It is, for Alain, isn't it? Has he realized yet that he is never going to see Jamie or any of the others again?

Roland ought to know. In the old days, the days in which the two of them were bound by brotherhood and fate, he would have.

Getting too caught up in the old days here and now may well get Roland killed. He takes a breath, then slides carefully down to kneel in front of Alain's leg again. "Aye, we'll grab something on the way out. Take this stick for me, hold it about here. And this other one, here. Once I finish tying- shit, can't do that either. Not like this. You'll have to hold one end of this too. And then something to lean on for you, I think. Maybe out of that door."

Alain meets that look steadily, holding the wood in place as best he can. It isn't easy, with his hands numbly aching from the burns, but he does it.

"I know he's dead," he says, in answer to the question Roland hasn't asked, and pins the ribbon against the wood with one finger, so Roland can work with it easier. "And that I'm like not to live to see him again, in any event. Still, can't help but wish for him here, when we could use both gunslingers and surgeons." Not that Jamie had ever been a surgeon, truly, but he was a damn sight better at field medicine than most of them. And he might at least have had two working hands, which Roland and Alain barely have between them at the moment.

Still, between them, they can just about get the work done, and that's what counts. Alain grits his teeth against the pain and, when the leg's splinted, turns to haul at the stupid wire-and-gauze wings on his back. Some of them can be salvaged - wire's nothing to be sniffed at in a place like this, and the gauze he stuffs into his pocket, along with Homilies and Meditations, to use as bandages later - but mostly he just wants the bedamned things gone.

"You'll live." The words come out with more force than Roland expected them to, and he wraps the last knot on the ribbon around itself a little more tightly than he'd meant. It'll be a little harder to untie now, but it'll hold. He lets Alain go at his outfit, heading instead to take better stock of the place. There's wood long enough to make a fair cane here, maybe even a crutch, but he'll need to take it from either the support beams over the walls or from the door, as he'd been thinking earlier. That will have to be done last.

So here he is, pacing around the walls of the little cottage. Sorry, taking stock. Totally not pacing. "Maybe not in Gilead again, but Panem- it isn't so bad. I'll show you." Again, more emotion than Roland expected has entered his voice here, but this time he does not notice the desperation that begins to creep in near the end.

"What did you see when you reached out?" He turns to Alain, realizing he should have asked this earlier. Should have helped Alain's hands dismantle those wings, too, so as Roland talks he starts over to do so. "Anything about this arena, or the people in it? Do you remember?"

Alain's hands slow on the wings for a moment. Roland's force, his desperation, would be striking enough even in the hollow, Touch-less confines of the Tribute Center. Here, they strike him full force, and leave an ache of understanding. He doesn't fully know why, though he can guess - knowing that Bert was here, knowing he no longer is - but he feels his dinh's worry.

He refuses to let it worry him in turn. Nodding a little, he holds out one of the wings, goes back to stripping the wire from the other. "Animals that aren't animals," he says, after a moment. "The rats. They're wrong. They're ill. Other creatures like... I don't know. Their minds aren't minds. And there's something in the woods, I don't recognise the shape of it." He frowns, deep and worried. "Most of it I didn't understand. And it's all wrapped up in fear and anger and determination from the others, much as you'd expect. Except for a couple. They weren't frightened at all. They'll be the dangerous ones, I think, if we can figure who they were." That was the trouble with the Touch. Like any sense, it could only pick up so much - and Alain had only been able to quest out with it for a few seconds.

At least one of them now is aware of Roland's emotions - and in that way he does have a little of their old childhood khef back, if only Roland was aware of it.

His mind, instead, is on Alain's words. He does not comment on what Alain's seen, and certainly does not guess at what any of it might mean. That would be foolish, and barely occurs to him. He only takes it in, his fingers - all ten of them, looking oddly identical in these thin gloves - moving steadily over the material of Alain's 'wings'. "We'll stay away from the rats. And the rest, of course, much as we can help it. Same of the other tributes. Most of 'em may not shoot first if you don't, but those few others you felt make the caution worth it."

Does Alain need this little talk? Surely he's had at least one arena how-to in the time leading up to this one. Well. He's getting it anyway. "We'll grab a few supplies here, maybe tie them up in this sash around my waist, if we can manage the knot. A crutch for you. But let's make it quick. We need to move, spent too much time here already."

Alain nods, winding the wires from his wings into a loop he can shove into the pocket of his vest, and levers himself gingerly to his feet. Well, foot. "There's living stock out in the fields. Doubt they're threaded, but they might be edible. Worth heading there, maybe, if we have aught to butcher them with?" As he speaks, he's casting around the room, looking for anything they can use. The hook over the fire could be a good weapon, if they find nothing else. And where there's fire, maybe there's matches, a tinderbox...

It's hard to take stock properly, when he can't walk, but only essay something between a shuffle and a hop. Using the edge of the bed for support, he manages to make his way over to a chest of drawers, wincing as he pulls it open with blistered fingers and rifles through the contents. "Where do we head?" he asks after a moment, not looking up.

"Out." He walks on the opposite side of the place, briefly looking through for anything likely. "Don't know the land yet. Got to look around a little. Not much. The first place out of sight will do, though those lights over us might make some trouble. Might have to keep moving. Nothing for that yet. I'd like to bring a pot along, boil the mold out from some of these rags, but that'll have to wait. For now we'll find some weapons, break that door down so you have something to lean on, then we'll be gone. You remember how to use a staff, I hope."

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Arena 14: A Grimm Age

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And this or your next one can fade it?