thearena | Pretending There's Nothing That You Aren't Prepared For [Open]

WHO| Venus Dee Milo and open!
WHAT| Venus teleports around the Arena setting off danger and distributing supplies.
WHEN| Week One
WHERE| Everywhere in the Arena
WARNINGS| Death, explosions. Venus having some suicidal thoughts.

Venus has been dying for far longer than the two days she's been in the Arena. Ever since she got herself banged up on that mission against the Capitol, she's been biding time with increasing difficulty, trying to make it to the Arena so she can cover up for the internal bleeding that's killing her from the inside out. It's gotten more difficult, but thankfully she's had Porrim on her side, who's been able to taper off the amount of in-person interviews Venus has had to do and cut semi-nude shoots down to zero.

To finally be able to die instead of fighting it is a strange form of release. Venus thinks to herself as she crawls through the wormholes she rips into the fabric of space and time that it probably says something about her that death always feels like a relief, like relaxing after a long day's labor, rather than as something to fear. Having to stay alive has always been such an inconvenience for her, and she became a superhero because it was a clear-cut path towards dramatic, beautiful, and permanent ruin. It's eased in the last two years, this dogged pursuit towards a final end, and yet it's always there with her.

And so she's strangely sort of happy as she teleports around the Arena, looking for worthy allies to disperse her Cornucopia supplies to. The Gamemakers are coming for her, with rats and fires and claps of lightning. She emerges from nowhere, literally pulling herself from places out of eyesight or earshot, like a migraine in quick-motion to anyone watching where she blips back into reality, with a wild, jagged, beautiful smile on her face and a bag over her shoulder.

"Hey! You!" she'll call.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Shepard has, in the intellectual arena of warping space-time, a solid grasp of the expression of gravity wells. A planet's gravity fluctuates slowly, in time with tides and the shifting of subterranean magma-flows, even magnetic fields. You could feel it, if it was unfamiliar. She preferred the mechanistic control of spacecraft-- a lot of biotics complained about the subtle vibrations and computerized micro-adjustments, or got headaches off the changes in power-draw when a starship re-prioritized from life support to weaponry. Not so with Shepard.

But she had had days to get used to the firm, steady heartbeat of Panem's version of Earth again. There was something to be said for living down at the bottom of a big, stable gravity well like this.

For one, it made even subtle local changes obvious; case in point, the puckering of space-time around a singularity as it bent the fabric of space-time to form a wormhole. It was invisible, but as Shepard felt it start to form almost immediately; she darted into cover. You didn't need to see something for it to kill you, and she didn't intend to give it any advantage.

By the time Venus gets to Shepard, she's an outright mess, but she'll suppose Shepard's used to that. Venus has been hit by two Gamemaker traps, a fire that ripped up her forearm and leg and rats that attacked her enough to take some fingers with them. Worse, she's started to finally go into shock from the collapse of her internal organs, glutted with blood where they shouldn't be.

She still meets her new location with a grin, even though it's a woozy, tired one. For the first time in the Arena, she feels a sense of purpose, no matter how pointless it is. Maybe it's the ephemeral pointlessness that so appeals to her, the candy sugar rush of doing something useful for people on a sinking ship. Delivering supplies to people who may as well already be dead.

"Who's there?"

It took the count of three to get up the nerve. Wisdom said, stay silent; and it was true that the smartest idea would be to walk away.

"It's me," She stood slowly, hands empty. Shepard never was all that smart, "What do you want."

"I'm Santa Claus. Catch, swear they're not a bomb." She pulls her last set of earplugs out of her bag, then tosses both them and the bag onto the ground by Shepard's feet. "And you've been very nice this year, I guess."

She takes a seat, too tired to even stand up.

Shepard has to stretch to catch them-- she's not stupid, but without mutual trust there's nothing between them but malice.

"Uh... No I haven't," Earplugs? Something just happens to Venus in the Arena. She goes from simply being a bitch straight into bizarre moon-logic. Shepard decides it's better not to question it, "Thank... You?"

There is a pause.

"You look like shit."

"Thanks, Shep. You don't exactly look like a tall glass of water either." Venus uses her wrist to wipe sweat from the back of her head, wilting like a flower in a cold snap.

"Look. I'm on my way out. I grabbed a bunch of those at the Cornucopia so I'd put money on them coming in handy for some Gamemaker shenanigans later." Her panting vainly tries to cope with the way her lungs are shutting down, as if her body can't decide between preventing itself from expiring or ripping itself apart from her power and is putting most of its energy into the latter. "You might want to step back. Any minute now I might go nuclear."

She grins. "Unless they hit me with lighting or something."

"Hey, screw you, I'm a tall glass of whiskey, thank you very much."

Burning and all, maybe she is. At the very least she looks like the way you feel the morning after a bottle of the stuff, a mud-smudged and scab-spattered dirt-goddess, in clothes tied on from scraps. Still, she's not quite starving to death just yet, so that's something for her.

Well, she's a short glass at least. Shepard's not winning any height contests.

"I think I'm at least as radioactive as you are, to be honest. I'll take my chances, for now."

"Bitter and dry? Or is that gin?" Venus can't stand any longer, and so she all but collapses into a kneel, panting hard enough that her shoulderblades look like a bird's wings pumping for altitude.

"Hey, no blaming me if I explode and rip you to shreds. You saw my exposé. You know I don't exactly have great control over all this." She swallows and grits her teeth, forcing herself not to be ripped apart by the energy coursing in her veins. It's like trying to hold back the tide with a spoon, and she won't last much longer. "Seriously. Get the backpack and go. Go, Shep, let me explode in peace."

Pretending There's Nothing That You Aren't Prepared For [Open]

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