thecapitol | We crown a victor

WHO| EVERYONE in the Capitol! No literally, everyone.
WHAT| The crowning of Shepard as this round's victor, a celebration, and an unfortunate surprise.
WHEN | A week after Shepard kills Kaidan.
WHERE | The whole city. All of it.
NOTES | Your character can be anywhere. Please make sure to specify setting/time in your subject bar.

The crowning ceremony made every other party pale in comparison. The whole city exploded into an over-the-top expression of debauchery and revelry. Everywhere a person went, there was food on open towers, drinks flowing freely, and fireworks lighting up the sky.

President Snow's crowning of Shepard went flawlessly. She had made it out of the Arena in fairly good shape, and District 9's stylist had rose to the occasion. The crowd was obviously eating her up; a victor who came out of the arena as something other than a broken child.

The party ran long into the night. And it was luck for those who found themselves far from the city center. Because around 1 am, just a few blocks away, while the party was still in full swing, someone misstepped, someone did something wrong, and a pod full of Trackerjackers was triggered off. A pod that should have been deeply dormant and entirely untriggerable.

It takes a good hour for the Capitol to get them under control, sending out men in bulky suits with a spray foam, and peacekeepers to manage evacuations. By the end of the night, a few Capitol citizens closest to the pod when it burst open were not able to receive treatment fast enough and succumb to the poisonous stings to a painful and unpleasant end. The death toll is not high, or perhaps, not as high as it could have been, considering there are many people in the area who got to experience the hallucinogenic effects of the muttations' venom first hand.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She was happy for Shepard. It was better than nothing after all; one of them had managed to survive the elements, each other, everything that the Gamemakers had thrown at them. It wasn't to say that the entire matter wasn't completely surreal, but Ariadne attended all the same.

She had only the vaguest of ideas what would happen now; her previous conversation with Elias had shed just a little bit of light. But she was still concerned, her brows furrowed even as she watched the ceremony in silence.

It seems like hours that she's up there, on display like some kind of pageant queen and she wants so badly to scream and punch just about half the people around her (and that's her being generous, really) she's actually angry when they let her down; let her mingle with her crowd of adoring fans. Or... whatever they are. She doesn't care to speak with any of them past learning which ones are responsible for this.

That is, until she spies a familiar face: a pretty dark-haired girl among the sea of strangers.

"Ariadne?" she asks, trying to keep as much of the surprise out of her voice. She'd already seen one ghost tonight, and she was still getting used to seeing others.

There's a slight ping of sadness seeing her like this, clean and beautiful and delicate as she should be. Someone put her back together only for her to be ripped apart again.

It was purely that she wanted to say something - that she wanted to see the woman she got to know outside of the Arena - that made her inclined towards dealing with the crowd. She had been keeping to herself, glancing around warily at the Capitol fans until she heard her name.

And though they knew her name as well as anyone else, thanks to the copious quantities of cameras watching their every move, she knows it's Shepard. The surprise doesn't faze her; at this point, Ariadne all but expects it when she turns, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear.

"I was starting to think you had been taken off somewhere else by your escort by now," she greets, offering a small smile.

"It isn't for a lack of trying," Shepard says dryly. She's had a pastel yellow shadow all night in the form of her escort, and... well, they're persistent. She'll give them that much.

"It's good to see you," she returns the girl's smile, and tries to act like this is a totally normal thing to say to someone you thought was supposed to be dead. If she were anywhere else, she doesn't think she would care; wouldn't need to put on an act. But the world is still watching. Looking. Staring. The last thing she wants anyone in this place to think is that she's scared. That something has her freaked.

Its easy enough to focus on the good part though: Ariadne is alive.

"It's hard to get rid of them sometimes," she concedes. Admittedly, hers seems more inclined towards figuring out what to do with her mentors than escorting the more sane of the lot of them around. Ariadne can take care of herself; the morphlings can't.

Admittedly, she knows what's coloured this interaction more than the others: she doesn't need to be able to read minds or anything like that to know that she should be dead right now, and this is more than a little strange for Shepard. "You too. Have you seen the others yet? They're here too," she states, keeping her voice light so as not to let on that she too doesn't really like that the Capitol can apparently bring them back like this.

"Kaidan," she tells her, "But only from a distance."

She hasn't seen anyone else. Or, if she has, she didn't recognize them. There hadn't been a lot of time to get a good look at a lot of the others' faces inside the Arena aside from those that she had come to know. Or, in some cases, already knew quite well.

She hasn't seen Garrus at all though, and he's not exactly going to blend in around here.

"Are they treating you well?"

She nodded; though she hadn't really had the opportunity to see many people from the Games themselves, she knew that they were there, at least in some regard. Probably being rushed from place to place by their escorts, just like she had been.

Stifling a bit of an internal smile at that, Ariadne tipped her head in assent. "Better than I expected, considering I was supposed to be dead. I suppose that being in such a popular alliance helped, though."

"Even in the worst situations it's good to have people at your side," she says, because even now she still believes that. "Are you still staying in the apartments?"

She's pretty certain Ariadne's answer is going to be yes. It's been a hectic few days, and little news had been given to her past what she had picked up via everyone else's chatter. But the one thing that she had recently come to know that bothered her more than anything was that... some tributes were going back.

"I am," she acknowledged, glancing aside for a split second before back to Shepard. Like the other woman, the fact that there was a number of them going back - Ariadne wished she had numbers to figure out exactly who - was bothering her more than a little. It was enough to colour her experience of the party, in fact.

Not that it was terribly obvious.

"You're staying somewhere far nicer now, aren't you?"

"They tell me I have a better view," Shepard says with a shrug. To be quite honest, from what she's seen of the Training Center so far, it's all pretty swanky. Far more spacious than what she's used to. Hell, her quarters on the Normandy were down right enormous.

She looks over her shoulder, sees her wild-haired escort engaged in what appears to be an enthusiastic conversation, but then again, from what she's seen of her, it may just be how she speaks all the time. "I don't know about you, but I think we've earned a drink. Would you care to join me in one?"

"A better view of more brightly coloured buildings," Ariadne chuckles softly under her breath. Either way, she couldn't much argue with it; the views still weren't terrible either way.

"I think you're right." She hasn't seen her own escort in a while; she can't see how it's much of a problem, since she does know the schedule well enough. "I'd be happy to. Judging by the look of everything, I think a drink will probably be easy enough to find."

"What more could a girl ask for," Shepard says dryly. She suspects Ariadne would find the views far more enticing than she ever would.

She does smile at the girl though, shifts herself so she is standing at Ariadne's side so that they can walk together. "At least there are some perks around here. They may want to kill us all, but they do feed us well."

It was true; she didn't half-mind the view when she got the chance to admire it. It was more than a little interesting to think about the context that had brought about a place like the Capitol, though that only led in a circular path back to her own misery at the circumstances behind being there to begin with. A vicious cycle, if Ariadne had ever heard one.

It's more comfortable walking alongside Shepard, even if it earns them a bit more attention. Two Tributes being friendly after the Games, one having just been crowned a winner. It was quite the sight. "They owe us that much. For however long we're in the Arenas, we don't eat much at all; it's only fair that we get a feast when we return."

We crown a victor

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whoa sorry for such a late reply! gmail ate it D:

man, gmail. D: i hate it for that o9

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