thecapitol | I'm just a stranger in a strange land

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I'm just a stranger in a strange land

Who| Alain and OPEN
What| Alain arrives, in a rather desperate state
Where| D7 suite and around the Tribute Centre
When| Just before the Binding plot (slightly backdated)
Warnings/Notes| TBD

One moment, he was riding hell for leather in the gathering darkness, hunched low in his saddle, a bullet-graze in his thigh and his heart in his mouth. The next, he woke up in a strange room, alone, with the pulsing pain gone from his leg and the horse vanished out from under him. His heart, though, was still pounding, and although he put up no fight when he was led to the suite, he wasted no time in leaving it again. His gun was gone. That was bad. Worse, more frightening, was that the two guards who had taken him here had given him no echo of the Touch. They were cold and dead as automata, without any sense of personality. And all that might have frightened him, but for the fact that there was a more pressing issue at hand.

He had to get out. He had to get back. Blood pounding in his ears, he cast around for a weapon, and, finding none, decided not to linger and search - a gunslinger is his own weapon, Cort's voice echoed in his memory. Instead, swallowing, he set out into the strange new land, walking fast, taking in all that he could around him. The place was foreign, reminded him of nothing more than the old broken-down machines of his world, but shiny and new. And confining. Too confining. He had to get back.

In short order, he was thoroughly lost, fighting down uncharacteristic panic. He tried to reach out with the Touch, but found nothing, not even the sense of the Touch itself. That was horrifying, but he had no time to be horrified. Is this the Clearing? he thought at one point, desperately. Am I dead? But if he was dead, then who would bring the message through? If he was dead, then the gunslingers were dead, too, and Gilead's last hope with them. He couldn't be dead. It was unthinkable.

Unconsciously massaging his forehead, where a sharp knot of pain was gathering, he took a deep breath and cast around for someone to ask. The next person he saw, he approached, ignoring that dull sense of emptiness where the Touch ought to have sensed their mind. "Cry pardon..." he began, and cleared his throat.

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Emily attempts a smile, one that she hopes is both reassuring and apologetic, but she knows that it won't go very far to assuage the concerns he has about being brought here, and moreover what he's expected to do here. She wishes that she could feel more sympathy for the Tributes, but apart from the very youngest of them she's mostly just grateful that they've been brought here to fight so that her own people don't have to. She rises from the sofa in the common area of the suite, abandoning the pile of magazines she'd been trawling through for mention of her Tributes, gesturing for him to sit with her.

"I know it's strange, but it will be okay."

"No." He meets her eyes, holding them, trying to make her see the urgency of the situation. He does not sit. It's rude, and he doesn't like to be so brusque, but he can't stand on courtesy. Not now. "No, you don't understand. It won't, not if I can't get back. The chances are slim enough as it is. There's..." He swallows. "A message. I have to get the message through. Everything hangs in the balance. It's not the strangeness that troubles me, s-sir." And he's so intense, so thoroughly caught up in that need, that he doesn't even notice that somehow sai has become sir.

"In that case, there's not much I or anyone else can do to help you there." It still feels odd to her when she has to face the fact that the Tributes aren't just pulled in here from hazy, obscure places that she doesn't have to think about, but real worlds with lives and families of their own. It's a lot harder to send them off to die over and over when she has to think about that. "But there's nothing you can do, so you're better off focusing on yourself here."

"No," Alain says, but it's more a sound of stubborn disbelief than of disagreement. "There has to be. There has to be something." Hot tears are starting to sting at the backs of his eyes, and he swallows hard, shaking his head. "Thirteen men... thirteen gunslingers died so I could get this far. All the others will die too, if I can't tell them. There has to be something." He dashes at his eyes, and it's that, more than any conscious thought, that shows him he believes her. He's not going to make it in time. Farson's army will fall on the remnants of Gilead's men, unprepared and unaware, and they will all be killed, without even the chance of defending themselves. Because of him. Because he failed.

He sways a little, paling, and looks like he might be sick. "Cry pardon," he says hoarsely, not looking at her. "But there has to be."

She doesn't like having to be so harsh with a Tribute, especially one so new and even more so when he's stuck with her and Jason for support, but she knows there's nothing comforting she could say, either. "The people who brought you here don't care. In fact they probably waited until now to pull you in here knowing the deaths of thirteen people weigh on you so that you'd make more entertaining television for the Capitol." She purses her lips tightly, breathing out deeply through her nose, knowing that if she goes much further along that line then she's in danger of sounding as though she's arousing anti-Capitol sentiment to the security forces that she knows are always listening in. "Look, I'm sorry. But the only thing you can do is make sure you don't get killed yourself."

"Tele-fishon?" The word means nothing to him, a man who comes from a world of horses and candles and only perished remnants of technology. He blinks at it, rubbing his hand over his mouth and closing his eyes. "They won't carry it back for me, then?" he says after a moment, his voice low and broken. "I don't need to go back myself. If they would only send it, let Roland know..."

There isn't a great deal of hope in his voice, not after what she's said. But he has to try. If this was his last mission - and he's afraid, no matter what comes next, that it was; he could feel that growing sense of doom the whole time he was riding back with the message - then he has to at least complete it. He has to. Failure can't be an option. Too much depends on him.

He's not the first of her Tributes to not have seen a television before, but Emily still finds it a little strange to explain, seeing as it's one of the only cultural things that crossed over from the Capitol to the Districts, so she just assumed they were everywhere. She points over to the large screen on the wall, currently showing highlights of a previous Arena. "Like that, see? You'll be on it too soon enough."

At the name she pauses, recognising it but not wanting to give him too much hope - Roland was a common enough name after all, one she'd expect the lower Districts to be full of. "There's a Roland in District Four. He's probably not the man you need, but maybe it's worth a shot. Plenty of Tributes have been brought in from the same worlds."

Alain looks at the screen with a faint flicker of recognition - he's seen things like that before, though most of them barely functional and long-defunct, and he can at least see what it's for. But what she says snaps his attention back to her. He feels something like hope rising in his breast, and hates it, because he knows the chances are it's a false hope altogether.

"The man I'm looking for," he starts, and bites his lip, running one hand back through his hair. "You'd know him if you saw him. He's very tall, very thin. Dark hair, dark skin, pale eyes. About my age, though he carries himself like one older. Deschain. Roland Deschain." His eyes search hers, and he swallows. "That isn't him, I suppose?"

Emily grabs the remote control from the table, flicking through the channels until she finds a talk show recapping the events of the last Arena, pausing when Roland comes on the screen. "Is this the guy you're looking for?"

Alain doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. The sharply indrawn breath when Roland comes onscreen is probably answer enough.

The man on the screen doesn't look like Roland. He's too old, too haggard; older than Steven Deschain, with the heavy lines and sharp edges Alain knows from the statues of Arthur Eld. But he can see Roland in that man, like an optical illusion. Look past the crags of his face, past the grey starting in his hair, past the lines of age and pain around his mouth, and that's Roland.

He looks more like himself, in some ways, than he has since Hambry. Less hollow. That makes Alain smile, just a little, but his eyes are stinging. "He was my age," he says after a moment. "A year younger. How is it that he's become so old?"

"I'm not sure," Emily admits, knowing nothing of the means the Capitol uses to bring in the Tributes and finding it rather sinister to think about the fact that they seem to be able to look along the entirety of a person's timeline and choose the point from which they came. No, maybe it was all random, that felt a little more comforting. "People have arrived here from all over the place - different worlds, different times... All I know is I have to look after you now you're here."

Alain goes on staring at the picture of Roland a moment longer. "He survived, at least," he says quietly. "That's something to be hopeful over. And I thankee for it." Turning back to Emily, he gives her a faint smile and a little nod. He's silent for a moment, though, looking up at the screen again before he goes to sit down.

"When you say look after," he says at last, choosing his words carefully, "what does that mean?"

"It's my job to try to keep you alive in the Arena." She replies quietly, sadly. It's not a job she's had much success at so far.

"Ah." He's quiet for a moment, sorting through what he knows. Fight to the death, they told him. And the flashes he saw on the screen, when she was flicking through... it paints a clear enough picture. He sighs, quietly. "I suppose it's too much to hope that they'd give me back my gun?"

Emily makes her way back over to the sofa, gesturing again for Alain to join her, now that he's a little calmer. "You might find a gun in there, if the Gamemakers decide they want you to have one. A couple of the Tributes got guns parachuted in midway through the last Arena. There aren't usually any at the Cornucopia, though. They think it gives an unfair advantage."

"They're not wrong," Alain admits with a little half-smile, and lets himself relax just enough to sit down with her. There's still a lot of tension in him, though, thrumming undeniably just below the surface. "Anyroad, it's not just a gun I want. It's mine. My father's. But if it's not to be had..." He shrugs it off, running a hand back through his hair and shaking his head.

After a moment, he collects himself, holding his hand out to shake. "I'm Alain. Alain Johns. Cry pardon, I should have introduced myself sooner."

"Do you have experience with any other weapons?" If it was more for the sentimental value, she hoped he'd be able to train up in other forms of combat before the Arena, knowing that there was realistically a slim chance of finding a gun.

She slips his hand into his, shaking firmly. "That's quite all right, Alain. I'm Emily, your Mentor."

"Emily," Alain repeats, and nods. "Well met." That isn't entirely true, of course. No meeting on a day like this is going to be well met, especially not when all she can tell him is that it's hopeless. But she did show him Roland, and she seems well-meaning enough. It isn't her fault that everything has gone so very wrong today.

Withdrawing his hand, he knots his fingers together in his lap, considering how to answer her question. "I'm a gunslinger," he says at last. "Trained and blooded. Do you know what that means?"

"It ... means you're really good with a gun?" From the way he'd said it she can tell it means much, much more, but it's the only guess she can make, really.

That's a no. He isn't surprised, really, but he's weirdly sad. Not being recognised as a gunslinger is one thing, might even be good. But having anyone not know what a gunslinger is only reminds him how very far from home he is, and how lost.

That only shows as a flicker on his face, though. He may not have Roland's stoniness or Cuthbert's easy, false emotions, but Alain is still not as much of an open book as he seems. "In part. It means," he says, choosing his words carefully, "that I have trained since I was a child. In hand-to-hand, with knives and staves, in hawking and hunting. That death is my trade." It meant so much more than that, but how was he to even start explaining what a gunslinger was, in truth?

Emily nods encouragingly as she listens, feeling more confident by the moment of her District's chances in the next Arena. "You have a wide variety of skills. Far more than most of my Tributes. I have high hopes for you."

And I have none for myself. Alain presses his lips together, closing his eyes. His skills should be used for war, not for sport. His comrades are dying. The last thing he can spare hope for right now is that he'll make a good competitor.

Aloud, he says slowly, "If I can find Roland, mayhap. We've fought off armies before. This is..." A little smile, one that twitches into existence without meeting his eyes. "This is doable."

Her expression falls a little, remembering her own Games. "Just be careful. Allying with your Roland is a good idea, so long as you remember that there can only be one winner."

"Then I fear you'll not have a victor," Alain says gravely. "He is my d... my di... my commander. And my friend. If only one of us can win, it will be him." It isn't what she wants to hear. He doesn't need to be sensitive to know that. But she should have the truth from the start, in such a matter as this, and he's known for many years that he's ready to die for Roland's sake.

"I see." She says it quietly, disappointed and trying to conceal her own frustration. She hopes that he won't be this forthright with Jason, knowing how badly he'd react to such an admission. "In that case, can I make a request of you." She looks across at him, a grave expression in her eyes. "Please get to know the other Tributes here in District Seven. If you're determined not to win yourself, at least you can help one of them to win."

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