thecapitol | People In Glass Houses...

People In Glass Houses...

Who | Timaeus Nadir and guests
What | Timaeus is hosting a picnic get-together/catch-up.
Where | The picnic will be taking place in the Tropical Habitat Dome.
When| We'll be using a bit of wibbly time so that people who want to attend can.
Warnings/Notes| None as of yet.

(This is an opportunity for me to make some new CR as well as catch up with ongoing relationships, but I also want to encourage tagging around between characters! Feel free to do whatever you like in the setting with whoever you like! Also I will be backtagging this so don't feel you've missed the boat if you haven't tagged in immediately <3)

Timaeus certainly knew how to organise a gathering- even if it wasn't an outrageously opulent celebration to be held on one of his own yachts. This one was to be held under the expansive dome of the Tropical Habitat- the entire location rented out for the day to Timaeus and his guests, a loosely private affair- formal invitations as such hadn't been extended, but those welcome knew they were. Naturally, all tributes and victors were included in this group.

The Dome was a beautiful piece of architecture in itself, though antiquated when compared with the technology used for the Arenas. Rather than invisible forcefields, the climate of the interior was separated from the outside by elaborately curving steel and glass. Inside, tropical plants of all types thrived- there was a still, green pond and, deeper inside, a cascading waterfall. Butterflies in hundreds of colours, sizes and shapes flitted about, tropical birds swooped between the trees, brightly coloured fish darted in the water.
Blankets and cushions had been scattered in the main clearing with hampers of food, but there was plenty of space for the guests to break away from the gathering if they so desired- the dome was full of winding paths through the greenery- some even climbing around the trunks of the largest trees and leading to viewing platforms above. In a temporary gazebo in the clearing, a string quartet played music that wasn't quite the classical pieces Tributes were familiar with.

Timaeus himself seemed in a brighter mood than he had been for months, more than happy to make conversation with anyone who approached him- though he was certainly keeping an eye open for particular individuals. Some that he'd met, some that he'd lost and had returned to him, and others still that he had yet to meet.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"It may have been the screaming," Sherlock said mildly, raising an eyebrow. At least Guy was self aware enough not to take it too seriously.

"It isn't surprising that you suffered a severe form of culture shock. By my reckoning, yours is the furthest world that they have pulled anyone from - past or future. Whether or not yours is ancestral or parallel," He added, before Guy could start that debate again.

"But the human race is nothing if not adaptable."

Senses of humor weren't really a modern invention, and that meant senses of humor at oneself weren't, either. Guy knew he was sometimes ridiculous, and awkward. And now he had a handy future device thing to see it on playback.

"It wasn't so much culture shock as probably just more like, actual, shock. People have that before they die, the before-death. It's not really surprising I still felt that way after."

He went on, "But you're right. Adaptability is the name of the game. I'm already learning things. Some of these people talk too much and a lot of them assume too much." He'd mingled with some of the Capitol guests after talking to Timaeus, now a little more secure in interacting with them. "Things are so complicated and difficult for me to possibly hope to understand they just go on explaining them in detail. And that lets me see."

It let him stand right up on the edge of that cliff so he could look out at the entire panorama below.

A proper genius, some portion of his mind echoed, but for once he had the good sense not to voice it.

"Well, then they haven't been paying attention," He mused lowly. "What exactly has it let you see?"

Guy lowered his voice so that the general din of the party was louder than it, and looked around to make sure they were properly alone.

"They told me the history of this place and they dress it up like they're the good ones, but you can tell what really happened. Whatever reason these 'districts' fought - and I'm guessing they're all separate tribes under the Capitol's tribe? - everything they've done since then is to keep them afraid and beaten down so they won't fight again. 'Here, look at what we can do to your children, imagine it was was worse because it can get worse.' They do it to keep them in the dark. And the people here aren't very smart and they teach them that it's all a great thing. They make them so empty they can fill them with whatever they want and the only feelings they can have that they have meaningful lives happen because they live them through us. We make them feel special because they can pretend they're unselfish by helping us, they can pretend their lives have meaning by caring about us, and they can pretend they're loved back by owning us."

He went on, "They probably brought us because something must have happened. Years and years of their children being taken away? They had to stop for some reason - something must have happened, something must have put them over the edge to where they thought it was safer to not take the children away."

He tapped his temple. "I'm not stupid." His voice dropped even lower and he covered his mouth with a hand as if afraid someone would see the words on his lips. "They think I'm too stupid to understand how it all works and why it's so necessary but really they're the ones not smart enough to see the way things really are. It's about fear. And control. They don't realize they're being controlled, too, maybe because they're never taught what freedom is themselves. They're locked up in this little...ant hill and they don't realize they're trapped, too. Or they do, but they're too afraid to question it, they know they'll be hurt if they do. The Games - that's to control them, too. They'd rather be the ones watching, not the ones inside."

Edited 2013-12-12 00:32 (UTC)

"I can tell you exactly what happened," Sherlock said after he let Guy go on for a bit. "Katniss Everdeen won the Hunger Games, alongside Peeta Mellark. They faced a second rebellion. Of course it's about control, this is as totalitarian a society as has existed in human history, and I'm almost surprised they took to the Roman Coliseum rather than genocide - though from what I understand they did that as well, after the first rebellion."

He raised an eyebrow as he spoke.

"You may want to be careful, Guy. They don't stop watching outside of the arena. And they like us to keep in line. If threats to your person aren't enough, they'll bring in someone else whose presence is more likely to keep you quiet."

He tilted his head, the fire kept carefully tucked away, the rebellion purposely smothered under a year's worth of oppression. He was not about to waste everything he'd so carefully laid. So he lied. He had to lie, because there was no other choice and not lying put his friends in danger.

"Ignorance is often preferable - there's wisdom in keeping quiet."

Katniss. He'd met Katniss, shaking, covered in blood, in the jungle. He needed to find out more then, about what she'd done, but he wasn't going to ask it here after Sherlock's warning about discretion. If they'd faced rebellion because of it, surely it wasn't something they wanted people talking about.

At mention of them bringing in people they loved to keep them in line, Guy shrunk in on himself a little bit, climbing onto one of the nearby cushions and drawing his legs up.

"I can see. That - that doesn't mean I'll speak."

He hadn't said anything remotely untoward to the Capitol guests he'd spoken to other than Timaeus - who he'd been prodding to test the limits of - and he knew Joan trusted Sherlock. Joan was open, at least, about holding onto herself in the face of all this.

"Joan seems to trust you. That's why -" was his explanation for saying as much as he had. And Sherlock had asked what he saw, after all. "But I told Joan I'll stay in line. It's better to do what they want."

If he fought back at all it had to be quiet. He had to learn to be quiet, to silence his outrage. It was just going to take a little bit of time. Hopefully, he'd learn to as fast as he needed to.

One thing was niggling at him, though.

"What's genocide, anyway?"

He didn't understand the other words but he gathered "Roman Coliseum" had to be like what they were forced to do in the arena. He didn't know what the other word meant.

Edited 2013-12-12 23:33 (UTC)

"You've nothing to fear from me. And in a place like this, most won't be recorded - I hope. Too many people. But the safest assumption is that you are always heard. Even with me. Even with Joan. But no. That doesn't mean you can't see." However, Guy seemed to get the point, so he went on to the next.

"Genocide, in a word, is the mass-murder of a large number of people, usually committed by a government, and usually related to political differences, race, etc." His voice was completely emotionless as he described it. "Thousands, millions-- there have been plenty of cases where it was undertaken to wipe an entire group of people off the map."

Guy believed Sherlock when he said he had nothing to fear from him. There was something unyielding about the man but that seemed more the kind of thing that would be directed more at the Capitol than anyone else. Someone that seemed that controlled was probably someone that didn't want to be controlled, was Guy's thinking.

At the explanation, all Guy could do was gape at the other man, eyes wide. It was difficult to understand the scale when there were possibly not even a million people in existence in his world yet. He had no way of knowing how many there were, but the fact he rarely came across people certainly suggested a small population.

Still wide-eyed, he cast his gaze to the ground.

"Oh."

He drew his knees closer.

"I have this funny feeling that I am going to really regret learning the meaning of some words as time goes on," he said darkly.

"With larger populations comes larger problems," Sherlock agreed lowly. "Where tribal warfare would generally have much fewer casualties, once you have the ability to kill indiscriminately, some find that they cannot resist using it."

He glanced at his hands and seemed to observe his fingernails casually. "Compared to what they have the ability to do, one could say that bringing in tributes from other worlds and forcing them to fight and be revived is almost humane."

His voice was even, and casual, the dark fire underneath carefully disguised in a supposed complete lack of empathy. He offered Guy a sharp smile.

"Well. Some would say. I would be much more useful if they allowed me to work."

"I'm not sure it's just the population," Guy said slowly. "I've noticed I don't - I don't think the way some of the people do here. A lot of people back home don't. I don't even look the way a lot of you do." He pointed to his nose which was mostly human but still had an odd darted shape that hinted of something a little more animal and apelike. "If my world is different, even though we have similar roots, we might never go the same direction."

He added, "Or at least I hope not."

Guy shrugged and moved on, not wanting to get into another debate about it being a different world, either.

"Anyway, that'd be a very broad definition of 'humane.'" Curiously, he added, "What work is it you do?"

"It could be that you're an entirely different species, but we have different species here as well and they seem equally inclined to war and murder," Sherlock pointed out. He wasn't enough of an anthropologist to be able to tell Guy that humans once looked more more like he did, after all.

"At home, I am a consulting detective. My work revolves around the fact that there will always be evil acts to unravel and solve." He used 'evil acts' instead of 'crime' because the way that Guy was talking about it, he wondered just how much crime his world had.

(How boring would that be?)

Not boring at all! What with all the beautiful landscapes and magnificent creatures and pretty flowers and buzzing little frogbees...

Which meant, for Sherlock, it would have been exceptionally boring.

The average killing went like this:

'Oh no, Gronk is dead!' 'How did this happen?!' 'Mnug hit him on the head with a rock, I saw him do it.' 'Oh okay, why?' 'To steal his food.' 'That was pretty stupid. Welp, let's go kick him out of the tribe or kill him then.'

"So," Guy tried to wrap his head around that. "So people do...bad stuff. I guess. And - maybe sometimes they get away? And you somehow find out who they were and how to find them? To stop them?"

Guy thought that actually sounded interesting. Not the bad stuff part. The bad stuff was bad. But the idea of someone solving a puzzle to find out who did it was a fascinating one.

He scooted forward on his cushion slightly and sat with his legs folded and leaned his cheek on his hand.

Sherlock never really minded gushing about his job (though of course he would never use the word 'gushing'), even if it had nearly been a year since he had actually been allowed to do it. A fact, of course, he refused to think about in depth.

"Simplified, but accurate. Our population is large enough that there are a group of people called the police that are hired by the state in order to enforce the law and stop crime. Or solve it, if it has already been committed. Ninety-nine percent of the time they are straighforward and simple and require nothing more than common sense and grunt work, but sometimes... Sometimes there is something interesting, and when they are unable to solve them, (which is often), they come to me."

"I'm guessing a law is...that's the rules. You have to have the rules, that everyone knows, that say certain things are wrong."

He figured they just had a name for them. He had no idea of how formalized the process was, but he was able to understand the basic gist of it all. There were rules, sometimes people broke them and hurt someone, they had special people to find them and punish them or kick them out of the tribe, and then all was well. Sherlock was who they called in when it was too hard to hunt them down. That wasn't too difficult to understand.

"How do you figure it out?" he asked. "If they leave do something horrible and then leave and go hide? I'm guessing if no one knows who they were, no one saw it."

"Even if they did, Witnesses can be wrong. Their memory can twist away from actual fact into interpretations that they want to believe. But it depends on the crime. There are plenty of ways to gather evidence, but only some of them may be applicable to any one crime. But I look for patterns, and evidence, and eventually the puzzle comes together and I have an answer."

Except, of course, for the times that he didn't, but those were so rare that they really weren't worth mentioning.

Now Guy was grinning, his mouth hanging open slightly in astonishment.

"So a crime happens, and you can just look at where it happened and see anything left behind. And your mind can just figure out from all of that who did it? No tricks, no magic, just your brain. You can look at nothing, where no one is now, and see what happened."

He looked incredibly impressed.

"Wow." He added, "I mean, I'm smart, probably smarter than a lot of people here, because some of these people..." He waved vaguely in the direction of a cluster of Capitol guests. "But it's very - it's the kind of smart that's in the moment? It's taking pieces of things and making them into something that no one else can see. This sounds like you looking at the pieces of things and seeing what no one else saw. You don't make the pieces into something, you have to see what the pieces were. I don't think one type of smart is better than the other type of smart, but that's still very impressive. And it must have taken a lot of discipline to learn what all the pieces might mean."

He looked very openly impressed.

Sherlock was very certain that Guy was not nearly as smart as him, but then, he was quite certain that no one was (even if Moriarty, perhaps, came close), but since he was getting praise at the same time he made an active decision not to be a complete prick about it.

"I was the best in the world at it," He said instead, both egotistically and almost a little sad. He was. He had been. But now he was a shadow of himself, locked here, far away from where he might be useful.

"Not that they care. Here I may as well be canon fodder."

"A good tool's still useful even if someone's using it for the wrong thing. A sharp knife's still a knife even if someone's trying to rub it against a stick to start a fire," Guy pointed out.

He smiled a bit of a wry smile.

"But I know what you mean. People here seem to have mastered shoes and that whole making-fire thing here, so even if I had the freedom to do it, I doubt I'd, ah, find my niche. It's not just about being displaced from the surroundings we're used to. It's that we can't be who we're meant to be doing what we're meant to do."

Edited 2013-12-26 07:16 (UTC)

"They may as well be attempting to use a spoon to serve meat," Sherlock grumbled. What possible use did a spoon have in an arena, except to fake dignity?

"That is precisely the point. Though I'm certain I could make myself of use if they allowed me to, they never will. It would be too much of a risk, on their part."

"I bet it probably would be."

Still impressed over here. He'd be even more impressed if he saw Sherlock doing one of his deductions because he had no concept of how many factors could come into play.

After all, when your murder weapons are limited to what you can pick up off the ground and maybe make sharper, there's only so creative that people can get.

"Anyway, I'm going to find more things to eat and try to figure out what the ones that jiggle alarmingly actually are." Sherlock got a wry little smile. "It was nice meeting you under less spear-filled circumstances."

"Mm, likewise," Sherlock said, though his tone didn't make clear whether or not he meant it. With an easy escape, Sherlock raised a hand to do a little sarcastic wave.

"Laters," He said, only slightly ironically, and then disappeared into the crowd.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

People In Glass Houses...

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject