Calm Like a Bomb

[hit_girl_mindy]

WHO| Mindy, Open
WHAT| General hope for CR interaction, basically
WHERE| I'm going to have her in the training center/tribute tower
WHEN| This week
WARNINGS| Swearing and likely dialogue of the adult situations. Mindy just rolls like that.

1. The training room was becoming her home away from home.

Which, honestly, it HAD to be. Home was where dad trained her, home was making herself ready, finding the tired, aching in her bones welcome after the drudgery of the games forcing her to be alert almost constantly. That had happened too soon after her attempt to conform to real life. Even in her "roll with it" personality demanded the switch, it still left her in a hard place, untrained for fucking wilderness and traps.

She knew better now. She'd eaten more, even allowed herself to get dolled up every so often (two random days) so she could regain a little bit of herself. It just helped her regain a foothold back to what she did best: training her body to shatter some bones. A run n the gymnasium cleared her head. A few choice weapons of the stabbing variety kept her senses sharp. A rundown on long ranged weapons told her how much more she had to go. Everything she did, she recorded on a notepad for herself.

There was no more dad here to keep tabs on her: kill or be killed. Mindy wasn't going to go into the latter category easily.

Right at the moment, she was suspended from a rope, her eyes closed. One of the exercises she had set for herself was sensing everything around her. She had lost the previous games because she blundered into a set trap. That had been reckless, and made her feel even dumber for falling for it. She'd make sure that didn't happen again. This meant sensing everything around her, disciplining her body in the case someone or something had to be detected. This, she knew, would be harder to do suspended like this.


2. It was hard to get to sleep sometimes. Between nightmares of her father and her leg getting torn up, her head was becoming a space of unpleasant imagery and that was not something she needed. She was in a faux lap of luxury suite, she didn't need her mind reminding her how desperate everything was: all of this was wrong. So she regressed back to her over sized shirt and walked out of her suite, trying to gather her thoughts.

Comments

[hit_girl_mindy]

Mindy was actually doing well for someone who had blood rushing to her head. She moved her body a little, swaying from side to side.

"More like making sure that I can use my senses if I ever need to. I can probably untie this my own, but I wanna make sure next time I do this shit, I'll be able to sense people and things better. I thin I knew you were, what, twenty feet ago. So how'd you make out with the Arena?"

[onlyimmune]

"That's pretty awesome," Ellie admitted as she looked up the rope to where it was tied off from the ceiling. "Hardcore."

She shifts her weight a little bit when she is forced to think about the arena.

"... Yeah. Not sure. Fifth, or something. I kind of lost track, if you know what I mean."

[hit_girl_mindy]

"More that I want to have the option of tearing the fuck out and not getting into any traps like the last time," Mindy said. "I pretty much fell for a stupid trap the last time."

Mindy wrinkled her nose. "nah, I mean, how did you die?"

[onlyimmune]

"Oh. Yeah. I got stabbed a shit ton of times from a guy that kind of looked like a really fucked up lizard." Her voice was carefully devoid of emotion about it.

"You fell in a trap? I saw your face in the sky but I didn't know what happened..."

[hit_girl_mindy]

"A lizard?" Mindy thought for half a second. "Are you sure it was a lizard and not a turtle? Because then I at least know who did it and I can pay you back."

She grimaced. "Had a bear trap snap up my leg, and then the girl who did it tried to finish me off. I scared her off after I took her eye and, you know, started to suffer for a few hours. Then this caveguy named Guy came and talked with me awhile before he slit my throat so I wouldn't have to suffer anymore. It was actually pretty sobering."

[onlyimmune]

"You mean Don? The fucking crazy ass turtle? No. No, it wasn't him. But if I see him in the arena again I'm going to shove a knife in his eye." Her blood boiled thinking about what he'd down to Hawkeye.

"No. Some other lizard guy and trust me it is super weird to have to say that."

She winces as Mindy describes her death. "Mercy killing, huh. That fucking sucks. I'm sorry."

[hit_girl_mindy]

"Damn, that is some vengeance," she said, shaking her head. "What did he even do? Granted, I'll probably be seeing him soon, he is a tribute from my district. Sorta curious about this new lizard you're talking about though: never even heard of him."

Not that this was saying much, considering how new she was to this place.

"I don't hold it against the caveguy. If you see what he did after I died...I mean, if I could crush on a guy, that'd be it. No, the girl that did it to me is a former victor, so I can't touch her."

She was smiling as she said this tough, so clearly she had some plans of her own.

[onlyimmune]

"He hurt one of my friends," She said simply. "The other guy... I dunno. I think the TV said his name was Garrus or something like that. We didn't really get around to exchanging pleasantries, if you know what I mean."

She smirked a little bit at the note about the crush, and was about to ask why she couldn't when she got distracted by the note about the former victor.

"What? You mean she won before?"

[hit_girl_mindy]

Mindy knew what she meant and now she was curious to find this lizard guy. Not that she was going to go around avenging everyone. She was going to have to concentrate on actually surviving, after all. If they happened to come across her, well, she would just have to get creative, wouldn't she?

"Yeah, in a past game, I guess. So I won't be able to directly get to her."

[onlyimmune]

"Why the fuck was she in ours, then?" Ellie wondered aloud as she wandered over to an empty hanging rope and tugged on it.

"Don't even follow their own rules," She muttered as she began to climb to get up to Mindy's height. She needed the practice too, after all. So why not?

[hit_girl_mindy]

"Supposedly all the mentors were," Mindy said, shrugging. "You're telling me. Apparently they can just change the rules whenever the fuck they feel like. Not that we can do anything about what they decide anyway."

She grinned, watching Ellie climb the rope, then began to swing, upside down.

[onlyimmune]

"Yeah, like that's a real surprise," Ellie murmured conspiratorially. Once she'd climbed the rope up to Mindy's height (no where near as proficiently, but hey, she managed), she looked over.

"Okay, so now what do I do. Loop the rope around my ankles or some shit?"

[hit_girl_mindy]

"It isn't," Mindy said. She observed Ellie's progress, then swayed over to her direction and, upside down, started to tie it around her ankles.

"Takes some practice to do alone," she said, her face starting to get red.

[onlyimmune]

She clung tightly to the rope as Mindy worked, and then once it was securely tied she tested it, and slowly lowered herself upside down.

She immediately laughed, thinking that this must have been what Joel felt like. At least there were no infected, this time.

"Oh god, my head feels heavy," She said as she tried to swing herself on the rope around to face Mindy. "How long have you been hanging like this?"

[hit_girl_mindy]

Mindy swung freely, letting the quick movement jar her slightly before regaining equilibrium. At the question, she looked over.

"Uh, don't really have a watch on me, but I'm thinking two, three hours so far. Every once in awhile I have to lift up though, so I don't pass out. How long do you think you can go?"

[onlyimmune]

Ellie snorted. "Not that fucking long, that's for sure." She could already feel the blood rushing to her head but she was determined to keep it up as long as possible.

"At least we don't have hoards of infected trying to grab us while we're tied up. Bill set up a trap like this, once, and we wandered right into it and Joel dangled for ages. It was pretty funny to watch him shoot a gun from upside down, though."

[hit_girl_mindy]

Mindy chuckled. She liked that Ellie at least cursed as much as she did. That at least allowed her to avoid THE SPEECH. "It takes some getting used to."

That sounded like the kind of thing she'd enjoy, actually. "I'm more worried about someone taking us out during our hanging around.We'd be sitting ducks."

[onlyimmune]

"I dunno, Joel managed to take out at least twenty of them before I managed to get him down." She twisted around and found herself spinning. Woops.

"Mind you, bit easier with a gun. If you had a bow on you, you'd be alright. Not sure what you'd do with just your hands, though."

[hit_girl_mindy]

"You gotta be really good for that though." Which Mindy was, actually, but what if she didn't have the gun with her?

She nodded. "With your hands, you do your best to untie the shit and get down so you're not a target."

[onlyimmune]

"Well, Joel is awesome," Ellie said with a grin. (She refused to say 'was'.)

She curled herself up as far as she could to get a look at her legs, before trying to swing and grab at them. "Yeah sounds like the best fucking plan to me. Somehow I think if I got actually trapped in something like this in the arena it would come with some heavy teeth," She said as she flopped back down.

"Like Venus' bear trap. That was a doozy."

[hit_girl_mindy]

She could definitely see a parallel between Joel and her own dad. She wondered a moment whatever happened to Ellie's parents, but figured it was better to keep that question to herself.

Mindy winced. "Yeeah, we can stop talking about teeth. It just makes me think about how I went out in the last Arena. But we'll just have to be more careful next time. Being flexible definitely helps."

[onlyimmune]

"Sorry," Ellie said with a mirrored wince. She'd forgotten.

"Flexible. Gotcha." She twisted around and grabbed her leg from behind her so that she sort of resembled a tear drop. "Something more like this?" She teased, her other arm flailing to grab hold of something.

She wasn't quite that flexible.

[hit_girl_mindy]

"It's cool," she said. "At least you didn't actually see it. Pretty gruesome."

Mindy chuckled, then swung over to the girl to catch the other arm.

"Yeah, sorta. Just wanna make sure you know how to contort your body. They COULD be trying to ice you with a bow and arrow, after all."

[onlyimmune]

"Yeah, though I mean they've been showing a lot of replays. I guess I've just been lucky to keep missing yours.

Ellie laughed as her grip on her ankle slipped and she swung back down a little roughly. "I think I'd be pretty fucking dead, by this point."

[hit_girl_mindy]

"That's not lucky," Mindy grumbled. "Well, I mean, it sucks the bitch caught me in a bear trap, but I DID take her eye too. And hell, I even had someone mercy kill me. Pt wa pretty intense."

Nevermind what Guy did after. If she was interested, she would talk about it.

"You just need practice. No one gets just automatically good at that. Only superheroes can do that shit easily. You just need to be very quick."