thecapitol | (no subject)

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WHO| Eep and Guy, and you, if you'd like to be screamed at and possibly bitten!
WHAT| The freaking out of a super-strong cavewoman.
WHERE| The District 6 suites
WHEN| After Eep is pulled from her world.
Warnings| None currently, other than that you're more than likely to get tossed around if you're not careful; patience is not Eep's forte. She'll most likely end your conversation with snarling and running off.

Eep woke up covered in the most strange furs she had ever felt. It was the first thing that came to her senses, that she was wearing something soft, fluffy. What it was, in fact, was crinoline: lots of it. A bright salmon tutu, with long, bright teal leggings. Her shirt was a wrap, a salmon kimono-like apparatus that had clearly been carefully put together in the most detailed and delicate of fashions.

It was too tight around her neck. She ripped the shirt's collar immediately, tearing, panicked, at it. Was something wrapped around her neck? Was something trying to choke her? It may have well been. With the collar ripped, the shirt loosened itself and fell off her shoulders, staying up only by virtue of being attached to her back. Someone might have foreseen this issue.

In her struggle to turn around and around to get the fabric away from her neck, she felt the scratchy lace of the crinoline, looked down, and screamed. Something was ALL OVER HER. She was COVERED in ... STUFF. She began tearing at this as well. Whoever designed this petticoat was going to be rather disappointed. Pieces of it began to drop to the ground.

In her frenzy, Eep turned over, trying to get at the leggings, and accidentally turned on the television in her room. It buzzed to life. "...at the Arena, with the brave stylings of one Guy..."

Eep froze. There was a hole, a hole in the wall, and it had said Guy's name. It was showing--art to her. And the art was moving. It looked like what was happening, but it wasn't. She pressed her fingers to the glass of the screen, as a tiny version of Guy began running across what looked like a field.

"Guy," Eep whispered at the screen. He was tiny, like an ant. Maybe if she yelled? "GUY."

He didn't notice her. Instead, he was picked up and thrown by something that looked like a giant pile of rocks in the shape of a man into a tree. Eep screamed then, terrified, and whimpered, as Guy slumped to the ground, and there was another woman there, and Guy, Guy, Guy. Desperately, clawing at the screen, Eep tried to reach her hand into it. There was no way to do so. Angrily, she rushed her hand forward and smashed the screen, which shorted out and fell all around her fingers. She moved her hand too quickly to be hurt, but the electric short out that happened immediately afterward made her jump back.

Why was this happening? Where was she? Why was she covered in fur that looked so completely different from any fur that she had ever seen before? Why was Guy in a painting that moved? Why had he been hurt? Where was he?

Eep began to hyperventilate, clutching at her throat where the collar of her shirt had been. And then, very quickly, she began to yell. And the yelling turned into a screaming, the kind of screaming that she made on the hunt. Loud, powerful, terrified, angry.

Eep stumbled out of her room, covered in salmon tutu pieces and teal leggings, and proceeded to scream her way through the hallways of the District 6 quarters.

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As it just so happened, Harley was stalking the halls in a particularly flashy holiday outfit. This one seemed to be made completely of green and red glowsticks wrapped around her body, giving the effect of a glowing, ribbed jumpsuit.

For her pleasure.

A pair of bells hung from her ponytails and she was at the moment admiring a tree someone had set up in this hallway and was stealing ornaments off it to put on her own tree up stairs.

Then came the shouting, and the screaming, and a door flew open knocking the ornaments from her hands and into the air.

"BWAH!?" Was her less then articulate response.

The ornaments crashed onto the floor, snapping like eggs against the ground with a distinctly festive sound.

Down the hallway was the undeniable sight of a cavewoman, whose hair was completely un-tameable (they had tried to sleek it into braids and failed), and who was covered in what appeared to be a ballerina outfit that had been torn to shreds.

She was running toward Harley at an entirely too-fast speed, looking very angry. And she probably would have knocked her over at an entirely too-strong speed, as well, were it not for the tree, which momentarily distracted Eep. It looked so much like trees at home. It even smelled like them. This gave Eep pause, and she stood there, unsteady on her feet (they had put heels on them, but she was clearly barefoot, and did not mind).

Sniffle.

That was another person, wasn't it?

Eep dropped to her feet in a defensive crouch, tears drying on her face, her teeth bared in a snarl. Harley was unlike anything she had ever seen, but she was the first person that Eep had seen, and that meant she might be completely responsible for all of the events of today.

Poor Harley.

"GUY," Eep shouted, at the top of her lungs.

Well...this was something that didn't happen every day. Even in the Capitol.

"Uh...no." Harley pointed at herself. "Harley. Girl. See? Boobies."

She then groped herself slightly to make her point. She was not a guy, she had breasts.

Eep watched, with the confused fascination of someone who has had a lot going on in their life, as Harley said only three words that she understood: no, girl, and see. And then Harley was groping herself.

This was not the strangest thing that had happened to Eep today. But it was one of the more strange things.

Eep forgot to yell anymore and just stared for a minute.

Quickly thereafter, she came to the conclusion that Harley was not going to be helpful. Her face screwed back into anger, and she growled at Harley instead. "No," she said, through gritted teeth. "Guy." This woman was clearly stupid. Eep was going to have to speak very slowly.

Great, not a fan of slapstick.

Harley once again held up her hands.

"Alright alright Guy. Whatever you'll figure it out sooner or later. So what do you want?" Another thought and she pointed at her face. "Harley."

Eep made an extremely loud, exasperated noise, and ran her hands down her face. Harley pointing to her face was the last straw. She could understand Harley perfectly well, but Harley appeared to not be understanding Eep in the slightest. That was alright; Eep didn't need this woman to track Guy.

He was here, somewhere, and she was going to find him. And she was also going to get this ridiculous clothing off.

Having been calmed down some by Harley's antics, Eep began to, instead of clarifying herself (perhaps correctly believing that it wouldn't help much), rip off the rest of her leggings.

Harley blinked, startled by the sudden strip show but burst out laughing and cheered.

"Yeah girl that's the spirit! Break free of your confining pants. Just don't be upset when you go outside and freeze your personal hair off." She giggled wickedly.

Eep understood about half of Harley's sentence, but from what she could understand, Harley also apparently hated clothes. This was fine with Eep, a person who came from a place where little clothing was worn as possible, with usually the point of having covering for when it rained, and telling other people what you'd killed.

She stripped down to what was clearly meant to be an undergarment underneath, but as Eep did not know or care what underwear was, this was unimportant. They were bright blue. She stared at them for a minute, then shrugged.

And promptly tore down the hall away from Harley without saying a word.

Harley laughed delightedly and tore off after her. "If you're gonna wreck something make sure you do it outside where everyone can see. It makes for great TV later!" She urged.

The Signless had been on the fifth floor to check in on Kankri -- he felt he owed his past life that much, after all. He knew adjusting to life in the Capitol wasn't easy. He'd just left and was heading back up to twelve when the thumping and the screaming started from upstairs, and then eventually made its way down and onto District 5 turf.

Clearly someone else was also having trouble adjusting, if looking at her was any indication. His own leggings were artfully ripped, a continuation of Cinna's new aggressive look for his district, but her clothing was destroyed to a degree beyond artful and into worrying. And she was, y'know, still screaming. Asking 'are you okay' was probably not going to get through to someone in that advanced state of panic.

Nothing else for it.

"Shoooosh," he said in his very best soothing voice, hands up in front of him. No weapons. No harm meant.

Eep stumbled onto fifth floor after discovering stairs by falling down them. Growling, she had burst through the door and hit the wall on the other side of them in her rush to run down the hall. There were so many walls, closing her in. She felt tiny, and small, and so angry.

The shoosh hit her a minute later. The second it did, Eep felt something. Something completely different. Like a fur pelt being wrapped around her body, soothing and calming and quiet. Instantly, her eyelids felt heavy. Unsteady on her feet, she stopped growling and stood there, unsteady on her feet, completely uncertain.

Oh, thank goodness, that worked. Shooshing didn't always have the intended effect, especially on someone one didn't know, but he hadn't really had time to think of anything else.

"You're new, aren't you," he asked, careful to keep his voice neutral and calming. "It's a lot to take in at first."

Really, her reaction was the one most everyone else had when they first showed up -- just, usually they had it internally.

What the hell?

Zelos jumped to his feet when the ungodly screaming echoed through the previously calm halls of the rooms. He flinched as it kept going instead of trailing off, reminded of the last time in his life he'd heard a scream that terrible. He clenched his hands into fists in an effort to stay calm and think. Something was going down, and it could be someone being attacked.

Even knowing that he didn't have any way of fighting or defending, Zelos found himself taking forceful strides to the door. Throwing it open, he stepped out into the hallway, only to be nearly deafened. It took some control on his part not to snap, as he saw the cause of the noise was a girl clad in some green and pink monstrosity storming around.

"Hey!" he shouted, trying to catch her attention.

Zelos caught Eep's attention. That wasn't hard; she was used to paying attention to every small noise around her.

Stumbling in her monstrous clothes, she turned toward the sound that he had made--that "Hey!"--and began to barrel toward it.

That was probably not what you intended to happen, Zelos. Sorry about that.

Oh. Crap.

He tried to get out of the way, but without his Exsphere (damn it), his effort was futile. The girl/creature barreled straight into him and sent them both flying down the hall.

"Whoa!" In a last-ditch effort to minimize some of the damage, Zelos grabbed onto the girl and pushed her away as he tried to prevent her from landing on top of him. Unfortunately, he still landed hard on his back, and had the air knocked out of him for a few seconds. "Ugh..."

Sitting up, he rubbed his spinning head and looked around quickly to make sure she wasn't coming after him again. "What was that all about?"

Eep jumped back off of Zelos like a graceful gazelle, and, feet carefully braced against the ground, snarled at him, teeth bared. This man's hair was red--as red as hers, if not more, and their eyes were similar colors. In fact, were his skin darker, and he less... elongated, they could have been cast as convincing siblings.

As it was, Eep looked like she was getting frighteningly close to biting Zelos's leg. This girl had clearly had a bad day.

"Whoa, hey there," Zelos said hastily, putting both hands up at the feral look on her face. He cleared his throat and tried for a more soothing tone of voice. "I'm not gonna hurt you!"

And he stayed still and hoped that she wouldn't take advantage of it to attack him again. "See? Totally harmless."

At the words, Eep stopped. Mostly because she was surprised to understand Zelos, completely. This hadn't always happened when she and her family had met other people before. There had been a lot of cultural exchange problems over time. The clans they'd been in contact with before had mostly died, and the last time they had actually had contact with another, different family, it had not been a pleasant situation.

This was mostly why Eep was so on guard, although she also came from a place where if she stood still for too long she could get squashed by a mammoth. So there was that.

She stared at Zelos through narrowed eyes, and then, very clearly spoke: "Where is Guy?"

Oh.

Well, he should've seen that coming, given all the rampaging and general... wildness. Then his bemusement turned to horror, at the prospect of living in the same suite as both of them. Wonderful.

"That way," he said slowly, pointing down the hall to where Guy's room was. Probably.

Screams are like catnip to Punchy - alluring, exciting and just a little bit intoxicating to a not-especially-refined brain. He fancies himself a superhero, so the instant he hears the aural bat-signal of distress, distress, he launches himself out of bed and, bereft of both shirt and pants, throws open the door to the hallway. The light streams in on his sculpted pecs and also his dollar-signs underwear.

"Yo, what be rumblin' up in my crib?" he yells, searching this way and that down the hall until he sees a girl around the corner wearing what appears to be the refuse of an 80's music video. He stops where he is and holds his hands up in the traditional gesture of peace. "Shit, shawty, you okay?"

Another day, another bout of restlessness for Mindy. granted, the past few days were fairly eventful, but somehow it didn't seem to be nearly enough. She had desperately tried distracting herself with the stuff that Harley had come up with: holiday garbage for the room, a little bit of tinsel, a stupid ass tree in the corner.

She and dad, after all, had celebrated Christmas. This would be her first year not doing that with him. Less she thought about it, the better.

Of course, her wallowing in momentary self denial was shattered by a pretty noticeable ear splitting howl. Mindy immediately was up on her feet, curious as to what was causing such a noise. Had some of the government thugs descended on somebody?

No, it was...a girl, likely a tribute by the look of her, just arrived, by the looks of it. There was something else here, though: the wild eyes, the yelling, the crazy hair...this HAD to be someone from Guy's world.

"Wait!" She said, pretty loudly. "Come here a sec. I'm not gonna hurt you."

Not that the girl would ever come to that conclusion. She was pretty tall in comparison to Mindy.

When he thought he'd heard her voice yelling his name, he convinced himself he was hearing things, but then he'd heard the screaming. By the time he got to the room - the door still open - no one was there.

But a TV was smashed and clothes were shredded on the floor and when he looked in the closet to see what clothes the stylists had put there, they were all in her size and some looked as ridiculous as the ones they planned to have him wear - some even coordinated with his.

That was when he knew for sure. His heart leaped at first, then sank again for a multitude of reasons.

That was when he yelled her name, too.

"EEP!"

Then he ran, following the trail of destruction. He had to stop her. He had to find her before she really hurt anyone or got outside, where the Peacekeepers might hurt her back. The panic he felt was all-consuming, making it so all he could hear was his own blood rushing in his ears.

That was why he almost ran into her without hearing her.

A door to the rest of the Training Center was just a little bit up the hallway so he threw himself in front of her, hands thrown up in the air as if he was trying to make himself seem bigger to spook her and give her a moment of pause.

"STOP! EEP, STOP!"

Edited 2014-01-03 00:46 (UTC)

Eep was so surprised, and the floor was a slippery tile sort of thing, clearly meant to impersonate marble, that her immediate reaction when Guy threw himself in front of her was to slip back and fall immediately backward, hard on her tailbone. This probably would have hurt a normal person, but for Eep it just sort of smarted a bit before disappearing entirely due to a mixture of adrenaline and shock.

For a minute, she just stared at him.

Then, although she had mostly recovered from crying beforehand and had moved on to pure rage, Eep burst into tears.

She hadn't seen him in so long, and the next time she had seen him he had been very clearly dying. So to have him yelling her name, and to just show up in front of her, right when she had been about to run into the wind outside, was the ultimate test of her strength. Eep could smash boulders into nothing. She could eat an entire mammoth by herself. But the idea of losing Guy, who was so important, who had brought the entire world to her, was too much.

She sat on the ground in front of him and sobbed, reaching out to his leg like a lifeline.

Naturally, that got him going, too, and he dropped down on his knees so she didn't have to paw at him, pulling her into his arms.

The sobs that burst out of him surprised even him in how wrenching they were. His time in the arena - the fear of dying without seeing her again - had perhaps caused more damage than he'd realized.

"Is Bug okay?" he managed to choke out. "Is the rest of the family okay?" He needed to know that first, before anything else. He needed to know that the Capitol hadn't hurt or killed them when they'd grabbed him.

She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight, but not tight enough that he couldn't breathe. (She'd learned that skill, eventually, over time.) And then she buried her face in his neck, breathing in his scent. It was there. It was definitely him. 100% Guy.

Him crying only made her cry harder. They sat there holding each other for a while. She felt so small and helpless. She felt like she had when the world had ended, when she had met Guy for the first time. Holding him close erased one part of fear from her, but she still had so many questions.

For now, having him close was enough.

"Everyone is fine," she murmured into his neck. She had so many questions. She didn't know where to start. Finally, she leaned back in his arms and asked, simply, "What is... this?"

"It's - it's complicated. It's - let's just go somewhere private, okay? I promise I'll explain - I'll explain everything."

He hugged her tightly for a just a minute longer, burying his face in her hair, breathing in her scent, too. The smell of her just opened all the floodgates and let all the rest of the tears out.

"For right now, though, listen to me." He pulled away to look her in the eyes, nodding at her with little abrupt bobs of his head that made the tears on his face plop on the both of them. "I'm safe. You're safe. The rest of the family's safe. Now that we're both here, we'll figure everything out, okay? It's okay. It's okay now. Just take a minute and a few deep breaths and we'll get you to my room. It's like ... like a mini cave. Like the place where you punched the TV thingy. I'll get you there and get you warmed up a bit and we'll find you some better clothes, because otherwise you'll be cold here."

He could tell it wasn't just her being upset over him being missing. Her clothes were a tattered mess - most likely because she'd been alarmed by them and had torn them off - and all that screaming had been terror, too - much like he'd felt when he'd woken up in a strange room and then been tossed into the arena to die.

Guy didn't like seeing that fear on her face so he tried to kiss it away, pressing soft little kisses all over her face and against her lips, trying to soothe her in the only way he knew how.

Edited 2014-01-03 04:23 (UTC)

She kissed him back, with solid, smooth kisses. In situations like these, Eep's first and foremost instinct would always be to comfort Guy. He was the one who got scared, mostly, in terrifying situations, at least a kind of scared that could come out like this. She just hit things. This was different. It was her who needed comforting, but she wanted so badly just to be held right now. Now that she was being held, she felt less terrified. More stable.

"Okay," she said, and ran her hand into his. "Let's go somewhere private. Is there anywhere private?"

This didn't look anything like a cave. But Eep would let Guy talk things out. Guy talked; Eep listened. She was used to listening. Things made sense after Guy explained them.

He took her by the hand to help her to her feet but after that, holding her hand just wasn't enough. As he led her to his room, a protective arm was wrapped around her shoulders, holding her in close.

She always fit perfectly there, right at his shoulder, because of their heights.

She was usually the one that was better at protecting him - stronger, faster, less prone to panicked yelping, but he was still always willing to protect her if she needed it. That was what that arm around her shoulders was saying.

It was saying: 'I'm here and just like I know you won't let anything hurt me, I won't let anything hurt you.'

His room was cozy at least - warm, because he'd discovered the thermostat and dialed it up to what equated to a balmy 80 degrees.

The bed and mattress had been shoved to the side of the room - too soft - but the blankets and pillows had been piled into a little nest.

"C'mon, let's climb in, and the hugging will commence, and then I'll explain. The cuddles will help it go down easier."

Now Eep would learn about the wonders of cloth and how blankets were even comfier than skins.

Edited 2014-01-06 04:59 (UTC)

She looked at the tiny room that looked like her room, like the one she had left behind. It was warm. Like a tiny, white cave. He had piled all the blankets to the middle of the room. She recognized what that meant immediately, and when he sank to the ground, she followed him.

The cloth and blankets WERE comfier. She ran her hands over and over them, mesmerized.

After a minute of lying there underneath the blankets, she just rested on top of him and sighed. The calming presence of his skin against hers made her feel almost like passing out again.

Yeah, there went the poncho so he could feel her skin against his chest properly. It was warm enough in here that he didn't need it and even if it hadn't been, body heat was a wonderful thing. As he lay there, he ran a hand against her hair. Not through it. Eep's hair was pretty much a solid mass that was more likely to hold your hand hostage than let it run through it. He just kept smoothing it over, petting her head.

He was still crying a little. He couldn't help it, although it was silent, no sobs. Tears just kept dribbling out because she was okay and she was here, and also because she was here and that was not okay.

He'd never felt so torn about something in his life. He wanted her to be here more than anyone else in the universe and at the same time it was the worst thing that could've happened.

So the tears - of relief, of sorrow - kept dribbling out the corners of his face and down along his temples to the blankets.

He had to clear his throat before he spoke again. There was a lump in it that wouldn't go away.

"This place - it's not a good place. You know how Tomorrow was another world? A different one from Yesterday? This world is called 'Panem' and the people in it are - they're not good people, Eep. And they can do things that seem like magic because they're just so far along as a people. You know how we talk about all different stuff like if people could build a way to fly? Like what if people just kept building on the things people before them made to make those things better?"

Edited 2014-01-06 05:42 (UTC)

Tears were dribbling out of her eyes and out of her nose. She was one big snotty mess. She rubbed her nose against her arm and sighed, a big, long, tired sigh. She held onto him like a lifeline, tight enough not to bruise, but only just.

She just felt like if she let him go, he'd disappear again. He was going to have a hard time getting her to let him out of his sights for a while.

"If this isn't Tomorrow," she said, slowly, "then... how do we get back?"

Because that was the only thing that mattered. Eep's arms constricted a little bit. She wasn't even aware of it, really. "Why do they keep building things? Don't they stop building to eat? Or sleep?"

"It's - it's more that they've been doing it a really, really long time. The people of this world brought us and people from other worlds, other Tomorrows, to this one. And people here - when they see me, when I tell them about home - most of them say that in the worlds they come from, people like us existed thousands and thousands of summers ago. It's like...our world is newer. Their worlds have had people in them for longer - and so has this world. And in this world, they've built on everything in all that time until they learned how to make things that seem like magic, when they're really just so far ahead of us that they make the impossible seem easy. So they built something that was able to pull us here - to pull people from all different worlds, all different Tomorrows - and - and I don't know if it can send us back. That's what people are hoping, that we'll be able to use the way they brought us here to go back home, but no one knows for sure because no one knows how they did it, other than that it was something they made instead of magic."

He sucked in a deep breath.

"And in the meantime...in the meantime, things are bad here. The people who brought us are -" his voice dropped to a whisper. "They're bad news."

That was what he called bad things, bad surprises, bad things that were new.

Edited 2014-01-08 03:45 (UTC)

"Bad news," she whispered. "Oh, no."

She was quiet for a very long time, wrapped up in his arms, her head buried into his shoulder. After what seemed for an eternity, she raised her head; her eyes were red, but clear, and determined.

"We have to get back," Eep said, firmly. "I don't care if this place is--is newer, or whatever. We need to go back. We need to go back to the family. And we've figured it out before. We'll figure it out now. If they pulled us from our world, they can put us back."

She moved her hands in reassuring circles on his back. Guy was the smartest person she knew, in the whole wide world. He would figure out a way to get out of there. She would help him. She would calm him down so he could hear all the thoughts in his head. And they would go back.

He needed this. Something to center him. He'd been aimless before he'd fallen in with his new family, bouncing from one thing to the next. He'd been happy but he hadn't been centered.

Not being centered, being unfocused - that was a bad thing to be if you had a fight on your hands.

It helped to have someone remind him of the fight.

It helped to have someone to fight with, side by side

He wiggled closer to her.

"We'll figure it out. Somehow. In the meantime, we have to be careful. They can hear anything you say and see anything you do wherever you are. They have these things called bugs but they're not bugs that are alive, they're fake ones they made and they're everywhere. Inside our rooms, outside in the world... And they get mad if people say too many bad things about them, especially in public. They kill people. Sometimes they cut out their tongues. They're trying to use us for something and for it to work, we have to smile and pretend everything's fine when it's not."

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Don't mind Eep, Harley. She's just going to strip for you without explaining anything

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