So throw on the black dress, mix in with the lot [OPEN]

[isthistheregion]

Who| The Creature and Open
What| Testing the boundaries of his "freedom"
Where| The Training Center
When| Sometime between Christmas and New Years
Warnings/Notes| No initial warnings. In terms of tagging in: Avoxes and District 8 Mentors are welcome to tag him in his room. Otherwise, your character is the other person to call the elevator at the end.

Once he had been taken from the room he'd woken up in, once he had been brought to the training center and evaluated, the Creature had spent days in his room.

At first, it had been out of despair and confusion. They had taken him away from his master, from his purpose, brought him into a city greater than any he had ever seen even at a distance. The scale of it, the sprawling man-made structures and the teeming population had been oppressive, unable to be faced except by viewing it through his window -- and even then, at times, it would overwhelm him, and he would be unable to bear the sight of it.

Hours passed. A day. Despair and anger melted into a sober confrontation of reality. Frankenstein was lost in more ways than one. Even if the Creature could escape this place and navigate north and somehow locate his creator, there would be nothing there but a frozen corpse.

Probably. The remote possibility that he might stumble upon some outpost, be given aid and be drawn away from his pursuit was enough to make his rage flicker back to life. He consoled himself with the thought that Frankenstein would not allow himself to linger in one place for too long. Even without the signposts the Creature had been leaving him, his need for revenge was too strong. He would take up the search again. And he would die on the ice.

The Creature mourned. The sun set and rose again.

Over time, he began to consider his current situation more closely. He discovered how to work the device that made flickering images come to life, and the things it showed him were in turns illuminating and confounding and an assault on the senses. He examined the smaller device his captors had given him, discovered how to make the map appear.

The room began to feel small, the walls too close. Where he had at first been determined to stay put until they came to collect him for these 'games,' he wanted to wander.

They had told him he was free to do so, after all. He wondered, if he made his way toward those mountains... how far would he get? What would they do once he got there?

He chose clothes that would cover him as well as possible. Trousers made of rough blue cloth. A hooded shirt. A scarf, which he wrapped around the bottom half of his face before putting the hood up. Simple, canvas slip-on shoes. He had never had a need for shoes, but until he got to the mountains, he wanted to stand out as little as possible.

He slipped out of his room, toward the small room that moved -- the elevator. He remembered enough to know how to call it, and stepped in when the door open.

And then he was faced with the other buttons. He had thought the floor he would want in order to leave the building would be obvious. But -- no. Floor 1? Central Commons? What was a sublevel?

He hesitated, but then there was an electronic tone, and the door slid closed before he could enter a command. Someone else had called the elevator.

The Creature put his back to the wall, his head and eyes angled downward.

Comments

[doc_holi]

Holiday, as usual, wasn't having too great of time in the Capitol. Christmas wasn't helping, not that these people really celebrated, but they did go out of their way to make sure the tributes knew it was happening.

There were reasons why Rebecca recorded time by arenas she had been in rather than months or years.

During times like this, she didn't want to get drunk in her room. She wanted to go out and get drunk with people. Happy drunk. That sounded very nice.

When the elevator opened, though, she straightened up immediately to notice there was someone else in there already. She definitely didn't recognize him - someone of his stature was hard to miss - so she continued to watch him as she waited for him to get off. Didn't he want to come to the District 8 suite?

[isthistheregion]

Someone of this stature -- or with those eyes. Between the hood and the scarf, they were some of the only things visible when he lifted his face to look at her, along with the groove of a deep sutured scar running over the bridge of his nose. His eyes were yellow, gleaming slightly, like a cat's, in the dim shadow cast by the hood.

A second passed, and he realized she was waiting for him to do something. So he stepped back, held one hand out to the side, gave a nod -- please, come in.

He might as well ask. Always a risk, showing more of his face, but with luck, the interaction would be a short one, and he didn't have to look directly at her. He worked the scarf down from his mouth, revealing the scarring around his mouth and, when he opened it, his half-rotten teeth. He spoke carefully, but was unable to completely disguise his lateral lisp.

"Which floor leads to the exit, please?"

[doc_holi]

Oh. Yes, he was definitely new here.

Holiday shifted her shoulders and stepped onto the elevator. "The first floor. That's where I'm going. You, as well?"

[isthistheregion]

"Yes." Suddenly much surer. The first. Of course.

He hadn't been outside of his assigned room for days. Hadn't seen anyone but the silent servants and -- those people who had come into the space uninvited. He wondered. Was she one of them?

"I am going for a walk."

[doc_holi]

Right. She pressed the button for the first floor, while the doors closed and began moving down.

Holiday tucked her hands into her jacket pockets, her lips twitching into a small smile. "If you're hoping that your walk will take you outside of the city, you may end up being disappointed. I hope you have a nice walk, anyway."

[isthistheregion]

She was kind. Not overbearing. Maybe she was one of the Tributes after all.

Now he was wondering if he would be expected to kill her.

"The mountains. Are they inside the city limits?"

[acroodawakening]

The little man stepped into the elevator without really paying attention at first, but then he couldn't not pay attention when he saw the hulking figure standing there, a man even taller than his adopted caveman father.

The hulking figure had skin that looked sewn together like the skins Guy wore back home.

The height difference between them was significant. Even though he was fairly tall for his world, Guy was fully grown and had topped out at a whopping 5' 7", shorter than the average in most modern societies.

"Uuuuuuh."

In the time he'd stood there staring, the elevator doors closed behind him. Guy backed into the corner of the elevator, reaching behind him and hitting a button. Any button was fine, really.

"Hiiiiii," he said slowly.

Then reason took over. Grug was tall and scary-looking and had once tried to pummel Guy into a fine, meaty paste before, but he was a big softie at heart. R had been terrifying to behold but the zombie had been a sweet guy underneath the blood and bits of human liver. He himself, so far, had been called savage, simple, even dirty, by some.

Who was he to judge?

His voice was hitched just slightly with fear as he spoke but he was clearly trying to be friendly.

"Are you new? You look new. What's your name? I'm Guy."

[isthistheregion]

The Creature had watched Guy through all that -- silently staring him down, studying him, which could not have made the whole ordeal any more comfortable -- with his yellow eyes gleaming slightly from under his hood. The sutured scar running over the bridge of his nose wrinkled at the introduction. He'd long since given up on ever having a name. The assumption that he must have one was nothing but a reminder that he'd been pulled into a world he could never expect to fit into.

His eyes finally broke contact with Guy, his chin jerking toward his shoulder before his head rolled back to sitting on a straight neck.

"Guy," he repeated. If he didn't have an introduction to give in return, he could at least accept the one offered him. "Are you a gladiator?"

[acroodawakening]

"I don't know what that means but if you're asking if I'm a Tribute, one of the people being forced to fight in the arena, I am."

Ugh, yellow eyes. Ughughgugh. The staring had been unnerving but now that it had stopped, Guy found his curiosity growing greater and greater, outpacing the fear. 

The elevator dinged as it stopped at a random floor. Not the one Guy had wanted, but he found himself not wanting to skip out the door to run as much as he had when he first hit the button. 

So he hit another button and this time it was just as random. He did this sometimes. Rather than just using things as they were meant to be used, he would keep hitting buttons for the novelty of seeing what they did and seeing if they would do the same thing every time. The end result was sometimes chao; because of Guy's experimentation and repeated flushing, he'd flooded his bathroom by playing with the toilet until it clogged, for instance.

"I love this thing. It takes you to all the different floors. I wish I could find out how it works."

[isthistheregion]

Those eyes flicked toward the door when it opened. The layout was similar to the floor they'd brought him to, but everything was sparkling lights.

Probably not the one he wanted, either.

But Guy... he was playing. Easy to conclude he'd done something like this before. All the different floors. The Creature took one step closer to the front of the elevator, examining the buttons again.

"Which floor leads to the exit?"

[acroodawakening]

"That one."

Guy hit the button for him.

"If you go outside, be careful, though. The people in the city are terrible and crazy and there are great big crowds of them. And if you try to leave the city, there's a great big wall and the only ways through it are guarded by the bug-people. They don't let anyone out."

He still thought the Peacekeepers were some kind of species of bugman because of the armor.

[celebrityskinned]

Venus Dee Milo, District Five, is eager to get out of her District suite and away from the smothering discomfort of awkward roommate relationships and not-relationships. She's still got a cup of coffee in her hand - thank God for paper cups in the kitchenette - when she hops into the elevator with the Creature. A single earbud drips from her left ear, and the sound of some mindless pop song comes out, muffled and tinny, from the other that hangs down over her chest.

She dresses to be photographed, always. Even limited by the cold weather outside, her coat is nipped in at the waist and the faux-fur lining her hood gives her the guise of some wild lion turned human. Her boots cut up to her knee, making up for practical soles with glitzy beading around the ankles. Her makeup almost successfully hides that she's spent a lot of the holidays crying herself to sleep; the puffiness around her eyes could be mistaken for a natural quirk of her facial structure.

"Hey," she says, thrusting her empty paper cup at him. "You know where I can toss this? I'm not sure if it's recyclable."

[isthistheregion]

One hand reaches up to take the offered cup automatically, out of instinct. He looks down into it.

Looks at her. The sparkling beads, the makeup. The clothes designed to accentuate her figure. She looks -- at least, in his so-far limited experience -- like she fits in here.

He shakes his head: he barely knows what she's asking ('recyclable?'), and he's not certain he wants to converse with her anyway.

But he does pull his scarf down from his nose and bring the cup up to sniff at it. Smells bitter, and a little sweet.

[celebrityskinned]

Venus raises an eyebrow at him, and a little bit of her upper lip too. "Yeah, it's cinnamon-flavored. Don't judge me."

She takes a moment to actually look him up and down - not an Avox, like she'd originally presumed in her just-woke-up state. She made the mistake because they have a tendency to take up space as if they're hoping no one will notice.

"Newbie?"

[isthistheregion]

Yellow eyes stare back at her from under his hood. A sutured scar runs down his forehead, the bridge of his nose, disappearing underneath the scarf.

So little of what she said makes sense. New-bee?

Perhaps it's best if he doesn't try to respond. She could be one of them, and this ride can't last much longer.

[celebrityskinned]

She looks back into those yellow eyes, noting an intelligence - no, not intelligence, Avoxes aren't stupid, a vitality - that doesn't exist with the servants.

She leans back and purposefully presses every single button on the elevator panel between them and the bottom floor.

"I should charge you for staring."

[orestes]

He still didn't particularly like elevators, were he to be entirely honest. There's a quality to them which seems lazy and excessive when one could perfectly easily take the stairs and arrive at their destination just as quickly. But the stairs are (perhaps purposefully) nigh inaccessible within the Tribute Tower and so Enjolras was destined, nay doomed to wait for the elevator. He wasn't quite over the awkwardness of the doors opening, and each party passing each other through the tight space of the entry. The shuffle of bodies between each other still confused him, but he needed to be anywhere but in under the public eye fro the moment and that meant escaping to the library for the day.

It was with a jumbled mind full of resentment half for the Games as an abstract entity constantly looming over them, and half out of general frustration for the fact that no one in Panem seemed ever to actually read that he first laid eyes on the creature. There was something off about him, as he shuffled, performing the customary exchange of space for space, and Enjolras couldn't help but notice. The oddities of the Capitol would never cease.

"Be easy, monsieur." His voice held a false confidence to it, unusually rich if perhaps too practiced. "You will soon be safe again in your room where they will leave you in peace."

[isthistheregion]

Monsieur. The man's accent had a note of familiarity -- like, if not exactly akin to, something the Creature might have heard in Ingolstadt or Geneva. That, perhaps, was why he felt more comfortable speaking with the man than most.

But he still did not look directly at the man after he'd pulled the scarf down from his face, and there was a slight halting in his speech.

"I'm not trying to go back yet. I am trying to get out."

He gestured to the panel of buttons. "Do you know the way?"

[orestes]

Frankly, he hadn't expected that level of fluency. The Trolls were seldom articulate, and sometimes he felt that for all of Guy Crood's good intentions, there were tragic rifts in communication between himself and the primitive man. This creature had no such issues however. It was equal parts reassuring and unnerving.

"Yes," He replied easily, again with the same false bravado as before. "The buttons control the direction in which we move," his voice faltered then; Enjolras knew full well the likelihood that this man didn't truly need his explanations. Sometimes it was inconvenient to marvel at things others took completely for granted. Nevertheless, he punched in the command for the lobby and continued. "They are less inconvenient after a time, but I shall never like waiting for these things.

"You are a Tribute, then?"

[isthistheregion]

"That is what they are calling me." Tribute to what, he kept wondering. The word suggested sacrifice, as though to a god, though this was (so far as he could tell) a godless place.

[orestes]

"Do you know why?" If this man were new, it was possible he did not. Enjolras himself had been more than a little confused upon his arrival. Better he hear it from someone who understood their situation and would not couch it in terms of honor and nobility.

"Surely your escorts and mentors have coddled you sufficiently if they are permitting their pet to wander."

[privilegecheck]

Kankri entered the elevator, unsure of where he would even go but wanting to be anywhere that wasn't where he'd been assigned. His suitemates all seemed far more comfortable with their situation than he felt anyone should be; and when he looked at them and thought that soon, they might be trying to end his life in the arena, while here they were so very casual towards everything...

He didn't want to think about it. So instead he aimlessly pressed a button, any button, and then turned to examining his companion in the elevator. He was startled when he noticed the sewn-together patches of skin, and he stiffened in some fear as the elevator doors closed - but then he reminded himself that it was hardly fair of him to judge on appearances, particularly where aliens were concerned.

"I beg your pardon if my question is at all rude or demeaning," he said after a few moments, "but may I ask what, exactly, you are? You look like a human, but rather...different."

So sorry about the slow response!

[isthistheregion]

The Creature felt his reaction more than saw it, before Kankri spoke. He knew that feeling: the sudden stillness in the air, the sense that he was being examined.

At the question, he turned to examine in turn. His inhuman eyes flicked up from the face to focus on the horns.

He tugged the scarf down from his nose.

"So do you."

No problem, my reply was super slow first!

[privilegecheck]

"Oh, I'm not human," Kankri replied. "This is my first time encountering the species, and I must say it's a rather unfortunate first impression to make. I'm a troll. One of several here, though the others aren't really, ah, like me, I suppose you could say." His mouth twisted a little. It was pretty awful feeling isolated among his own kind.

He ducked his head slightly into the oversized turtleneck Claudia had given him, feeling self-conscious again. "And you?"

[isthistheregion]

He tilted his head. Troll? The word was familiar, and yet he had only known them as beings of fantasy, or at least legend. Never mind that this was not precisely what he had imagined.

"I am only myself," he answered: slowly, carefully, not quite certain how much to reveal, or whether it could even be explained. "Somewhat like a man, but as you say... different."