District Tours: Train Ride

[etcircenses]

Prior to their departure, the Tributes have to suffer a photoshoot, a few interviewers asking them a thousand questions about how excited they are, and more than a few members of their style teams asking the Tributes to bring back mementos. "Don't worry about quality, dears, we can get that all here - we want you to bring us souvenirs for the novelty of it!"

The day of the trip, Tributes are roused bright and early, well before sunrise, and driven in Peacekeeper vans to the train station. It's all rather dour, and not like the start of a vacation at all; if one didn't know what was going on, and if the Escorts and head Stylists weren't chattering excitedly, they might think they were being hauled off to a war zone.

The trains, on the other hand, are plush, fancy things, and there is one per District. There's a single blockaded car for cargo, another for maintenance, driving and Peacekeeping staff, and then several others which are open to the Tributes. A dinner car serves three meals and has small snacks available throughout the day. Another car is an entertainment center with a selection of Capitol-approved films, and a the last one is the Tributes' temporary room. It has a bunk bed for each with sheets that was a truly intense threadcount, and a single massage chair in the back. The Stylists, Mentors and Escorts sleep in the same car, although separated by a partition.

Unfortunately, all the Tributes have to share the sleeping quarters, and it's first-come, first-served.

For the most part, the trip is so smooth that the surface of a glass full of water would not be disturbed. The trips to the closer Districts are a little under a day, but the furthest Districts - 3, 4, 7, 8, 11 and 12 - take nearly 48 hours.

[OOC: For Tributes accepted during the District tours, you can assume they arrived before the departure so they can participate in the District festivities. During the train ride there is still network access. There will only be this post and the party post from the mods for this event, so players are encouraged to make their own of their characters exploring their surroundings and enjoying the Districts.]

Comments

[savedbyasong]

"Fishing?" Shion looked up from where his face was pressed to the window. Since being here he had seen a lot of nature, the arenas had been amazing to him, as someone who lived in a place where all there was outside his city was wasteland.

But all that he had seen had been arenas, man made paradises turned into places of horror and death. This was real nature, actual grass grown and not made by human hands. And over there, there were mountains. And they were going to a place with an ocean, a real ocean and not a acid filled copy like the one Shion had died gazing upon.

Rat wasn't here, he was going to district one and Shion missed him, worried about him. Not that anything would happen to him exactly, but that he wouldn't be able to behave, would start a fight and get himself executed.

Rat knew how to survive, but he had always lived on the outside of No. 6, and knew how to work his way around the system, here it was different, he was constantly watched.

Not to mention he couldn't keep his temper.

But for now Shion blinked at the man who had just announced a fishing trip. He pushed hair out of his eyes, it was partly white, though they had died strands of it a deep blue, to give it a rippling affect. They had been harsher than usual and Shion didn't know what he had done to anger them. "Do you even know how to fish?"

[swill]

He almost even felt bad, turning his head to get a decent view at the boy, twisting around in the chair so the conversation can be a little more direct, even if it put him in a ridiculous position. One hand dangled off the back of the seat, one leg was propped up on the arm rest. And Hawkeye almost felt bad, or maybe he did and only didn't want to dwell on it, for the little attention he'd given district mates before. But he sports a smile, and it's as confident and comforting as he can mix together without making himself sick. The only part of the kid he had reason to hate, after all, was his stupid hair.

"Yeah, fishing," he repeats, and brings both hands to the side of his face, thumbs hooking behind his ears-- fins. Palms out, they're supposed to be like fins out the side of his head. "Blub, blub." And he lets them down, and remembers not for the first time that he has no idea what he's promising.

He shifts in his seat again, glancing from Shion to the window he was plastered on. "I haven't gone fishing in a long time," he answers, no rise in his voice, no tangible fondness. "But I guess I should still know how. I'd spend... days in the Saint Croix River. It beautiful there." If memory served him right. And what a stupid thing to think- of course it was beautiful there. There had been the pines, the clear water, the changing colors of the trees all around. Hawkeye feels like he owes the chuckle he gives. Of all the things to talk about when herded blindly into a train, heading nowhere. "Deep sea stuff, I, uh. I hooked a bluefin, once." Isn't that exciting, kids? Even the old colonel would have asked him to spice up the tale.

[savedbyasong]

The hatred of the stupid hair at least was mutual. Shion turned fully from the window so he could talk properly, blinking at the blubbing... was it supposed to be an impression of a fish? Perhaps, or perhaps the sea? Shion didn't know.

Nor did he know where the Saint Croix River was, or had been, if it had existed in his world at all. But the fish he knew, never seen. Such species of fish had been long extinct in his world, anything that could not life in a lake. Or perhaps some great species too far down in the remaining oceans for the folly of humans to have ever touched them.

"Thunnus tonggol, Thunnus maccoyii, Thunnus orientalis or Thunnus thynnus?" He asked, his face fascinated though probably not for the reasons Hawkeye had been expecting.

[swill]

The talk wasn't even making him homesick, and Hawkeye half wondered if that meant something was wrong with him, now more so than before. He felt the pull in his chest that came with talking of days before the war, before the first time he'd been drafted into a conflict he had no part in, no desire to fight, but that was all. Like there was a wall that had built up. Last time he had remembered that thirty pound tuna, he had been writing his final will. And for a man who held on to that memory despite everything- despite the terror of drowning in cold water, despite all the open bellies of boys about Shion's age he had stuck his hands into, he still had to conjure up a look that said what he was thinking: that he had no idea what those streams of letters out of Shion's mouth meant.

He opens his mouth once, closes it, opens it again and says, "Yes."

To the one that was right. And he thought, wow, this boy must have been a bookworm, gone through all the encyclopedias at his local library.

"Next time I dine with one, I'll ask her her family name." He says, and there's a gleeful little lilt. He's not mocking the kid, but it was a funny little predicament. "You read a lot?" Or was his father a marine biologist?

[savedbyasong]

Shion blinked, unsure at the answer and the joke going right over his head, family names were not a concept in his world, and only something he knew from old books.

He shook his head, "No... well yes now I do, but books were banned in the city I used to live in. I'm trying to catch up." He smiled, "I studied ecology as a child, I didn't finish my studies though, but I have always been interested in the natural world, though it is mostly extinct where I am from."

And ecology had been a lot about how to replicate life, how to change it, how to make it benefit people. But he had gained a lot of knowledge from it.

[swill]

He quirks a brow, and the smile stays in place. He should know by now that asking any kid any innocent question will end up turning the world he thought he knew on its head. Oh, you lived on base? Yeah, fucking Infected are everywhere. What's your day job? You know, human lab rat. Do you like to read? Yeah, let me tell you what I studied in my childhood, despite still being a child.

So Hawkeye quirks a brow, and feels like he'd done damage by asking that one simple question. He should stop, he figures, and was it any surprise why he'd feel reluctance to pry? The natural world, almost extinct. Why? A third World War? A fourth war to end all wars? "Huh," he says. "Well, the natural world's an interesting thing. All over my backyard, where I used to live. And you can thank Toby's dog for that." And everything before was so casual. Still, like he's bored out of his skull making small talk with B.J. on a lazy and hot Korean summer day. It just wasn't right. So he frowns a little. "And you'd still very much be a child. In my home." A necessary distinction, and one he shouldn't make.

[savedbyasong]

Shion nodded, the natural world was really interesting, he had always found it so. His smile widened at the mention of a dog, he liked animals, especially dogs, dogs were his favourites. Or maybe rats. It was a hard choice.

"Oh, I'm sixteen." He pointed out, wondering if the man thought him younger, he guessed the brightly coloured hair that his stylists insisted on torturing him with made him look a lot younger at times. In his world he was very much an adult, if a young, naive idiot of one. And here nobody was a child, not if they were a tribute.

[swill]

How bad would it look if he just let out a string of expletives? Pretty bad, he figures, and it wouldn't change anything or help anything at all, so the string's swallowed and slides down his throat. Hawkeye moves his hand, and thinks of how his left foot's been shaking restlessly, like there was some big suspense in a film in the old mess tent. Sixteen! Right, right, it wasn't anything new. Before the Capitol found how to bring tributes from other worlds, they had pit children even younger against each other, right? That was how it went.

But like hell he'd call a boy who couldn't grow a darker fuzz than what's found in peach skin anything other than a child. Some kids liked to think they were brave, and some were, but. Okay, sure. So he'd found himself wrist deep in the guts of children younger, still, digging for metal parts that didn't belong. Circumstances make a man, but they shouldn't. Sixteen!

Since they're rattling out things that don't matter, Hawkeye offers up, "Yeah? And I'm a Captain."

A second later, he's done with this whole thing, and he's still moving his foot. "So I'm going to take a guess here and say you've never been fishing before. You only... what was it? Textbook learning?"

[savedbyasong]

A captain? A captain of what? He opened his mouth to ask but then got asked a question first and paused a moment to answer properly. "No, I've never seen the ocean before. Well I did... last arena... But that wasn't real. Or it was... but it was acid and made specifically to hurt us, I've never seen the natural ocean before."

He gave a nervous smile, "It was all on computers but yes, I learned through studying. There wasn't really anything outside the walls of the city. And as impressive as the scientists were at creating plant life they couldn't make an ocean."

Which put them behind the Capitol scientists, which was worrying.

[swill]

As shocking as certain revelations, spoken or un-, had been, this one was tame and Hawkeye was angered by only one thing Shion said. It seemed to him like some sort of new record, and one he was happy to take. For once, he only felt disgruntled and disgusted at something that was fault of the Capitol people, the ones who were in charge of the operation of bloodsport entertainment. It made Hawkeye return a smile, broad and sly all at once.

Not to say the talk about walls didn't want to revert him to a silently simmering state, or to say the talk about scientists doing things out of the worst science fiction novels didn't want to make him shiver. "The computers I know take years alone to learn, and the only way I can see you studying through them is if you were told to memorize levers and flashing lights. Which would make you a mouse. If I have it right, I think a red light means the thing's turned on," he says, his version of oh you kids.

[savedbyasong]

"A mouse." Shion blinked, a little confused. Not sure how he was a mouse or what that had to do with computers at all.

"I guess... Though the computers we have in my world might be a little different..."