thecapitol | District Tours: Train Ride

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District Tours: Train Ride

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.]

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Kain nods as she approaches and settles in. He'd figured he couldn't spend the whole trip in solitude... besides, anything he can learn of this world is important, and that means talking to anyone who isn't one of those outlandish Capitol people.

"I am. I just arrived at the time of the crowning..." And he'd not really gone out of his way to meet people afterward. Getting the vague idea of this world, getting around and so on had been more important. And looking futilely for ways out. "I'm Kain Highwind."

Being anti-social worked for awhile, Cindy knew that much. She wasn't like that at all, but there were plenty of people who were able to work that to their advantage. They had a few of them in Eleven, come to think of it. But like hell was she going to go away to her own little corner.

"Oh. I'm sorry about that." Cindy laughed, giving him a grin. "Not one of their better ones. I could have done without sharing some dream space with everyone else." There was something wrong with having other people in her head. Or vice-versa.

The whole thing had been terrible. "A pleasure, Kain. I'm Cindy. I don't think I'm too late to welcome you to this crazy, wonderful world of ours." A sarcastic stress put onto 'wonderful'. Because... no.

At least Kain appreciates the sarcasm. He's also glad he's not the only one who took such great offense to the notion of that shared dream. Altering his mind in any way is not anything he cares to go through. Ever. Never again. He'll fight for them, whatever they want, as long as he has his own mind at the end of the day.

"It's a better welcome than they can apparently give. I cannot stop wondering what they truly intend to gain out of sending us on this little journey?" Not that he minds all that much, in some way... "Even if it is a change of scenery."

At the mention of why they were on this train, Cindy frowned, pulling her legs a little more under her. It reminded her a little about meeting Howard the first time. The seating arrangement deal that had to go through. She wished he was in eleven. Him, Ian, or Harley, they would have been great to have along.

"This is a whole different ball game they have going now." Cindy replied, looking at Kain. "I have some ideas of why they're sending us out now, but none of them are good. And some of them shouldn't even be spoken out loud. It's like the Red Scare all over again, taken to an extreme."

"The Red Scare? Then has your world been through something like all of this?" It's nothing familiar to him, but he's not too surprised by that. Almost everyone was from some other world in the gods' conflict, with their own backgrounds and problems. Though oddly enough, it seemed that many of the others had faced incredibly powerful threats to their worlds... the enemies that Chaos had brought in.

How many others have gone through similar in this case, he wonders. He has no doubts, either, that the Capitol has sinister motives for doing all of this.

Cindy laughed. It wasn't strange to her, the people from different worlds all converging here. It was like fleeing from the Homelands. Eventually they ended up in the same place, but everyone was different. Still, explaining things could get tricky. She wasn't supposed to be alive during the Red Scare.

This guy had no idea, and maybe the Capitol didn't, either. "Nothing like this. I mean... the Red Scare didn't have anything like this, the whole killing thing and forcing districts to sacrifice their kids for entertainment. Not in this</> way, anyway. That whole thing was just about people always listening." Maybe he didn't know, and Cindy tapped her nails against the glass. "What, the government in your world didn't keep a list of people who might be spies?"

More like the rulers were the spies, at least for a while. Kain thinks back to that, still astonished that they hadn't realized the extent of how much the king had changed... had been literally not himself. "Something no less sinister. The king of my home country had been... replaced, without our knowledge."

He folds his arms and continues. "And elsewhere... I've also been taken to another world, and forced to fight in an unending series of battles. The war between Chaos and Cosmos. It had its similarities." Although that too also lacked this whole entertainment angle. That's the part about all of this that he hates the most, really.

"What?" Cindy was monetarily taken off guard. The king was replaced, and no one knew that it happened? How did that... did he have a twin? Or did no one see him during that time? Really, back in her Homeland, their king was fairly public. There was no way that he could be replaced unless it was through magic.

Maybe it was through magic. "I've never heard of someone replacing a king and no one being the wiser. Hasn't ever happened in my world." The Mundy world. Never happened there, not yet. "The war between Chaos and Cosmos? So this is... more normal for you then for some."

Kain looks a bit surprised that she's so taken aback by the king's replacement. He hadn't figured it would seem so outlandish... but then again, he supposes to an outsider it must sound that way. The very notion.

"He was heavily cloaked under an illusion of some sort. It was strong enough magic that not even his best warriors knew the difference. Although some among us began to notice his strange behavior eventually." The attacks on the innocent, the obsession with the crystals... Kain is rather appalled that even he hadn't seen it as strange, at first. "Anyway, when I first arrived here, I kept assuming this place was similar to their war... and in some ways, it is. Overall, though, there's much that differs greatly."

Well shit. It was magic. Definitely not surprised then, and Cindy frowned, holding back making a face at that. She hated magic. Sure, it had it's usefulness, there was no doubt about that. But it could turn from back to good with a snap of your fingers. Just thinking about it made her annoyed.

"So how did you... stop him?" She waved a hand around, though she was interested. She couldn't hide that, and he could probably tell. Just like a fairytale, right? Maybe this was just another tale that she'd never heard of.

Shaking her head, trying to ignore that for a moment. "Sort of, sure, though I'm pretty sure some people were just not great people already." Cindy shrugged. "So, what's different? Not counting politics, I guess."

It hadn't been that long ago, in the grand scheme of things. Still, this is one of the easier parts of the whole thing to tell about, even if it involves one of those fiends, who'd likewise been forced to serve under Golbez.

"He was defeated in battle. Since he was the elemental fiend of water, his weaknesses would have been obvious to exploit. But he was only the minion of another, stronger force. Our world has been through considerable difficulty recently." Though they'd triumphed, hadn't they? In some ways, Kain still didn't feel like it was truly over. Perhaps that was part of why he'd had to leave. He couldn't join in their celebrations. "I was surprised when I found myself in that other world's war, soon after. It seems there's never any true rest... Anyway, the difference in that world was that we were directly fighting the true enemy. That, and we had our memories removed of each cycle."

It meant he had no idea how many times he or his comrades may have fallen. The only one he remembers is the last cycle. He has to wonder if it would really make it any better, if they forgot each arena here. As for the true enemy... most of Chaos' warriors had belonged there, he was certain, but then there were people like Giolbez... it was complicated.

"Sorry to hear that." About the difficulty they've had lately. It really did sound like something from one of the Homelands, something that could have happened. There were so many things the Adversary could do, after all, and one of them was recruiting the worst Fables of them all to work for him. Or serve him. Both were terrible, really, something that could only be a fate worse then death.

But the memory removal makes her pause. "So that's... every time you fought whatever the enemy was, some sort of adversary deal, your minds got wiped each time?" Cindy leaned forward. "Wait. Did you... did you lose each time, and your minds were wiped?" It didn't make sense if they had won, after all, but that meant... how many times did that happen?

"Only when we lost and fell. Something in the revival process erased what we knew of the past cycles, even our homes. It did make it easier to bear in some sense... that war was all we knew." But it meant, in a way, through losing their memories, they'd lost their homes, everything that they all held dear. They'd become simply warriors, nothing more than that.

At least, for now, it seemed the Capitol couldn't take that from them here.

"Jesus fucking Christ." Cindy wrinkled her nose. "Sorry. But you're not just warriors, you're real people. So that's... I'm sorry, but you come from one messed up place."

At least the Capitol didn't take their memory away from them. Or maybe they did, who were they to know any different? You obviously didn't know you lost your memory once it was lost.

"It's certainly not a place I would call home, or think of fondly." Though he'd somehow made close comrades anyway, despite everything, and despite his own tendencies to keep to himself. But they'd all been banded together serving Cosmos. "It may have prepared me for this place, in a sense."

He wondered if this was going to be his fate now, to endlessly travel to these other worlds and repeatedly die in someone else's war. Maybe it was the fate he deserved.

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District Tours: Train Ride

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