thecapitol | These Pants Are Optional

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These Pants Are Optional

Who| OPEN to Lyle and YOU; closed to Lyle and Brainy
What| Vegan acrophobe wakes from death-by-falling to leather pants. NOPE.
Where| Suite 10, the elevator between Suites 10 and 8, Suite 8; Brainy's room
When| Week 4
Warnings/Notes| Swearing, out-right refusal to wear pants. Anything else TBA. Put where you find him in the subject line.

Lyle woke as he always did in stressful situations: instantly alert and betraying no sign of having done so other than the jack-hammering of his heart in his ears.

This time, it's flavored with distinctly more panic that he's used to.

Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod.

He doesn't...feel injured, though. Which he should, because ohgod nope, not going there, not thinking about--

Lyle rolls out of his (really soft) bed and into a defensive crouch, looking around for signs of a threat. Seeing no obvious ones, he makes for the door, scrubbing a hand over his face to make sure it's completely under his control.

Okay. Not dead. Good job step one. Step two: find Brainy. He'd said he was representing District 8. Surely there was going to be a sign somewhere indicating where to find the District 8 rooms.

...what the sprock was he even wearing?

The shirt was fine (sleeveless, high-collared, black, clung to him like a second skin), but the (black, fitted) pants were weird. They almost felt like they were made out of the same material as Brin's jacket, but the texture was slightly different. He'd felt this before, where had he felt this--

--Oh. Oh yeah.

"Ew!"

Lyle had never gotten out of his own pants so fast, and he'd had to strip down due to hazardous chemical spills before. On the other hand, he'd never found himself wearing pants made out of actual skin!

On the upside, there was a clothing dispenser in here. On the downside, the only pants in it were also made out of skin, buttery and smooth and as black as Darkseid's soul. The selection of boots likewise appeared to be made from skin as well.

Fine. Lyle was a grown man, he'd worn less to the beach more than once. His underwear (well, "his" underwear in the sense that they were the underwear he was wearing, because the death match and the skin pants weren't creepy enough) was also black, so at least they kept the theme.

Lyle strode out of his room; face impassive, feet bare, and utterly sans pants. Bring it, Panem, Lyle Norg was on a mission.

Hey, elevators. That looked positive.

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Lyle assumed from the gesture and the tone that this sentient's first comment had to do with his lack of pants. He had to assume from the context because the vocabulary was completely incomprehensible. He seemed more amused than offended though, which was good since Lyle wasn't in the mood for a fist fight in an elevator right now.

On the other hand, giving that the other sentient was apparently wearing some kind of tent, Lyle could probably escape pretty easily.

"They were tragically unworthy of my legs," he explains, his words and the shrug of his shoulders more reflex than anything else. "Floor eight. Or whatever floor the Eighth District Tributes are on."

"Your threads? You oughta hook up with my peeps, they got me all gussied up. I be dripping the butter around here, ya dig?" Punchy leans against the back of the elevator, running his hands through his hair to keep it at its intentionally-disheveled look.

"Six. Number of the beast, yo." Except not quite, but you know. Attempts were made.

It took Lyle a few befuddled moments to parse the words coming out of this sentient's mouth into something he could understand. He was pretty sure he was being encouraged to get styled by this sentient's stylists (ha! Hahaha! No), and that he was representing District Six. Must have gone too far down in the elevator.

"You know, I think I will," he said with a smile. Except no, he was just going to steal pants from other floors. Not from this sentient's room, because he was too tall and Lyle could probably fit another Legionnaire inside those pants with him.

"Been here in Panem long?"

"Tell 'em I repped 'em. Maybe I'll get some free swag."

Punchy sticks his hand out, not for a shake but for a bropound. Everybody should give each other bropounds. With as many fists here made that actually have violent intent, Punchy finds it so nice to have ones that speak of camaraderie instead.

(He also misses his floor.)

"So you's freshman class here, right? You in the last jam?"

"Are they charging us for the privilege of picking our clothes without our input?"

Lyle looks down at Punchy's extended fist with a confused expression. That's not the fist of someone who has something inside their hand (not unless it's something very small and malleable), and it's not a fist aimed to hit him, so probably some alternate form of a handshake. He supposes that a fist makes more sense here, since there's no way that everyone here means no harm (and all of the species he's seen thus far have had hands or something equivalent, so bowing isn't a necessity).

That's really clever, actually. Lyle curls his own hand into a fist and taps his knuckles against the other sentient's.

"Got thrown in about a week into play," he says. "Just got out, depending on how long they kept me under."

Punchy grins ridiculously widely once he gets that bropound. He's been severely bro-deprived - even in the Capitol, most people think he's a bit off in the head, and don't humor his attempts at bonding in his own language.

"They get all tizzed up if you check their threads without permission. Best just roll with it, or they give you itchy shit next time you got a big television performance."

He holds out the other fist, as if to test if this guy will keep bropounding him.

"You stick with me, frosh, I be good to the new blood."

"I'll take itchy," Lyle says. "I've just got moral objections to wearing skin that's not mine. And that's me saying it."

Ta-da, allusion to his state of villainy slipped right into the conversation. He dutifully raises his other fist for a second knuckle-tap.

"Thanks, I promise not to hold you too tightly to that." This sentient seems (for the moment at least) like not a terrible person, he might not want to hang around a self-proclaimed super-villain. And actually, now that he's thinking about it...

"Say, you were hanging out with the scientists in the last arena, weren't you?"

"Ah, I feel ya." Punchy winks and nod. He doesn't feel Lyle at all. "You gots to be picking your own threads for a full skin. I understand."

Third knuckle-tap time. It's kind of addictive.

"Yep, they was my homies. I threw myself down to protect my crew." Punchy manages to take an incredible amount of pride in his pointless and stupid death by electrocution.

"Absolutely."

Lyle has no idea what he just agreed with, but he goes for the third tap anyway.

"I got in just as you checked out. Shame too, I was looking forward to hanging out with other smart guys, but it ended up just being me and Brainy on our own again."

Tap four! This will just never get old, and Punchy follows Lyle out of the elevator. His tone gets a bit more insistent.

"What, you dissing my crew? They be some flat-out Einsteins. Not as wired upstairs as yours truly, of course, but solid scientific motherfuckers."

Tap four! Lyle was a little surprised to be followed off the elevator, and shook his head at Punchy's objection.

"I'm not dissing anyone. Everyone went their separate ways after we escaped the planetarium, so it was just me and Brainy then. Apparently, you were the glue holding the group together."

Well, that flattery certainly seems to smooth Punchy's ruffled feathers. He tilts his head and pulls his shoulders back and just about preens.

"Damn right, my peeps ain't nothing without me." He stretches and rests his hands on the top of his head, apparently entirely oblivious to the fact that now he's dissing his crew.

Some people were easy to deal with. Either this sentient's one of them, or he's playing pretend really well.

"You visiting someone on this floor too?" he asked, glancing around in an attempt to determine where Brainy's room might be. The layout looked the same as his floor, so if Brainy was in his room and hadn't gone off looking for Lyle, he shouldn't be too hard to find...

"Oh." Punchy doesn't want to admit that, having nothing better to do, he's just following Lyle around. That just sounds pathetic. "Thought homie might need a bodyguard, you know, in case anyone jumps you."

Perfect save.

"That something I have to worry about here too?" Lyle asked, eyes sharpening. He'd been under the assumption that they were only supposed to try and kill each other inside the Arena. That's what Brainy had indicated, at least. Were they wrong?

"It's a harsher street here than it is in there," Punchy says, suddenly extremely serious. "Trust me, I'm preaching."

The physical scars from getting his tongue cut out have been erased by his revival. The mental injury is still there. The scar tissue is fear.

Lyle glanced briefly around the hallways they were standing in, wondering where the surveillance was, and moved in closer to the other sentient. Huh, they haven't even swapped names yet.

"Anything you can fill me in on?" he asked, pitching his voice more softly but not whispering. Whispering caught attention. "Ah, homie to homie?"

He could tell the kid was scared; you got to that sort of thing when you were running around in tights fighting things that could swallow a squad of Science Police whole. Still, the more quickly he gets informed, the more quickly he and Brainy can start dismantling this awful place without doing something egregiously stupid.

Punchy pauses, not because he's afraid but because there are rules to these sorts of things, and anything that could get the other Avoxes in trouble is a rule that he will, actually, take seriously. He's done enough of getting innocent people hurt from his stupid and impulsive heroism.

He jerks a thumb at one of the Avoxes busy sweeping the kitchen. "Be nice to them. They's the victims. All I'm sayin'."

Lyle cast an appraising glance toward the indicated sentient, and nodded. "All right." Something there that this guy either couldn't or didn't feel comfortable talking about, then. So noted; he'd find out which when he talked to some of the others here.

"You know," he said, his tone more casual to indicate a change of subject (for now), "we've been talking all this time and I don't think we've traded names. Lyle Norg."

"Punchy." He says this as if it's the coolest name on the planet and that he should be donning sunglasses for the first syllable and taking them off for the second. "You know. 'Cuz I'm a hero and shit."

And incredibly tactful.

Lyle laughed, but only to disguise the face he wanted to make.

He kind of liked Punchy, it was going to be a shame to shut this down. On the other hand, not putting people in danger from the Capitol with his friendship was why he was pretending to be a villain anyway.

"Oh, well, if we're going that route -- Chemical King. Because I'm a bad thing that happens to bad people."

"Wh- what?"

Punchy looks outright confused. Dammit, he's not supposed to get along with villains. This guy can't actually be a villain, right? Must be some tryhard teenager.

"Rewind that for me?"

Grife, it was like kicking a puppy.

"Sorry, hero," Lyle said glibly. "If it helps, it's my old government's fault." He smiled, a little sadly. "If they hadn't popped me into assassin school when I was twelve and then tried to have me killed a few years later, I might have turned out better."

"I- I gotta..." Well, what's he supposed to do, arrest him? In Panem? It suddenly strikes Punchy that there's really nothing he can do when faced with self-professed evil here. The law isn't on his side. The forces of good aren't on his side. The most he can do is beat someone up, and that, in addition to being unwise, doesn't seem like the most lasting or virtuous way to uphold heroic ideals.

So instead, he postures. He gets all up in Lyle's face and scowls and points a finger right at Lyle's nose.

"I see you be doing any villain shit on my beat, I'll be icing you, homes." And then his expression softens just a bit. "Sucks about the assassin school, though."

Lyle grins, seemingly unrepentant and unintimidated. He's the bad guy here, a bad guy in a place where the good guys are at a disadvantage. But it was so sprocking good to see a self-proclaimed hero who wasn't buckling under the weight of the Arenas and wasn't dead because of their heroic inclinations.

"Hey, you see me, have at," he said. "If I'm seen, I'm doing something wrong. But thanks for the sympathy. And don't worry too much about me being a corrupting influence on you. Me and my team, we're not kicking-puppies bad. We've got a code."

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nunpunching - 2014-05-15 02:17 (UTC) - Expand

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