lord have mercy

[sleeplessinalternia]

Who| Karkat and OPEN
What| After nearly half a sweep a year away, Karkat's back in the tribute tower. He's not happy about it.
Where| D1 suite, elsewhere in tribute tower, in the capitol itself
When| Week 6 and beyond
Warnings/Notes| I'll be putting up some prompts in the comments for the three locations, but otherwise feel free to make your own wildcard prompt! JSYK, Karkat has been revived a week or so after he died (roughly concurrent to when Kankri got resurrected from his) and looks roughly a year older than he was last time anybody saw him. As for warnings... there will be language, probably references to Karkat's death and a little bit of Homestuck spoilers.



Familiar overhead block surface.

Karkat blinks his occular orbs in dismay. He-- he fucking knows this place. Memories come flooding back. Panem. He's in fucking Panem. Held captive by the fucking Capitol humans. Here he was, half-a-sweep older, and now, now, he knew what a fucking travesty that really was.

"We made you," he mutters under his breath. "You should be worshipping us, not fucking turning us into reality television."

There's a paper container of mixed goods next to him on the resting platform. Karkat shakes it out onto the thermal retention fabric. A bottle of what proved to be some kind of artificial scent. A hat in the shape of a gelatinous sea creature. Rubber bouncing spheres in the shapes of his, Signless, and Kankri's heads. A pendant with an enameled picture of a hamburger on it. Gummy candies in the shape of hamburgers. A black shirt with the word DEAD written in his own blood color. A toy figure of himself whose head came off when you squeezed it.

Karkat stares down at the assorted goods. "What the fucking fuck?"

Comments

[sleeplessinalternia]

"Does it look like I give a shit?" Karkat asks him. He squints at Barbie. "You're new." Stylist? Mentor? Tribute? Escort? Probably not a Peacekeeper, unless he was some sort of stealth plainclothes Peacekeeper.

He does stop bouncing the ball, just in case he is.

[baaarbie]

He didn't answer that first question, it was obvious the kid didn't and Barbie didn't really either. The capitol only cared about how he dressed and how he competed, not whether he broke a lamp or something, so it wasn't Barbie's concern.

"Barbie. I'm a new mentor for District 1. You're one of mine, if I'm not mistaken." He was fairly certain this was Karkat, but honestly he was an alien and Barbie wouldn't be surprised if it took him some time to sort out who was who for a little while.

[sleeplessinalternia]

Okay. As far as the options go, Mentor is less shitty than some of the others.

"Yeah. I'm Karkat. Welcome to the Land Of Random Gross Smells and Zoidberg. We're pretty sure the first is Howard's fault."

[baaarbie]

That actually got a smile out of him. "I'm sure I'll get used to it." For better or worse these were his tributes and he wasn't going to abandon any of them simply because of strange smells or appearances.

"So, I'm not really going to implement any training schedule or anything unless that's the type of thing you want. I'm here to evaluate your fighting abilities, improve on what is needed, prepare you for any kind of arena and get you sponsors.

But I can also answer almost any questions you have."

[sleeplessinalternia]

"It takes a fuckwhile to get used to," Karkat warns him. "You can follow your sniffnodes back to his room and I'm pretty sure the whole place is covered in, like, assorted refuse. That's basically what it smells like. And yeah, sure, fine, we can go down and I'll show you how I fight. But as far as questions go, unless you know why the fuck they stopped shoving you guys in the games and started kidnapping us, I'm kind of out of things I don't know."

[baaarbie]

Barbie nodded, trying to think of the safest way to say something that might help. "Good, I'd like to see it. As for that last part...the best I can say is that people weren't happy and something had to be done, so the government did what it decided it needed to."

He was going to leave it at that but decided it was safe enough to express a little more opinion this early on. It was good to have a good reputation to cushion you. "I'm sorry about it all; none of you deserve it. But that's why I'm here: to help you as much as I can."

[sleeplessinalternia]

"Well, if you do more than feed me beastshit lines about how your weird 'snow' stuff is made out of ice cream and occasionally press your rumble spheres against my back, you'll be doing better than the last mentor I had 'help' from," Karkat answers.

(Adelaide hadn't been an actual troll but she'd sure been a metaphorical one.)

"So, uh, do you want to go down now or do you have other shit to do up here?"

[baaarbie]

He wasn't sure he understood some of that, but he got the gist. Working with Karkat was going to be a new experience, that was for sure and not necessarily a bad one.

"My time is yours, if you've got nothing else to do, we can head down now and get it out of the way."

[sleeplessinalternia]

"Yeah, okay," Karkat says, and he sets the stupid head-shaped rubber bouncing sphere on the table before standing up. "Might as well get it over with."