Consider the Following: it takes the human body about one hour to metabolize one drink

[googledox]

WHO| Open to any Science Bros, medical people, or people who might otherwise randomly be at the bar
WHAT| Happy Hour
WHEN| About a week after the arena is over, I guess?
WHERE| Unzip Your Genes, a Capitol bar
WARNINGS| Drunken arguments about physics and possibly whether a caveman or an astronaut would win in a fight

After their rather electric deaths (and close calls, for some) the Science Bros (also known as the Science Alliance) were firmly established as a group in the minds of the Capitol public. That was why all the members were given an invite to the Capitol bar Unzip Your Genes as guests of honor, a publicity stunt - er, gesture of appreciation - because the bar had re-themed and re-named itself in their honor.

Drinks were on the house - as were the Science Alliance T-shirts they were all given as door prizes - and there weren't too many Capitol guests so it promised to possibly actually be a good time. For those that didn't care about a good time, they could possibly drink out of spite until the bar regretted offering free drinks.

The decorations actually weren't half bad. Lots of glass, stainless steel, colorful charts, blinking lights, and wires that did nothing. There were plasma balls everywhere and huge tesla coils had electricity arcing up to the ceiling, shooting out mini electrical storms that might make some of the bros just a little bit nervous, even though it was just a visual effect. There were glow-in-the-dark wall panels and every bathroom door had a biohazard sign. A star map was also projected on the ceiling, sometimes zooming in to feature individual galaxies, planetary bodies, and nebulae in more detail.

In the middle of the bar was a stage shaped like the periodic table of the elements, where attractive dancers in science-themed costumes rocked out in Faraday cages.

All the drinks (often glowing and sometimes flaming or even sparking) were served in beakers with radioactive signs, test tubes, graduated cylinders, or flasks, and the barmaids were just going to keep them coming.

Comments

Drinking

[googledox]

Whether it's sitting around chilling with some brewskis or trying to drink each other under the table, the drinks are on the house, so get chugging or tossing back those shots.

Beer Pong

[googledox]

Beer Pong can get a little more competitive when some of the people involved in playing have a working knowledge of physics. Sure, you can bounce the ball in the cup but can you do it off of three separate points around the room and get it in at a 10 degree angle?

Pub Quiz

[googledox]

Naturally, the Science Alliance is their own team and naturally they'll do fine with questions about science but can anyone among them answer the following: what is a passing style employed in football in which the quarterback initially takes a three step drop or more into the pocket to make a pass?

Everything Else

[googledox]

The night is young and anything could happen, whether it's a fist fight or someone wearing a traffic cone on their head!

Re: Beer Pong

[splendid_roman]

"I think this beer's watered down and I haven't had enough to make it interesting," Ian said, eyeing the table. Although playing this game might end up with him having drunk enough beer, whether it was watered down or not, to make it more interesting.

However, he was not one to refuse a challenge, and he threw the ping pong ball. It might have gone in a cup, had it ended up hitting someone after it bounced off a wall. "Oops. Sorry," he added, louder, so they'd hear his apology.

Re: Drinking

[atippleoftransparency]

Lyle had stripped off his dark red button-up on his way to one of the tables in favor of the Science Alliance door-prize T-shirt he'd been handed. The both shirts were equally mismatched with his black-and-purple pants, which were suspiciously identical to the pants Brainy was wearing. He didn't see a lot of people who didn't also look like Tributes, but the sooner he got a reputation for catching attention, the sooner he could start leveraging it for his and Brainy's own ends.

He'd flagged down a waitress and given her a drink order, gesturing to himself and Brainy to indicate, even to someone who couldn't hear, that he was ordering for the both of them.

She came back with a surprising number of shots.

"Remember the first time Jo challenged you to a drinking contest?" he asked Brainy, rhetorically. Because there was no way any of them would forget that event. "That was hilarious."

[youbarium]

Carlos stares at the screen, squinting. Then, he takes his glasses off, and squints some more. "I didn't know football fields had pockets," he says, several drinks in and a little bleary. "....I don't know much about football at all, honestly. In high school, the people who knew about football were the ones that made my life miserable, so I did my best to avoid all contact with it."

Re: Everything Else

[nunpunching]

Did someone mention bad fashion? Because in additional to his unfortunate face tattoo, Punchy's rocking a new mohawk and blingy gold fabric that makes him look like a human-shaped disco-ball. Someone apparently never told him to edit. He looks like a punk Oscar trophy covered in glitter.

Unlike possibly the entire rest of the Science Alliance, Punchy looks absolutely thrilled to be here, and has a shit-eating grin stamped onto his inked-up face. He's also a bit flushed, since he's about three drinks in.

That means he wants to dance. Yes, with you. No, he doesn't know how to actually dance, and it mostly involves stomping around and trying to grind on people. Have fun with that.

[youbarium]

Carlos was the one it hit; up until then, he hadn't been paying much attention to that corner of the bar, but when he saw what was happening, his eyes widened in disbelief.

"They still play beer pong?" he deadpanned, recognizing the game immediately. "In a future with holograms and force fields, they still play beer pong?"

[splendid_roman]

Ian was relieved the other person wasn't annoyed at being hit with a ping pong ball and he smiled. "Some things never go out of fashion. But I've never played it before." Perhaps it was something that came into fashion.

"Do they play often where you've from?" he asked, sipping his beer.

[youbarium]

"Not after a certain age," admitted Carlos. "You usually find it in colleges, at parties and in fraternity houses. It's not a very sophisticated game." He took a sip of his own drink. "I haven't played it in years."

[splendid_roman]

"You don't want anything too sophisticated when you're drunk." Especially as the game involved getting drunker. "We usually just played darts, but this isn't too different."

He picked up a clean ping pong ball and held it out to the other man. "Want a go?"

[youbarium]

Carlos considered for a moment, looking at Ian over the lip of his drink.

"Well...all right. Why not?" He set his drink down on a nearby table, where he could keep a clear eye on it, and took the ball from Ian. "But I have to warn you," he said, "I used to play this with physics majors."

[atippleoftransparency]

"What does it say?" Lyle asked. He had, at some point, ended up with his back to the screen showing the questions, but it hadn't dulled his enthusiasm for the competition. Just his ability to turn around and look himself, apparently.

"'Football'? Is that a sport? The only thing I know about sports is that I'm banned from the room when they're on the holos."

[splendid_roman]

"Knowing the mechanics doesn't make it any easier to do," he said, chuckling. He was keen to see what he could do though.

[youbarium]

"But it does make you very competitive." Carlos shot Ian a grin, and tossed the ball up and down in his hand once or twice, getting a feel for it. "Especially when you're drunk." He took a second to clean the ball off, since it had just hit him, then tossed it gently across the table. It was nothing fancy, just a straight arc into a cup full of beer.

"So," he said, "where are you from?"

[youbarium]

"Why? What did you do?" Carlos asked, honestly more interested in Lyle's story than answering the question. Someone else on the team could field it, maybe, but Carlos himself had given the points up for lost.

[googledox]

"It was a perfectly understandable mistake on his part. My people were rarely prone to revelry, so the advantages the Coluan metabolism bestows in regards to alcohol tolerance weren't exactly common knowledge."

He was smirking slightly, though, as he did some mental calculations.

"This volume of alcohol should suffice in getting us drunk but not so drunk we'll regret it in the morning. You know I usually abstain but, well..."

Sometimes you needed a drink. Whatever the species, whatever the chemical makeup the substance causing it was, whatever hole you had to pour it into, you needed a drink.

[googledox]

"We...talked. Apparently, it's a crime of the highest order to make fun of the completely incoherent, utterly pointless rules of magno-ball."

He went on, "...But then our team leader at the time was a former magnoball champion. It was a sensitive subject for him."

Re: Everything Else

[googledox]

"Don't even think about it."

That was Brainy's singular response when Punchy approached like he was going to try to grind up on him and lure him out of his chair to dance.

He did want to try to strike up a conversation if he could, though.

He remembered him from the Cornucopia.

[youbarium]

"People who pride themselves on toughness can be very sensitive about sports," said Carlos sagely to the deep brown, frothy drink in front of him. "You're better off staying away. You aren't missing much, besides a potentially dangerous, or at least very uncomfortable, situation."

He took a long drink.

[atippleoftransparency]

Lyle raised his glass in a toast. "To potentially dangerous, or at least uncomfortable, situations that involve chemicals and things that might explode instead of ball-chasing!"

[googledox]

Brainy absently raised his glowing blue shot glass to toast that, occupied with his tablet at the moment while he searched furiously to fact-check an answer to one of the culture questions another group had just answered to see if something that stupid was actually true. (They did not give a schnauzer an award for Best Actor in a Drama Film, did they - oh gods, they did.)

"Agreed. To fixing a broken quantum compositor instead of winning all the points by doing the half-yard jump shot from the defense line into the magno-ball ring - or whatever it is they do."

He had quite a few of those shot glasses lined up in front of him, actually, (about ten left) and after he knocked the one back, the way he went to the next in line made it clear they were not actually meant to be shared with the group.

Re: Everything Else

[atippleoftransparency]

Lyle was under the table. Nobody had drunk him under the table; he'd just moved there because it was a good place to be when you were pretending to be more drunk than you were and you happened to be somewhat annoyed that you couldn't turn invisible and observe people from your chair. (Lyle had never been much of a bar person to begin with anyway.)

He leaned over and poked Brainy in the shins.

"I'm still here," he announced. "I didn't sneak off. You should join me, the floor isn't sticky."

[googledox]

"That sounds like a glowing endorsement," said Brainy sarcastically. "In terms of places I should relocate myself to."

Yet he still slid out of his chair and down to the floor, making the slow sort of grace someone managed when they were slightly drunk and trying very hard to hide that fact.