thecapitol | I'd like to phone a friend [Open]

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I'd like to phone a friend [Open]

WHO| Bunnymund and whoever you are.
WHAT| Bunny tries to get help from below, by contacting a local Earth spirit. His attempts are failing to yield results.
WHEN| As soon as he got out of the Training Center into the city.
WHERE| The park at the center of The Districts shopping center.
WARNINGS| Child-friendly swearing, attempted magic.

A giant rabbit lighting fires in a park draws attention. Which is all the more frustrating for Bunny, since he SHOULDN'T be drawing attention, no matter what he does out in the open like this. Every adult who stares at him with open confusion hammers home just how wrong something has gone, that whoever's in power in this city has the ability to suppress him into as close a state to mortality as he's been in many hundreds of years.

He could grumble about his situation, but that would get in the way of trying to get help. So he ignores the stares and keeps at work. His work, so far, is a hole in the ground, a pawful of pulled grass, moss, and flower petals stolen from various topiary on his way in search of the most natural place he could find in the midst of the city. He strikes a shard of flint he uncovered in the digging of the hole against the metal of his communicator, lighting a fire in the dry moss on a patch of earth he's cleared of grass, and dropping the flower petals onto the heat.

The way he kneels over the smoldering plants has all the look of a ritual, and the words he intones over them in a language that hasn't been used in the Capitol in much longer than 75 years do also.

All his kneeling and chanting isn't yielding much, though, to his frustration. With a growl, he jumps to his feet over the smoking flowers, still looking at the ground. "I know you're there, and I know you can hear me! You might not recognize me, but I'm close enough to being one 'a yours and I need your help. Wake up."

Still nothing. He stamps the ground, impatient, and growls again as no hole opens, no flowers grow, nothing happens except that he garners a few more bewildered looks from the humans who shouldn't be able to see him.

"Strewth."

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A groan from just beyond the bushes was his response, followed by the sound of something moving...something big.

The bushes rustled and a thick hand with fat fingers came from the leaves and branches and planted itself on the ground. It seemed to be made out of stone and covered in pebbles.

With another grunt and groan the fingers dug into the dirt and then relaxed their grip slowly. Whatever was in there wasn't moving fast.

That looked like a response. Far from being alarmed at all by the presence in the bush, Bunny grinned in triumph. "Hah. There we go."

He loped over, pushing the branches aside, frowning down at the stone-hided person lying there.

"I don't recognize ya. Local spirit?"

There was so much pollution still thick in the air that it didn't surprise him the local spirits were this sluggish. He reached down to try to pull the rock spirit to his feet.

"C'mon big fella, up 'n at 'em. I'm in a hurry. Who's being called a god 'round here?"

It said quite a bit about the Capitol, and just how long Wyatt had been in the city, that the creature he encountered in the park while out for a walk in the fresh, spring sunshine was not the first giant, talking rabbit that he'd seen.

Granted, it was no less strange, but it did offer him experience enough to be careful as he approached.

While the rest of the crowd whispered and gawked, he addressed the beast - in that smooth, easy drawl he was famous for.

"If yer tryin' to reach someone in particular," he offered, pointing at the communicator the rabbit held, "Ya might try that little box there. It's better for more than jus' a striker."

Though, to be fair, he'd never known you could do that with it too. He filed that away for later.

"Are you alright?"

Julian wasn't staring because the being in front of him was an oversized bipedal rabbit. Being in Starfleet meant he was used to seeing all shapes and sizes of people, he just...wasn't used to them yelling at the ground.

He glances around at the people staring, rolls his eyes, then comes closer.

"I hope you don't mind being the center of attention. They'll move on in short order, I'm sure."

"Huh?"

Orc blinked his bleary eyes and only crawled to his knees on instinct, shrugging off more branches. He must have weighed a ton given his size, but at least he was co-operating.

"God? I dunno if god's here anymore..." He mumbled, his breath reaking like he'd been eating garbage. The cracks of his stones seemed to permeate with the stench of alcohol.

Once he was up it was clear he'd been wearing a T-shirt and it was ripped in half hanging off his shoulders. His custom tailored pants were dirty and ripped as well.

Bunny looked up from his offering fire, rising from a crouch to his full upright height as he sized up the approaching human. Now that he was mortal enough to be seen by them, his instinct was to be wary around the adults who approached him - but this one was keeping his distance enough that Bunny didn't see a need to fight or flee. Instead, he chuckled, his laugh equally a drawl, but the accent was from the other side of the world.

"Mate, you can't reach who I'm tryin' to reach on that box."

Still, the locals, even the mortals, would know more than he would. If the Grandmother Earth he knew from home did not have an analogue here, or at least, one who didn't heed his pleas, maybe he'd have better luck using local names.

"What do people call their gods around here?"

His first instinct upon seeing a giant rabbit was 'ooh, dinner,' and hiding in a bush, but the fact that it - the fact that he was talking quickly chased that line of thought away. Still, it was a strange thing to see, a giant talking rabbit, digging a hole in the middle of one of the parks Guy sometimes hid out in to find respite from the urban world.

One the one hand, he wanted to say hello, but on the other, he could only stare in rapt fascination from his hiding place, not wanting to break his silence in case the rabbit man stopped doing...whatever he was doing. He wanted to figure out what it was first.

For someone with sensitive ears, though, the sound of quiet breathing and the slight rustle of leaves wasn't impossible to hear.

"They didn't take my hearing, y'know."

He had resumed chanting, but he stopped and stood up at the sound of rustling in the bushes.

"C'mon outta there. I don't like bein' watched."

And he DID like to know who was keen on watching people while being unseen. After all, someone here had been watching him long enough to find him interesting without his notice, and it had gotten him stuck here with only a fraction of his power.

If the watcher ran, he'd just have to run them down. They'd taken most of his speed, but left him more than enough to catch a human.

Bunny gave Julian a look of disbelief.

"Just bonzer, mate, why d'you ask?"

He turned back to his smouldering offering. "They can look. I'm not trying to get THEIR attention."

He stamped the ground again, growling when nothing happened.

"Yeah, well, neither is Grandmother Earth, based on all the silence I'm getting."

Once the smell of the alcohol and the halitosis hit his still-sensitive nose, Bunny almost dropped Orc's arm. Not that his support would have made a difference - he was nowhere near strong enough to hold up someone made of rock, and wouldn't have been even with his powers. He aimed his nose away from Orc's mouth with a groan of disgust he didn't even bother to hide.

"You're mortal, ain'tcha? Mate, are you off your face or hungover?"

"Off my what?" He groaned and rubbed a hand over his craggy features blinking away exhaustion and feeling a familiar pounding in his skull.

"Mortal? No my names not Mortal. I'm...they call me Orc."

He glanced around to see where he'd woken up and then looked back to Bunny.

A long silence followed.

"You're a rabbit...a giant rabbit."

Well observed Orc. Bravo.

"Well spotted. You sure can tell Christmas from Bourke Street."

The sarcasm in his voice was fairly gentle, given that Orc was clearly impaired, possibly young, definitely calling himself a monster's name.

"They call me Bunnymund." He considered laying out his full title, but if they were snatching tributes from other worlds, Easter might not mean anything to Orc. "Bunny'll do. Where's home, Orc?"

Because it clearly wasn't here, no matter how much like an Earth spirit Orc looked. Someone ought to get him there.

Maaaybe that hadn't been the most well-thought-out plan. Bunny's unasked-for guest hesitated for a moment, debating whether he should strike up a conversation or try to run away but then he slowly crawled out of the bushes and the spirit was treated to the sight of a small man creeping just slightly closer, movements hesitant. His hair was somewhat unkempt as if it was something he rarely fussed with, and he was wearing furry boots, calfskin leggings, and a woolly green shawl wrapped around his body and tied with little leather ties so it didn't fall off.

What skin was visible had some kind of animal stripes stained to it. After the last arena he'd bought what he needed to change the design just slightly from the usual, adapting to a world that kept trying to take away the symbols that meant something to him by creating new ones. Lines of red-brown curled up his neck in geometric shapes.

He was more out of place here than some and against the backdrop of the Capitol, with it's strange people with painted faces, he looked as if he'd stepped out of the past rather than out from a golden currant bush.

His expression, despite it all, was curious, though, filled with the sort of wide-eyed wonder that places like Panem destroyed in people.

"Uh. Hi."

"Home?" He repeated and coughed a few times spitting back into the bushes.

"Perdido Bay, California." He surprised himself by even getting that far. His eyebrows arched as he studied Bunnymund further.

"But I haven't been there in...a long time...I think it's March so maybe like...half a year?"

Despite the pounding in his head, Orc was doing fairly well. He must have remembered to take his vitamins last night before he started drinking.

"G'day."

Back at ease - not completely at ease, because how could he be, stuck in a world that suppressed his power and had designs to make him kill for entertainment? - Bunny crouched a little to be closer to the small man's level. Guy didn't have a weapon, and Bunny couldn't hear anyone else with him, so if this had begun as a hunt, the hunt was probably over now.

He studied the human back with curiosity not quite on Guy's level, but still with interest. Guy screamed foreign, in a different way than he did, but still in a way that said "not from this circus." It went leagues toward making Bunny prefer talking to him over talking to other citizens.

"What can you tell me about the gods 'round here?" Bunny asked. That WAS what was important right now - finding allies more on his wavelength than the Capitol had to immediately offer.

"Uuuh, well my friend Gabriel says his dad is one. Actually, he makes it sound like his dad is the only one. He's a spirit and he said his dad is the spirit that created everything. I know it's true because in the arena he could do things like make things appear out of nowhere and - and he sort of accidentally exploded. With all this light. It kinda blew out one of my eardrums."

An awkward shrug.

Was that helpful, maybe?

Very, actually. Bunny listened with interest. That meant that unless this Gabriel was a particularly good magician, he wasn't the only spirit to be brought here. And Gabriel - that was a Hebrew name. That would make his god the Capitol G Judeo-Christian one, and Gabriel possibly an angel.

Which meant not from his world, where if there were angels, and a lone God, they hadn't seen fit to let the spirits know. Or the two Goddesses who did make their presences known.

"Right, well, he can tell that to my grandmother, once I get her attention." Bunny turned back to his offering fire, adding a few more blades of grass he'd plucked from another garden. "So what about local spirits, ones these gallahs haven't repressed down to mortal yet. Heard about any of those?"

"I didn't even know spirits were real until I met Gabriel and I haven't met any other ones unless some of the people that look different here look different because they're spirits. They're just...stories. Ideas. That people have sometimes to explain things they don't understand," said Guy, inching a little closer.

Stories and ideas. Bunny couldn't help but chuckle out loud.

"Yeah, sometimes," he agreed.

He was still working at his offering fire, but his amusement was all too clear.

"And sometimes they're different from the stories. Sometimes they let humans have their own ideas."

Like that he was pink, or wore a top hat, or any number of other soft, harmlessly inaccurate presentations humans came up with for him.

"Or they're not real," said Guy, holding up a finger. "In some places, they might be. In other places, lightning is lightning and fire is fire and magic and spirits aren't real, they're just the ways people try to understand things."

He added, "Except for all the other types of magic. The types that happen every day. Those types are real."

There's a momentary pause as Bunny considers whether or not to be insulted by that. After all, how exactly does Guy know that there aren't spirits everywhere there are humans?

The look he finally throws Guy is dry.

"You know, at some point, when I'm not busy, you'll have to tell me about your journeys to these worlds where spirits definitely beyond a doubt do not exist and aren't just, ah, not interested in being proven. If you're implying this world has no spirits, forgive me if I don't take your word for it, seeing as how I am one, and you're not. Up to now, I had a pretty good track record of never being seen by adults."

The Earth here might not be listening to him, but that's no reason to give up. He can smell the pollution in the air, even with his power suppressed. The humans here might have done terrible things to their Earth.

Maybe she has a good reason not to help a foreign spirit who wants to help them. Or maybe they've done something to the point where she truly can't.

As that possibility rears its ugly head, Bunny's frown deepens. He exhales over his offering fire, concern starting to creep into his expression.

Edited 2014-03-23 06:43 (UTC)

"If there were spirits everywhere that could be seen by not-adults, I would have seen some in my world when I was a kid."

Logic.

"So if there were none in my world, it means there might not be any this world, which is possible because they take people - and spirits and trolls and I think they're called aliens? - they take them from all different worlds, where every kind of thing is possible and no single world is exactly alike."

Guy moved in closer to the fire Bunny was bowed over, still curious and now catching just a glimpse of the concern.

"That's okay, though, if there aren't spirits here. Because people like you that were taken from home are - and you are a person. Spirits are just a different kind of people, like there are lots of kinds of people here. So you're not alone. People try to look out for each other. At least as best as we can, all things considered."

Very few had forgotten who the real enemy was.

Edited 2014-03-23 06:50 (UTC)

For another second, he debated telling Guy not to go down that road. The alone one. The one that few were ever unfortunate enough to know better than him.

He crossed his arms, drumming his fingers on his biceps, rolling his eyes and letting out his frustration in a deep sigh. No. Don't even draw attention to it.

The part he zeroed in on was still sensitive, but nowhere near as sensitive as the concept of being singular in the world. "Children don't need to see to believe. They shouldn't have to. It's bettah that they grow up thinking that the kind of joy I put into the world for them, they're responsible for passing on to their kids."

Adults with fond memories, adults who believe it's their job to give their children fond memories . . . they do that.

He looked up from the fire, considering the human. "You're tryin' to reassure me. You think I'm afraid to be alone? Nah, mate." He spread his paw on the ground, for effect, and to see if he could get the earth to respond to him better that way. He couldn't. "Whatever they've done to this world, it was bad. Bad enough that if there's a Grandmother Earth here like the one I know, even I might not be able to get her help."

And that's a horrifying prospect.

"I don't see anyone else trying though. And it's London to a brick I haven't met anyone else who'd get a bettah response from her than me."

Guy knew that road. Guy had walked that path in places where there was no road at all.

Losing a people was terrible but being a child alone in the wilderness, chased by things in the dark, after having lost all light and love and laughter, that was a special kind of alone, no worse, no better, but it's very own kind of terrible.

The fact Guy had lived it before dragging himself out of the dark to walk a path in search of the sun was all the proof he needed there were no special spirits that only children could see. He'd had to find his own light, his own joy.

If the rabbit-man wasn't afraid of being alone, though, then he wasn't going to be the one to dash his hopes of finding a way to change things.

So, at all that, he just shrugged.

"Do you need help with your fire then? It's kind of pitiful, unless you're trying to have it smolder like that." There was a chance he wanted it to smolder like Guy sometimes would make little smoldering fires of fragrant woods to smoke out his clothes to make them smell nice. "I can help you with it if you need it - it's kind of my thing."

"If a fire I built is smoldering, it's because I want it to."

Pitiful indeed. Bunny snorted.

After a moment, though, he recognized the olive branch for what it was.

"Where'd they take you from?"

Later, he'd really delve into his focus, and meditate on this problem of not being able to reach any Earth spirits through easy means. For now, though, it was a good idea to figure out who was being taken, besides spirits.

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