thecapitol | In the evening, I've got to roam

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In the evening, I've got to roam

Who| Jet and Open
What| Some books about psychology, law and weddings...? some maps, some painting and some technology (sorta)
Where| A book store and the training center
When| After the crowning but before the special arena
Warnings/Notes| Scenarios are in separate comments in the post to keep things organized! Feel free to tag whichever or more than one, if they ping you. If you want some other scenario, just let me know!

Things had been quiet enough with only a few remarkable events here and there, right up until the crowning and the surprise reaping that had set him back on edge for a little while. It could have been him or, worse, Albert...instead there were other names he recognized called, including one that made him very uncomfortable, but there was nothing he could do...which made it worse. Nothing like a dose of reality to bring back that feeling of anger and helplessness that he'd seemed to have finally shaken for a little while.

Some practice targets had suffered for it when Jet had slunk off in the middle of the night to take some of his aggravation out on them for an hour or so, but he kept it to himself. Instead, he tried to force himself on focusing on other things.

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After his initial trip to the training center to massacre one of the dummies, Jet stayed away from the area, afraid he might take out that deep-seated rage on something else while someone was actually watching. He'd been managing to keep it hidden and bottled away for two months now, he wasn't looking to change that. However, he found himself heading down there anyway on two separate occasions when he knew his partner wouldn't miss him.

Luckily, he didn't feel like attacking anything, he simply decided to bypass the weapons table and check out some of the other things offered to them.

Most of it seemed pretty customary, though an apparent' tech' section caught his eye, some place to fiddle with electronics and maybe learn your way around them maybe? He passed it up.

Instead, he found what appeared to be paints for whatever reason. It didn't make sense, but he found himself going for them anyway. There seemed to be some practice sections that you were supposed to use...but Jet wasn't too good with rules and in a slightly rebellious fit, he turned to one of the walls for a canvas. He wasn't exceptional, but after years of practice, he wasn't too shabby either. He painted a stylized plane, a bird, The Dolphin, and finally he took up a huge section just to paint the sky, the top part a deep inky blue that he filled with pinpricks of white paint, that faded into a softer blue that got an unobtrusive splattering of clouds. It was relaxing. It was also probably severely frowned upon, but who cared?

Once he'd taken his artistic urges out on the wall, he packed up the paints and started to leave, only to spot that tech section again. An idea occurred to him that sent him back to the paints to grab the black and some of that paper and retreat to the aforementioned section.

Most of the crap there he could only guess at with only a few things he could actually name. He wasn't the 'tech guy' of their little crew, but he'd spent years having to do his own maintenance on his cybernetics, so he wasn't too terrible. More than that, he was looking for things he only knew the shape of and not the name. The paper started to develop what could potentially be called schematics if it had any numbers or figures next to it instead of just being a series of pictures of machinery. Q being Q had offered jokes and sideways explanations to the technology Jet asked about, so he honestly didn't know what he planned to do if he found the parts he was looking for, but that didn't stop him from looking or planning.

After all, how useful would it be if he could recreate that transporter Q had been working on?

It honestly doesn’t take long for Kili to need a break from his brother, from the questions, from the concerned glances, and the younger dwarf has never been very good at lying. Trying to hide all of this from him was far more difficult than he ever expected; there was only so much false smiling Kili could do in one day. He had to sit down and plan or think over what his next steps might be, and while not in the same room as him. So, the training center is the first choice, a place where he could go under the pretext of needing to work on his bowmanship or his survival skills, and instead get some much needed thinking done.

Despite his selfish hopes, the dwarf had never truly thought about the possibility of his brother arriving in Panem and being exposed to the Games. Of course, while their life back home had not been without violence, their lines had been clearly drawn: the orcs were evil, the dwarves were good, and everyone else was more or less good enough.

Here, in the context of the arena, there was so much less certainty, especially with Fili here now. Could he afford to make friends who he may eventually have to kill to protect his brother?

Just as Jet’s packing up the paints, Kili notices the wall and its delightful colors. With a genuine smile, the dwarf approaches, all thoughts of hard thinking and planning gone from his mind in an instant.

“What’s this here?” he asks as he points to the dolphin, not minding the smudge of paint that ends up on his fingers. He ends up just wiping it on a lower piece of the wall in a swirl.

Jet pauses in his 'packing up' when what he initially thinks is a child comes up to the wall. But the voice and appearance weren't right. This was probably the shortest man Jet had ever met and he'd thought that about Pyunma.

"It's called the Dolphin, it's a ship. Mostly. It's from my home."

He brought the paints back over on a whim and paused a moment before offering a brush. Why not?

"This is easier to use than a finger. Wanna join in?"

"Yes!" Kili replies enthusiastically as he looks back up at the dolphin.

Smiling up at Jet, Kili regards the brush with curiosity before shaking his head. Painting with his hands seemed much more fun. He reached down for the closest jar and opened it with little regard for the color. Without hesitation, he dipped his fingers in and then smeared it on the wall, grinning at the resulting smudge of bright orange. He would paint his brother, he decided as he looked back down at the jars for a yellow.

He was surprised to see the man just dip his hands into the paint and it resulted in the blond staring for a moment or two, simply watching. He looked at the brush in his hand and finally decided 'why the hell not?' Brushes were more effective, but fingers were more fun. Besides, when was the last time he'd even painted with his hands? He had to have been seven or eight, before painting was a 'bad thing' at home.

So he dipped his fingers into the paint and decided he'd take up another section of wall to paint the New York skyline. Again, why not?

"You've gotten very good." In a pop-art Andy Warhol kind of way, though the sky is beautiful and obviously painted with love and care. "How long did you spend on this?"

It had been at least a few hours before Albert had woken to an empty bed, the pillow beside his possessed of only residual body heat. Albert must have been more tired than he thought to not wake up when Jet had rolled out of bed, though it's something of a norm for them. At least it used to be. Albert had gotten used to Jet's restlessness and light sleeping habits and often the American would get out of bed and entertain himself for a little while until he felt he could sleep again. Albert had developed the skill of cracking an eye open, mumbling a query to if anything was wrong, and if he received a no he'd fall right back to sleep. Still, it had been a long time since Jet had done that and Albert has to wonder if something actually is wrong.

Finding Jet gone this time, Albert had followed his instincts in going to look for him, first the District 2 suite's kitchen, then the common area on the bottom floor. This had been his third stop and Albert had entered the training room in virtual silence, barefoot and only in his long pajama bottoms. He still takes comfort in being able to feel the floor against skin on the bottoms of his feet instead of listening to metal clack as he walks.

He takes his time examining his fiance's handiwork, eyes tracing the lines and brush strokes. "Couldn't sleep?"

Jet jumps a little at the voice but smiles when the he looks over, the brush he'd been holding falling back into one of the jars of paints.

"Thanks. The sky took a while, I wasn't really keeping track." Which meant he'd left the bed empty a long time and potentially made his partner worry. Guilt crept into his expression and sheepishness tinged his voice. "Sorry, I didn't realize I'd be down here this long. I didn't wanna wake you up just cause I was restless."

"It's alright. I only would have panicked if I couldn't find you by morning." Albert moves away from the painted wall and settles onto the floor next to Jet, crossing his legs and hunching forward to peer at the other paintings.

"Schematics? For..." He tries to make sense of them but while Albert was also fairly skilled at his own inner cybernetic workings, this is beyond him. He let's the word float, raising an eyebrow at Jet in askance for him to finish the sentence.

Jet's hand finds untamed hair as he looks over the glorified scribbles he'd made. Now that there were other eyes on them, their imperfections were glaringly obvious and it made him want to grab them all and rip them up in frustration.

"Well..a transporter, in theory. But, honestly, I don't really know what I'm doing. When Q and I were working on it, I never saw any plans myself and that ass never explained anything." As Q was one to do. "But I remember what the parts looked like and where we put them. I was hoping messing with cars for so long would give me some ideas but, as it turns out, cars and transporters are really different."

"I didn't get much of a look at it either." He'd been around when Q was working on it but they'd ended up talking of other things. "There might be others around who have knowledge of such advanced technology, but I don't know yet just who we can trust."

Digging into a pocket, Albert pulls out a pack of cigarettes and taps one out to offer to his fiance. He's rarely without them since his little adventure with Kili to find some, a nasty habit he knows, but it keeps him calm. Especially when talking about things like this. "I'm not sure they wouldn't just pull us back anyway. We need a look at the tech that brought us here."

Jet takes it somewhat gratefully and waits to light it before speaking. "Yeah, I figured there's probably someone better at this crap around, but you're right that you don't just go around asking who knows how to build stuff like that. Guess I was just hoping to get what I remembered down before I lost it." Not that this was exactly helpful when--to someone who knew what they were doing--his 'diagrams' would look like scribbles.

"Anyway, that's kind of why I thought a transporter might help--not to escape, but to break in. If we could even get it working."

"Clever," Albert grunts approvingly around his cigarette. "We'd only need to use it once to get in and out again. Not alone, though. Eventually we may have to try and trust someone with this or other things."

He inhales and exhales slowly, letting the smoke curl through him comfortingly. "If we could find a way to synthesize those mushrooms, that would be another option as well." And also require help, but having their cybernetics back even for a short time would give them an advantage, even if it's not as monumental as it would have been in their previous environment.

"That would be helpful." He pulled one of the papers over to him, retrieved a pencil he'd stuck in his pocket days ago, and began absently sketching out said mushroom.

"I could fly recon around this whole city before they even knew what was going on. Maybe even further." Probably wouldn't even be able to try and shoot him down unless they had random anti-aircraft weapons lying around. And imagine how much he could figure out if only he weren't grounded. That was a bitter thought.

He gathered his papers and stood once the sketch was finished. "We should try to go back to bed...you need your beauty sleep, after all..."

"And the pot calls the kettle black." With a smirk, Albert leans over and roughs up Jet's hair as he stands. He'd at least been asleep for some time before coming down here. By the look of the walls, Jet had barely spent time in bed at all.

Albert takes some of the papers from Jet to help carry with a playful smirk. "You should sleep though. I'd prefer to be engaged to a man, rather than a raccoon."

His hand instinctively jumps up to try and smooth out the 'damage' Albert had done even though he knew it couldn't really be messed up in the loose state it was in now.

"I'm not a raccoon." It's said a little childishly but he smirks and bumps Albert's shoulder with his arm as he turns to head out of the training center. Albert did have a point, Jet's complexion was very pale, so any dark circles under his eyes often looked twice as bad as they were because of it.

"I'll sleep if you sleep." Which meant he intended to curl around Albert as tightly as he could, that feeling of powerlessness that had driven him down here--now more vague than anything--fueling the clingy inclination.

The German huffs at the bargain Jet set on the table, but it's a fair point. Even if tonight Albert got more sleep already than Jet did, he's not generally in the habit of sleeping much in these surroundings and it's starting to show. Jet's not the only one who may end up looking like a ring-tailed rodent.

"Fine, if it gets you into bed," he sighs, but it's an affectation. He knows what Jet means by his caveat and to tangle himself up in his partner sounds like just this side of heaven.

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In the evening, I've got to roam

Training Center- Painting on walls and trsnsporters(??)

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