thecapitol | Thicker Than Blood Start

Thicker Than Blood Start

For Tributes with keen eyes, they'll notice that Peacekeeper presence seems increased and yet infinitely more ineffective in the last few weeks. Peacekeepers seem harried, as do the Stylists, and most of the Escorts titter and plot without alerting the Tributes as to what, exactly, is so exciting. They simply say that this weekend they'll know.

And so it happens that on the weekend in question, the Tributes are woken by their Escorts early and brought to a restaurant for a hearty breakfast. The restaurant is nothing spectacular, although they seem to be trying to make an impression on the television cameras that float around. The sleepy, cranky meal goes by and then the Tributes are led back to their Suites for a mandatory meeting.

Sitting on couches and the floor, in chairs and on windowsills, standing off to the side - people from the Tributes' homes are waiting to greet them in each District Suite. Some are confused, some accepting, some frightened and some elated to see their beloved. Either way, it should be an eventful reunion.

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"He's right, this place is low tech compared to what we're used to. Especially when you compare it side by side with worlds like Colu. Not that all that technology did our universe any good but that is neither here nor there."

It was still a source of bitterness and grief for all of them, it seemed, the loss of their universe.

He held out a tentacle for a limbshake.

"Name's Reep Daggle, but you can call me Cham. It's short for Chameleon. If this place wasn't cramping my style, you'd see why that's my nickname, but apparently they thought the only way I could enjoy my visit was if my shapeshifting got a good power dampening."

Carlos took the tentacle and barely flinched. Again, he had seen more horrifying things, and although they were usually trying to kill him at the time, this one obviously was not, and Carlos didn't want to be rude. His air was coolly professional -- that's about all he could manage, for now.

He picked up on the bitter undertone, though, and frowned.

"What happened to your universe?"

There was a pause and Cham's face was expressionless only because he didn't particularly have face right now. If he'd had one, Carlos would have seen the deepest regret.

"Multiversal crisis - we had a lot of those. Some other supervillains harnessed the power of a cosmic being to mess with timelines. The thing with messing with timelines is that means certain futures no longer get to exist anymore."

There was a gentle slope to his "shoulders" that looked like he was almost deflating inside his sackloth.

"Bad guys though we may be, that wasn't exactly one where we were rooting for Team Evil - we might have even sided with the heroes if we'd had the chance, despite how badly we got on with our home governments, but we didn't have much of a chance to try to save it."

Edited 2014-04-21 00:58 (UTC)

As he listened with sympathy, words came unbidden to the surface of Carlos's mind, bubbling up like noxious gases in a tar pit:

The unraveling of all things.

Carlos didn't recognize the phrase, nor did he remember where he'd heard it. The look on Carlos's face grew only more troubled, both with sympathy for Cham's universe and confusion about the strange phrase.

Best to put it out of his mind for now.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said, and meant it. "How did you escape the cataclysm?"

"Everything was falling apart. Brainy worked a little magic."

He kept it vague, not knowing what Brainy had told anyone. Fortunately, that still matched what little Brainy had told Carlos about traveling from universe to universe.

"We've been traveling across the multiverse ever since."

"Right, right," said Carlos, nodding. "He mentioned that you had the technology to transport yourselves safely across dimensions." A breath, then he went on: "Thank you for you willingness to discuss this with me. I apologize if my questions were overly personal -- I don't really know how to talk professionally about the destruction of an entire universe."

He cleared his throat. "My name is Carlos," he replied. "I'm a scientist. I've been in Panem for about four months now. I still can't agree to the, uh, offpsring thing, but if you have any questions, I can do my best to answer them."

Cham waved a tentacle.

"There is no way to talk about it professionally. Don't worry about it."

He did have questions, though. If he was a scientist, he might be the type Lyle and Brainy would hang around and he seemed to know them.

"I do have a question. You seem to know Lyle and Brainy. Do you know if they're holding up okay? They'd never say if they weren't."

Carlos pulled a slow breath as he considered the question.

"They keep to themselves a lot, so I don't know them that well," he admitted. "I know Lyle better than Brainy, mostly because we both live in these rooms and do science together sometimes."

He suspected that they were seeing each other, after they left the bar together that one night, but Carlos was not about to mention that. It wasn't his place to say.

"None of us are really happy here," said Carlos, resisting the urge to rub his shoulder where, under the lab coat and shirt, a bandage covered a Capitol-inflicted burn, "but if they're miserable, they're hiding it very well. I think they're all right."

Interesting, how these villain types looked out for one another. Carlos was honestly growing more and more scientifically curious about what qualified as villainy in Brainy and Lyle's world. Sure, Lyle talked about poisoning people, but Carlos had never seen him actually do it, and Brainy built lasers, but really, what self-respecting scientist didn't know how to put together a laser that could cut steel?

"Good to know. If they ever got to the point that it showed that'd be bad news."

It was hard to tell without a face to have expressions on but he seemed pensive.

Strange how much concern he had, wasn't it?

Carlos' body language betrayed his curiosity and while Cham had an idea what it was about, he still asked to make sure.

"You look curious. More questions about what I am or are you wondering why self-professed villains care about each other - or is it a mix of both? Whatever the case, I'm an open book."

He unfurled his tentacles like a flower blooming.

Edited 2014-04-21 03:28 (UTC)

"Both," admitted Carlos, "though since you admitted to having cultists I didn't want to pry too much into what you were, in case you were offended. But I suppose what I'd like to know first is -- as villains, what was it that you did?"

"Murder. Mayhem. Exactly what it says on the tin."

He oozed over to a chair and settled in.

"I'll give you the full skinny, since I like to hear myself talk and they're not going to make any allies if they do the evil insinuation thing without adding a little depth to it. You may want to get comfortable."

He waved a tentacle to the seat opposite him.

Carlos obliged, brushing his lab coat out of the way as he sank into the chair.

"I'm listening," he said, resting his arms on the sides of the chair and propping one ankle up on his knee, leaving his legs loosely crossed. His body language said cautious, but receptive.

"The Legion started out as a youthful superhero team formed by the United Planets as an example of 'interplanetary cooperation.' It was an image thing and we were all teenagers that were someone our worlds wanted to get rid of and who were also exceptional in some way at the same time. Por exemplo, Lyle? Preteen spy-slash-assassin who was killing people at age twelve."

Which was...actually probably true, though Cham tried not to think about how much blood might be on Lyle's hands. He'd never felt it was his right - or anyone's - to ask.

"Brainy? He's descended from one of the worst supervillains who ever lived and most of his family line has gone insane. The kicker is they were all about ten times smarter than the average Coluan. The mutation for that didn't come out as much in him so he got raised like he was already a villain without being much worse than moderately more intelligent than the average Coluan. And me?"

He tried to find the words (aka figure out a good lie). Lyle'd intimated they hadn't gone on much about his background and he could make sure to drop it to him right after this so the lies matched up.

"I'm a Durlan. I'm from a species of shapeshifters and due to various wartime actions before we joined the UP, we weren't what you'd call 'well-liked. My people's religious beliefs involve transformation, emphasis on the assumption of the form of certain things or representation of them. So there's a family line of religious leaders that are honored as representing the best of Durlan society and my family line, which was supposed to represent the worst. A living example of sin they can cast out. We're supposed to be shunned and mistreated our whole lives as a way of the Durlan people parting from their past actions. No one's supposed to worship the scapegoat but -"

His voice went very tense.

"I got a little tired of getting kicked around. And I found some Durlans - and even non-Durlans - that could get behind worshiping a mortal being meant to represent evil."

He went on, "Naturally, my people hated that so I was chosen to represent my world in the Legion, since they knew the rest of the UP had no idea how our religious practices went and knew the survival rate wasn't stellar. That's the place almost all of us came from - the downtrodden and the powerful, all at the same time. The UP practically threw us into meat grinder after meat grinder, without considering what they were creating. They tossed us at the UP's enemies, covered up when we lost people, and followed it up with a propaganda blitz about how victorious the UP was in their spread of peace and democracy through the universe."

Bless Lyle and his ability to confer information without giving away that he was conferring information. Their entire talk had been rich with details to get Cham on the same page.

That was why he was the bossman.

"So what do you think happens when you toss a bunch of scared, messed up kids into mess like that and back them into a corner?"

Edited (formatting ugh srry) 2014-04-22 00:34 (UTC)

Carlos listened quietly, tapping his chin. His face and voice are carefully neutral, carefully professional.

"I assume they rebel. So, your group went rogue? Broke from the United Planets' control and struck out on your own?"

"Bingo. After we lost enough people, we rebelled, and then it was us against the universe. That's the way it's been ever since. If there's anything good in us it's in that - us looking out for each other."

He leaned forward, face tentacles roiling in a way that looked almost friendly.

"So if you're wondering why we're not mustache-twirling types tying babies to railroad tracks, it's because we've been the ones pushed around. We have limits. The occasional dead baby joke aside, we don't hurt kids, we don't mass murder for the hell of it. We'll stab anyone in the eye if they back us into a corner but otherwise it's more merc work. Assassinations of people who aren't actually very nice people, robbery and extortion, death lasers we never actually use. And we wear colorful spandex while doing it."

That painted a pretty little picture, didn't it? Criminals, villains, bad people, but not Capitol bad. Self-serving, not sadistic.

"Of course, in a situation like this, you takes the sides you need to."

"I can't argue against cooperating with the Capitol," admitted Carlos. The burn on his shoulder still stung; though he resisted touching it, Cham was free to gather clues about it from his body language. "You're better off if you do, and besides, we don't really have a choice."

Cham was also free to pick up on the fact that this wasn't something Carlos believed: that he knew something more, but was hiding it.

Cham caught the subtle body language but didn't comment on it.

If he was hiding something, it might be hope, and in a situation like this, you didn't drag hope out into the open where it could be destroyed and you didn't expose the good things that toiled away in secret.

"We're used to being controlled. The stuff happening here has always been the background radiation of our lives. And we threw it off once but you can't always count on being that lucky."

There was a shrug of his "shoulders."

"We're not all that bad. At least you know where you stand with us and we don't take shots at people for no reason. It's about survival, not sadism."

A pause.

"Well, it's a little bit about sadism but some of us are in a better place than the rest of us because we kidnapped a really good therapist. For instance, Lyle's my best friend but I still don't eat any food he makes."

"Yes, I heard he was a poisoner," said Carlos, with more caution than moral judgment. After you lived in a place like Night Vale where journalists are routinely herded up and caused to disappear, and children were issued semiautomatic weapons to bring to school, and violent vigilante justice was encouraged, you lost a lot of your horror at the idea of murder as long as it wasn't happening to you or someone close to you. Carlos didn't have the energy to judge everyone who had taken a life in Night Vale, and he didn't have it here.

Then, he realized that he might have made an unfair assumption.

"...or is it just that he's a terrible cook?"

Because one could easily consider forcing someone else to try experimental recipes sadistic.

Cham waved a tentacle in a lazy "this-or-that" gesture.

"Little of both. Aside from the poison thing, he always burns the popcorn."

Oh, well, that answered that. Some others might have commented on the juxtaposition of the mundane and the terrifying, but not Carlos. He was far, far too used to it.

"Thank you for being so forthcoming about this," said Carlos. "Like I said, I'm a scientist, so I'm very interested in individuals from other worlds, and I'm a District 10 tribute, so I am also interested in whether or not I should run tests on my food before I eat it." This was said completely casually. "Anyway, you said you were from a species of shapeshifters. Do they all share your current basic physiology in their unaltered state?"

"Brainy and Lyle aren't really the best at, shall we say, creating good will with other people. Which we do sometimes - you can't get up to villainy 24/7. I just want them to have a chance."

As for his species, that was something he had no problems talking about.

"They did. (Past tense and all.)" He snaked out some tentacles for Carlos to get a better view. "We, uh, didn't exactly have a peaceful history. The stories went that Durlan civilization destroyed itself in a six-minute war. After that, our planet was a wasteland. Supposedly, we changed ourselves to be able shapeshift to survive. No one even remembered what we used to look like before so we tended to go a little...amorphous when we're not shifting, like this. I tend to go humanoid a lot, though, since I spend so much time with humanoids. One form some Durlans thought we used to take was that of orange humanoids with antennae, so that's the face I tend to wear the most. The girlfriend likes when I actually have lips. Without my powers, I can't shift to it, though."

Edited 2014-04-26 23:03 (UTC)

Ah, right. If their universe was destroyed, Cham would be the only Durlan left. Carlos felt a twinge of guilt -- the use of present tense might have been insensitive.

"Lips matter to most humanoids in romantic relationships, yes," said Carlos, quickly, not really wanting to linger on the subject. "Do you mind if I make notes about this conversation later? I ask because I know it's covered a lot of very personal subjects and if you don't want a record of it lying around, I understand completely."

"It's fine. Just don't let Brainy and Lyle know I said so much. They like to pretend they have social skills."

"All right." Amusement tinged Carlos's voice -- he really didn't mind Brainy and Lyle, eccentric as they were. He probably would have outright admitted to liking them, actually, if they didn't make it so clear that they should be kept at arm's length. After all, Lyle was a poisoner and Brainy was an awkward green bag of mixed friendship signals.

Then again, if what Cham said was true, they might not make bad friends, or at least allies, after all. Carlos had known much worse people. He opened his mouth to say something else, but the communicator on his wrist beeped at him. He glanced at Cham, then back down at the holo-watch. (He still called it a holo-watch in his head, because he thought it sounded cool.)

"I'm sorry, I have to take this," he said, standing up. "Excuse me."

"No problem."

He appreciated the opportunity to add to Lyle and Brainy's cover.

And the lack of judgementality was a good thing. Hopefully, he'd made them sound more sympathetic so they could keep up the villain routine and not go without gaining allies.

Then, when the time came that they could show their true colors, when they could be Legion, maybe those people would stick by them even more.

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youbarium - 2014-04-28 15:27 (UTC) - Expand

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