I sense it now, the water's getting deep

[pythianjudgment]

Who| Terezi, OPEN
What| Terezi's back from the mini-arena and there's a lot on her mind.
Where| District 3 suites
When| After the mini-arena plot, before Thicker Than Blood [backdated a little]
Warnings/Notes| Mentions of drowning, but that's probably it.


For the first time, returning from an arena, Terezi isn't faced with the overwhelming sense that she needs to apologize for her actions. There's no hurt or betrayal. Well... maybe a little. She's still not entirely sure what was up with Susannah, but that doesn't sting so much, since she barely knows the girl.

Instead, Terezi's mind is preoccupied with other things. Other regrets. She heads back to her district suite and promptly folds herself neatly into one of the couches. The TV is on, but she doesn't seem to be paying attention to it. It's just noise, compared to the thoughts rolling around in her head.

She should have picked a different trap, she thinks. It had seemed so simple at the time to meet the deep water with haste rather than caution. She could have swam more carefully and avoid the things that grasped and clawed beneath her treading. The traps in the District 3 section might have been quicker. Electrocution was a pretty fast way to go, albeit rather painful. But she didn't think any of those deaths were going to be pain-free. That wasn't how the capitol played it's game. Time had been running out, either way. It was so quick and so easy to feign carelessness. To make her actions look like panic rather than suicide. She hadn't regretted anything in that arena--not until something had snatched her and dragged her under.

She shudders a little at the recollection, wraps her arms around herself and breathes deep--reminding herself that she still can. Drowning had been a horrible way to go. Once underwater, her struggles hadn't been feigned in the least. She fought her hardest to get back to the surface, to try something else. Fought until her lungs burned and panic set in at being so thoroughly blind. Fought until she finally tried to gasp for air that she couldn't reach. She'd been scared--that it wouldn't be entertaining or convincing enough, that they wouldn't bring her back. But it was, and they did. Or they were lying to begin with. Either way, she's here and she doesn't care to figure out which it was just yet.

All she really cares about is existing right now, breathing deep and trying not to remember the feeling of the water around her. It's going to be a while before she can stand to get wet again.

Comments

[silberfuchs]

"I suppose, though whatever you fixed would just get undone again when the day restarted." He shrugs, gratified to see Terezi cheering up just a bit. As obnoxious as she was on their first meeting, he'd rather she be that way than curled on the couch in emotional turmoil.

"Though you are right, humans do make some very stupid movies." He hasn't bothered going to the cinema in a very long time, preferring older films. The kind in black and white only played on the classic movie channels at god awful hours of the night. He could go on about how 'modern' movies are so violent and so focused on sex or are all sequels or adaptations of books where the book is beyond better, but he'd long since been (repeatedly) told to shut up on those opinions by multiple parties so he doesn't elaborate.

[pythianjudgment]

Terezi is not exactly a renowned movie critic, but she's pretty sure that she knows enough to know that most movies out there are crap. Human or Alternian. At least a good portion of the ones that Karkat has shown her are crap, which is a larger portion than she wishes it would be. Then again, it could also be a poor sampling procedure.

"Tell me more about your dumb human movies." She curls her knees up to her chest again. This time it's less in emotional turmoil and more in making herself comfortable. The mug of cocoa is still clutched in her hands, cooling as she sips periodically. "I have to keep up on the culturally backwards things that my cosmic offspring produces."

[silberfuchs]

"I don't watch a lot of them myself, I prefer to read, but Jet seems to like them. Baseball movies were a short-lived trend..." He pauses, trying to remember details. "There was one with angels helping a down and out team to succeed as I recall. Oh! And high adventure or super hero films where physics and history are apparently little details that no one pays much attention to. There is no conceivable way that turning the earth backwards would turn back time."

Apparently Superman hit a sore spot by the look of Albert's impressively (comically) deep frown.

[pythianjudgment]

A bit of a grin pulls it's way onto Terezi's lips at the scent of Albert's frown. "I am pretty sure that stopping and reversing the rotation of a planet would not only not turn back time, but would probably cause widespread natural disasters and mass extinctions." If it was even possible at all. It shouldn't be worth noting that he's pretty much proving her point about human movies being dumb.

"And the angel movie just sounds unrealistic. Why would angels care about sports? Unless they get the devour the mangled carcasses of the losing team?"

[silberfuchs]

"I think our cultures may have very different ideas of angels," Albert supplies tactfully. The more he learns about Trolls the more savage they sound to him, but they're technologically advanced too. Troll evolution must have been very different than that of Humans.

[pythianjudgment]

"Probably. I've heard that they're not exactly similar." She just enjoys remarking on how soft and squishy human culture is compared to hers. It makes for some great faces, when she points out the more glaring differences.

"You can bet that we probably have a movie like that, though. It's a shame I can't replicate them from home."

[silberfuchs]

"It would be nice if we could. I could stand even a small reminder of home." Not where he came from before this directly, but Germany. He misses Berlin, or even New York despite never having lived there. He hadn't been back in over thirty years but something of Jet must have rubbed off on him in the form of nostalgia.

"I'm curious, what is your world like?"

[pythianjudgment]

"Nothing like this, that's for sure." Unless you counted the overbearing oppressive system of government. But that isn't the sort of comparison that you make out loud and expect to be overlooked by said oppressive government.

"What sort of description are you looking for? Physical? Geographical? Cultural? Historical?"

[silberfuchs]

"I'm not sure. Maybe start with the most glaring differences?" Of which it sounds like there are many, but he's damned curious and at least with Terezi he won't feel vaguely threatened every time he asks a question like with Initiate. Not that Initiate has ever been anything but cordial with him despite the religious inflections to his speech, but there's something running in the background of everything he says that always leaves Albert unsettled.

[pythianjudgment]

"That is still a long list to start with!" she practically whines. Honestly, she's not even sure where to begin. He wants the most glaring differences, so maybe she should just give him all the bad stuff first.

"We're a space-faring conquest-driven race. Our home-world Alternia is populated entirely by children and the Jadebloods who take care of the Mothergrub. Because the adults are off discovering, invading, subjugating, murdering, and pillaging new worlds. In that order, and in progressively larger and larger distances from Alternia.

Everything is survival of the fittest. Literally everything. We're hatched in batches by the thousands in the brooding caverns. Our first task after prying open our beady eyes is to find our way out of the caverns without being eaten, stepped on, or otherwise killed by the natural fauna or other grubs. That's what we call the Trials.

We don't have parents. Most of us have a lusus, one of the natural fauna I mentioned, but this one is supposed to protect us and teach us basic survival. If we make it past the Trials, a lusus with matching blood is supposed to pick us as it's ward. Lusus quality varies drastically, so it's a touchy subject for some trolls.

After that, we're given the chance to create our own dwellings. We're all natural architects. We design the dwelling and the drones build it for us. Higher castes are usually allowed to have more expansive hives. If you want to move for any reason, there's also prefabricated hivestems around. And a bunch of abandoned hives from dead wrigglers, which happens a lot. We're not prone to playing gently. You can't turn your back on anyone, or you might suddenly find a knife in it. Our lives don't generally ever stop being violent or geared towards our own survival."