thecapitol | we wine, we dine, and everything is fine [open!]

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we wine, we dine, and everything is fine [open!]

Who| Everyone still in the Capitol. If the Hunger Games is a significant part of your life, or if you wield any influence at all in the Capitol, you've received an invitation. Unless you're Victory Hannibal.
What| Week 1 viewing party! It's horror-movie/monster themed, so break out your best sexy witch/vampire/mummy costumes! Also, feel free to use it for sponsor schmoozing.
Where| A ballroom, and some adjacent rooms.
When| Just before the Arena begins, and into the night.
Warnings/Notes| Watch this space for warnings. Also, feel free to make closed threads amongst yourselves, but Stephen will likely at some point come up to greet you personally. If you think your Capitol character would be familiar with the Reagan family, make an OOC note, and I'll give you a quick rundown on their sordid past.

There is a fog machine.

The fog hovers around the guests' knees and ankles, doing nothing to impede visibility or movement, but it creates a ~mysterious~ atmosphere. The ballroom is modest, by Capitol standards, able to comfortably hold about a hundred people. There's plenty of space. The room is dimly lit from concealed sources that nonetheless throw the guests' shadows into frightening shapes on the wall. There are tables laden with food along one wall, and plenty of comfortable seating, for projected onto the far wall is a live feed from the Games.

Through the doors are smaller, more intimate rooms, with cushy couches and a smaller screen apiece for watching the Games a little more privately. One pair of double-doors leads out onto a balcony with a beautiful view of the city.

Everyone who received the invitation was informed of the theme, of course: no pressure, but if you want your outfit to match (and he's sure you do), make sure it's a little bit -- spooky.

Stephen himself, tastefully attired in a shimmery black suit, cape, and vampire teeth, is moving about the guests, giving friendly greetings to those he knows, making polite conversation with those he does not, ensuring that everybody (or at least, everybody possible) is having a good time. So what if his smile looks a little fixed, every once in a while? It's a party. What could possibly be wrong?

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How quaint.

A party where everyone played at being a monster. All porcelain fangs, and colored contacts. Gallons of fake blood to disguise all the old stains.

His strange, serpentine eyes of full display - a glittering red and gold - Wesker watched them mill about like dark, fluttering moths, wondering to himself who they thought they were fooling.

If they were truly so deluded as to believe it themselves.

She was taking a little break from the mingling with prospective sponsors to take a breather. That was when she noticed the strange gut. She vaguely remembered Harley talking about him, although she had seemed far from complimentary. It made her curious.

"Hey," she said, offering him scissor hands to shake. "Enjoying yourself?"

The pale head tipped, the slitted pupils so narrow the strange two-tone eyes were almost nothing but iris. A reptilian measuring the young mentor before him. (Like a snake, trying to decide if it really could swallow her whole.)

His eyes moved down to the offered 'hand,' but didn't take it.

"Always," he murmured dryly.

So. That was the kind of guy he was. Mindy might have been put off by this, as people who went out of their way to be a dick pissed her off. But it was something a little different here, it seemed. He was trying to almost intimidate her, and he was not going to be doing that anytime soon.

She withdrew the hand, still keeping the gaze.

"Figured this was a good time for mentors to talk to each other. Heard your Arena was pretty ruthless."

Wesker didn't go out of his way to do anything. He did exactly what he meant to, exactly when he meant to. And he wasn't about to shake a pile of fake scissors simply because she couldn't be bothered to remove her glove first.

(And he was the rude one.)

"My arena, or me?" he asked, his snake's eyes unblinking.

He still could have shook one of them. They weren't sharp. Douche.

"Every Arena is fucked up, some more than others. Nah, I was talking about you. For some reason, Harley doesn't seem to like you, and she likes everyone."

Children.

"Not as insane as she seems, is she?" he replied easily, almost conversationally.

If she expected for his feelings to be hurt, she'd come to the wrong place.

Manners.

"No, she's not that insane. Spontaneous and totally acting on her ID, sure. But she's not bloodthirsty. She doesn't think the same of you though. So I'm curious. What was going through your mind, in that Arena?"

"That I was going to win."

The blond head tipped, eyes narrowing slightly on Mindy's face. He took a breath, but his senses were too muddled here, the crowd too think to give him anything than the general stink of sweat and the unpleasant chemical aftertaste of makeup and latex.

"A sentiment I would think you'd be familiar with."

"Well." He hadn't said much, and yet he had in a way. It had been implied, of course, that she was pretty ruthless in her area, but in reality she had actually been trying to be careful. She could never have killed people in the Arena like she did back home. No, that kind of thing she saved for really big lowlifes.

"Everyone wants to win for different reasons, have different stories. Me, I had something to prove. People saw me in the last Arena and thought I needed to be protected. Had to show them why I was brought here in the first place."

"You did what you had to."

Including, he was sure they both remembered, shooting a competitor in the back rather than facing him on an even field of play.

"So did I."

Considering she'd been run through the shoulder with an arrow and the guy she faced she knew was a much, much better shot than she was? Yeah, she had definitely did what she had to. The odds were against her, so she had to make it count.

"Can't argue there. So now what's in store for you? Shmoozing for tributes or what?

He smiled. A small, cool curl of his mouth that did nothing to warm his strange eyes.

"Tonight? Yes, I'll do what I can for my dear tributes. Tomorrow... well, that's a new day."

And he kept busy.

(Rome wasn't built, or destroyed, in a day.)

Man, even the way he talked about his tributes seemed, well, slimey. There just seemed to be something very unpleasant overall about Wesker, just as Harley had tried to warn her about. It kept her wondering exactly what he would do to get out on top, when it came to Capitol matters.

Then again, Eva had been just as dubious, hadn't she?

"Wish I understood the reason for the theme," Mindy said, looking amused. "Halloween isn't on us yet."

"In my experience, people rarely need a reason to make a spectacle of themselves."

Especially these people, who didn't breath without making a glittered production out of it.

His eyes flicked away, watching what appeared to be a woman wearing nothing but strategic splashes of bloody body paint, teeter by on slender heels.

"Particularly if one is irony impaired."

Mindy wanted to say something in defense of-no, no she didn't, actually. Considering her win of the last arena involved her life as a superhero being paraded around like some kind of cheap bitch, and before that they were all tromped around in French affects, she knew what he was saying was true.

"I don't think these people would get what irony was if it fell on their heads from the sky like a brick," Mindy said. "There are people in my world that do something like that, and they're called hipsters. They're not looked at too favorably."

"I recognize the term," he drawled, eyes returning to Mindy, inhuman pupils shifting - re-sizing - in the shifting light. "We had them in mine as well, before the end."

Then, he imagined, Darwin had gotten the best of them at last.

The philosophical world-view of its dinner mattered little to a hungry infected.

What was seriously up with this guy's eyes? Mindy didn't usually let small things bother her, but this was just making her unnerved. What was he?

"The end? What happened in yours? I keep hearing about zombie apocalypses from other people."

"It does seem to be popular, doesn't it?"

Though whether that was because mankind truly had a knack for finding ways to reorganize the food-chain, across time and space, or simply because the Capitol preferred the skillset such worlds inhabitants typically had and was skewing the data, Wesker couldn't say.

"Though we simply called ours the 'Infected.'"

Much more straight-forward, much more clinical.

'Zombie,' in Wesker's opinion, was far to fanciful a word for such a base creature.

"If by popular you mean eerily fucked up, sure," Mindy said. "Then again, they're bringing zombies here, or one anyway, and apparently MADE people zombies in the games. I can only imagine what other fucked up thing they're going to do next."

Suddenly, something did seem to click. They were dressed like Halloween, and there was the arena. The Arena always seemed to run on fear, so...

"Wait a minute," she said softly. "This whole thing. The Arena. It reminds me of something I saw awhile back, something right out of Evil Dead. It can't be a coincidence we're dressed like this, can it?"

"A coincidence, being dressed like monsters in a society built on fear and power." Wesker's mouth curled, a sharp sneer, white-teeth flashing. His head tipped, slanting a look down at Mindy.

"What do you think?"

"That's a acute observation." Wished she thought of it, actually. Said a lot about this place, considering.

"I think its a clue to the Arena. Not that they haven't gone monster before, but that's a few. This place, look at it. So much fog, slight stirring...something big is going to happen, and I think we're just the mirror for it. Some kind of fucked up irony or something."

"It wouldn't surprise me," Wesker drawled. "The Capitol has a history of imitating the events of the arena."

He shifted slightly, a slow flex of muscle, and tucked his hands neatly behind his back, slipping into an easy parade rest.

At east, but attentive.

"One might think they felt left out."

"I don't think they ever really feel left out," Mindy said. "Everything we do is for their amusement. If anything what they like to do is move us around like pieces, give us backdrops. Keep things exciting for all the people watching."

This evening was more than a testament of that, after all.

"It's not just about the show they're watching," Wesker told her, with the cool confidence of someone who knew what he was talking about.

Someone with some experience in the area.

"It's equal parts the show they're putting on - for each other, for themselves."

For mysterious wizards behind the curtain.

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