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Who| Helena Wayne and OPEN!
What| Helena dealing with undeath and meeting new people.
When| Post-Announcement
Where| District 4 Suites; Common Area; Training Centre
Warnings/Notes| None as yet?

[Prompt 1: District 4 Suites]

For the past few days, since returning back to life, Helena has holed herself inside of her room, fiddling with the communicator, studying a map of the city (because it was always good to be familiar with your surroundings) and listening to this whole destruction of District Three thing. She doesn’t have any emotional connection it, not yet. She’s still dealing with the fact that, somehow, she’s alive after having been killed.

I’m going to kill Loki. Possibly literally.

Still. It’s time for her to venture out. She can’t stay holed up forever. It’s not like her.

[Prompt 2: Commons]

Food. Food is good. Food is always good. Though what she’s craving is something hideously junky and laden with carbs and sugars and possibly everything that’s bad for her, she’s fought against the urge. If she’s going to stay in tip-top shape, if she’s going to win next time (and Helena really does hope that she’ll win), then she needs to stay healthy. Lean meats, lots of veggies, milk, and water. All the things a healthy, growing teenage girl needs.

And all I really want is a cheeseburger topped with bacon, chili, onion rings, and barbecue sauce.

But no. She can reward herself later. For now…well, for now, she’s going to try to be serious and healthy about this.

[Prompt 3: Training Centre]

She’s a fierce little fighter, but there’s not a lot of finesse there, as anyone watching would see. She’s a tough brawler - all street fighting fury but no martial artistic finesse. But she is working out her anger and her frustration, which is probably a good thing. She needs to be calm, cool, collected, and centered. She’s lost, but this place more than anywhere makes her feel comfortable at some sort of level. After all, this was what she’d done for hours at end back at home. Fighting, training, honing.

Between it all, though, she takes breaks. Rests. Watches everyone else, and scopes out the competition.

And maybe the possible allies? I don’t know. Can there be such a thing here?

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Joel shakes his head, almost sadly. "I come from a place worse than this, in some ways. Bow and arrow takes a lot of arm strength, and you have to hold it just right." To demonstrate, he shows her how he holds the arrow against the bowstring.

"You gotta pull it back, far as you can, and hold it there steady while you take aim."

"I can't imagine a place worse than this," Helena says. "I'm sorry." She picks an arrow up herself and mirrors Joel's posture. Pulling back the bow string was...not easy. But she does it, and struggles a little to hold that posture. She aims as best she can at the target. "Okay. How bad does this look, boss?"

He shrugs off the sympathy - there's no point, it doesn't matter.

"Could be worse," he says mildly. "Like most things, it's about muscle memory. Here - " He gives her a glance, as though to ask if it's okay - then reaches over to adjust her fingers on the bowstring. "Like that. Try aiming for that dummy."

When Joel goes into teacher mode, he really gets into it.

Helena looks at the dummy, and then at the arrow in relation to the dummy. This feels normal. Training. Having someone train her. This is something she knows. Joel will notice a release of some of the tension that Helena's been holding once he gets into teacher mode.

She looses the arrow...and misses the head of the dummy by about an inch.

"Okay. That...could have gone better."

"Could've gone way worse," he points out with a shrug. "You've got a good eye. Try aiming for the broader target - the chest. Better chance of hittin' somethin', even if you're off a little."

"You should have seen me the first time, with the throwing daggers I was training with. I'd been aiming for a dummy...instead, my throw went wide and I punctured the tires of one of my dad's favourite cars." It had been an early model Batmobile. Bruce hadn't been all that excited with her. She had improved, though. Just as she would improve here.

Helena nods and chooses another arrow, once again nocking it, pulling the string back, and aiming. She waits, focuses on the dummy, and looses the arrow. She doesn't get a bullseye...but she does get the torso. A few inches to the left, and it would have been a perfect hit.

"I don't get how Robin Hood does it," she half-whispers. Sure, he probably isn't real, but Helena had grown up idolizing the hero much like how her father had grown up idolizing Zorro. After all, Robin Hood was a thief, like her mother, and a hero, like her father.

What wasn't to love?

"Practice makes perfect," she says. "I'll get good at this, sooner or later."

"Years and years of practice, that's how he does it," Joel says with a snort. "Like I said, it's mostly all muscle memory and building up your arm strength. You're already doin' better than most people would their first time."

Joel is really good at the encouragement thing. "Arrows have almost the same stopping power as bullets, and you don't have to worry about givin' away your location with all the noise of a gun."

He really is. Helena already feels better about trying to work with the bow and arrow. "That way I can still perch somewhere, take someone down, and it won't really alert others to my presence." She smiles. Okay. Depending on the next Arena, she can maybe make this work. At least, it's an option. Granted, with the new Arena...well. She'd be let loose with the others. That means that she would have a good chance of getting to a decent weapon.

"I've had some practice with aim and throwing long-range weaponry. It's not the same thing, not by a long shot, I know, but..." aiming grappling hooks, bat-bolas, batarangs, throwing talons...that all had helped her a little bit.

All she needs is to get used to the new weaponry.

"You didn't pick all this up here," she says. "Not in the short amount of time that you've been here. What did you do before all of this?"

What did you do. Such a simple question on the face of it, but the answer is so complicated, Joel almost doesn't know where to start. Maybe the easiest answer to that would be smuggler, or, if he wants to stretch the truth, carpenter - though he hasn't done carpentry for twenty years.

He hasn't really been a smuggler for about a year, either.

She asks it in the way someone would ask someone else what their job is - back in the days when people had regular jobs that could be talked about like that. It's been a long time since that's been the case for most people in Joel's world, though.

"I survived," he finally says with a shrug.

Helena watches him for the moment. It's not the whole story, obviously, but if he doesn't want to elaborate, she doesn't want to push him. It'd be all kinds of rude, and though she was born with an extremely (un)healthy sense of curiosity, Selina had also raised her daughter to be polite. "Well, that explains why you seem to know so much," Helena says. "I mean. You know." She indicates the bow in her hand. "Can't have been an easy thing, surviving." More and more, Helena was getting the feeling that the weak weren't brought here.

"It never is," he says quietly. No part of it is. The part where you keep going after the people you love are gone. The part where you give up pieces of your conscience, your humanity, for the sake of staying alive another day.

But the other thing isn't easy, either. Laying down and dying.

"You should watch some of the arena footage, if you can," he says finally. "It's good to know what everyone's like - who might help you, and who to avoid."

Helena doesn't intend to die. "Do people really work together here?" She doesn't believe that they do, so far. "I mean, the end goal seems to be winning, and it doesn't seem like they're found of a tie." Tie-breaking probably involves one person literally breaking the other, Helena assumes. "But you're right. Studying who else I'm going to be with will probably help as much as, you know, working on my fighting and survival skills." Though if the next Arena has a fully stocked mall or something, that would be nice.

"Course they do, you don't think everyone takes the official rules seriously, do you?" Joel snorts. "Everyone's got folks they try to look after. The Capitol just rigs the arenas so they're nearly impossible to survive for long regardless of whether other tributes are tryin' to kill you."

"Well..." Helena trails off. She seems a little sheepish. "Okay. I may have been a little naive here." Granted, her first time in the arena, when she'd tried to team-up with someone, she'd ended up dead.

"Great. So if someone doesn't manage to kill me, the Arena will." That was about as comforting as a crowbar to the head. She was going to have to be smart there, then. Not just with people, but with her surroundings as well. More than she had expected.

"Are you someone I can count on to have my back?"

"That is the point. Only one person survives every arena," Joel points out. "Everyone else dies, every single time. No exceptions. Chances are, you'll die a lot."

He sighs, glancing over the weapons racks. "I won't kill you. I don't, mostly, unless we get attacked. I've got some kids I look after, though. But if you need help and I can help you, I will." That's really the best he can do.

"Gee, how comforting," Helena says off-handedly. A constant cycle of death and rebirth didn't sound fun at all. Should've just called myself Phoenix instead of Robin, clearly.

She nods, places the bow down, and holds her hand out to Joel. "I appreciate that," she says. "I won't make with the killing you either. Unless, you know." He asks her to or something. Which would be weird, but then she's already made a similar sort of deal with Sirius.

It's like the plotline of a ridiculously bad Lifetime movie.

She's not surprised that he seems to have kids that he looks after, though. Whether he means to or not, Helena senses something paternal in him. Or maybe it's just that he reminds her of Bruce. Either, she smiles up at him. "And thank you. For the pointers. I'm going to keep them in mind." And maybe practice more with the bow. It really does seem like a fun weapon.

"Don't hurt my kids, you've got nothin' to fear from me," Joel says with a nod. Something tells him this one - clearly not much more than a child herself - probably won't actively threaten Ellie or the others.

"And sure. Anytime." Which - is true enough, he realizes with a slight jolt of surprise. It surprises him how much time he spends here, showing other people things. Teaching. Sharing what he knows.

"My name's Joel, by the way."

"Oh, jeez," Helena says, shaking her head. "I'm sorry. Manners." This place had clearly already robbed Helena of one or two. "I'm Helena." She reaches her hand out to Joel for him to shake. "It's an honest pleasure, Joel."

Manners aren't really something he thinks about, but it is a good idea to know what to call someone, in case you need to yell at them. Having a name is better than having to shout 'hey you!'

He's still weird about shaking hands, but he only hesitates for a moment before taking hers. It's maybe a little awkward, due to him being long out of practice, but it's firm, nonetheless, his hand calloused from years of hard labor and heavy lifting.

"Nice meetin' you," he drawls, dredging that up from his memory. "Good luck with the training."

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