[Open] Sometimes with turbulence

[aboveangrybees]

Who| Steve & Anyone
What| It's been a crazy couple of weeks.
Where| A little bit of everywhere
When| After Cruentus' announcement, but also backdating welcome.
Warnings/Notes| There will be mention of: Arena Death, the District 3 Tragedy, and the Abuse of a Punching Bag. In one tag, which will be marked, there will be mentions of Nazis and the Holocaust.
You can date anything as far back as two weeks ago when Steve got out of the arena, but for time reference: The Training Center is Anytime Post District Three Announcement and the Speakeasy is Anytime Post Quarantine.


1. Roof:

[Up here on the roof, the air feels fresher. Away from everything, up here it feels like a small escape, even if he never can. His mind is always going over plans and ideas for how to take this place down, going over maps Lonestar shared and ideas for communication - especially after learning about the chip and it's upgrade.

All of it being thought out as his hand flies across the paper sketching - people, places, memories, the plant to his left, nothing anyone could look at and see any of his thoughts. If anyone is up here too long with him, he'll end up sketching them too.

But even if he's drawing or looking out at the city on thought or reading, Steve looks up when people come too near and acknowledges them with a nod.]


2. Training Center:

[It isn't as if he thinks his slight change in routine will go unnoticed, how after what happened to District Three he could be found down in the training center more often, but he keeps what he does down here varied. Hopefully to keep them thrown off to precisely his reasons for being down here more often.

Working at multiple stations, using them to practice skills and to gain new ones. Not just things like making a fire or fishing hook, but also his body in all aspects, especially his parkour training and stamina. Sometimes beating the snot out of a punching bag.

The frustrations of what happened and being helpless to act now is what's driving him into the routine change, but it's also to keep in shape and his mind sharp for the day he finally gets to take on the capitol.]


3. Speakeasy:

This is a good place; yeah it's useful, but more than that, it's got an atmosphere he can appreciate. A reminder of the days before blood and ice and war. Even the name feels right to him. Everywhere in the Capitol is behind enemy lines, so he'll never forget his situation or be properly comfortable, but it's nice to have that moment of memory.

So, he's not surprised to realize he's coming here whenever he feels like meeting someone. Maybe make connections, find people with similar goals against the capitol - a task too big for even him to take on alone.

He greets anyone who approaches him with a nod and if they are familiar a hello along with it. The company is welcome, he doesn't come here to be alone with his typically non-alcoholic drink.


((OOC: Prose or Brackets work fine by me! I like both.))

Comments

[hiccup1puberty0]

Despite years of being respected by his village having helped him lay a lot of his old insecurities to rest, Hiccup still got a slight thrill over people wanting to be friendly with him. Fifteen years of being left out and treated like a perennial pain in the behind had still taken its toll.

That was why he practically bounced his way over to take a seat near Steve. He took out his notebook and pencil, making it clear he'd had the same idea as Steve.

"My name's Hiccup. Are you one of those people that does that handshake thing to say hello?"

He held out his hand hesitantly.

Vikings were more about the battle buddy hand clasp than handshakes for greetings. Simply not tossing an ax at someone was considered an acceptable gesture for a friendly hello.

[aboveangrybees]

Hiccup's enthusiasm to both join him and introduce himself brings a smile to Steve's face. It's refreshing in it's own way, being a more uncommon trait amongst the tributes around here. So, Steve doesn't do anything to dissuade it.

"Well, it's nice to meet you, Hiccup, I'm Steve," he breathes a short but good-natured laugh, "and yeah, I'm one of them, though it's only one of many greetings back home," still, Steve takes the offered hand and gives it a shake, tempering back his strength. It feels too rude to not accept it even if the kid doesn't seem to share the culture.

"Anyone explain it to you?"

[hiccup1puberty0]

"What, explain this place or explain the handshakey thing? Because I've been figuring out this place just fine, despite it not making any sense whatsoever. I'm just kinda winging it there. But nobody's explained the handshakey thing."

He got comfy and started sketching one of the far off buildings with his pencil, a crude-looking thing that was clearly handmade. The leather-bound notebook itself was worn down and weathered as if it had endured being left out in the elements and was clearly filled with drawings and notes. Anytime Hiccup lifted his hand enough for the wind to ruffle a page it flipped through the pages and gave glimpses of a world that seemed more like something out of a child's imagination than something real. Little penciled dragons flew through soft, cloudy penciled skies and mountains rose up beneath them, jagged and tall. Enormous men and women that looked like mountains themselves, dressed like fantasy Vikings, danced through the pages. Here and there, the wind ruffled a page to reveal schematics for various things - cisterns, bucket and pulley systems.

Hiccup kept smoothing the pages down, back to the one with his drawing, but anytime he got really distracted looking out at the buildings, the wind caught at them again.

"Back home, people shake hands like that sometimes but it's more a 'lo, we go into battle together as brothers, let us raise unholy horror upon our enemies together, bestest of buddies' kinda thing. Not a hello."

Despite working on his drawing, he was apparently very, very chatty.

[aboveangrybees]

The images he catches sight of are interesting in their own right. It makes him wonder if that's real depictions from home or ideas and stories from the kid's head. Steve used to draw things for his stories and ideas when he was younger and in college, but once the war came up, such things got left in the dust.

He opens his own sketch book again, seeming to be working on a very detailed sketch of a nearby plant. This plant wasn't entirely familiar to him, so this was his way of familiarizing himself with it; learn more about it by drawing it. On the other page seems a rough sketch of a woman's face and a small cartoon doodles of animals doing silly little human things. He lays a couple more lines on the plant, listening to Hiccup chat away.

"That must be quite the handshake," Steve sounds amused, but as he speaks, his hand moves away from the plant and to a blank space below it, begins a cartoony doodle of two people shaking hands. "For where I'm from, it was originally to show you meant someone no harm, that you weren't armed, come in peace in a sense. Stuck around as a greeting after showing you're unarmed became unnecessary," Steve read about it in books growing up. Silly facts like these were some of his favorite to read about.

[hiccup1puberty0]

Hiccup got a glimpse of the drawing of the woman but said nothing about it. That was a rude thing to do when someone was drawing, and he'd lost count of the times it had been done to him. Sometimes one of his friends looked over his shoulder and made stupid comments if they found him parked somewhere sketching something that wasn't dragons. (Dragons were considered perfectly normal to draw when they spent so much time learning about them).

"Aaah, that makes sense." Just like you had to drop any weapons and nudge them away when meeting a dragon that was frightened of armed humans. Same went if you were meeting other people - leaving your sword in its sheathe or your axe strapped to your back was the smart thing if you didn't want a fight. "Where do you come from that showing you're unarmed when you meet someone isn't necessary anymore, though? Where I come from, an axe is generally considered just as much an accessory as it is a weapon, but that's Vikings for you. We don't use them on dragons anymore, but old habits die hard."

[aboveangrybees]

Steve has to think a second how to describe it, because it's not something he ever really thought on. To him, carrying a weapon was becoming infrequent when he was a kid and even more so when he woke up in the future. Not that people didn't still, just wasn't a necessity. Or not a much as it was when law was looser and people could shoot and get away with it.

Well, he can give the most logical explanation for it, but he can't say for sure if it's entirely accurate.

"Well, it used to be, but time went on, society became more organized, too large, so laws were set in place and people to enforce them, so, after a while, people started to feel safe enough to not carry weapons as often, went from there," weapons also grew more dangerous, so more need to restrict those too, but he doesn't go into it right now.

No, he caught that mention of dragons. "Dragons? Like real ones? Those are just stories back home."

[hiccup1puberty0]

When Hiccup really thought about it it wasn't that strange that people eventually became more peaceful in other places and had more rules and less fighting. Despite the weapons that people still carried about on Berk, they'd certainly come to use them less. Gobber's stall, at one time overloaded with customers that needed weapons to be made and repaired, was more often used to make dragon saddles anymore. Gobber and Hiccup sharpened the odd sword now and again but with their usual ongoing peace, weapons didn't get worn out as easily.

It was an interesting idea, a world where things were so peaceful that people felt safe without weapons.

It was an interesting idea he liked and planned to ask more about, especially about what kind of rules they had, but then Steve asked him about his favorite subject ever.

"What's up with all these places that don't have dragons?" Hiccup asked, looking amused. "You're not the first person to tell me they're just stories where you come from, which boggles the mind a bit because they are very real where I come from and were a very big problem until about five years ago. That's when we stopped our constant war with them and managed to make peace. Now we've got a whole band of them that's moved in with us on our island."

[aboveangrybees]

Steve loved books like The Hobbit, so hearing about dragons really existing in someone's world is immensely fascinating. Fantasy and Science Fiction stories, especially radio dramas like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, those were his bread and butter growing up. He was sick in bed so often, books and radio dramas filled in the space between art and near dying.

So, Hiccup has his undivided attention right now.

"Sounds incredible," Steve says it honestly. "So, was there a reason you were at war with them? Had to be an conflict you could settle to make peace."

People seem to go to war for selfish reasons. Not to say they don't sometimes fight for the good cause, to do the right thing, but the more he read about his time under, the more he realized how really rare it was. So, he's curious what could make a war between people and dragons. Though, if The Hobbit was good example, Dragons were also selfish.

[hiccup1puberty0]

That led right into a subject that Hiccup adored talking about: dragonology. His eagerness to talk about it was all over his face. He sounded just like a kid enthusiastically showing off his baseball cards or gushing about his bug collection.

"It all has to do with their natural hierarchy. See, there are alpha dragons, who tend to control large groups of them - multiple nests even, in a given area. They're kind of the pack leaders. Most of the time they're pretty benevolent and are seen as a protector, provider, and leader of the nests in their territory, though you can sometimes have ones that control the others more maliciously. Then sometimes in an individual nest, you'll get a dragon that acts almost like the nest's queen, like they're bees. Most of them also do that in a benevolent way, keeping the peace, making sure all the dragons get food. But a really nasty, huge queen was in charge of the nest of the dragons near our island and it made them steal food constantly to feed it. And since the larger dragons that are usually the alphas are getting rarer and rarer, there were no stronger dragons to challenge it. To have enough and not get eaten themselves they raided our island and kept stealing all our livestock, our catches of fish, anything they could take. Half the village burned down several times a year, people lost limbs or their lives - and we killed thousands of them, too. But they were more terrified of the queen than us."

He held up a hand in a fist like it was a rock, and made his other hand swoop in to smack against it.

"So we had an unstoppable force meeting an incredibly stubborn immovable object. Or objects, as it were. My people never, ever give up anything without a fight and were too stubborn to leave - especially since we didn't really have anywhere to go. But the dragons needed the food, too, and need warm places to nest at like the volcano the queen was in, so we were killing each other for years. It became a way of life, fighting against them. You weren't a good Viking unless you could take down a dragon."

He shrugged slightly. "Until one of us made friends with them and found out about the queen. Then everything started to change."

There was a part of him that wanted to brag. Bragging was a time-honored Viking tradition, but it wasn't always easy to think of himself as the pride of his village that everyone made him out to be. Now, after everything that had happened with Drago, he was even more prone to humility.