thecapitol | The Crowning of Tony Stark

Entry tags:

The Crowning of Tony Stark

Who| Everyone.
What| The Crowning of Tony Stark.
Where| The New Capitol Stark Expo!
When| Friday, late afternoon into the evening.
Notes| This event is mandatory for all Tributes to attend. Even if you do not tag in, your character will attend this party. Peacekeepers will be on high alert, so no funny business.
WARNINGS| Alcoholism / References to Alcoholism.

The Capitol might be known for its extravagance, but Stark Expos have never skimped on a show. Combining the two together could only be a recipe for the most wild indulgences. The center theater takes styling after a arc reactor, with glass ceiling and glowing blue lights set right within the metal and putting a glow to the sky. Lightshows go off on the main stage, the stark logo overhead and a massive screen displaying the Panem flag and Tony Stark's image just behind the dancing Ironettes. A circle plattform going off from the stage, clearly reserved for the guest of honor, features a design Panem's bird in red, gold, and glowing blue.

A globe is featured in the outside gardens, showing off a map of Panem, and the park is filled with artistic statues of destroyed Iron Man amror. But there's no quiet here, not with the fireworks going off all night and the consistent playing of music that is not but sounds an awful lot like that of Daft Punk, Eifel 65, ACDC, and one other song that breaks them up.

Various shows can be found about the gardens, including display models of some of Tony Stark's old weapons and Iron Man suits. Further along guests may find the Avengers display, featuring large portraits of the Avengers and their allies, large red x's going over greyed out portraits of those deemed dead, including Phill Coulson, Natasha Romanoff, and Thor. Along with these portraits can be found the Stark family tree, featuring the Victor Tony Stark and all his relations including apparent son Dave Strider, and Arya Stark, Ancestor of the Stark family, not to mention the great Howard Stark who's accomplishments (and tragic lack of care for Anthony) are lovingly illustrated. One such accomplishment being a "flying car" just a short walk over.

There's plenty for guests to do besides just ogle the brilliant sights however! A bar has been set up with a whole variety of drinking games available from Sink The Battleship and Drink Roulette to an extravagent variation of the classic game, Beer Pong, and an ongoing run of the Games with rules of drinking for each emotional scene, funny incident, or death. Those under the age of eighteen will be served fizzing juice or soda instead and can participate in junior versions of the very same games. All the cups are made from the finest glass with Tony Stark images over them. Avoxes are on scene to clean every spill and break of glass that might come.

A cave has been crafted of artificial and real material, designed to look like the Cave in which Tony Stark became a real hero, but with a twist; it's been made into a fun-for-all maze! Guests can attempt to navigate their way to the labyrinth and reach the core, avoiding those nasty pop-out rebels along the way. Those who make it to the fire-lit center may receive a limited edition "Tony Stark Heart" miniature arc reactor in a beautiful glass case.

An indoor sky diving station is also available, large enough that many guests may enter at once and still find it spacious. Here, guests can don Iron Man themed sky-diving suits and experience the sensation of flight, just as Tony Stark once did. Of course, the party doesn't start until the Victor comes in; he'll be appearing by Capitol-controlled suit to make his entrance at center stage. It is here that his Throne shall be raised up through the stage and his crown gifted to him. Following the official Crowning Ceremony will also come a speech from the Capitol's very own, Cyrus Reagan.

Tributes are dressed in formal wear with robotic accents. Such as a full mask or metal armor. Capitolites can be seen with Tony stark styled hair, bearing tattoos in his image, and even with surgically implanted lights, in honor of the new Victor. Available for purchase are handcrafted Tony Stark dolls, Iron Man action figures, and models of beloved robot-pet "Dum-E" in both small and life-sized. The Iron Man light gloves come completely free for all guests.

The Crowning ends off with a bang, as in the center of the sky, a massive "wormhole" opens up showing a vast darkness full of sinister creatures just on the other side, sure to inspire some screams from fans. Guests near to the Iron Man suit displays are asked by peacekeepers to step back-- far back-- but may be the first to witness the incredible scene of all those suits launching into the sky and exploding around and "in" the wormhole. The wormhole shifts to a message stating the show to have been brought to you by the Hunger Game's skilled Sky-Display Designers before going into advertising for the rest of the night as the party dies down.

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Éowyn managed to restrain herself from exclaiming, and her only outwards response to that was an elegantly arched eyebrow. Inside, though, she was reeling. That was rather more extreme than she had expected, in all honesty.

"It sounds to me as if you have tales that could well rival mine," she remarked, at last. "Your life seems as if it were rather too interesting for comfort."

He realized too late that, for someone who hadn't lived through all of that, it was probably an infodump. So his shrug at her comments looked almost apologetic.

"Yeah, I've got a lotta stories. Mostly 'cause my friends get wrapped up in a lotta crazy things." And poor Firo was just along for the ride, the way he'd tell it. It wasn't quite the truth, but it was truth enough for him.

He smiled crookedly as he considered her comment on comfort; it was an interesting thought that he'd never touched on before. "Comfort-wise, I was doin' all right for a while before that... Almost ten years, I think. Some strange stuff still happened, though--actually, I think my life was mostly just boring when it was less comfortable. Standin' around tryin' not to starve isn't very exciting."

It was all said in the same casual tone. He didn't think of his life as anything too spectacular--outside of the amazing family he'd found and the stuff with the immortals.

"I should like to hear some of those stories," Éowyn said, but then glanced up at the party around them and made a show of cleaning her ear out with one finger. "Perhaps another time, though. When we can both think without so fearful a din." She smiled at him, just in case he hadn't grasped that she wasn't entirely serious, and took another sip of wine. "In any case, I can sympathise. Boredom is a part of some hardships that tales rarely tell, and poets rarely sing of."

Firo laughed at her antics. "Yeah. Anytime we can find some place quiet, I'd be up to share a few." Firo wasn't a fan of poring over the past, but some of the stuff he'd been through made a damn good story. He had to get something out of it.

He nodded, mouth twisting into an expression of sour contempt. "Guess it'd ruin the fun, eh? Or they just don't know about it--people who make up all the stories and songs about it usually haven't lived through it."

If Firo had a dime for every decently well-off singer who crooned 'Brother Can You Spare a Dime...' Well, he'd have a lot of dimes.

"There's little space in a song for ten verses of nothing," Éowyn observed dryly, shaking her head. "And, I fear, few words to capture that sense of walking without a destination. Those who have spent their life in the light will doubtless struggle to imagine hopeless darkness, at any rate. I know I would have, once." She smiled a little, rueful, and looked down into her glass. "I believed those tales, once. Thirsted for glory and for adventure, before I knew what such things cost. They should have taken me then, for I would have been half-blinded by this place."

"You got that right. People don't even wanna look at it." As a kid trying to make it on the street, sometimes he'd felt almost as much contempt for those who shied away as he did for those who tried to attack or otherwise come after him.

Even as he tilted his head back to drink, he kept a questioning eye on her. "That's kind of a scary thought. Bein' taken in by this place, I mean."

"People back where you're from were into this stuff?" He waved his hand around, gesturing at the festivities.

"No." She was surprised into laughing, shaking her head. "No, not in the slightest. Our music is quieter, our laughter louder. This is... this is all sound and fury, and nothing beneath." Her smile faded, and she shook her head. "But there was a time when I might almost have welcomed it. This place is a cage, but a prettier cage than Edoras had been, and one where we are given the promise of glory, borne by the strength of our arm and not only our ability to hold our tongues. Had they taken me from Edoras in those days of shadow, I might have swallowed their lies, as sweeter than the truth. I would never have been happy here. But I might have been content, for a while."

"Well, I can't say which'd be better..." That was up to her. He couldn't know her pain and he wouldn't pretend to, though he did want to say that he was always grateful for another anti-Capitol person.

"It's weird to think about it, though. I dunno if I woulda' liked it... But a while back, it probably woulda' been better here than where I was. At least the way I woulda' seen it."

Firo back then didn't care too much about people. He hadn't found his place and, cheesy as it sounded, hadn't opened himself to loving or being loved. He couldn't see an end to most human interactions that wasn't violent, so going out and hurting other people wouldn't' have troubled him all that much.

He swirled his glass around and tried to smile. "...But all that matters is that they're not foolin' you now."

"True." She smiled back at him, although it was a smile with no warmth or happiness in it. "And never shall again. I have seen too much of late to be taken in so easily."

For a moment, she lapsed into silence, considering, and sipped thoughtfully at her wine. At last, she said softly, "I am sorry, that we must meet this way. And yet, for all this conversation if for no other reason, I am glad that meet we did."

Despite the sadness and frustration of it all, he smiled at her; there's a hint of childish simplicity in it, the hallmark of one of his really heartfelt ones. "You don't say? I could say the same thing to you--you're a neat lady, Éowyn."

He tipped his glass towards hers, suggesting a toast.

Edited (tenses) 2015-04-07 03:22 (UTC)

She returned his smile with one of her own, one which was not entirely open - few of her smiles lately were so simple, unless they were surprised out of her - but heartfelt nonetheless. "I feel less neat than I should like, in this ridiculous garb," she said, jokingly, and shook her head as she clinked her glass against his. "To glad meetings in dark days, then?"

"It ain't that ridiculous if everybody's in the same boat."

He nodded, approving of the toast before he took another gulp. "Yeah, to good meetings. One a' the only things that keeps you goin' in times like these."

It was reassuring to meet people who felt the way he did and who weren't incredibly difficult to get along with.

She nodded, taking a long draught of her own wine to hide the darker thought that sprang into her mind: keep you going, aye, until good meetings turn into sorrowful partings. But that was a passing thought, no more. Death was nothing here. Had she not been told as much?

"I still feel ridiculous," she said instead, shaking her head. "The denizens of this place have a queer sense of what passes for beauty."

He sighed and joined her in shaking his head.

"Tell me about it. People who dressed like this would probably get arrested where I'm from."

He was always careful not to look too hard at the garments of the crowds, for fear of accidentally seeing something indecent. It was none of his business what other people--particularly girls--chose to wear, but that didn't stop him from getting uncomfortable at these parties.

"At the very least, they would draw strange looks." And that really was at the very least. It was hard to imagine what would happen if people wore these clothes around Ithilien or Edoras, because it was hard to imagine anyone in their right mind doing so. Then again, she was coming to conclude that very few people in this city were in their right minds.

He nodded, unconsciously drawing his arms tighter around himself as if hiding. At least he was used to wearing suits at home, but never one this loud.

"Havin' to dress like these idiots just makes this whole thing even worse."

She looked down at her skintight catsuit, the window in it exposing her cleavage, and at the ridiculously high heels she'd been browbeaten into wearing, and raised one eyebrow. "You need scarcely tell me twice," she remarked dryly.

He was staring out before them still, not daring to raise his eyes and look at the same thing she's looking at. It'd just be rude.

To offer sympathy, he nodded and gazed into his glass. "...Yeah, I'm sorry. They've got no idea how to be decent."

Again, something she didn't need to be reminded of. But he could let her know that she had at least one person agreeing with her.

She laughed, a little bitterly. "I should settle for it, were it not for these shoes. I can scarcely stand in them, and I fear that my feet will be naught but blistering come the morrow." Grimacing, she took a long draught of wine. "I should sooner walk a full day's hard march in my own shoes than another five minutes in these. Do you think anyone will think it too amiss if I take them off?"

"And a full day's march already sounds like hell." He gave a moment of quiet thanks that his shoes were pretty normal.

He tilted his head as he considered her question. "I honestly can't tell you if they'd start thinkin' it was the coolest new style or if they'd freak out." He shrugged; he wasn't even going to try guessing what went on in the heads of their hosts.

He grinned up at her. "So go ahead and do it. I'm not gonna tell on you."

And hopefully everyone was wrapped up enough in their own business to not even notice.

The grin she gave him in return was quite at odds with her grace and poise. It was the slightly mischievous smile of a girl who knows she is doing something wrong, but is going to do it anyway, and who will take some delight in the wrongdoing. For a moment, she looked younger, as if the years she had taken on herself during the war had melted away, and it was suddenly very clear that she was still little more than a girl.

Kneeling down, she unbuckled her hateful high shoes, and stepped out of them with an audible sigh of relief. "I should hate it to be the new style," she said lightly, bending to pick up the shoes. "The spoiled lordlings here would only stub their fine-painted toes and wail to the high heavens over it."

He thought back to conversations he'd had with some Capitolites who seemed to feel that the resentment they faced from the Tributes was a harsher struggle than that of those who had been wrenched from their families.

He didn't like to wallow when he got a bad lot--as he frequently did--but he thought he was entitled to at least a little resentment in this case.

He rolled his eyes and laughed. "Yeah, seriously. I've never met people who were so fat and happy and still complained so much. It's embarrassin' to listen to. You've got people back home who've lost everything and they just pick up and move on without a whimper."

"...Kinda makes me wanna drag some of 'em back home with me so they can see what real pain is."

"It might do them some good," Éowyn agreed, in all seriousness. "Most are not evil, I deem, but only ignorant and shallow. A taste of the loss they inflict might not go amiss." She would have liked to give more than a taste of loss to the ones actively responsible for her imprisonment, of course. But as she had been coming to realise over the few days she had been here, not everyone here was responsible. The vast number of those one saw in this place were slaves as much as she was - it was only that their shackles were cast out of wilful ignorance and careful misinformation. To blame them for their foolishness would have been like blaming her uncle for his heartsick attendance to Wormtongue's counsel; it was to ignore the infection, and blame the symptoms.

That didn't mean she didn't hate them, of course. Their vanity and complacency sickened her. But they were, in the end, only fools.

"I wonder," she said after a moment, thoughtfully, and paused for a second before starting again. "They watch the fights, do they not? Yet I wonder how many of those gathered here have smelled a dead man's stench, or felt the strain of steel meeting flesh. For without that solidity, is it so shocking that our deaths mean as little to them as songs or tales may to us?"

Firo's thoughts were hardly more charitable than hers. While he didn't blame any of the staff or most of the populace for kidnapping and imprisoning them, he couldn't think of ignorance as any excuse. They were all at fault--if not for the acts of stealing the Tributes, then for going along with it and especially for berating those who dared to be open about not liking it.

And he couldn't grasp how they all blindly ignored what was right as if they just didn't know--though he'd had to cast aside his dented moral compass in the past, he'd still managed to figure it out.

He shook his head and laughed. "Probably none of 'em. Only crazy assholes still like that stuff after goin' through it." For Firo, violence was the logical solution to many problems. Outright killing someone was the same way, but a tool to be employed much more carefully; a necessary unpleasantness. He'd never claim to enjoy inflicting hurt on people.

...Most people.

He spoke slowly, considering both her words and his. Though he had little but contempt for the Capitol, he did, on some level, kind of want to understand what the hell was going on. "I guess you're sayin' it's all like a movie to 'em? Might as well not even be real?"

That was a feeling he could almost understand, though he was unwilling to be that kind in his opinion just yet; he remembered sneaking into the films when he was a little kid and staring at the smiling, happy people with consternation. It just didn't feel real until he became a part of it.

"I know not what you mean by 'movie'," Éowyn said, slowly and carefully, "but aye, I think so. They know us not. They know the pain of battle not. It cannot be so far different from how a child at the hearth sits and wonders at tales of battles past." Her mouth twisted a little, bitterly. "Then again, most children do not cause more battles for their sport. And so they are easier to forgive."

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