thecapitol | The Crowning of Tony Stark

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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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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."

Not knowing movies? How sad. He blinked and filed that information away; she'd have to be introduced to them at some point.

"Yeah." He grunted. He sure wasn't offering up much forgiveness to these people anytime soon.

"And at least when kids do pick a fight, they don't hide behind all these rules and stuff." Wary of anyone thinking he might harm a kid, he added, "I mean when they're fightin' other kids and all. Might not be fair, but at least the other kid's got a shot."

She nodded, in thorough agreement. "There is nothing clean nor fair about these fights," she agreed, lowering her voice a little. "All this place has the stink of lies and treachery to it. 'Tis a hollow place, a mask on which we tread. I should sooner face a thousand Orcs with sword in hand than this place."

He followed her lead and spoke more softly as well. He imagined the crowd around them afforded some safety from prying ears, but he was already taking a lot of chances. "I've got no idea what an Orc is, but I'm on the same page as you are. I never thought I'd say this, but people back home were more honest. Or, at least up-front about things like this."

They didn't hide behind finery and television screens when they wanted someone dead. To Firo, even paying the hitman was more honest than this.

"It counts for a great deal," Éowyn agreed, nodding a little. "I have known people who acted this way, hiding behind pretty words and smiles while their cruelty eats like a canker at the people around them. I have never known a whole land of them ere now."

"Yeah. Maybe 'cause this is the kinda person who can only last so long as the same kinda people buy their bullshit. Lotta people I know back home would--" He cut himself off before he got to painting too vivid a picture of the hypothetical bloody end of a Capitolite. "--they wouldn't let this kinda person make it."

"But it's different when they're all like that. How'd it even get like this..?"

"At a guess?" She's quiet, and pauses for a moment in thought before saying, in a low voice, "Fear. Fear, and loss. Such people feed on it. To seem what is wanted, to comfort those who grieve, that is how they gain their footing. And I suppose, once it is set up so, laziness and complacency alone are enough to keep it constant." She sounds less certain about that, though.

He listened carefully.

"Hmph. And they just let it make 'em into this." He should have probably toned down the contempt in there, but he couldn't. At least they were still being rather quiet.

"I thought people were supposed to control things like that." Firo was often controlled by his own emotions, but, in his mind, fear was something worse than anger or pride.

"They are." A note of scorn crept into her voice. "But too many have not the strength, or the will. Too oft do people fall into shadow, only for want of fighting it." But that was unfair, and some part of her felt it. She hesitated, but at length added, "...Though for some, it may not be fear for themselves that drives them. We all have those we would wish to protect."

Firo's lip drew back in a grimace. "...You think any a' these people understand that?"

His heart clenched as he thought of some of the conversations he'd had with Capitolites here. How they acted like his concern for Ennis back home was nothing, that their little problems and desires were infinitely more important.

But maybe he should have counted himself lucky that they didn't seem to realize just how weak a spot he had when it came to his family.

"I think some of them must." Her voice is a little softer than his. She's thinking of what she's been told about the history of this place, which is little enough. "I think they will try their hardest not to. But any man with a heart must know how it is to care for someone. Even if they admit it not."

He was still frowning, unsure if he could agree with her just yet. Firo didn't try to be stubborn when it came to people he liked, but it was one of those things he just couldn't stop.

He shrugged. "Even if you've got one, people can still turn that stuff off."

"At the least, they don't seem to realize that we feel all that stuff."

The apparent contradiction between his two statements--that a person could simply shut off the ability to care and that the Tributes were treated as if their cares were unimportant--was lost on him. In his mind, both ideas could coexist just fine.

"No, well." Her mouth twisted sharply, and the softness of her voice was gone again, leaving only that steely will behind it. "I doubt that they suspect hounds of such deep feeling either. Or caged birds. Or furniture. It seems to me that they consider us little more than that, at any event."

Was it wise to speak so sharply, so publicly? Probably not, but Éowyn couldn't bring herself to care.

"You know, I should be used to that shit, but I think that's part a' what pisses me off the most."

He shook his head roughly. "No concern at all for the people who might actually need us."

They were the ones that were important.

She nodded agreement, her mouth a hard line. There were few people left at home who needed her, when she thought of it, and that stung in the hollow, aching way of a wound only just realised. But she knew what it was to be needed, and to be kept from those who needed you. She had known that long before she came here.

"I don't know that our homes exist to them," she said at length, sipping her wine thoughtfully. "Stories at most, and for many not even that. They take that, too, from us in their minds."

"Too much energy to think a' all that, huh?" He laughed.

Having died quite a few times before, Firo didn't really grasp the full horror of the Arenas. Talking with her, though, was forcing him to really understand how bizarre everything was.

In all his time here, he'd rarely had an opportunity to talk about what was going on, save for some confirmation from Jack Sparrow that this place was indeed crazy. Others had just brushed off those concerns, acted like they were just supposed to deal with it and move on.

Firo shook his head, astounded. "...What the hell're we gettin' wrapped up in?"

"You would know that better than I," Éowyn said softly, shaking her head. "All here is madness and blindness to me. I understand none of it, and fear that I am happier so, for nothing good can lie behind this."

She looked away from him, her expression shadowed, and drained her glass. It frightened her, that was the honest truth. It frightened her more than anything, and Éowyn Éomund's daughter hated more than anything to be frightened. This place had taken all her shields from her, leaving her naked and shivering in the gaze of the Capitol, and she feared it as she had never feared anything before.

"Yeah. Stupid question, sorry." She was newer; he didn't need to be giving her any more questions than she already had.

"Guess we might just be better of leavin' it a mystery. I know my brain doesn't need anything else to do." He clunked his glass against his head, a little harder than he meant to.

Obviously that meant he needed to take another sip.

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The Crowning of Tony Stark

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