The Message Logs [Open]

[gamemakers]

[OOC: General catch-all for in-person reactions to this.

Warning: making out with zombies in a lower thread.]

Comments

[savedbyasong]

Shion is in the shopping center, it is a bit late and he is just thinking of heading back to the tribute tower when the screens nearest to him go off.

Though there is still plenty of people about the silence without the constant blare of the televisions.

He frowned and looked at the communicator just as the message showed. He looked up to see it on every screen.

In situations like this two minutes was a long time, enough for panic. Not from Shion but from the citizens around him. For the first time since they had done so Shion was glad his stylists had dyed his hair, it made him stand out a tiny bit less. He put his communicator in his pocket and made his way to the exit.

Mulling the words over in his head. The revolution was not dead, there was a revolution. Which meant that not everyone in this world agreed with the government.

It might have been a four lined badly spelled message that only lasted two minutes but it gave Shion hope anyways.

Blaine -- Looking for Kurt but OPEN to Anyone.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine can't reply on the network. He's too worried that they see and he and Kurt will be punished for it. Still, he's shaken.

The thing is that Blaine hadn't thought there really was a revolution. Despite the attack on Tribute Tower and for the assassination attempt, he didn't think there was some organized struggle against the Capitol.

He had bought into the propaganda in that way.

The idea though that there are people fighting against the government that has done this to him makes him feel anxious and hopeful. The hope part was what scared him the most. Hope makes him think he might feel stupid.

He needed to find Kurt. Kurt managed to help him sort through his emotions. It was selfish to put so much on the other boy, but he felt so confused.

[wantwhatiwant]

Ian was stood frowning at a screen. He hadn't replied to the network either. He remembered what Neffa had told him when the bomb had gone off, they'd be looking for someone to blame, and probably wouldn't care if that person was guilty.

Ian wasn't sure about this message, there was a revolution apparently but Ian had never heard of a successful revolution. And this badly spelled message did not give him much hope in the success of this one.

He saw Blaine and made his way over, hands in pockets. "You alright?" He didn't look great.

[mediumdrip]

Blaine paused and smiled at Ian. He hadn't been thinking that people would be looking at him as he was looking for Kurt. He remembered that he needed to be in control of himself.

He still looked pale and shaken, but he was pleased to see Ian and that also showed on his face.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I was looking for Kurt, but he might be training right now so I probably shouldn't bug him too much."

[wantwhatiwant]

"Probably," Ian shrugged, "He seems determined to learn to use that bow."

He went over, "You sure you're alright?"

[mediumdrip]

"Yeah, yeah," Blaine answered. "I'm just a little shaken, that's all. I hadn't expected someone to hack the hologram network."

[wantwhatiwant]

"Not just the holograms." Ian nodded towards the nearest TV, "It's on every channel."

[mediumdrip]

"That's... really intense," Blaine said. "Is it just in the Tower or throughout the entire city?"

[wantwhatiwant]

"Not sure, I've only been in here, we should go see." He looked towards the door, "There's a couple just outside right?"

[mediumdrip]

"I think so," Blaine said. He let Ian's thought pull him away from looking for Kurt and turned to check out another room.

[wantwhatiwant]

Ian followed him looking at another TV. "It seems it's all of them." He said, just as the message disappeared and the screens went blank.

Open!

[formersurgeon]

Joan had made a point of avoiding looking at the screens as much as possible. Maybe she would have to desensitize herself to graphic violence and death. Maybe she would have to get used to the idea of the Games as entertainment. But she sure as hell was going to hold off on that as long as she possibly could.

So when the screens in the lobby of the Tribute building switched over to the messages, it was the shocked murmurs of the people around her that made her look up.

"Oh my god," she breathed.

She knew there were people who had actively fought against the powers that be here. She knew that there were people, citizens, who were at very least not as fond of the Games as everyone else. But this? This was organization. This was the capacity to break in on the broadcasting signal, which suggested resources and know-how.

This was hope that there were possibilities besides being forced to think of violence and death as acceptable.

She had to talk to Sherlock. Probably both Sherlocks.

Holiday | ota

[doc_holi]

Holiday had been sitting in the lobby at the time of the broadcast. When it started, she had been in a state of shock.

At first, she figured it was a little childish, but it was right. It allowed people to know that they weren't alone and, best of all, that the Capitol was vulnerable. There were weak links and, with work and patience, someone had found one of them.

For the rest of the time, Holiday remained incredibly still in her seat, trying to keep her face as unreadable as possible. There were so many things happening to her right now. She was excited and eager to get on with things, yet there was also a sense of dread. She hoped that this was the work of someone she didn't know, had never spoken to, because they were going to make this execution a big one if they caught them... and they probably would catch them.

Their work won't be in vain, though. Ariadne's case was one thing. A badly planned assassination attempt closed off from everyone else. This was different. This was an invitation.

Don | Open to all!

[polyturtle]

He was just coming from the Training Center when the screens happened. Don, who spent almost all of his free time now in the Training Center. He hadn't touched a book or a machine since he came back, and his money from the kills he scored went into a drawer with the rest of the money he'd previously earned and saved. He didn't even drink tea any more, instead drinking water at all times.

He ignored everything which, before, had given him some comfort, knowing the comforts he remembered were truly false, programmed things from a past that never belonged to him.

He couldn't ignore this, though. Not forever. This reminder of why Ariadne died.

The turtle watched the screen as it flickered on, its message flashing. Stared at it, eyes narrowed. Something he might have come up with if he felt he could get away with it. At least before.

"The revolution is not dead."

No shell, Sherlocks.

But the truth of it was, what did it matter to them?

Don felt nothing, seeing the badly spelled message. Revolution or no, it didn't change their fate as mere fighting figures (in so many senses). If the Capitol gained enough of the upper hand, the Tributes would be the at there wouldn't be reprisals against them for being Tributes. They were like the gladiators in Rome, beloved and popular - but considered a danger regardless. They were expendable and implicated in every way.

So Don ignored the message after several seconds, instead opting to take a shower. He had a party to go to. No doubt they people there would be discussing the disruption there.

Not that it mattered. In the end, they were just empty words and static on a screen. In the end, it meant nothing.

Punchy | Closed

[nunpunching]

Punchy has a bowl of gummi worms as he watches the broadcast. He loads them into his mouth one at a time, sucking the sourness off before he swallows the gelatin part whole, eyes fixed not on his television but on his laptop as it runs scans and searches. As he watches the walls of his digital fortress weather the siege of Peacekeeper programming, and eventually fall.

After the message is deleted, after there's a knock at his door, he stands up. He straightens his jacket in the mirror and runs a hand through his hair, making it stand up in the front. A little bit of sugar from the candy falls from his fingers into his scalp, onto the tip of his nose, in his eyebrow, and he sneezes. Then he wipes his nose on his sleeve and goes to open his bedroom door.

This is the place where he can make a difference. Here in the Capitol, with technology and a captive audience at his fingertips. Not bleeding and gasping in the Arena, knee-deep in the bloody wreckage of his own failures. Watching over the corpses of the people he failed to protect and those he injured by accident.

From the knock at the door, he's expecting to get hauled out quietly, with as little fuss as possible. He's surprised but somewhat pleased that he gets to feel a bit like a martyr when a Peacekeeper clubs him over the head - and then he gets to feel nothing as he slumps unconscious to the floor and is loaded up into a truck behind the Tribute Center.

R || Closed to Howard Bassem

[shambler]

Howard finds R sulking.

R's found a nice, dark place to rock in the Avox's supply closet, stuck underneath the stairs and artfully hidden by a spread of blood-red flowers his Escort's walked past several times trying to find him. After that talk with Wyatt about Howard and Aunamee, he thinks he needs time to think and that mean no distractions. No talking, no straining something invisible trying to gasp out word after word, each syllable feeling like his last. Just drifting away in his head, thinking (sometimes not thinking at all). Waiting.

Basically he's sulking, end of story.

R's not prone to it, but sue him - he gets in moods every now and then. It sometimes hits him deep, bone-deep, that he's really, really tired of being a corpse. He's over it. He wants more. He wants. Maybe, just maybe, he's not happy shuffling around like the others. Names and places and tastes that aren't on the zombie menu. If he had a pulse, he'd know what to do about Aunamee and Wyatt. Known how to read both of them, instead of nodding along and staring and realizing things are a lot more complicated between Living. He wouldn't bite first and groan questions never. There's a lot of what-ifs and could've beens. It's enough to make whatever's left of a zombie's brain give up and call it a day.

He sways where he's staring at a corner, scrubbed to perfection by some Avox despite the fact Tributes and Escorts won't see it. R's shoulders sag, boneless. Answers don't come. They rarely do.

I miss Howard and Julie floats up, wanders a bit like a lost patrol, and sinks away with nowhere to go. He keeps dully staring.

Re: R || Closed to Howard Bassem

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard, too, has a proclivity for the dark and secluded. He thought maybe with the killers out of District One, he'd feel safe there, but Alpha and Hyperion's absence really just worries him more than anything else. The emptiness of their rooms is a monster unto itself, creeping at the corner of his vision like a cat in the undergrowth.

It's with this specter looming over him that Howard spends his days. He woke up in Wyatt's bed last night, with the cowboy sleeping on a pile of pillows and clothing on the floor, and snuck out in a fit of guilt and panic (leaving the blanket that had previously covered his own skinny shoulders over Wyatt's hips). The resurrection that usually buffs Tributes up, fills the curves they lose in the Arena back out, erases their blemishes, is never so kind to him. He's back to looking like, in his opinion, a skeleton of a proto-human, full-grown at 'too short to see the inside of the microwave' and bony and incomplete, like a sketch of a person that needs charcoal to fill it out. His lips are chapped; his feet are swollen; his ribs stand out like pillars in a cathedral and there's a slight red rash along one arm where the styling team has pumped booster shot after booster shot of vitamins and antibiotics into him.

The bridge with Wyatt mended, Howard sets to recouping his other allies now that he knows they still live. He saw R at the date auction but wasn't able to get a free moment to talk to him, instead being stuck on the world's most awkward date with Eponine and teaching Shion the hokey-pokey. When he can't find R in the District Four suites, he thinks of other places a living dead boy might find interesting, and the phrase 'somewhere to collect things' starts to make a repeat performance in his brain. The phrase would be more honest if it were framed 'somewhere to hoard', but Howard's own denial extends to R's behavior as well. If R's a hoarder, Howard's goddamn Smaug.

Eventually he happens upon the right closet. R's sitting there, staring forward with such simplicity and vacancy that for an instant Howard thinks he's a statue, and then thinks he's in the zombie version of sleeping, and then spends just long enough to realize that R's pupils don't contract when the light from the hallway shines on in, and that that's weird.

He makes sure he can see that R's muzzle is fully on before he asks, "mind if I join you?"

[shambler]

At first he doesn't see Howard. With the perfume - today's poison of choice is "Evening Shore Glow" - R can't smell him, either, and he's so far down a twisty road leading nowhere in his head that he doesn't notice the door opening. Light splashes across his face, the usual grey washing out even more, the veins frozen blue in his neck in that Dead spiderweb.

He starts when Howard's voice suddenly cuts through the fog. It's a delayed flinch, a shudder running down R's corpse as he comes back to the present and his head bobbles up in slow motion. The stare he levels at Howard is the haunted one a rabbit gets before it's smeared into roadkill, a vague "oh crap" plastered on his face that's too little, too late.

Look, he's not ready. Like at all. He was supposed to have more time to get his act together.

Suddenly he's grabbing at his words like a man without a parachute, R's mouth flopping behind the muzzle as he fumbles. What does he say? He should say something, something that torpedoes I'm sorry I bit you out of the water. Instead he gapes, shuffles awkwardly out of the way, bumping into the other side of the closet and knocking a broom over. It clatters to the floor. He staggers the other way only to kick Howard in the ankle. R's horrified: this is already off to a bad start and he didn't even say anything yet!

Clearly he needs to find a better closet to hide in.

He almost tramples Howard again out of nervousness. With how shrunken he looks, a second time around might smoosh the poor guy.

"Huh...How....Ho-ward," R stutters, at a loss. His voice comes out creaky from disuse, nowhere as bad as the Arena, but he's been avoiding his favorite activity - conversations - and it shows. Painfully. Are they still friends? Or has Howard figured out he's more dangerous than he's worth? What comes out is more of a whisper than anything else. “Fff…free….closet...?”

R finally decides to wedge himself shoulder-first into a corner where he’s least likely to trample the human to death. There. That works. It gives Howard enough room to squeeze in after, the closet smelling strongly of a mix of lemon cleaner and Evening Shore Glow. R hunches his shoulders, straining something trying to think fast on his feet. Howard doesn’t take up much space physically, but R thinks about the last time he saw him and suddenly the air hangs heavy enough to crush.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard slips in, and then, as if holding a secret meeting regarding espionage and other secretive things, closes the closet door behind him. He feels the hairs on his arms raise being alone in the closet with R, goosebumps spreading like watercolors up to the base of his skull. R doesn't give off body heat, and Howard's surprised to realize that that upsets him, in some strange way.

Howard takes a seat in the corner, pushing a bucket and a mop out of the way. The mop smells faintly of cleaning fluid over the perfume, not of mold like the ones in his middle school did, and it's dry. All that does is remind him of how R seemed to be put together of sandpaper and dust when they met last, when the zombie took a chunk out of Howard's neck. His hand moves up to his collarbone subconsciously.

"So."

The word hangs in the air, weightless for only a second before the rest of the sentence drags it down to shatter upon the floor.

"You bit me."

It's not an accusation so much as a statement of fact. There's no resentment in Howard's voice, no cutting edge; he's been expecting to get bit for a long time now, and is actually somewhat surprised it didn't happen back at Disneyland. He stretches his legs out, nudging his foot - intentionally - against R's knee, and leans his head on the mop bucket. He's shivering slightly from a bad combination of negative body fat and normal room temperature, and as such his body language is closed off, all hands tucked under arms and shoulders hunched.

"I don't remember anything that happened after that and I don't want to."

[shambler]

R's gone so silent in the closet that the only sign he's in there is the mix of perfume and decomposition wafting out whenever he shifts his position. That "so" gives him a second to brace himself, waiting for it to build up into - there it is. Howard remembered, because it would've been too much to ask for him to forget those last couple of minutes in the cave.

He can't read Howard. R's not the best at reading Living faces these days, but with the dim light filtering in through a seam between the wall and the door, and the matter-of-fact tone of his voice, he's struggling here. Are things already over? Is it too late to groan anything? Howard nudges him in the dark, R thinking too late maybe he should move his knee away because hey, zombie here, he can't be trusted. It's not like physical contact won't spread the infection but, but all the same, it doesn't feel right to be bumping shoulders or knees with a friend he killed, just like anyone else.

The grunt that comes out of R is unhappy. "Better...that way. Sss...sorr - "

R can't get it out. Even if he gets out those two syllables, it still doesn't feel enough for what he did to Howard. R drops his eyes from Howard's shadow. This reminds him too much of that cave back there - dark and cramped and Howard's body heat dragging him closer like a magnet, the smell of his particular brand of Life seeping into his corpse and tugging. Blinding him to his number one rule of Friends Don't Bite Friends.

Unable to get that one word out, R shrugs helplessly.

"I...think...a mistake. Us?"

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard shrugs in the dark, one shoulder jerking up like the opening moves in Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. Appropriate, he thinks. "We're cool, Rob."

There's more he could say about that. He could tell R about all the nights he sat up, curled in on himself, feeling the pangs in his stomach reverberating up to his neck. He could tell R about catching cockroaches to eat them, about digging up roots until his fingernails split, about mixing all-purpose flour with water and calling it a meal. He could tell R about the chills he felt run from his heels up his spindly calves when he stood on a scale and saw the needle not even hit the number seventy. He could tell R all about what it's like to die in slow motion.

But what would be the point in recounting an existence that R lives, if in a slightly different iteration? There's no series of words, no compilation of memories that quite captures the way hunger erodes you inside, the way it's impossible to place anything as a higher priority when your every thought is consumed by the nagging, pulsing voice of need and want.

Instead he just settles on "hunger fucks you up. I can't blame you for doing what you gotta go."

He wiggles a little into the corner of the closet, back against the wall as if that'll help him keep warm. Something about small places makes him feel less small, and he wonders, sometimes, if it's his size or if it's the way other people look at him. The other Tributes look at him like prey, or like a child to protect, and the citizens here look at him like a toy to dress up and throw in the world's most hellish dollhouse.

[shambler]

It sounds like they’re still friends – according to Howard, they’re still “good”. R wonders if it’s real. Maybe he’s daydreaming, still swaying back in his hideout, staring at nothing and this hasn’t actually happened. For all he knows, he didn’t hear Howard drop that nickname like nothing happened. Should he relax and enjoy it? Try to stick to his guns, convince Howard this can’t work? Drift away because he wasn't prepared to have this conversation yet?

R’s chin has sunk to his collarbone in the meantime. He hears the human moving in the dark, getting himself comfortable or maybe making sure there’s a few more inches of space to work with. After the Arena, R feels like he needs to be the voice of reason here.

“But,” R starts, pauses, and blunders ahead at full-steam. There needs to be a but there. If Howard isn’t going to whip it out, then someone else has to. “…Should…be…better. Things not…cool.”

Finally running into that wall between what he thinks and what he can actually get past his stiff lips, R snaps his mouth shut.

It’s the closest thing R’s made to taking a stand in awhile, instead of going with the flow and hiding and avoiding what’s out there because for all he knows, he was this bad when he was a person, like Howard and Julie. R shifts where he’s wedged himself in the closet. Being a zombie has its perks; he doesn’t feel the need to fidget (it’s more to fill up time, to remind himself he’s not as far gone as the other Dead if he can still remember to fidget), and the more cramped he is in here, the more stable he feels. Less chance of tipping over.

It's okay to cheat when your sense of balance sucks.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

"Far as I'm concerned-" Howard shrugs, "long as you got a muzzle on you're 'better'."

Silence yawns between them like a ditch where bodies are buried. Normally Howard's so claustrophobic around other people, so scared to share the spare near his body with another soul, but when he feels R pull away in the dark it only makes him feel lonely. It's not as if he wants to cuddle - that's ew for a variety of reasons, most of which Howard doesn't care about enumerating - but he also doesn't like feeling repellant.

He doesn't like his acceptance for the unoffered apology rejected like this.

He kicks his feet up on the door, so that they're resting half a foot above the ground, his rubber soles finding purchase at that weird angle. The light from the doorframe looks like it could be a door to anywhere, and he wonders if he'd find Narnia if he opened it now - but knows, deep down, it's just a hallway where some escort will pounce on him and some fangirls will poke at him like a zoo animal. It's just more of his life on the other side.

"Sorry about setting you up with Diana at the date auction." He figures Diana probably deserved it, but he's not about to say that out loud, because that makes it sound like hanging out with R is a punishment. Howard knows it is for others, but the truth is he'll be sad if R keeps insisting there's a problem between them that Howard doesn't want to acknowledge.

[shambler]

Howard makes it sound so easy.

R's lips press together behind the muzzle, the one he wouldn't need to have stuck on his face like some safety guarantee if things really were "better". Maybe he's not making himself clear. His groans aren't up to snuff. Communication errors. Something lost in translation from Dead to Living. He falls quiet trying to think of a better way to word this in a way Howard will have to get, no ifs ands or buts; he's still struggling along when the human suddenly changes the subject on him.

That's cheating! R wants to shout. The urge's intensity surprises him, coming at R with a jolt because he's never thought about yelling at Howard before. And because he's a zombie, R gets stuck; he waffles between going through with it, wheezes and gasps and all, and giving up because it's easier to go where Howard's leading. The urge to toss all the exclamation marks in the world at Howard rolls over and dies. Now he’s bogged down trying to remember faces and names. This probably would’ve been easier if he hadn’t staring at a wall for who knows how long. It’s not easy trying to think of his feet after slumping in a rut.

R's so distracted he starts listing over again, trying to remember any Dianas, rolling the name around in his head for Howard. His face goes slack behind the muzzle. It takes a few long, torturous minutes to massage his memory back to the last week.

Girl. Not-Julie. Ordered bigger than her eyes. That Diana.

“Why?” R’s genuinely curious despite himself. Things still aren’t cool between them because friends don’t chow down on friends but, at the same time, he doesn’t get why Howard did that. “Not…good dating...materi – stuff…here.”

Zombies aren't exactly a girl's first choice. Or second or third.

[iselldrugstothecommunity]

Howard scowls in the dark at R, not because of the death, but because it's clear from R's blank stare, the little weird noises he makes when he wants to argue a point, that R doesn't feel like the matter's dropped. Howard wants it dropped. He wants to have it be definitive, friends being forgiving of all the many, many transgressions that can be enacted upon each other, because having someone in his corner is a good thing.

He wants it to be something other than a dead body bleeding out next to a deader body covered in beartraps like big metal piranhas.

"She's from my world." R probably noticed that she was underfed too, although not quite so bad as Howard. Beauty and pull got you privileges in the FAYZ, and while Diana may have been 'eating for two' with her pregnancy, Howard had an alcoholic lump of fucking rock to shovel the meager spoils of his work into. God knows Orc never scrounged up his own food.

"Figured she should make friends before someone takes advantage of her. We look out for our own, FAYZians. You know, out here." Inside the FAYZ it's a different story; he and Diana probably would have bitten each others' throats out for a handful of Spam. But out here in the Capitol, there's a certain solidarity in going from starved and despairing to pampered and idolized and dolled-up. It's the same kinship that drew Howard to Eponine and, he realizes, to R.

To be hated and forgotten, to be a face in the masses, only to become a star used to sell toothpaste and spears, neither through any choice of your own.