I woke up with the power out

[alsohawkeye]

CHARACTERS: Kate Bishop, Simon Monroe, Katniss Everdeen, others tbd
LOCATION: Around!
WARNINGS: tbd
SUMMARY: A catch-all for plot logs and maybe November, too.
NOTES: I might add some open scenarios to this top post a bit later, but for now drop me a pm or a plurk or just throw in a starter if you want something!



[ I may edit this in a bit to throw in some open scenarios, for now just putting up starters for the things that have already been discussed. ]

Comments

katniss | closed

[alsohawkeye]

Kate's been trying to avoid following the voices. Her experiences in the hallways have made her familiar with the tricks the ship plays and wary of falling for them. She does her best to escape them, leaving wherever she is at the first prickle at the edges of her hearing, but once the lights go out that becomes more difficult. Not just because there are even fewer places she's comfortable going but because the voices get worse, more frequent, more insistent. She can hear them even when she's in her room, now, so she leaves it.

The hall offers only a brief respite and then there they are again. She flees them, walking faster and then jogging and finally sprinting down the corridor away from them, turning corners blind, nothing in her head but conversations almost-heard. She pushes through doors, she doesn't know how many sets-- and then suddenly they're gone.

She doesn't know where she is - it doesn't look familiar except that it looks just like everywhere else. And the door doesn't respond. She tries it a half-dozen times before she spots the error message. SEC access only. Great. Her comm signal is spotty at best, but she sends out a message anyway, in hopes it might eventually get through to someone. In the meantime, she kicks at the door, not in a futile effort to force it open but just in case someone comes near enough to hear and investigate. She pries at the room's control panel while she does it, hoping for some means to hotwire the door. It's almost certainly in vain, she knows; if someone were ever going to figure that out it wouldn't be her and it wouldn't be now, but she's not going to sit and do nothing.

Hours later she's sitting on the floor, back to the door, the panel pried open, wires hanging from it uselessly. She thumps the door with a weary arm or occasionally her head. More and more often her head.

early in the event (obviously) (sorryyy)

[revivalism]

The first time Simon hears the voices, with the lights low and red, he spends hours sitting against a wall with his head in his hands, feeling like he can't breathe even though he only barely needs to. But he isn't strapped down this time, and through his damaged nerve endings a splitting headache is—awful, still, for someone who usually barely feels anything at all, but not as punishing as it might have been. Not enough to put him off. And trusting things he can't see or touch is a habit of his.

The second time, he follows, and when the shouting falls silent and his head clears, he's in someone's quarters: the room is lived-in, or at least used, with couch cushions propped against the wall behind one of the beds and one of the oversized data pads that passes for a television on the opposite wall.

He can feel the black blood leaking from one of his ears and down his neck only in a distant way, like faint pressure through clothing instead of something wet on his skin, but he isn't willing to sacrifice a shirt sleeve to wipe it off. He sits down to wait out the pain in his head, holding his elbows with either hand, makes a play at distracting himself. For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.

The pain fades and his largely-habitual breathing evens out, and he would leave, and nothing would ever come of this, except when he lifts his head there's a black and red mural next to the television that wasn't there before.

Simon is standing with a hand pressed against it, over the curled shoulders of a red-painted figure in pain, when the door slides open. He turns his head to look but doesn't move away from the wall.

[alsohawkeye]

The door slides open and the next noise is a rustle of cloth and the whisper of an arrow drawn, as in one smoothly practiced motion Kate tips the bow across her back into her hands and preps an arrow, string pulled taut to her cheek. Her eyes go wide for a second even as she's moving, but her voice is quick and cold, shock tamped rapidly down into focus.

"What are you doing in my room?"

She knows the voices can take you places you shouldn't be, places you wouldn't choose to be. She's seen the murals appearing, tried to catch their origins and failed. She doubts it was a passenger, but it doesn't prevent the suspicion that she's caught him almost-literally red-handed, or the fear that he's there because he's found her out and decided to eat her brains or something. Just thinking that is totally racist-against-zombies, isn't it? Shit.

But this is how she'd treat any stranger invading her privacy, and she keeps the arrow trained on him, steady until he answers.

[revivalism]

He keeps his hand pressed to the wall when he turns to face her—and maybe it looks like fearlessness. He's looked at guns aimed at his head with both the same confidence impassiveness and the same utter lack of confidence he wouldn't actually be shot, wondering if he'd have a second chance at an afterlife. But he isn't unafraid, only stubborn. The shift and squaring of his posture has as much to do with preparing to dodge as it does with refusing to look rattled.

"I don't know."

He doesn't know who she is, either, or he wouldn't take his eyes off her to look back at the mural. The arrow is still in his peripheral.

"I heard voices." He rubs his thumb against the line of red, unevenly-drawn arm. It's a sympathetic gesture. Too bad he won't feel nearly as bad for a painting of Kate, later, as he does for a featureless and anonymous figure. "This wasn't—was this here before?"

[alsohawkeye]

She's not sure what to do with that response. He doesn't appear to recognize her, and his reason for being in the room is plausible. He hasn't seemed like the sort who would bother to lie if he were really there to attack her. All good things, all things that ease the tension in her shoulders and jaw bit by bit. But not far; she's been wrong about that sort of thing before and she keeps the arrow aimed at his eye, even as she glances at the mural.

"No. Definitely not." Her glance turns into two, brows lowering even further as a detail catches her eye around him. The lapel of the jacket, the bit of a tie-pattern. She looks from it to him and back and doesn't bother to ask the too-obvious question.

[revivalism]

Simon answers it anyway, as silently as she didn't ask it, by turning back to her and spreading his arms at his sides to mimic the central figure's posture, less the knife in its hand (which he doesn't understand) or the blood on its mouth (which he does). He doesn't smile, but there's a tension around his mouth and a brightness to his eyes, under the standard impassive melancholy, suggesting one is possibly trying to escape. If he let it, it'd be sheepish. Despite the suit and tie and vague menacing, he isn't comfortable with dramatics.

He also doesn't know how to deal with the Living other than to antagonize them. Maybe he'll get better at it here, eventually, when he's been brought up short by kindness and lack of revulsion enough for it to really sink into his thick dead skull that most of them don't see him as subhuman.

In the meantime, manners are hard. His silence reaches awkward before he says, "I'm sorry I frightened you," with a pointed shift from her face to the arrow still trained on his head.

[alsohawkeye]

She lowers it, when he spreads his hands and doesn't quite smile. When he apologizes. He wouldn't apologize if he knew who she was, she's pretty sure of that. The arrow's point goes from his head to his feet and after a moment's consideration (visible in the glance she gives it) the arrow goes back into her quiver and she lets the bow hang from her hand. Her smile's on the sheepish side as well, crooked but polite. "Sorry for the arrow pointed at your head. It's hard not to be kind of on edge around here."

She gestures at the mural, the swing of her hand encompassing it as well as the bits of his outfit it depicts. "This is new. Them looking like us. Usually it's just nineteen headed things and bloody hands and stuff. But they're not usually in the passenger areas, either." She scrubs at an eyebrow with the back of her thumb, and her smile's tighter this time. "Doesn't seem like a very good sign."

[revivalism]

Simon acknowledges the apology with a nod. He's not quite sure what else to do with it. No one has ever apologized for aiming a deadly weapon at him, and not because it's never happened before.

(It's also never been a bow and arrow. Who even uses those anymore?)

"Worse than bloody hands and nineteen headed things," he says—not a question, more a what is my life anymore, other than not quite a life. He takes a sideways step away from the mural, distancing himself from the discomfort the only way he can. "It wasn't like this when I came in. There was something else."

[alsohawkeye]

"Did you change it? Or did it just--?" Kate hasn't had her mural appear before her eyes yet, so Simon's claim just gets her brow furrowed in confusion. It doesn't look like wet paint-- none of them ever do as far as she's seen. But the mural changing on its own isn't beyond belief, either.

She sets the tip of the bow on the ground, not leaning any weight on it but resting the weapon instead of keeping it dangling. (Cool people still use them, obviously. The coolest.) She gives his mural another long look now that he's stepped back, taking in the knife, among other details. "Have you been in the halls?" She turns back to him with the question.

[revivalism]

Simon shakes his head at both questions: he doesn't know what it just, but it did just something, and he's never been out in the hallways. "I read someone's report about the unexplored parts of the ship," he offers, assuming that's what she means by halls. The report said something about time-sensitive medical conditions being rendered unpredictable out there, and he hasn't been interested in testing that.

He tightens his tie and straightens his sleeves, channeling his natural nervous fidgeting into something less recognizable as such.

"Are they holograms?"

[alsohawkeye]

"I don't think so," Kate says but she's still squinting at it and her voice lilts up just a touch too much at the end of the phrase. "It's hard to say for sure about anything around here," she admits after a moment, "But the holograms in the holodecks aren't interactive. You can't touch them or anything. But these-- at least the other ones I've seen-- you can feel them, you can scratch paint flecks off. So I think it's something else."

She doesn't approach any closer; he can touch this one for himself if he likes.

"Some sort of hallucination is a popular theory," she says. At least it's popular with her, if 'popular' can encompass something being found deeply unsettling. "It's a theory for pretty much everything around here."