thirty-ninth jump;

[ataraxites]

CHARACTERS: Any and all.
LOCATION: Gravity Couches and beyond.
WARNINGS: Maybe some swearing, or even some violence, and more than likely some implied (and possibly explicit) nakedness.
SUMMARY: Another month, another jump, another round of new faces.
NOTES: A feeling of deep dread greets you as you stumble out of the gravcouch, strong enough to hold you still for a long moment, searching your surroundings for the source of your wariness. Nothing becomes apparent, only your fellow passengers waking up. Eventually you gather the resolve to pick yourself up and start moving, the feeling fading slowly as you progress through routine.

New arrivals will find messages spraypainted across their lockers telling them not to follow their tattoo numbers, and instead to find a room on Floors 001-010.


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There's a breathing tube jammed down your trachea, and you're suspended in a tube of clear blue fluid. Upon registering your level of consciousness, the gravity couch drains the fluid surrounding you and retracts the breathing apparatus; the doors in front of you open, and you're deposited on the floor of a stark, sterile medical bay.

ＹＯ́Ｕ̴ ̧Ａ̨ＲＥ ＮＯＴ҉ ̷ＡＬＯ̨ＮＥ҉

There are others who have come before you, others who are awakening beside you. Some may be familiar to you, perhaps even friends. Others have much less amiable plans. Some are merely alien and inexplicable, but there are always those who might mean you harm.

After you catch your breath and your vision returns, you notice a number on the inside of your forearm. Maybe it's a familiar number. Maybe it means something. Maybe it's just a number. But the number—completely unique to you—is a tattoo, and it does not come off.

If you enter the room adjacent to the medbay, you will find a small locker with your number on it, surrounded by rows upon rows of identical lockers. Inside, you will find a few of your personal items, a communications device, and a ship's uniform in your exact size. The comms device is fully powered and connects directly to the ship's network; it's your only means of communication beyond physical conversation. Upon turning the device on, a neutral, automated voice will say, "Please take the blue lift to the passenger quarters." Any other attempts at communicating with the rest of the network are met only with static.

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Comments

[axeyou]

She's so not joking. Her shoulders twitch up a little when Newt takes her hair into his hand. There's no way she could feel the knife--it's not a person, it's not a presence that she can necessarily sense--but she still knows that it's there, just behind her.

If he stabs her in the back, she'll cut his hands off.

But she doesn't say it. She stares forward, fixedly, her shoulders still held a little too high for her to look like she's at all relaxed.

"No dreams." There's a deceptive lightness to her tone, an extra measure of airiness. The slice of the knife, the tug and fall of the hair. Johanna's shoulder twitches up, and then drops. "Thank god. Can't a girl just go for a change of style every once and awhile?" And, before he thinks of seriously answering that, she plows on: "Do you do this a lot?"

[gimp]

Oh Johanna. You are something else. Newt just shakes his head when she asks about the change of style--because he doesn't even know if that's a thing that girls do and even if it is who would he, of the once shoulder length blonde hair, be to tell her anything about it--and fixes up some of the uneven ends in the same spot, cutting them idly with the edge of the knife while she rapid fires questions at him again. Newt's ever patient, and though he does kind of want to ask what the point of this is, he keeps it to himself, and hums thoughtfully.

"Every now and then. Boys in the glade needed a cut, everyone else thought they'd get their ears cut off if it wasn't me who did it. 's why I kept mine long for so long." The ear thing was probably true, because Alby was known to have little patience for klunkheadedness, and Newt adored him but he was still not letting him anywhere near his head with a knife. Leaning back a little to look at her to see if the sides are even, he shrugs. "The short suits you better. Even lookin' like this. Want me to do the back too?"

[axeyou]

Looking like this. She turns to look at Newt, her eyebrows raised. His work to even out the ends has actually helped, a little. It's not as neat of a job as it might have been with real scissors, but it's better than her efforts.

"Looking like what," she drawls. When she cocks her head, her hair falls onto her cheek, a neat swoop. He's probably right. She could probably carry off any haircut. Even a shaved head, and she thinks that mercilessly, like a sneer directed inward. "Looking good, you mean? Of course."

But the compliment gets her to crack a grin anyways, just a little, before she turns away to fix her stare forward. "Do the back or I'll look totally crazy. Maybe I'll let you cut my hair all the time. A whole glade of boys can't be wrong about your skills, right? You don't do your own, do you?"

[gimp]

Newt rolls his eyes, but it's seemingly affectionate, and gets up to shuffle around behind her so he can settle down. "What I mean's choppin' it in three different directions. Looks like you've got your head moved like you're tryin' to ask a question all the time." But, it still kind of suits her--Johanna is sort of wild, as Newt's learned, so maybe the wild haircut fits her better than anything else.

But! He'll fix it anyway. It's the least he can do. Carefully, he uses the sharp edge of the knife to trim away some of the messed up pieces--the back takes longer than the side had, and he keeps glancing over the side of her head and back to make sure it looks okay in comparison to the rest of it. Gotta do a proper good job, after all. As for his skills, he just chuckles. "Nah. Wouldn't let anybody touch it--mine was bout as long as any girl's coulda been up till I got the Tranquility. Figured while I was in space it'd be easier short, so I just tied it up and sawed it off a couple months ago. I trusted just 'bout all of the boys there with my life, but the shanks who volunteered to cut it just made me nervous."

It's kind of funny to imagine that now, mostly because he knows Alby would have been super careful, but--well. He can't dwell on Alby for too long. "This something you do often at home? Just kinda saw it all off for the hell of it."

[axeyou]

Still focused forward, Johanna lets herself imagine Newt with hair as long as a girl's. Hair that long, that's tame, compared to some of the hairdos the Capitol set have favored. But Newt isn't a Capitolite, and wouldn't be, if he was from Panem. And that means that he's free game to laugh at.

So Johanna does, and it lacks some of its usual mockery. Just good old-fashioned amusement, nothing else. What, she would defend, if anyone challenged her for laughing, it's funny, because it is.

"Too bad, I bet you were really pretty." She's actually doing a pretty good job of holding still, for all her keen awareness of the knife just behind her. "And I don't ever cut my hair, actually. Not on my own. I've got a whole team to take care of it for me. Or I did," she adds, with dark amusement. A tickle creeps over her skin as a clump of hair falls under the knife; she bites, hard, on nothing, turns it into a grin. "If you tried cutting your own hair, they'd just put a wig on you. I love this freedom."

Not.

[gimp]

He chuckles even when she laughs at him, because in retrospect, it is kind of funny. He'd mostly grown it out when he stopped running when he stopped caring, but coming to the Tranquility, for as terrible as it is, gave him a new thing to focus on. In the Glade everything felt hopeless--in the Scorch and beyond, maybe he'd have the chance to find something to make him feel alive again.

So, evenly, he agrees, "Like a proper shanky girl, I guess." Which is what the other gladers told him, frequently, but whatever. He takes off another too long strand in the back, sawing at it carefully to try and even out the wild strands. Newt had yet to really ask Johanna much about her own world--he'd garnered that it was a klunkhole like his own--but with an admission like that, he's admittedly curious about it. "Almost done back here. Why'd they put a wig on you? Can't imagine you like a proper shanky girl."

[axeyou]

"Because my hair doesn't grow fast enough to suit what they want it to do." Which is: just about anything. Twisted into weird shapes, colored green, and gold, and brown, and red. Spiked, slicked down, braided, coiled. Sometimes it had been fun, and sometimes it had been shitty. "My stylists are total idiots. They couldn't plan their way out of a wooden box."

Like a coffin. Johanna's smirk lifts at the corner of her mouth, just a little. "Maybe they're dead now," she says, conversationally. The thought is both nice and not. She didn't have any love for the crew. Maybe it's a little sad, in a very distant way, but mostly not. Except it would have been nice to put an axe in some faces personally.

"And what the hell does shanky mean?" Sharp, but not cruel, she shoots a glance over her shoulder, her mouth pursed. "You keep saying it like it's an actual word."

[gimp]

"Why do they want it to do anything?" Ah, yes, the root of the question. Newt can't imagine people trying to control even his hair--WICKED was bad but not that bad. Maybe. He hesitates to think of them as anything but not horrendous and life ruining but, hey. At least he doesn't have style issues. He makes an agreeable noise about the stylist comment, as well, mostly because it sounds like Johanna didn't like them, but also because well, if they're making her do stuff like that, they were probably pretty terrible.

Trying to get everything to a semi even length with a knife is a little more difficult than it looks, but Newt perseveres, only pausing to give her a look when she looks at him. "It's a word!" Only in their world, but, still. "Shanky. 's like...Iunno. Stupid, or something. We made it up. Somebody can be a shank, and somebody can be proper shanky."

[axeyou]

"Aww. That means you were complimenting me." Making up words seems like a total waste of time--but using that word to pay Johanna a sort-of compliment is no waste at all. She smiles, sharp, a little teasing, before she turns and settles back into staring straight forward again. 'Not a stupid girl' isn't the highest compliment she's ever been paid, but it's okay.

"They want it to do stuff because the better you look, the better they've done their jobs. And that takes everything, clothes and hair and make-up. Once you win the Hunger Games, they figure out how to sell you." Literally and figuratively. It's all about image. Johanna's smile has dried up. She prods at one of her canine teeth with the tip of her tongue. Maybe she should have had them sharpened, like Enobaria.

"But, hey," she adds, conversationally, "when you're a Victor, no one's trying to kill you anymore. Or that's the way it used to be. That was nice. Are you done, I want to see it."