PIIIIIIIPE WREEEEEENCH FIIIIIIIIIGHT

[unrecovered]

Who| Wash and others
What| Murderworld. So much Murderworld.
Where| All over the arena - locations are in toplevels
When| Murderworld! Late day 1, all of day 2, and early day 3
Warnings/Notes| Violence for days. Most of these have been planned using the almighty spreadsheet - if you want to plan something, feel free to poke me on plurk!

Get pulled from a perfectly benign covert mission to be thrown into a bad Hunger Games ripoff run by someone with zero sense of style or humor. Survive, probably on his own, until help comes or he manages to escape. Sure. Okay.

What could possibly go wrong?

Comments

[unrecovered]

Wash blinks. Well, she's not wrong. "Point," he concedes. "Do you plan on using it at all?"

[littlecousin]

"Nah, not my style."

Once, she disarmed a guard of his rifle and then swung it like a baseball bat to club him. Nita is very lucky to be bulletproof.

"You're a pretty good shot, though," she says, looking up at him as she cleans his knife on her pant leg. While not exactly a born diplomat, she's nice, and doesn't comment on Wash's general human squishiness. "You want it?"

[unrecovered]

Admittedly, Wash has survived a lot despite his general human squishiness. (Then again, he usually has armor to help with that.)

"I'm that obvious, huh." He gives her the beginnings of a smile - it's not like he was trying to hide his interest in the rifle. "Yeah, I do want it. I'm a marksman, so that's right in my wheelhouse."

[littlecousin]

"Hey, nothing wrong with efficient allocation of resources," Nita says with a laugh, flipping the knife around with a graceful motion to offer it back hilt-first. "It's all yours. ...Remind me to give you the bullets, too."

Yeah, she didn't even load it.

[unrecovered]

Wash accepts the knife and sheathes it with a practiced motion. "Thanks. And yeah, those would be helpful." Somehow, he's not surprised Nita didn't load the gun. He's not sure whether that's better or worse than Mabel waving her handgun around with wild abandon; at the moment, it's probably best not to think about it.

As for the matter at hand... "Do you have any idea how to cook shark?" He's got fire starters, but beyond that it's just a big question mark.

[littlecousin]

Nita blinks, taken aback by the thought of cooking perfectly good shark. They don't have fire where she's from, and on the surface, she subsists on takeout and invitations to eat at friends' places.

"Uh...campfire?"

[unrecovered]

Evidently it's a big question mark for Nita too. "...okay. I have fire starters, so we just need something to burn." And the ocean itself is not going to be helpful with that. Hopefully the beach has driftwood. "Meet you back here in 20?"

[littlecousin]

"'Kay." She rises smoothly, gathering up the poncho and shark steaks as she does. "Don't want to lose this to another cybershark or something."

Her first stop is to collect her things from their rock farther up the beach, and she stuffs everything but the trident into her pack.

While most of what she knows about fire involves how to avoid it, Nita has seen enough disaster movies to know that wood has to be dry to burn, so she tries up near the high tide line--and finds a big chunk of tree. In life, it had probably been majestic, and now it was still an impressive chunk of wood, perhaps a foot thick and substantially longer than Nita is tall, studded with the remains of branches.

Pleased with her find--that ought be enough wood for anyone!--she picks it up under one arm and jogs back to where they'd left the shark carcass. It strikes her as not the most appetizing location for dinner, so she unilaterally relocates a few dozen yards upwind, to a pile of conveniently chair-height rocks.

It won't be hard for Wash to find their new campsite. He can just follow the loud cracking sounds as Nita breaks off the branches one by one. She then casually picks up the log itself, and just as casually snaps it over her knee.

[unrecovered]

"Sounds like a plan." Wash gets to his feet and heads in the opposite direction from Nita, already searching a bit further up the shoreline. He's not terribly successful: he does manage to find a few sticks of driftwood, hopefully enough to build a small fire, and some tangled seaweed that had recently washed ashore. (He has some vague idea about wrapping the shark meat in seaweed to cook it; given that the memory is pre-Epsilon, it's fuzzy and vague and he's honestly not sure if it's a legitimate idea or something he got from a movie or TV at some point. Still, it might be worth trying.)

He heads back up the beach, following odd and vaguely worrying cracking sounds, to find Nita manhandling the biggest piece of driftwood he's ever seen, culminating in her breaking the log in half with seemingly no effort.

Uh.

He makes a concerted effort not to stare as he approaches the relocated campsite and sets down his comparatively pitiful findings. Nita, he's starting to realize, is weird even by crazy future standards and is definitely going to take some getting used to.

[littlecousin]

"Hey, Wash!" Nita drops half the log to wave as he approaches. "Do you have any idea how small the pieces have to be?"

She's pretty sure what she's got is still too big, so she digs her fingers into one end of the log, and simply tears it apart lengthwise with another loud crack and a shower of splinters.

[unrecovered]

"Yeah, about-" He pauses when she just. Rips a log apart. Okay, then. He blinks and tries again. "About this big," he gestures with his hands, indicating a shape about a foot long and three or four inches wide. "Any bigger and we'll have a pretty clunky campfire." At least the little sticks he's gathered will serve as kindling. You start a fire with something small, right?

[littlecousin]

"Right-o, hang tight." They might not have the proper tools...but Nita's demonstrated she doesn't need them, and it's a few quick, albeit noisy minutes until she's dismantled the log into roughly firewood-sized pieces.

"Okay." She dusts splinters off her hands and clothes, grabbing the end of her ponytail to inspect that as well. "Your turn. I've never actually seen someone start a fire with matches or whatever."

She knows a lot of people with flame powers.

[unrecovered]

Wash has definitely spent those few minutes sitting on the other side of one of the larger rocks. Removing splinters without the proper tools is a bitch, and just because he can heal doesn't mean he wants to have to cut himself open just to get wood out of his skin. He goes for the ounce of prevention rather than the pound of cure, pride be damned.

"Right." He sets about building the fire. It's been a while since he's had to do anything close to this, and he pulls on very old memories to try to figure out what to do. The fire starter in the middle, smaller pieces of wood and twigs built up in a loose pyramid around it, and four of the larger logs in a pyramid above that. It's a moment or two before the fire starter catches, but then the fire climbs up the twigs and then the logs and they're in business. Wash sits back in satisfaction, grinning. He's prouder of himself than he probably should be, but fuck it, that's a nice fire and they're going to have a hot breakfast with the first meat he's had in months. He's allowed to be happy, dammit.

[littlecousin]

It's Nita's turn to hang back. She can hardly be hurt by something as trivial as a campfire...it's just that she has no idea what a person does to light one. Wash seems to know what he's doing, and she sits quietly on a rock with her knees tucked up under her chin, watching. She might even remember how to do this if it ever comes up again.

The flames flare up unusually yellow as the salt on the surface of the driftwood burns, and then settle into the normal orange at the fringes.

"Ha, good job. I'd say it's time for s'mores, but I never want to see a piece of candy again in my life."

[unrecovered]

"Thanks. I haven't done that in..." Wash shakes his head and blinks. He doesn't actually have a defined time for the last time he built a fire - it predates Epsilon by quite a bit. Not being able to remember the specifics of something is unfamiliar (and, admittedly, kind of nice sometimes). "Forever, I think." He stands up, picks up one of the sticks he'd gathered, and heads to the rocks, taking a seat near Nita. The stick's too big for smaller kindling and too small to work as a log, but it might be just right for cooking. He pulls his knife out and starts whittling the stick to a point. (He's pretty sure "put it on a stick against a fire and see what happens" is not how one is supposed to cook shark steaks, but fuck it, he doesn't exactly have any better ideas.) "Really. What'd candy do to you?"

[littlecousin]

While Wash preps his stick, Nita wraps a piece of raw shark in one of his strips of seaweed, and starts eating the assemblage raw like it's the universe's most questionable burrito. She has very dainty table manners for someone sitting on a rock without a single utensil or serviette in sight for miles.

"Oh man, you didn't land in the candy zone yet? It's great for the first fifteen minutes and then the nausea sets in." She's exaggerating for effect and did not in fact make herself sick instantly, though given the way she acts, Wash could be forgiven for not realizing that.

"You want a lollipop? I picked a couple before I left."

[unrecovered]

A few years ago, the shark sashimi burrito would have given Wash pause. Now, however, he has a few years with the Reds and Blues under his belt, and in that time he's definitely seen Grif assemble and eat far less appetizing concoctions. Wash just looks at and goes back to prepping his stick. Wrapping seaweed around the point would probably be a good idea - it'd keep splinters from getting into the shark meat, at least.

He does look up again when Nita answers his question. "There's a candy zone here?" So Arcade is either ripping off board games or Disney movies. Good to know. "Should I ask if there was anything living in it, or do I want to know?" If she tells him she ran into a unicorn named Charlie, he's leaving.

"Sure." Who knows - a quick sugar-induced burst of energy might come in handy later.

[littlecousin]

Nita transfers her breakfast to one hand so she can dig around in her pack with the other.

"I saw some bats, and I made friends with a unicorn." She did not, however, get a name. "And there were some mean elves made of peppermint sticks. They shatter real good if you hit 'em, though. Aha!"

Nita brandishes one of those enormous swirl lollipops in rainbow stripes. Somehow, amazingly, it's not broken.

[unrecovered]

"Of course there's a candy unicorn." Why wouldn't there be a candy unicorn. Evidently Arcade has taken to ripping off internet shorts that are hundreds of years old, which is arguably worse than ripping off board games. (At least she didn't say its name is Charlie, so he's not going anywhere.)

All work on his cooking stick comes to a complete stop as Nita pulls a giant lollipop out of her bag. It's the size of Wash's head, and miraculously unbroken. For a moment, all he can do is stare. "How did you get that here in one piece?"

[littlecousin]

"Wrapped it in my spare shirt."

Nita shrugs as though that should have been obvious. She is only wearing the t-shirt, duh. As far as she's concerned it would have been weirder if the lollipop had broken. It's not like she got in any fights while carrying the pack, after all.

Also, she's basically a Disney princess and this kind of thing happens around her a lot.

[unrecovered]

Wash is about as far from Disney as you could possibly get, so yeah, this is pretty damn weird.

But Nita essentially comes from another planet in terms of weirdness, so. It's really not worth contemplating too deeply. He quirks an eyebrow and accepts the lollipop, taking the time to place it in his own bag before going back to his stick, smoothly and carefully wrapping the point and top half in seaweed. "Okay. Thanks."

[littlecousin]

Nita has a mouthful of shark-rito, so she just waggles the fingers on one hand in a little wave of acknowledgement.

She's finished her sashimi before Wash's own dinner is cooked, so she licks her fingers--it's charming when she does it, okay--and once again starts going through her backpack. At least this time she produces something Wash will approve of unequivocally: a magazine full of rifle bullets. She also grabs the rifle itself.

"Uh, might want to rinse off the stock. It's all sticky."

Blood does get sticky, but it's hard to tell what is exactly is coating the butt of the rifle underneath all the red sand adhering to it. Besides, blood would be way too normal a thing to find on a weapon Nita owns.