legionmissions | PIIIIIIIPE WREEEEEENCH FIIIIIIIIIGHT

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PIIIIIIIPE WREEEEEENCH FIIIIIIIIIGHT

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?

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It's been less than twelve hours since Wash woke up in this ridiculous murder arena, and he's already completely tired of it. They'd been a hair's breadth away from busting out of this godforsaken place before Arcade had interrupted them (though really, that's to be expected when the person running the place cheats as often as he breathes); he'd had a hard landing from that; and he'd long since been separated from Grif, which isn't too bad - Grif has a habit of taking care of himself - but that doesn't stop Wash from worrying. He can't not worry, what with everyone being caught in a goddamn death arena.

But worrying isn't going to help them or him, so he moves on, walking through giant trees and toadstools as quietly as he can manage, looking for uninhabited shelter and listening for threats.

What he hears instead is muffled whimpering and crying echoing through the trees. It sounds human, and female, and young.

There is no way in hell that's not a trap. There's just no way.

He takes a deep breath, wrestles for a moment with his conscience, and goes anyway.

The source of the sound isn't too far away - it only takes him a few minutes to get there - but it definitely confirms his worst fear. There's a Harrubian child - a teenager at best - bound at ankle and wrist and dangling from one of the giant toadstools at what would be chest height for him. She's fallen silent aside from the occasional whimper, a terrified expression on her face and eyes fixed to a point to his left. He slowly heads around the side of the tree he's hiding behind, following her gaze, to see a wolf the size of a horse standing by another tree, licking its chops, eyes locked with the young girl.

Well, shit. It's obviously a trap - if he exposes himself, he either gets eaten by a wolf or attacked by whoever set it, or possibly both. If he does nothing, a child dies. There's not really a choice to be made.

The wolf starts trotting towards the girl, teeth bared, and Wash surges forward. The wolf hears him, pricks its ears, turns towards him-

And he plunges his knife into its eye.

The wolf rears back with a scream, and Wash manages to yank his knife out and land on his feet, When the wolf lands, he lashes out again, slashing across the wolf's nose and opening a deep cut. "Get out! Go!"

There are some meals that are worth the trouble; to the wolf, a mouthful of girl isn't one of them. The wolf yelps and turns, heading back into the woods away from the assailant with the knife. Absolutely not worth it.

Between the noise the wolf made and his own yelling, Wash knows they don't have much time before whoever set the trap is attracted by the noise. There's no way they're not nearby - you don't set a trap with live, sentient bait and then leave it. You stick around and wait to see what you catch. Wash doesn't intend to be here long enough for that to happen. He sprints for the girl and cuts her down, catching her as she falls and slicing through the ropes around her ankles and wrists. "You need to get out of here-"

There's a sharp report and an even sharper pain in his arm. He yells in pain and dodges to the side, dragging the girl with him, as another plasma blast tears through toadstool stem right where his head had been a moment before. "Run!" He pushes the girl towards the foliage and turns to face his attacker.

Attackers, in this case. Cashmere smirks and twirls a plasma blaster around his finger, as though it had been a trick shot that he was particularly proud of and not an attempt on someone else's life. Next to him, Gloss smiles, and it's sweet ad terrible, poison all the way down. Their trap was a success, and they can't help but toy with their prey. "Should I chase the girl?" Gloss purrs.

Cashmere gives a rolling shrug, locking eyes with the Legionnaire they've flushed. "No. She'll still be close when we're done with this one. Plenty of time to hunt her down after we've finished here."

If there's a cue, it's silent - both of them raise their blasters as one and start firing, leaping off the toadstool they'd been on and heading in semicircles in opposite directions from one another. If they can herd their prey, it'll be that much easier to kill it.

There are some days when Wash hates being right. This is absolutely one of them. He bolts the moment they start firing, heading behind the toadstool and trying to think. He's got a very short length of rope, a giant toadstool, a knife, and two people after him who won't think twice about killing him - hell, they probably think it's a sport. He's got three and a half seconds to think before they make it around the toadstool and he gets caught in the line of fire.

Two seconds later, a chunk of toadstool flies out from behind the toadstool itself, hurled from an improvised rope slingshot and aimed for Gloss. Wash doesn't stop to see if it hits - he's darting towards another toadstool, trying for cover in the less terrifyingly giant foliage growing around its base. Anything to get away from these two.

Gloss sidesteps easily to avoid the flying fungus, though it does interrupt her firing pattern for a moment. "Oh, that's funny," she says, all predatory amusement. "He thinks he can actually get away."

"Well, he has another think coming," Cashmere shrugs easily, gesturing at the underbrush and drawing his plastisteel sword. The plan is simple: he'll go in there and engage the target in hand to hand combat, and Gloss will lay down covering fire and kill the target if it escapes. It's child's play for them.

Gloss smirks and waits as Cashmere heads into the underbrush.

Wash makes it to cover by the skin of his teeth and takes a second to breathe and observe. Okay. Okay, the next step is-

Is one of them breaking off, drawing a fucking sword, and heading forward to join Wash in the underbrush.

Well. Fuck this guy. The last guy who thought he could beat Wash in a knife fight ultimately got a spaceship dropped on him and then got flung off a cliff, and while Wash doesn't have nearly the advantages here that he did on Chorus, this asshole is no Felix either. He can do this. He just needs to be smart.

He leaves a piece of rope behind, loosely tying several branches and bushes together. The knot will slip in a matter of seconds; hopefully, it'll be enough to draw Cashmere's attention. It's enough time to move away as silently as he can and wait.

It's not terribly to follow the target's tracks through the underbrush, and Cashmere is silenty gloating as he makes his way through. Warnings from his sister to watch for the game and be prepared are, for the most part, dismissed - he's chasing a mostly unarmed human through the brush. What could possibly go wrong?

A plant rustles to his left, and he smirks. Look, the human's so scared it's tripping up. This should be simple. He sneaks through the brush and stabs his sword forward into-

A clump of brush with a small, severed piece of rope hanging from it. What the-

That's all the opening Wash needs. He's not hiding far from his trap, and Cashmere's angle of approach and relative carelessness has given Wash a position behind him and the advantage of surprise.

There is absolutely something to be said for sneak attack damage. Wash surges forward and reaches around Cashmere, plunging his knife into Cashmere's neck and dragging the blade across his throat. "Say hi to Felix for me," he snarls, knocking Cashmere's blaster off its holster and tossing it to the side. It clatters to the ground next to the plastisteel sword that slipped from Cashmere's grip when Wash stabbed him. Now all he has to do is take care of the other one and he'd be home free.

The second the blade plunges into her brother's throat, Gloss screams and plows into the underbrush. She will not lose her brother to some upstart piece of garbage meant to die in the arena anyway-

She has the presence of mind to switch her blaster to darts before she comes upon the scene, firing one point-blank at the target and screaming all the while. "How dare you! How dare you!" She doesn't bother picking up sword or blaster, instead grabbing her brother's limp body and screaming for a teleport. He's not dead yet; with Arcade pulling them from the arena, there's still hope.

As she and her brother fade, she snarls down at her target. "I'll come back for you later. Enjoy contemplating your death." The twins disappear, leaving behind weaponry, a bloody patch of ground, and an inert target.

He'll pay for what he did to her brother. Gloss will make damned sure of that.

How did she know-

Wash drops Cashmere's body when the scream rattles through the underbrush. He barely makes it two yards away before he feels the dart bite into his neck. His neck begins to tingle, a spreading numbness that surges through his body within moments. His legs fold beneath him and he collapses bonelessly to the ground and lands hard, unable to catch himself. He hears the threat; hears the sound of teleporting; hears silence. He tries to get up. He tries to struggle. He tries to move.

He can't.

Whatever's in that dart has paralyzed him almost completely; his only saving grace is that he's still breathing.

But that's the point, isn't it? Gloss wants him to contemplate his death while he waits for the wolf to come back, or for her to return. He didn't even manage to kill Cashmere, and now it's only a matter of time before they come back to finish what they started and he couldn't follow through on.

He's going to die here, alone and unable to defend himself, and there's nothing he can do about it. He made a decision, and now it'll mean his death.

He's trying to stay calm, struggling to keep his breathing even and not attract attention. He's not sure whether getting eaten alive by the wolf or tortured by the twins will be worse, but he's not exactly in a hurry to find out either.

He doesn't know how long he lies there, staving off panic as best he can, before he hear footsteps approach. He holds his breath, praying they don't find him, that they'll just pass him by-

But while the footsteps meander a bit, they do head towards him. He manages to glance up as they come to a stop in front of him, and-

It's the girl. The one that they'd hung from the toadstool as a trap. The one he'd freed. She'd come back and found him.

She kneels next to him, rolling what he thinks are leaves between her palms until the smell of bitter mint fills the air and the plants are more of a paste. "This tastes bad," she says, opening her mouth and putting the paste under his tongue, "but it'll help, I promise."

She's absolutely right: it's the most bitter thing he's ever tasted, and it's only the fact that he can't move that keeps him from spitting it out. He waits, and breathes, and after nearly a full minute it turns out she's right again, as the numbness starts to fade and sensation slowly returns to his limbs, along with a wicked case of pins and needles. He shifts and winces a bit - yeah, this is definitely not fun, but-

But he's alive. He'd saved her life, and she'd come back to return the favor.

She waits until he can sit up before nodding in satisfaction. "You can spit those out if you want. You should be okay now."

Oh, thank God. He turns to the side, leans over, and does just that. It's going to take a good long while to get that taste out of his mouth, but at this point he's so grateful to be alive and able to move again that he's more than willing to put up with it. If this is what life tastes like right now, he'll take it.

"Thank you," he finally says, a little hoarse and a little slurred as the last remnants of paralysis fade slowly. "You saved my life."

The girl shrugs. "You saved mine," she says simply. "I couldn't just let you die after that."

It's a fair point. He nods and struggles to his feet. "We need to get out of here. We don't know when they'll come back, and I don't think I can win a fight right now."

"Okay." She nods, gathering the sword and blaster, and nods at him. "Follow me."

They walk in silence for nearly half an hour before she leads them into a little alcove between two of the gigantic trees. It's snug and quiet, with a small fire pit in front and a nest of leaves towards the back. They gather food - turns out the scanner on the Omnicom is incredibly handy for pointing out edible material - and Wash builds a small fire to roast vegetables as the sun begins to set. They get to talking, quietly, with frequent breaks to listen for approaching fauna (or, worst case scenario, approaching tributes) in the surrounding area.

The girl's name is Arlie; she's thirteen; her mother is a botanist, which is why she knows what plants double as general antidotes to strange poisons; and her father is a political dissident. "He has Opinions," she explains, and Wash can hear the capital O that starts that word. "So they sent us here. I haven't seen dad since they grabbed us. Mom went out this morning and hasn't come back yet. I was out looking for her when the twins grabbed me and tied me up, and..." she trails off and shrugs. "You know the rest of the story."

He takes the plasma blaster - hard won, as far as he's concerned - and gives her the sword and several fire starters out of his pack. She settles in for the night and he stays up, sitting up by the fire and keeping watch. He dozes lightly a few times, but really, he's had worse. It's an uneventful night, which is exactly what he and she both need.

In the quiet and the dark, he thinks about the arena. Thinks about Grif, sent God knows where. Thinks about Dipper and Mabel - kids, caught in this murderous manmade hell - and about how they'll take care of each other. Thinks about Arcade, putting innocent people and children into a torture arena. Thinks about how good it's going to feel to track down Arcade and deliver justice, insomuch as he can and still stay within Legion guidelines. Thinks about getting everyone out of here. Goal one is survival. Goal two is to shut this whole damned place down.

The morning brings a teleport storm, and when he manages to open his eyes again, the forest is gone. Goddammit.

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PIIIIIIIPE WREEEEEENCH FIIIIIIIIIGHT

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