[EVENT] The Simulation Ends

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: 6I Fountain Park & Elsewhere
WHEN: April 1
OPEN TO: ALL - Mingle
WARNINGS: N/A

---

In the snug circle of an old park, a fountain sits burbling beneath a broad, midday sky.

Once-neat paving stones have buckled and cracked from the slow nudge of wayward roots. Benches stand covered in lichen and rust. Three paths push into the underbrush like the spokes on a wheel, the encroaching forest creating lush tunnels through the dark.

But the fountain stands singular and pristine, brightly splashing in open rebellion of the deep, muffled sounds of a place long ago gone to seed. A vibration hums through the ground, there and quickly gone, and the water in the fountain trembles, lapping against the high walls of its cool, pale reservoir.

Far, far away, in a place that isn't really there, people begin to blink out of existance.

It is the first of April.

It is precisely ten o'clock in the morning.



[Please see event details and guidelines here.]

Comments

[fishermansweater]

He'd heard the shouting loudly enough to recognize her voice; Finnick's hiding spot is near enough to the fountain to be able to hear and he's partly relying on that to be able to hear Annie arrive.

The cursing isn't Annie, but it is someone he trusts enough to want to speak to her: Kate Kelly. So he waits, and he watches; Finnick has a good view of the direct path to the Inn from his tree, and he waits until he sees Kelly's distinctively red figure head off in that direction before he edges back around the trunk of the tree and drops down out of its branches.

"Kelly!"

[lastofthekellys]

"JesusMaryandJoseph."

It's not exactly a shout, nor is it a startled whisper. It's a shocked, fast breath from the woman as she whirls around to face him. Her hands have gone into fists without thinking, her feet moving into a balanced stance.

Then, she stares.

"Odair?" Her eyes narrow. "Finnick Odair, I know you've been a trifle odd at times, and this is a bit of bleedin' trying day, but really. Droppin' out of trees is no way to behave to your acquaintances."

Kate takes a deep breath and lowers her fists.

"That said, I'm glad you're in one piece. Has your missus turned up?"

[fishermansweater]

"You rather I was still up it?"

It's said with the swiftness of easy repartee, but Finnick's eyes have a sharp alertness in them, looking around and beyond Kate Kelly, scanning for dangers. There's something of the wildness and paranoia that had been so obvious in him when he'd first arrived in his expression, his stance. It's not just the long hair and shaggy beard, it's the razor-edge tension that's been there ever since the Games.

"She's not here," he replies, his voice tightening a little along with the clutch of worry that tightens again (and again and again) over his heart. "What's happening? Were you just in the village? It's been hours since the first people came through the fountain."

Not that he particularly expects Kelly to have more information than him, but maybe, if she was in the other village, she knows more than he's found out watching from up his tree. And he believes that she'd tell him what she knew if there was anything.

[lastofthekellys]

"If you were still up it, and called out, I'd call you down and so you'd not be startlin', now, would you?" Kate retorts, her temper not mollified in the slightest. Normally, she tries to keep her temper in check, but currently, it's decidedly off the leash.

Still, she forces herself to take a steadying breath has the man admits that he hasn't seen his shy wife.

"I was just in the village," she confirms. "The sky turned all purple and people have been vanishing in little groups maybe every quarter hour, or so it feels like. But the queerest, darndest thing is besides the sky, it was all normal. No other weirdness like our captors like to throw at us."

Kate regards him for a moment.

"I'd say the odds are that Mrs Odair is unharmed."