[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

[treadswater]

She makes a small sound and then crawls over him, headbutting his arm in quiet affection. He's asked a question, and it's a decent enough one; she's just not sure how to answer it.

"I've been thinking," Annie begins, still resting her head against him. It's not exactly an answer, but it's not exactly a dodge, either. She has been thinking. She's just also still lost.

"I don't have any conclusions. It's. I don't." She sits up, rubs at her forehead a bit. "Either we're in a replica of the old arena. Or, um this is the old arena, just we've been taken out of it for ages? So, your beard. But I don't understand our stuff or the fence."

[fishermansweater]

Usually, when Annie can speak again after she's slipped like that, it means she's back, that whatever it is that twists away in her mind has righted itself and she can reach out from within her mind. When she crawls over and butts up against him, he reaches out to caress the side of her head for a moment. Her hair's oily and tangled, far longer than it had been the day before -- or the apparent day before -- but that doesn't matter. Annie's what matters.

He tilts his head a little when she speaks. She sits up, and he moves to sit with his arm pressed against hers.

"Star and the peahens haven't grown any more. The others still look the same. If we've been out of here this long," he adds, gesturing to his beard, then Annie's hair, "they'd look different."

He lifts one hand to his other wrist and starts to fiddle with the watch, trying to pull it away from his wrist, but just like when he tried to smash it earlier, he can't make it move.

There's more he want to say to her, but he has to pause. There are things that can't be said out loud in an arena, and he doesn't know what rules, if any, might have changed.

He holds his hand up, silent, and tips his head to the side.

And what about this? says the unasked question.

[treadswater]

He holds up his hand, and Annie shrugs. It's a tracker, she answers. She hasn't thought about it. Another way of tracking them all, but this time with a visible way of toying with them. Time is so easily manipulated.

His gentle rebuttal is of more interest. It's a good point. It's one of the reasons why she doesn't have a firm conclusion at all.

"So why the difference?" Annie is half asking him, half thinking out loud. "It can't be for aesthetics, not with you looking like that."

Her hair is fine. It'll be a pain in the butt to untangle, but she's always suited the wild-haired waif look. Not so Finnick.

"Unless it's just all to confuse us. Maybe."

She wouldn't exactly put it past their captors.

[fishermansweater]

They don't need a tracker like this, not an obvious one. Finnick and Annie (and Johanna) have had them implanted in their arms before, the hard little under-the-skin lumps injected there before their Games. Maybe they're afraid of someone working out how to get the things out, but the question then is why tracking them -- or being seen to be tracking them -- is important now when it wasn't before.

Finnick drops his hand back down, but Annie's comment about their hair makes him lift it up to his face and run it along the mess of hair on his chin.

"I've never grown a beard this long," he says. "It's got to be months' worth."

Yet the still-young peafowl haven't grown since he saw them the morning before he found himself here. If it was the same morning.

His head rolls back and he stares at the ceiling. There's still the light fixture there, though he hasn't checked if there's electricity. It makes no sense, not by the rules of the arenas he's so long ago learned to try to read, where everything is about the balance between the deaths of most of the tributes and the ability for one of them to survive.

"Keep us guessing as some sort of distraction?" he eventually offers, a sort of tentative extrapolation from Annie's suggestion.