multiversallogs | The Arena Riots ( open, gamewide )

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The Arena Riots ( open, gamewide )

Who: The Militia, the city, and you.
What: The Arena Riots.
Where: The Arena, Griss Twist.
When: Newdi, Eliaderen 1. (Monday Oct 1st)
Notes: Companion post for questions and plotting is here.
Warnings: Violence, police brutality, disturbing content and imagery, graphic death.

It's apparent even before dawn that something out of the ordinary is happening. Canton sheriffs are roused from their sleep or pulled away from their work to be told that on no uncertain terms, today will be a day that they do not leave their neat lines on the map. That their individual offices will be responsible for all crime and unrest within their jurisdictions, with no help; the powers that be offer no details, but the creeping feeling in their presence suggests no questions would be tolerated anyway – the implication that they'll all be watched is a strong one. In Mog Hill, Sheriff Norrington proceeds as he always does under such orders. In Mafaton, leadership is stoic but one deputy laughs, sharp and bitter, while the Emissary of the Council merely checks his watch, unseen underground. Sir Hellsing is pulled away from her dinner in the Guild Hall, a Sobek Croix deputy anxiously relaying the news. The sound of shattered glass disturbs the pre-dawn silence in Flyside, a brick hurled by some faceless figure into the front window of Thames – and nothing else.

From the Spire, hooded Militiamen move quietly and uniformly south, to Griss Twist. They are followed by wagons, full of prisoners.

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Ilde is no where near the Arena when it begins - she's at home watching a man from the store putting her nursery furniture together, she's made him a cup of tea, they're making the kind of pointless small-talk that gets made when awkwardly hanging around while someone else works. Orion sits in the doorway, alert, and while it's quiet even outside, it's not oppressively so.

He's still there when they both start getting CiD alerts, and then things change; the job isn't finished when he leaves, his face drained of colour, but she doesn't (can't) protest. She sits down on the floor in what's going to be the nursery (it hasn't been painted yet), vaguely aware of Orion trotting into the room and settling himself beside and behind her, and she watches, white-knuckled and huge-eyed. The sense of helplessness settles in like a chokehold around her throat and she can't breathe, can't move, can't go down there and fucking do something. She's still sitting there watching - listening, remembering, flinching when she recognizes a face and reminding herself that Sonja is there, that Sonja saved her, that Sonja can do so much more than she can anyway and putting her faith in that, rewarded for it in a way her namesake never was when she prayed to a dead God - when there's knocking downstairs, purposeful but not threatening.

She'd told Lea about the house, Remy and Wanda's house; how it's been empty, how they left it to her ownership, how she doesn't know what to do with it. Lea has an idea about that - she's going down after dark, with a group of them. They'll need a safe place to go. No one lives in the house yet - Ilde hasn't even got around to finding a property manager, like she knows she should.

Of course she says yes; she only has one set of keys, so she'll go herself, and be there to let them in. There's still power and water and it's still safer than some places, so- it's a good idea. She takes the long way and goes via a series of carriages, just in case, giving the last one Ivan's address - she doesn't expect to find him there, and she doesn't, but she stops anyway and if anyone wonders where she was, someone saw her go in and nobody saw her come out. The face she borrows for a short carriage ride and then a brisk walk the rest of the way through Mafaton and Abrogate Green belongs to her godmother, a Russian English woman who is always laughing, who loves champagne and married men, who jumps at every good and bad idea because she never learned how to be afraid of falling. It might be an unnecessary precaution, but she needs the borrowed braveness, anyway, and she doesn't sink back into her own appearance for a little while once she gets there.

She makes a pot of tea. She waits.

When Wolfgang shows up, he is not nearly as bad as he looks. He bled a lot, and healing the wound did nothing to clean all that off; all that blood caked on his abdomen and soaked into his clothes and hair looks pretty frightening.

He gets most of that cleaned up — with help, his hands are shaking and he's exhausted, he can barely keep his head up — and a change of clothes that don't fit him very well, he's too tall so everything is short on him, but he's not complaining. Someone, he's not sure who, deposits him somewhere and he sleeps for a while.

But he keeps having such weird dreams like he hasn't had in years; they keep waking him up every few hours. They're not bad dreams, in comparison to the usual they are a welcome reprieve, they're just... odd. Now and then his eyes open, his breathing changes and he shifts around, indicating that he's awake. The pain is pretty bad but he's afraid to take anything for it, and anyway pain won't kill him, he can just deal with it. Bootstrapsing is something he is specifically not to do but extenuating circumstances etc.

Although she doesn't stay with him the whole time - there are too many things to occupy herself with, and she needs anything to be occupied with - mostly, when Wolfgang stirs, she's at least nearby, and comes closer every time he seems to be stirring. She doesn't want to disturb him if he isn't...disturbed, but if he needs anything, she reasons, then it makes sense for her to stay nearby. To have things he might need. (Painkillers, water, a different blanket-)

Just in case.

When his eyes are open, next, she signs, Are you thirsty?

It takes him a bit to understand, he's sluggish in just about everything and it's only been a couple months (has it really?), he's not fluent, but eventually he translates that in his head and —

While his instinct is to be all oh no I'm fine thank you because he never wants to bother anyone ever about anything, it's an instinct he has honestly been trying to learn to repress. So he nods instead, consciously, and struggles to sit up a little so he doesn't have to be gazing up at her awkwardly. He's rather pleased with himself for managing even that little bit of movement. Basically he's like Robocop or something.

"Hi," he manages after a bit.

“Hi,” she says, opening a bottle of water and sitting down beside the low day-bed to hold it out to him. “You look terrible,” which is probably more candid than he really needs her to be right now, but that- happens, especially when she's anxious enough to forgo the effort required not to do that awkward fixed staring thing. It's a display of concern, it's just also sort of unsettling.

"You should see the other guy," he croaks, because he thinks he's hilarious.

Duly unsettled, he takes a sip of water, pauses, then drinks half of it in one go. It does make him feel slightly less shitty, so there's that. She can stare enough for both of them, he keeps looking around, trying to remember where he is and shit what it must be like at home, all the shit he has to do — "How is it out there?"

He's too foggy to sign, but he makes the effort to make the movements of his lips distinct and not mumble, so she doesn't have to strain to hear.

“Bad,” she says, after a moment. “Outside of Griss Twist, things are mostly- very quiet.” Oppressively so, people trying to go about their business ignoring what's happening in and around the Arena, or sitting indoors glued to the CiD coverage. She's kept up with it while staying indoors here, but less than she was before Lea came; now there are people coming and going occasionally, and now she has things she's supposed to be doing that don't involve sitting in one place. “It'll have to end, eventually, it's just- not. Yet.”

"Probably take a couple days, at least." A minor incident set off riots in the Spatters for one or two days. But opening fire on crowds of normal civilians? Then again, the rest of the city likes to look away when things like this happen. You never know.

He rubs at his eyes, drinks some more, little sips now instead of trying to drown in it. Something occurs to him as he's looking around, something is missing, and he sits up abruptly, alarmed. "Where's Hassan?" If he went back out there in that, Wolfgang is actually going to kill him. (Spoiler: no, he isn't.)

“I think he's still here-” Ilde half-stands in the midst of that thought, to see if she can get a better look of the rest of the room or maybe spontaneously develop the ability to see through walls and keep track of where people are and are not at any given moment. (And why not, anyway, it'd be nice if she'd come out of the apocalypse with something useful to apply to her every day life, instead of something she has to work not to use.) “Would he have gone without saying to you?”

Probably it goes without saying that she's curious about Hassan - who he is, when he arrived, how Wolfgang knows him, why he's so very important - but now is almost certainly not the moment for interrogations.

"No." He thinks. He's suddenly not sure. It's been ten years, people change. But not that much and he obviously still cares, he wouldn't just leave him here without at least telling someone where he was going. Right?

He could check, but he doesn't. Partially because he trusts him, partially because he's completely wiped out, he has nothing left. "No, he's here." He lies back down instead. "Where is here, by the way?" The events immediately leading up to his coming here are sort of a blur for him.

Ilde could check, too, but Wolfgang says no, he's here and she sits back down because given the option of staying nearby, she'll take that one, under the circumstances. It takes her a minute or so to work her way back around to answering the next question, although she can't decide if it's more or less complicated than it feels-

“It's my house. Um, my other house. That I inherited, sort of.” That she did in fact inherit, but she's semi-confident that it didn't involve anyone actually dying, thus complicating how 'inheritance' works. Not being in Baedal is as good as, legally speaking, something that only makes Baedal seem all the more alarming, even if it makes sense. It's the kind of mental logic puzzle that is the refuge of a mind that can't decide between trying to forget the things she can do nothing about right now or trying to aggressively remember them because she should, she just should, because it isn't fair to look away. And here she is, looking at- her hands, mainly, but then back to Wolfgang, in case he speaks, because she is paying attention today. “I have another house. This one.”

"Oh." Yeah, he understands what that means. Death in Baedal must be a relief against the uncertainty of people randomly coming and going, never sure how long they'll stay, if they should build a life here or if they might go back home and never come back, and just leave everything and everyone behind.

He's thought about it a lot.

"It's a nice house," he offers after a moment. "Sorry for bleeding on it." That's a joke, ha ha.

"Are you okay?" It occurs to him that prior to this she might have been out there, too. Or something else could have happened. He's been out a couple hours, probably, at least.

“I'm fine,” she says, quickly - it's a rerun, it's the monsters falling all over again, people in danger and Ilde sitting safely indoors, wringing her hands and feeling sorry for herself. She hasn't got anything to complain about so she doesn't. “I'm fine, I've just been here to let people in and make sure everything's...I don't know, everything.”

Organized. Suitable. Readily at hand for people who are distracted and in no mood to dig around for what they need.

“Sonja's at the Arena, and I think Ivan might be, but I couldn't go, since-” a gesture at what is definitely not just a fold in the fabric of her dress from sitting, “-so I'm doing this. It was Lea's idea.” A good idea that she'd seized on.

"Oh... right. How is the baby?"

If this sounds slightly (or a lot) awkward, well, it is. This is probably not the time for this, but right now he doesn't want to think too hard about what's going on out there. He'll have to later, but he might as well put it off until he feels less like hammered crap and can do more about it than worry and feel anxious and sad and angry.

It does require a moment of mental recalibration, but if Wolfgang would rather think about her baby than the riots, then...well, it's not like it's not a subject she devotes a lot of daily thought to. She can make that conversation.

“Good, I think? I'm past the usual 'don't tell anyone in case you jinx yourself' cut-off date and nothing has gone terribly awry yet.” Besides the fact that this is innately ill-advised. “I've been really careful, I have to pay attention to- absolutely everything, I guess. Ivan bought me a sort of fae wine that I can still drink, though, I thought that was...sweet. I've been thinking about talking to this woman in the river, too, since she has...well, my baby's probably going to look similar to her, and it's not as though I have a set form, per se? I thought it'd be nice if I could be like that, so the baby would- have something like she is. Um, that's probably more than you were wondering.”

Lea arrives sporting three deep wounds on her back that resemble what one would incur from a whip, a grim expression, and the tattered remains of her shirt hidden underneath her jacket. She isn't limping or obviously wincing in pain, but that's only because of sheer fucking determination. No sense in diming herself out, though she's made sure she hasn't been followed.

She lets herself in. It's her wards (which will be increased when Ivan turns up with that heart), she doesn't need a key.

When she gets inside, she stops in the front hall and swears, quietly, to herself, in Arabic.

Ivan arrives a bit later than Lea - it took him some time to get through the streets without being followed (and he may have made a stop or two along the way). He has a bundle tucked under one arm, about the size of a loaf of bread. Though he's covered in blood he still manages a stylish air, and he looks flushed, healthy and hyper-focused and paradoxically alive if not very human.

He's looking for Lea first, though if he catches sight of Ilde to be sure she's safe, that's just as well.

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The Arena Riots ( open, gamewide )

remy & wanda's place; ilde's safehouse.

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