{Nøthing as it Seems}{Wolfea}

[WT]

((OOC- Ha. Szet is raring to go at the Arena, but I managed to get her to help wring a post out of Cadia.))

The walk was silent and more than a little awkward, at least from Cadia’s perspective. She kept her mouth shut because she just plain didn’t know what to say (aside from small talk that wouldn’t mean anything, that was, because she hated small talk). Why was the other girl so quiet, though? Had she noticed her reaction? Not-Stabbed seemed like a curious sort of person, but she wasn’t asking questions. Did that mean she already knew something, or did that just mean she was respecting a stranger’s personal space?

The biting of the lip answered that- she was definitely curious. Of all the things the other girl had done, that was probably the one that put Cadia most at ease. It was a tiny motion and a subconscious one for most of the people who used it, so if she was acting she probably wouldn’t think to emulate it. And if she was curious, but she wasn’t saying anything- well, even if she wasn’t exactly trustworthy, holding back showed some sort of good quality. Cadia just didn’t know what it was called.

She was still watching her associate when it was announced that they were apparently at their destination. Cadia took her eyes off Not-Stabbed, because obviously studying the other girl wasn’t helping her figure out what was going on. Then again, looking at the building didn’t help too much either; there was no sign or any other identification. With a slight frown, she moved her head to the side to peer through the window the best she could.

Ah, a pub of some sort. Not-Stabbed wanted to buy them food, then. Or perhaps a drink, but Cadia generally avoided any drinks she found in pubs; she didn't like the idea of having her thinking muddled, so alcohol had never particularly appealed to her. So hopefully food.

She could back out now. She could turn around, brandish the knife long enough to take a few steps around her acquaintance, and then split down the street. It was the dead of night, so there would be few people to stop her, and running people in District Eleven weren’t that weird to see anyway. It would be easy to get away.

"Suppose so," she said with the tone of a sigh if not the action itself. Stepping lightly, ready to run if anyone inside the establishment seemed to be a problem, she moved past the other girl and gently pushed open the door. Her head went in first, and she did a very brief scan of the place- the doorway she stood in was the only exit, it seemed, but there were a few small but serviceable tables and chairs and the like, and none of the people inside seemed like Peacekeepers anyway. (Most of them, actually, seemed out of it. Go figure- it was a pub, after all.) She allowed herself to walk inside, and held the door behind her for her acquaintance.

“Nice place,” she commented wryly. Actually, considering where they were, it wasn’t too bad. Nasty and run-down and of possibly doubtful integrity, but hey, this was District Eleven. Besides, she thought everyone was of possibly doubtful integrity.

The question was where to go from here. Cadia had a few shops she frequented, mostly to sell things under the table, but that was it for this type of thing. She wasn’t sure if they should approach the counter or just pick one of the tables and sit. This was Not-Stabbed’s idea; with luck, hopefully Not-Stabbed would also have a clue about what to do.

[aya]

Kale looked on as the other girl scanned the place briefly. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be so overly cautious all the time, to never let her guard down. It had to be exhausting, not taking a break from being so wary.

Although, it seemed as though Ground-Girl had done just that in coming with Kale to the pub without being told where they were going. So maybe the extra reconnaissance was merely Ground-Girl trying to regain the footholds she’d lost in agreeing to accompany Kale at all.

Kale couldn’t help but flash a triumphant grin as the other girl gave her approval of the place--if the snarky comment could be called that. Ground-Girl lead the way into the pub, holding the door for Kale, though seemed unsure of what to do beyond that. Having previously been presented with many such situations in which she hadn’t the slightest idea what to do, Kale sympathized and willingly took the lead of the situation.

She took a seat at the bar, giving a little squeak of surprise and flailing her arms as the stool fell back an inch or so, due to one uneven leg. It took her a second for her heart rate to slow back to normal as she clutched the counter of the bar, cheeks flushing in embarrassment for a moment.

“Oops,” she murmured, a slight chuckle in her voice. She had a tendency to be something of a klutz, neither entirely athletic nor coordinated. Considering the establishment, she probably could have expected faulty furniture. She reiterated. “My bad.”

She would order in a minute or two, she decided, trying to ignore the look of skepticism she was receiving from the bartender, who was polishing a glass (or, trying to, for that matter; the rag he used was no cleaner, and all he seemed to accomplish was smudging it further.) Kale, for the first time since the fiasco that had resulted from her sitting down, glanced at her companion, trying to nonverbally invite her to order first while she herself tried to recover from the embarrassing encounter with the barstool.

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[WT]

Cadia couldn't avoid snickering a bit at her new acquaintances' fumble. It wasn't particularly nice of her, but really, when had she started wanting to be nice? (She squashed down the voice that tried to say "Several minutes ago," because such comments were not appreciated from her own mind.) Besides, Not-Stabbed herself was laughing a little. "By all means, don't apologize," Cadia told her with a slight smirk. "Keeping doing that, it's amusing." She paused for a moment before reluctantly relenting; that hadn't been fair. "Well, the stool was broken."

She took her own seat, making sure to shove it a bit before sitting. The stool wobbled, and she took that into account while sitting. She did not take into account the fact that the wood had rotted in one place, and one leg of the stool cracked and threatened to snap. She leaped out of it before it collapsed completely, knocking it back and herself into the bar in the process.

She eyed Not-Stabbed for a moment. "Say nothing," she begged commanded, before turning to the bartender and jabbing a thumb at the stool. "You might wanna get that fixed before someone falls and cracks their head open." Cadia doubted he cared much about people getting hurt, but the possibility of liability statements never made establishment owners happy, at least not in her experience. He just looked at her, pausing in the glass-cleaning attempt, and waited for her to take another stool.

She did so, this time the one on the opposite side of Not-Stabbed. Once more she shoved it, and this one didn't even wobble. Pleased (and more than a tad surprised), she climbed into it and settled down, pushing her hair back over her shoulder so it would keep out of whatever she ordered. A few strands stubbornly returned to the front; she grimaced and began a quick plait. Any food or drink here would be close enough to the edge of edible without her hair getting in it.

Suddenly her hands stopped mid-braid, and she blinked at Not-Stabbed in confusion. Why was her acquaintance looking at her and then at the bartender like that? And why was the bartender staring at her like he was expecting something? This wasn't-

Oh. What might be (very, very loosely) defined as terror made a pass on Cadia's face before she obstinately replaced it with annoyance. She didn't know what to do, which was much too akin to being caught off-guard than she liked. Not knowing what to do was a bad thing, or so she had drilled into herself for the past two years. She didn't, though- this was not on the list of places she frequented. There was a moment of total floundering before she blurted out, "Oh, just bring me something."

Something else occurred to her as she finished braiding her hair, and she pointed at the bartender, eyes narrowed. "And no trying to pull up the most expensive thing on the list," she ordered with an edge in her voice. "My f- acquaintance here is paying and I do have to pay her back." In the moment it took her to recover from stumbling over the word friend, she had forgotten what else she was going to say, so she just sighed and shook her head. What had she gotten herself into?

Her eyes weren't hurting, exactly, but there was a curious sort of burn left over from crying so much. She was sure she looked like a wreck, but the appearance of puffy redness didn't bother her quite so much as the odd sensation of heat. She put the tips of her fingers to her eyes, and the cold helped for a moment, but she didn't want to keep her hands out of commission and her eyes blocked for any longer than she had to, so she put them down. The heat returned, as did Cadia's frown. Add to list of reasons she disliked crying: it hurt afterward.

For lack of anything better to do, she looked over at Not-Stabbed (whose name she should really find out eventually). She wondered what the other girl was going to order. For that matter, she wondered what she herself was going to get. Nothing that would kill her, if she was lucky.

[aya]

The minor catastrophe of the Barstool Incident over and done with, Kale managed to settle herself while Ground-Girl chewed out the bartender over the ordeal. The man himself did not seem incredibly shaken by the entire sequence of events, but Kale was impressed with Ground-Girl’s boldness. She could never see herself practically threatening a big, beefy man in his own establishment.

In reality, Kale was anything but confrontational. By herself, she’d have been more than happy to let the incident slide without verbal comment--although her cheeks would certainly speak to her embarrassment. But then, she wouldn’t have gone for a drink by herself, she reasoned. It was nice to have a friend to stick up for her pride while she was busy recuperating.

For the second time in under a minute, the Ground-Girl proved her bravery by leaving her order up to the bartender, the only condition being that it wasn’t the most expensive thing they served. “Make it two,” Kale ordered, intending to dismiss the bartender more than anything. She was sick of him hovering over the two of them.

It wasn’t like she came here often enough to have a drink of choice, anyhow. There wasn’t anything in particular that was exalted above the rest. Everything they sold tasted the same to Kale for the most part, anyhow: burning and bitter.

“Don’t worry about paying me back,” she muttered to the other girl, breaking the silence. She had intended to cover the whole tab herself--she’d been saving for awhile and had the coin to spare. “I dragged you out here. It’s on me.”


OOC- infinite apologies for the lateness and the shortness... my muse has decided to take a vacation >.>

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[WT]

The bartender nodded curtly and walked away to get a couple glasses. As he started pouring something into them, Cadia turned to her companion, who was arguing the point about money. Her first reaction was to argue, but then she bit her lip. It was never a bad thing to save money for oneself, and if paying for them both would make Not-Stabbed happy then she may as well let the other girl do so. At the same time, though, she had never liked the idea of someone else paying for her food and drink. That opened up a world of possibilities regarding poison bribes and people calling debts or blackmail.

"If you say so," she finally returned, her voice doubtful. Just to add insult to possibility of injury, Cadia had been raised under the principal that she should be able to accept help if she absolutely needed to, but only if she couldn't do fine on her own (and only until the person stopped being useful, at which point she should off the person helping her when the opportunity presented itself). The past few years had only strengthened the idea that she should be able to do everything on her own. She nodded in assent, but her pride was screaming at her even louder than her paranoia.

She managed to shove both down with some difficulty. Then the bartender (she did not like this man, although she supposed his sullenness was a little better than him trying to talk to her) arrived with their drinks, though, and the paranoia started raring up again. It was an automatic response. She had never been here, the bartender was shifty, and someone else was paying; in this situation, trusting the glass that had just been put in front of her would be about as unnatural as spontaneously floating up to the ceiling and bursting into flames.

She eyed the glass carefully, trying to gauge the contents. It was hard to tell if something was poisoned when you weren't very familiar with the drink in the first place. It had a sharp sort of smell, but she figured it was probably supposed to be like that, and she couldn't identify anything that might kill her. As for the color, and the consistency... She leaned the glass over and watched the liquid inside, trying to discern something, anything. Dammit, how was she supposed to figure out if something was safe to drink when she didn't even know what the something was?! She should have looked at the menu and searched for something she knew. That had been stupid on her part.

She eyed Not-Stabbed's glass, trying to discretely compare the liquids. They looked the same- and the other girl wouldn't poison herself, would she? But there were colourless poisons out there. Maybe she should suggest switching glasses, but that had disadvantages too. If her companion was really out to kill her she'd know that Cadia hadn't fallen for it and would probably attack; if she wasn't out to get Cadia, she would probably go "this girl is damn weird" and walk off now, and Cadia was way too curious about what was going on here to let that happen.

With a sigh, she decided to talk a sip of the liquid and see what happened. She allowed herself to drink a bit, blinking at the unfamiliar taste and the even-more-unfamiliar burn in her throat. This was new for her; she tended to avoid alcohol, because if fuzzed up her brain, but her brain was already pretty groggy.

"What exactly is the point of this, anyway?" she asked Not-Stabbed, waving a weary hand in the direction of the glass. "Don't-" a yawn interrupted her, and she raised a hand to her mouth. She had forgotten how late it was; she had woken up at an odd hour, even for her unpredictable sleep schedule. Of course, she thought bitterly as she rubbed her eyes, it didn't help that she'd sobbed her eyes out for the first time in ages. That tended to take something out of you.

With a sigh, she thunked her head down on the bar and closed her eyes, not caring that it probably looked odd. She did, however, care that it left her neck exposed; the moment Cadia realized that her hand went to her knife and her entire body shot upward. She looked wildly, making sure that no one was standing over with a sword. When no murderers appeared, she sagged a bit in relief and sighed. Yes, she definitely needed some rest.

[aya]

Ground-Girl did raise a very good question: what exactly was the point of drinking, anyhow? What had possessed Kale to make her think this would be a good idea? Her friends drank to get drunk. To get so completely out of their own heads that it didn't really matter what anyone said or did, it was still funny. It was a social institution, wasn't it? Get together for a little while, knock back a few shots, laugh, have a good time.

This didn't really seem like a feasible outcome for the two, though, or at least it wouldn't compare to the rowdy crowd of teens celebrating nothing in particular whenever they could scrounge up the money or distill their own moonshine. Kale herself didn't really care much for the irresponsible waste of money that went into the social events, and didn't care at all for most of the people who attended them. Some were okay, but the others could be downright obnoxious.

Kale didn't get along with the big, boisterous jackass types. When she was a bit younger, they'd found her as a good subject to tease, and she'd found them to be thick-witted and a waste of oxygen. More recently, they'd leave her alone for the most part, but she still sometimes couldn't help but feel antagonized by them whenever they were in her vicinity.

With a mental shrug, Kale picked up her glass and took a big swallow. Her eyes watered as the sharp liquid burned her throat the whole way down, exhaling sharply as the strong drink settled in her stomach. People obviously didn't drink for the taste, she decided, although she already knew that.

Next to her, Ground-Girl rested her head on the countertop for a moment, and Kale was reminded of why her father drank from time to time, after particularly tiring days of work: to relax. To calm down a little. To take the edge off. Maybe to feel a little less. A short-term solution to all the problems that had been unearthed during the day.

The Ground-Girl shot up suddenly, startling Kale and causing her to almost lose her balance on the wobbly barstool for a moment. She managed to avoid toppling over, clutching the countertop for support, heart pounding. She was getting a bit mad at that damned stool, but didn't think she'd fare any better with the others

"To relax," Kale told the other girl simply, her own pulse slowing back to normal as she released her death grip on the bar. She picked up her tumbler again and took another sip, doing her best not to wince as the biting drink made its way down her throat. "Can't be all that bad, can it?"


OOC- finally… sorry bout that.

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[WT]

Of all the disconcerting things going on here- crying, being caught out on the streets mostly-unawares, talking with a stranger, trusting a stranger enough to walk into a strange establishment with her- there was one that rose above all the others on the Scale of Disturbing Things. No amount of time spent staring into her mug could fix a lack of knowledge borne of years of having no experience with alcohol- which, naturally, meant that Cadia still had no idea what she was about to put into her mouth. The longer it sat in front of her without exploding, the more apprehensive she got. Harmless-looking things were frequently the most vile...

She eyed Not-Stabbed just in time to see the other girl raise the glass to her mouth and gulp down a large portion of her drink. It didn’t look like the most inviting of experiences- she could see visible glinting in her counterpart’s eyes as they teared up, and the girl’s next breath sounded like it was halfway to a cough. Cadia eyed the performance, then glanced askance at her own glass. She started to pick it up, then abruptly set it back down again. Just sitting there, watching the ripples in her obviously-not-water and turning the merits of unfamiliar drinks over and over in her mind, sounded a lot more appealing than risking anything.

What Not-Stabbed could not oblige by example, however, she could through the wounding of an ego stoked by years of parental fawning and Career conditioning. Cadia didn’t really see that her sudden upright jolt had made the girl next to her start, but she saw the movement out the corner of her eye, and reacted to it. She was out of the chair and her knife was halfway out of its sheath when her eyes actually focused and found the girl who had brought her here clinging to the counter, looking startled. Sheepishly she returned to her seat, letting her blade slide back in, and reached for her glass. This girl was making an idiot out of her, and she’d be damned if she let someone who was showing her up seem braver than her for drinking something she wasn’t willing to touch.

The problem with never having touched alcohol is that such a person is highly unlikely to have any idea what to do with it, and will unwittingly chug drinks, such as vodka, that were never meant to be chugged- especially if utter pigheaded obstinacy keeps them from putting down the glass when they want nothing more than to drop it and have a hacking fit. Not to mention, of course, that if one is genetically predisposed to have absolutely no alcohol tolerance whatsoever, a lack of inoculation is not likely to help- not with one’s body knowing how to process it, and not with recognizing when one should put the glass down already because really, that’s more than enough.

One fit of uncontrollable coughing (and several long seconds of ignoring the world in favor of staring down into an empty cup) later, the end result of all this was that Cadia felt very addle-brained indeed, and wasn’t entirely happy about it. Some part of her was screaming and stomping its feet that it had warned her this would happen, had told her in no uncertain terms that if she so much as touched that liquid she would regret it...

That image was rather amusing, actually. A giggle slipped out of Cadia’s mouth as she lay her head back down on the counter. Her brain- at least, what bits of it were still functioning- attempted to spare a moment for revulsion, but the rest of her mind was distinctly fuzzier than usual- like when she drank soda, only a lot worse. Or maybe better. She couldn’t tell, and for some reason that struck her as funny, so she let herself giggle a little again. The anti-silly part of her mind, shocked to find itself in the minority when it was usually the only thing that was even present, protested weakly and then just gave up. If its charge really wanted to be stupid and get herself stabbed in the head, stopping her wasn’t worth the effort.

"I dunno. ‘Pends." She started to laugh again, then stopped, her face settling into an eerie sort of calm that wasn’t really calm at all, but the washed-out expression of someone whose face is too lost in the territory between anger and anxiety to do anything constructive. "How many people ‘re g’na kill us if w’ do?"

[aya]

Though Kale could feel her state of sobriety already beginning to slide, she had to raise an eyebrow at the Ground-Girl, who had hurriedly gulped down the liquor after spending some time scrutinizing it. It didn't take long for the other girl to displaying an apparent low tolerance for alcohol, while Kale herself was only feeling a bit buzzed. Draining her own glass sped up the process, until she reached the point where everything was hilarious. Losing her balance for the umpteenth time and almost taking a dive off that damned wobbly barstool had her in stitches; funnier than that was the fact that Ground-Girl herself was giggling, head down on the countertop again.

In response to the question posed by Ground-Girl ("How many people ‘re g’na kill us if w’ do?"), Kale began to snicker uncontrollably. In her inebriated state, it did not occur to her that the concern might have actually been serious, despite the generally on-edge behavior displayed by the other. "Dunno," she shrugged, before making the alcohol-induced lack of judgement in the slurred words that followed. "Th' Capitol, maybe… but don' they wanna kill ev'rone?"

Blaspheming the Capitol was never a good idea, and something Kale usually was able to restrain from doing; but for whatever reason, she couldn't keep the words down. It was odd — she didn't have any particular beef with the governing forces of Panem right then beyond the usual, and had never really been outspoken about it. It was unlikely that anyone in the dingy establishment was sober enough to care, and as most had already taken active steps to induce their own liver failure, it was probably safe to say that she would be okay, unless Ground-Girl had some unwavering Capitol loyalty. Possible, but it didn't seem likely. She shrugged.

[WT]

For some reason, Not-Stabbed word's brought on a mental image of the entire Capitol picking up, floating over to District Eleven, and dumping itself on top of the two girls. Despite the total ridiculousness of this idea, which a small part of her mind was still trying very hard to point out, it struck Cadia as both the most hilarious and the most terrifying thing she had ever encountered. She let out a kind of shriek, then fell over laughing hysterically. "Ev'r'one," she sputtered, nodding and trying to pat the other girl's shoulder (unsurprisingly, she missed by several feet and knocked over her glass instead). "Bu' i' sucks t' be th'm 'cause buildings don't move!"

She tried to take a sip of her drink, but it was disappointingly devoid of liquid. This was devastating, and her good spirits plummeted accordingly. Turning to Kale, dark eyes large and anxious, she said, "But wha' if th' can?" Cadia reached out to clutch the other girl's wrist; she ended up with the upper arm, which really was a notable achievement considering that Not-Stabbed was doing a funny sort of spin. At least she didn't knock her glass off the counter. "Oh m'g. 'S gon' happen. Big ligh'-ub buil'in' in the s'y, ca' you see it? There's just g'n squish us!" She demonstrated this by banging her free hand down on her glass, which skidded out from under her hand and would have fallen off the counter if it hadn't bounced off Not-Stabbed's glass, halting its momentum. "El'v'n's gonna look awful wi' all th' gau'y colours and shi'. W' might die of fashion before sk'ishing!"

[aya]

Flinching at the Ground-Girl's hysterical shriek, and feeling generally uneasy as the other girl reached out in Kale's general direction, knocking over an empty glass, Kale tried to make sense of what realization had made the other girl burst out laughing. She giggled along, because it was just plain funny to see someone who'd been so serious and so distraught a mere hour earlier dying with laughter, but nothing the other girl said made immediate logical sense to her, and she doubted there would have been any more understanding had she been completely sober.

Kale gave another small start when Ground-Girl punctuated a muddled sentence about squishing by bringing her hand down on top of the glass she'd tipped over, and probably would have fallen off the stool had her arm not been captured by her new acquaintance, who was an increasingly destructive drunk. This might have been terrifying under some circumstances; however, intoxicated as she was, Kale had trouble finding it anything besides hilarious. The fact that they might run into a bit of trouble from the bartender didn't even occur to her; she payed, and in District Eleven, you couldn't be particular about customers.

It was the line about gaudy colors that finally allowed Kale to piece together what convoluted thought process Ground-Girl was trying to convey, which brought about an unstoppable fit of laughter as her imagination constructed a thought even more wild. "Can you 'magine th' Cap'tolites 'emselves commin' in from th' sky on par'-shoots? All glittery 'n diamon's 'n it migh' star' a ffffire 'fore th' even land!" For some reason, she even giggled at the thought of the dozen blazing infernos that would ravage the district, should the bedazzled and word-adverse Capitol citizens somehow be hit by sunlight from high enough in the atmostphere.