ArchivedLogs:In the WaspKing's Court (pt1)
| In the WaspKing's Court (pt1) | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia
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2013-06-09 The kidnapped students awaken to a nightmare. (Part of Them! TP) |
| Location
Somewhere in Clinton | |
The inside of this abandoned building has been stripped. The top floor, in what used to be space 6 or 8 apartments by the look of it, is now essentially one big open space with just the load-bearing pillars for support. The windows have mostly been blacked out or boarded over. In two places, the room has been walled off with a translucent papery material which is deceptively sturdy. These areas have been partitioned for privacy, and seem to just be a bathroom, and a bedroom. The bedroom looks like it was made for a king. A king who is also a teenaged boy. It has a king sized bed, a huge flat screen TV sitting on the floor and an apparently random collection of DVDs and video games in a pile near it. It's mid-Sunday afternoon by the time everyone is waking up again. Between the wasp venom, and the heavy drinking Friday night, this could be a pretty rough wake-up. The wasps have arranged everything just so. They ordered Ivan's favorite breakfast, which has been laid out neatly on a crummy looking card table, even though its already close to 3. Apparently ‘Breakfast’ is what you eat after Ivan wakes up. With a little hunting around, the wasps even found a couple extra mattresses to put on either side of Ivan's already enormous bed. Ivan is in whatever state he would normally be in, in the morning, under the covers. Also under the covers with him are all three girls, distributed across the mattresses, still dressed in whatever they were wearing the night before. It’s an Ivan, a Rasa, a Shelby, and then a Kris, all in a row. The wasp women stand around, eager to present the results of their master plan to Ivan, King of the Bees. {Soon everyone} {will wake up,} {and we will be a hive!} Their conversation includes Ivan of course, but they're not speaking with their mouths yet. Ivan will be able to sense their expectation that the girls must be able to understand them the way Ivan does, yet this is not the case. The only audible noise they make is their happy humming and buzzing sounds as they flit around, setting things up. For the record, everyone's cell phone was left back in that alleyway outside of Evolve. The girls have only what they were wearing. Ivan sleeps, sprawled out in the huge bed, blissfully. No shirt, though the rest of him is hidden away under the blankets. A sharktwin-inflicted scar lines his collar bone and another marks the side of his ribcage, but in general he looks very well taken care of! Sleeping oh so gently. At least... until there is the mention of waking up that enters his mind, and his eyes open as though he'd been /waiting/ for it. He sits up, blankets bundled up around his waist, to blearily look from the wasp women, to the bagels and lox they're brought him, true to form, and then to each and every one of his friends. Sort of unsteadily. He... should probably be happier to see his friends. No, that's not true- he's plenty happy, this much the wasps sense and /know/, and the bright smile that belatedly and slowly makes it onto his face suggests it to be true. But for all the empathic joy he's expressing, there's a startling lack of it actually present in his movements or actions. He SITS there, perfect posture with his back straight, hands in his lap, eyes... a little unfocused. Head tilting slightly to one side. {... Wake up.} He glances to the wasp women for a moment, baffled. Oh. /Oh/. His eyebrows go up, then tries with a voice that demonstrates rather nicely the fact that he hasn't spoken aloud in a week, "{Wake up!}" ... In Russian. It's a start. There is a noise. It's there, somewhere in Rasa's brain that is vaguely familiar. It certainly isn't the city sounds or the incessant buzzing from the wasp women which has been there for long enough to ignore. It might not even be the words that are spoken, even though it is a part of it. Instead, it's the tone of the voice, the sound itself, something that nudges hir awake. Ze stirs, groggy and headachy, limbs feeling a bit like they are on fire from being dragged around throughout the night. There's a whimper from hir, a curling of hir arms underneath hir, a stirring around hir head and the pressing closed of hir eyelids. If ze were comfortable, ze might start muttering about five more minutes, but as things are and as bright as they are, ze keeps hir words to hirself. From hir vantage point, ze only sees the two other girls first. Hir lips purse and ze swallows hard, reaching for the first shoulder near by and giving it a gloved-handed shake. "Hey. Hey. Wake up." Then, Rasa looks around, squinting, first at the rest of the room and the other people in it, then finally to the other side of hir bed, blinking and squinting at the being sitting on top of it. "Oh. Sorry. I must be asleep still. This... hurts too much to be sleep though." Ze lifts hir hands and starts scrubbing at hir face. The buzzing doesn’t rouse her, the Russian doesn’t rouse her but when Shelby is shaken, she begins to claw her way back up to full consciousness. It isn’t a pleasant process, between the headache and the feeling that something might have crawled into her mouth and died overnight. She flops from stomach to back and pushes the heel of her palms against her eyes. “Nnnugh, I think--” Oh wait. It takes several seconds for street-born instincts to step in--showing just how soft she’s grown in the past six months!--but when they do show up, it’s with a vengeance. Shelby sits bolt upright, eyes wide as dollar pancakes and mouth working silently. Her voice appears to be caught in her throat, which has closed off. She does not see Rasa, or Kris, or even Ivan up there on his CUSHY KING BED. No, Shelby sees the human-sized wasps bustling around. And when she’s done being scared motionless, she begins to frantically kick herself off the mattress, across the floor and right into a corner. “...n-no...oh no...no no no...” The wasps go still at Shelby's panic, looking over at Ivan and Rasa. The sleeping Kris gets a headtilt, but they let her rest. The humming and buzzing stops, except for a couple of nervous wing-flits from Camellia. If Ivan is touching Rasa's skin, ze would receive his understanding of their speech, though not really a translation. {Ivan, help} {her, she's frightened of us.} They broadcast sadness and regret. {What should we do?} With all the alertness of a bumblebee in winter, Ivan sits. And watches. His smile, previously so HAPPY and warm, fades quickly when negative emotions start folding in onto his mind. Concern makes it onto his face without pause, eyebrows crumpling toward each other before he reaches blindly for Rasa, to gently grab hold of wherever his uncoordinated movements might lead both of his hands. Lest ze kicks hirself off into a corner too, perhaps. {I don't know!} Panic joins the broadcasted fray, his breathing picking up as he applies the wasp women's understanding of Shelby's actions against them to himself. Surely Shelby isn't scared of /him/? "Shelby--" He utters, somewhat awkwardly, as if he has to think about how to pronounce it properly, before turning to Rasa again. "Rasa. No- not scared. Please." When Ivan grabs hir, ze locks on him, blinking more rapidly and looking confused. "Ivan? Is that... you?" And then, because ze is wearing too much clothing (because ze needed to guard against accidental touches in the club and while hefting Kris around), ze takes off hir gloves and reaches out for Ivan's head, as if trying to make sure it's really him and not some sort of illusion or robot clone. "Ivan!" << What the fuck is going on? >> It's hard to keep some of those thoughts at bay. Ze swallows hard and starts trying to sift through everything going on in his head, head tilting a little to one side, face looking confused and still pained, but mostly overwhelmed. Eventually, ze widens hir eyes and twitches a little at the noise, then looks over at Shelby. "They're actually... upset you're unhappy." This makes no sense, by the look on Rasa's face. That the wasps go still helps somewhat. They’re not moving. But they’re /staring/. With their buggy eyes. Shelby’s own eyes, white-rimmed and haunted, roll between wasps and people. She’s in her unhappy place right now. She /might/ be trying to hyperventilate, after she’s shoved herself into a tiny little ball there in the corner. “...nnnnnnn,” she vocalizes, more senseless whine than any proper plea. Human!Photoshop has stopped working; would you like to close now? The wasps all snap back to Ivan and Rasa, totally focused, when ze touches him. They send the sensation of feeling Rasa join their 'channel', like an extra carrier signal. It's shared through Ivan, and a little dimmer than his, but then, ze's not Ivan, so it makes sense to the wasps. With an effort, the three begin to speak individually. Azalea kneels at the foot of the bed, reaching out a hand to rest it on Rasa's foot, with the blanket separating them. {Little sister, [she's | |
