goneawayworld | Corona [OPEN]

Entry tags:

Corona [OPEN]

Who: The New Hires and Planker
What: Fun
Where: The Gym
When: Post-plot.
Warnings/Notes: Foul language from Planker.

The first warning the New Hires have is that some of them quietly get pulled aside by various members of the staff before training even starts. Not only does this mean that some of the personnel had to wake up extra early, already a warning sign, but they don't mention why. They just take a few key people aside.

The second warning is when Planker walks in, whistling a cheerful tune and wearing a smile like a man with a three foot erection. "All right, you miserable fucking reprobates! Big Daddy Planker has heard your complaints about his training methods. Pity the Princess got transferred out, she could feel the love today." He paces in front of the assembled crew, doing his best to show off every little tooth. "And, believe you me, that's the only love that exists for you little shits! God doesn't love you, He's dead! I killed Him! He came upon me in His divine glory while I was showering and didn't duck fast enough when I turned around to face Him! And if you anorchous shit-stuffers don't want to be buried in the same fucking hole, you'll straighten those fucking backs and pay attention!"

He snaps his fingers, directing everyone's attentions to a series of chambers. Clear material forms the walls and the rest promises an obstacle course. "This is your obstacle course! And you are mine! I have permission to keep you here until I get bored! And if that means you blowzy copremetics will all get through this course." He slams his hand against one of the walls, then jabs a finger at the first person to catch his attention. "That means you, filth! Mount that wall, put some effort into it, and go! You! Join them!"

The course is an exercise in sadism, as only Planker could imagine. There are seven chambers.

The first room seems simple enough, you simply have to run across. But the floor moves, like treadmills, and each segment is in an opposite direction. When the participant hits the floor an ear-piercing siren starts blaring, increasing in volume with every fall and not ceasing until the course is completed.
The second room is a mud crawl under rows of concertina wire that snags and catches at the clothing, with stinging insects there to hurry people along. If the poor unfortunate is too slow, tear gas starts to fill the room.
The third room has a set of irregular monkey bars, but they've been greased. It's set above a three foot pit filled with mouse traps straining to go off.
The fourth room has, dangling from strings, chattering stun guns at various heights. There are sparking hurdles, as well, wrapped in barbed wire to snag at any clothing and drag people in to the electrified bars. Three double-sided cattle prods rotate like ceiling fans, threatening anyone who gets too close. To add to the stupidity, the floor is covered in tires.
The fifth room brings them to a ball pit! But some of the balls are electroshock grenades. Some are glue bombs. And some of them are flashbangs. Both are set to go off on contact.
The penultimate room has air rams that go off as the participant drags a dummy (or their partner. Or the previous, possibly unconscious, runner.) through, blasting powerfully enough to knock a man off of his feet. To make things worse, giant strips of fly paper stretch across the room, snaring anyone unfortunate enough to get caught.
The seventh, and final, room has something different. Carrying a tool box, the participant has to dash up a spiraling ramp that has alternating barrels and greased ball bearings dropping down at regular intervals. At the end, they have to solve a puzzle and disarm a bomb. If they fail to do it in time, the 'bomb' goes off. Unfortunately for them, Planker isn't allowed to use a real bomb. Instead, the box underneath the bomb springs open, revealing an enraged skunk.

After about the third person starts to go through, Planker will press a button. At that point, the chambers will rise up, revealing wheels, and start to move about the gym in swift circles, controlled via his remote, designed to throw the people inside off-balance and remove any illusion of stable footing. To add salt to the wound, there are cameras in every chamber, capturing every possible humiliation for editing and presenting to whoever Planker sees fit later on.

[[Obviously you don't have to participate. Your character was taken aside for some reason. Otherwise, you can either have your characters run through, react to, or simply have them talk about being forced to undergo this new, improved obstacle course later.]]

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"Pain is weakness leaving the body," comes the reminder over the intercoms.

Oh, right. There are intercoms. So Planker can offer moral support.

"When I get out of here I'll show you pain, just wait!" Catra hisses at the intercom. She looks up as Setsuna launches herself--and lands in the midst of a bunch of flashbang explosions and glue bombs. Catra mutters under breath, cursing, then tugs herself back to get as much of a running start as she can manage, then leaps. She's good at this and has a frankly absurd long jump, even with the limited start.

Sadly, it's not enough to get her across either and she lands in the pit. She's tucked into herself as much as she can manage and even then, not's not much help. There's a flurry of flashes and pops as bombs go off. A pained yowl follows, high and shrieking, as she's hit with an electric shock bomb stuck to her arm. She jitters for a moment, teeth clamped together as tight as she can partially because of the shock and partially just because she doesn't want to risk chomping down on her own tongue.

"Fuck--!" She reaches bag to grab at Setsuna and hauls again, dragging her through the pit as she struggles to make progress towards the far side.

"I'm going. To kill. This man," she pants.

"Death is too good for him," Setsuna says, and it could be mistaken for sounding slightly prim, except she is bleeding from multiple angry-looking welts and some painfully red splotches of skin that are almost certainly going to be very very bad bruises very very rapidly and the look in her eyes is a hot red fine-pointed anger through the tears making them waver. He entire body shivers, not helped by the electric shock grenades she set off pulling herself to her feet instead, after the initial swarm of bombs nearly knocked her out cold and buried her underneath the rest.

She drags her way through the pit, so visibly hanging on to consciousness with a vengeance the next two grenades only make her sway a little on her feet, because what's one more wave of dizziness and shock and glue compared to the stars she keeps having to blink to see through anyway. Once she manages to grip Catra's hand in hers, she lets the older girl drag her through the rest without complaint.

"I don't think he's felt helpless before in his life. I think a little empathy for the experience ... would do him good. It could be ..."

She smiles. It's a sweet, sunny, and utterly compassionless smile. "It could be educational for him," she finishes, at last.

... Setsuna, it must be said, while it's not a part of her life which she's proud of or particularly keen to revisit, knows a thing or two about inflicting despair in people, should the need arise.

"You know, there aren't a lot of people I'd say that about. He's one of them," Catra agrees, hissing as more glue sticks to a bare, furry leg. She scrambles forward, jumping and squirming every time another bomb or grenade goes off to scorch fur or disorient her with flash and sound. She glances at Setsuna and the smile isn't one that she knows exactly. It's definitely one she recognizes the meaning of, though. And hearing it and seeing it from Setsuna, a girl who has so far been nothing but kindness and light? Well it does make one worry.

"I just don't get how this guy can somehow be more sadistic than the stupid Horde. He has to be trying." She groans, hauls herself another few feet. She's almost at the lip of the pit.

"What am I saying, of course he's a try hard. I'm gonna shred his damn face!" Catra says as she reaches out to try and find a handhold out of the ball pit.

"This isn't a -" Setsuna's interrupted by brushing against an electroshock grenade, and her eyes nearly roll back in her head as her body goes stiff and all her senses scream at her at once, but she doesn't have a shriek left in her so she just grunts and shakes once it's released its payload of voltaic misery into her. Her voice is raw and slightly raspy, when she manages to continue. "This isn't a training course. This is a ... punishment course. The only thing we're meant to learn from this is -"

She brushes a flashbang and goes down, hard, her entire leg knocked out from under her by the blow. "I hate this," she mutters, when either she manages to pull herself up or Catra helps haul her to her now-deeply-unsteady feet. "All this is about is to show us what he can do to us, whenever he wants."

She sucks in a hard breath, once they finally reach the other side, as Catra looks around for a way out. "He probably -" She coughs, wet, her entire body rattled. "- wants us to hate him. I bet that's what he wants, he ... probably thinks if we end up hating him enough we'll fixate on him ... become like him, to get back at him."

She narrows her eyes, and in lieu of seeing any easier ways out she puts her arms together, offering a pedestal of limbs for Catra to use to springboard off of and out of the pit. "He doesn't know people as well as he thinks he does."

"Believe me, I know." Catra snaps back at Setsuna. "I had this kind of crap all the time in the Horde. Shadow Weaver would--" She clamps her mouth shut after a moment, realizing that perhaps she's saying too much or that perhaps it's just letting Setsuna too far into her head. Into her world.

"I've seen it before," is what she finally says. She leans against the side of the pit for a moment, having blessedly found a spot free of grenades and other traps. Sucks in a few heavy breaths and tries, desperately, to regain her strength. She had been doing fine the first couple rooms but now the combination of shocks, small cuts and bruises and burns have all combined to wear her down. She doesn't want to keep going--doesn't even know if she can. But if she doesn't, that bastard wins.

"And yeah. He definitely doesn't," she says with a spare, humorless laugh. She plants her foot on Setsuna's arms and shoves herself out onto the lip of the pool. Laying on her stomach, she reaches out for Setsuna, offering her a hand up and out.

"I'm worse than him already, after all."

She takes the hand, then rests there for a moment, bruising and bleeding and battered in more ways than one.

"I doubt that," Setsuna says, too exhausted to really think and stop herself. "I can think - of a few ways you could have made this worse, if you were."

She swallows, heavily, wiping a hand across her mouth. Unfortunately, this leaves a nice smear across her mouth after it, because her hand is covered in grenade residue and sweat. She bites down on air, clenching her teeth, determination and frustration lancing the pain in her voice and letting some deeply ugly sort of optimism leak out. "Maybe we'll run him through a revised version, someday, how does that sound."

"Hey, just because I'm not a sadist doesn't mean I'm better than him," Catra says defensively. There's a messed up, aching, painful comfort in thinking (knowing) that you're awful. That you've down everything possible to hurt the person who mattered to you and they've still somehow given you a chance. Hell, she almost destroyed the world.

Not that she'll say that. Outwardly she just grits her teeth, eyes narrowing for a brief moment as she considers Setsuna. Nice kid, seems to understand stuff better than some people. And still a vulnerability. She takes a breath, tries to ignore the stench of singed fur and the stinging brusies that are just now making themselves known.

"Heh. I like the sound of that. Come on--" She hauls at Setsuna's arm, grunting as she struggles to help tug the other up and onto the relative safety of the pool. "...We can't stay too long or he'll probably get pissed."

This is the part of the conversation where Setsuna discerns tabling any further comment and coming back to it later is the better part of valor, or however that thought's supposed to go for people who aren't habitually incapable of talking their feelings out loud, instead of, say, Setsuna, who's easy to read but hard to talk sensibly to. Case in point: she just gives Catra a look out of the side of her eye, quietly and fairly unjudgmentally acknowledging that Catra sure just said that, but she is utterly unmoved, emotionally, in any direction by the fact that Catra did.

It is a problem for future Setsuna and future Catra to worry about if she's actually going to bring this up later, and when, because for now there are more important problems. Like staying not passed out in the middle of Planker's hell gym long enough to escape it.

"Right now making him happy is the last thing I want to do," Setsuna says, a little mulishly, but she doesn't particularly want to find out if Planker can arbitrarily make it worse for them even more than he already has, either, so beyond that she lets herself get pulled up, doing her level best to brace herself for whatever comes next.

She's aware that whatever comes after flashbangs and electric shocks is hardly something she can realistically do much to brace herself for, but here's hoping.

Last time Catra said something was a problem for future Catra, it ended up being a really big problem. So that's normal. She looks back at Setsuna, scoffs.

"I don't want him to be happy, I just want to do the minimum to avoid him getting all pissy over this," that siad, though, she hauls herself up to her feet and then staggers into the next room. She stares blankly at the line of waiting dummies, then across the room that's dotted with giant strips of hanging paper that wafts in the air cannon blasts.

"...Seriously?" She says, her patience starting to wear even thinner. "I don't care what they do to me I am going to rip his face off."

"I care what they do to you," Setsuna says, a little grumpily, from where she's currently leaning against Catra for a momentary spell of literal support. She can take a lot of punishment but that was so much punishment at once.

She lets out a groan as she takes in the sight before them, however. "This isn't even that funny of a joke," she grumbles, to no one in particular but potentially to Planker, who she assumes could possibly be listening in at any moment it pleases him. "Are we dealing with a man with the brain of a sadist or the mind of a literal child?"

"Then you're an idiot," Catra says sharply. "Be smart and stop." Normally she'd probably bristle and shove Setsuna away from her, but she's too exhausted, too angry, and too focused on the idea of hurting Planker to make much fuss in the moment. She studies the obstacle for a long moment, teeth grit.

"Both? Let's call it both," she mutters, then reaches down to grab one of the dummies. Grunting, she swings it onto her back as best she can and then hunkers down into an awkward four-legged sort of stance. She pauses there, looks at Setsuna.

"...More points of contact. Better balance." As if that explains everything.

"Do you call everybody who keeps their promises to you an idiot?" is maybe not the smartest thing to say under the circumstances, but Setsuna is deeply not at her best, right now.

Setsuna has been eyeing these dummies, herself, and thinking, not out loud, wouldn't it be easier to carry each other and ignore these instead but remembering the no-touching rule at the last second. Eventually she swings one onto her own back, a whuff of punched-out air leaving her as the weight of it hits her.

"I don't think I'd be as balanced like that as you are," is all Setsuna says, looking at Catra, "but good to know." But she hunkers down anyway, trying to pull her personal center of gravity - weighed down as it is by the dummy - closer to the ground and, hopefully, harder to dislodge by air cannon than teetering on her already shaky legs would make her. Even if it feels like bending at the knees only makes her ability to keep walking forward even more unsteady than it already was.

And then the only way out is through, it seems.

"Maybe if I knew more people who kept their promises," Catra snapped back, glaring at Setsuna.

"You don't know anything about me, so stop acting like you're my friend. We're not friends and we're never going to be friends, got it?" She doesn't bother waiting any longer. She starts forward with a scramble of limbs, buffeted by the blasts of the air cannon. Her strategy seems to be working--and she's already got naturally good balance. She's making it slowly and steadily across the room, hand over hand as low to the ground as she can get. She's ignoring Setsuna now, cursing herself inwardly for starting to let her walls down around the other girl. Stupid. She should know better by now.

Setsuna just kind of stalls there before she can actually keep going, too stunned to speak or continue, icewater down her back. So this is how it feels to be on the other side of this ...

She's not Love, though. She knows what Love would say and she's not Love and she has figured out, by now, how to be herself as much as she has figured out how to be the person Love loves her for being. And Love isn't here, and this place is full of so many stupid, awful situations that only one part of her life, and all the pain she's tried to heal or move past, can really prepare her for facing any of it.

She's a Labyrinthian as much as she's anything. It's all about writing the right code for the social contract you made. Her voice goes hollow, and soft, and maybe Catra doesn't hear her over the noise of the air cannons, but she isn't really saying it for Catra's sake, either. "I never said I promised to be your friend, I said I promised I'd have your back. You can't hurt me by taking away something you never gave."

Then she moves, implacable and, despite the unsteadiness of her legs, too angry to be anything but unshakable, despite the blasts of air that threaten to topple her and fling her into the strips of flypaper just waiting to mock her if she falters.

Catra doesn't give any indication that she hears Setsuna's words. She's too wrapped into her own head now, too angry at herself, angry at Jorgmund, angry at Planker. She hates this place, she hates all the people here, and right now she wants nothing more than to tear everything down around her and break into pieces. Let them all suffer the way she suffers, let them all experience pain the way she does. It's all she can think of as she hauls herself to the finish line.

She is going to find Planker and carve a reminder into his skin that she isn't to be fucked with, Catra thinks. SHe might be stuck here but that doesn't mean she has to be the weakest one, the one being stepped on. She can work her way up, right? She can subvert them, turn this into her willing army and then grind the bastards into the dirt where they belong.

She just has to be harder, crueler, more menacing than them. She stands, dumping aside her dummy as she reaches the far end of the room and leans up against the wall for a moment, panting. Eyes narrow as she watches Setsuna come forward. Slow, but steady.

"Can't you go any faster?" She half regrets the words as soon as they drop from her mouth, but there's that part of her that feels happy mocking someone else. It means she's not in pain, just for a moment.

"Let's get this over with already. You're slowing me down."

Setsuna almost - almost says something deeply ill-advised, like "stop acting like you don't care about me, you're a terrible liar and I can see right through your stupid thin skin", or "you don't have to be like them to be better than them", but she just bites down hard on air, instead, pressing her mouth into a tight, unhappy line.

"I'll try not to," is all she says, a faint and angry echo of the words she offered at the very beginning of this nightmare full of obstacles, not giving Catra more than an inch of the satisfying hurt she knows the older girl's actually looking for in the moment.

But a burning certainty stings her chest, right about the same place her exhausted, laboring breathing comes to rest, in all its raggedy, scraping glory: Catra's going to get an earful, someday, and when that day comes, Setsuna intends to be sure Catra listens. Because Catra needs the help. And whether she likes it or not Setsuna will do what she knows she's capable of, and help her. With a fist to the face if she has to.

She's fought enough people she cares about to prove it. She's had plenty of practice at it by now. Catra will find out firsthand just how much. She's going to make sure of it.

Catra remains confident that she needs no help, that she wants no help. That what she wants is to run far, far away and disappear from people's lives because then they will be better and happier for it. This confidence is brittle, a veneer painted over the deep, deep well of pain and anger and grief that has been roiling in her for years. It only really got bad when Adora left, but that thought has never been far from her mind. How could it be, when all her life she has been told that she is worthless, that she is nothing, that without Adora she'd be tossed aside like so much trash? There is a small voice, urging her to tell Setsuna that she's sorry, that she didn't mean it, that she's just angry and in pain and hates Planker and this whole stupid place, but not Setsuna. Setsuna has been kind and understanding and she's just a kid.

In the end, though itt's easier to hide that. To be angry. To lash out. To cause pain in others before they can cause pain in Catra. So instead of doing what the little voice in the back of her head says, she just takes a few more ragged, painful breaths and then steps towards the final chamber.

"Come on."

Whatever you say, Catra.

Setsuna just pushes past her, wordlessly, picking up the toolbox without even waiting to let Catra offer to do it first.

And, honestly, compared to the last few chambers ... this is child's play. It doesn't go fast, because she's exhausted, bruised, literally crusted with blood where the flashbangs broke her skin, her legs aren't that steady, but this is just a ridiculous obstacle course full of things to avoid being hit by or stepping on, and this is, legitimately, a whimper of a final challenge, by her own experience's standard for difficult training. She doesn't expect the older girl needs any help here, either.

If Catra needs help, though, she doesn't notice, fortunately for Catra's pride; as much as this isn't much of a challenge, she's exhausted enough that it takes up most of her concentration just to keep it that way. Unfortunately for them both, they don't know what's waiting for them at the top ... or that the timer on Planker's "bomb" started when they entered the first chamber, not the last.

Setsuna's also never actually seen a "bomb", before, so she takes a precious few disastrous seconds to even identify what puzzle they're being asked to solve, here at the very bitter end.

Catra is happy to go without conversation. Conversation is stupid. Conversation is vulnerable. It's garbage, really. Like Setsuna, she doesn't find it difficult to stay on her feet now--it's more that it takes time because she's so fucking tired. By the time the pair have clambered up to the top and the bomb that they're supposed to somehow defuse, Catra feels like she might just crawl out of the course and collapse.

"...Great, which wire do we cut?" She mutters. "Red, green, blue, yellow, black..." She peers at the mess of electronics.

"What happens if we cut the wrong one?"

"Probably something bad." Setsuna does not know a 'bomb' but at this point she sure does know Planker.

She's looking at the tangle, warily, frustrated, tired, deeply spent. Her brain is tracing circuits, connections, pathways, running numbers on autopilot almost before she registers she's doing it.

But the time keeps ticking down, and right as she finally decisively moves to shove a few wires aside and cut - the yellow one - their time runs out.

And inside is a small rodent with a giant fluffy tail, black, white, and vibrating, facing entirely the wrong direction. Setsuna laughs, slightly hysterical, the comedy of it all coming down to a dumb, childish prank of making them think something awful awaited but actually it's a cute fuzzy animal, surprise!, and falls back on her knees, tears stinging her face.

It puts her face right into the line of fire.

Catra snorts as the box pops open and it's... an animal? Black with a white stripe, but clearly not happy to be where it is. Not that any of them are. Like Setsuna, she has to laugh. It's absurd.

"What the hell?" SHe snorts and plops down. "That's it? C'mon, I expected something worse--" And of course, right when she says that is when the skunk decides it has had enough of this tomfoolery and sprays the both of them. Catra's sensitive nose is overloaded immediately and she tries to cut off the smell by clamping her hands over her face.

"What the FUCK?!" She scrambles away, trying to duck out of the line of fire.

Oh god, the smell is awful. She's never smelled anything this bad before in her life and she's literally inhaled aerosolized despair, which is one of the worst smells in the world.

The tears burst from her eyes completely involuntarily, the stench stinging her already raw and upset eyes beyond anything they can tolerate. Shutting them doesn't even seem to help. Every breath sucks in more of the odor, her nose feels like it's on fire.

She can only imagine what it must be doing to Catra, and the sympathetic agony obliterates most of her frustration and resentment over how the older girl was just treating her and she just kind of - swipes aimlessly through the air in search of Catra's hand to grab and - hold on to something, be something to be held onto herself, who knows.

"I hate him," she says, in a sobbing, hysterical laugh, just, nothing about this is funny but it is so, so stupidly, comically malevolent that it kind of is a really bad joke overall, "I hate him so much ..."

He really does remind her of a dumber, shittier Northa. And in this moment, for the first time in a while, it really does connect for her that she really did kill Northa, back then. It doesn't always feel like it, but there wasn't anything to Northa but hate, and she and the other Cures punched that hate right out of existence. Northa couldn't live without that hate inside her, animating her. So what else could anyone call that, except a death?

She wonders if there's anything in Planker but hate, and ... if not, how easy it would be to do the same to him.

Catra's sinuses are screaming at her. Her eyes are watering, her head hurts just from the lack of water and the sheer bombardment of sensation she's experienced in this hellscape. She scrambles away further, only pausing as she feels Setsuna's hand grip hers. For that moment, she forgets her anger towards the other and simply grips Setsuna's hand. It's an anchor as she she tries to scramble for the exit, someone and something to hold onto as the world dissolves into pain and misery, just like it always does.

"I'll kill him," she says as she coughs and hacks and winces. "I hate him so much I could kill him--" She gasps and chokes, coughs again. She shoves forward against the exit door which refuses to give at first, her eyes still blind, her poor nose and mouth filled with the disgusting scent of the skunk's spray. She doesn't have the same experience as Setsuna, but Catra knows what it is to hate. Knows what it is to despise someone utterly and completely. She shoves at the door again.

"Let me! OUT!" She shoves one last time and it finally pops open so the pair can tumble out onto the floor of the training area in a tangle of ill-smelling limbs and sore muscles. Catra struggles to push herself up onto her hands and knees, then immediately retches and vomits out her half-digested breakfast onto the training floor. She convulses, her whole body trembling in exertion. There are tears stinging her eyes and her nose is still filled with foul stench that is clinging to her, refusing to let go.

Edited 2020-06-11 18:29 (UTC)

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Corona [OPEN]

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