among her own kind

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell finds Milliways once when she is eighteen. She has been there for two days now, setting up her sign ten minutes out of every waking hour, wiping down tables for her quarters in the staff area, eating buttery potatoes (she has been told that this is a complete nutrient package, for humans). Her wand is holding a bun of hair in place on the back of her head. Her shells are stashed safely in her room; she's budgeting carefully and she'll pay her tab when she leaves.

No one's talked to her due to the sign yet. They don't always. She sets it up anyway, like clockwork, so everyone gets the chance.

Comments

[ferratus]

"Nice stick," says Tony.

[she_sells_seashells]

"I like my stick. You can't have it. It took practice to make it do what I want and I'm lucky I live near the ocean."

[ferratus]

"Hey, you can keep your stick," he says, raising his hands placatingly. "I wouldn't dream of touching your stick."

[sicaria]

Sherlock snorts.

[she_sells_seashells]

The flame goes away. Shell Bell puts her hair up with it once more. "If it were easier to use, it might make sense to a certain sort of mind to put it in the hands of someone with more freedom of movement than I have," she says. "But it's not. Anyway. Self-deploying explodey things? Yes or no?"

[ferratus]

"Easily if I had the right stuff," he says. "Not a chance if I don't. Right now I don't."

[she_sells_seashells]

"What stuff?" Bell asks, predictably.

[ferratus]

"Depends what kind of self-deploying I want," he says. "Do we want flying or scuttling? Scuttling's easier, I could probably scrape that together without worrying anybody, but it's more limited. Flying means propulsion systems, which usually means some kind of fuel, which means controlled substances that I can't actually get from Bar and I know this because I've tried."

[she_sells_seashells]

"You can't use, I dunno, booze as fuel? Because she does booze," Bell says. "Flying's better because it won't leave tracks but scuttling could work."

[ferratus]

"Flying can leave tracks, too, and sometimes they're a lot clearer," says Tony. "No way alcohol is an efficient enough fuel. I could probably... hmm, there are options. What do we blow up, anyway?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"I don't know yet. A map would help. Knowing more about the Capitol's inner workings would help. It's possible directly burning things down is a better idea anyway."

[ferratus]

"I can get you a map," Tony says easily.

[she_sells_seashells]

"A good map? Not a pointless little tourist map or something out of a kids' book. Actually, I wonder if the bar has them." Bell gets up to ask.

[ferratus]

"She probably does," he says.

[she_sells_seashells]

Bell comes back with a crisply folded map. She spreads it out over her sign. It's kind of odd that Tony hasn't commented on the sign, but whatever.

"I can control a lot of fire with my stick," she says. "But only one... amount of it at a time. Anything requiring simultaneous strikes requires something else. And it would be a good idea to know what we want to leave standing. In terms of structures and in terms of structure. Who is pulling crap? Who is an ignorant patsy? Who is trying to help? That being a list of people in the Capitol in order from most-acceptable-casualties to least-acceptable-casualties."

[ferratus]

"Now that is something I can do," he says.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Can you? Good."

[ferratus]

"Most of them are ignorant patsies," he says. "Like, upwards of ninety percent. And then you have the ones who are pulling crap, which is most of the rest."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Nearly nobody being decent?" sighs Bell. "Well. I guess that makes logistics easier, if there's just about no one it's a massive priority to avoid." Pause. "Are we on roughly the same page with casualties, here?"

[ferratus]

"What page are you on?" he asks.

[she_sells_seashells]

"I expect people are going to die," Bell says flatly. "I expect not all of them are gonna be personally responsible for the Games, or for policies related to public flogging, or for people in the Districts not having the vote. I expect that, since as of this time we are all humans with extremely limited resources compared to the bad guys, we will be off our game one day and somebody who really oughtn't be dead will die - somebody we like or somebody who happens to be twelve or somebody who would've gone on to cure salt fever. And I expect we ought to do what we can do anyway, because if we wait for someone else to do it, that amounts to betting that the next revolution will not only succeed, and will not only be less bloody than ours would, but that it will come quick enough for this difference in death toll to make up for every person in every District who'll die in the interim of the Games or of starvation or of terrible medical care or of casual execution."

[ferratus]

Tony exchanges a look with Sherlock.

"Believe me," he says, "we get it."

[she_sells_seashells]

"So," says Bell. "Pages, similar, yes. Okay." She turns her attention to the map.

[ferratus]

"I mean, not that I wouldn't love to do this without killing anybody we don't wanna kill. But unless we have seriously superior force, the real world doesn't work that way."

[she_sells_seashells]

"But," Shell Bell says, "the more superior the force, the faster and more surgically we can work. So I think you guys probably want to set up signs for assassinations and custom engineering projects. And acquire stick-equivalents of your own if you can."