welcome to the party, pal

[branchifer]

Who: Branch, Miguel, Tim, Boba, Dan, and Stacia
What: The supply and prisoner exchange
Where: The emptied out workroom floor
When: After all of Branch's chaos.
Warnings/Notes: Some blood, eventual cw mentions of cannibalism probably when Branch is hashing it out with Dan and Stacia, I'll put warnings in the subject.

[It's going to plan. And the heightened chaos is making it exactly as distracting and chaotic a situation as he was hoping for. The floor is cleared and there are people leading Elves and yetis to areas they've cleared, but traps can still be heard going off, sometimes randomly. Occasionally there's the angry argleblorgleblorg of a yeti getting chili powder exploding out of an air cannon to their face.]

[In some areas where traps were already set off and cleared, somehow (read: thanks to his 14-year-old secret accomplice) they've been reset, only to go off again.]

[It leaves things nice and unsettled and distracting.]

Comments

THE EXCHANGE - Boba, Miguel, Branch, Tim

[branchifer]

[Branch drives in to the appointed meeting spot in a little RC car, the controller propped on the dash. Tethered to the car with a bit of jump rope is an adjustable kid's roller skate, the kind that straps onto a sneaker, with the little critter cage containing Tim safely strapped into it.]

[He parks the cage where Tim is visible along multiple gaps in the tables.]

[When he gets out of the RC car and uses his hair to lift himself up onto a work table it is very clear that he is not well. The thing about being poisoned with enough snake venom to kill you probably like 2000x over is that even when you wake up, you have to take it easy. He has very much not done that, pushing himself to the absolute limits of trollish endurance. After getting hit by a different RC car right around the beginning of all this, reopening his leg wound, he's been overtaxing the myth healing by just running around.]

[The venom had blood thinning properties and while he's no longer poisoned, his body's hasn't entirely self-corrected everything wrong with his body chemistry. You might even say it's not...N'Sync? As a result, as he limps slightly on the table, the Christmas ribbon that was used as a poor substitute for a bandage over the original bandage is now soaked through, too, and he's leaving tiny little footprints of his own blood with the foot of the affected leg.]

[He's a far paler blue than he was when many of the others saw him in the Multi-plex or before and he's sweating hard and panting with exertion.]

Alright I'm here! [He calls out with that deceptively loud voice.] And I brought Tim. A deal's a deal!

For Dan and Stacia, cw: cannibalism

[branchifer]

[This whole situation has absolutely gone sideways, but one very good choice has been made: calling in two people that might be better equipped for a talk with a despairing tiny nonhuman sentient creature.]

[By the time Stacia and Dan get there, Branch is trapped in a butterfly net, the handle weighed down with several pounds of loose sand. Blood is dotted along the mesh from when he was struggling to break it open. The little Christmas ribbon tied around his left lower leg, over top the original bandage from the graze of Kaa's fang, is soaked through with blood.]

[Getting hit by an RC car had reopened the injury. Overtaxing his myth healing had come at a bad time when his body was repairing all the damage that had been done to his blood and its ability to clot.]

[He's sweating like someone close to passing out.]

[He'd needed to rest and had instead pushed himself to his limit. And he hadn't trusted anyone like Tim that had offered to dress the injury better.]

[Something is wrong with his color compared to when Stacia saw him last - there's hardly any. It's not that he's gone pale from blood loss. It's that he's lost almost all color, as if reduced to grayscale. The blue highlights in his hair are gone, so that it's now black. Even the green of his shredded little leaf vest and the patches in his shorts are duller.]

[He's sitting down in the center of the net's circular frame when they get there, his arms wrapped around his knees. He briefly looks up from where his face is buried in his arms with a dull expression on his face. He's completely emotionally shut down at this point.]

I know you probably don't care what I want, but please, when you feed me to one of your pointy-headed little kids, can you tell them to chew? I don't want to be swallowed whole.

[He closes his eyes tight.]

Just get it over with.

For Miguel

[orivodika]

[Boba watches Branch's breakdown. It makes him feel-- nothing. He doesn't feel anything about it. (But if he were to feel something, if would be sadness; pity. And a little resentment, being forgotten about so quickly and easily.)

He pushes all that not-feeling down and turns to Miguel with a challenge in his eyes.]

If I leave then it's not your problem. I can take care of myself.

[Miguel helped him before. But he's getting no goodwill when he's standing between Boba and his way out.]