Prince Zuko |❂| Avatar: the Last Airbender (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
failbender) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
legionworld2016-01-05 12:31 am
failbender) wrote in legionworld2016-01-05 12:31 am
Entry tags:
Wake Up Call [closed]
Who| Zuko, Parker in the vents, and the Legionnaires
What| Zuko has a very rough awakening
Where| All over the vent system and various places -- because fucking really, Zuko?
When| The evening after Zuko wakes up the first time
Warnings/Notes| None.
Zuko had no idea how his life had wound up like this. Quite literally. Because the last thing he remembered was leaving with Katara to face down his sister and now he was laying in a bed somewhere strange with terrifying floating lights and beeping noises and some kind of tube stuck in his arm and he had to figure out how to get out of here. Every single instinct was telling him he had to get out of here.
This wasn't the first time he'd woken up. The first time he'd woken up he'd had tubes in his arms and a mask over his mouth attached to a another tube and he'd seen the strange vision of a city unlike any he'd ever seen before outside the window, with metal moving trains like the ones in the Earth Kingdom, and flying...things. And then people dressed in white had swarmed the room like ghosts and he'd tried to fight them and after firebending at them to spook them they'd tackled him and he'd still been too weak to fight back. They'd yelled at him to calm down and after he kept fighting them, he'd felt a pinch at his neck and then the world had gone blurry and he'd fallen asleep again.
He was fairly sure they'd drugged him with something.
But he'd woken up again and this time he played it smarter. This time he stayed in the bed and didn't move, and opened his eyes just enough to look around without making it obvious they were open, watching people move in and out of the room. He waited until the scene out the window was dark. Outside his room, the people in white rushed off somewhere, acting as if there was some emergency they were running to, and he decided that was his moment.
Zuko sat up in the bed, ripped all the tubes and needles away from himself, jumped out of bed and ran out of his room, body-checking a man in white who responded to all the beeps and alarms that started going off the moment he did it.
"He's awake! The patient in room 203 is awake!" the man called from the floor but the noise was already fading behind him as Zuko vaulted a desk with more blinky lights and weird...things. He slipped the moment he landed and almost fell on his butt, and that led to him hopping on one foot as he pulled off one of the little booties on his feet and then the other.
There. His bare feet gripped the floor better.
Now he had to get away. He didn't know where he was going yet but he knew it had to be anywhere but here where strange people in white thought it was okay to drug him and stick tubes and needles in him.
One of the people he passed was purple and had four arms.
Zuko ran faster.
What| Zuko has a very rough awakening
Where| All over the vent system and various places -- because fucking really, Zuko?
When| The evening after Zuko wakes up the first time
Warnings/Notes| None.
Zuko had no idea how his life had wound up like this. Quite literally. Because the last thing he remembered was leaving with Katara to face down his sister and now he was laying in a bed somewhere strange with terrifying floating lights and beeping noises and some kind of tube stuck in his arm and he had to figure out how to get out of here. Every single instinct was telling him he had to get out of here.
This wasn't the first time he'd woken up. The first time he'd woken up he'd had tubes in his arms and a mask over his mouth attached to a another tube and he'd seen the strange vision of a city unlike any he'd ever seen before outside the window, with metal moving trains like the ones in the Earth Kingdom, and flying...things. And then people dressed in white had swarmed the room like ghosts and he'd tried to fight them and after firebending at them to spook them they'd tackled him and he'd still been too weak to fight back. They'd yelled at him to calm down and after he kept fighting them, he'd felt a pinch at his neck and then the world had gone blurry and he'd fallen asleep again.
He was fairly sure they'd drugged him with something.
But he'd woken up again and this time he played it smarter. This time he stayed in the bed and didn't move, and opened his eyes just enough to look around without making it obvious they were open, watching people move in and out of the room. He waited until the scene out the window was dark. Outside his room, the people in white rushed off somewhere, acting as if there was some emergency they were running to, and he decided that was his moment.
Zuko sat up in the bed, ripped all the tubes and needles away from himself, jumped out of bed and ran out of his room, body-checking a man in white who responded to all the beeps and alarms that started going off the moment he did it.
"He's awake! The patient in room 203 is awake!" the man called from the floor but the noise was already fading behind him as Zuko vaulted a desk with more blinky lights and weird...things. He slipped the moment he landed and almost fell on his butt, and that led to him hopping on one foot as he pulled off one of the little booties on his feet and then the other.
There. His bare feet gripped the floor better.
Now he had to get away. He didn't know where he was going yet but he knew it had to be anywhere but here where strange people in white thought it was okay to drug him and stick tubes and needles in him.
One of the people he passed was purple and had four arms.
Zuko ran faster.
no subject
Weird kid. But then, he did just say he was the prince of some place she'd never heard of, and she'd heard of a lot of places. Maybe they'd done something to his head.
"Don't worry too much about it, I know what to look for."
no subject
"Tripwires I've heard of but not cam-ras or...FaceSpace? It's like you're speaking in a different language."
Then again, maybe she was.
"Wait. Stop."
He still had those things in his ears. She did, too, he could see them.
"We both have those things in our ears. I want to see something."
no subject
"Whoa. These are tiny!"
She'd barely felt them -- she'd probably have noticed if she wasn't accustomed to wearing Hardison's earbuds. She pulled first one then the other out of her ears, and squinted at them in the dim lighting that could reach them.
"Yeah, pull yours out," she said. "You'll figure out what an electronic is pretty quick."
no subject
"[Can you understand anything I'm saying?]" he asked. To Parker it would sound like he was speaking in a dialect of Chinese not quite like any dialect on Earth.
no subject
"/And now you're speaking gibberish. Is that what these things do?/" She made a face. "/I guess I should have listened more when that cop lady was talking./"
The most pertinent question was, were they also tracking devices? This was way beyond anything Parker had ever heard of -- and while she didn't keep up on the latest technology, Hardison certainly did, and he'd have told her if he heard about anything like this. But if they could fit language translation into these things well enough for her and Zuko to be able to talk, would there be enough room for a tracking beacon?
no subject
"Everyone back home speaks the same language. If you're from somewhere that doesn't speak it and I don't understand half of what you're saying even with these things doing...whatever they're doing, that means we're from places that are very, very far away from each other."
Impossibly far. He couldn't even begin to imagine where she actually came from or where they actually were. It wasn't as if any parts of his world had been left uncharted, after all. Between the Water Tribes, the Fire Navy, and the Air Nomads, every surface on the planet had been traveled to at some point, and there weren't any other continents out there.
That meant he had to be in another world, like the Spirit World. Or something. And she had to be from another world, too.
no subject
"/How much of the world had been explored, back where you're from?/" she asked. Because all he'd said was 'back home'. Maybe he was from some weird, isolated place that didn't have electricity -- but that didn't explain how they had the technology to make their languages mutually intelligible when at least one of the two of them was wearing them.
"/Take one out, see if you can still understand me,/" she added. If they didn't need both, they could abandon her's somewhere to delay pursuit (if they had trackers in them) and just use one of Zuko's each.
Right now though, getting out of here -- or at least getting somewhere where they could get more information -- was more important than the "how did we get here" and "how is their technology so good" problems.
no subject
He winced slightly because it did actually seem rude to say she looked strange but they did look...weird.
"Different," he amended, trying to figure out what word Uncle would use instead. It probably wasn't right but it was his best guess. "You look different from anyone I've ever met."
He took one of the earplugs and left the other in.
"Talk again so I can listen."
no subject
She imagined that weird anti-technology cultists didn't do a lot of traveling.
"/When we get out of here, we'll see what we can find about where we are and how their stuff is so advanced,/" she added. "/Heard enough yet?/"
no subject
This wasn't really his forte. He wished Aang were here -- maybe he could just do his Avatar thing, question some random spirit, and get some answers.
"And I can hear you in the one ear but it's gibberish in the other."
That meant one set of them was enough for proper translation.
no subject
She reached back, waggling her fingers at him. "/Give me one of your earbuds./"
...Oh, she probably ought to explain that.
"/They might be able to use them to track us, we can leave mine somewhere to throw off pursuit. And if we hear anyone speaking a language that we do understand, we might be able to find our way home./"
no subject
It was at least a better plan than nothing and he didn't understand how they could track such tiny things but so far she seemed to understand this place more than he possibly could. He wasn't going to argue or ask for explanations when they probably didn't have the time.
People might be coming after them as they spoke.
So he handed over the earplug.
no subject
"Trust me, I'm a criminal mastermind," she answered, waving for him to follow. "Come on, we've got a ways to go yet, and we're not getting any further from pursuit chatting about it."
no subject
He followed after her despite her proclamation.
"What kind of criminal are you?"
That seemed important, the type. Even if she knew what she was doing he wasn't going to hang around with a murderer or someone cruel.
no subject
"I'm a thief. I steal from bad guys who are using their money and power to hurt people so that we can make them face the justice that they're trying to escape. It turns out that stealing that is much more interesting and satisfying than just stealing stuff."
no subject
Maybe like being a traitor but doing it to stop a war was a good kind of criminal to be, too.
"I'm a criminal, too," he volunteered, feeling that it was only fair. "Technically."
Only because the people who decided he was a criminal were bad people.
"Back home I'm trying to help stop a war. So I'm considered a traitor to my country."
no subject
"But I understand how that goes. Sometimes bad guys are the only good guys you get."
She paused again at the next junction, motioning for silence as she listened to the sounds echoing through the shafts.
"This way. I think we're far enough away that we can start looking for a way out."
no subject
"There. That looks like a hatch."
Who knew where it led, but they had to see if there was a way to get outside of...wherever all this was. They could work out what was going on and figure out their exact location later, when they were more firmly hidden away somewhere safer.