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Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 8:22 pm
[SOLO] Easy to Sway
”Explain to me why I have to be the one to do this again?”
Rather than turn to face his parents, Elliot simply leaned back in his chair, head rolling back as he peered at them upside-down with heavy-lidded eyes. The book he had been reading a moment ago was now sitting in his lap, his index finger pressed firmly between two pages and acting as a makeshift bookmark as he listened to his parents’ newest attempt at roping him into something he didn’t want to do.
”Because,” His mother replied, returning Elliot’s bland look with a wry smile, ”Your father and I don’t think it’s good for you to just…laze around all day. We appreciate you helping around the shop—granted that we initially had to make you do it—but we both think that you need a greater sense of responsibility.”
The pink-haired teen’s expression dropped even further at the word “responsibility”, and he lazily lift a hand to stop them before letting it flop back down. ”Hold on a sec. How is running a flower booth during the festival going to make me any more ‘responsible’? I already help out at the shop—the only difference here is that the festival is going to be louder and busier--essentially, everything I don’t like.”
His father stepped forward then, gently setting a hand on the back of Elliot’s head and easing it up so that it was no longer hanging off the back of the chair. ”Exactly the point,” He grinned as he turned the chair so that the boy was actually facing them, ”I think it’d be a good experience for you. Get out there see what it’s like to run a booth during such busy times!”
”And socialize too!” Taking a step towards him, Elliot’s mother beamed down at him with a smile, ”You know, maybe you can find people your age? Make some friends?”
”Mom, I already have frien—”
”—Yes I know,” She interrupted, ”But it never hurts to make more, right? And besides that, Bas is…” Trailing off, the woman frowned, brows creasing as her expression visibly shifted into one of hesitation. When the silence ticked on for another few seconds, Elliot folded his arms over his chest, lifting a brow at his parents as he suddenly felt the need to defend his friend arise.
”What? What’s wrong with him? He’s a good guy!”
”He is!” Came the hasty reply, his father holding his hands up in an attempt to placate him, ”Your mother just means that…well, you know that we both like Bas, and he is a good kid…but whenever you two hang out together, it’s like your laziness meters combine. If you were initially at 75% laziness and Bas was at 60%, the minute you two get together, your meters suddenly shoot up to 135% each.”
…Well, Elliot couldn’t deny that (though he wasn't sure what to make of the percentages--how could you only be 75% lazy?) because when it came down to it, neither he nor his best friend liked to do any sort of work or exercise. Most of the time they spent hanging out involved laying outside in some shade, chatting, or just taking a casual stroll around town to check out the wares or to grab a bite to eat. Their friendship could basically be summed up as slow and easy.
Okay, so they had a point there. ”And Kody?” He asked, flinging out the name of another friend. He had a feeling he already knew how they felt about her though.
As expected, both his mother and father brightened up at the girl’s name. ”Nekoda is wonderful! She’s very admirable—”
”—and a very hard worker—”
”—and the fact that she can get you and Bas to get up and work is a testament to her patience! I still don’t know how she does it—she must have some pretty impressive persuasive skills.”
Elliot barely managed to bite back his laugh. Yeah, if physically dragging Bas and I around and making us get up unless we want that limb to pop out of its socket can be considered a ‘persuasive skill’.
…Still, he’d be lying if he said that he wasn’t fond of the girl.
Instead, he turned the conversation back to its original point: running the booth at the festival. ”Seriously mom, dad,” He looked at both of them in turn, ”This is not the job for me. I hardly think this will do anything positive for me—on the contrary, I would expect to come out of this experience deaf in one ear from all the shouting and ten times as tired than usual.”
Elliot leaned back then, letting out a noise of protest as his father’s big hand descended on his hair, ruffling the already-messy pink hair. ”Maybe, but you’ll come out of it learning how to deal with bigger crowds and different kinds of people. We don’t have a festival this grand everyday either, so I think it’d be quite the experience.”
Groaning, Elliot slouched over, forearms resting on his knees. ”So why don’t you two go and experience this instead?”
When he was met with silence, he glanced up, quickly realizing that he had said the wrong thing when he found that both of his parents were grinning down at him. Before he could stop them, his mother piped up.
”Who, us? Your poor, old, aging parents?”
Oh no. Suddenly sitting upright, Elliot desperately held his hands up in front of himself. ”—Hold up a sec. For one thing, neither of you are that old—”
”—Can you imagine us standing there for hours on end, with our bad backs and our frail bones—”
”—Dad, you’re so fit you could probably lift an ox with a single hand—”
”—And serving all of those customers? We know that it’s not something that you’d like to do, but we’d really, really appreciate it if you took this job on. It’d really take a huge load off of our backs. We know that it’d really tire you out, but you’re still young, compared to your little old mother and…”
The man trailed off, lips spreading into a wide grin as Elliot held one hand high in the air to stop him, the other pressed against his face. When he spoke, his voice was muffled. ”Stop.” With a sigh, he dropped his hand and tilted his head back to stare up at the pair. His expression was one of defeat.
”You guys know I can’t take guilting,” The boy grumbled, ”So enough of that. Please. You win, I’ll do it.”
He sagged in his mother’s arms as she moved forward to hug him, nose scrunching like a child’s when she pressed her lips his cheek in a kiss. ”Thank you, sweetheart. You won’t be on duty all the time—we’ll come by to replace you once in a while so that you can rest and check out the festival yourself.”
”You can even bring Seren to keep you company while you man the booth,” His father added, clapping him on the shoulder, ”And really, I think that you’ll actually have a lot of fun.”
The teen slouched in his seat. ”…Yeah, maybe.”
Somehow, he didn’t really think so.
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Posted: Thu May 29, 2014 8:27 pm
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Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2014 10:41 pm
Not So Different [PRP w/ Shun]Elliot Lindstrom Look who I ran into. Well, it's actually kind of nice being able to talk to him, sans all the noise of the festival...
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Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2014 10:41 pm
[SOLO] Nothing But AntsPrompt
Elliot never got used to this place no matter how many times he came here. His eyes never fully adjusted to the dark and dirty alleyways, just as he could never stop the bile from rising in his throat whenever the scent of trash and stale urine reached his nose. How a human being could live in such filth was beyond him, but it wasn’t their fault. After all, he was pretty sure that none of the people who lived in these slums really wanted to be here—who would? They had been driven down here due to circumstance—due to the fact that they were desperate for food and a place to live, and no one would reach out to help them.
Yes, Elliot would admit that he had some extreme biases against the monarchy. His parents, neither of whom were quite as outspoken as he was, usually scolded him for saying such things, but really, didn’t the blame rest on them? He certainly thought so. He wasn’t so blindly idealistic as to say that the King would be able to whisk every single impoverished person into a decent life, but what Elliot took issue with was the fact that they weren’t even trying. Dozens of people here in Trost were forced to face the cold and scavenge for food, and from what he had heard, even those within Wall Sina weren’t all living the high life either. It was an embarrassment.
Ultimately, the fact of the matter was that if the government wasn’t going to do anything to help, then he would. As he was only one person with absolutely no power, there wasn’t much that he could do…but as a citizen, the least that he could do was try to bring some food to those who needed it. Elliot purchased canned goods with the money he had left over at the end of each month, dropping by the shadier places in town to distribute them to those who needed them most.
Today was one such day. As per usual, Elliot felt like he was on the slide of a microscope as he walked through the darkened alleyways, aware of all the curious and calculating gazes that peered out at him from every direction. Whenever he came out here, he always made certain that it was during the day when the sun was brightest, and he made certain to dress simply and leave any valuables at home as well. He hated having to take these precautions, but the unfortunate fact of the matter was that they were necessary—there were plenty of unsavoury figures skulking about out here.
But on the other end of the spectrum…there were some innocent ones as well, ones who really didn’t deserve to be here. Those were the people he was here for. The ones who carried knives and charmed tongues had other methods of getting their sustenance, but what of the families? The ones with children and the elderly?
As he had been doing this for the last couple of months, he had come to recognize some of the faces who he set cans in front of, and in turn, some of them began to recognize him. They’d reach out expectantly—hopefully—when he stopped in front of them, sometimes thanking him for his gift, but oftentimes simply snatching it wordlessly out of his hands. The children—those who were still relatively healthy—would sometimes even jump up to greet him, and he’d reach out to ruffle their hair…but he found that he could never smile, not even for them. It was just all too grim.
…Though that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that because he had begun to recognize faces, he had also begun to notice when they went missing. The young mother he had seen last month was now staring blankly at a wall, her baby nowhere to be seen. Three months back, he had encountered a small household that consisted of a grandmother, a grandfather, and their two grandchildren. Two months ago, the grandmother was suddenly gone. This month, when Elliot swung by to drop off some cans, he found only the two children, cowering together as they peered up at him in fright.
Elliot wondered if it was only a matter of time before one of those children was left alone.
His stash of canned goods was depleted far too quickly. By the end of an hour’s time, Elliot had nothing left to hand out, and that familiar sense of guilt settled over him at the knowledge that he probably hadn’t even gotten through a quarter of those who needed something to eat. Even those he had managed to get through would only have enough food to last them a few days at most…and then it was back to scrounging for whatever they could find.
He was never going to get used to this place…but hell, no one should have to.
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Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2014 10:42 pm
[SOLO] A Golden Cage is Still a PrisonPrompt
Even if his perpetually bland expression seemed to suggest otherwise, Elliot was intensely curious about the world and its workings. Like many other children, he had always wondered what kind of world was beyond the walls. Although he had heard plenty of stories of “oceans”, “tundras”, and “volcanos”, it was nigh impossible to imagine what these things were really like. A huge mass of salty water filled not only with fish, but with odd swimming mammals as well? Lands that consisted of either ice or fire? Based on his limited world view, none of these things sounded remotely possible. For all he knew, all the stories he had heard of the land outside were exactly that—stories.
But he liked to believe.
He liked to believe that there was something out there. Huge bodies of water, plains—even just more forests. So long as it wasn’t a deserted wasteland—so long as there was some hope of humanity being about to exist outside…
Because whether people liked it or not, the walls were coming down. Maybe not now, maybe not in the next year, but Elliot was convinced that there was no way that they could survive in here forever. He wasn’t going to deny that they played a very important role in protecting the people from the threat of the titans, but while they were trapped in here, there were other threats to consider. How long until there was no more free land left? How long until all of their resources were depleted?
As it was, things were already on a steady decline. There were too many people whose daily lives were a struggle to survive. Food did not come cheaply, especially considering the land limitations. If there was more space, perhaps more farming could be done, but as it was now…?
It wasn’t like Elliot hated the walls. He definitely wasn’t a fanatic like those Wallists—those people he would never understand—but he did acknowledge the importance of the walls. It was the only thing that kept them from becoming titan food, so he was pretty appreciative of that particular function. He found that it always begged the question as to where the walls had come from in the first place though. Logically, with walls this high, he figured that they were probably built after the arrival of the titans…right? But on second thought, that just didn’t seem to make any sense either. Had they been built during the days before the titans showed up, then? Though in that case, what function had these walled off pieces of land served before?
Too many questions, and absolutely no way to get any sort of answers. People had theories, but no one had anything concrete. Those who probably knew something said nothing at all, and the Wallists…well, he wasn’t about to listen to them sprout off their mumbo jumbo about these walls being holy relics or whatever it was they were saying. In his personal option, they were probably all a little touched in the head.
In the end, it probably didn’t do him any good thinking about all this. As curious as he was about how vast the outside world was and whether it would be inhabitable without the titans were questions he didn’t expect to be answered in his lifetime…or the one of the next generation, or even the generation after. If the Survey Corps ever did manage to find a way to get rid of all of the titans, Elliot imagined that it would probably be long, long after his death, and who knew what the state of the towns within these walls would be like then. Maybe the population would have been halved by then—being in an enclosed space certainly did wonders for the spreading of sicknesses and diseases. Perhaps nearly everyone but those in Sina, who could actually afford a decent living, would die off one by one…or maybe it was just being overly pessimistic, and everything would miraculously be okay.
Whatever the case, there was no denying that they were all living in a prison. It didn’t feel like one, and it didn’t look like one, but none of them would truly be free while they were trapped within the circles of walls.
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Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2014 1:46 pm
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Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2014 1:47 pm
The Last Resort [PRP w/ Kody]Elliot Lindstrom I don't really have any other choice right now. Hopefully Kody can at least shed some light on what I'm about to get myself into...
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Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2014 1:50 pm
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Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2014 3:03 pm
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