[LN] Thank Goodness We're Well-rounded Characters

[matchmadeinhell]

Kon was reading at relative superspeed. It wasn't at his usual brisk pace, because he found that the limitations of his powers meant he couldn't retain the knowledge for more than a few minutes at his usual speeds, so he had to slow it down a little, but he was still thumbing through far faster than some of the others were taking just to go through the study guides they'd quickly procured.

"Is it just the fact I'm reading this as superspeed or does this story make no sense?" Kon said, as he thumbed through page after page.

Another reality shard had fallen away and now that their brands had signaled it, it was time to go dimension-hopping. Fortunately, it was a very small shard in the middle of the wilderness in Siberia and the area of effect was spreading slowly, so they had time to prepare.

With his otherworldly wisdom, Manny had managed to help out on this one, communicating some clues about the world they were about to enter by flashing the image of a cover of a book.

A fairly terrible book. Apparently they were entering the world it was based on.

So they were doing their homework as they geared up to go and trying to make sense of the senseless.

"So what I'm getting from this is this is a world where you're not allowed to have more than one personality trait? I think? Under pain of death, you have to be a one-dimensional character."

Comments

[matchmadeinhell]

Her crankiness was palpable.

"Dude, you are going to have to give her the emergency chocolate way sooner rather than later," Kon whispered to Raph, his voice too low for Nico or Cassie to hear.

[othersdestructive]

"Sssh."

Raph paused.

"Soon as this guy stops hovering over us."

[morethanmyth]

Four led them to a vast dorm room with very utilitarian looking beds.

"You're going to be sleeping here for the next ten weeks," said Four.

"Boys or girls?" someone asked.

"Both," he answered.

That got snickering and comments of "Nice!" and "That works!" from both boys and girls in the crowd.

"If you like this, you're going to love the bathrooms."

Right in the view of the main sleeping area, without even a divider, was a massive bathroom. It was mostly clean. That was about all that could be said of it. There were large sinks with multiple faucets and shower heads over grated drains in the floor. And toilets all in a row at the walls.

No toilet stalls or shower stalls. No privacy whatsoever.

"You should feel right at home, Candor," he said dryly, "everything all out in the open. Now everyone get changed."

With that, he left them to it.

[staff_and_wielder]

Oh look: Hell on alternate Earth.

Nico was giving serious thought to tearing the Staff out of her arm with her bare fingernails and seeing how long she could maintain both a copy of herself and an invisibility spell. It might be worth it. She could duck behind the other three and summon the Staff there where none of the idiots native to this reality could see and just cast a couple quick spells and be done with all of this. She could go and look for the shard while a duplicate of her could fail all the stupid tests and she wouldn't have to be here anymore.

[othersdestructive]

They quickly dibsed beds near one another. Without discussing it, just mostly doing it on instinct, Nico wound up in the middle with Kon on one side and Raph on the other (with Cassie on the other side of Kon) in a neat little row.

"Here," he said, taking something out of a little pouch and tossing it at Nico. "I was gonna save it for a really bad day but you look like you need it already."

It was a little bar of chocolate.

[staff_and_wielder]

Nico reflexively caught the thing Raph tossed at her, and almost fumbled it to the ground when she saw what it was.

Chocolate. He'd smuggled chocolate here for her because he'd known this place was going to make her miserable. He'd figured that out and he'd tried to do something to make it better.

Something in her chest crumpled like tinfoil, and she had to cram the chocolate bar under her pillow and look at the wall to keep from bursting into tears. She dug her fingernails into her palms and tried to ride out the wave of swirling emotions because she couldn't cry here, not now, not in front of everyone.

"Thanks," she said in a small voice as soon as she could trust herself not to completely lose control.

[othersdestructive]

"Don't mention it," Raph said, ""We got your back. Even if it gets crazy, don't forget that." "

He busied himself with grabbing some clothes and trying to look like he was changing when one set of clothes didn't even exist. Fortunately, the spell helped with that, pretty much absorbing the new set and magically changing it into what he was supposedly changing out of.

He seemed a little befuddled over how it worked so he kept his hands just sort of...vaguely moving.

"Can somebody tell me how zippers are even supposed to work?" he whispered. "How do you make both sides stick together? What should my hands be doing right now?"

[mark_in_the_sands]

Cassie tugged on the collar of her oversized sweater to block Christina's view of what she was doing with her hands, and brought her hands down sharply, as though she were unzipping something.

"Like that," she whispered back. The she pulled her sweater off over her head and began going about untying the knots she'd made in her skirt to keep it out of her way while she'd been climbing and running and jumping.

[othersdestructive]

He mimicked the hand gesture and the spell did the rest.

"Huh." A pause. "I'm gonna need help on the boots too when I get there."

[morethanmyth]

So far no one had been inclined to harass Cassie, probably because of the fact she was completely stacked, but Tris, it seemed, was fair game, most likely do to Abnegation's reputation for being modest and the fact that she was a little more self conscious, trying to cover herself with her clothes as she changed.

"Nice legs, stiff," said one of the Candor transfers, lewdly, very obviously staring - the same one that Kon had punched for joking about Tris taking her clothes off on the roof. A few of the boys sitting near him snickered.

Some of these same boys were, in fact, paying a little too much attention to any girls in the room that seemed self-conscious, like Tris and Nico and a mousy-looking Erudite girl.

[mark_in_the_sands]

Cassie had just stepped out of her skirt when the boy from Candor decided to go from leering to verbal harassment -- while she'd been too caught up in her team to notice the former, the latter definitely caught her attention.

She moved toward him like a shark on the scent of blood, grabbing him by the front of his undershirt and lifting him bodily up off of his bed.

"There are so many better ways to say 'please take my tongue, I no longer want nor need it'."

[matchmadeinhell]

Oh boy, looked like it was time to lay down the law. Kon was still shirtless as he walked over to join Cassie, making his physique very clear for all to see. Even dialed down, he and Cassie were still two of the tallest and most muscular people in the room, clearly more powerful than all the rest - just like they'd been among their age group when they'd been younger and smaller.

"Everybody, listen up!" he called out in a commanding voice. "It's time for some ground rules. What goes on out there, stays out there. I think we can all agree on that. But in here, with all this close quarters stuff, if anybody here gets handsy with anyone else without their express permission, is oggling, oogling, or otherwise eyeballing anybody else in an obvious and disgusting fashion, or is making creepy little comments to somebody, you're gonna deal with me and Cassie here."

He spread out his hands theatrically. "I know what you're thinking, 'yeah, they're muscular - and extremely good looking - but they're just two people, what can they possibly do?'"

With that, Kon threw a punch at a nearby column. He held back on the power, because at full strength he would've broke or at least put a huge impact crater in the thing, but he still used enough force to completely smash one of the wall tiles on the column, a feat that still took incredible strength - but at a high end human level. And he made damn sure lots of muscles rippled while he did it.

"We can do something like that. To your face. So no creepy stuff. Are we all clear?"

Quite a few people nodded in response, wide-eyed. Others gave a simple yes. The boy that Cassie scruffed squeaked out, "Crystal."

"Glad we're all on the same page," said Kon cheerfully. "I'm told good interpersonal communication is important."

As he went back to getting back to getting dressed, Tris stared at him and Cassie gratefully.

"Thanks," she said to Cass, quietly.

[mark_in_the_sands]

Cassie dropped the boy from Candor on the floor with a sniff and a toss of her head and moved back to her bed. She clapped Tris on the shoulder as she passed.

"You're welcome," she said with a smile. Then, to Kon as she passed, "you know we're going to have to do a repeat performance later when the people who were raised here come back here, right?"

A repeat performance wasn't going to be a problem of course, but people raised in Dauntless might give them a little more push-back.

[matchmadeinhell]

"We can take 'em without blowing our cover. Between the two of us and Raph. And Nico can dig us out of it if we get in over our heads."

He pulled on and started lacing his boots.

"Besides, they'll probably be a little more well behaved. This place has nothing close to proper military discipline, but anyone being nasty probably learned real fast not to be when they're all raised to take each other's heads off whenever they're pissed off at each other. And when you have a set routine with bizarre stuff like no privacy you just stop noticing it. It starts seeming normal after a while."

He knew that from experience.

"They're probably too used to it to react to it like...well, like I would've when I was younger."

His mouth twitched slightly.

[mark_in_the_sands]

"Some of them might go after the newer people here to make themselves feel big," Cassie said, pulling her new clothes on. The Erics of Dauntless had to come from somewhere. There were always bullies.

She pulled her boots on and began lacing them slowly, so Raph could follow along. She also couldn't quite swallow her own smirk.

"I'm pretty sure we voted you 'most likely to break into the girls' locker room' during one of our slumber parties in the old days," she said in an undertone. "Of course, we also voted Bart 'most likely to be found in the girls' locker room and not understand why it was weird'."

[matchmadeinhell]

Kon chuckled at that, then chuckled even more as he saw Raph carefully mimicking shoe-tying movements like a kindergartner learning it for the first time.

"You don't have to break into a place that girls are perfectly comfortable inviting you into." He shook his head and reached up to bop his hand at one of the stupid little curls at the top of his head. "Though why they did is now a mystery. Look at this. Look at it."

He went on sarcastically, affecting his old trying-way-too-hard way of speaking. "I am so fresh right now. How phat is this blast from the pizz-ast? It's da bomb. Smokin'. Totally fly." A brief pause. "Word. Represent."

[mark_in_the_sands]

Cassie made a choked, garbled noise that was trying not to be a laugh.

"Oh, ahh, no, stop. Stop stop stop! It's terrible, make it stop!"

[matchmadeinhell]

"And you liiiked me." he said in a very quiet singsong. "For some inexplicable reason. Despite actually having a lot going for you. Mind worms. That's the only explanation. Mind worms."

[mark_in_the_sands]

"What can I say, the hormones and adrenaline were flowing thick and fast, and spandex and leather was a very flattering look for you." She eyed him in his new Dauntless duds. "Still is, in spite of the lack of tailoring going on with that set."

[matchmadeinhell]

"It ain't exactly an unflattering getup for you either," he said, very clearly giving her a look up and down.

[staff_and_wielder]

"Maybe you can accessorize your couples-dressing-alike look with my vomit," Nico interjected. She couldn't believe she was trapped here with all the stupid mooks who lived in this world and these two dorks.

At least their schmoopy flirting had been something of a distraction from how horrible everything else was.

[othersdestructive]

Raph's arms were crossed in a way that exuded an air of judgment. Lots of judgement.

"If you don't stop, you'll be doing the rest of the mission alone because Nico and I will have died from the diabetes you caused. Or dehydration from all the barfing. Probably the dehydration first."

He gestured to the other initiates who were now filing out, carrying their old clothes with them.

"Can you stop while I can still eat carbs? 'Cause we need to get moving anyway."

[mark_in_the_sands]

Sounded like some people were cranky because they were still in the recreational eye-contact stage of the relationship.

"I suppose we could deign to permit that," Cassie said, tossing Kon another wink as she picked her Abnegation clothes up off the floor.

"Let's go see what happens next."

[othersdestructive]

They were all instructed to toss their old clothes in a burning pit.

"That's nice," muttered Raph sarcastically, holding his bundle of clothes, transformed from the Dauntless outfit into the Candor clothes his illusion had made that he'd "changed" out of. "It's not like homeless people could use these or anything."

[staff_and_wielder]

"Nope, not at all useful to anyone," Nico muttered back. "Totally worth burning them in a ritual rebirth."