Greetings to For Their Entertainment! As some of you know this was previously posted as For Their Entertainment: The 11th Hunger Games a fanf ic which I have not written on for about 2 years. It was my first HG Fanfic I believe or was begun right around the time as The Phoenix: Burning Day. I had previously posted twelve chapters.

After a lot of careful thought and consideration, instead of continuing the story I decided to revise it completely before continuing (it has been revised and extended so much that it is at the core the same story but also very different). The chapters were too flat and too short. Then there came the matter of time-namely having enough to rewrite it. I've been working on this along and along, and I finally decided to take the leap. So here is the newly-revised-so-much-it's-a-different-but-same-story.

I hope you enjoy this revision/redoing as much as I have redoing it and I hope that you can enjoy the new depths the characters have.

Love,

Phoenix Refrain.

PS: No relation AT ALL to Gale, I promise! But her mother WAS in Districts of Hunger and is currently being written about in Districts of Rebellion

Disclaimer: This is posted on my profile and here. I don't own any characters that are not mine. I am merely playing in Suzanne Collin's world. Original characters however, are mine. I am making no money off this.

Melanthe "Mags" Hawthorne, District 4

Chapter 1: The Cornucopia

All we are is entertainment
Caught up in our own derangement
Tell us what to say and what to do
All we are are pretty faces
Picture perfect bottled rage
Packaged synthesized versions of you

Is this only entertainment? Pull the curtains, places please
We learned to sing and dance and cry on cue
But this is more than entertainment in a world so sick with pain
This is the only thing that's real or true

Rise Against - Entertainment

As the chute lifts me to the open air, I feel the humidity press in on me. As far as I can see is forests, some of the woods swaying as if some strange creature is making the very floor of the forests rock with its impact. But there, just a few hundred yards in front of me—is the Cornucopia.

My eyes fall on the center of the treasures and there is what I know that I need—a spear.

I've only been out in the open for a few seconds, but I can feel the heat in the air. I can feel it drying out my mouth, and vaporizing the remnants of home until they are only a part of my memory. There are no beaches or oceans here, nothing but trees, biting wind, and heat.

I'm not use to such arid temperatures. Where I come from, there's always water—everywhere, even in the air it feels like water. It's a part of you when you're born in District 4. You can taste the ocean on the tip of your tongue, on everything around you. The salt works it's way into your hair and into your skin, even the houses are crusted with ocean water that coats everywhere with it's salty brine. Sometimes, I even think it rains with salt.

But here, there's a different kind of salt—from sweat and not the water. I can feel it trickling down the back of my neck onto my back. The trail of it making my shirt start to stick with sweat after only a few seconds. It drips from my hair into my mouth, and I lick my lips. Salt, but not the salt of home...But I can't think about any of that not now, the games are beginning. Any second no—

Before I have time to make my decision again, to do anything but process what the arena looks like—the gong has sounded and I am running toward the Cornucopia. My feet make the decision that my brain and heart could not.

As I leap to the ground, I can feel the force of it impacting my knees, causing me to stumble slightly before I can regain my balance. The earth is firm, and I'm unused to running like this where the sand doesn't give away beneath your feet. I stretch out my legs and run, pumping my arms by my side in rhythm to propel myself forward. I'm used to running at least, even if it's under different conditions, so I won't be winded easily even if I'm unused to the dense air. I find that I'm faster on this harder surface. But it's not the sprint to the Cornucopia I'm worried about, it's leaving the Cornucopia after I'm there.

This is the moment that mattered most in the games, at least from what I had seen of them in my home—The Cornucopia. It is both the place of life and of death. If you can reach the golden shaped vessel, anything you might need for the games could be there, but also the knowledge that almost everyone else will be running for it too.

I had spent all night going back and forth between running to or away from the Cornucopia. I had finally decided that though I felt I could outrun the other tributes, I could not outfight so many of them at once. I was fast, but was I fast enough? It would be better to leave behind the bloodbath, better to take my chances in running the other way. Make my own weapons, find my own food...

Inside of me, the decision wars on still. Hesitation plagues my actions as I go toward the golden tube of death, but it doesn't slow my steps. I am risking my life for a spear I could possibly get later, at less cost…but until then I will be unarmed. How many times over could I die without a weapon? And sometimes to survive the arena you have to have something from the Cornucopia—whether it be water, food, medicine, or a weapon. What if it was one of those years? But there is no reason to question it now, I am closing in on the horn and I am not the only one.

I thought I was fast, but I'm not compared to the other girl. Not far from me on the left is a tall, thin girl with white blonde hair. I remember seeing her in training. She is dangerous looking—lethal and vicious. Her body has little meat to it, deceptively making her look weak—but I've seen her hurl an axe or a sword. She can hold her own with tributes twice her size. There is a cold curve to her smile, a steely look in her unpleasant grey eyes. But perhaps the most dangerous part of her is the intelligence that you can see in the way she reacts to things, and the way she speaks. Everything comes out as if she's had a lifetime to think about it, even in her anger. She is cold and calculating, also apparently wickedly fast.

She has outpaced me with her longer limbs, and she isn't slowing as she comes upon the Cornucopia. If I'm quick, I can grab something and get out before there's much of a scuffle, but as I reach the spot where her feet have just passed over I see her scooping up an axe and using the momentum of her speed to launch herself back toward me with the full weight of it. Her face is a mask of fury and rage as she brings the axe down on me with all of her body behind it.

Sliding, I find myself in the dirt with the axe thudding an inch from my ear into the hard-packed earth. Her vicious face is over me, livid that she has missed her target. We both grapple for the axe, intensely aware that the others are arriving and around us now—our tenuous lead garnered by speed and low-weight isn't of much use now. I wanted to be out of here before this. She probably did too.

Unexpectedly, the blonde throws her fist into my face causing stars to pop in my head. My head rockets back into the ground, causing more confusion as it hits the earth with another loud sound. It had been unexpected to say the least. As I struggle to find the world again—to focus my gaze and my muffled ears, my fingers lose the grip on the axe as she yanks it from the hard-packed earth.

As she lifts the axe, I know I won't be able to stop her this time—I'll die in these games just like my mother. I am powerless against her, I realize. My whole body freezes up as I look into her cold grey eyes.

The axe is above her head, she's not pausing or gloating—she's not taunting. She's going for the kill. Her lips are parted in the realization that I am hers and that she has won this battle. I'll be her first kill. It's all going to end, just like that and I'll never get back to Leif or Phae or…

I react out of anger, out of a fierce desire to live but it doesn't matter. Out of nowhere, I see the girl lifted from me like a rag doll. The brute from District 2 has her by the hair, and his other hand is at my throat pulling me up too. My eyes are watering and I'm trying to focus as he speaks.

"As much as I love watching a cat fight, it's not the time ladies." He throws me back down into the dirt, and I land with a hard thud that knocks the breath from me again. My hands go to my throat clawing at hands that aren't there anymore in an effort to catch my breath. But his eyes aren't on me when I can finally focus on him. I can see that his eyes are watching the blonde he's thrown down. The handle of the axe is in his hand, and the blade is just inches from her chest as she stares at him.

There are still strands of long hair in his hand from where her hair was ripped from her scalp with his grip. Her face is wearing a seething look of hatred as she lays there, unwilling and possibly unable by some superior breeding to beg for her life. She stares him down calmly, not a whimper or cry from her the whole time. It's like she's daring him to try it, daring him to kill her.

"Take it, get your weapons. Let's go now," he orders dismissing her quickly. It's then I realize, he means me too.

Something clicks in the girl's eyes and she takes the axe from him with a swift jerk and begins gathering up another pack and as many axes she can pick up. I find myself scrambling beside her, when his eyes fall on me. As I grab up the spears, small knives and a fine piece of netting I wonder why he wants us both?

He's obviously more powerful than us. I would have likely been killed, but he saved me whether that was his intention or not. Did he want me to feel like I owed him? Why would he want two allies he couldn't trust?

I glance back, where the big brute from two still stands over us. He didn't ask, he had merely demanded that we were going with him. It seems like a better chance than anything at the moment though despite the dangerous prospect of an alliance with two feral animals—he's the best chance at survival. Saying no to him, I'm sure would bring sudden—possibly painful, death. But alliances are tenuous and I doubt that either of my "allies" will be willing to lay down their life for me like my mother's partner did.

The man from two seems like a lone island of calm in the fight, until suddenly someone rushes at him intent on getting past him toward the treasures beyond. His hands are quick and effortless. I see the girl from District 2's, his own district, neck spin around backwards as her body falls to the ground at his feet.

Clean. Neat. Easy—without batting his eye, as if he'd done it every day for all his life. His first kill was just thateasy and she was from home. She was one of his people... I feel a shiver run down my spine.

I turn away from the hollow eyes and gaping mouth of his district partner to see the look on the blonde's face, as she struggles to her feet weighed down with axes and a bow and arrow. Her face is set, there's nothing there except interest and a cool, calculating look. I feel sick though. He didn't hesitate to kill someone from home, so why not me?

Hefting a large bag, the willowy blonde thrusts it at the large male. By the weight of it, she can barely lift it, but as he takes it in his hands it looks almost too small and light as he hefts it onto his shoulders. He makes everything look easy—big burdens, murder, alliances…

Grabbing up the sword he had resting at his side, and a heavy coil of rope, he looks around at us calmly. Attached to his side already, is a small dagger that glints in the sun. If he's skilled at death with his hands, I can't imagine what he can do with a weapon. To be in an alliance with two people I know nothing about is risky, but what choice do I have?

The fray around us is calming, and I can barely hear the fight going on at the other side of the horn. Stepping over the body of the girl from 2, and several other mangled bodies I find myself standing beside the blonde and the brute who are looking at each other in that cold measuring way. Maybe they're wondering who's going to blink first?

It feels like an intrusion to watch them or to be here. There's something so deadly about the both of them that it makes me feel inadequate. But fighting is in my blood, even if I haven't trained like these two have. I have to hold my own with them if I want to make it back to my family, because as much as I'm afraid of them in some way I want to stay with them because I'm ashamed to admit I also know that as part of their group I'll have some safety.

Because, apparently we are an alliance.

Whatever that means.