Head Gamemaker Zena Odele
Zena was panicking. She had exactly two more days to come up with a brilliant arena idea for the 105th Hunger Games or else, she could say goodbye to her life. Out of the two choices, Zena obviously preferred the former choice rather than the latter and that meant she had to push her mind out of her arena-inspiration block. Zena revised the stack of papers surrounding her for perhaps the seven hundredth time and all the ideas seemed bland and unexciting, nothing to excite the Capitol...
Her cellphone starting ringing abruptly and Zena widened her eyes startled. The shrill scream of her phone had pulled her out of her daze. She grabbed the cellphone without checking who it was and with her most professional voice, one that could be described as self-confident and polite, said, "Hello, Zena Odele speaking." As soon as Zena heard who it was, she had to suppress a groan. For the past two days, the Head of Mutt-Desiging Department, the very persistant Felix Titos, has been calling her, wanting to know the arena theme so they could design mutts accordingly. "Hello Mrs. Odele. The meeting with the President is after tomorrow and we still do not even have a preliminary sketch of a single muttation that would be present in this year's Games. We request you to hurry up with your 'brainstorming' about this arena as us and along with many other departments are severely behind," Felix's voice said impatiently. Zena closed her eyes, her experession obviously annoyed. She took a deep breath and attempted to keep most of the annoyance out of her voice, "Mr. Titos, I request you to be patient with me." Zena could hear Felix's annoyed sigh and that seemed to set Zena fuming, "It is not exactly easy to create an arena out of scratch, to be exciting and awe-inspiring. As I said earlier, be patient." She angrily threw her cell phone down as she sat down again behind her desk, now more a paper fortress than a desk. She shuffled once more through all the papers, now a monotonous job, just one to convince herself that she was actually doing something...
Zena was looking through the last file when her over-cheerful and bubbly daughter, Adonia, bounded in. Adonia was now thirteen and Zena was still beside herself that while all the other teenagers, like her neice were in that phase, the angry and cranky teen faze, Adonia always managed to keep cheerful smile and say a silly joke to start the day. Adonia grinned at her mother and Zena raised her eyebrows and almost boredly asked her daughter, "What do you want?" This did nothing to crack Adonia's cheerfulness as she babbled excitedly, "Me and Tatiana are going to the new Laser Tag centre in the city. Please, can I go?" Zena nodded. She expected that sooner or later, Adonia and her best friend, Tatiana would want to check out the new Laser Tag centre, after all, it was the newest Capitol fad when suddenly it dawned on Zena. Zena could feel a smile spreading on her face. She came up with a brilliant arena idea, she gets to keep her life. What would be better than making this year's Hunger Games Laser Tag themed. No weapons, just Laser guns and some packs at Cornucopia. Better yet, she could split the tributes into two teams. She gave some money to Adonia and beckoned her to go. She ran to her desk and rapidly started scribbling notes and drawing sketches...
The next few hours were rapid and quick, Gamemakers, random Mutt-Designers and different messengers ran in and out of her room. Zena was beaming as she looked over the work of one of the interns. The hologrammers already were working rapidly, fixing different holograms of dark shadows as an aspect of fear in the Games. They had to hire some workers, referred to as Laser Men, to quickly design different samples of Laser guns to show to the president. Zena looked back on her day, and smiled. Had her litte darling daughter didn't come bounding in, all over herself to go with Tatiana to the Laser Tag centre, Zena would still have been in the same inspirationless mood.
The FireBlossom here! Back with these Games. I'm hoping you will submit! Form and rules on my profile! Hope you liked this chapter! More to come, maybe inside the Presidential mansion next time!