AUTHOR'S NOTE: Anyone who thinks that Wes, Ava, Jun, and Vigo are imitations/replacements for Peeta, Katniss, Effie, or Haymitch, I can assure you right now that this is not the case. Yes, it's about a pair of District 12 tributes with a female escort and a male mentor, but that's about where the similarities end. Enjoy.

CHAPTER 2: Sibling Tributes

Cars were rare in a country where there were high speed trains and hovercrafts, but nonetheless, there were a few, but these were usually just used to shunt tributes from the justice building to the train station. They were escorted by Peacekeepers, for it was not unheard of for some of the more impoverished tributes to try and make a run for it. It never ended well for them—ever.

Usually this was the part of the trip where the tributes would at least give their names to each other, but Wes and Ava knew each other for their entire lives, and so it was unnecessary. Instead, they both sat in reserved silence, anticipating what was surely coming ahead of them.

Soon they were on the train, and as they sat down, they finally got to meet that long-haired mentor properly this time. He was sitting at a table, running a pencil in broad strokes over a blank piece of paper. He looked up, nodding slightly as if to acknowledge them before continuing his sketching.

"So…" Wes spoke up after a moment or two, "you're our mentor then?"
"mm." Vigo nodded affirmatively. For a moment Wes opened his mouth to say something, but instead decided to watch and see what Vigo was sketching. Surely Junichi was around as well to maybe spice things up or to get Vigo to pay attention to the tributes that he was now supposed to be training.

Ava seemed transfixed by the sketch as well.

Vigo's image soon proved to be graphic. It depicted a girl with an 8 on her shoulders and a wicked looking blade in her arm, appearing as if she had just landed from a flip, given the lines coming from his body and the blade for effect. The victim, a boy with a number 1 on his arm, had a string of blood coming from his right arm and shoulder, as if it had just been cut right off seconds ago, which is exactly what the picture was depicting.

"Scenes from your games," Wes tilted his head curiously, and this time Vigo stopped to look up.

"Aye," he nodded. His voice was a lot gentler than one would think it should be. "Some things stick with you for life, for better or for worse."
"I know the feeling," Wes agreed, "well, sort of. I guess I should say I feel for you."
"There are plenty of things about me you will never understand even if you emerge as the victor of the 91st Hunger Games." Vigo warned, "Although there are already things that I will not understand that you have to deal with. I did not have to kill my sister to come home."

Ava looked up. "He's not going to have to." She chipped in, "There are other ways to play the Capitol's game without us being forced to fight each other."

"Don't listen to her too much," Wes whispered to Vigo, "I'll go more into it later."

"Well then," Vigo pit his hands together and turned from Ava to Wes. "You want me to teach you? Tell me what you wish to learn."

"Everything," Wes instantly replied

"Where should I start then?" Vigo immediately retorted. He was clearly a very detail-oriented man, and Wes was beginning to catch onto this.

"How did you win again," he asked.

"I paid attention to everything." Vigo expounded, "Of course, your results may vary, based on your own thinking skills, the arena, and the other tributes, obviously, but there is your answer."
"So what did you pay attention to?" Ava spoke up, "obviously some things are more important than others, yes?"
"I would hope so," a soft but cheerful voice interrupted, stepping in and sitting down at the corner of the table. It was Junichi, cracking a joke. "I do not think Vigo here won by painting pictures of daisies."

Ava actually chuckled, which in turn made Wes follow suit.

Vigo cracked a smile. "Very funny, Jun," he quipped, "I won by paying attention to the sounds around me, and to the messages my body was telling me. I ate only when I knew I needed food, and kept myself hydrated semi-regularly to keep myself functioning normally. We're familiar with starvation, but when you're truly deprived of food, and especially water, it drives some kids mad."

"So food and water are obviously important then," Wes nodded, "did you have any alliances?"

"My district partner was one" Vigo clarified, "obviously since you two are brother and sister, I figure you're sticking together" He could tell that they were on very good terms with each other.

"Did you have anyone else?" Wes asked, hoping for an idea of what kinds of people were willing to side with District 12 in these games.

"The tributes from District 11 were our friends, even if we were not in a formal alliance with them. Our only other actual ally though was a boy from District 5. He died shortly after my district partner did. By that point there were only five of us left."
He smiled approvingly at the two siblings in front of him that, while calm with their expressions, revealed with their eyes that they were clinging onto his every word.

"You want to hear the whole story then, I take it?" he looked them in the eyes, and without a word, both Wes and Ava nodded.

"Well then…" he took a drink, also grabbing some food, "sit back, get comfortable, and help yourself to some food. We've got a long ride to the Capitol anyways."
He proceeded to start at the beginning from the moment he and 23 other children were raised from their pedestals to find themselves in the ruins of some desert city, with crumbling stone structures in every direction, surrounded by a backdrop of cliffs that likely served as the natural boundaries of the arena. One of the greatest oddities was that the tributes were all barefooted, which actually gave the outlying districts a rather prominent little advantage in the opening seconds. The hot, rocky ground was harsh on the feet, although tributes from the outlying districts, who often went barefoot in their own lines of work, fared just fine and many of them did not even grab some of the numerous boots that sat in the cornucopia.

"The kids from District 11 took off with two backpacks before the careers could even reach them. '10, '11, and '12 all survived the bloodbath that day, thanks to our lack of shoes." He chuckled at the irony. Only one of the careers had died on the first day—the girl from District 1.

Vigo continued to describe his experiences, noting that there had to be water sources somewhere around there. All cities, no matter how old, were built near some sort of water source.

"We found numerous dry lakebeds and riverbeds, many of which were nice and flat. The sand was a lot more lenient on our feet than the sharp, jagged rocks. It was surprisingly not a very hot desert, but there was no water to be found.
Nightfall came, and the clear night suddenly and quickly clouded up, and then… rain. We managed to fill our bottles, but the next morning when we checked to see if any of the lakes or rivers had filled, we just found damp ground. There were 14 of us left at this point."

After exploring another of the ruined villages that day, Vigo and his two friends found these odd cemented bowl-like structures in the ground that were holding water in them.

"Unless your arena is a lake of some sort, always try and camp next to some water source, but also try to stay hidden. Trees, shrubs, rocks, or even old structures if they exist, are good places to start." He pointed out. The others, including Junichi, had stayed silent this whole time, listening with interest.

"Day 14 is when things really started heating up." he continued, "by that point there were 5 of us left. It was a drought, and we had all but exhausted the water supplies in our bowls. That day there was the biggest monsoon I have ever seen in my life. We made the dire mistake of walking through one of those dry riverbeds. It flooded, and we were carried downstream. The worst of our luck was when we passed the careers—the girl from '2 knifed my partner with a lucky shot, and the boy from '5 ended up triggering a trap set by a District 11 boy a few days prior that somehow still worked. Well… when I finally washed up on shore, another cannon went off, which left just me and that girl from District 2. I'm fairly certain that we hated each other's guts from the get-go, but long story short, we fought and I won."

"So don't trust District 2 then," Wes shrugged after the story.

"I wouldn't." Vigo replied, "But after telling such a story, I need a little nap. I'll be up in a few hours."

"Alright," Wes and Ava both nodded, watching their mentor—their lifeline in the games, get up and disappear into his compartment.

"So, always follow the water, and avoid District 2," Wes turned to his sister, "seems simple enough." Of course, he knew that simple did not mean easy—nothing that involved death was ever an easy thing.