10. Rooster Games

The fourth day dawned all across the lake. Lucario was still awake, and had been for the last four hours. By now, it was 5:21 AM, and yet he wasn't tired. His aura abilities allowed him to subsist on little sleep. Granted, this was an extremely high-stress situation, so it might not have been as risk-free as it normally was.

Lucario had quickly befriended that rooster that had so rudely woken him up at one in the morning. This wasn't hard. He was just glad to have someone else. Fox and Falco didn't count. Although they had been friendly to him, all three had known that there was that little bit of underlying "we'll have to kill each other eventually". However, with the rooster, the survival of these two beings was not mutually exclusive.

"So," Lucario said, using his aura to communicate with the rooster, "I want you to go attack the Careers and make them paranoid and believe that you're going to attempt to peck them alive. I want them to run off in three separate directions. That means that the plurality alliance would then be gone."

The rooster appeared to be okay with this. And, within a few more minutes, the rooster had set out to the Career's camp on the lake shore.

The rooster, now in the middle of the Career pack, began to caw. Toon Link immediately woke up, wondering if it was another Cuckoo that would need to be captured. He then saw feathers all around him, so…

A rooster was flying all around them, trying to peck all over Jigglypuff and Mr. Game & Watch. Both looked at Toon Link with the scariest looks ever, then ran off in different directions. Toon Link then found the rooster pecking on his face. He knew he had to flee, so he decided to. He ran in a direction that formed an equilateral triangle.

It all happened so fast, and Lucario was laughing the whole time. It appeared that the plurality alliance was no more.

Fox McCloud woke up free falling.

He wasn't in free fall for long, of course, since he was wearing a climbing harness. He came to a halt twelve feet below the beds, about ten feet beyond where the wire mesh, which was no longer needed due to the storm having stopped, ended.

It had been the crow of a rooster, miles away, that had woken him up. Hanging in midair, Fox looked towards the center of the lake. It was 05:50:33, Day 4, so it was still early in the morning.

"Fox...you're OK!" Falco cried, looking over the edge of the bed.

"If I remember correctly", he continued, "two of the three mornings we've had in the arena, this is how you woke up. By falling out of bed. No wonder Krystal left you."

This was pretty tactless of Falco, of course. They were both still recovering from the knowledge that Fox had been abusing Krystal. Granted, he hadn't been in control; it had been a part of Andross's curse. Still, though, no matter what he did, he would never be able to convince his soon-to-be-ex-wife that he was unconscious while committing domestic violence. He had to let it go, and hope that he might just survive to fight for partial custody of his son.

He forgived Falco almost immediately, saying, "It's fine, dude. Will you please just help me up?"

Falco pulled Fox back up until he landed back on the mattresses.

"No cannons last night. Still eleven. Still three more before we disband".

Fox nodded.

"Let's stay in bed for another hour or so," Fox said, "we have nothing better to do. Let's just hope someone comes towards us. Then, we can shoot them down with our blasters".

Pit had heard the crowing of the rooster, but he assumed nothing of it. Probably a muttation of the Capitol, but not one that could possibly be close to him. The Careers were still his biggest threat.

Stopping for a drink of water, Pit gazed down at the Cornucopia. It was now 6:02:39, Day 4. These Games sure were going quickly. He was just grateful that he could fly now that he wasn't over the lake, although he had to be as quiet as possible about it. He wasn't like Maximum Ride, though; he couldn't do it for very long, and he couldn't gain any altitude after three jumps or so. And he would just have to deal with it. He had no choice. Master Hand had just plucked him from Palutena's palace and put him in the Games. Totally unfair.

But he had to move. He spread out his wings, long white feathers that reached far out from his body. Despite being only 5'9", Pit had a wingspan of nearly nine feet. Of course, this was a far cry from Maximum Ride's thirteen feet.

Why was he thinking so much of Maximum Ride right now?

As he soared into the sky, he began humming Coldplay's "Hymn For the Weekend" to himself.

It wasn't a happy realization, as Toon Link ran through the pine forests, that the plurality alliance was over. There were only eleven tributes left, so this was just how it was going to be.

Still, though, the rooster had appeared malevolent, conscious of what it was intending to do. And, the more Toon Link thought about it, the more certain he was that it was a mutt. How else would it have been so clucking efficient at driving them apart from each other?

He couldn't worry about that right now. The next time he saw one of his former allies, they would not leave without one of them being dead.

He'd been running for over an hour when he sat down, realizing that he'd gone nearly halfway around the arena. Since the radius was roughly five miles, it was 31.4 miles or so around the far outer part. He checked the clock. 6:34 AM. The end of the Games can't come soon enough, he thought, whether I'm dead or alive.

The fourth day was in full force. Unlike the previous three days, it was quite warm. Snake could tell that it was 87 degrees Fahrenheit. It had probably been a good thirty degrees cooler during the day, and near freezing at night, but given the heat today, it was likely that it would be far colder at night than it had been. Snake didn't see why this was necessary-they'd had no fewer than two deaths a day since the Games had begun, with nine dead in the Bloodbath on the first day.

But now things had shifted. Now, Snake could tell that there was a loud noise somewhere near the lake shore. It sounded...almost like the clucking of a rooster. What was going on? A muttation? Some other Gamemaker trap? Snake didn't know, and he didn't want to be around to find out. He began walking further, towards the tall limestone cliffs. He thought he detected a life force somewhere high up, but he didn't worry too much at this. Why would a tribute be so high up there? It just made no sense.

Of course, if you have read up to this point, you'll no doubt be aware that there were, in fact, two Smashers high up on the cliffs.

It was now two hours since Fox and Falco had woken up, 7:18 AM. They still hadn't gone around to getting up yet. Falco was wishing they had, when he heard a rustling far below him. Someone was climbing on the ropes.

"Fuck!", Falco shouted. "Fox, he's right below you!"

Sure enough, Solid Snake was clinging to the climbing ropes about thirty feet off the ground. He had his grenade launcher slung over his back, and he wasn't wearing a harness. A fall from this height could kill him. Which was what they wanted.

Of course, the Star Fox teammates had not killed anyone yet. And they didn't want this to be the first time. But they understood that they had no choice. After all, Snake was looking up at them with murderous eyes. They knew that he was out for blood. And he was going to climb that rope and blast both of them to bits, unless they did something, anything, to stop him.

"Fox, give me that pocketknife! It's in my backpack!"

Fox searched through the backpack for a small knife, which he eventually found. By now, Snake was just twenty feet from the top. Falco began sawing through the rope.

Fox thought of something, though. If they cut through the rope, they would no longer be protected. If they fell, they could, and probably would, die. "Wait till he's a bit farther up, Falco!", he ordered.

Falco stopped. Then, once Snake was within reach of Falco's beak, the surly pilot deposited the knife in Snake's cranium.

Snake let go and fell seventy feet to his death. The cannon sounded a minute later.

"That was a close call", Falco said.

It had been a loud morning for Kirby. First, there was the loud rooster-sounding noise, which Kirby ascertained had been nowhere near him, and then there was the cannon fired in response to Snake's death. Of course, Kirby wasn't sure who had died. But he would know in time thanks to the nightly death recap. The Capitol was probably not bored. They'd had plenty of deaths in the last three days.

It got harder and harder to get out of bed every morning. Kirby's ultra-fast metabolism burned as much as 7,000 calories a day. Since he couldn't have been eating more than a tenth to a fifth of that, he was losing his hard-earned muscle mass, fast. He had put on as much weight as possible before leaving the mansion, but that hadn't helped. It was almost gone by the fourth morning due to the extra stress, maybe 9,000 calories a day total. He'd lost perhaps six or seven pounds since the beginning of the Games, and he'd be a lot less puffy by the time this was over. If he even survived.

But right now, Kirby knew that he had to stay away from whoever had performed the kill. Probably one of the Careers. He had to stay away from the plurality alliance at all costs.

The whole morning had been a barrel of laughs for Lucario. At 7 AM, the rooster had come back and told him, through aura, that the Career alliance had been disbanded. This was going to be good for him. Now, it would just be Fox and Falco left in an alliance. And maybe not even that, if they had turned on each other. But why would they? They had vowed to stay together until the final 8. Why would they disband now?

Now, though, it was 08:24:13, Day 4, and Lucario was swimming away from the Cornucopia. When he reached the shore, he would use aura to dry off his fur so that he wouldn't leave tracks through the dirt. If he left tracks, someone, maybe not one of the Careers, might still be able to track him, in which case he'd be in trouble.

On second thought, however, bring it on! Lucario was very fulfilled from the feast the day before, and he was more sated than he had probably been in his life. Italian food was pretty filling. There were some good pizza places in Celadon City, but it wasn't native to Kanto. This pizza had been better than any he'd ever had. It was just too bad it had been followed by a bout of gastrointestinal distress.

So he reached the shore and dried off. He then began hiking up the fifteen-degree angle and wondered what his strategy was going to be now. He would try to attract more sponsors.

Without thinking, he whipped his aura sensing organs over the side of his head and stared at the camera. He said, "If any sponsors are watching this, know that I'm still a good bet to win. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. I'll stand a little taller. It doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone".

Hopefully, the audience would appreciate the Kelly Clarkson reference.

Meta Knight was still alive. He'd finished off his baguette, and he was wondering how he would find more food. Without food, he had virtually no chance at winning. It would probably still be a couple days until the Games were over. He'd need sustenance, and you couldn't get sustenance without looking.

So he decided to start looking for berries or something. He wondered why he was so dizzy. It probably had something to do with not having eaten that much. Again, he needed food. Without it, he would be a goner.

For the next three hours, he looked for something, anything to eat. Eventually, though, he found a bush with dark blue berries. He tried to remember-weren't these berries poisonous in the books? Whatever. He was going to take that risk.

And this was a foolish risk to take, because as soon as the berries passed his throat, he felt an excruciating pain in his chest. He realized, too late, that it was nightlock. Katniss and Peeta had threatened to commit a double suicide by eating these berries so that there would be no victor if both of them ate it. That pretty much set off the whole events of Catching Fire.

Then, Meta Knight crumpled to the ground as the cannon fired.