Carameuse Heloise, 48
Capitol Citizen
The papers have been discarded on a table at the edge of her room, but Carameuse hasn't forgotten the words on them at all. Hart has informed her that the girl who gave them to him was in room 203, so she'll be heading to room 204 to check on the man who had dropped these papers in the hallway. And if she's lucky… well, she might have caught the man behind the Panem Day murders.
She's not sure if she should feel nervous, apprehensive, or gleeful, but only a feeling of unsettlement is wrapping itself around her sweater-covered shoulders. Is this the right guy? Is her hunch correct? Or is this just a misunderstanding, some weird guy who likes collecting bits of information and has accidentally stumbled onto the phrase that Ember has censored from the nation ever since Panem Day?
Someone knocks on her door and she rises to answer, stumbling over a footstool that she carelessly left out in the open last night to rest her feet. She should have put it away, she knows that, but she's been feeling tired today. If anyone asked her to do some serious work after this, she'd need a cold glass of iced tea and whiskey in order to push herself to go finish it. Right now, she just wants to curl up on her red velvet couch and watch some silly, inane Capitol show until her ears are tired enough and her eyes are deadened enough to send her off to bed.
But duty calls, and she'll be damned if she doesn't answer it.
The door reveals nothing but a flat pad with a shiny screen that makes her realize that Fiammetta must have sent it for correspondence. She picks up the tray with the pad and closes the door, but not before looking around to see if she can spot whoever brought it to her. It wouldn't hurt for her to know if she has a few more allies on this train. But her weathered eyes show nothing, and she closes the door carefully before sitting down on the couch and turning the screen on. Up pops a berated image of Fiammetta, her red hair faded on the strangely low-quality footage.
"Carameuse, I'll be coming soon. I've made a few public appearances that you might have caught if you've been watching the national channel -" Carameuse takes this moment to curse, she hasn't been watching any news streams on the train thus far, "and we haven't met with any strange occurrences. I've made a decision, and I'm going to be on the train by the time it hits District Seven."
"No!" Carameuse claps a hand over her mouth when she hears Fiammetta's decision, her hands shaking slightly in terror. No, this isn't a good decision, she has barely had any time to scope out the train and there's definitely at least one threat aboard. She won't find them before Fiammetta boards the train.
She'll have to get in contact right after inspecting the room that Hart told her about.
She stumbles against an avox while she walks towards room 203, and nods her apologies to the man before continuing to hurry towards the room. When she reaches the door, she tests the knob and it opens without a hitch. Inside is a plethora of papers, all of them bearing graphs and charts and all sorts of things that her eyes feast on instantly.
Jackpot.
At least, that's what she thinks before she feels something hit her head and then everything goes black.
Tristan Locke, 18
District Eight Male
He shifts uncomfortably on the small, dull green plastic chair that he's been given to sit on in the examining room by the peacekeepers on duty. On one side of the room is a light blue wall, which he's already punched to find out that it's just padding protecting the concrete wall behind it, and the other side is a sheet of bulletproof glass that a few peacekeepers are glimpsing through to watch him. Some whisper to each other, trying to veil their words by putting a hand beside their mouths as they turn to each other and ask who the boy in a ripped sweatshirt and with the insignia of the Locke factory on his sleeve is, and why in Panem he's handcuffed to the table with legs bolted to the floor.
Tristan smirks at those watching him, fiddling with his cuffs to see if he can't unlock them with his nails. But his fingers, bitten to the quick from the stressful past weeks, prove to be of no use on the lock keeping him stuck in this room. Groaning, he looks at the small door that's firmly locked until the therapist comes in to question him.
Staring at the wall, he tries to forget everything that he's seen in the past few hours. But the blood, the bullets, the death just keeps flooding back.
Ellis slams her fist down onto the table, her mouth twitching as she gives a dark glare to the rest of the teens scattered around the room. "So you're just going to stay home? Stay home? After all we've done to prepare for this, all of those explosives set up, all of that freedom that you're going to waste? You're wasting months of your lives if you just walk out now. Just because one peacekeeper saw Chiffon put up a poster doesn't mean they know about the rebellion. It doesn't mean that they know."
"I'm not frightened," Chiffon says from the back of the room. Tristan smiles gratefully to his friend, stepping next to Ellis as Chiffon makes his way to the front. "And you shouldn't be either. If we do this well, we'll free Eight. We'll be safe!"
"You're quite brave," Tristan remarks as they walk out of the room. "Mother would be surprised that you have the gumption to speak up like that after such a close call. She always thinks you're a vagrant or something."
"I'm scared half to death, Tristan." Chiffon shudders and pulls his thin, dark jacket around his skinny shoulders. "But it's about how you deal with the fear that makes you brave."
"And how are you dealing with the incident?" Tristan snaps his head up to see a tall, thin figure illuminated in the harsh white light of the interrogation room. "It must be difficult to see so many that you know, respect and care about die. Even if they're known rebels. Like you, Tristan Locke."
"You know nothing," he spits back at the woman, glaring with all of his might. He doesn't care if he's thrown in jail, shot, or hung. He doesn't care anymore.
About anything.
The woman patiently sprays her glasses with a cleaning fluid that appears in little droplets on the glasses, wipes them with a thin white cloth that she produced from her shirt pocket, then sits down to face Tristan. "I'm Emmeline Gorgerat, commissioned by the Capitol to interrogate prisoners. They ask me to do this because they realize it's easier getting someone to speak when they're talking with one of their own."
She lifts her pant leg and reveals a small cuff fastened around her ankle, a bright red light flashing on and off in the centre of the black cuff. "I was imprisoned for fraud and treason against the mayor. But my qualifications in psychology have allowed me this position. I know how it feels, Tristan, to be all alone like this. But if you promise to not to do anything rash, as well as wear an anklet whenever you leave the house, you'll be free to go with no repercussions. The Capitol doesn't want you to be viewed as a martyr figure for the rebels, henceforth the anonymity of the whole situation. Would you like your parents to be notified?"
"No!" he blurts out before he can even think, shaking his head frantically. "I'm not letting them know. Please don't tell them, I'll hide the anklet from them, I'll hide everything! Just don't let them know. I can't let… I can't let that happen. Please."
The woman shrugs, folding her glasses and putting them back into her shirt pocket. "As you wish. It's not our concern over whether your parents know about this or not. As long as you follow the Capitol's instruction, telling your parents is completely up to you. Even if they'd like to know what their son, heir to the Locke fortune and set to manage their factories in a good ten years, is up to these days."
She tosses Tristan the anklet, who puts it on with a weary sigh. "Be good. You're free to go."
But before she leaves, she drops a piece of paper on the floor and closes the door without saying a word. Tristan picks it up and follows after her, common courtesy pushing him to return the paper, but then he sees what's written on it.
Anklet bugged. Be careful what you say.
He crumples up the paper and shoves it into his pocket, nodding to the peacekeepers who had hovered around the glass barrier and walking through the dark halls quickly. When he reaches the glass doors that lead out to the outside world, he starts to run. Ignoring the specks of blood on the sidewalk that cleaners are scrubbing away - blood from the rebellion this morning.
Blood from his friends.
Blood from his compatriots.
Blood from Chiffon.
He stops when he reaches his home, the vast mansion stretching out around the outskirts of Eight. But the splendours of the Locke mansion are lost on Tristan.
He's busy deciding how to best avenge the dead and the gone.
Desdemona Steen, 15
District Eight Female
She wipes the glass window with a rough cloth, making sure to get rid of every dirt stain from the now-gleaming windows. She just wants to do her job well. She wants people to appreciate what she does for them.
At least, until she's sick again.
Behind her, rows upon rows of densely packed crates are stacked upon each other, tiny silkworms bustling in and out of the mulberry leaves that she tosses into the crates every day. The dark, wooden crates are a stark image against the gleaming windows, which let light into the growing area, the whole room teeming with silkworms. But she's not supposed to be gawking at them all day. She should be getting on with her work.
She walks through the first rows of crates, looking for any mishaps amongst the insects. Sure enough, row three shows quite a few shrivelled corpses of silkworms, only a few still alive to serenely hop over their dead comrades to feast on the mulberry leaves. She shrugs and brushes them all into the bag to throw away, not caring about how they died. Maybe the leaves weren't good enough for them, or maybe something else was at play. But even if they were diseased, she'd move the crate into a corner where it couldn't let any silkworms move to other crates to spread anything like pébrine or flacherie. But when she looks closer, she sees the brown spots on larvae in the crate and shakes her head. It's pébrine for sure.
She picks up the crate and heads to the end of the growing house, but then she sees Emilia and her mother walk into the aisle, a case
"Emilia, we've got a case of pébrine in the third row," she calls before coughing fiercely, her throat aflame while she tries to touch her head. The crate of silkworms falls out of her hands and the corpses and live worms fall to the floor, the mulberry leaves spilling onto the floor. But all she can feel is the burning of her throat, a tendril of smoke in the air clogging it, closing it, shutting it…
She can't breathe.
Then the air comes back and she takes a deep breath, her throat still burning from the sensation. She can feel the first twinges of pain on the sides of her head, right next to the temples. She's sick again.
Emilia rushes over and rushes to put on a pair of gloves, picking up the leaves and silkworms to put them back into the flat crate. "What happened, Mona? What's wrong?"
Mona coughs, a sickly groan coming from her throat. "Oh, I'm sick again. It always happens, Emilia. Why can't it go away? I just need to go to bed again, where I seem to be for most of the year." She gives a hefty sigh but her friend pays no attention to her despondency, fiddling with the cochlear hearing aid right next to her ear.
Emilia snickers and taps a gloved finger on her head right next to the hearing aid, shaking it firmly. "I'm not going to let you continue to moan about everything, moaning Mona. You know the rule, whenever you start falling into another wave of self-pity I turn the hearing aid off." Her words are understandably clunky and forced, a result of not being able to hear herself speak, but Mona gets the point. She sighs and nods her head, trying to ignore the migraine while picking up the remainder of the silkworm catastrophe.
"I do need to go home, though," she says as she picks up the crate and carries it towards the corner where she had intended for it to go in the first place. "I feel really bad. Like, really bad. This is one of the bad migraines. I think I might have that stupid flu again, especially since I pu-"
"Too much information!" cries Emilia, putting two hands to her hearing aids. "I don't need to know what happened last night. I'll tell Mom that you need to go home, just don't explain it to me in detail. The last time you told me about the chunky stuff that you puked into the toilet or something, I had to to vomit as well. You're too much for my squeamish stomach, Mona. Now go. Go! You don't need to stay around here any longer and breathe in the smoke from the smoke devices we have for the… boxes behind the factory."
Mona nods, turning to walk out of the green doors that were so recognizable from the distance, from her own home when she looked at the growing houses. She doesn't need to see exactly how many illegal beehives that the Laces had behind the growing houses in order to sell honey on the black market. The less she knows about that little operation, the less she'll be able to tell to any peacekeepers who may hear about the operation and bust it, wanting the tax money from the honey to go to the Capitol instead of just in the Laces pockets. No, she wouldn't tell. After all, the Laces supply honey to her own family.
As she shrugs off the slippers that she wears in the factory and puts on her own running shoes, she looks to see her house in the distance. Beyond it are the factories, churning out smoke that billows over this section of District Eight and increases her headache. Even now, she can feel her throat tightening in the smoggy air. It's not asthma, the six doctors she has been to have confirmed that, it's just that she has a bad immune system and the bout of pneumonia she had when she was eight has made her vulnerable to the smog ever since. Even when she works here, far away from the poisonous smog that ruins her immune system, she still gets sick every few weeks from some sickness or another. Maybe it's the flu again this time, but she doesn't really care what exactly is causing her to be stuck in bed.
She knows that she's going to wither away until she's a shell of her former self.
And then, she'll be as hollow as those silkworm corpses. Her skin will be as gray as their bodies, her eyes will be as cloudy as their silk, and her skin will be hard to the touch.
And she'll be dead and gone.
A/N: And that's finally another intro! Sorry I took this long, but it's been hard for me to keep up, especially since I've started my second semester and have been hit somewhat hard with the workload. But I'm pushing through it, and here's the next chapter for all of you to enjoy! I'm sure glad it's over XD
What do you think of these two? btw, Mona is chronically sick if you're confused. You'll see more as this continues, but feel free to be satisfied with that explanation if you were overthinking her pov XD I hope you liked this two, as well as the next continuation of the Carameuse saga!
It'd be nice if you'd do everything I hope for you to do, like review and such. Always nice to see your thoughts on the tributes!
Anyways, that's all I got for you. I still have the goal of finishing the intros by the end of February, which could take a lot of writing, but I am determined! Let's see if I can't at least get District Nine out before March :P Wish me luck! Until my attempt to get there, TheAmazingJAJ