AUTHOR'S NOTES: back to standard-length chapters, and now that the Games are over for the time being, enter in some crossing over.

CHAPTER 11

The recollection of what happened next was a bit hazy for Katara. She had weird dreams of the tributes she met and fought on the 79th Battlefield, and thought back to her own trip here, the Capitol itself, and some of the other victors from past games that she had seen alongside Sokka, her brother and district counterpart. She remembered watching several Hunger Games in preparation for her own, and several stuck out to her.

There was one, somewhere around the 28th Hunger Games or so, where a girl from district 4 named Kya had won her tournament by triggering an enormous tsunami that rode dangerously near the wall of the electric forcefield. She rode right over most of the tributes, and had then slung the water against the electrified wall, frying the survivors. The girl had the same name Katara's mother did, but they were not the same person. This game was the one Katara remembered when watching the 70th Hunger Games, when a girl who was also from District 4 won her games after the Arena flooded.

On the note of wily female tributes from District 4, there was Mags, a lady even older than Kya considering the order of the Hunger Games that she had won. In fact, she had probably been Kya's mentor. Her victory wasn't as memorable as Kya's or even Annie's, but if she was still alive, Katara wanted to meet her. Her own mentor, Hama, who won by exploiting the strongest tributes under a full moon by bloodbending them, had been considerably deranged. She wondered if all mentors had been like that. Hama was so old, that she had been alive before the Hunger Games had even started, being the victor of the 2nd Annual Hunger Games.

Then there were the 74th and 75th Hunger Games, where two victors won each of them, since they were from the same district. The victors of Game 74 were a pair of brutal, ruthless tributes from District 2 who exploited that rule from the moment they heard it, and they proceeded to utterly dominate each and every other tribute that had survived the Cornucopia bloodbath, tearing a bloody swathing path through the arena, leaving utter destruction in their wake. At the end, the two tributes, Clove and Cato, used a combination of firebending and earthbending to make a volcano erupt in the area, just to show how freaking awesome they were. It was one hell of a show. Katara remembered liking that game, and it had also reminded her to watch out for the Career Tributes, particularly those from District 2. Cato and Clove definitely had had the same mindset that Toph and Zhao had had during the game. A lot of the memorable tributes had apparently volunteered, and these two were said to have choked a couple of other kids in order to volunteer.

Then there were the victors of the 75th Hunger Games, which was apparently supposed to be a Quarter Quell, but the requirements for the rule change could not be met that year, and so they had put it off—indefinitely. It seemed to be a fear tactic—a reminder to the districts that not even the greatest of them could predict the ways of The Capitol. The victors of those games, however, were arguably fiercer than the victors of the previous ones. The boy, a waterbender named Gale Hawthorne, had an "any means necessary" attitude and was a ruthless fighter in the game. What surprised Katara—as well as most Capitol Citizens—that year was that he was a more deadly opponent than most of the Career Tributes, a few of which he personally annihilated.

The girl that year was even worse. A fierce, ruthless firebender with a really bad attitude, this Katniss Everdeen tore up the arena, almost literally. The Gamemakers had given her a Training Score of 12 without hesitation, and it was after the 75th Hunger Games that the Training Scores became known for indicating tributes to watch out for instead of go for, because Katniss had lived up to that 12 in every way possible. It was her district number, her training score, and was even the number of tributes that she singlehandedly destroyed. The fact that both of these tributes were from District 12, known for being the laughingstock of Panem, was enough to strike fear into the hearts of many, and the only other Tribute in Hunger Games history to get a higher score was Toph of District 2 during the 79th Games, who somehow got a 13 out of 12.

Katara remembered that story well, in fact. Apparently the Gamemakers thought that a 15-year-old blind girl was not going to be a threat, and so they paid her little attention until she had punched the ground so hard that the building almost came down on top of them. Before any of them could react, however, she slid her feet and thrust her arms back out, sealing all the cracks and putting the building back exactly how it had been. With a crack of her knuckles she replied, "Who's next?" and strode out.

Other than a man named Haymitch who exploited the forcefield around the arena to deflect another girl's ax back into her skull and win himself a Games, the most interesting match Katara remembered was the 77th Hunger Games, where a little 12-year-old airbender girl from District 3, whose Training Score was only a 4, had figured out the ins and outs of the technologies implanted in the arena. The Careers recruited her, and they ravaged the field until it was just them. When they were about to kill her for a lack of use, she pulled out an Equalist glove and shocked several metallic rods she had set around their camp, effectively frying 6 kids at once, and securing her victory in a manner of seconds.

Katara's victor's interview was nothing of note. She rambled a little bit about how it was a matter of knowing when to move your piece instead of worrying about its power, which was how she was able to evade the most powerful tributes, and personally kill one of the most powerful Careers. She was glad that she had won, but as it did to everyone, The Hunger Games had left Katara a changed woman, and not just because she was about to live a new life in the Capitol's Victor Village. The recent consolidation of Victor's Villages from the districts to the Capitol itself was a new change, and Katara had a feeling that it and the "mixing things up" that had happened in Games 74-79, were connected events. Perhaps she'd ask the other victors about that when she met them.