Isa James, 15, District Six Female
She's still all alone.
Yesterday had left her walking around the cornucopia nervously, eventually reciting the history of the Dark Days to occupy her mind. Two cannons have boomed as of yesterday. And, up in the dark sky last night, she had seen none other than Ajax and Taffeta, along with the boy from Three.
What's happened to her allies?
She sits back down near the ashes of what was her fire, absently poking the blackened chars of what were the logs meant for the fire with a sword. There hasn't been much to do today, and with the fact that nearly half of her alliance were dead, her mind was fixated on the possibility that she had lost them all. She doesn't want to be alone.
She can't be all alone this early in the Games, can she?
She misses home. If she was back at home, she would be watching the Games with her friends and the family. Perhaps Mother and Father would bet quietly on the tributes, but hopefully not this year. She doesn't want to think about the possibility that they might be betting on someone other than her. Even if they were betting on her, would it really be that comforting that they were acting as if she was just someone to make money off of?
Would she feel sympathy for the girl from Six in her place if she was back home?
She wouldn't. And that scares her more than the fact that her allies have vanished.
She stirs around some of the charred wood in the firepit and sighs absentmindedly, looking up towards the sky. Dark clouds cover the arena for as far as she can see, with only a small line of blue at the edge of the horizon.
More rain will be coming.
And she'll be ready.
She moves towards the edge of her seat and watches the wind blow through the bushes surrounding the cornucopia, the thorns trembling slightly in the strong breeze. A branch breaks off of one of the bushes and tumbles towards the tunnel to the rest of the arena, disappearing into the dark space. She sighs and gathers more food to put into her backpack, packing it tightly so that she can fit as much as possible in there. She'll leave soon to search for the remaining careers, but she'll gather her thoughts first and choose a few weapons to take along. She doesn't want to be caught off guard.
A sudden noise at the bottom of the hill startles her and she whips around, grabbing a knife and standing up to see what caused it. A large figure walks through the tunnel, carrying a spear and boasting a mane of black hair.
Isa gasps in relief and drops the knife, waving to Keelan as he stumbles towards the cornucopia. "Keelan! Are you okay - what happened? Where are the others? Did something happen - was it Ashrifah? Did she attack you? What happened?"
Keelan waves his hand in the air and brushes away Isa's questions, his eyes darting greedily to her sack of food. "The others - dead. At least most of them. I don't know where Zora is."
Isa looks behind him as if Zora will enter behind Keelan before looking back to the tall teen from Four, slowly slipping a knife once more into her hand. "How did you lose her? And how did Ajax and Taffeta die? You do realize the pack is cut in half now, right? That isn't something you can just brush off, Keelan. You can at least tell me how you lost them." Her voice takes on a wheedling tone and she brushes her hair back, gazing intently at Keelan.
"We - we got caught in the storm and… Ajax got swept away in the river. Taffeta tried to kill us off… but Zora fought with her and they both tumbled into the river as well. I managed to stay at the shack that we had tried to shelter in until the storm died down and then came here as soon as I could." Keelan struggles to tell his story as fast as he can, a look of gratefulness coming over him as he finishes. It's almost as if… as if…
As if he's lying.
Isa takes a step back, grabbing her backpack and staring Keelan dead in the eyes. "I don't believe you. We haven't seen any shacks in the arena, especially by the river, have we now?"
Keelan flinches, struggling to keep a calm demeanour. "Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's what happened. Don't you trust me?"
"No."
Keelan's eye twitches. He turns around and stares into space, his voice deepening and his spear dipping slightly towards the ground. "Well then, we'll have to do something about that, outlier."
Isa takes the moment to sprint towards the tunnel, dodging past Keelan and ducking under the spear that inevitably is thrown at her. She shrieks as she sees the weapon smash into the ground and darts into the tunnel, her lungs gasping for breath as she emerges into the fields. She looks towards the soaked fields and launches herself in, trying to make a small of a trail as possible as she looks for a place to hide. Faster and faster, Isa dodges through the wet stalks of wheat before collapsing onto the ground. She listens for any sign of Keelan as she tries to catch her breath, but no sound of the career comes from her surroundings.
She slowly pushes herself up, feeling the clunky pieces of food and supplies press against her back-bones. Isa shrugs off the backpack and looks up at the sky in nervousness, watching the clouds swirl around and seem to turn darker. It seems to whisper insults to her, taunting her with the fact that she's just lost the most secure place in the entire arena because a crazed career scared her away from her safe haven.
She has to find shelter, and soon.
If not, she'll suffer the same fate as the rest of her allies.
Giovanna Fillinfini, 18, District Nine Female
The forest seems tense in the morning light, almost as if it anticipates another storm to come. Rightfully so - Giovanna can see several fallen trees around her fort from her vantage point through the little window that she's made to properly view the damage. She's lucky. A few dozen more feet to the right, and she could have been under the gigantic fallen tree to her left. She's lucky. Very lucky. The storm could have easily killed her off just like the three deaths over the past few days, signified by the cannons that had rang through the arena, but she's still alive. Fate has smiled on her today.
Or maybe the game makers want her to make it to the final eight. But either way, she'll go as far as she can.
She couldn't do anything less.
She pushes past the fronds that she had woven together out of pine and maple branches in the forest to make a door for her fort and steps outside of her wooden sanctuary, looking around for any sign of tributes. Like always, the forest is still. She's all alone once more.
And she likes it that way.
Giovanna hums a little tune to herself as she walks towards some of the trees, looking to see if she can spot where the downpour has drained towards. The arena seems to be on a slant, so if she gets a bit higher, she might be able to see where it's all gone. After all, if it managed to make its way through the feet of branches that make up her fort and drench her in her sleep, it had to be a ton of water that had fallen from the sky.
She's rewarded with the sight of a waterline down the slight incline of the forest, gently washing against a few trees at the edge of her vision. When she leaps down from the trunk of the fallen tree that she had clambered onto, it disappears into the thick forest. If she hadn't climbed onto the tree, she would have never noticed the water below her.
But if she's close to the top of the arena, does that mean that over half of it is completely flooded?
She turns back to the fort and suddenly hears a large cracking sound coming from the top of the forest. Giovanna tumbles out of the way as a huge branch comes falling from one of the trees, smashing directly into the fort that she had spent almost all of her time in the arena building. The branch crushes most of the fort instantly, leaving only part of the structure upright. Giovanna screams in terror and falls to her knees, ignoring how soaked her pants are getting. It's gone! It's gone!
She tears through the remaining walls of the fort with a scream of frustration, her eyes looking down on the one thing not crushed by the fallen branch - the spyglass. The spyglass. The damned spyglass.
She screams again and throws the spyglass against one of the trees, watching one last cloud of dust come from the object. Before the spyglass rolls down the incline, Giovanna stomps on it with her boots, splintering the spyglass and breaking it into dozens of little pieces. She gives a scornful smile to the broken toy and grinds her heel on the remaining pieces, letting out another scream of anger.
A beeping sound comes from the top of the trees and she looks up in confusion, her angered expression being replaced by a gaze of curiousity. The large sponsor gift drifts down from the tops of the trees and towards Giovanna, the package shaped curiously large. It has quite an odd shape, almost as if it's in the shape of one of those guitars that people play in the bars of Nine that she's seen from a distance while she runs. But it's larger than a guitar, it's almost bigger than her!
The gift hits a branch and gets tangled up with the branches, the clasp holding the parachute to the package giving way to let it fall to the ground. Giovanna approaches it cautiously, sneezing as she touches the dark package. Maybe there are supplies in there that she can use - but no, it had come less than a minute after the branch had fallen. There was no way that Falcon could have reacted to the accident that quickly.
She opens the package and drops her jaw in surprise, gazing at the large instrument inside the leather case. Her surprise holds back the anger at another useless gift for a while, but she soon spits on the ground in disgust and gives the case a mighty kick. The kick dislodges a note attached to the top of the instrument - a label on the side of the case says that it's a cello - and Giovanna picks it up.
Been a while since you've went blind, hasn't it?
She touches her face in confusion and nods slowly, feeling her eyes carefully. It's been days since she's succumbed to the darkness that those waves of blindness bring, but she hadn't noticed because of the storm. Is she - did something cure her?
It hits her like a slap in the face - it was the dust from that wretched spyglass that had cured her. There was no other reason for it to come - especially since it was broken in the first place. This new gift was just to distract the audience from the fact that she's now the only person in the arena to not suffer from the blindness. She has the advantage.
She can win the Games.
A slow, wicked smile makes its way onto Giovanna's face, her fingers tracing the wooden instrument and lifting it out of the case. She still has those matches somewhere in the wreck of the fort, and now she has a new reason for her to keep on going, to rebuild.
Are cellos flammable?
Ashrifah Kayeut, 16, District Five Female
The forest seems to grow darker the more she wanders through it, fallen branches and trees leading her along a twisted path of life and death. She hasn't had a good sleep since the third day, she's been too focused on hunting or hiding from the remaining tributes to think about regaining her energy through sleep. It's starting to catch up again with her, but she blinks away the drowsiness and focuses on continuing to move. She can't afford to stop, not yet. She has to find a tribute. Just… one… tribute…
She snaps back to focus, her eyes starting to shut once more. Panem, she's got to keep on moving! She can't stop! Why is she so tired?
She shivers as she wades through the waterline to another portion of the the forest, her feet freezing inside the thin shoes that she has on. She's going to catch her death of cold if she doesn't find a way to start a fire sometime or other. She'll have to -
She pauses, her vision erased suddenly by the whim of that injection from a week ago. All she can see is black as far as she can see, no matter how hard she tries to regain her vision. Her head throbs in pain from her tense stance and she sits down on the ground, clenching her fists just in case some tribute - or some mutt - finds her in her vulnerable condition. She's not going to die, not today. Not today. She'll wait here until the blindness leaves her, and then continue on her hunt. Yeah, that's what she'll do. She should stand back up. She should get ready to keep moving once she regains her vision.
She shifts to her knees and fumbles around for a tree, grabbing onto a trunk of thick, gnarled bark before she hauls herself back up to her feet. There she stands until her vision returns, her sight showing her the waterline once more. It's still at the same level as it was before she had lost her vision, but she can't shake the suspicion that it'll rise sooner or later.
Ashrifah coughs loudly and wipes her nose as she dashes through the water once more, heading uphill towards a random direction. Perhaps she'll find someone, but she wants to be above the water by the time night falls. She can't tell exactly if it's night or day, though - the clouds have blocked what little sunlight that can stream into the forest, but it's been quite a while since she had fully woken up from her restless night. It could be the next day, but there haven't been any cannons yet.
Not yet.
An animal chitters as she passes through a thicket of bushes, scampering up a pine tree before Ashrifah has a good chance to look at it. She doesn't pay much attention to the tiny creature, continuing to move towards the top of the arena. If she listens to the forest, she can hear something that sounds oddly like thunder.
Maybe she's imagining things. The game makers wouldn't have another storm come this soon, would they? Would they?
She stumbles on a root and faceplants into the soil, spitting out dirt and pine needles as she struggles back onto her foot. "Ugh! Disgusting!"
A bird flies from a tree at her exclamation, and Ashrifah rolls her eyes. Her tongue tastes like dirt now, and trying to wipe it off with her sleeve isn't working. She needs some water.
She reluctantly trots back to the water line and impulsively scoops a handful of the liquid, slurping it down her throat greedily before taking more. She can taste a bit of dirt in the water, but it's so icy-cold and refreshing that she can't help but continue to drink more and more. She stays there until she's had her share of water and wipes her mouth, turning back towards her destination. It's time to keep on moving.
She walks up the hill carefully this time, making sure that she doesn't trip over anything. She doesn't want to make a fool of herself on camera again. If she's going to be taken seriously by anyone in the Capitol, she'll have to keep looking serious, not goofy and clumsy. She'll likely regret that mistake later, but she has no time for that now. She has to find a place to shelter from the incoming storm.l
A beeping noise fills the air and she looks up in surprise, watching a small package float down towards her. It nestles itself in a small branch, the package resting lightly on the leaves of the tree. It's about twelve feet above Ashrifah, but just low enough for her to climb up to it.
Ashrifah sighs and walks to the tree, leaping for a branch and using the sheer strength of her arms to hoist herself into the tree. From there she climbs, dodging under jutting branches to get to her prize. And get there she does, snatching the silver canister and taking the parachute after pausing. She quickly descends the tree and tears open her gift, looking at the two knives that glisten as she turns the canister around.
They're beautiful, she thinks as she traces a long finger on the sharp side of the knife, watching blood trickle out of a small cut on her finger from the blade. She sucks on the finger and looks down at the blades, carefully picking each of them up and tucking them into her belt. The parachute she tucks into her back pocket, and she tosses the canister with the black five on it into the water. It can't help her kill or strangle anyone, and she hasn't seen a large amount of food to package in the canister. She can let some lucky mutt play with it while she focuses on her true goals - to kill.
And kill she will. If she sniffs the air, she can smell blood. Death is coming.
And Ashrifah is going to bring it back to the arena.
Bernard Hancock, 12, District Twelve Male
He coughs as he continues to hold onto the roof of the barn, saddling the top of the metal roof and looking towards the top of the arena. Water stretches out around him almost as far as his eyes can see, coming to a stop a few feet beneath his shoe-clad feet.
Bernard's trapped.
He's honestly surprised that he's still alive, let alone strong enough to have found his way to a dry surface. But he had seized the opportunity to swim to the barn when the storm had calmed down, using a floating branch to help keep him above water in the long swim. His clothes are still soaked from the water, and his stringy hair is clinging to the sides of his cheeks, but he had made it far enough to be safe from the cold, cold water. And that's good enough for him.
There haven't been any cannons today, of that he's certain. After a while, Bernard spent his time entertaining himself by watching the few birds circle over the waters and look for fish to spear with their sharp beaks. He has a count of fifteen so far, all of which are over at the edge of the waters. If he looks closely, he can see them wade in and out of the water. Perhaps they're talking to one another, chatting about the silly tributes who can't seem to find their way out of the waters, or maybe they're searching for prey. But Bernard would give up everything he owns to get to dry land.
He slides down to the edge of the waterline and reluctantly scoops up a handful of water, slowly sipping it out of his palms as he fights the urge to spit it out. He remembers that the instructors always wanted them to boil the water and get the bacteria out of it before drinking it, but he has nothing to use for sanitizing the water, and he's thirsty. His parched throat is soothed by the water, but he knows that he'll soon feel the urge to drink later. Until then, he'll have to focus on finding a way off of the rooftop.
Who's left in the arena? He doesn't know for sure, but he's fairly confident in his guesses that it's the girl from Two, the boy from Four, the girl from Five, the boys from Seven and Ten, and the girl from Nine who remain with him, along with Moon. Who's the ninth? He's got no idea. Eh, they won't matter anyway. It's going to be one of the older kids who'll win this game of skill.
Unless Bernard finds a way to beat them all.
The edge of his shoe clips against something that's a bit higher than the surface of the slanted roof, and Bernard looks down in surprise to see a hatch into the barn. It juts out from the normal metal roof, a strip of metal welded onto the hatch for the opening.
He's found an escape route!
He looks up towards the sky before opening the hatch and clambering in, jumping down onto the soaked bales that lie just a bit above the water level and sinking to his knees in relief. He's finally found shelter. And does he see… backpacks strewn across those bales to his right? It is!
He grabs the backpacks and opens them eagerly, grabbing an energy bar and swallowing the thing whole. It tastes absolutely horrible, but he doesn't care. He has food! He has supplies! He doesn't know how they got here, but he has them!
He grins at the water below him and picks up a few of the backpacks, looking towards the hayloft at the other side of the barn. It looks dry, dry enough for him to shelter in for the night. After all, the cloudy sky seems to be darkening even more.
He climbs onto a beam connecting the two sides and quickly traverses the wooden plank with backpacks in his hands, scurrying back to the other side for more in his quest to move them all to the hayloft. After all, he has no fear of a harsh fall from the heights of the plank when water lies just a few feet below him.
Several trips lead all of the backpacks to be dumped into the hayloft, and Bernard sinks to his knees in relief. He's got his treasures in the dryest place in the whole barn, allowing him to wait out the Games for as long as the game makers are content with leaving him there. He may be bored in a few days, but he'll be safe. He'll be alive. He's definitely not going to be the next to die.
The bloated corpse of a cow floats through the barn and Bernard peers down at the dead beast with morbid curiousity, watching the cow slowly drift out of the barn and towards open water. Maybe it'll sink eventually, or maybe it'll float all the way to dry land.
Dry land. Dry land!
If he builds a boat out of the planks in the barn, he can make his way back to dry land before the finale.
Bernard yelps in delight and dances on top of the hayloft, a merry little jig that consists of him beating his feet against the floor and his hands waving wildly in the air. "A boat! A boat! I'll build myself a boat!"
He grins as he walks across the planks once more, landing on a bale and yanking the twine off of it with his bare hands. He can use it to tie the planks together for his boat. After all, it won't be missed by any farmers. They likely gave this hay to the Capitol to use for the arena, and now it'll go to Bernard's use.
He doesn't allow his mind to wander from his idea, starting to gather the materials for assembly back in the hayloft. Bernard has a mission.
And he's not going to fail.
Guess who's back?
Yep, it's me, with Day Six! Sorry for abandoning y'all, but I had midterms and a swim course that ate up a ton of time. But I'm back, with half of the interviews written and an itch to write Day Seven soon! Hope you enjoy this deathless chapter, and that it contained lots of interesting moments! Anyways, back to the regularly scripted show. We're still one death away from the final eight. Can you guess who it'll be?
KILL COUNT
(Italicized are deceased tributes)
Taffeta Paisley, District One Female - 1 Kill
Zora Stikander, District Two Female - 1 Kill
Ajax Hollis, District Two Male - 1 Kill
Keelan Spinnaker, District Four Male - 2 Kills
Ashrifah Keyaut, District Five Female - 2 Kills
Ryker Underwood, District Seven Male - 1 Kill
Paxton Webb, District Nine Male - 1 Kill
Giovanna Fillinfini, District Nine Female - 1 Kill
Marshall Furr, District Ten Male - 1 Kill
Moon Kraków, District Twelve Female - 1 Kill
Arena - 3 Kills
DISTRICT PLACEMENTS
District Two
District Four
District Five
District Six
District Seven
District Nine
District Ten
District Twelve
9th: District Three
10th: District One
11th: District Eleven
12th: District Eight
Alliances
Anti-Ashrifah™: Marshall, Ryker
Wait there's lots of us now yet we're still alone: Ashrifah, Giovanna, Moon, Bernard, Keelan, Zora, Isa
The Dead: Lincoln, Tony, Hollister, Nehemiah, Wyatt, Cornelia, Carol, Paxton, Pepper, Mira, Luxx, Monique, Aris, Taffeta, Shawn, Ajax
I'm lazy so even though I should, I won't put up the sponsor points now. Next chapter! Anyways, the cello was from Silver, but I gave the knives to spice things up. Let's see if I can't spit out a chapter in the next week, and RIP to Stan Lee as well as a thanks to all who are still here. Prepare for a lot of drama in the next few days, possibly the next week in the arena! Until next time, TheAmazingJAJ