Ever Fellows
My alliance would likely be together a long time. We might be the last alliance standing if things played out the way I thought they might. Vera's alliance was obviously the strongest. When she made her move, she'd likely aim to break her biggest threat- Beth's gang. Then she'd move on to Apollo and his allies, since they were the next strongest. By the time they got to us, the rest of them might be weak enough to put us on top.
That should have been good, but I was thinking farther ahead. There would come a time eventually, unless one of us died, that we were each others' biggest threats. When that happened, the group dynamics would shift. I was stronger than Junie, but Junie and River were close. If I attacked one, the other would come to the defense. I definitely couldn't take on both of them. They were likely considering the same possibilities, and if it got close to that point, one of them- River, I was sure- might strike preemptively.
There was one route I could take. If I ever got alone with her, I could kill Junie and hope she got taken by the hovercraft before River found the body. But there were so many risks. It would mean killing my ally, which I wasn't sure I could do just because of morals. Then there was the fact that Junie was a valuable medic. If I acted too hastily I'd shoot myself in the foot, but the longer I waited, the more likely one of them was to guessing my thoughts. And if I killed Junie and River suspected, I'd lose an ally at best and be in a fight for my life at the worst. It might have been less dangerous to have weaker allies.
Felix Veaux
I was the dark horse of the alliance. Everyone wanted to get home, and we were all willing to do things we weren't proud of. But only I still had connections to my old life. I knew Vera and Frankie saw Shogo when they looked at me.
I didn't mention the elephant in the room as we worked on fortifying our mausoleum. Lyte sorted the supplies and the rest of us prepared for the battles we knew were coming. We picked our site because of its proximity to a nearly completely crumbled stone building. We hauled the stones and piled them outside our entrance, making a narrow tunnel that would allow us to cut down intruders long before they got to us. The strength of our alliance meant we could keep a fire blazing in our shelter, and it warmed the stone walls around us.
We were preparing for a battle of epic proportions, and I could feel it drawing closer. The ghostly noises and disturbances in the Arena lead me to believe it would be mutts and not Tributes we first fought, even though we hadn't seen the flying things since the Bloodbath. I wasn't sure we could prepare for what the Arena had in store.
Zach Connouis
It was all doom and gloom around here. Everyone looked half-dead already.
"So a skeleton walks into a bar," I said as we heated up a can of tomato soup over our fire. "He says 'give me a beer and a mop'."
Jake and Logan laughed. Austin groaned, Blaise looked like he didn't quite get it, and DeMarcus snickered.
"It had to be a skeleton, didn't it?" Austin asked.
"Oh excuse me, cupcake, do you want one that's not so scary?" I said. "What do you get when you cross a dog with a plant? A collie-flower. A beauuuuutiful cauliflower that is not scary at all. Better?"
"Okay, you can tell the skeleton ones. That was worse," Austin said. But even he and Jay were smiling by then. Jay always took himself too seriously. He thought he was the stalwart leader who had to keep on a brave face so his men wouldn't be scared. But we could take care of ourselves. We were big boys. I knew he was taking Logan and Cooper hard, but it was going to happen eventually. He was doing his best. That was all anyone could expect here.
Pandora Sent
Apollo didn't have to stay with me. I would have been okay by myself.
I was lucky in this Arena. I was used to the dark. And the Arena was full of other senses. I could smell dirt and water and dust and death, which was more than I wanted. I could hear Apollo wandering around reading headstones and gathering the food by some of them. I could tell when I was by a building because I felt the wind stop. I wanted to know more, and I started to poke around, stopping every few minutes to listen for Apollo.
I didn't know what drew me to the nearby mausoleum at first. When I got closer, I heard a noise coming from inside it. It was rhythmic and steady, like a drum. I couldn't imagine what would make a noise like that, and my curiosity welled up right away. Apollo was just a few rows away. He'd come if it turned out to be another Tribute or a mutt.
When I got close enough that even I could see it, I saw the mausoleum had one main room and then another one farther in, making it twice as big as the others. I could feel a stone door we could close to keep out intruders. It would just look like an empty building to them.
The noise got louder when I went inside. It sounded like a heartbeat, but there was nothing there. There was no heat from a living thing, and I couldn't smell anything. If something had been in there it already would have attacked me. It must have been a Gamemaker trick. I felt my way along the porous stone walls into the inner room.
There was a stone coffin on a table in the middle of the room. The noise was coming from inside, but when I nudged the coffin top, it moved. If I could move it, so could anything inside. So what was making the noise? I pushed the lid off and peeked inside.
I was glad I couldn't see what grabbed me by the throat and pulled me up against the coffin on my stomach. It was enough that I could smell that it was musty and faintly rotten. I could feel how cold its hand was on my skin and I heard that the heartbeat had stopped. I felt teeth on my neck and then the hand was warm. I knew what I'd found. I didn't want to see it.
55th place: Pandora Sent- bit by a vampire
A lot of people were surprised Pandora didn't die in the Bloodbath, which is perfectly reasonable, since she's legally blind. This is why. Her form said her curiosity would kill her and maybe unleash a Pandora's Box on the Arena. That was completely perfect for exactly this situation. I didn't kill her so I could save her for this death. Pandora might never have been able to win, but I liked her anyway. She worked with her limitations and perceived the Arena in a totally new way.
You might have noticed by now I'm matching chapter names with horror films that match chapter events. This one is named that because you can actually see exactly what it looked like when Pandora opened that coffin (except Pandora's a chick and it's a guy in the movie) in either the movie House of Dark Shadows or episode 210 of the original show. I say that in full disclosure for both visual aid and so I don't claim credit for something I ripped off. The vampire does look different, though, since I didn't want to be a total thief.
