Hades Rodriguez, Victor
"Guess what time it is, pal?" Paul asked after the coronation was done.
"Time to go home?" I asked.
"No. Pretty soon, but first, we have to have an initiation," Paul said.
"Like, you all throw water balloons at me or something?" I asked.
"Whatever you want. You get to pick. But if you pick the water balloon thing I'm going to be a little weirded out," Paul said. He checked his watch. "The others should be coming soon."
"All of them?" I asked, expecting almost fifty Victors to burst through the door. And that's more or less what happened.
"Is this where the party's at?" Hyden asked as a stream of people started pouring into my room. I heard more coming down the hall.
"Do you all travel together?" I asked.
"Yes. Every time we are not training, we are legion," Lancia said.
"So what's on the agenda for today?" Careen asked.
"Is everyone here?" I asked.
"Paul looked over the mass of people crammed into my room. "Everyone who's coming," he said. I didn't recognize all of the Victors. I wouldn't have noticed if a lot of them didn't show up. The only one I noticed who wasn't there was Shane, which I totally understood.
"Now it's time for us to do something fun and welcome you to the team," Paul said.
"What kind of things do you usually do?" I asked.
"For Careen we went skinny-dipping," Azure said.
"We did not!" Careen said, and she punched him in the arm.
"Can we just have a big party?" I asked. "With lots of candy? And we can watch a movie on the big projector?"
"That sounds easy," Pray said.
We could have just ordered snacks from the room service system, but it was way more fun to go out to a store and load up a cart with all the junk food we wanted. We piled back into the lounge in a cloud of snack bags and candy wrappers, jostling for spots on the couches.
"Does anyone know how to run this?" Paul asked, fiddling with the projector wall. A third of of looked at Acee, a third of us looked at Beetee, and a third of us looked at Wiress.
"Stereotypes," Acee grumbled as she ran to join Beetee and Wiress, who were already hooking things together.
"Let's watch something with animals," I said. I didn't want to see anything bad happen to people for a long time. "Something happy."
"I like happy movies," Bambi said.
We picked a documentary about tropical animals. That way we could watch the pictures and mostly ignore the narration while we talked.
"That was pretty cool, winning the Games at your age," Blake said.
"I didn't think it would actually happen," I admitted. I munched on candy while Bacchus nibbled a chunk of peach. Labyrinth wouldn't leave Bambi's side, but he did let me pet him.
"Now the whole world is your oyster," Nassor said. He didn't seem convinced, but he had a harder time of it than I did. I was one of the lucky ones. I didn't have to kill anyone. Weirdly enough, that didn't seem to help the others. The only other Victors I could think of who didn't kill anyone were Toby, his partner, and Cornflower, and none of them were really normal.
"Do you feel like a Victor yet?" Sky asked.
"I'm not sure, but I do feel like I really get to go home," I said. The world is my oyster. That could really be true for me. I was going to have some effects, but mostly, I was the same person as ever. I could go back home and live a normal life. I was just rich and famous now.
