LOL I guess you could say Meenah's not hurting for food if you don't mind eating raw cave spiders. But I know what you mean.

Yttria Noxus- District Three female

Jezzebell and Paloma weren't really asleep so much as they were sort of dozing. None of us had really slept since we got here. The dark cave just got sort of darker for a while and time got more blurred and stringy. I would 'wake up' feeling like I'd laid down but not that I'd been asleep.

While I sat watch, I thought strategy. There were three of us allies. The Careers were obviously our biggest threat, like they always had been. We needed to get just one of them dead. Preferably Elissa or Grande, since they were together. With either of them dead, the other wouldn't be interested in maintaining an alliance with Caio. They would fight and then we'd only have one Career to deal with. We could kill one Career between the three of us. Especially since whoever it was would probably be injured. It was ambitious, but it was possible.

How will we get one alone? The Careers weren't static objects. They were making their own moves and plans. They knew there were three of us and they wouldn't be splitting up like a bunch of characters from a kids' book. If I was them, I would be looking for the three of us to launch an assault. Three of them against three of us wasn't a risk to them.

If just one dies... Two Careers, and we could move. Preferably one, but two was feasible. We could lay out our plan and launch an assault they wouldn't see coming. That was even better. With one, they would be watching their back. Two would still be secure. Two it was, then. But not until we had a plan.

Visenya Lloyd- District Nine female

I stepped lightly out into the cavern. Yttria was keeping an eye out, but not as much as she might have been. It was just a fact of the human race that we tended to stop paying attention if nothing happened for a long time. Tell someone to keep watch and she'll be hyper-alert for some time, and then, when nothing happens for hours and hours, your brain just starts autofilling for the lack of information. Yttria seemed to be thinking about something that took a lot of brainpower, since her head was in her hands and she'd been looking the same direction for a few minutes.

In one hand I held a rock the size of my fist. When I got close enough to Yttria, I'd hit her with it. It would knock her out, I insisted to myself. It would knock her out and I would take some food and run. I held that thought in my head. There were other thoughts, thoughts about killing her while I could, killing her allies and having three opponents eliminated. Those thought lingered, unaddressed but unbanished.

It wasn't that big a cavern. It wasn't long before I was only a few steps behind Yttria. That was when she turned and saw me.

Yttria Noxus- District Three female

When I turned to make sure no one was sneaking up on us, someone was. The girl from Nine was just feet away from me.

She was holding a rock. She threw it at me as soon as I turned. It hit me on the eyebrow and my head snapped back at the burst of stunning pain. I fell back off the rock I was sitting on. I scrambled with my arms behind me to push myself back up and fight back.

Visenya Lloyd- District Nine female

It didn't work. I wasn't strong enough or the rock wasn't heavy enough. It knocked Yttria off her seat, but she was still in the fight. As she started to get up, she screamed.

Nonononono no noise no noise

I picked up another rock and threw it at her face. When she crossed her arms in front of her head to defend herself, I jumped the last few feet between us and landed with one knee on her chest. Her scream ended in a rush of air. She reeled and her face went tight with pain. Before she could recover I picked up one of the rocks that had hit her and smashed it into her face.

Stop making noise just be quiet

I hit her in the side of the head and again in her face. She fell quiet. The moment after I realized it, there was another noise behind me, amplified by my earpiece. I looked up from Yttria for an instant of belated horror.

Jezzebell Fern- District Seven female

Yttria's scream yanked me out of the pathetic excuse for sleep we could reach in the Arena. I wasn't aware I was rising before I was already up and running.

Yttria was on the ground. Another girl was on top of her, beating her with a rock. There hadn't been a cannon yet. There was time. But that wasn't what I was thinking as I closed the short distance between us. I was thinking about how I was going to kill the girl who hurt my friend.

Visenya Lloyd- District Nine female

A fist hit my jaw so forcefully I was almost airborn. I landed twisted a foot from Yttria and skidded across the dirt on my side, wondering what the cracking noise had been I rolled over to get on my hands and knees to rise.

The girl from Seven's boot hit me in my lower arm. Two of my fingers snapped like pencils and I felt them bending limply around her strike. The force reverberated through my arm as I fell back on my stomach.

Another scream rent the air, this one furious. The screaming girl kicked me again. There was a sound like a popping seal and everything flickered around me when the boot hit my temple. My head snapped back and my surroundings reeled crazily and then blurred into slow motion. My cheek was pressed against the dirt, though I didn't remember getting there.

It looked like two girls were standing near me. It looked like six girls were standing near me, but four of them were translucent and flanked the two more solid girls. There was pressure at the back of my head, and then I was rising, a dull pain nagging at my scalp. The pressure released and my face fell hard onto a rock.

I never wanted it to be like this. I used to play hide-and-seek with the others in the fields. The fields were sunlit and open, not dark and cold and closed. I wasn't the one that wanted something like this.

Something like a hammer hit the back of my head. It must have split it open like a melon.

Yttria Noxus- District Three female

"Yttria! Yttria!" Jezzebell was calling. I couldn't see her. I was tugging free of my body. There was nothing alarming about that. I simply didn't need it anymore.

It was quiet. Then another voice.

"She's dying," Paloma said.

"What do we do?" Jezzebell said.

"I heard they can hear us, right up until they die," Paloma said quietly.

"I killed her, you hear me? I killed her dead," Jezzebell said.

"You told us you wanted one of us to win," Paloma said. "We'll try."

"No one's killing me," Jezzebell said. And that was what I left with, since someone very much had killed me.

9th place: Visenya Lloyd- curb-stomped by Jezzebell

Visenya and Linden were a pair but they were never absorbed into each other. What they had was more a business contract than anything else. It was cool how they were friends but never lovers, ignoring the cliche about same-sex friendship being impossible. Visenya was the more compassionate and philanthropic of the pair. Still, she also had her own difficulties relating and finding her place. She made it a long time by using the Capitol to her advantage, but this time she took a gamble and lost. Thanks CarlpoppaLOL for the second half of a great pair.

8th place: Yttria Noxus- Beaten to death by Visenya

This wasn't an ideal Arena for Yttria. In an urban one she would have had a lot more opportunities. But even here she didn't slow down. She was planning and analyzing all the way, from her burgeoning ambush to her part in the successful scheme to harvest the mutt's flesh. She only died here because I had to keep winnowing those numbers down. She was a possible winner. This just wasn't the one where she won, like when Dr. Strange looked out at the branching timelines. Thanks LordShiro for clever, independent Yttria.

Okay it was more a rock stomp but Jezzebell's form said it would be super cool if she curb-stomped someone and that WOULD be super cool so I made do.