Merry Christmas! Enjoy this games, which is based on a Christmas experience with my family.


Taia Warden, District 6

"Everywhere you look,

Everywhere you turn,

Illness is watching,

Waiting its turn."

Sufjan Stevens, I Want To Be Well


It was a historic year for Panem.

In March, it was announced that Livia Snow was pregnant with a child. However, what was not announced, even to Livia herself, was that the child wasn't hers.

The child really belonged to the president's mistress, Io Jasper. It was easy for Io to secretly transfer her embryo to a Petri dish. Easier still for Coriolanus Snow to convince his wife that it was one of her IVF treatments gone right.

Even when Suetonius Snow was born with dark hair, despite both his parents being blonde, that was easy to explain away. It was just a matter of dominant genes.

But the Twenty-Third Hunger Games also made history. It was the one that gave District 6 it's first victor, a victor nobody had expected.

Or wanted.

Taia Warden was the daughter of one of the district's biggest drug lords. To some, she was a snivelling, spoiled brat who deserved to die painfully. To others, she was just an innocent girl who wasn't responsible for her father's crimes, but still someone District 6 could afford to lose. After all, countless kids had lost their lives to the Wardens and their drug empire. It only seemed fair that they'd have to lose someone to the Hunger Games.

After Taia had scored a one in training and spent every moment of screen time she was given weeping, the odds of her death looked extremely high.

What they didn't know was that Taia had a secret weapon, a weapon that even she didn't know about.

The tributes rose into an arena built like an ancient town with wooden buildings and cobbled streets. To Taia, the town looked familiar, like she'd seen it before during her childhood, but she was too busy rushing to escape the bloodbath to figure out where she'd seen it before.

To the other tributes, the fourteen who survived the bloodbath, the arena was completely unfamiliar. Knowledge of the history of the world was very limited in Panem and only a select few were able to learn about ancient cities and the disasters that had befallen them. A select few like Io Jasper, who had received a very special birthday gift from her boyfriend - a book on the history of diseases. One particular epidemic had stood out, one so spectacular that she knew it would inspire the next Hunger Games.

She'd decided to recreate the Great Plague of London.

On the second day of the games, Io decided to release the rats. They scurried through the arena, their fleas biting the tributes and infecting them with the plague. Since the rats weren't attacking the tributes, most of them assumed that the rodents were harmless. Some even tried to catch and eat the rats.

But not Taia. She knew, deep down in her bones, that the rats carried disease. It was the one thing that scared her more than death.

Nobody quite knew how Taia Warden had come to develop such severe germaphobia. Many of her father's enemies claimed it was because she'd witnessed the decline of so many morphling addicts under her family's influence. But the real reason was because her father kept a lot of books in his office. Not because he liked reading but because it made him look more important. When she was six years old, Taia had opened a book out of curiosity and hadn't been able to stop reading, no matter how much it had frightened her.

Even though it had been eleven years ago and she'd tried to forget it, the book Taia had read about the plague had burned into her mind.

Two weeks into the games, Taia was the only uninflected tribute left. She wasn't completely healthy by any means. She was exhausted and dehydrated, losing weight rapidly because she was too scared to eat, and the cameras couldn't even pick up the effects on her mental health that came with being trapped in the arena of her nightmares. But all the other tributes were covered with sores and boils, feverish and coughing up blood.

Suddenly, it looked like District 6 would have its first victor. Taia Warden shot up the odds table. The sponsors began to rally behind her.

Then Io decided to launch the second big event of the games. It was only so exciting to watch tributes writhe in agony. It was much more fun to set them alight. It was time for the Great Fire of London!

There were six tributes still alive when the fire started. Three of them were too sick to run away and were engulfed by the flames. The pair from Eight, who had only just begun to show symptoms, both ran down the streets, chased by a river of molten metal from a cathedral roof. The girl tripped and was swallowed up but the boy managed to scramble up to the rooftops.

As the fire pushed the two remaining tributes closer and closer together, the boy rushed at Taia. He knew that, if he killed her, the Capitol would give him a cure.

Taia saw the boy with the deadly, contagious disease running straight at her and screamed. She fought with all she had. She kicked. She scratched. She knocked the boy right off the roof and into the flames.

Finally, Taia's ordeal was over and the hovercraft came to lift her to safety. But she'd never be able to forget what she'd seen. District 6 had its first victor but part of her would always be trapped in the arena.


This chapter owes a lot to 'Cheating Death: Those That Lived' by CragmiteBlaster. One of the victors there won his games in a sewer arena due to being a germaphobe and, as a germaphobe myself, it warmed my heart a little to see someone so relatable win the games. I wanted to try something similar with one of my victors because it's pretty relevant to 2020. I'm quite proud of my 1665 London arena. It's based on my own childhood trauma from reading a book about the plague. It's definitely one of the more wacky, out-there arenas I've used but it has a special place in my heart for being so flipping terrifying.

As for how this chapter is Christmassy, when I was twelve, my brother and my parents came down with a vomit bug over the Christmas period. I was the only one in the household who didn't fall sick because I kept to a strict regime of washing my hands and avoiding people. I survived Christmas in a similar way to how Taia survived her games. In fact, Taia's strategy of just not dying of the plague is probably the one I'd be able to replicate most successfully. It may be a pretty depressing Christmas story but I hope you take comfort in the fact that, even though we're in a global pandemic and many of us are unable to see our families over the Christmas period, it's a lot better than putting your loved-ones at risk of getting sick. I hope you all have a happy and healthy Christmas and make the most of it despite the current situation being far from perfect.

The next chapter will be less of a product of 2020, I promise.