I wake up on the morning before training begins with the light from the windows blinding me as Alistair pulls the curtains open. I swear loudly, realising that I should have been up hours ago. Alistair is already in his compulsory Tribute body suit for training. His muscles bulge through the material. I pull my eyes away from his amazing figure and swing my legs out of bed into a pair of fluffy slippers. I make my way over to the bathroom in my underclothes, and shriek when I remember Alistair is in the room. He laughs, and makes my bed. I have a quick shower to rid myself of the gold dust that was still on my skin from last night and wrap my hair in a towel. Wriggling into my body suit, Alistair and I walk down the hallway to the breakfast room, where Angela, Marc, and the two prep teams and stylists are just finishing.
"Eve you are so incredibly late!" says Angela to me over her clipboard. Alistair smirks. I punch his arm.
"Hey! No Physical engagement with other tributes before the Games start!" He says in mock pain, rubbing his arm.
"I think you two have already broken that rule." Marc grumbles, eating toast. This shuts both of us up.
We eat breakfast in silence, listening to Marc talk about allies and which training stations to go to first.
When we arrive down in the training room, most of the Tributes are already sitting down together, listening to the Gamemakers tell us about the different stations. Alistair and I move off to the spear throwing station with a bunch of careers, but soon enough to my embarrassment, I find that I am not strong enough to even lift the spears, forget throwing them, so I walk over to what looks like a martial arts station. One person is already there, the girl from district four. She is sitting down raking her blonde hair into a high pony tail. When she sees me she smiles.
"Loved the hand prints", she says with a smirk. "Hi, I'm Nimiane." She holds out a hand and we shake.
"Eve." I reply. "Shouldn't you be over with the Careers?"
"I actually can't stand them. The boy from my district," she points at him, "his name is Kai, he wanted us to act like a couple to get more sponsors but I wouldn't. The other four from one and two scare me."
We talk while we practice. The man at the station teaches me how to break a neck, and as I practice on a dummy, I wonder if I will have to use the manoeuvre in the Games. I turn out to be quite good at it. An hour later, I am delivering round-house kicks to a dummy's face and ducking and diving under the moving obstacles. But compared to one of those big careers, I wouldn't stand a chance.
Nimiane and I move on to the edible plants and berries station. We quickly learn how to tell what we can't eat. I am guessing that some of them might pop up in the arena so I pay close detail.
We decide to use our last hour before lunch to visit the weapons station. The boy from district one is throwing knives. Not throwing, hurling them at the targets, getting a bullseye every time. We had been standing there gawking at him for about two minutes, when he suddenly turns around. We jump backwards a little bit, and he struts toward us, knives in hand. He is about to push through where we are standing when he stops. He holds the blade up to my face, twirls it in the light, and points it at my face. I gulp.
"You're very pretty, aren't you?" He drawls, tracing the blade around my mouth. I can't move. I feel Nimiane behind me and the district one boy looks up. He laughs, points the knife at me one more time in a knowing way, and continues walking to his next station.
"What a dickhead." Nimiane spits, picking up a large axe and pegging it at a dummy.
"Funny enough I don't think he likes me." I say, trying to keep my voice even.
I sort through the weapons lying on a table, being careful not to cut myself on the sharp blades. A glint catches my eyes and they widen as I uncover something I never even thought of being in the pile. A sickle.
We use them back in eleven to reap the wheat in the fields. I pick it up and run my fingers along the crescent shaped blade. You would have to be pretty keen to survive to use one of these as a weapon. To try it, I gently swing the blade against a dummy, and to my surprise, the sickle completely decapitates it. I am disgusted, but keep doing it until half of the dummy's heads are missing. Then I start to throw it, hitting every target I aim for. I forward roll on the ground and with the momentum, hurl the sickle at a dummy's head and lodge the blade into its forehead.
Happy that I have found something that I could possibly use in the arena, I turn back to the table to put it down and head over to lunch with Nimiane, who seemed comfortable throwing a trident around. She was also very good at shooting, probably from her naturally keen eyesight accumulated and passed down generations and generations from her fishing ancestors. I pile fruit and pasta onto my plate and we head over to a bench away from the others. I look over my shoulder for Alistair, and spot him sitting and laughing with the two Career girls. My heart drops. Will he abandon me in the games for the Career pack? Will he help them hunt me and the rest of the other tributes down? I think about the kiss in the elevator and realise that he was probably lying when he told me that he meant it. I can bet it was his way of gaining my trust so I am an easy kill in the Arena. What a fool I have been.
One of the girls says something and they all start laughing, banging their fists on the table. Annoyed that he seems to be enjoying himself so much, I abandon my lunch and stalk off to a new station to learn about snares. Once I feel that I have snared to perfection, I move to my last station, climbing. I climbed trees a lot when I was younger, and can clear them in no time due to my light weight.
Once I feel I can't climb any further up, I make myself comfortable leaning up against the trunk and sulk about the whole games ordeal until an announcement from a Gamemaker orders us exit the training room for dinner. But before she climbs down the tree, she jumps right out of the page and wraps her fingers around your neck, strangling you. You try and unclasp her fingers from your neck but you are too weak and unfit from sitting around reading fanfiction all day, so you decide to ask her what she wants. Eve tells you the horribly long tale of her tragic and mysterious past, and when she is done, you see that you have cried so much that your skin is wrinkly and the room around you is knee-deep in your own tears and your cats saliva. She also asks you in the kindest, saddest, sweetest little voice in the history of the universe that you thought wasn't even possible to write the writer of this amazing fanfiction a little review. You happily take 5 seconds of your time to tell her that you appreciate her writing, and Eve is so happy that she bursts into sparkles and starts spewing rainbows.