AUTHOR'S NOTES: This was another one of those chapters that I had written a while back, before it was brought to my attention that apparently Chaff won the 45th Hunger Games. I couldn't find any official confirmation in or out of the books (apart from Katniss' "thirty years ago" remark, which I had just assumed was an estimate), and as such, there is no Chaff this year. Needless to say, he's not being replaced; he'll just show up a couple years down the line, closer to Haymitch's games. On a similar note, this one was designed as being a direct sequel to the last one, and so there's a bit of continuity here that I also wanted to preserve. Fear not though... Chaff will appear soon. If you've enjoyed the series thus far, feel free to tell me how I'm doing-or spread the word around. the more readers, the merrier.
That said... Happy Reading!
The 45th Annual Hunger Games
Some people called the 5th decade of Hunger Games "The Golden Years" considering how full of surprises they so often were, but also for the cunning and deviousness of tributes and Gamemakers alike. The 45th Annual Hunger Games were just like their predecessors, producing promising tributes that made the games almost feel like a sequel to the year before. Blaze DiFronzo represented District 1, volunteering to avenge the death of his older brother Flint the year before. Partnered with him was a sinisterly beautiful woman named Victoria Salazar, while District 2 produced Alan Blackstone and Roxanne Aranai, both determined to put their family names on the victors' map.
District 11 did not produce volunteers this year, but with a cunning mentor like Sagittaria Svenja at their side, even a small boy like Leon McFaren or the Mayor's daughter Daisy Hallowell might have been able to stand a chance if she took the older girl's advice.
Another promising candidate was a District 4 girl from the Tallarico family named Valendria, often referred to by her middle name Varsha. A gigantic beast of a woman, she almost felt more like the stock right out of District 2, even if Alan and Roxanne were definitely not fighters to sneeze at. This year would be full of intrigue and surprising tributes all the while though.
Few people thought much about Kiva Rivnay and Dezna Meraxa from District 6 until they stood out in the parade wearing elaborate armor and attire that resembled exotic astronauts. In the training center, they also proved their competence with building gadgets and traps, with their only real competition in this field being from District 3, where a quiet and cunning pair named Clemont Ishiko and Hikari Kuro also excelled. Despite her mighty prowess, Valendria seemed to be fairly elusive and did not seem to show interest in joining the careers. Instead, she went after a young District 5 girl by the name of Glimmer DeLosSantos, and the two quickly became friends.
It became clear within the next few days how the tribute performances were going to play out. Blaze, Valendria, and the careers were going to score very high, Glimmer and the District 6 pair would score moderately high, with Leon and Daisy from District 11 scoring around the average ranges. At the end of the week, it turned out to be almost exactly as the gamblers and Gamemakers predicted, with Blaze scoring an 11, the other careers scoring 9s and 10s, Kiva, Dezna, and Glimmer scoring 8s, and Valendria scoring a 12. Leon, Daisy, and a small girl named Hazel from District 12 all scored 6s, but it was clear that Hazel was no Kyla.
Incidentally, during the interviews the ones that stole the show were Kiva and her dazzling rainbow getup; and her partner Dezna was decked out in a similarly dazzling bright colored suit representing lightning. Their stylists had explained that it was matching their skills—Kiva's rainbow being a reminder that she was a jack of all trades, and Dezna's lightning being symbolic of his blinding speed. Time would tell to see how useful these tricks ended up being.
The arena was also a distant departure from the sinisterly beautiful jungle of the year before. Instead the tributes found themselves surrounded by a ruined city, full of decrepit greys and browns instead of the lush greens and blues and yellows of the year before.
The first really odd thing the tributes noticed was that the cornucopia only had a few proper weapons among the supplies. Instead, it was littered with a huge array of various metal shards. A lot of the tributes didn't even know what to do with them until Victoria grabbed one and threw it at a girl from District 9, decapitating her immediately. After the first blood had been spilled, it seemed to shake the tributes into knowing what they had to do, and the fighting was on.
The bloodbath included 9 casualties, and the games were on as the careers teamed up, Kiva and Dezna took off in another direction, while Clemont and Hikari took off into the ruins not too far from where Glimmer and Valendria had fled. The urban environment of this arena meant that perhaps districts like 8, 5, 3, and 6 would excel more than usual.
Exploring the ruins revealed to Kiva and Dezna that it was a war-torn city—or at least had been designed to imitate one. Kiva could even imagine Capitol armored vehicles roaring through these ravaged streets in whatever war they were battling.
Daisy, despite highly doubting her own capabilities in this arena, was taken under the wings of the District 6 pair, who also managed to keep her safe for the rest of the afternoon as they hunted for water and shelter. The ruined buildings solved the shelter problem, while the water was found in these large potholes that seemed, surprisingly enough, to be clean. The tributes still used filters to help ensure that they did not become diseased, and soon the little trio was hunkering down in a three-and-a-half-walled roofless building for the evening.
Unbeknownst to the careers at the time, was that the mentors from District 6 and District 11 had advised their tributes to ally themselves with one another. The reasoning behind this was unclear, but these games were full of various mysteries. Another of these included the odd smell of gas that Leon and Hazel had found during their afternoon trekking. These two were trying to find the pair from District 6 as they trekked through the darkness. While District 12 had not been in on the alliance between '6 and '11, most tributes from '11 and '12 had soft spots for one another insomuch that alliances between the two districts were fairly common.
Originally Leon and Hazel had just wanted to get away from the foul-smelling buildings, but during this time they were nearly sniped by Dezna, who thought they were enemy tributes. After quietly calling out who he was, Leon was let in, and little Hazel climbed up into the shelter with them. Even with the five tributes present, it was rather roomy.
They knew that something was wrong the next morning however, when the moon remained bright and high above their heads. It was going to be another one of those dark arenas.
"Might make the place easier on the eyes," Dezna quipped. "I can see through this just fine; How about the rest of you?"
"Well I've got some of those night-vision glasses," Leon piped up, "Hazel and I jacked a pair from the career's supply pile last night before running."
"Impressive," Kiva nodded approvingly. "I think you two will fit right in." as they settled down for the night they rummaged through their supplies, Kiva found some matches, and wondered what they might be used for. Leon mentioned the smell of gas, and Kiva's mind immediately got to work on how that could be used to their advantage.
They found out not too much later. There were odd smelling pockets of gas that had Kiva's mind heading into overdrive as she thought about how to rig one up for a trap. However, her thought process was interrupted as Victoria suddenly came screaming past them. Figuring that there was something up, they turned to see what she was fleeing from, only to find tracker-jackers on their tails. Immediately, Kiva knew what to do with the matches. The tributes passed through a gas field, only to turn at the last moment as Kiva struck a match and tossed it. The gas ignited, roasting the tracker-jackers swiftly and effectively.
With that threat out of the way, Dezna proposed that they cook and eat the wasps. They were nothing spectacular, but his experience with hallucinogens had taught him that most of the venom was cooked out if you heated them up enough. Daisy was skeptical, but the lack of food was enough for Leon, Hazel, Kiva, and Dezna to give it a shot.
The resulting scene was almost comical from a Capitol perspective. While the toxins in the tracker-jacker venom had been cooked away, the hallucinatory effects remained, which caused the four tributes to see all sorts of wild delusions, and behave a bit comically as they giggled and talked about random things that the Panemian audiences did not see. Daisy, on the other hand, seemed to be dwelling more on the death of Rye Grove from the year before—a legacy that now lived on through victor Sagittaria Svenja, his lover.
Unfortunately, this discomfort caused her to disconnect from the remainder of the group, who only noticed her absence later the next 'morning'. Immediately, however, Hazel, Leon, Kiva, and Dezna were on the prowl with the hopes of finding her before the careers did. They knew Blaze would be after the kids from '11 in particular, as if to avenge his brother Flint from the year before. However, that ws exactly what happened, and with hardly more than a taunt and a remark about how easy it had been, he left Daisy impaled with one of the metal shards while his three companions looked on. Dezna and Kiva attacked, fighting off Alan, Roxanne, and Victoria. While there were no further casualties, Dezna's blade disrupted Alan and sliced Victoria, and in this frenzy, Hazel managed to swipe Alan's sword before the career pack fled. They were a hit-and-run pack this year it seemed, and while it was unorthodox for them, results were something that no one could argue with.
While they made shelter, Dezna felt it was safe to start using some of these metal shards to build a crossbow similar to the one he had built in the training center, which in turn was based off of the one that Sagittaria had constructed the previous year. They were safe for the night, they figured, and so had made themselves comfortable.
However, the arena was not fully safe, and one of the other tributes learned the hard way that the desolate cityscape was not devoid of mutt life. Giant rat-mutts attacked him and did him in, and some of them also found the ragtag team of tributes in the derelict house they had taken shelter in.
"Ugh, who did this thing's dentistry?" Kiva joked as she and her friends fought off the creatures. Dezna was bitten in the arm, and he griped and complained as Kiva wrapped it, but otherwise, the group was fine for the moment.
Two more cannons belonging to the District 8 pair rang out the next day, although they had been offed by Glimmer and Valendria rather than the careers. The next couple of days were mostly silent, but that meant that odds were the Capitol was going to be looking for some action—and District 6 didn't want to be on the receiving end of an arena hazard if they could avoid it.
On day 9, however, a vicious battle broke out as the career pack swooped back in with the intent of slaying Leon. However, they were disrupted by Glimmer and Valendria, who brought the total number of fighting tributes up to 10: all but two of the tributes—the elusive and mysterious pair from District 3—had just converged on this one spot in a vicious battle for bloodshed. As Leon grappled with Blaze for his life, he and Kiva noticed a rather prominent landmark in the dimness of the night: the house Leon had mentioned before, and the smell of gas that surrounded it. He seemed to know what had to be done, and cocked his head towards Kiva almost in desperation. Kiva threw a lit match into the house, setting it ablaze. Leon tried to force Blaze into the inferno and keep him there, but he was so tightly locked in combat with him that he began to suffer burns as well. It only took a few minutes for Leon to realize that he was going to die alongside Blaze, who, despite his own screams, was doomed as well.
Kiva actually recoiled in horror upon realizing what she had done, but the battle raged on around her regardless of how she felt.
Victoria, Alan, and Roxanne were locked in combat with Dezna, Glimmer, and Valendria, the latter of whom were winning. Valendria was a beast of a woman, and the careers' morale seemed to have plummeted as they tried to fight her off. Within a few brutal minutes, Roxanne had been shot down by Glimmer's arrow, Val had sunk her axe into Alan's chest, and Dezna had pinned Victoria, slashing her throat. With the careers dead, Dezna braced himself for Glimmer and Val turning on him, but such an event never came. Instead, the two girls had disappeared back into the darkness as quickly as they had emerged from it.
After the rather traumatic events that had conspired last night, three major things had changed: the entire career pack was annihilated, Kiva was traumatized from watching two boys burn to death, and Hazel was nearly frozen in shock from seeing everything that transpired, and seeing Dezna's right arm splattered with Victoria's blood. Of the three, he was the only one that did not seem to be traumatized.
Hazel did not survive the night, reducing the surviving number of tributes down to 6. She had been trembling most of the evening from the horrific events she had witnessed, and sometime during the night as the District 6 pair slept, Hazel suffered from a seizure and did not survive. When the other two woke up the next morning, Kiva gave her a little memorial from some of the metal shards, and the two of them began to migrate towards the cornucopia. They knew that the end of the games was approaching, and so they spent the night in the golden horn, figuring that no arena hazards would come for them this time, and that the remaining tributes would have to come for them.
A night or so later, they saw odd lightning off in the distance. They knew that it was not ordinary the moment they heard a cannon fire, and saw Glimmer's face in the sky.
"Rainbow lightning," Dezna quipped, "that seems oddly ironic."
"Might explain the rubber-tipped staff they sponsored you," Kiva shrugged, "but it doesn't explain these strange discs."
"I guess we'll find out," Dezna pointed to another flash in the sky, "it's getting closer."
"that's because it's not normal," Kiva warned, "…and I think we just found District 3."
Sure enough, the nefarious District 3 pair that had disappeared at the beginning of the games had resurfaced, and strapped to their backs and arms were shields and lightning machines. A battle broke out, which alarmed the District 6 pair, because they also knew that Val was still out there.
The first step was getting their shields to break, and so they used their weapons to deflect the electricity, forcing Clemont's shield to surge over. The surge protectors had been built only into the attacking part of the machine, and so the shield went down. Hikari took the forefront to make up for Clemont's lack of defense, but Kiva was too erratic and Dezna was much too swift. Her shield soon went down, and in her moment of desperation to defend herself, Kiva used the opening to strike down Clemont before he could fully recover. However, Hikari was not through with the fight. Turning her machine towards kiva and Dezna, she hit the former of the two with a powerful lightning strike that put her into a state of debilitating paralysis. She knew at once that she was going to die.
Dezna managed to give his partner the honor of outliving Hikari, who he struck down moments later. Now he braced himself for the end. Sooner or later Valendria would arrive to finish him off.
However, instead of that happening, she helped Dezna climb atop the cornucopia after showing her face, because she knew a far worse threat that had been keeping her at bay the entire time.
Grey-skinned, red-eyed creatures with black hair and clothing that resembled the tributes appeared from a hazy mist. 7 of them were left, and they were modeled after Glimmer, Dezna, Kiva, Hazel, Leon, Daisy, and Valendria. These became the iconic and notorious "Night Witches" that tributes from later games would fear as some of the most dangerous mutts the Capitol ever unleashed upon the games. Still, Dezna and Valendria managed to take them all out, and this was finally when Dezna braced for Val turning on him and finishing. Instead, she requested that he kill her and end it. She began an elaborate tale about how she was a tool used solely for the games, while at heart, she was a rebel. Seeds sown by Rye and Sagittaria the year before had germinated, and thoughts of rebellion had taken root in some districts. As such, Dezna took down Valendria with a swift, fell stroke, ending the games. As such, Dezna Meraxa became the 4th victor from District 6, and the 45th victor of the Hunger Games.
Because of his previous state of being permanently addled by drugs, Dezna did not change much after the games, but he did learn a few cool things about tracker-jackers and other various substances. Despite these damages, he remained an incredible mechanic and a decently skilled pilot thanks to his testing of hovercrafts and other workings in District 6. His games on the other hand, went down as one of the notorious ones of history, later dubbed "the Golden Years", for the same reason the previous year was. Sometimes, games produced memorable arenas, tributes, and events—and this was one of them.
VICTORS BY YEAR:
1HG: Fukaya Kerezaki (#1, District 5)
2HG: Lucy Takamatzu (#1, District 11)
3HG: Naseru Litzak (#1, District 3)
4HG: Naisha Szasz (#1, District 2)
5HG: Jade Prima (#1, District 1)
6HG: Cedar Hardin (#1, District 7)
7HG: Susan Jackman (#2, District 5)
8HG: Malcolm Reed (#1, District 6)
9HG: Mags Cohen (#1, District 4)
10HG: Faren Dragmire (#2, District 1)
11HG: Maius Karuha (#2, District 2)
12HG: Iunius Karuha (#3, District 2)
13HG: Hilda White (#1, District 10)
14HG: Minali Otoyome (#2, District 3)
15HG: Willow James (#3, District 1)
16HG: Lark Chandnea (#2, District 11)
17HG: Woof Casino (#1, District 8)
18HG: Leah Holden (#2, District 7)
19HG: Zeruda Mezkiel (#2, District 6)
20HG: Muscida Lee (#2, District 4)
21HG: Kada Lahka (#4, District 2)
22HG: Gleam DiFronzo (#4, District 1)
23HG: Ivette Coronado (#3, District 5)
24HG: Olivia Thurman (#1, District 9)
25HG: Laurel Fox (#1, District 12)
26HG: Daron Armstrong (#5, District 2)
27HG: Cobalt Evans (#5, District 1)
28HG: Lyme Golding (#6, District 2)
29HG: Ash LosDias (#3, District 7)
30HG: Challis Worth (#2, District 8)
31HG: Beetee Latier (#3, District 3)
32HG: Fletch Crossley (#4, District 5)
33HG: Seeder Howell (#3, District 11)
34HG: Price Emerson (#6, District 1)
35HG: Leto Irizari (#7, District 2)
36HG: Jackson Kjelle (#5, District 5)
37HG: Zerviah Hawke (#3, District 6)
38HG: Wiress Plummer (#4, District 3)
39HG: Nephi Lott (#3, District 4)
40HG: Miriam Luxio (#7, District 1)
41HG: Marcelina Kovac (#6, District 5)
42HG: Niles Lincoln (#8, District 2)
43HG: Blight McKay (#4, District 7)
44HG: Sagittaria Svenja (#4, District 11)
45HG: Dezna Meraxa (#4, District 6)