To my dear friend Hello-Yello:
You have read chapters 12 through 29, right…?
I don't think my private messages ever reached you.
Because you reviewed Chapter 11, the one where I said I would go on hiatus for a week, and then stopped. I believe you must be mistaken due to my shortcomings –– I fail to remove my Author's Notes when I am done with them –– but no, I never went on any hiatus.
So if you have not read the chapters after chapter 11 (or chapter 12 as Fanfiction calls it seeing as there is nothing set up for prologues) then I would highly, highly, highly recommend going back and reading them before continuing. Okay? Go, go on.
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Okay, for you people who have read it, here's Chapter 30. Have fun trying to understand the genius-talk. You'll see what I mean. ^_^
Chapter 30
"That's my control disk!" yelped Artemis. She broke away from the group and made a beeline towards the fifteen-year-old boy on the cleared pathway, but Caius merely glanced down, tapped and swiped a few times on the screen, and looked back up. The formerly dormant muttattion spiders blocked off the pathway and surrounded Artemis completely, cutting her off from the other seven tributes.
Iris raised her bow, and following her Cynthia did the same, and they aimed at Caius. The boy looked up, that impassive glare on his face made all the more sinister by his dead eyes, long black hair, and ashen skin. "With something as small as a tap can I control all the muttattions in this arena to kill Artemis in a second," he said, in the same flat, emotionless voice. "If you loose those arrows, I have no doubt that I will die. But you can also be assured that if I hear so much as the twang of a bowstring, my finger goes down half a centimeter and touches a single icon, unleashing the muttations and killing all of you, even as I die. It'll be exactly what the rebels want, so feel free to shoot."
Iris's hand trembled as she tried to keep her aim steady, and her much taller and much older fellow archer cast a quick glance at her. "Keep your arm relaxed," Cynthia advised. "If he does so much as flinch, don't be afraid to kill him."
Kill him… Iris repeated mentally. It is what my grandfather would have wanted. No, I will not. I am not my grandfather. I was meant to save life, not take it.
But he wants to kill you and your friends –– it's only self defense!
Who said he wanted to kill me…?
Cornered as she was by killer spiders, Artemis's fear level seemed to have gone over its limits. And so, her rational mind realized that her irrational mind was going to drive her to insanity, so it took the wheel. And Artemis started to think. If her insanely fast thought process could be put into words, this is what it would have looked like:
He wouldn't have come here just to gloat. Would he have? Yes, it is true that he is untrusted, so he might want to use the control disk for ill purposes. Maybe he is using it in the way I was tempted to use it but didn't…maybe he is planning to kill us all anyway and win the Games by himself. But he cannot do that now; if he so much as blinks, which I have never seen him do anyway, Cynthia and Iris will let those arrows go, and we will all die. And yet I have seen how fast he moves; he might be able to dodge two arrows, or at least keep them from hitting a vital spot. Is that his plan? I am not sure.
It just does not fit in with what I know of him…but he is a liar and a thief. As much as I want to trust him, I know that in certain circumstances, he cannot be trusted in the least. And these circumstances certainly call for that level of suspicion. But if he wanted us all to die, why did he not just protect himself and let the muttattions kill us all? As I mentioned before, surely he would not want to gloat. That is just not his style. Possibly he was meaning to give my control disk back to me, as my message, which I had prepared in case of hacking by foreign sources, suggested. And upon seeing me charge towards him in such a way, anyone would be alarmed. Especially Caius, the jumpy, easily startled little boy that he is. I will test my theory, but first I must put that control disk out of the equation. In my hands it is a help, but in his it is only a hindrance.
All of the above was mentally sorted out by Artemis in the space of three seconds.
"Caius," she said.
He turned his black gaze towards her inquisitively.
"Voice command: lockdown sequence seven-point-nine, liber, confirm," said Artemis simply and clearly. Fast enough that it did not make sense to human ears until it was too late, but clear enough for the tiny sensors on the control disk to pick up and recognize the sound waves, then shut the device down. All around them, the muttattions froze, and then crumbled into dust.
"Liber," repeated Caius calmly and defeatedly, staring at the now dormant device in his hand. "The Latin word for 'free'. That's your password."
Artemis said nothing, only inclined her chin. "Give it back, Caius. Do what you came here to do."
All warmth vanished from his cold dark eyes. "How do you know what I came here to do?" he snapped, completely losing the low, cool monotone that, until now, had been his only approach. "And why do you want it back? Are you planning on killing us all here and winning the Games yourself?"
"That is what I thought you would do," replied Artemis. "But it isn't. You haven't had that control disk for long. It was given to you by one of or some of the Gamemakers, Beetee probably, sometime after I left. Judging by the amount of time it took you to become proficient in how to use it and your level of intelligence, I will assume sometime between two and two thirty in the morning. Upon receiving it, you broke through the virtual defenses by some sort of hacker hidden on your personage, probably that silver ring on your hand. You saw my message, and therefore vowed that you would not give the disk back to me until you figured out what I would be doing with it.
"You came here for several reasons: the first involves the alert system on the control disk. When a Gamemaker sends out muttattions or an artificial natural disaster that may harm a tribute, it alerts you as to what it is and where. The second involves the death of Romulus –– when you heard the cannon, you knew it was serious. So you came, using the control disk to repel the muttattions, and realized that you had to spare us if you were to ever find out what the control disk was for and how to utilize it to its fullest. So you did. With it in your hands, you had the advantage, and were planning on using it to contain us and hold it over us so that we would not be able to harm you. But you had forgotten one thing: the voice commands. Am I right, Caius?"
The boy holding the control disk seemed to be the only one who understood Artemis's verbal dissection of his plan. He nodded reluctantly. "You are right," he said, "and by this I can also infer what your plan is.
"The Gamemakers did send it to me, it's true," he continued, "but they didn't mean to. Checking the coordinates of each tribute's placement when I received it, I notice that you, Artemis, and your allies were at the coordinates N 7, W 12, Sector 9, while I am at coordinates N 7, W 12, Sector 19. All it would take is a wrong move of a finger as they punched them in for one to mess up these coordinates, hence sending it to me instead of you. It was a complete coincidence, but a coincidence that could be solved by a bit of deductive reasoning." He looked down to the inactive disk in his hand, his hair hiding his eyes, then continued.
"Using this information and the knowledge that the Gamemakers did mean to send this control disk back to you, presumably after taking it from you on suspicions that it would be used to harm others, I can deduce it is not meant to be used to help you and only you win. Your outer personality suggests that you might be tempted to use this to kill off your opponents, but your inner personality is too weak to use this device for an offensive blow of that scale. By running to me when you saw that I had the control disk, you showed that you are afraid that others will use it in the wrong way, and knowing you, I can put myself in your shoes and picture what I must look like –– with my appearance and reputation, you would be afraid that I would misuse it. And from this, I conclude that this disk was not intended to harm, but to help."
Artemis stared at the fifteen-year-old boy with a mixture of admiration and amusement. "Not bad," she mused. "Not bad at all. You have earned my respect, Caius Adrian Angelico. Perhaps you are not as foolish as I once believed you to be."
"Forget respect; all he's earned is my confusion," offered Cornelius unhelpfully. "Can someone tell me what in blazes is going on?"
The two young genii ignored him. "And you have earned mine," replied Caius. "So I trust that I can give you this control disk without worrying about if you are going to blow off my head or send a muttattion after me?"
"That is actually what I am worrying about now," said Artemis amusedly, "even though the proof and the truth tell me that I can trust you. If I can trust you, you can trust me."
Caius nodded once. "The same."
"Seriously!" shouted Cornelius. "What is going on?!"
Caius and Artemis turned their equally ticked-off glares towards him. Next to Cornelius, Julius cleared his throat. "I never though I'd say this, but I'm with him. What are you talking about?"
They quickly summed everything about the control disk up in the simplest words they could manage. When they were finished, the other seven tributes just stared at them. "Uh, when were you planning to tell us this?" inquired Petronius.
"When it became relevant," said Caius.
"Which it just did," finished Artemis. She turned to her fellow genius. "So I believe that you trust me?"
"To a certain extent," replied he. "Enough to give you this back."
With the muttattion arachnids reduced to no more than piles of harmless black dust by "lockdown sequence seven-point-nine", Artemis strode forward to take the control disk from Caius's outstretched hand.
Her fingers were about to close around it when they heard Iris scream.
Told you. Genius talk. I don't know how I did it and I doubt if I will ever be able to repeat it. Even now as I edit these long stretches of monologue I have to read some of these advanced sentences twice to remember what exactly I meant by them.
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