Lottie Parker- Res D2F
Olivine came through the door. I craned my neck to look around her. Marley shouldn't scare me like that. What was I going to think if they didn't walk in together, and when Olivine had blood on her shirt and hands? I looked at the empty doorway for a moment. If I didn't look at Olivine, I wouldn't hear what I knew she was going to say.
"Marley's gone."
I held my arms tight to my sides, so tight I could feel the blood squeezing out. My chest shook. We all thought it would be both of them or neither of them. I'd thought if I just saw one of them coming through the door, that would mean it was okay. Surely if someone was there who could kill one of them, it was one of the alliances big enough to kill them both. I'd prepared for two deaths, though I hadn't really been ready. I wasn't ready at all for this.
"What happened?" I asked.
"It was bullshit." Olivine's voice shook bitterly. "It wasn't even a fight. It was the Gamemakers. Stupid, disgusting-" she broke off and scowled at the floor, unable to say it. "All the prizes were bad. We both took one. Mine was just a prank, but when she opened hers she started bleeding. Just everywhere- her eyes, her nose, her mouth. There was nothing we could do." She wiped a tear away and gave a shuddering sigh. "I held her while she died."
"That's not fair." We did so much for the Capitol. We gave them their show. We killed all those kids for their entertainment. We tripped over ourselves to run into the arena and throw our lives away. Why couldn't that be enough for them? They told us all that mattered was dying well and then they stole that from us, too. They took my friend. They took her over and over.
I screamed as I shot my fist out. It hit the wall and punched through the first layer, raising a cloud of dust. The soft insulation inside cushioned but didn't erase the pain of the impact. I tore my fist out of the hole, little bits of broken plaster and insulation sprinkling to the floor. I didn't care that I shouldn't have done it. It was too much anger to keep inside me. I was happier with it out.
"Yeah," Olivine said in agreement. She brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. Her face twisted in disgust and horror when she saw a streak of red in it. She ran to the sink and started clawing at her hair.
Across the room from her, I stood glaring at the hole in the wall. Good, I thought. It's good this way. Let there be an ugly, broken hole in their arena. I would tear it down if I could. This was supposed to be the greatest few weeks of a Two's life. I'd rather have Marley.
Lacey Weaver- No Way Down D8F
When I was little I used to sit up in bed at night, too scared to sleep. I hadn't even known for sure what I was scared of. I only knew it killed little children. Maybe it ate them, but the most important thing was that it would get me. Maybe it would pull me down into a hole under my bed that wasn't there when I checked. Maybe it would rip me all up right in my room, and my parents would find me the next day. I never understood how every adult had at one point been a child, but it seemed every one of them forgot how these things were real. They'd smile and say there was nothing to be afraid of, and they thought that was it, and every night thousands of kids like me sat up and feared.
It didn't entirely go away as I got older. Usually things would be okay, but sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night. Usually it was after a bad dream. I would know the dream would seem silly in the morning, but for those few minutes after I woke up in the dark, that old world was real again. Every once in a blue moon, I'd creep out of bed and turn on the light.
The monsters were real in the arena, of course. I lay in the chair beside the bed in the hospital room. If someone came by and I'd been sleeping in the bed, they'd see how the blankets were tousled. Every night it took forever to fall asleep. Either my shoulders or my legs were always folded wrong. I would wake up barely more rested than when I'd laid down.
I saw the shadows under the crack in the door before I heard the knock. I slid off the chair, carrying the blanket as I ran for the bathroom. There was a little cabinet under the sink. It hardly looked big enough for a person, but I was one of the skinniest and smallest people in the arena. I'd removed most of the toilet paper rolls in it and shoved in a towel I'd folded over so it hopefully looked like the cabinet was full if anyone gave only a cursory look. I doubted anyone would be that careless, but I needed every hope I could find. In the time it took for them to force the door, I wedged myself inside.
Through the edges of the towel and out the crack in the cabinet door, I could see Jessie going to the bed. She put her hand on it. "Nope," she said, and my stomach clenched seeing I'd been right. They weren't leaving, though. Jayden checked behind the chair and I heard the door creaked as one of them checked there.
There was nowhere to go if they found me. I thought of the paper in my pocket. It seemed wrong to kill one of them just out of spite, but it wasn't that simple. I could help all the other outliers by taking out a single one of them. My first thought was whoever happened to open the cabinet door, but I quickly settled on Chrome instead. It was either her or Jayden, but one of the two of them seemed like the hardest for us outliers to survive.
Fable walked into the bathroom doorway. She looked at the door, which was too close to the wall for anyone to be hiding behind. The garbage bin was also too small. There was only the cabinet. I saw her eyes come down. She bent over and reached out an arm. It was agonizing, the helpless feeling of my cramped legs curled under me and my body pressed tight against the wooden cabinet walls. I wanted to curl back tighter but was afraid it would make a noise.
Fable tugged the door open. I felt my lips move to form Chrome's name. Fable glanced at the towel hiding me, her face registering nothing. She turned and left, leaving the door open. Less than a minute later, I heard the three of them leaving. I crawled out of the cabinet and sat on the bathroom floor for a long time.
Artemis Jager- 28th Hunger Games SYOT
It was uplifting to know that someone cared about me. I wondered who had sent the parachute that was floating down toward me. One of the older Victors, maybe? The ones who shared my bewilderment at how far things had gone?
The package was small, but you know what they say about good things and small packages. I opened the top to find a single pea, quite obviously an excuse to send the note underneath it. I unfolded the paper.
At least use them
I slowly smiled. I didn't need a signature. It seemed my little sister had decided that maybe she loved me just a little after all. She was right in another way, too. I'd been boring for the entire Games. I needed to make some moves. If there was one thing I'd learn from the newer Careers, it was just how image-obsessed the Games had become. I just hoped Pray didn't mind if I did things my way.
I'd been keeping an eye on the nurse's lounge for some time. It seemed to get restocked every day or two. I'd thought about taking the food, but the outliers would just find another lounge. With a flash of inspiration, I'd landed on a better idea. It might be more befitting a scrappy outlier, but unlike Pray, I couldn't afford pride. It wasn't hard to find various heavy things in the nearby rooms. I packed them all into a laundry bag and suspended them, after several failed attempts, over the door. I tied the other end of the rope to the door and sat down to wait. I didn't have to run around hunting, and as a side bonus, I got to sit and nibble on nurse food while I waited.
Makara Khed- Res D2F
The outliers had been doing so well, and then the feast came and reasserted the status quo. Part of me wondered if that had been the intent. It must be embarrassing for the Capitol any year their champions don't win. But there were still some of them out there fighting the good fight. If I could find a way to convince them I wasn't like the other Careers, maybe they would even let me ally with them.
I turned the knob to the nurse lounge's door and stepped back, waiting for any sign of hostiles. I opened the door a crack to check again for anyone who might be waiting to attack. When nothing happened, I stepped inside.
I was on the floor. The room spun above me. By my face, blurred by how close it was, was some sort of bag surrounded by various objects. For more important, though, was the woman running toward me.
The woman was almost upon me by the time I collected myself. In a split second I identified the best target and struck. My brass knuckled cracked against her ankle bone. She yelped and fell forward, dropping her spear as she landed on me. She bent her knee as she fell so her full weight went onto the small of my back. I twisted over, aiming a fist at her face, and she threw up an arm to block. As my thoughts settled, I put together the trap she'd laid. Here I thought Careers were above traps.
The woman brought up her knee to try to pin me down by the throat. I squirmed sideways, blinking in surprise at the claws she seemed to have grown. I must really have a concussion, I thought, but when they raked across my upraised arm, the pain and trickle of blood was real.
I bucked, knocking the woman off-balance. I punched her in the stomach and her clawed hands flew to the wound, almost scratching herself. I reached sideways for her spear. She grabbed my arm and shoved it down against the floor. I drew back my other arm to punch her in the face. As my arm came forward, hers came down, both of them brushing. Just before I hit her face, her clawed finger sank into my eye.
I shrieked as the curved blade at first shoved my eyeball aside and then sank into it. My vision blurred and the light seemed suddenly unbearable. I shoved at her arm with both of mine, having somehow pulled loose from the woman's grip. Spikes of light and scaled blurriness shone around the spear like a halo as it arced down at my face. It was a horrible, horrible way to die. Because I'd volunteered, some outlier didn't have to go through it.
Maxson Deloria- Swing Vote D6M
"Oh cool granola bars!" Theo said, peering over Gaius' shoulder at the cabinet Gaius had just opened. My eyes fell on the slip of paper folded on top of them.
"What's this?" Gaius asked, picking up the paper.
"Ooh, an easter egg!" Todd said. "Open it up!"
Gaius unfolded the sheet of paper and read.
"Oops! It's-" he squinted and continued with difficulty- "fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva!"
"The heck is that?" Theo asked.
"Doesn't sound good," Todd said.
"What is it? Like, do I have it now?" Gaius asked nervously, still holding the paper.
"Do you feel sick?" I asked.
"I don't think so," Gaius said, seeming unsure. The muscles in his face twitched a little. "I feel like maybe I have a cramp in my leg, but just a little. It might be nothing."
"Let's see if we can find a library or something," I suggested. Even if it was nothing, to be honest it was freaking me out. I just wanted to know.
It was Theo who found it. We were all flipping through thick, wordy textbooks (surely everyone used computers these days? The Gamemakers must have wanted atmosphere) when he sat up sharply.
"Here it is!" We clustered around him. "Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or 'stone man syndrome', is an extremely rare genetic disorder in which fibrous tissue such as muscle, tendons, and ligaments turn into bone tissue."
"What does that mean?" Gaius asked. He grabbed the book from Theo. As he read, his face got darker and darker.
"It means your muscles to turn to bone," he said, disbelief and fear in his voice. "They stop moving. More and more of you can't move, until you can't move at all. Then you die."
"What's the cure?" Todd asked.
Gaius didn't look at him. He wasn't looking at anything. "There isn't one."
We all sat stunned for a minute. "How long does it take?" I managed to ask. What did it matter, though? Before he got anywhere near death, someone else would kill him. Just looking at Gaius, I seemed to be looking at a corpse. We all had the haunted feel of someone facing mortality and seeing you cannot, you just cannot, run away.
"Years, normally, but that's not what this will be," Gaius said bitterly. "They won't put it in here unless it could kill me before the Games were over. I can't imagine it will be longer than two weeks."
"No," Todd said. "No, there has to be a way. They wouldn't put it here unless there's a way." We'd come through so much together. It couldn't end like this. We couldn't lose someone to a stupid piece of paper put there by some Gamemaker laughing at how "bad" he was being and not understanding at all what it meant for the people living through it.
"There's no cure!" We all recoiled at Gaius' sudden shout. "Don't you get it? Even if I win, there's no cure."
They wouldn't really do that, would they? They need their Victor. But he wouldn't be the first to die after winning, would he? There was the other one from Twelve. We weren't even sure if she was dead at all. She just wasn't here.
Theo looked up from where he'd been bent over the textbook, intently reading something. "I have an idea," he said.
Zibby Spooly- A Night to Remember D8F
Usually Tuesday's blog didn't interest me. I skimmed over it now and then to see if I could glean anything new happening in the outside world.
HUGE CHEMISTRY BREAKTHROUGH! Did you Tributes hear about the BIG HUGE SCIENCE DISCOVERY? It's shaking up the entire scientific world! BIG! HUGE! CHEMISTRY! DISCOVERY!
Zibby now that you're reading, we've got something for you. The Gamemakers hid diseases all over the arena and one of us has fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. The textbook says scientists are close to a breakthrough but progress is limited by the extreme rarity of the disease. Well, here's your chance. Here is your once-in-a-lifetime chance to study one of the rarest diseases known to man. You say you're smart. Are you smart enough to finish this for them? Hope you decide quick. Time's short.- patientzero
It wasn't a trick. Anyone trying to hook me in with some super-secret incurable disease wouldn't pick Stone Man syndrome. They would have picked a virus- everyone knew how much scientists geeked out about viruses. Or even better, a prion! Oh, if they'd baited me with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, I'd be so torn between my scientific curiosity and my suspicion. But Stone Man syndrome? Most people couldn't even imagine something so bizarre. They wouldn't even know where to look in the textbooks. No, this was the real deal. So, how to respond? There was no question I wanted my hands on the specimen. I had so much amazing equipment and nothing to use it on except sterile, boring samples. I definitely wanted in. Cool as it was, though, I did have to consider my safety. I had plenty of safeguards in my home base, but just letting someone in wouldn't do.
Oh my gosh I am so in. You got my brains, but the rest is on you. Figure out where I am and get the patient to me, and I'll do the rest.-DrZib
50th place (looks like I got misaligned) Makara Khed- Speared by Artemis
Someone always gets underutilized in a story and sadly this time it was Makara. There are a lot of stories waiting to be told and just not enough room for all of them. Makara had a cool background that kept in mind the point in Games history where she volunteered (before Careers were firmly entrenched in their District culture and when many people still opposed them). I had to kill more people and came down on her, but hopefully she'll get more development next time.