My laptop used an African charger socket but I finally got an adapter for America so here I am!
Toddward Howard- Swing Vote D8M
I'd always thought of myself as smart. Working with Zibby made me see just how dumb I was. This was Zibby's arena and the rest of us were just living in it. Max and I followed her around like two wide-eyed apprentices, handing her tools or writing down results for her. Gaius helped when he could, but it was pretty hard for him to move. He could hobble around, mostly because he was too proud to admit how hard it was, but we were all afraid he'd fall over and make himself worse.
"That should be it," Zibby said, looking down at the scribbles on four sheets of paper spread out on the table in front of her.
"Should be what?" Max asked.
"The way to fix him," Zibby said casually.
"What?!" Max and I yelled at the same moment. How could she drop that bombshell as casually as saying 'good morning'? But oh well, as long as it worked.
"How?" Gaius asked from the other side of the table. He was leaned forward in his seat and his face had that intense look he had when he thought a fight was near.
"Well, it might not work," Zibby said in the same casual tone. "We didn't run a proper double-blind experiment and the sample size is way too small to properly extrapolate." She pointed out various figures on the paper. "Also the variance is 5% above the generally acceptable threshold. But-"
"What is it?" Maxson couldn't hold himself back from interrupting any longer.
"We gotta shock him real hard," Zibby finished.
"That's it?" I asked.
Zibby looked at me with distaste. "That's not 'it'," she huffed. "I had to identify the irregularities in the disease, pinpoint that they indicated artificial pathogens instead of organic, determine their approximate wavelength and tolerance, and identify a device that would provide the proper voltage. It was genius, not 'it'!"
"What's the device?" Gaius asked. His chair squeaked as he pulled himself to a stand.
"Good news!" Zibby said. "It's an AED. They're everywhere- there's at least one on every floor. Just wander through the halls a few minutes and you'll see one. They'll have directions on them. They're way easier than you'd think."
"Just shock him and that will fix everything?" I asked. All this time, it had been so easy? We weren't the only ones who had gotten tricked at the feast. My heart sank at all the other tributes who had gotten horrible diseases and would never know there was hope.
"It'll deactivate the nanobots," Zibby said. "There's not enough data to promise anything past that."
"Good enough for me," Gaius said as he started hobbling toward the door. Max and I rushed to either side of him. He gave us a heart attack every time he stood. It was like all those times I visited my grandpa and had to plead with him to remember to put his glasses on before he went down the stairs.
"Good luck!" Zibby said, waving at us. "I'm staying in here. It's crazy dangerous out there."
Vulpes Kerr- No Way Down D9M
Visenya would have been so ashamed of me. If she had any idea what I was thinking, she would have wished she had never met me. What I was about to do, I wasn't doing it for myself this time. I wanted to live, and that was why I fought for one more day in this arena. But getting out of here, getting back to the world, I wasn't thinking about me when I thought of that. I was thinking this could all still mean something. There could still be something good about my existence. If I got out of here, I could use my prize for something good, like Visenya would have. There could still be something about my life that would prove her right about me. But only if I killed her.
The girl looked so young. She must have been at least fifteen, obviously, and she might have been older. It was just that she was so short, and so small. I couldn't tell if she hadn't hit puberty yet or if she had and was too malnourished to fill out. She was lying on her side mostly under the bed, wrapped in a blanket and only a sliver of her head visible from under the bed. Her frizzy hair stuck out in all directions except where it was dented flat by the floor.
I'd already made the decision of what I was going to do. I was only sitting there, wasting time, because I wanted a few more minutes of the person I would be before I did it. Visenya would have been so disappointed, but there were things Visenya didn't know. People like her thought the world was a good place. They thought that deep down, people were good, even if they lost their way sometimes. The thing was, people like Visenya could only exist because of people like me. It was clear I couldn't get out of this by being a good person. If I was a bad person, though, I could get out of this, and then I could do good things. I could help people like Visenya and shield them so they could stay innocent. I didn't think it mattered if it was blood money I used. It only mattered what I used it for.
What was her life like? I knew nothing about the sleeping girl. She was from Eleven, if I remembered right. Her life was probably hard, then. It left her thin and sickly-looking, though at least it hadn't left her scarred. I wondered if she had a family. Probably most people her age in Eleven would die without a family. Were they a nice family? They hadn't kept her well-fed, but that probably just meant the rest of them were thin, too. There was something in her life that she wanted to get back too, if she'd lasted this long. Or maybe she was just afraid to die.
There was no reason to make it painful. I sat there another few minutes trying to think of the fastest way. The best thing I could find was a heavy metal reflex hammer. I stretched out on the floor next to the girl. It was penance, maybe, that I had to be looking her straight in the face as I did it. I could have closed my eyes, but I wasn't so squeamish. As I positioned myself alongside her, it would have looked to a passerby that I was embracing her.
I brought the hammer back over my head and swung it toward her face. I watched her face in the last few seconds it was pristine and unbroken. The hammer hit and I felt the reverberations in my hand as her head snapped back. It wasn't as broken as I'd expected. There was a little dent that would have looked cartoonish if it wasn't for the blood. Her cannon didn't go off, though it was clear she wouldn't be waking up. I pulled her light body out from under the bed and hit her again. It was disturbing how the only movement in her body was her jerking head.
Her cannon sounded after three more hits. I left the room, not wanting to stay with the body, but of course it didn't leave me. I hadn't asked for this. I killed for business and to protect myself, but it wasn't what I ever wanted for myself. I was what my world made me. I could still do some good, but I would have to go through more ugliness to get there.
Lily White- Into Thin Air D11F
Sometimes I had lucid dreams. Usually when they happened I right away wanted to fly, but this time I'd been using it for something else. I knew I wasn't really at home, but it looked as real as it did when I was awake. I could see my little log house with the dent in the roof from where a tree got hit by lightning. I could see the fences around the orchards and I could smell the peaches on the branches and on the ground. If my family was home, I could talk to them, too. Not strategy, though. I'd do that when I woke up.
Olivine Martinez- Back to Normal D1F
There was someone nearby. Every now and then I heard a sound. It didn't seem like the tribute was doing anything in particular. The sounds came at random intervals. Some were almost silent, while others were so loud I almost thought it was a trap. How could anyone be so careless with the noise they were making? Clearly they weren't a Career. All the better. I wouldn't have to be so cautious.
Unless it is a trap, I warned myself. But that just didn't make sense. A Career making noise would only scare away outliers. If they were looking for other Careers, it was beyond stupid to let them know your location before you knew theirs. It's not a Career. As I went over the remaining tributes in my head, no doubt missing some and mistakenly including some dead ones, one name stood out.
It's Gabriel. It was amazing he'd lasted this long. It wasn't going to be my proudest kill, but the job had to be done. Another sound came from down the hall to my right- a shoe squeaking across the linoleum floor where he must have stumbled- and I moved that way.
The sound was coming from inside a nurse's lounge- one of the few we hadn't sealed up yet. I poked my head in and there he was. Gabriel was looking through the fridge, his view of me blocked by the open door. I ran toward him, brushing past a table and knocking a chair aside. I flinched when Gabriel paused at the noise, then smiled at my silliness when I remembered he was deaf. I grabbed the refrigerator door and threw it open.
I had never imagined Gabriel could be that strong. When he punched me it was like he punched every nerve in my body at once. It was like being hit with lightning. After an instant of total paralysis, I fell backward into a table, scraping my back as I fell onto my butt.
What the actual ) *^ was THAT? As I looked up at Gabriel in a daze, I slowly registered the contraption he was holding. It looked like a TV remote at first, but from the context I gathered that Gabriel was packing a taser. That was hard enough to absorb. Even worse was how he had clearly heard me coming. No one's reflexes were that fast. I didn't know how that was at all possible, but something was going on here, and it was too much for me to want to risk. While Gabriel was still trying to figure out what to do next, I got to my feet and cleared out.
24th place: Lily White- head injury by Vulpes
Lily did about the only thing she could: hide and try to stay away from everyone. Even when that didn't work, though, she was able to adapt and stay alive. She made it a long way in this very stacked cast and finally got unlucky. She's come a long way from her first time around, though.