LACEY WEAVER- Camille Igawa
Did that make me the last female outlier here? There was Nene, but I didn't count her as normal- not because of the autism, but because she was six feet tall and was literally a gang member. In my opinion, Lacey was more normal than I was. I wasn't that out-there, but I had the poor little rich girl thing going on. Lacey was a normal girl, the kind the Capitol would say was barely even a loss. That was why I hated them.
FERRARI BENZ- Titian Qin
I hated her. I'd tasked two of our most brilliant pathologists with creating the most lingering, painful disease I could think of, and she'd flipped me off and gotten high. It made me want to throw myself into Games design just so I could get enough favor from Snow to bring her back as my own personal Avox. Oh, the things I would do with her.
JOSEPH CARPENTER- Walcott Patel
Shinju wouldn't get away with this. She couldn't hide forever. I knew she was out there, waiting for me to slip up so she could pounce. She didn't even have the courage to face me, even with all her advantages. Her kind didn't win, though. Good would triumph in the end.
TABITHA SPARKS- Nene Palmer
I never knew what to feel when people died. I was sad, sort of. I just felt like I wasn't as sad as I wished I was. It felt remote to me, like I'd barely known Tabitha in the first place and barely noticed she was gone. I did want to be sad, so that probably counted for something. I just worried she was a better friend to me than I was to her.
ZIBBY SPOOLEY- Todd Howard
I hadn't meant to kill her. I'd just wanted to destroy some of her weapons of mass destruction. I thought she'd get away, like any sane person would have done. I knew it was twisted, but I did feel some weird respect for her commitment. She really did think of it as nothing but science. She hadn't meant it sadistically at all. It didn't bring people back, but it did give me more sympathy.
Nassor Doyle, District Nine mentor
I was in no place to condemn Zibby. I'd done the same thing in my own Games. Worse, if you asked most people, since I did it against my District partner. It had been hard to watch Zibby do what she did, but I had been rooting for her to come home. Even that brought me guilt, though. I hadn't really wanted her to come home because I wanted her to be safe. I'd wanted her to take half my mentoring burden.
Nene Palmer- District Six female
There weren't many of us left. If I wanted to get home, I needed to make up a plan. With Tabitha and the rest of my allies, we had strength enough in numbers, so we hadn't had to think too carefully about our strategy. When it was just me and Tabitha, we'd started to think about what strengths and resources we had and how to best use them. Tabitha had been more interested in hiding than fighting, which made sense. I was stronger than she was, but I was still more than happy to take the cautious route.
Zibby's gone, the thought came to me. Her face had been in the sky last night. I'd wondered idly how she died, but now I was thinking of something else. She'd been all into science and medicine and all that stuff. In this arena, that was maybe the best strategy possible. I didn't know much about that kind of stuff, since the schools in my area were too underfunded to even provide extra notebooks, but I had a solid brain in my head, and I was really good at reading. Maybe I could do some studying and come up with something useful. Poison to smear on a knife, some sort of explosive or toxic gas, something like that.
It quickly became clear that reading medical textbooks was one of the coolest things ever. I'd thought it was best to start with a basic anatomy textbook so I'd know what I was working with. I thought I'd just skim over it, but it was so interesting I pored over every word. I'd never known that most germs couldn't survive much heat and fevers were the body's way of literally cooking them to death. I'd never known that viruses were so simple we weren't sure if they were really alive or not, or that blood clotting was super ridiculously complicated. With each new awesome thing I learned about, I looked at the shelves and shelves of books around me and knew that I would never run out of things to learn.
From my basic anatomy text, I learned that the next books I read should be about "pathology", which was the study of disease, or "toxicology", which was pretty common-sense to decipher. I pulled books off the shelf, knowing I could probably only read one in a day but too fascinated by half a dozen books that I had to pull them all.
The five main types of toxins are genitotoxins, hemotoxins, phototoxins, hepatotoxins, and neurotoxins. Genitotoxins affect the urinary and reproductive systems. Hemotoxins affect the blood. Phototoxins cause photosensitivity. Hepatotoxins affect the liver. Neurotoxins affect the brain.
Oh cool, I thought. The blog says Shinju's a vampire now. Since this is a hospital arena, the Gamemakers probably used chemicals and stuff. They must have exposed her to a phototoxin so she wouldn't be able to go into the light. Meanwhile, I should probably use neurotoxins if I can find them. People with non-functioning brains become not dangerous like right away.
Diamond Kai- District One male
I didn't like how nervous I'd been recently. With so few Careers left, I wasn't able to hide and blend in anymore. All the other Careers left were looking for me and just a few others. To complicate things, almost all of them were bigger than I was. Judging from the blog, Fable and Jessie were back together. That made them the only known Career alliance and the presumed frontrunners. Arielle was both forebodingly muscular and far more experienced in the arena than I was. Wangari was way taller than I was probably way stronger too. Flint had been killing people since his early teens or maybe earlier. I didn't know as much about Tuesday, but better to err on the side of caution.
My biggest advantage and disadvantage were the same thing. I used poisoned darts. A long-range weapon was always a safe choice for a smaller Career, and the poison ensured that even an imperfect shot would be fatal. That double advantage, however, brought its own dangers. Almost all Careers hated poisoners. It was illogical at best and pretentious at worst. They were mad I could kill them before they even had a chance to react, but those same naysayers were all hoping that was what they could do to someone else. The mitigating advantage of this particular Games was that with so many people, a lot of them didn't even notice I was there until the Games were underway. There were probably at least some of them left who didn't know I used poison darts. There were probably some who didn't even know I was still here. If they saw me, though, they'd recognize me. Whether or not they knew I used darts, they'd know I was a Career. They would- ironically, if you asked me- try to kill me before I knew they were there, and they would eschew other targets to focus on me.
Sealing the doors was the fastest way to narrow the arena and clean up the outliers, but I didn't want to run into Arielle or one of the others while I was doing it. When I'd taken a moment to consider how the Careers would go about clearing the arena, a probably path emerged. It would be easiest to either go up from the bottom or down from the top. Careers were trained that panicked people tend to try to go upwards, so Arielle probably started from the top and was going down. She might not be the only person sealing doors, though. If there was another Career sealing doors, and if that Career had not met Arielle and been killed or injured, then they were probably going from the bottom up. I, therefore, would take a less obvious path. The first thing to come to mind was to go to the front entrance of the hospital and work out from there. Assuming the Tributes had dispersed in a relatively random pattern, it was as good a place as any (except the top floor).
After failing to entirely seal the gift shop, since it had one of those big grate doors shops had that pulled down from the ceiling, I moved onto several more empty rooms. As I was walking through the shelves in the library, I almost jumped out of my skin when I reached the end of a shelf and saw the Six girl sitting at a table not twenty feet away. She was sitting with her side toward me, where she should have been able to see me in her peripherals, but she was staring intently down at the page she was reading. I hadn't heard a single noise since I entered the library. She must have been reading the best book ever. I ducked back into the shelf to line up my shot, though I doubted she would have noticed if I'd walked right up to her.
Nene Palmer- District Six female
It didn't hurt much when the dart hit the skin of my shoulder blade. It hurt more- a sharp, uncomfortable little ting like biting a fork- when it stopped against my bone just under the skin.
Oh, that's a poison dart, I thought with detachment. I'd always reacted really slowly to sudden calamities. I was impossible to jumpscare because my brain always processed it as, "Oh, a monster has jumped out. That is a scary thing," and by the time I remembered to actually be scared it was too late and the moment had passed. As I processed that I'd been shot by a poison dart and that meant I was dying, I would have been more scared, but I was going to die no matter what and in that case I was more interested in the specifics of the dart.
Lip numbness, I thought as my mouth went all blank and I moved my tongue around at the weirdness of the feeling. Weakness, I thought as my arms got heavy and I leaned forward to support myself on the edge of the table. A neurotoxin, then. I made a last token effort to rise as I drooped sideways and then fell off the chair. I went over what I'd just been learning. Maybe botulinum? That's used in hospitals even though it's toxic, since it can also help relax rigid muscles. Or tetradotoxin or curare? They have anesthetic applications, like I'm feeling right now...
17th place: Nene Palmer- shot by Diamond
Nene doesn't have much luck with long-range weapons. I thought maybe I should have her die in a fight since she's so physically impressive, but she did have a cool moment fighting Brad earlier so that did showcase her prowess. She's also very focused and nerdy so I thought it would be fitting for her to go out infodumping to no one about her own murder weapon. All great writers steal, and I stole from myself in that that's also how I react to jumpscares. Nene is super cool and that's reflected in her very high placement. I think she had more to do and her story was a but truncated here, but there's just so many more tributes to kill and this story is already really long so I had to make less than ideal cuts.