District 7 male - Arnold Pryor, 15

There were two days of silence. Two days where Rick and I camped out in the summer quarter of the arena, fishing and simply eating the fish raw, because apparently you could do that. It didn't taste nice, exactly, but it would do. Rick complained about my cooking the first time I'd cooked him fish - he said it had tasted nice, but it made him feel sick. This annoyed me, a lot, because how dare he insult my cooking like that?

Rick had also said he was too nervous to keep the fire going, he thought the smoke was drawing too much attention to us, so we walked away from it, and sure enough, a fight had broken out near our fire. We weren't close enough to see it - but we heard it. The knives being thrown, the running, the earthquake, the tree falling. We were lucky none of it had affected us.

We were also lucky that the river was so long, because neither of us knew how to hunt, but Rick was a great fisher. And given that we apparently couldn't make fires, it was good because fish was alright to eat without being cooked. But, after three days of just fish, I was really sick of it. I was the sort of person who enjoyed eating a variety of different foods every day. The least I wanted to do was cook the fish up in different ways, but no.

Rick was annoying, in my opinion. I regretted asking him of all people to be my ally, but I needed someone. I'd originally intended on running these games solo, but after seeing just how fast everyone was dying in the first few days of the games, I was terrified and needed someone to have my back.

Of course, I intended to kill him eventually, I just had to wait until there were fewer tributes left - at the moment there were nine - the girl from two, both from four including Rick, the girl from five, both from six, me, the boy from ten, and the boy from twelve. Almost all of them were a threat - a Career, the entire crazy person alliance, and the boy from twelve who got the highest training score.

Our strategy for the rest of the games was simple: survive anything the game makers threw at us, and avoid other tributes at all costs. That was until there were five tributes left - then I would poison Rick, and then find other tributes, and slip something into their food when they weren't looking, or… spike their water… I wasn't entirely sure yet, but I'd do something to poison everyone else until I was the winner. I knew it was unlikely that the game makers would let me do that for the final tribute, however. I knew they would want a show.

Rick, despite how annoying he was, was observant. For example, he thought the only reason I wanted the fire so bad was because of my 'lazy, lumberjack tendencies' and I wanted to be around the wood to make the fire, just because I was from District Seven. He seemed to think I was obsessed with wood and trees. But this observance did come in handy, in a way. He noticed patterns in the arena, like how there was a slight change in the weather before a hurricane during the fourth day, and we'd managed to avoid it completely by moving when he pointed out it was getting unusually windy. As much as I didn't want to admit it, his instincts had kept us alive.

He also noticed that neither of us had received anything from our mentors - we were supposed to receive supplies, funded by sponsors, during the games. That's what happened every other year, and now that I thought about it, I hadn't seen a single parachute in the arena during the whole time we'd been here. I wondered if any other tributes had received anything.

"The Capitol is full of hedonistic pigs - they would have forgotten all about us," Rick scoffed, dragging a branch towards our makeshift shelter - we'd been working on it since we moved away from where the hurricane was, just adding onto it to make it more protected from rain, wind, and another potential hurricane. It was my idea to take the branches from the tree that had fallen the other day. Perhaps I did have lumberjack tendencies.

"But they do it every other year," I said, frowning.

Rick dropped the branch and dusted off his hands. "Maybe they're tired of the same old thing. Maybe they want to see us struggle more. Or maybe they think we're not entertaining enough."

I considered this. It was possible the Capitol was withholding supplies to make us more desperate, and more entertaining. The thought made my blood boil - how could they? Just for their stupid show, we had to be denied any outside help, something that tributes in every game before we took for granted?

"It might be because it's a Quell," said Rick. "Because we were all voted in, you know? Obviously, a lot of the tributes in here were voted in because no one likes them, so the Capitol thinks they should just make us suffer even further."

My stomach dropped at those last few words. Make us suffer even further? What if they decided that all of us were to die? We had to be punished, so… so twenty-four of us would die? The idea of it made me feel sick. I found myself dropping the branch I'd been carrying - what if that was the case?

"You good?" Rick asked.

I looked at him, feeling sick. My head felt like it was spinning. I was questioning everything now - why was I a chef and why had I been so competitive and why had I worked so hard on it to make people sick and why had I let so many people complain about the restaurant to the point they chose me to go off to the Hunger Games and now I was going to die and why was I going to die and why was Rick screaming and…

Why was Rick screaming?

I looked over to him and I saw him in double. Why were there two Ricks? He was screaming, loudly, hysterically, "I DON'T WANT TO DIE! I DON'T WANT TO DIE!"

I shook my head, trying to clear the dizziness. The two Ricks blurred into one, his face painted with terror. His screams pierced the air and I had the sudden fear that he was going to draw attention to us. I tried to reach for him, but my hand seemed to move as if it was stuck in a thick syrup - the air was thick.

"Rick!" I shouted, my voice coming out distant, and warped. "Rick, calm down!"

But he continued to scream, his eyes wide with panic, "I DON'T WANT TO DIE! I DON'T WANT TO DIE!"

I felt my heart pounding, matching the rate of a pulse in my head. In a way, it felt like I was floating, like the ground didn't even exist. My head hurt and I was floating and I felt terrified, hysteric, that I was going to die. I was like Rick, I didn't want to die. Not now. Not here. I tried to take long, slow, breaths, trying to calm myself down, but it didn't seem to work. I felt like I was going crazy. I'd never really struggled with panic attacks before, maybe some mild ones just before being launched into the arena - but nothing like this.

I didn't feel the panic - the panic consumed me. I couldn't breathe or think and I didn't want to die but I was going to die and Rick was going to die and we were all going to die and it was all a waste of time and all just for the Capitol's entertainment and I was nothing more than a pawn in there game, nothing more than entertainment for them, for the game makers, for the president, I was nothing, I was nothing, I was nothing, I was going to die.

"I DON'T WANT TO DIE!" I joined Rick in his screaming - I was absolutely terrified and I didn't know why I was acting like this and then it hit me - it hit me like it was obvious, and it was obvious, the whole time, that it wasn't real, I wasn't in my own mindset. The air was thick because we were in something - in some sort of gas that was manipulating our minds and making us crazy and scared and we had to get out of it.

"Rick…" I said, but I couldn't get the thought of wanting to die out of my head, and for some reason, the thoughts in my mind were that if I killed Rick right then and there, I would survive, I would be OK, I wouldn't die. Everything would be OK. But I didn't have any weapons, and I couldn't seem to see anything around me that I could poison him with - all the plants looked the same at that moment, blurred like they were about to kill me.

The same thought seemed to have entered Rick's mind, because the next thing I knew, he had hit my head with his fishing rod hard, which knocked me out cold.

District 2 female - Dania Khatib, 18

The two days of silence had left me uneasy. I'd run away after the earthquake, and gone straight to the cornucopia to collect everything I'd left there, but I knew I couldn't stay there - the outlier tributes would immediately assume I'd gone there - so I'd taken all my stuff, and I'd hidden. I'd found a cave in the autumn section of the arena, there was a large boulder that I'd managed to move in front of it, so I just had to pray that none of them were as physically strong as I was.

Over the past two days, I'd heard no cannons, which was a scary thought, because it meant the outliers hadn't killed anyone else, and they were actively seeking me out. I'd heard them pass by my cave twice in the past few days, and the second time I heard them, which had been the afternoon of the fifth day, confirmed to me that they were searching for me because I heard them mention 'the girl from two'.

I felt pathetic. Look at me, the Career tribute, hiding from a bunch of poor criminal kids. No other Careers had done something as stupid as this. And I was getting thirsty - I'd managed to pack enough food with me when I stopped by the cornucopia, and a water bottle, but that bottle was now empty, and it had been for the past twenty-four hours. At this rate, I would die of dehydration and everyone would look down on me and I'd be the failed career… I'd already failed enough as it was, letting my alliance fall apart.

I had to do something.

My biggest contender in these games was the criminal outlier alliance, or, as I'd heard them be called by some of the game's hosts behind their backs, the psychotics. It was four against five in the beginning, with my alliance having the extra person, but now it was three against one. It was nearly impossible to take them all out alone. There was only one person I could think of who might help me, but I was too stubborn to use him as an option.

I'd kicked Janusz out of the alliance for a reason - I didn't want his help. And even if I did, I wouldn't ask for it. Ever.

I'd do this on my own.

The quickest way to take them all out would be in their sleep, but I didn't know where in the arena they would sleep - the arena was huge and there weren't so many tributes left, so much so that the psychotics somehow hadn't killed anyone else in their hunt for me. I knew that the audience must be getting bored, if I didn't kill them soon the game makers would force us together in some way or another.

So I was forming a plan to find them that night - I couldn't sit here and wait any longer, being a failure of a tribute. Of a Career.

I wished I could tell what time it was. It was dark in this cave all the time, so I wasn't even sure if it was day or night. I'd heard the national anthem play three times since I'd arrived in this cave during the afternoon of the third day, which told me it was night, even if it didn't play for long given that there were no deaths, and it let me know that it was currently in the sixth day of the games. I'd fallen asleep after the last national anthem, and I'd woken perhaps three hours ago? So, assuming that I slept for a regular amount of time, it was maybe ten in the morning on the sixth day. I decided when the national anthem played that night, I'd wait a few hours, then set off to find the psychotics.

By the time I found them, they should be asleep. I decided I'd take out the girl from five, first. She was the worst of the three of them, so if I woke the others up and had to make a run for it, at least she would be gone.

But if everything went to plan, I'd kill all three of them swiftly, take their supplies, and then find water. I had a full backpack full of weapons already, so I had a good advantage there. I wasn't sure how much weaponry they all had, but I knew that they at least didn't have as much as me.

I locked my plan into my mind and slowly drifted into a day-nap, my dagger in my hand.

Yes, two updates within 24 hours. I got into a Hunger Games frenzy