Good morning, afternoon, evening, midnight everyone! If we have not gotten the chance to meet, I am happy to introduce myself as Paradigm of Writing (or as Para, whichever you prefer!) I have been sitting on this idea here for quite some time. Yes, I do have a current SYOT in the works known as Declaration of Death, which is concerning the 2nd year of the Games in this long-connected piece of history known as Libertyverse into Slaughterverse. This will count as my fifth syot (technically sixth), so welcome to... *drumroll* - Tales of Flesh and Fortune!

This story was initially a partial where I was going to only take say about 16 tributes, but I have instead decided to open it up into a full-24 kid story. Tribute form will be below and on my profile as well. Subs will be open for quite some time; tentative end-date is looking to be around Thanksgiving given my teaching job. This is going to be based off the 72nd Games from HG-canon, using Seneca Crane's first year of the Games. And boy oh boy, do I have ideas. Canon-characters will appear, but there are some canon-rules I will not be following, mainly District 12 being eligible for winning and other ideas. My worldbuilding is extremely loose as well. Without further ado, enjoy Chapter 1 of Tales of Flesh and Fortune: Legacy of Drowned Beings.


"Every person has a legacy. You may not know what your impact is, and it may not be something that you can write on your tombstone, but every person has an impact on this world," ~ Dara Horn

Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane

Five minutes past the hour is simply too long to wait for Seneca Crane. Five minutes past anything has always been too long for him, even if it is the Master of Ceremonies, Caesar Flickerman coming in for a round of pre-interviews. He should be more patient, perhaps, but if there has been anything in the Crane family that has become a mainstay from generation to generation, it is impatience.

The impatience of sitting on your hands and waiting for the world to spin and go on axis, round and round has never sat right in his gut, twisting and gnawing at his insides, chewing the steel beams up and spitting them back up. As he taps his polished black shoes on the tiled floor, checking his watch and chewing on the bottom inside of his lip – shame, shame, shame, biting at yourself like a mining heathen – the words tumble in his head of what he'll say to Caesar when the perfumed pounce walks in like he had never been late in the first place.

He shouldn't however. It would be viewed as rash, certainly, if not impulsive and provide an air of arrogant impetuousness to Seneca that would be… unbecoming.

Certainly for him that it is his first year as the Head Gamemaker of the Hunger Games, elevated beyond stature and status, that biting and snapping at the interviewer on his first day of the job would ruin him before Seneca even got to wave at the Capitol crowds. It is not that the Gamemaker in charge of the 71st year did poorly, but the woman before him was ailing financially, if not mentally, and all the time away from her household left the lady in tatters, hence the need for an upheaval in upper management.

Seneca may have spiked a few of the candidates teas' and coffees' with laxatives found on a corner fountain in the presidential square to ensure his interview with President Snow – beguiling, serpentine, emerald eyes that flashed with the subtlety of a brewing thunderstorm across a sea of mahogany wood, the scent of roses wafting from the carpeted floors – but it had not been just mere chance that has landed him in the chair.

The Crane family had been one in the middle, floundering along the other parasol ladies and bowtie men that believe their last name needed to be higher on the gilded totem pole. Seneca watched his parents day by day whittle away with their friends, dining on dishes they could not afford, swallowing goblets of wine. Streams of murky dark down their throats, as their tongues spewed words of legacy.

Legacy.

A task set on Seneca Crane's shoulders, and the Hunger Games could be that for him, to establish a legacy in which the Crane name would be remembered long after he was gone, or long after his Gamemaker tenure was up. No one knew the men that sat around the Head Gamemaker, just the one who got to wear the white lab coat on the televisions screens, the one sat across from Caesar Flickerman multiple times a year to ensure the districts did not forget their yearly penance and punishment was not going away.

The Capitol and Panem at large had been focused on the recent victor of the Games, eighteen-year-old Johanna Mason from District 7, with her game of acting like some scared kitten in the cupboards hiding from the storms outside. It had worked, Johanna skirting by the monsters and mutts – tributes and engineered Capitol beasts alike – until she got her hands on an axe blade and carved her place among the hall of victors. Blood ran down her skin, onto her arena dress, and the country welcomed their next victor entrant with open arms.

The announcement of Seneca Crane getting the Head Gamemaker position stole the girl's thunder within a week, and for his promotion he had received a pile of flaming cow dung on his front porch stoop the next day, Johanna's favorite f-word expletive strewn across the bag in hastily, angrily letters in black marker. A maw of bleakness.

He didn't mind the bag or gesture – though the smell had made him reach for the fainting couch just off the foyer – for the act of Johanna Mason's own impetuousness meant something. His legacy, already at work, before he even got to sit down at the table with all of the controls. Making waves, a name that would be repeated…

"Seneca, Seneca, Seneca…" he repeats to himself, voice thunderous enough to resemble a chant, in the moment, as the man leans back and crosses his legs over the other, fingers drumming incessantly on the arms of the chair. Seneca found himself sat in a solar of a greenhouse on the outskirts of the presidential mansion, waiting on Caesar's retinue. Any minute now, surely-

"And the man of the hour! There he is, there he is!" a voice protrudes from the quiet chirping of the gardens, a lilt of decadence percolating out of a rose bush. Seneca turns his head, and stepping between two foliage plants brushing up against moonlight blue sequined shoulders, is the face of Panem, Caesar Flickerman.

Seneca does not rise to meet him, nor does he smooth out the lapels of his jacket, as there was far too much white in the greenhouse between all the roses and glass walls, settling on somber black to mark the cheery occasion.

Caesar Flickerman in the flesh, and while it is not the first time Seneca has been in the man's presence, his breath is not taken away any longer like it may have been in the past. Time does not hide wrinkles, no matter the plastic surgery Caesar has had done since the last Seneca lay eyes on him, smile lines that encircle eyes or the frown lines of his mouth. Caesar's eyebrows rise as he appraises the newly appointed Head Gamemaker, the lack of manners far more transparent than the walls of the greenhouse.

"Trying out a new beard design, are we?" Caesar quips with a half-smile, one side of his face tilted up in a jest. Prickled with enough humor to come across as a barb.

Seneca's fingers immediately run to his face, smoothing out the edges of his beard. He had never had facial hair in his time as an intern Gamemaker, nor as one of the official ones on the board in years past, but from the time President Snow granted him the position to the interview date – three weeks before the reaping of the 72nd Games, to now, a week later – he had been… experimenting.

The trimmed sides of his beard swoosh back up to the middle of his cheeks, pointing towards his dark blue eyes, like Seneca stepped out of the swells of District Four versus being born under the Capitol's glimmering sun. Bold. A statement to be made, though as Caesar's laugh echoes against the chirping surroundings of the greenhouse, Seneca takes pause.

"A new look for a new year," Seneca settles with it as his response, hands opening outwards for a handshake from his vantage point. "All attention is good attention, one would say, no?" he nods his head, keeping his left hand extended.

Caesar does not shake back, opting to sit across from him and motion forward for the Avox camera crew to come forward, the servants dawdling in the back behind him clutching one handheld camera and a container of water. Seneca makes eye-contact with the Avoxes that joined the Master of Ceremonies, their bodies decked out in pale white – a further stand-out to his ebony suit handstitched from the Capitol's finest. The merest hint of red came from the lipstick across their mouths, both the men and women.

"You don't think the audience back in the districts will find the statement rather bold? The seat has not even been warmed up yet," Caesar lifts the other half of his face now in a smile, stretched from ear to ear, as fake as the tautly pulled skin around his neck and hands, as if the mid60s were something one should run from than embrace.

Seneca Crane did not want to settle for fakery in his Games, the smoke and mirrors of years past that allowed tributes like Annie Cresta and Johanna Mason to win pieces of the past he wished to forget. The legacy he wished to forge on with is all about the truth that lay inside all humans, especially those of the tributes that would come into his games. Flesh to pierce, flesh to bleed, souls to expose and strip away.

It did no one any good to lie and hide who they really were, when all it did was exhaust their energy out of them, sapping it akin to a hummingbird seeking nectar. Eventually, especially in the Games fighting for their lives, the arena and time spent surviving and dueling to the death stripped away all. Every falsehood, every falsified tale any tribute told to the nation at large, and any sense of morality for the victors that emerged had been chipped away.

Seneca Crane did not want a legacy of washed-out attempts and notions that he could not keep his word. He would reveal who he was to the entire nation, which was why Caesar Flickerman sat across from him with an Avox camera crew backed behind President Snow's rose gardens.

The president's own seal of approval, even if the man wouldn't see the footage of this interview.

"Do their viewpoints actually matter, Caesar?" Seneca asks, keeping his legs crossed, leaning forward off of the chair. "You know there's only one opinion that will matter at the end of the day."

"Perhaps," the Interviewer says, reaching over and grabbing one of the already opened water bottles for him. A bug flew by Seneca's face, he resisting the urge to reach out and smack the nuisance. A creature with a singular purpose, to ruin him, to take away from the fact that it is his moment. "Perhaps not, Mr. Crane, perhaps not."

"You think otherwise, Caesar?" Seneca asks, head titled to the side, eyes flickering over the man's face. "That the districts matter?"

The interviewer's face does not move a muscle, from the plastic surgery or otherwise. "I was once told, Mr. Crane, that the best way to keep the districts in line and to give them hope is for them to be convinced that their feelings and opinions matter, even in the shallowest of ways," a chirp distills the quiet that passes between them, a Mockingjay song. Seneca is surprised that the bird is even alive in a garden of thorns, roses, and trickery. "Some even say that hope is stronger than fear."

Seneca Crane nearly bursts out laughing at the sentiment. Years ago, with the Dark Days, with the heralding of Emrick Israel and Cain Passionia and his lapdog in Head Peacekeeper Lydia Wickervein, the Capitol proved with the rebellion and bombing of District Thirteen that it was only fear that allowed hope to thrive. When the country was destroyed, and brother turned on brother, fear and war rebuilt Panem.

He would not be sitting across from Caesar Flickerman if this was not the case.

"Well, should this interview come out as I intend it to, then there'll be no mistake as to what I want to happen," Seneca says at length, brushing off some dirt from his knee. The bug returns, and the urge to lash out quells again. "Let them have their hope," he spits out. "They'll need it."

Caesar sets the water bottle aside, leaning forward off of the bench, his hands clasped together. "Now that, Mr. Crane, is interesting indeed." It had not even occurred to the man that the camera had been potentially rolling this entire time, seeing his vitriol for all to see. "And what is it they'll need hope for?"

Seneca Crane maintains eye-contact with the camera, mouth level, in the greenhouse of the scariest man alive, his first true appearance for a nation that had zero idea what lay on the horizon for its upcoming Hunger Games. He cannot help the smile that crosses his face.

"Legacy, Caesar," he says, tone cold, without breaking a sweat. "My legacy, for the Games, and for what is to come."


And there we are, ladies and gentlemen! This story and any that come from it, are connected to my other SYOTs of Libertyverse and Slaughterverse (and my VE fic) at large, hence the names of Emrick Israel and company (OC characters from Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Death). I am quite excited for this project, and I am going to make sure to stay on top of updates as best I can! That was the first chapter, #1: Legacy of Drowned Beings, for Tales of Flesh and Fortune! The submission form will be on my profile as well as a tracking list for submissions. There are a few guidelines to go by, but they are [quite easy]

- While this story is set in canon-years (72nd) and will use canon characters, it will not necessarily follow full-canon rules. District 12 can win; Careers do exist, and my worldbuilding is extremely loose.

- Two submissions per person; my form is relatively the standard fare. Do not need to rush; I do not take reservations simply because I will lose track of time and who has who and this is not my first SYOT rodeo.

- I do prefer tribute submissions to be PMs, but if you write it as a Google Doc just send it to me through Discord if you are a member of SYOT-Verses.

- Have fun! I love these darn things and they mean a lot to me, so please, have a great time with it! Submissions will last for circa two-ish months or so, with prologues and updates interspersed. I have been excited to write an SYOT during the canon-years, and now is my chance.

Look out for updates with Bleeding Shores, Declaration of Death, and an epilogue of 2024 Victors' Exchange fic known as Feast (epilogue to Famine) in the coming month, for I am working to get back in the groove of things in spite of chronic back pain and a busy teaching job. Thank you all for your support! Submission form on my profile!

~ Paradigm