in the making : giselle : [junior gm, 96th]
Mar 4, 2024 22:51:23 GMT -5
Post by calla on Mar 4, 2024 22:51:23 GMT -5
She has her own desk.
It's still a little too close to the interns for comfort, but still, it's hers. So is the little rose gold nameplate from the Guncles and the dog-eared copy of Operant Conditioning & You from Blessing.
She's taken to messing with the UI of the holo when she's supposed to be on break. Just little cosmetic tweaks. Quality of life things, like adjusting the fingerprint sensitivity, or playing around with the testable mutt controls, changing the tribute death notification sound, poking at their little bio-diagnostics, stuff like that
Maybe that's her own type of Skinnerian conditioning. No one's stopped her yet.
She watches the Private Training Sessions playback feed on a little pulled up window in the corner of her holo. Incognito, of course, because she's actually supposed to be working on a clip for the artificial soundscape that she'd already finished hours ago.
Little velvet notebook in her lap, Giselle jots things down as the tributes go, separating by District and penning in the scores that she would've given each of the performances.
They all come out a little high.
It's just that she's excited. She's fascinated by them all equally. Twenty-four little dolls, ready to be pushed and prodded at until the porcelain breaks. The arena is the world's biggest Skinner box and now she's got two dozen rats scrambling for either a pellet or a shock. It's dizzying. It's her sixth grade science project's dream.
And it is helpful. For her other little project.
The soundscape had gotten her thinking. The wind. The stillness of certain places. All the little twists and turns that her rats could be led through. It can be so terribly hard to recognize voices in high stress situations, even ones that you've known your whole life.
Of course it has been done before. Less refined versions of what she's been crafting. There was an attempt in the 94th - never let it be said that Giselle is anything but Lilifee's biggest fan - but that was just to create confusion among the tributes. It's never quite been done by someone with this level of tenacity.
Giselle flicks through a sheaf of papers, a smattering of biographies and gathered intel on the Fives, and then taps open a buried folder of audio files. She adjusts her little wireless discretely and presses play pause play on one of the files, bumping up the decibels and smoothing out the frequency wave. She lengthens the syllables a bit. The vowels should be just a touch sharper, a little bit more panicked. Lucky she know what pain sounds like.
The program spikes and then chimes, as close of a match as their combined might can get it.
The acting technician, when she waltzes over with her inch thick dossier, looks around, a little shifty.
"Do the Head Gamema-"
"I just want to know if it's plausible." Giselle says reasonably, "Before I present it."
She slides over the file and taps one of the baby pink tabs sticking out.
"It's colour coded for all twenty-four. Each of them has three variations."
And then she brings out the big guns - pouts.
"Just test it out for me? Pleeease?"
