Cameron, Action Assistance for 81st [dars]

Hello, hello. I 100% feel rusty when it comes to this, and would love a bit of tutoring before heading out into the arena.

I am worried about my ability to write (and react properly) to action in threads, especially when it comes to the Games. In my absence from the site I've only really written short stories that were... more literary than eventful, I'd say. So I am out of practice and do not want to hold anyone back/limit anyone's writing because I don't respond in a way that pushes the action forward. Any help/pointers/practices for encouraging and developing that would be much appreciated!

Don't really have good examples of my writing for this since I haven't been in a Games in four years, so here's the best I can do lol.

Exover's reaping post

SPOILER: Click to show

When the rainfall of forgotten color finished dripping down the back of his eyelids and the bleak perma-wash of gray rolled over him like fog, his hair was still long. Long and tangled in thick knots down his shoulder blades, knotted from a year’s worth of waking up each morning without hearing his neighbor cry out in motherly anguish with her yearly reaping reminder. A year’s worth of not caring. He didn’t own a hairbrush, at least not that he could see, and tradition mandated he avoid all sharp objects when not absolutely necessary. Scissors were only needed on the morning of the lucky little lottery. The fog continued to fill where his vision should have been until there was no space for sight to break through, and Ms. Gavradillo screamed.

Rough skin tightened all over, clinging to his bones. It was reaping day after all. Exover’s eyelid twitched around the sphere of glass they told him would feel like home in no time and he set up on his undressed mattress. Five years was a lot of fucking time for him, but maybe old rich doctor types just felt time differently than the kid paranoid about falling in a gaping hole any time he exited his house. But what did he know, as the one with the alien glass balls where eyes used to be, where eyes used to see. Probably nothing useful at all.

He knew that penguins in healthy colonies would hunt and consume several hundred pounds of fish per day, and the tallest of the strange, icy birds were around four feet tall. But he didn’t remember what penguins looked like, had only seen them in that book his dad read him as a child, and he didn’t even know if penguins were real. A younger him cared so much, and wanted to learn and to explore and to take in everything he could; present Exover was a homebody stick-in-the-mud whose only chance for intellectual growth came when the newly-elected Mayor brought him fancy meats with tiny little bows wrapped around. As if he could appreciate her pleasantries and niceties the way most could or would. Probably the way most did. He needed to thank her, one of those days. She was a good one. There weren’t many of those.

His hair was still long when he pushed open his bedroom window and the stiff outside air greeted him with the unwelcome warmth of the sun. It was still long when he shivered and stepped out of bed, walking in predetermined spots in a predetermined path that was almost second-nature if not for the grogginess of sleep lingering overhead. And it was still long when he reached for the scissors off the old writing desk he had no use for and took a deep breath.

He left shortly after for the square, taking the usual path from his occasional grocery trips and blending into the walls like ivy. The sun bore down on him, even in the shade of buildings. He cursed under his breath as he continued past groups of siblings upsetting their families by playing around on “such an important day” or some other generational bullshit that needed to be bred out of society. Each year he felt lucky to be blind during the Games. Everyone else had to watch people they knew stab each other in the face and set each other on fire. An excuse was sewn into his body like patchwork. That was the only reprieve of it all, and he took full advantage. He remained guarded, off limits to anyone who may try and impose emotions on him, and it kept him safe and sound and unremarkable. For the guy with glass eyes, he dreamed of normalcy in technicolor.

As the distance between Exover and the annual death raffle shrank, he slowed his pace to the quiet shuffle that he learned to adopt in crowds. They cluttered his paths and thoughts the way they cluttered the world; they were nothing but litter, piles of trash all around the town red with flame. He slid his left foot forward a few inches, past a heap of burning garbage, and thought about the wide variance of storms. Snow storm. Thunder storm. He slid his right foot forward. Shit storm.

Sometimes when he stayed holed up in the house for long periods of time he would start to have the craziest ideas, like that people weren’t awful and that everything didn’t suck, and that maybe he was always exaggerating everything to make up for his lost senses and his still unexplained childhood trauma that he hadn’t really processed; then he’d step outside and his delusion melted like wax. His head was a wick that craved to be extinguished, to be doused in ice. Exover wanted to be a penguin. More than anything, he wanted to be a penguin, not the sweaty summer storm he was assigned.

Anger boiled his blood, and he felt his face redden, and he hated it. Nothing felt right when he wasn’t alone, and reaping day was always the least alone he ever was. The crowd stifled him, and he was escorted along with the movement of the pack. Powerless was not something he cared much for feeling. Eventually he was in control again, once the footsteps led up to the registrar and some lady took him by the arm to a special roped off section to the side. It was ironic to him then that he felt in control after being deposited in an area for the assumed powerless. How powerless could he be, really, when he’d cut his own hair blind only an hour before. It was probably a straight enough cut. Not that the cameras of Panem would ever pan to him.

Irony had a bone to pick with Exover, and it played out much like one expected. His name filled him like the fog as it was called out over microphone, projected into the world, into the storm, and the cameras all turned his way. He figured. He couldn’t tell for sure, but, he had to imagine there would be at least one camera aimed at his face. Fingers crossed his haircut wasn’t shit.

Unsure how to get to the stage, he raised his hand. “Hi, uh, that’s-” he gulped, a series of nerves tightening inside him like his skin earlier that morning. “Me. Me Exover.” Shit. Strikes one and two hit him back to back, something lightning was not supposed to do. But urban legends were not based in reality, and a blind antisocial kid surviving the hunger games wasn’t, either. He brought his hand down and put it in his pocket, where something cool and stringy met his touch.

It was his hair. A clump of his hair. In his pants pocket. The last clump of his hair that would ever be in his pants pocket in district ten in his life. He hated to admit it, but then and there he knew without a shred of doubt that he would never set foot in that dumb ass place again. Silver lining, even if the silver was as gray as the rest of the world.

A recent post with Zori

SPOILER: Click to show

By the time Vasco slurred out some gibberish words to - me? no one? I couldn’t be sure - I’d already begun to doze off. A terrible side effect of whiskey in my body was the sudden urge to fall asleep anywhere if I wasn’t in motion. With heavy blinks I pulled myself together to try and maintain some form of dignity. I wrapped my ankles around the base of the barstool and twisted my hips, but slowly spinning back and forth called back days of lullabies, rocking my siblings to sleep because someone had to. I stopped and sat still.

He was already staring at me when I started paying attention, and his gaze made me equal parts nervous and nauseous; somewhere in there, though, deep in the sea of whiskey, was something else. Something hopeful. He was speaking again, but I had stopped listening to think about paying attention. “...don’t go hungry. We owe you that much. Steady work. Maybe not even the kind to get your hands dirty.” Then he did the strangest thing: he smiled. It was blurred, and he could’ve just been grimacing at a bad smell from my mouth, but smiling felt better. “How does that sound?”

I breathed through my nose (in case my breath stank) and crossed my arms. My eyelids begged to be released from the strain of opening, so I spun myself right off the stool. It wasn’t graceful, but I wasn’t graceful. I fished around in my pocket and pulled out some cash, sitting it on the bar in a way that also served as stabilization. “Nobody owes me anything.“ The words slipped out without stutter. Leave it to a man to feel bad for me because I’d struggled. Leave it to a man to take pity on me despite staying above water this long. If he wanted to do something, he could’ve offered years ago. It shouldn’t take the promise of power to possess passion.

But…. he smiled. There was something about it that felt familiar, that felt righteous. And, even if he owed me nothing, why allow that to limit my brothers’ and sisters’ chances? It was a dilemma of principle and practicality, and I knew which always won out. I didn’t want, or need, his help. I was just fine on my own. But I’d be remiss to not take whatever offering would benefit the fuckers I loved.

Damn the world and how it worked. “But it sounds…” the pause felt dramatic, but it was really to keep myself from puking, “...good.” I turned and started for the door, and on my second step I wobbled into a flannel-stricken man with a thick mustache. Blinking, I looked back to Vasco, and said a bit too loudly, “hey, his breath is what stinks!”