Public Training Sessions

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Preparation was a rarity for myself, while for the strive of survival it was mandatory. A couple days prior, with my focus unmoving from the station of plants during the day, and attention upon the replays of past Games at night, an idea sprung - and arrangements were necessary. Appeal directed towards the head Trainer of the plant station, a desire for knowledge from me enhancing her more so then the charm required for others. And with the conviction that it’s for a tactic solely to be used within the Arena, she taught me her ways. For once interest hones me into a task, especially with life and death dwindling with its accuracy.

“And this is certain to work?” I question for the hundredth time, which results in yet another assurance that it surely will. “It’s unfortunate you won’t be around for the training session, still your day off?” A aspect that I clarified from the start of this brewing creation. Concern wrinkles her eyebrows in soft suspicion, as her eyes stare at my in attempt to dissect the truth. “I’m planning on going over the basic plants identifications, figured it’s something you’d enjoy watching.” Reassures her without an ounce of my notice of her obvious suspicion. And with this innocence playing across me so, her worry fades instantly.

Nervousness tightens my chest, a deep sigh attempting to ease it - before I layer the bright red lipstick across my lips. And right on the cue, that name of mine announces through the speakers in request for my presence. Despite the nerves streaming through my every veins, my demeanor doesn’t display it slightly, my hips swaying to the center stage that’s calling for my attention. A delicate grin lifts my ears in my welcome, eyes attempting to steady upon the Game-Makers past the beaming lights within the center of training.

“A pleasure to meet each of you lovely people. As I’m sure you already know, I’m Red Stone from District Twelve.” My lips rub against each other, as if fearful that I didn’t place on the beautiful red lipstick - that I distinctly remember painting on. “My only request is for the head Trainer of combat.” And to no surprise, my desire is met momentarily.

Baffled curiosity is evident upon his features, unsure of why a scrawny girl from Twelve would want his presence. Surely I can’t compete against him in a spare, so why else would I seek his company? Seduction courses my fingers to his jawline, tracing it down to his chin - and of course he doesn’t even flinch at my touch, he’s a big bad trainer after all. And without warning my lips meet into his own, embracing him in the art of kissing that I’ve had a plethora of practice in.

“That’s it.” A cheek smirk relishes me, as I brush my hand through the air in a gesture for him to depart. A tiny bottle is brought from my pocket, the lid flipped off, and the substance drains down my throat. For a moment my heart stops, but it beats again - assuring me of my current survival. “I took some tips from the last game, made a poisonous lipstick that kills a person in about two to three hours without an antidote.” The petite bottle that I already completed is dropped to the floor to shatter into pieces.

Eyes glance over to where the Trainer disappeared to, searching for his reaction - that I’m unable to see without knowledge of his whereabouts. My stare returns to the Game-Makers up above. “Is he valuable to you?” I question with grave curiosity. “If so, I did make another antidote - that’s hidden somewhere…” The tips of my fingers tap across my chin. “Perhaps a scheduled dinner date with Cricket will help my memory? Let me know what you think, clock’s ticking.” Another grin and innocent wave wishes my onlookers a farewell, before I depart from the room.

"Breathe. It's alright, no one is coming to take you."

Adromeda's hands dance gently through the thicket of Orion's head. His eyes are wrenched wide, scanning the shadows for hands to come reaching for his skin. It had only been days, hours since his name had been called. He was chosen to die, but from the sea of unknown faces, a voice had found volume and granted him freedom. Orion was meant to be in the silver city of sorrow, meant to be training to become a killer. But here he was, lying in his bed at home stuck frozen in the force of his fear. Spared, but shattered.

"Here."

Adromeda says softly as she steps away from him only for a moment. Her fingers flutter through drawers and cabinets until finally finding exactly what she is searching for. Stopping at the table by his bed side, she smiles while placing a small flash light inside of a tin bowl. Drenched firmly in a film of drying sweat, Orion stares simply with confusion at his sister. His state of fright and lack of understanding dies quickly in a revelation. The flashlight flicks and suddenly several streams of light spur from small slips in the side of the bowl. It seems as though suddenly, dark space is filled with flowing beams of light, with warmth instead of cold. Adromade walks slowly through the room passing her hands through each and every light.

"Now, you will know if anyone is ever in your room. You can see the beams bend or break. It will remind you that you're safe here Orion, they can't get you."

Orion's heart begins to steady as his own fingers begin to follow the bright beams. His breaths begin to deepen and slowly the exhaustion of his past days brews up from beneath his broken internal barricades. Sleep is starting to summon him as he looks towards his sister with large, slowing blinks.

"Thank you."

A loud cacophonous clamor catapults itself clearly from a fallen plate in the kitchen. Several avoxes quickly attend to cleaning while Orion spurs from his place at the table. At first, Orion had been busy adjusting the final factors for his Private Session equation that caused the creation of an unexpected hyperbola. Clearly at some point within the arithmetic and along the number line, he had fallen back into the past. It's a memory he has frequented often since arriving to the same city that had frightened him back then. Only this time there isn't panic poisoning his veins, but logic leading his mind. Endless ideas and constant calculations, safety in the science of mathematics.

Sparky, a name Orion still cannot quantify with any positivity, comes streaming into the room with her normal prowess of pressuring to stay on schedule. She makes her usual speech about the importance of promptness, but Orion is already walking away into the elevator. For a second through the closing doors, Orion thinks he spots a fragment of sadness on the escort's face. However, all of this isn't about her and whichever feelings she can have being from the Capitol. Orion needs to set his integers all onto the positive spectrum in order to increase his odds, tonight is too important to get caught up in the convoluted feelings of some painted person.

The doors open.

He enters a world of extreme examination.

Time seems to slip swiftly by when sitting in an uncomfortable metal seat. But the moment Orion hears his name in chilling metal monotone, every second is a century. One second he's rising from his chair, his fingers furling tightly around his small box of supplies. Another second he is walking, feeling the stinging stare of children who could soon become his killer. And in the last second of slow motion, he is standing at the precipice and he watches the world wane into total darkness.

His hands hold a flashlight, and enters the black space.

In this moment, Orion feels far from earth. He isn't walking through a room without light, but gliding along the frontier of space. Stars, planets, and moons are forming from fragments of dust, and he exists as its epicenter. He has an opportunity here, a chance. He can become the brightly burning center of the universe, or he can collapse under extreme insurmountable force and fall into an eternal hole of darkness.

He chooses light over dark.

Setting the closed box into the hands of an avox, Orion takes several objects with him before deciding it is time to finally give the Game Makers a piece of the performance. He steps quietly into the center of the room before flicking the flashlight onto his face and emerging from the darkness. He takes a breath, he lets his brain take over.

"I like puzzles, and I also like stars. I believe that is because stars are also like puzzles. A challenge of the mind."

Orion flicks the flashlight off and lets them just listen to his work. A mirror in his hands falls to the floor shattering, a single shocking sound within an otherwise silent space. Swiftly the shards scrape and move along with his fingers. He thinks back to his room, to Adromeda, to the hours adjusting coefficients and removing factors. To the memorization taking action along edges of his hands.

He pauses.

He stands in a new spot, the flashlight back on his face.

"I'm not fast, and I'm not strong. I won't face a problem by running from it, or by blindly running towards it. I could try to convince you all right now that I could, but after thoughtful analysis, I believe that to be pointless."

Orion stares at them, the Goddesses of the world he will soon inhabit. The ones he has to show why he is worth more than physical attributes, why everything that he is exists within the realm of his mind.

"I solve problems by figuring them out. By analyzing the algorithm, by completing the equation, and by perfecting the pattern. I like problems, and puzzles are a type of problem."

Flick, back into space.

More shards scrape and string from a spool wraps around some. The moment is coming, the moment when he becomes the true center. When all the math makes sense, and the equation becomes worth the effort. When he can finally tell himself for the first time since saying the words, I volunteer, that he is trying to stay alive. He is going to alter space around him, he is going to become what he has always seen in the sky.

The light returns for a final time to his face.

He is now perfectly placed.

"The strongest advantage of a puzzle is knowing its pattern, the way its pieces fit together. Without knowing, you go in blind and make mistakes. I told you that the stars are like puzzles, allow me to support my conclusion."

The light falls black for only an instant as he places it exactly on the floor before letting its light loose. Beams begin to bounce forth from every corner and crevice around where Orion now stands. However, they are not individuals. Each beam stems from the same source of light and moves around the room as it reaches another specifically placed piece of mirror, either on the floor or hanging in the air. The array of light continues to grow until finally stopping with a small spot on Orion's face from above. He now stands at the center of a linked chain of light.

"This is the constellation Orion. It is a puzzle, a perfect offense and defense. By knowing every inch of this puzzle and by watching how the light alters, I can know exactly where another person is within the field. But that's not all,"

Orion dances a finger through one of beams to demonstrate how slightly adding shadow alters the entire connected chain before continuing.

"By knowing this puzzle perfectly, I can move through its shadows with ease. And by using both its defensive and offensive properties, I can lead my enemies without them even knowing it. Time for a demonstration."

Orion sets several segments of cheese on the floor beside him. He then gestures to the avox still holding the box he brought in the beginning, she releases two rats he spent the past few days finding.

"Rats are smart, they will smell and see the cheese, but they will try to carefully get to it. Like tributes if the cheese were weapons or medicine."

Orion steps back into the shadows avoiding every shard and every ray of light, he has made a home court advantage. Nearby, the first rat is already getting close. The slight shifting of the hanging shards leads Orion carefully through the dark, a knife appearing from his pocket. Orion waits as the scuttling grows closer, waits at the first spot he knows the rat's stealth will lead it.

A squeak emerges from the shadows.

Following the next series of shadows and each set of shards, Orion finds his new place. A small tail appears only seconds later, he has only an instant to act.

Another squeak, and then silence.

Orion emerges from the shadows back at the center of his constellation. He says no words this time, the flashlight flicks off and the the field returns to empty space. The main lights revive and two dead rats in a maze of mirror shards await the Game Makers' eyes.

They are the first victims of Orion's Puzzles.

As expected, the last few days before the official Private Training Sessions have been spent intensively crafting. Every district, even the meekest (District Nine, in his opinion), hunkered down. He wasn’t a master spy and thus hadn’t been able to observe all of the other sessions. In all likelihood he would have been shut out of the very best. But from those he had witnessed during his careful sleuthing had brought him to one conclusion:

There is no point in stealing someone else’s PTS idea, because his is superior to all of them.

When his name is called, he stalks into the room, brow furrowed. He hustles straight to the back, dismissing the trainers, asking them to dim the lights on their way out. In the erie glow of the Emergency Exit signs, he carefully sets the scene. He works quickly, as quickly as his aching body will allow, but still spends a good half of his dedicated time.

Sweating profusely, both upon his brow and through his black training shirt, Elite finally turns the lights up and faces the Gamemakers.

“This,” he begins, right hand wrapped around a clicker that controls the holograms, “is what you want to see.” He clicks. Blocky orange holographs of people race around Leet, aiming spears and arrows at one another. One falls, then another. The final two take up swords as he continues on. “A chase. A fight. But it’s nothing without context. These are nobodies and they won’t sell the Games for you.”

He clicks again.

The four holograms rewind at triple speed, back to their starting positions: two beside a campfire and a little ways beyond, the other two leaning against the trunk of a tree. This time bright yellow tags light up above their heads:

District Four Female
District Four Male
District Nine Female
District Ten Female

They run through the same routine at speed. Leet pauses a moment to watch them fall, one by one. Click. Rewind. “So there’s a little bit of story here: a designation. Now you might be thinking it’s not much. Just some districts and genders. But for some citizens, that’s enough. They’re always going to cheer for their hometown girl or boy. It’s not very interesting though. Let’s spice it up.” He punches the air, hoping to emphasize his point. But it feels awkward, even to him.

The next iteration the holograms have their respective faces: Harper, Elite, Eos and Fayre. This time when Harper fells Eos with a spear, anguish plays over her projected face. When the holographic Leet puts an arrow through Fayre’s eye, he looks appropriately grim.

Harper and Leet circle one another, crackling swords in their grasp. Elite lifts his first, but it’s Harper who puts hers through his heart.

He walks through the hologram, shattering it. “This. This is a story, of an alliance full of traitors. Lovers too, but I think maybe you already knew that part of the story.” He smiles, the barest flash of an expression. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m no martyr. But this is the story everyone expects: the Career who slowly but surely fells her less competent allies.”

“It’s a story. But it’s an old one. I think it’s time we rewrote that file, don’t you?”

This time when he clicks, it finally becomes clear how he spent the first half of his session: not by programming the holograms (he’d spent the week prior working on that), but on setting up three dummies. They are placed in the camouflage section of the room, near a pile of costumes that he had clearly rifled through. The setup is identical to the hologram. Fayre and Eos lean against a tree trunk; Harper sits alone by the campfire.

With a spring in his step, Elite goes to take his place beside his district partner. He looks at the blank face of the Harper-dummy with perplexed adoration. He takes the dummy’s hand, kisses the back of it. He only looks at her as he reaches for the arrows whose tips rest in the hot campfire. “I’m going to tell you what you want to see, because I know best. Not just for you, the Gamemakers. For the people of Panem. For President Snow himself.”

“What you want to see is: someone who can write their own story, who can take matters into their own hands. Someone who actually believes in the Games and wants to win them. What you want to see is: me.”

He does not wait for the spears to come. He fires an arrow at Fayre’s knee, hitting her thigh. Another at Eos, right in the throat. A third at Fayre, this time through her stomach, and finally turns and carefully, with control, drives a burning arrow through Harper’s mouth.

He stands, covered in the fake blood of the dummies. “Thank you for your time,” he says, nodding but not quite bowing to them. Then, he lurches towards the exit, picking up a plastic crown out of the costume pile. He flips it up his forearm, letting it come to rest lightly on his brow. He leaves the room, crowned, and he does not look back.