7th Games - Halftime Show

As the last fight draws to a close and the sixteenth tribute out of twenty three collapses forever onto the dirt, the roar of the crowd is deafening. It'd surged and abated, fluctuating with the very actions of the tributes themselves. With each kill, the crowd erupted in a fresh bout of cheers. With each swing and a miss, boos filled the air. And on the rare occasions where the tributes didn't immediately try to murder each other but simply talked, like normal human beings were wont to do, the hush was such that even without the cameras, one could almost make out what was being said.

And that very hush had settled over the eight remaining as they gathered their bearings - Haobin Xu and Ishmael Khalil, Celeste Strom and Mako Perez, Ruth Baran and Maya Gomez, Roxana Burke and Pascal Gaultier - as they watched. Waited. Last year had seen a special event - a division of sorts - once the tribute pool had been narrowed down to eight; a series of one-on-one fights to force each remaining tribute to kill once, twice, thrice more in order to escape with their lives.

Yet it was not the arena shifting, nor the Gamemakers' voices booming over the intercom, that caught their attention. No, it was the sudden shift in the crowd as all four sections gasped in unison, and the smell of smoke.

A glance to the walls revealed the culprits; the banners, carefully hung over the black obsidian, had, as one, lit up in flames.

But no, not all of them - some of them (two from each section, to be exact) were rising. And it quickly became clear what the correlation was - the dead were burning up, turning to ash, while the living, all eight of them, were being held aloft by a set of identical drones. A declaration of sorts to the three sections that hadn't been focused on each of their respective fights who was still in the fight.

For a moment, the mix of crackling flames and the cheers of the crowd are all that could be heard as the eight surviving banners arranged themselves in a slowly rotating circle. It was only when the last of the banners had melted away that the spectacle was broken - as a distinct masculine voice was requesting for All tributes, please report to the edge of the arena to prepare you for the next round.

One by one, the tributes heeded the request, being pulled out of sight of all aboveground. Then, exactly ten minutes later, one by one, they reemerged from the depths - cleaned up, adorned in thin armor more reminiscent of past Games and their gladiatorial getups, and, in the case of Ishmael and Roxana, who had looked seconds away from collapsing, somewhat patched up as well. Yet the way they exited was not the way they reentered - instead of the two reds, the two blues, the two yellows, and the two greens reemerging in the same section of the arena, now there was a mix. Two corners held a red and a blue apiece, while the remaining two consisted of a mixture of green and yellow.

The tributes and the crowd alike, however, only had but a moment to digest this - for the announcer's voice rang clear over the crowd, and the roiling masses responded, insatiable in their relentless demand for blood.

Let the second round commence

--

For round two, tributes have been temporarily removed from the arena and fitted with ill-fitting, nigh-useless armor and helmets over their colored jumpsuits to more resemble the tributes of the past few Games. Likewise, as we're going by a pre-determined bracketed system to decide our top eight 1v1s, any tribute that ended Round One with over 30 damage has been brought back down to 30 damage to greaten the chances that they'll be able to write at least one post in round two, and any fight that had a damage discrepancy of larger than 10 damage after this adjustment had the more-damaged tribute healed down to the nearest multiple of 5 that would put them within 10 damage of their opponent. This was done both to ensure that the upcoming 1v1s are at least somewhat fair and give both tributes an opportunity to write out a proper 1v1 in the second round while likewise furthering narrative development.