brainiacs galore ❁ brennan&ama&haze

〖    b r e n n a n    f i t z g e r a l d    〗

Why is Atticus Manor still giving people like me and Duke advice? Like, how many deaths will it take for 'I won, listen to me' to stop holding its weight? We're approaching forty failed attempts, most of them not even close to sparking a drop of hope in the palms of our hands. I don't think he buys it, either, when he tells me to get well-acquainted with the world of the outdoors. That entails learning how to make fire, displaying patience around creatures designed to kill, and, of course, identifying plants as safe and dangerous.

The tablets have rows of plant silhouettes that we have to match as poisonous or not. They all look the same at first, stems and leaves. Other than the leaves that grow on the trees in the springtime, I've never taken much time to study them. As far as actual vegetation is concerned, I wouldn't know the closest plot of farmland to save my life. After one failure of a 48% score, I press the restart button and go again. It's easier now with repetition. The Games have a structure and a format to follow. Lots of people assume that someone is smart because they know a lot of things. Teachers will say you need to learn, not memorize… and they're liars! Memorizing things, like jagged or round edges of a plant's roots or leaves, creates patterns in my head that help to make an educated guess. Objective answers are either right or wrong. With enough repetition, it can be on cue.

"Hiya!" The voice is unexpected and startles me enough to drop the plant's silhouette in the wrong pile. It turns red and disappears. The girl squeezes herself between me and the girl from 6 who had already been working on the tablets. My shoulder pulls back and angles away from them almost on the instinct of a minor avoidant tendency. Five silhouettes later, I ease up again; I don't want her to think I dislike her for no reason at all.

"Hey there." I look at her. She breezes through the squares with more speed than simply memorizing could ever. She's from District Eleven, one of the districts where it makes sense for her to excel at this. "Have any tips for how all these things work? I don't think either of us have our… roots in plants."

She should kill me for that pun.

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Plant Modifier: +1

|2ZNmDS4LG1-20
[ 16 + 1 = 17 ]