an exclusive invitation | garnet & lucky

l u c k y
nachtnebel

Lucky ripped a dozen or so pages out from the camouflage trainer's notepad when she wasn't looking. He was already getting restless and bored after less than a week in the training center. His seventeenth birthday was fast approaching: two days away! Back in New Horizons, the kids always showed up for one another, throwing a party in whoever's home. Streamers, cakes, games, and gifts. Lucky missed that this year, caught up between twenty-three other kids battling death.

Warm-toned colored pencils and small tubes of paint disappeared from the station on the same day. While there was always next year to celebrate, seventeen was a big milestone, and it couldn't go without a party. Lucky stuffed the materials into his training bag before rushing up the stairwell to reach Four's floor. His laughter echoed off the steel steps and cold walls of the chamber. It was so ridiculous what he had in mind, straight out of a teenage drama book. New Horizons was so sheltered, that all of the kids were forced to get along. Or pretend to, at the very least. Any sense of drama Lucky had, it was ripped straight out of the books he read in English class. He wanted to have fun for his birthday, and being a tribute would not stop that.

He flashed his identification at the front of their door. Lucky threw his jacket onto the island counter and got to work. It would be a challenging task to invite twenty-three other tributes on such short notice and even more of a challenge to get all of them to come. He split the torn notepad papers in two, counting twenty-four total. On the front, he wrote in large letters: DISTRICT # TRIBUTE, slowly enough to make what every single one of his teachers called 'chicken scratch' to at least be partially legible. On Rita's and Xylia's, he added a heart, filling them in with the colors of the sunset. They were his girls. Lucky had to convince them that they were his favorites, a strategy that, when well-executed, would keep them in the palm of his hands.

Lucky smiled, even though little Selkie was torturously crying in the next room. A party in such dire times. Not everyone will have the guts to show up. Hopefully, that would weed out the lame kids from the cool ones– he was not excited about the prospect of a loser from one of the lower districts souring the vibe. In fact… Lucky wrote in fine print at the bottom of the invitation: rat this out, you die first! Vaguely menacing, but absolutely a threat. He wouldn't exclude anyone from receiving an invitation, but if one person's sour ass ruins his birthday, they're as good as dead.

One by one, Lucky folded the invitations and sealed them with a small strip of tape across the back. He put them back into his drawstring bag and stepped out the door, rushing back down the stairwell to start at the ground floor.

It was his plan to go floor by floor but with training done for the day, starting at the training center's entrance might kill a few birds with one stone.

Lucky spotted one kid exiting as soon as he opened the stairwell's door. "Hey, you!" He waved in their direction, starting his jog over. He couldn't catch the number patched onto their uniform but remembered them from their district's reaping clips. He dug into his bag and pulled out the two invitations with their district's number written on the front. "Hey! So, there's going to be a party tomorrow night. Twenty-four invites and one of them has your, uh," he was about to say name, but Lucky quickly realized that he didn't address any of the invitees by their name on the letters. Not even Xylia's or Rita's! Oops. "All the tributes are invited. Here. Here's yours, and would you mind giving the other to your district partner as well? It'd save me a lot of running up and down those stairs."

He handed the tribute the pair of invitations and smiled, happy to answer any questions about the birthday bash that they might have!