do you hear the people? [union plot meeting]

d6a georgie cham 🍓🐢 frankel
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do you hear the people? [union plot meeting] Mar 22, 2024 14:22:29 GMT -5

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Post by d6a georgie cham 🍓🐢 frankel on Mar 22, 2024 14:22:29 GMT -5

KARL AMOS

Karl has been living on extra time for nine years now. Twenty-six years old when it should’ve ended at seventeen. Would he have survived like the thirteen year old kid that volunteered to take his place? Who knows. He is grateful though and none of this extra time will go to waste. He doesn’t know when the next time will be when he is plucked from whatever bowl of life now holds his name.

Most days are now spent in the university, inside laboratories where new wonders of science are discovered. He is a researcher that wants to share his knowledge with curious minds, the end goal is to become a Professor. A District Six Professor, not a Capitol one.

Restrictions are growing ever so tight at the university, the best of District Six are being plucked away for the Capitol’s gains. Ever since the Rose Plague and even the bombings before that, working freely in Six is growing more and more impossible. A life-saving discovery is made but then a dumb Capitolite with a bursting wallet takes all of the credit. And now Fenwick’s questionable hospital expansion. Enough is enough! Karl is so over this, something needs to change. Karl thinks he can be that change.

It has been easy finding people with the same thoughts as him, most around him have become more outward with their frustrations. Surely if everyone rises up, they can’t take out the lot of them? Can the Capitol be reasoned with, just once? Well Karl is about to find out.

Whispers have been minimal, but an organisation has been achieved. Little information has been shared with those he trusts and on a normal spring Tuesday evening, inside a closed library, a meeting has been scheduled. All the details have been coded and hopefully, it is has only landed in the hands of those that should be attending.

Faces begin to show up in the dimly lit library. One rule will be lifted in this building tonight and that will be silence. So long as the words spoken do not spill from these very walls. Karl is sat in front of rows and rows of plastic chairs, he waits as a whole minute passes after the last person arrives before speaking.

”I don’t want to give a speech like the mayor, I am not here to lead anything. We’re all here because it is time for real change in the District. We have been given false promises by Mayor Cham and now the Capitol is stomping all over us!” Karl stands up and hands out a document to each of the attendees, with assistance from the others that helped organise this gathering. ”Inside this document contains the real purpose of Blessing Fenwick’s hospital expansion! Do we want this in our District? Who says that they won’t use us in these experiments!”

Karl paces around the room as he hands out the last of the documents. The tone of his voices raises so the person furthest away from him can still hear. ”We spend 7 years of our lives, worried that our name will be reaped and now we could be pulled into that research building at any moment. This District has survived bombings, a plague, nearly a hundred years of The Hunger Games! I am sure it can survive an uprising! On Thursday we will give Cham and Fenwick a memorable opening ceremony!”

andromache s. ⚔️ [d1b] sucy
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do you hear the people? [union plot meeting] Mar 31, 2024 21:30:47 GMT -5

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Post by andromache s. ⚔️ [d1b] sucy on Mar 31, 2024 21:30:47 GMT -5

AODHÁN CASSIDY

Aodhán hasn’t been here in a long time — he remembers his first visit to the university library. Back then, the rows upon rows of shelves, the avenue between them, had felt endless, like the opportunities that were lined up in his head. He’d spent hours, days, hunched over the desks, becoming as familiar with their graffiti as the contents of his textbooks. Coming back transports him to that time, when everything first seemed simple. It all grew so complicated so fast after that, until now, when just by decision, it’s become crystal clear again.

On his way across campus, he sees the change in the grounds immediately. He’s heard about it, of course he has, during hushed conversations with the others, but seeing it is something different. Back in his university days, they decried the restrictions placed upon them. They slammed down their steins after classes, beer sloshing, hands and faces sticky. The students now walk with their heads down. It’s an uncanny imitation of what Aodhán believes university life should be, one he observes with understated displeasure as he sidles along to the library, one quick and gangly step at a time.

No nostalgia filters his view of things. The place is more miserable now than it was back then, something he’d thought verifiably impossible. Traveling past the textbooks piled on high, Aodhán takes stock of familiar names, flashes back to pens running dry and hands grabbing his beneath tables, but refuses to get lost in the past. That time is gone. The only thing he has is the now — the meeting.

He takes a spot behind Karl, crossing his arms over his chest. Aodhán leaves on his heavy wool coat, emboldened by the mass it affords him. He nods along, expression becoming stonier by the word. The document goes out; his hand twitches for a smoke.

Working at the hospital these past few months has been especially taxing on Aodhán. It’s never been an easy job — especially in pediatrics. Working with kids is rewarding a lot of the time, but Aodhán, alongside many of his colleagues, had emerged from the Rose Plague feeling powerless. Whole families succumbed before their eyes. Mothers and fathers clung to their babies, faces all aglow, eyes and cheeks fading dull within hours of each other. All of that over and over again, with nothing he could do but offer plainitives and a comforting hand. Those had been the toughest years on his marriage; they needed each other more than ever, he thinks, but what was he supposed to do? Go home? Risk giving it to all of them? Hardly. Aodhán spent so many nights asleep at the hospital, curled up in cots. Oftentimes, at the least, he had someone else’s hand in his, whose chemical work skin he pretended was hers — they’d all been worked to the brink of madness in those days. Seconds spent on each other, minutes spent in dreams were all they had.

Which is why the people needed to see the contents of this document. They’d all worked so hard. They all deserved better. At first, Aodhán had only been in it for better worker’s rights, for better pay — but this, this twisted excuse for medicine that Blessing’s given her namesake to is more than he can abide. He nods along, face serious, as their little crowd’s eyes scan the documents.

Karl is a generational orator, he thinks. Behind him, Aodhán acts columnic, affirming him as he speaks, waiting until he’s done. It’s better that the face of their cause is young, after all.

“You’ve all seen Cham,” he says, once the murmuring has died down, “You all know exactly what he’s capable of — what he isn’t capable of, more accurately. They won’t see us coming!” A pause. Aodhán steps forward, clears his throat. “I’ve seen what they’re doing. Demonstrating now, before it goes any further, is a necessity for the sake of our district.”

ELEGANT

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minie
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do you hear the people? [union plot meeting] Apr 1, 2024 16:37:37 GMT -5

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Post by minie on Apr 1, 2024 16:37:37 GMT -5

My arms hugged my textbooks tight to my chest as I made my way down the stairs. Most days after school, I would head straight to the lab. Even if dad would exclude me from his work, I still had access to my own private room. A place where I could be alone with my thoughts and a haven for the books I had begun collecting the day I received my keys. I preferred my own space to the public desks of the school library. Something about the constant chatter and stench of food made it extremely difficult to hear myself.

The day should have ended around seven in the evening for most, I knew mom would have had dinner ready for seven thirty. Leaving me just enough time to walk home and set the table. Mom would be dammed if her children did not help around the house, no matter how hard we worked elsewhere…something about respect for the home she had built for us. I would never dare not show the woman who had put up with my lunatic father for so long the deserve she respected.

Still, something had caught my attention that night, a group of workers stood outside the facilities. The were crowded together, huddled and it almost seemed as if they were lowering their voices on purpose, trying to obscure their words from anyone who they must have deemed an outsider. Thankfully, the years in the lab with my dad have taught me to be a fly on the wall. Someone who sees and hears everything without ever calling all too much attention to her.

I had learnt to make myself invisible when needed the most and monarch butterfly calling attention to her wings whenever I had pleased.

The group talked of a meeting.

A gathering of those wanting to make a change, the ones willing to put their life on the line. Did any of those workers even have a life? I only had ever felt as if I were surviving, not living. How must have the bottom ranks been drowning in misery (or so did my own spoiled nature lead me to believe). They must have been longing for the fight I am just discovering in myself, a natural born drug in their own system. They had something to fight for when all I had become was bored and concerned.

A spoiled brat with too much time on her hands might as well been Panem’s most ignorant revolutionary.

I was mad about something, so I followed the anger. The collective rage had led me to a library, one so dark I could not make out any of the faces in the crowd. Most were older than me, that seemed to go without a question. Not all held the same face of exhaustion of the workers from my company, for it seemed to be a mix of anger and despair. I could feel the crowd feeding off the words spoken by whom I would only assume could be the leader.

He was not wrong.

In fact, I believed he was more than correct. The Fenwicks were not a topic I knew much about, but I did grow up surrounded by science. I was the daughter of someone who thought he could play God. If my dad would throw away morals for success, I did not want to imagine what a capitolite would do.

There was something in my gut saying the regime that forces children to kill each other would not shy away from using its citizens as lab rats. We are all running around in a hamster wheel already.

Opinions were thrown in the room, those involved in politics were named. I did not want to get to involved before I even knew what the game plan was. I never had started an experiment before knowing exactly what I would be doing and when. All of this was so far out of my comfort zone that I could only hope someone would give me own instructions.

It seemed however I would need to ask.

“What can I do to help? We can’t let them experiment on us, no one would make it out alive”

Last Edit: Apr 29, 2024 15:12:58 GMT -5 by minie

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do you hear the people? [union plot meeting] May 15, 2024 21:06:33 GMT -5

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Post by august vance d7b [Bella] on May 15, 2024 21:06:33 GMT -5

IGNACIO AGUILA-REYES

Being on this campus is like walking around in someone else’s dream. Among the bustling students with their tidy clothes and preoccupied faces, I can almost imagine myself in some alternate reality where my family paid for me to sit around and read books all day instead of working, worrying about due dates instead of wages. If you offered that world to me when I was eighteen, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. Now, I feel like a fish out of water.

I’m here out of sheer curiosity, a single word that caught my attention amidst the gruff, fatigued voices of the boys in the garage, uttered between cigarette puffs. Union. Someone was starting one, they said. A big one– not just one section of the hospital. All of the workers, from the doctors down to the janitors.

Sure, I said, rolling my eyes. Someone’s always starting a union. Usually someone like us, overworked and underpaid, fed up. And how do you get in? Fifty bucks a month in dues to raise money for a strike that never happens. Then the talk starts mounting enough that the higher-ups catch wind of the moving pieces, and the union leader gets fired. So our hard-earned money mysteriously becomes severance pay for the one person among us who complained the most.

But no, it’s different this time, they said. They’ve got doctors, nurses, pharmacy reps in on it. People with enough money that they aren’t asking for dues, that’s how you know it’s for real.

And they pulled a flyer out of their pocket, handing it to me. Crinkled at the corners and criss-crossed with lines like it had been folded and opened a hundred times. The meeting was today at the university library. Who knows how long they had been talking about it without me. I felt kinda left out, to be honest, like they thought I wouldn’t be interested. I folded it back up and slipped it into my pocket to demonstrate otherwise.

And you’re just telling me now? I said. How long you all been planning on joining?

Ah, c’mon, Nacho. You know we were gonna tell you. Just didn’t want you to give the secret away before the meeting, they said.

You thought I’d snitch, you mean. The words came out sharp, as cold as I felt. I tried to soften them for the sake of camaraderie. Well, don’t worry. I served my four years. Those keeps won’t get another free word out of my mouth now that I’m off their payroll.”

If you could call it that.

As I finished my work in silence, I felt the idea gaining momentum, snowballing in my mind until I couldn’t think of anything else. It must have started rolling back when I was a kid, when Dad told me never to complain without doing something about it. This might be the opportunity to do just that, and to show the guys that I wasn’t bluffing.

That’s how I’ve come to sit in this folding chair, right foot propped up on my left knee, in the back row of the last place I thought I’d end up. It feels ironic in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. I find myself looking between the clean-shaven faces of the other men, trying to guess how much money they make. Maybe I’m being too cynical.

When the speaker hands out the envelopes, I’m tearing mine open like it’s Ratmas morning, suddenly eager. The words click into place in my head: the new wing, the experiments, the mayor. Before I know it, my head is bobbing up and down in agreement, floating on the energy of the speaker’s lines, and the wave of assenting murmurs that follow.

Then a familiar face steps forward, his name gathering like a ball of dust in some far-off corner of my memory. It’s Dr. Cassidy, the pediatrician. I wonder if he remembers me, the grass-stained kid in hand-me-downs carrying his brother into the emergency room after a football game gone sour. Mati had a compound fracture in his shinbone. Mom had just passed, and we were too broke to call the ambulance, so it must have been almost eleven years ago now.

”Demonstrating now, before it goes any further, is a necessity for the sake of our district,” he says, rather eloquently I think, his voice betraying a subtle smoker’s rasp. I like the sound of “demonstrating,” like we’re going to show them something they don’t already know.

A woman pipes in from the crowd. I guess we don’t need to raise our hands. “What can I do to help? We can’t let them experiment on us, no one would make it out alive.”

Meanwhile, the words haven’t quite sunk in for me. Experiment. On us. My eyes shift warily from the speakers to the audience and back. I had expected them to announce some new bogus rule that benefitted the higher-ups and gave the workers the shaft. We were used to it. But this? Am I missing something? Is this even a conversation I can contribute to?

”Wait, let me get this straight. These people are building a new wing of the hospital where they’re going to… What kind of experiments are we talking about here? Are they gonna make us into mutts?”

Just what I needed. One more thing to lose sleep over.

*rabo de nube, sylvio rodriguez