swear jar | [tsi/um] | Hunger Games: The RPG

swear jar | [tsi/um] Sept 28, 2024 10:21:46 GMT -5

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Post by umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars] on Sept 28, 2024 10:21:46 GMT -5

They'd refused to let him bring his guitar from home- said the model was 'too primitive to properly inspect,' the meaning of which was completely lost on Umber. Nico had explained it better later: technically the guitar could be used as a weapon. Whatever. He bet if he was from some place higher up on the food chain, like One or Four, they would've let him keep it. He frowned over at a group of careers now: three girls talking around a table and maintaining their new friendship, parting their lips into smiles which felt as threatening as a gun being aimed right at his head.

It was so weird being here and seeing people his siblings' age- only a few years older than Umber himself- and feeling so hopelessly far behind them all. In truth, he was already taller than all three of the girls he was eyeing, but it was the features in the face that made it most obvious they were ahead of him. It was a look in the eye, a smirk when a joke was told because there were aspects they understood which Umber wasn't privy to just yet.

Here he sat, jellybean jacket, biting the corners of his pizza slices into dinosaurs because he had nothing else to do with his hands and no friends to talk to, and there they were, his competitors, who likely could shoot an arrow through the eye of a needle from across the room. He'd been warned already not to dwell on his chances of survival for too long but it was hard not to when he knew how slim those chances were. When was the last time someone around his age had won the games, anyway? It'd happened before, he knew, but not often enough for it to feel more like an actual possibility than sheer dumb luck.

Umber plucked a pepperoni from his pterodactyl's head and grumbled, "Assholes..."

He panned his attention to another girl, also older, who sat much closer to him. Her long hair was dark and curly, pushed out of her face while she ate. Umber recognized her as one of the tributes from District Eleven, which was maybe one of the only districts Umber wouldn't have traded for District Twelve. From the few whisperings he'd heard growing up from the workers in Twelve who found temporary jobs there, things were as bad as they were in Twelve, if not worse.

The girl before him was older, so maybe she didn't have quite as many strikes against her as Umber did, but surely when she looked at the careers, she must've felt a similar sense of... what did he even want to call it? Panic? Resentment? Some anxious mixture of the two?

He realized from her demeanor that she must've heard him before, so he cleared his throat in an effort to get her attention. he nodded toward the girls.

"What do you think career training is really like? I mean, they can't just go around stabbing each other with swords and stuff, can they? They'd all have scars... right?" He narrowed his eyes, trying to distinguish any markings.

"Or is it like theory? Like a philosophy class where you learn its okay to be a complete dickhead so long as there's cameras?"

swear jar | [tsi/um] Sept 28, 2024 15:07:41 GMT -5

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Post by minie on Sept 28, 2024 15:07:41 GMT -5

I never really considered myself a good person. Convinced myself of enough decency to deserve the occasional good strike of karma. The people around me on the other hand, they always were much better. My older sister’s nice enough girls to be married off by now. Irena had a strong sense of justice, it was a shock the hadn’t executed her by now, but if anyone deserved a nice long life it would be her. Or Marcellus, I never quite understood how someone so stuck inside their own mind could spend so much time volunteering in a place full of people. Not once did he have a bad word to say.

I wish that could have been me.

My days had been surrounded with drunks and degenerates, I smiled and did my best not to complain but by the time I should clock out; I always had enough. Complaining to myself about it all, knowing that I should be happy I had a job indoors and enough money to put a roof over my head.

Though through all my horrible days, the kind where I would hide in our cellar crying tears of frustration…I never let it out on them.

I was far from perfect, but at least I never tried to use anyone as target practice. Those damn careers made my blood boil. I could hear Irena pacing the corridor of our house if she only knew. No doubt my sister would have started an argument; “Why did you walk away, they want to play mean, then you goddamn fight fire with fire”. God, she would have been pissed. Part of me believed she could have even won the games if she had ever been reaped.

Instead, I clenched my jaw and stabbed my fork into a bowl of potatoes. None of them sticking, and soon I would have turned it into a bowl of mash. All that was missing would have been my ma’s homemade gravy and maybe that would have. Been enough to calm me down.

“Assholes”

The little kid from twelve curses at a group of the careers. Their gaggling resembling a coven of disgruntled witches. Back in eleven I could see me placing a bet with Carlo that one of them would kill the others over stolen camera time.

“Got that right.”

I muttered back at the boy from twelve with a smile in my right corner. My eyes still glued to my own plate.

Then he clears his throat and I look up with a smile in the corner of my lips.
An invitation for him to put down his arts and crafts session. I was the youngest of my family, always glad to have my sisters in my corner. All grown up now, I was still shaken up being in the training center. He was from twelve, probably knew more about how rough the world could be than those careers ever would. That didn’t mean he couldn’t use someone in his corner. At least for now.

I let him talk, both of us staring at the careers. Neither of us even attempting to hide it, a part of me hoping they felt uncomfortable under our gaze. Who was I kidding, why would any of them be intimidated by two kids from the lowest of the districts.

“Y’know, I think it is a little bit of both. They got ‘The art of being a Bitch’ in the morning and then an afternoon of ‘101 ways to kill your friends’ “A good person probably wouldn’t have cursed in front of a kid…but hey! He started it. “I’m Tsiuri” I held out my hand for him to shake.