The Lunatic Within {Open}

Ayla Stern

Ayla Stern didn't do well in a crowded gym. It meant waiting for her turn, cooling down, having others breathe down her neck to "rush it, for f***s sake," and basically just getting a bad workout.

But this monthly or even weekly annoyance had started to creep up to a daily occurrence, a standard even. The centre was getting packed, with more parents' ego's taking over, driven by an idealized image of their son or daughter as a glorious victor.

She'd seen many kids come in adopting this poor attitude from their parents, expecting to work miracles on their first day. It was fun to see them fall on their face, but if she was honest with herself: a little tragic too.

So these days Ayla kicked herself out of bed at a time her bones still creaked and her muscles ached from yesterday's effort and a poor night's sleep. She never was a morning person, but after months of telling herself the opposite, her mind got halfway convinced. And that would have to do.

Sighing, she pushed open the door, surprised to find the lights on and a lone figure practicing in the distance. The crunch of a javelin piercing a dummy at center mass echoed through the room. She threw her towel and water bottle on the floor, kicked off her running shoes and advanced towards the mats in the center of the mostly abandoned exercise room. Outfitted in worn, loose sweatpants and a black T-shirt that had seen better days, Ayla started her workout, hoping that at the end she would stop feeling the way her clothes looked.

It was only when she decided to move onto weapons training that she started paying heed to the raw power and anger radiating off her lone companion. It was a blonde girl she vaguely recognized from training. They had never talked and the girl never stood out to Ayla until now.

Collecting the district issued throwing knives, she set out to complete her own rounds. The practice knives had long since become blunt and damaged from the many impacts forced to endure, and the balance on most of them was off. But it made for good practice, because who knew what the arena would cook up for them.

Hammer grip, thumb onto the narrow side of the knife, relaxed stance, loose shoulders, quick swing and "swooosh", the metal object had left her hand and buried itself in the dummy's eye. In the beginning, she had to practice with a horizontal stick to get the arm positioning right, but many drills had made this into second nature. Different grips, different positions, it didn't matter anymore. She was smacking them into the defenseless targets with the same concentration the blonde girl was throwing her javelins, though blondie's dummies had now started to acquire an extremely rough look.

Ayla had asked the training centre for a dead pig once, so the careers could get used to the idea of hitting actual flesh, but it was discarded without second thought. The ones that ran the place were obviously too squeamish, Ayla thought, even though they were training kids to fight to the death.

While pulling a knife from a her target's throat area, she eyed the girl next to her, whose javelin stood out from her dummy like an exclamation point, piercing it almost entirely.

"So what are you trying to do? Kill it?" Ayla asked, her voice neutral. There was something off about this girl, something she couldn't quite put her finger on. Ayla didn't pretend to be a great judge of people, but her gut was pretty reliable.