{hubris // stark

[gm bourgeois decadence [aya]]

I fell in with men
Who were wicked in the end
As we roam by and by
So these crimes multiply

Stark Harper —

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As she waited for Dante to show up — the great oaf had probably gotten lost, or had at least exited the feast on the other side — Stark decided to explore what she could of the sandcastle. She doubted that she'd be back here before the end of the Games, but wanted to see what the interesting Gamemaker-created structure had to offer. Including a structure that wouldn't actually occur on its own in nature wasn't something that they did very often — perhaps once or twice every decade or so — and the aspiring Gamemaker wanted to get a close look at what they had done. Despite all the Games she'd watch, studied, poured over, the 61st still offered the blonde girl the greatest opportunity to learn.

Everything she did here was easy, after all. Fighting was not her second nature, but her first. Survival was not that difficult if you'd studied the mistakes of the 1,380 others that had utterly failed in the Games before hers. True, she had always had trouble identifying plants — so she steered herself away from them; there were plenty of other food sources. It was as easy as that. Food was not that hard to come by. Water was even more available. Deaths due to amoebic dysentery, due to toxic plants, due to natural causes were so boring, so of course it was easy to find food, to find water. The hunger portion of the Hunger Games was just not that difficult if you were reasonably intelligent and thought like a Gamemaker. For that reason, Stark was quite good at surviving. The rest of the Games was just fighting, and she excelled at that.

Out of boredom, Stark stoked a small fire out of the driftwood that was scattered throughout the room while she waited for Cyclops to show his ugly mug. She plopped down next to it, even though the temperature must be pushing 90, staring into the flame absentmindedly as she dangled her water jug over it at the end of her gaff. After it had reached boiling point, she removed it from the fire, but neither drank it nor extinguished the miniature blaze that she'd created. Instead, she plucked the sphinx feather from her hair and began doodling an arena in the sand with it. Her left hand was shaky and unused to the delicate task of drawing, but it didn't have to be perfect. She started with a small circle in the center, then drew a ring around it, and an even larger one around that. She divided the middle ring into four areas with an x, and split up the outer into four areas with lines half way between each of the region borders on the middle circle.

She didn't label any of the areas she'd marked off, but began placing objects into the little regions instead. A rock or two here, little bits of driftwood there. She dug a small hole in one area, spitting in it to suggest something other than solid ground, then chased a tiny fiddler crab towards the middle of the map, and, as a final touch sketched a little 'C' in the center to denote the golden horn that marked the start of each Games.

She studied her work for an minute, for two, for five; she'd put it on paper later. And then she stood, stomped out her fire, and left.


[lights a fire, boils jug of water]
[collects additional driftwood]


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