Public Training Sessions!

[Kire]

Does, Says, Thinks

The lack of an ocean was already making her feel weak, empty, lost, and she hadn't even gotten into the arena yet. How was she to know if she would even have an ocean to go to once she got in there. Water had to come from somewhere, but the sea was not always included. The thought of dying without one last touch of the ocean's waves crushed her and she struggled against her deflating hopes. In front of her the District one and two male and female had been ushered into the room to disappear behind unyielding walls. There was no way to know what they were doing in an attempt to impress the Gamemakers, and part of her didn't want to know anyway. It seemed like any hints she might get would only press hard on her shoulders and leave her gasping for air.

Then the District three tributes were called in one by one and she watched, silent and glum, as they too disappeared. She had no idea what feats they attempted, and even less of an idea as to what she might do. For all of her years training as a Career she still felt completely unprepared for this moment, and all the moments to come. Surely she could just fall on her training and work on trying to show the Gamemakers she knew what she was doing. Only that would fail, because she really had no idea. Finally it was her turn, her name was called and she stood. Looking back at the remaining tributes she could only be thankful that she wasn't last. Breathing in, she turned on her heel only to freeze for a moment. The two sides of her were discussing, and one was winning out.

It was no longer time to try and protect Reef, he was too far away and she was too far gone. She could no longer base her actions on what he would want and what he would see. Instead, it was time to be like Ray - it was time to make her mark and show that she had had training. Ray, this one's for you. Able to let go of her restraints, she narrowed her eyes and walked into the room on light and purposeful steps. Time to show just the kind of training she had had all her life - water and stealth. Her eyes locked onto the pool that she had so often abstained from touching. As a tribute from District four it would be no surprise to anyone that her strength lay in swimming, but she couldn't let it be known what her other water-related talents might be. It was time to let go of restrictions.

Her first manner of business was to get herself some victims. Like in the tales of old she drew in her prey with song, her voice attempting to hold a solid melody as she began to lug targets around. It was a show of strength in and of itself, dragging those dummies into placements around the pool. Some had their backs turned to the water, others faced the pool openly. Once that was done, she went shopping for some weapons, snatching the lone trident and the better looking of the bows from their holders to place them at the pool side. She had picked a spot halfway along one side, right over the depth marker, leaving her plenty of space on either side. A moment later she grabbed a serrated knife similar to some of the tools she had seen on her father's ship. Still singing, though she wasn't paying enough attention to whether there were actual words or just a flowing melody, she went back to her pile and placed the knife with her two other weapons before quickly lowering her hands to the edge of her shirt.

With ease, and no care about what she was doing, she pulled her shirt off over her head and swiftly followed it with her pants. The fabric would do nothing more than slow her down, but she had too much modesty to strip completely naked in front of numerous people - a fair number of them men her father's age. Eagerly, her deprivation of the water's embrace driving her mad for those last few seconds, she stretched her arms above her head and dove into the water with as sleek of a form as she could muster. She nearly bumped against the bottom but a small twist of her torso left her with an inch to spare. It took some effort to remind herself she still had a show to put on, and could not relax in the water for all she would like to. I am the Siren, I am the water monster. Now she only had to prove it.

She burst to the surface, hands grabbing the edge and pushing to use her momentum to help propel her from the water and onto the ledge around the pool. As she had planned, she was beside her weapons pile. She snatched up the knife and in a second's time was back in the water, driving herself towards the dummy on the opposite side. Three strokes and she used the same movement to send herself onto dry land. Knife raised, she pushed against the ground with her feet, driving herself upwards at the dummy to plunge her knife in the side of its neck. With her weight and velocity, the pair of them were sent to the ground. The thud knocked the breath out of her for a moment and she tried to hide her gasping by ripping the dagger from the dummy's neck. Grabbing it by the forehead she slit its throat and stood up, her eyes already searching for her next target.

Selecting the unfortunate dummy, she moved as fast as she dared on the wet, slippery floor, knife in hand. She bent around the corner of the pool as tightly as she could, trying to use every short-cut she could manage - she couldn't have the Gamemakers getting bored. As she approached she sped up, jumping to hook her left arm around the dummy's neck as she attempted to knock it backward into the water. She was successful, and soon the water held her once again. Had it been a real person, and they were facing the water like the dummy was, there would have been little chance for them to get out of the way. Smiling, she stabbed the knife into the dummy's stomach and left it there, letting knife and dummy sink as she power-kicked to the surface. She pushed off of the wall and slid from the water by her pile, her hand clasping around the handle of the trident. The trident flew from her grip like a snake's bite, her throw sending the weapon at the nearest dummy, and she let out a singing note as it stuck solidly in her victim's side. A few steps brought her to the end of her weapon and she yanked it out of the fake flesh. Taking a step and swinging the spear-like weapon she plunged the trident's three prongs into the chest of the dummy. It drove the stand-in backwards into the water and she turned back to her only remaining weapon, the bow and arrows, even as it sank to the bottom.

Her third weapons in her hands, she was stood where it had been shooting arrows at the two remaining dummies. She wasn't as competent with the bow as the knife or trident, but all of her arrows hit the dummies, though most weren't serious injuries. Feeling satisfied that she was more comfortable with this bow, she dove once more into the water's embrace, the synthetic body of the bow acting to break the water's surface tension for her. Now she bobbed at the surface, notching arrows and drawing the string back to shoot at her last two targets from the water. She was soon out of arrows and so she then swam, still holding the bow, towards one of the two remaining dummies. Hooking the bow around the shins of the dummy, she yanked backwards, sending the target tumbling onto its face with a smack. She let the bow fall from her grasp and, using the wall to brace against with her feet, dragged the dummy into the water. Twisting at the last moment, she avoided getting pinned underneath the stand-in. The body sank past her and she admired the flattened look to its face before diving towards the dummy with the trident still in its chest.

With one target left she knew this would have to be the climax and the conclusion, she couldn't slack off when the end was in sight. Gripping the trident in both hands she yanked at it, it moved but didn't come free of the dummy's chest. Trying once more with another hard tug - her feet placed on the dummy's shoulders this time - she retrieved it and swam up to the surface. Raising her weapon above the water, rivulets of water streaking down the length of it, she threw it at the final dummy. It stuck securely in the torso and she dove back underwater. Knowing that she would need a large amount of momentum to manage this, she readied herself to launch herself as high out of the water as she could. Pushing off of the bottom she tried to maintain a good speed until she burst from the surface. She placed her hands on the ledge and drove herself higher until one foot could plant itself on the wall. Using her remaining momentum and the power in her leg to boost herself the final hight, she grabbed the trident. It was all about tossing the dummy now and giving the Gamemakers a spectacular finish that they wouldn't forget. Trying to use her weight, she focused on flipping the dummy over her to launch it into the middle of the pool. The stand-in was too heavy for her, though and it ended up not working quite right. Pinned underneath the dummy instead of being clear, she had to kick and thrash in order to struggle free.

The dummy now sinking without her, she took a brief moment to calm herself before swimming towards the air and the end of her show. Breaking the surface, she floated momentarily as she contemplated retrieving the weapons from the drowned dummies but it seemed like too much of an effort and too much of a suck up move. Instead, she swam to the stairs and walked out like a normal person. Stooping only to sweep up her discarded clothes, she paid the Gamemakers no attention as she left - still dripping.

OTHER
Words: 1789

---

District four was something of a disappointment when it came to the games. Despite producing memorable tributes and fierce careers on an almost yearly basis, they hadn't won a games in recent history. Certainly not during Cadence's lifetime. It was a case of always being the bridesmaid and never being the bride. The runner up, not the winner. And it didn't seem like anything would break that streak. That being said, Cadence kept an open mind as Siren Baitwell entered the room. It was probable that she'd score well but there really no correlation between training scores and how well a tribute did in the games. That was up to the tribute.

As was expected, Siren went for several dummies first, arranging them around the pool.

What was not expected was the haunting tune that bubbled out of the tributes lips as she went about her work. It was...different. So different, that Cadence found her interest piqued. Siren went on to grab not one, not two, but three weapons and brought them to the edge of the pool. Was it possible that she was skilled in the art of killing with all of the above?

It was then that Siren started to take her clothes off.

Cadence rolled her eyes. Exhibitionism was Glamour's slice of cake, not hers. If a tribute was competent they didn't need to be half naked to keep someones attention off of the fight. Quite frankly, while it was a known fact that teenagers were full of hormones, watching tributes throw themselves at each other in the arena year after year had gotten stale and uninteresting. Honestly, it seemed like more often than not, kisses were traded more than attacks were.

After vanishing into the water, Siren reappeared, dispatching each of the dummies with an expert hand, leaving no weapon unused. The last dummy was dragged into the water with Siren and from Cadence could tell, it looked like Siren was miming drowning her last "opponent". All in all, it was damn entertaining.

A nine then.

There weren't any large bodies of water in the arena but Cadence didn't think Siren would need that to lure other tributes to their deaths. Cadence turned to her partner with an almost amused smirk on her face.

"Let's see what this fish can do out of water shall we?"

[L△LIA]

For what it’s worth, no one in the world knows who the real Nocturne Vargas is.

Over the course of the last few days, he has been a silent death-walker; a rowdy, cackling prankster; a half-crazed drunkard in a floor-length fur coat so flamboyant that most Capitolites would swoon with envy at the sight of him; a sarcastic wannabe princess, with fluttering eyelashes and the most annoyingly high-pitched voice he could manage; and for an hour or so, he even tried his best to be the spitting image of his decidedly dyed-in-the wool Mentor, Colgate O’Leary. The last one turned out to be more tiring than fun, although giving his District partner an exaggerated lecture about how "This is a time for serious faces!" — and making the poor girl have a contest with him as to who could look the most stodgy, on ‘threat’ of cleaning her mouth out with soap — was fairly entertaining.

Puns and practical jokes aside, there isn’t a soul he’s encountered within the Training Center who knows anything about him except whatever ridiculous lies he was in the mood to tell at the moment. Then again, there was never another choice. Thanks to the amnesia, he doesn’t even know himself.

For the past two years (maybe he wasn’t even alive before that, he doesn’t know), he’s been making himself up as a new person every day. Pretending himself into the lives of strangers or stories he might have invented or heard once upon a time he can’t remember… this is life.

Standing in line for his private training session, mulling over ten thousand disjointed ideas for what he’s supposed to do in that room, he realizes that being anything other than himself is the only skill he has. Without friends or family, he may have nothing to lose, but he also has nothing to fight for… except maybe that stubborn, unspoken hope that he’ll figure out how to fill in the blank space within his head someday. Until then he’s just fighting himself.

“Nocturne Vargas!”

The name he’s still not a hundred percent convinced is even his echoes through the hall and he turns to his District partner beside him — “Hold onto these a sec for me, will ya?” — shedding the ostentatious fur coat he’s been insistently donning since finding it on the train ride here and draping it over her shoulders before May can object. Removing the tiara from his head, he places that upon her own as well, grinning as he crowns her with an overdramatic, showy wave of his hands. “I crown thee Maiden May!” For the next three seconds his face is bright and childish, alight with the kind of light-hearted smirk that could make a person forget the place, time, and everything else about the kind of lousy situation the two kids from District Nine have found themselves in. Truth be told — regardless of what anyone around here may have to say about the boy’s antics — that fleeting feeling of forgetfulness he’s trying to pass along to the girl beside him in the disguise of glittering rhinestones and a coat that’s surely worth more than both the homes they’ve left behind, it’s not an accident.

As he turns, however, it all falls away.

The toothy smile collapses into the hard-edged scowl of a man who owned one of the bars around Nine. Everyone called the guy Butch and he looked just as tough as his name. Nocturne worked odd jobs for him now an then, filling in as a bar-back or wrestling drunkards out into the back alley for a last chance to sober up. Butch called him The Kid and had a limp just like Nocturne, except the floorboards would shudder beneath the slow, heavy THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. of his menacing footsteps. Nocturne used to think it might be fun to grow into an old, grumpy badass like Butch, imagining ten thousand theories for his sometimes-boss’s past, just the same as he did for himself.

Today that imaginary past becomes a very real present and The Kid drops the entire weight of his body into each thumping footstep of his bum leg, walking through the door and into the Gamemaker’s room sounding as if he were a man at least three times his size. Intimidating. A force to be reckoned with. A grumpy old badass, because the people in this room? This moment is all they know of Nocturne Vargas, so he can be anyone he wants.

A couple days of scruff bristles on his jaw as he clenches it, grabbing a small knife up from a table and using it to pick at a fleck of food stuck between his teeth for a moment, before casually flipping it into the air a few inches, as if he and the knife were old friends who knew each other well. Butch used to do the same thing with a pocketknife whenever someone showed up in his bar, looking at him the wrong way. Toss and catch. Toss and catch. Toss and catch. Nocturne would practice copying the movement, obsessing over the way it felt natural. Familiar. Like a long-lost memory.

Even now, he thinks, maybe he’s not making anything up. Maybe this is who he used to be.

With his wildly disheveled hair and crooked, echoing footsteps, right now he’s certainly not anyone the other Tributes have met. To some he’s a joke. Maybe a friendly face. Others might think him their easy prey, but they wouldn’t if they were here to witness the way he wields the blade in his hand, gutting a canvas dummy in order to steal a strip of it’s make-believe skin and nailing the piece of canvas to the back of a wide, square scrap of wood with the hilt of his knife — each slam of the weapon against the metal nails screaming violently throughout the room.

When he leaves here, he will probably laugh to himself like a giggling thirteen-year-old girl as he thinks back on his performance.

Despite the hindrance of his limp, he’s learned how to move quickly when he has to and he does, makeshift shield in one hand and a dagger in the other. There is a whirling dust-storm of urgency in his veins and it takes the earlier weight of his footsteps and hurls it into his hands as he whirls around as quickly as he can, flinging the dagger at the metal side of one of the machines in the room. Within a split second it ricochets back at him, spinning jagged through the air before lodging itself into his shield. Pulling the weapon free from the wood, he hurls it at the wall again, and once more it bounces back toward him, only to be captured by his defenses.

Now, as always, Nocturne Vargas is only fighting himself.

Picking up more knives from the table, he continues ricocheting weapons at himself, throwing his head back and whooping with haphazard adrenaline. Some fly off unpredictably throughout the room, but others come back at him like wicked shrapnel, lodging themselves in his shield one after another until the growing weight of metal causes it to crack and splinter apart in his hands, forcing him to duck out of the way as the last knife whirls out in search of his unprotected heart. He rolls across the floor, heaving with a dense, crowing cackle of laughter and, even now, the smile that splits his face is nothing like the one he gave to his District partner only a few minutes earlier. This one is all crooked edges and chipped teeth from the mysterious day of his accident, the spitting image of Butch, the might-have-been-outlaw Nocturne stole it from.

Somewhere across the room, there’s a clank of metal: the knife hitting the floor in defeat. As The Kid hauls himself up and walks out of the room with the same intense, earthquaking footsteps he entered with, it’s hard to say whether the boy has won or lost this battle. Regardless, this isn’t the first time Nocturne Vargas has fought with himself and it certainly won’t be the last.

Nocturne Vargas was one of the few tributes Cadence had heard rumors about before hand. One, because he had a limp which was a clear disadvantage in the arena, but the other reason was that he was generally thought to be quite...weird. However, the tribute that entered when his name was called had a much harder edge to him than she would have expected. And what he chose to do? Cadence didn't think she had ever heard of a tribute using one of the machines to attack themselves. And yet Nocturne deflected all the blades that the wall tossed back at him.Tributes that were capable of protecting themselves were so rare. And to find out that a sharp mind hid under the mask of the simpleton that Nocturne portrayed so convincingly in the training center? Cake. Albeit a slice of low fat, all natural cane sugar pound cake with no frosting, but still cake nonetheless. She would definitely be keeping an eye on the Vargas boy. Several scores whizzed around in her head as she leaned over to see what Glamour was doing in his notes. Once they compared, Cadence wrote a small eight down next to his name."Now we'll just have to hope that he and Soap don't disappoint." she mused to herself as the next tribute's name was called.