Merry Ratmas, Python!
Dec 24, 2015 18:52:48 GMT -5
Post by aya on Dec 24, 2015 18:52:48 GMT -5
Rarely in her seventeen years as a Gamemaker had Dom Copperview empathized — with her colleagues, with her tributes, with anyone. Day Seven had begun with half the tributes still alive, and had been set up for a 42% reduction — not an easy day for anyone who had a stake in the outcome. Things had begun to go south as soon as Daria Staite's knife drew across Jequitiry's throat — not entirely unexpected, but a shock all the same.
Hell broke for half the Gamemaking duo when District Four got its second win for the day. Capricious King had wailed, had sunk her claws into the nearest party she deemed responsible, had been unceremoniously dismissed from Dom's office. Gamemaker Copperview had no patience for the dramatic among her staff, but she saw in King a familiar anguish that made it difficult to reprimand the rookie beyond that.
She need only think of the heavy mahogany desk upended, papers strewn about, her tablet smashed to smithereens under the wreckage to remind herself that such a reaction was a natural one — was a human one — to losing a tribute one had already envisioned as champion — regardless of whether or not they were truly worthy, as Capricious had deemed Chase. Whether or not Dom had agreed was irrelevant.
Some time later — after Dom lost her first District One, after District Twelve had been removed from the running by the big tribute from Eleven, after Corléon's pet had been taken by the Dullahan — the veteran summoned her partner back to the now-empty office.
"Have a seat," she instructed, gesturing at the high-backed leather chair that the seasoned Gamemaker herself so often occupied. Capricious hesitated for a moment - when Dom invited her visitors and underlings to sit, they were relegated to the stiff squat chairs that faced her. Never the Gamemaker's comfortable throne.
Too savvy to pass up a rare opportunity when it presented itself, King did not need to be told twice.
Gamemaker Copperview stood on her left, arms folded. Though her office was decorated with trophies and keepsakes from her Games, most were out of her line of vision. She didn't need to remind herself of her own triumphs; they were purely for the sake of her visitors, lest they forget precisely who they were dealing with. She wore her decades-long résumé of trophies on her back. The only reminder of who she was that Dom Copperview needed hung on the wall directly in front of her.
"I expect you won't lose your temper over a tribute again." Equal parts challenge and demand, Dom lay her statement on the table as stating a fact. She was not inviting discussion. On the rare occasions when she wanted other input, she'd ask. But no part of the veteran Gamemaker actually cared what Capricious King saw in Dustyn Chase. That wasn't the point. Nor was reprimanding her rookie.
She sighed, eyeing her charge. For the most part, Dom stayed out of the way of the newcomers — she didn't like them any more than they seemed to like her. They were younger and younger these days. Hell, the prodigies that were given charge of the next Games were scarcely half her age. She kept her distance from the others, unwilling to mentor them, unable to shake the creeping feeling that they'd replace her some day soon. If not the twins, then whoever came after them, or after them. Dom still had a more ideas in her back pocket than she could reasonably expect to implement in her lifetime, yet the concern that she'd be viewed as washed up or played out still lingered.
But with few colleagues to mentor, Dom Copperview felt compelled to seize what teachable moments that she could.
"Some things will always elude you, no matter how badly you want them." That was the lesson of the day, as it had been theme of Day Seven. Both of them had lost favorites: Dustyn for King, Ruth and Jequirity for Copperview. (Somewhere under house arrest, she knew that Kinkade was swearing up and down at his screen, cursing the Gamemaker for the death of his Jack in his Games. She'd hardly spared more than a moment's thought for her disgraced former partner, except to curse him back for the President's additional micromanaging.)
"Small scale and large. People are complicated. They don't always behave ideally." Despite having a special knack for coercing her tributes to move where she wanted them, to fight when she wished it, to kill each other at her behest, Dom Copperview was continually frustrated by the human element. The unpredictability was a thrill and a nuisance both. She'd be lying if she said she'd never been baffled by some of her tributes' choices. She'd be lying if she said she'd never raged at the consequences.
Dom leaned forward, pointed at the mounted weapon on the wall directly in front of Capricious King. Of all the trophies from all the Games that decorated her office, the pole arm was the only weapon. "Do you know who carried that?" she asked.
King was silent for a moment. Games trivia was less a hobby to the older Gamemaker and more an accidental side effect of the extreme focus Dom Copperview's mechanical mind set to each undertaking. It wasn't a trick question. "Julian Bryze?"
"He carried a glaive. This is a voulge." The correction was automatic, reflexive, but not altogether helpful. The difference between a voulge and a glaive was less than the difference between a carving knife and a boning knife. People who weren't Dom Copperview — to her endless annoyance — committed worse weapon-categorizing sins on a regular basis, even to the point of mixing up halberds and scythes. Just because they were swung the same didn't mean —
"No, not Avon Lightwood's either." She grasped how ill-conceived this guessing game was and put an end to it:
"Akina Hooper picked up this voulge in the bloodbath," she explained. "Andal Ferde took it off her corpse and gave it to Mikhail Ivashkov."
She turned away from the weapon, facing the shelves filled with trinkets. She'd kept several from the 64th: the hair band Yaa Valarro had used to set a trap during her training session, compelling Dom to send all twenty-four tributes into the arena with them; the third key to the wealth chests, still in the velvet bag embroidered 4 and spotted with Florence Hartmyre's blood (into which it had been dropped by Opal Shore, who seemed to do alright without the opportunity to claim a treasure); the walkie talkie that Locust had been given after the Bloodbath.
She sighed, picked up the battered electronic, thumbed the switch. It crackled to life in her palm. Dom wasn't sure what had happened to the others; sometimes the tributes' items were auctioned off, others were kept in the museums of the previous arenas. She claimed a memento or two each year and let go of the rest. She turned the orphaned device over in her hand, then switched it back off.
"Do you know how many tributes I've scored an 11?" Some Gamemakers gave out double-digits like participant ribbons, but Dom demanded to be wowed before she'd even consider a 10. This year, there had been two; her last Games, only one tribute had even managed to scrape a Nine - the acrobatic, technically precise Pearl Millison. A favorite of Dom's from those Games, slain by the first Rhodes boy to pass through her Training Center. That had been a disappointment she'd borne with grace, twenty-two tributes more experienced.
"Two." One hundred forty-four tributes had shown Dom Copperview what they were made of, and she'd only been truly floored by two. She'd been impressed by a handful of 10s - Lexig and Corléon, Grimm and Valarro, Moreno, Charlesburg — but had only given her highest honor to two.
"Julian Bryze got his crown." Her favorite victor from the outset, he'd lived up to and surpassed every expectation she had of him. A ruthless showman with unrivaled technical precision and a pedigree, he'd been the genuine opposite of her previous victors. She appreciated him for it. The ratings had been record-breaking; culminating with her victor, Dom's second Quell had been perfect.
She'd seen her share of disappointments since, but had felt none so deeply as the 64th Hunger Games.
"But Locust Lovelace got away from me," she said, an uncharacteristic softness creeping into her voice. Dom placed the walkie talkie back on the shelf, cleared her throat, and leaned against her desk.
Swift. Clever. Brutal. Locust Lovelace had exuded a collectedness that the seasoned Gamemaker had not seen replicated, before or since. She was levelheaded and put together without being an apparent sociopath (Corléon); she was precise and disciplined without stiffness or hesitation (Millison); she had enough clever tricks up her sleeve to trip up her opponents without being reliant on them (Chase).
But Locust Lovelace had no equal.
The District Four had been a favorite those Games, and not just Dom's. She had a sneaking suspicion that a portion of it was as shallow as 'Cricket and then Locust, a matched set!' But for someone solely responsible for ensuring that the Hunger Games were enjoyed by the masses, the stern Head Gamemaker gave astoundingly few fucks what the masses were saying.
Still, the Capitolites were known to occasionally exhibit something that resembled good taste. And Dom didn't think a single one of them was dim enough to disapprove of her prized tribute — from her well-earned training score and charisma, to the compelling narrative with her and Valarro, there was nothing to dislike and much to adore.
Dom shook her head. "She was the best, the best to ever grace my arenas. A once-in-a-lifetime tribute. There will always be those that catch your eye, but when true greatness stands in the Training Center, you'll feel it."
There was silence for a moment.
"What happened?"
"I miscalculated."
Dom had not expected Yaa Valarro to waffle. The two had run into one another a number of times over the course of the Games, had kept in contact via walkie-talkie. When it had been Locust and her ally — one Opal Shore, baring more teeth than Dom had seen before or since — Yaa went unharmed. But from his dismal private training session forward, the seasoned Gamemaker had made the fatal mistake of underestimating Mikhail Ivashkov. Or, perhaps, overestimating the scrappy District Seven she'd favored nearly as much as her frontrunner.
She'd run the numbers a dozen times on her computer, a hundred times in her head before, and turned them over and over in her brain a thousand sleepless nights since. No part of Dom had ever doubted that Locust could take the curly-headed District Six on his own. In fact, before she'd arranged the run-in, Gamemaker Copperview had been entirely confident that Locust could've taken both District Six and Seven together, if that was the way the chips had fallen.
She didn't account for the distraction that an indecisive Yaa Valarro would be.
"Sometimes, no matter how you stack the odds, even Gamemakers are left at the mercy of the arena," she muttered, arms crossed tight against her chest.
"Did you... do anything about it?"
The Gamemaker let out a low chuckle, unnerving in the way it combined both authenticity and vengefulness.
"My retribution was as swift as his voulge when it speared her throat." She hadn't stepped in before then — it wasn't until Ivashkov had taken off her would-be champion's leg off that Dom had even thought to worry, and even then she wouldn't stoop to intentionally interfering with single-combat. Not even to aid a favorite. But the minute she'd had to fire that cannon, she placed herself behind the controls.
"First it was the living moss," she said. "I meant to strangle him with it — I wanted to. But when he cut himself free, I let him go."
"Why?"
"Because killing him isn't my job." That was a common misconception about Gamemakers — even the President seemed to hold on to the notion that it was up to Dom to lay waste to whichever tributes he decided ought not win. "I could've spun up a herd of combistiphants, sent him into the clutches of my army of armored sloths — hell, I could've dropped the entire banyan tree on him. It would raise questions, yes, but I could've done it."
She stood, paced over to the mounted pole arm. "They've called me old-school for it, but I've always felt that such cheap tricks diminished the integrity of my Games. Should it be perfectly fair?"
The question hung like a noose.
"...perhaps not. Certainly I have favorites — though I'm above the blatant biases that got Glamour Kinkade fired — but that doesn't mean I won't test them. If they can't rise to the challenge, are they worthy of the crown?"
She shrugged. Somehow there was a distinction between differing degrees of disadvantage — moss ensnaring Mikhail, lava crippling Heron, lightning striking her one-man palanquin — than directly laying a tribute to waste. In her earlier years, Dom had been decidedly more willing to dole out unbalanced adversity. Since her second quell onward, she'd left much and more up to chance.
"I made Yaa finish the job. Made her pay for her inaction." She pulled the voulge from the wall, spun it once, gave a few practice jabs at an imaginary opponent.
"It's a lesson every Gamemaker has to learn sooner or later: Some things will always elude you, no matter how badly you want them." She made a swift cut with the voulge, burying the sharp blade into the paneling beneath the mounting braces. "Next time," she cautioned, "don't lose your head about it."
Hell broke for half the Gamemaking duo when District Four got its second win for the day. Capricious King had wailed, had sunk her claws into the nearest party she deemed responsible, had been unceremoniously dismissed from Dom's office. Gamemaker Copperview had no patience for the dramatic among her staff, but she saw in King a familiar anguish that made it difficult to reprimand the rookie beyond that.
She need only think of the heavy mahogany desk upended, papers strewn about, her tablet smashed to smithereens under the wreckage to remind herself that such a reaction was a natural one — was a human one — to losing a tribute one had already envisioned as champion — regardless of whether or not they were truly worthy, as Capricious had deemed Chase. Whether or not Dom had agreed was irrelevant.
Some time later — after Dom lost her first District One, after District Twelve had been removed from the running by the big tribute from Eleven, after Corléon's pet had been taken by the Dullahan — the veteran summoned her partner back to the now-empty office.
"Have a seat," she instructed, gesturing at the high-backed leather chair that the seasoned Gamemaker herself so often occupied. Capricious hesitated for a moment - when Dom invited her visitors and underlings to sit, they were relegated to the stiff squat chairs that faced her. Never the Gamemaker's comfortable throne.
Too savvy to pass up a rare opportunity when it presented itself, King did not need to be told twice.
Gamemaker Copperview stood on her left, arms folded. Though her office was decorated with trophies and keepsakes from her Games, most were out of her line of vision. She didn't need to remind herself of her own triumphs; they were purely for the sake of her visitors, lest they forget precisely who they were dealing with. She wore her decades-long résumé of trophies on her back. The only reminder of who she was that Dom Copperview needed hung on the wall directly in front of her.
"I expect you won't lose your temper over a tribute again." Equal parts challenge and demand, Dom lay her statement on the table as stating a fact. She was not inviting discussion. On the rare occasions when she wanted other input, she'd ask. But no part of the veteran Gamemaker actually cared what Capricious King saw in Dustyn Chase. That wasn't the point. Nor was reprimanding her rookie.
She sighed, eyeing her charge. For the most part, Dom stayed out of the way of the newcomers — she didn't like them any more than they seemed to like her. They were younger and younger these days. Hell, the prodigies that were given charge of the next Games were scarcely half her age. She kept her distance from the others, unwilling to mentor them, unable to shake the creeping feeling that they'd replace her some day soon. If not the twins, then whoever came after them, or after them. Dom still had a more ideas in her back pocket than she could reasonably expect to implement in her lifetime, yet the concern that she'd be viewed as washed up or played out still lingered.
But with few colleagues to mentor, Dom Copperview felt compelled to seize what teachable moments that she could.
"Some things will always elude you, no matter how badly you want them." That was the lesson of the day, as it had been theme of Day Seven. Both of them had lost favorites: Dustyn for King, Ruth and Jequirity for Copperview. (Somewhere under house arrest, she knew that Kinkade was swearing up and down at his screen, cursing the Gamemaker for the death of his Jack in his Games. She'd hardly spared more than a moment's thought for her disgraced former partner, except to curse him back for the President's additional micromanaging.)
"Small scale and large. People are complicated. They don't always behave ideally." Despite having a special knack for coercing her tributes to move where she wanted them, to fight when she wished it, to kill each other at her behest, Dom Copperview was continually frustrated by the human element. The unpredictability was a thrill and a nuisance both. She'd be lying if she said she'd never been baffled by some of her tributes' choices. She'd be lying if she said she'd never raged at the consequences.
Dom leaned forward, pointed at the mounted weapon on the wall directly in front of Capricious King. Of all the trophies from all the Games that decorated her office, the pole arm was the only weapon. "Do you know who carried that?" she asked.
King was silent for a moment. Games trivia was less a hobby to the older Gamemaker and more an accidental side effect of the extreme focus Dom Copperview's mechanical mind set to each undertaking. It wasn't a trick question. "Julian Bryze?"
"He carried a glaive. This is a voulge." The correction was automatic, reflexive, but not altogether helpful. The difference between a voulge and a glaive was less than the difference between a carving knife and a boning knife. People who weren't Dom Copperview — to her endless annoyance — committed worse weapon-categorizing sins on a regular basis, even to the point of mixing up halberds and scythes. Just because they were swung the same didn't mean —
"No, not Avon Lightwood's either." She grasped how ill-conceived this guessing game was and put an end to it:
"Akina Hooper picked up this voulge in the bloodbath," she explained. "Andal Ferde took it off her corpse and gave it to Mikhail Ivashkov."
She turned away from the weapon, facing the shelves filled with trinkets. She'd kept several from the 64th: the hair band Yaa Valarro had used to set a trap during her training session, compelling Dom to send all twenty-four tributes into the arena with them; the third key to the wealth chests, still in the velvet bag embroidered 4 and spotted with Florence Hartmyre's blood (into which it had been dropped by Opal Shore, who seemed to do alright without the opportunity to claim a treasure); the walkie talkie that Locust had been given after the Bloodbath.
She sighed, picked up the battered electronic, thumbed the switch. It crackled to life in her palm. Dom wasn't sure what had happened to the others; sometimes the tributes' items were auctioned off, others were kept in the museums of the previous arenas. She claimed a memento or two each year and let go of the rest. She turned the orphaned device over in her hand, then switched it back off.
"Do you know how many tributes I've scored an 11?" Some Gamemakers gave out double-digits like participant ribbons, but Dom demanded to be wowed before she'd even consider a 10. This year, there had been two; her last Games, only one tribute had even managed to scrape a Nine - the acrobatic, technically precise Pearl Millison. A favorite of Dom's from those Games, slain by the first Rhodes boy to pass through her Training Center. That had been a disappointment she'd borne with grace, twenty-two tributes more experienced.
"Two." One hundred forty-four tributes had shown Dom Copperview what they were made of, and she'd only been truly floored by two. She'd been impressed by a handful of 10s - Lexig and Corléon, Grimm and Valarro, Moreno, Charlesburg — but had only given her highest honor to two.
"Julian Bryze got his crown." Her favorite victor from the outset, he'd lived up to and surpassed every expectation she had of him. A ruthless showman with unrivaled technical precision and a pedigree, he'd been the genuine opposite of her previous victors. She appreciated him for it. The ratings had been record-breaking; culminating with her victor, Dom's second Quell had been perfect.
She'd seen her share of disappointments since, but had felt none so deeply as the 64th Hunger Games.
"But Locust Lovelace got away from me," she said, an uncharacteristic softness creeping into her voice. Dom placed the walkie talkie back on the shelf, cleared her throat, and leaned against her desk.
Swift. Clever. Brutal. Locust Lovelace had exuded a collectedness that the seasoned Gamemaker had not seen replicated, before or since. She was levelheaded and put together without being an apparent sociopath (Corléon); she was precise and disciplined without stiffness or hesitation (Millison); she had enough clever tricks up her sleeve to trip up her opponents without being reliant on them (Chase).
But Locust Lovelace had no equal.
The District Four had been a favorite those Games, and not just Dom's. She had a sneaking suspicion that a portion of it was as shallow as 'Cricket and then Locust, a matched set!' But for someone solely responsible for ensuring that the Hunger Games were enjoyed by the masses, the stern Head Gamemaker gave astoundingly few fucks what the masses were saying.
Still, the Capitolites were known to occasionally exhibit something that resembled good taste. And Dom didn't think a single one of them was dim enough to disapprove of her prized tribute — from her well-earned training score and charisma, to the compelling narrative with her and Valarro, there was nothing to dislike and much to adore.
Dom shook her head. "She was the best, the best to ever grace my arenas. A once-in-a-lifetime tribute. There will always be those that catch your eye, but when true greatness stands in the Training Center, you'll feel it."
There was silence for a moment.
"What happened?"
"I miscalculated."
Dom had not expected Yaa Valarro to waffle. The two had run into one another a number of times over the course of the Games, had kept in contact via walkie-talkie. When it had been Locust and her ally — one Opal Shore, baring more teeth than Dom had seen before or since — Yaa went unharmed. But from his dismal private training session forward, the seasoned Gamemaker had made the fatal mistake of underestimating Mikhail Ivashkov. Or, perhaps, overestimating the scrappy District Seven she'd favored nearly as much as her frontrunner.
She'd run the numbers a dozen times on her computer, a hundred times in her head before, and turned them over and over in her brain a thousand sleepless nights since. No part of Dom had ever doubted that Locust could take the curly-headed District Six on his own. In fact, before she'd arranged the run-in, Gamemaker Copperview had been entirely confident that Locust could've taken both District Six and Seven together, if that was the way the chips had fallen.
She didn't account for the distraction that an indecisive Yaa Valarro would be.
"Sometimes, no matter how you stack the odds, even Gamemakers are left at the mercy of the arena," she muttered, arms crossed tight against her chest.
"Did you... do anything about it?"
The Gamemaker let out a low chuckle, unnerving in the way it combined both authenticity and vengefulness.
"My retribution was as swift as his voulge when it speared her throat." She hadn't stepped in before then — it wasn't until Ivashkov had taken off her would-be champion's leg off that Dom had even thought to worry, and even then she wouldn't stoop to intentionally interfering with single-combat. Not even to aid a favorite. But the minute she'd had to fire that cannon, she placed herself behind the controls.
"First it was the living moss," she said. "I meant to strangle him with it — I wanted to. But when he cut himself free, I let him go."
"Why?"
"Because killing him isn't my job." That was a common misconception about Gamemakers — even the President seemed to hold on to the notion that it was up to Dom to lay waste to whichever tributes he decided ought not win. "I could've spun up a herd of combistiphants, sent him into the clutches of my army of armored sloths — hell, I could've dropped the entire banyan tree on him. It would raise questions, yes, but I could've done it."
She stood, paced over to the mounted pole arm. "They've called me old-school for it, but I've always felt that such cheap tricks diminished the integrity of my Games. Should it be perfectly fair?"
The question hung like a noose.
"...perhaps not. Certainly I have favorites — though I'm above the blatant biases that got Glamour Kinkade fired — but that doesn't mean I won't test them. If they can't rise to the challenge, are they worthy of the crown?"
She shrugged. Somehow there was a distinction between differing degrees of disadvantage — moss ensnaring Mikhail, lava crippling Heron, lightning striking her one-man palanquin — than directly laying a tribute to waste. In her earlier years, Dom had been decidedly more willing to dole out unbalanced adversity. Since her second quell onward, she'd left much and more up to chance.
"I made Yaa finish the job. Made her pay for her inaction." She pulled the voulge from the wall, spun it once, gave a few practice jabs at an imaginary opponent.
"It's a lesson every Gamemaker has to learn sooner or later: Some things will always elude you, no matter how badly you want them." She made a swift cut with the voulge, burying the sharp blade into the paneling beneath the mounting braces. "Next time," she cautioned, "don't lose your head about it."
Merry Ratmas, Python ! Wanted to take a minute to reflect on one of my absolute all time favorite tributes - IC and OOC both - hope you enjoy^^
