Author Games: Panemdemic

Entries of Fatigue

District 7 Female: Kaelyn 'Kaylee' Menorr

The click of the pedestal brings forth peculiar things- at least, given the certain situation.

Memories.

They swarm crazily through her mind, trample each other, and seem to tear at Kaelyn with vicious claws. A whisper of bright crimson hair tickles teasingly to Kaylee, and swiftly morphs into a trickling stream of blood on grass as it reaches Kaelyn's consciousness. Faded traces of a vibrant voice race alongside the wind, becoming a lost streak of colour in blackness, a final scream that trails forever in memory. She sees glimpses of elegant colours swirled together on a blurry canvas, a paint brush in the hand of a girl who aspired to replicate her sister's work, and watches as it shifts into the blade that took the sister's life.

It is quite an eccentric time for them to come, especially unbidden. Perhaps they have come to shake Kaelyn's stability, but the tremors of the quake reaches only Kaylee. To Kaelyn, the queer surges of remembrances are simply nuisances to time- howling, wailing, screaming as they grapple for her attention. They shriek of her negligence to them, but Kaelyn finds only agitation in the way they are heisting her time- watching with glee every second out of the few she has that ticks away into nothingness.

Then, a tribute falls.

The sound of it reaches Kaelyn's ears in a fraction of an instant- a resonating explosion, a sound that travels into the ground, an aftermath that rings in her mind, and savagely pierced through the remnants of the memories. With the blinking of her eyes as she attempts to see through the billowing of dust that clogged the air, Kaelyn registers her first moment of true clarity since entering the arena; active ground mines are buried underneath the pedestals until the gong rang, and it isno special knowledge. A feeling of unease- a sensation almost a stranger- settles in Kaelyn.

She grasps a horrible notion that something had infected her; it is a sudden idea, an almost terrifying idea of something out of her control. But it is an idea reflected on the expressions of the other tributes. Revisited once more as the previous week's training session's memory springs from nowhere. And suddenly, the image of the arena becomes wholly clear to Kaelyn- yet her time has finally run out of the clock.

The gong rings, sounding at a volume nearing that of the explosion. Kaelyn leaps into the air, momentarily flying- yet as her feet meet the ground, her knees collapse, scrape painfully against the stone. She knows something is not right with that; something is also not right with the way some tributes remain on their pedestal, expressions dazed with panic. But Kaelyn can only get up, and scramble to a broken-down fountain, laced with streaks of brown rust. There is green liquid in the fountain, a substance with elegant corpses of rotting rats, emitting a stench worthy to audition for Seven's sewers.

Some type of masks hang emptily from the edges of the fountains; Kaelyn daintily selects one without a rat's graceful tail curled up inside. There is a sense of malice in the air, one that penetrates through her sense of sereneness, and it's as if she can feel it slowing down her movements. Sounds of rapid footsteps alert Kaelyn, and she sprints away, fixing the mask onto her face- it's uncomfortable, but instinct told her it was necessary.Death himself has surely taken a walk in this arena. There are houses, but the only things that adorn them are bones. Eerie shadows dance from the eye sockets of skulls, jumping from every corner Kaelyn turns, and loom above her. But she feels only empty, for there is only a flower of budding curiosity that itches inside her, keeping her moving.She sees a building a few blocks away. It's an oddity in the town; a hospital that will stick out in no special way at the Capitol, but is a diamond among stone in this arena. Something invisible pushes Kaelyn to approach the door- perhapsthere is a party going on, though there is doubt in that contemplation- and prompts her to shove it open.