Author Games: Panem Entangled

When Stabbed By A Knife | Entries 7-12

District 7 Male: Noble Spruce

Ten seconds. The world was moving fast. Tributes stood on the top of their pedestals with their pale faces and sweaty palms. Noble glanced at them but it didn't seem to help. If anything, it only made things worse. His heart beat in an unsteady cadence, pounding, and skipping beats, and he could hear it in his head. The edges of his vision were blurred and it felt like he were seeing the world through a tunnel. He could start to feel the spikes of adrenaline as the timer dropped to five and he straightened his posture. Four. Three. Two.

The cannon went off.

Tributes ran from every direction, and Noble leaped off his pedestal. He raced them into the city where the cornucopia sat, and one by one, tributes went down. He tried to ignore it, instead, charging forward into the mess of bodies all fighting over backpacks and weaponry. An ax sat beside a sealed off manhole and he made a beeline for it. No one had noticed his presence yet and if he could just keep it that way—

"Noble!"

He whirled. A boy charged forward with a spear, and Noble dodged an incoming blow. He threw a glance over his shoulder to see a flash of ginger before cursing under his breath. His attacker wasn't giving up and when he charged again, Noble just barely dodged it. Goddammit, Puck.

"I thought I told you not to come," he hissed.

"But—"

There was no time to talk. When the boy from Two swung again, Noble didn't bother to dodge. He barreled into him at full force, knocking them both to the ground. The boy dropped his spear and together they fell on their backs hard. The impact of the fall made Noble wince and he struggled to get up. Rolling onto his stomach, he made a move for the sword. He reached out for it but the boy from Two had recovered faster. He hurled himself at Noble, and they wrestled on the city pavement.

"Puck," he'd managed to say. "A little help here?"

"But you said—"

"Puck."

"Okay, okay," she replied.

His attacker was now straddling him, his bony fingers wrapping around Noble's neck. From the corner of his eye, Noble could see Puck charging forward, throwing herself onto the boy's back before the two of them collapsed on top of him. Crawling out from under all the deadweight, he pushed himself toward where the sword was lying when the tip of his fingers grazed the handle. The sword moved a centimeter and then vanished. What the fuck?

Forcing his way out from under the entanglement of bodies, he pulled Puck onto her feet by her shoulders and didn't think twice before pulling her into a run. Somewhere along the line, his mentor had told him to be expecting a timed cornucopia and he couldn't afford to take any chances if that rumor were true. He could forget about the ax, he and Puck just needed to get out of there and fast.

If they could, anyway.

District 7 Female: Puck Georges-Bouffairet

Somewhere out there, there's a place where children are taught to read and books are free to be read. Puck goes to children's school and today, whenever that is, they all made möbius strips out of two-ply paper in any color imaginable; just because it was interesting and tangentially related to the topic being taught. When Puck gets home, she scribbles about it to her diary. It is a heartening entry which will soon be buried with rants of friends who are fantastic one page, and the subject of murder plots the next. One of the worst ones is a story, rather. Most of the characters from her original work end up in a situation not unlike the one a Puck from a different dimension finds herself in now. The Puck living here and now, authors herself winning with ease and killing without pause, though if she thought critically about it, that would not be the way it would go. Right now, whenever that is, she's too busy thinking the craft she did at school today and getting that onto the page. It makes for a good entry. That's how most journals are, some pages are looked back on with fondness, others aren't looked back on at all. It is what it is.