Day One
Sponsorship
The winner of today’s sponsorship vote is…Sarena Foster of District 5!
Sarena Foster, D5 Female
Congrats Sarena, you get a free attribute point added to your lowest attribute (Strength).
Day One
Cole Dennis, D5 Male
My jumpsuit clings to every inch of my body, and I tug at the pinch points as my metal pad slowly rises towards the arena. This is it. The moment I’ve been waiting for for weeks now. The moment where I start my journey towards victory.
No one from my district has even come close to the finale, ever. And I know no one’s expecting me to either. But I’ll prove them all wrong. As soon as my plate clicks into place at the top of the lift tube and the sixty second wait period ends, I’ll be storming towards the nearest weapons and making my first kill.
The lid of the tube slides open, bathing me in warm sunlight. I’m ready. I’m so ready!
But as my plate finishes its ascension and I get my first look at the arena, my enthusiasm trickles away. Because there’s nowhere to run.
Michal Gliszewski, D1 Male
It takes a couple seconds for my eyes to adjust to the glare, but once they do, all I see at first is water. The Cornucopia lies ahead, half-submerged in the center of a giant lagoon. Water laps at the edges of my pad as I glance around at the never-ending sea, interrupted only by six islands of varying size and distance from the Cornucopia.
The woman from 5 stands on the pad to my right, her eyes locked on one of the many floating containers and duffel bags scattered around the lagoon. There’s nothing in the Cornucopia but saltwater; we’ll either have to grab a duffel bag and hope for the best, or go scrounging through the containers to find exactly what we need.
I’ve barely made headway on which option is best for me and my alliance when the gong sounds.
Tributes splash into the water, and I impulsively follow. The Games have begun.
Emily Paddon, D3 Female
Call me weak, but my immediate concern when I see the arena is how in the hell my ally Ily from 6 is going to survive in her power chair. As tributes leap into the water, I scan the pads until I find her. Relief floods over me as I see that she’s managed to roll off of her pad and right onto a sandbar.
My body snaps suddenly and violently as I’m tackled off of my pad and into the water by a great force, my face grinds against the seafloor in the knee-high water (Attribute Point Lost). Surfacing quickly, I whirl and reflexively send a knee up into the crotch of my male would-be-assailant from 4, who yelps and doubles over in pain into the water (Attribute Point Lost).
Still disoriented, I stomp my way through the water towards Ily, who’s somehow managed to pull a duffel bag up into her lap. My district partner Stefan has already reached her, and I can see Michal from 1 heading towards us too, a container full of weapons in tow.
Behind him, tributes are already fighting.
Tyler Ellsworth, D10 Male
I reach one of the floating containers just as a knife whizzes past my head. Thinking quickly, I grab the lid and whirl to face my opponent, using it as a shield. But the woman from 2 has taken better aim this time, and my hand explodes in pain as another thrown knife slices across it (Attribute Point Lost) and forces the makeshift shield out of my grip.
Weaponless, I stand in total defenseless shock as the woman from 2 prepares to throw another knife.
A flash of ice blonde hair is all I see before the woman from 9 leaps in and tackles the woman from 2 into the water, her thrown knife veering way off track. I half-wonder if the woman from 9 wants to ally with me, but the look she gives me as she pounces on my attacker makes it clear that had I been closer, it would be me being pinned underwater.
“Tyler! Let’s go!”
My district partner appears at my side, blood pouring through a slice in her forearm (Attribute Point Lost). She shoves a duffel bag into my arms, and then pulls me towards a sandbar that traverses all the way down to one of the islands in the lagoon.
As we run, I glance back to see the lagoon slowly emptying, as individual tributes and alliances flee from the Cornucopia on various sandbar bridges. The water is mostly clear. No deaths. Not yet, anyways.
Nick Siciliano, D9 Male
Peering out from the treeline of the colorful island closest to the Cornucopia, I watch with with sick fascination as, off on the horizon, my district partner drowns the female tribute from 2 in the lagoon. Their splashing is the only noise left coming from the lagoon, as the rest of the tributes have begun to disappear down the sandbar bridges linking the islands to each other.
The shock I feel from watching the auburn-haired woman violently struggle for her life catches me off guard. I can’t say I was scared of facing her, but intimidated? Sure. We all watched her predecessor almost win the Games last year. We all know the women from District 2 are always strong, always contenders for the crown. I’d watched her closely in training, watched her effortlessly throw and slash knives without ever missing her target, so determined and focused that I never even once thought of offering to ally with her, as I feared she would literally stab me in the back the second she got the chance.
It dawns on me that she wasn’t just one to watch for me, she was the one to watch. The only one I really watched at all.
And now she’s being pinned underwater by my district partner Christie, who wasn’t even remotely on my radar after I earned a higher training score than her. I’d offered her an alliance on the first day of training, out of a loyalty to our district, and she’d turned me down flatly and stated that she’d rather go at it alone, in an almost resigned way. By that I thought she meant she’d rather die alone, but now I see that she has absolutely no intentions of dying in this arena. None at all.
The first cannon of the Games fires as the woman from 2 finally runs out of air. As my district partner gets to her feet and grabs the duffel bag the two of them had fought over, I realize that the true danger in this arena will come from the tributes I underestimated.
All twenty-two of them.
Ally Walker, D4 Female
I finish setting up the last of my snare traps on the beach as the sun begins to dip under the horizon, painting the sky and sea a beautiful burnt orange. Behind me, the sound of snapping twigs signals the beginnings of a fire being constructed.
My allies and I made it to this island just as the tide began to wash over the sandbar bridges that snake across the lagoon. As far as we can tell, we’re the only ones who settled on this island, or at least the beach. The water should stay deep throughout the night, so with a guard standing by to listen for splashing, no tributes should be able to sneak up on us. And even if they do, my snares will string them up for us to find in the morning, hanging from the palm trees scattered across the beach.
I saunter back to my allies, who have gathered around the growing fire and are watching Pam from 11 draw in the sand.
“The Cornucopia is here,” she says, dropping a shiny pebble in the center of a giant circle that represents the lagoon. She then draws a zigzagging line away from the Cornucopia and takes it almost to the edge of the bottom right curve of the circle, far away from the Cornucopia. The sandbar bridge we traveled down to get here.
“Our island is here,” she says as she places a spiraling cone-shaped shell down at the end of the line. “And there are five more islands.”
She places other types of shells inside the circle, approximating their distance from each other and from the Cornucopia.
“Why the different types of shells?” asks Lee from 12.
“For the different types of islands,” Pam replies, as if stating the obvious.
There’s silence as we all look at each other, confused. They all looked the same to me. Palm trees, beaches, and jungle forests deeper in. Pam looks up at us, and then sighs exasperatedly.
“You didn’t notice? There are four different types.”
She points to both our spiral shell island and another to the top-left of the Cornucopia.
“Mountainous islands.”
I glance behind me at the looming cliffs as Pam continues, gesturing to the flat shells with ridges, directly north and south of the Cornucopia.
“Flat islands with flowering trees.”
The conch shell signifies what Pam calls the shiny island.
“The sun was reflecting off of it like a light show,” she claims.
“Yeah, I noticed it too,” says Alyx from 12. “Something in the sand.”
Pam nods, and then points at the last shell, a silver dollar.
“Storm island,” she says firmly. “The only island that had clouds hanging over it.”
Joe Scott, D11 Male
Pam instructs the other three members of our alliance to put tiny twigs under which islands they saw tributes running towards, so we can map out which islands are safer to visit. I hang back, quietly observing, still wishing that it was just me and my wife.
We’d been unlucky to be selected for the Games together, so I figured our best chance of getting one of us home to our daughters would be to work as a couple. Pam had wanted one more ally though, and she picked Lee from 12, who also picked his district partner Alyx, who somehow managed to wrangle Ally from 4, one of the strongest tributes in the Games, into an alliance. So now there are five of us, staked out on the beach of one of the mountainous islands. Pam’s sure that there’s some sort of mountain spring, and that the other tributes will have been lured in by the bigger and more attractive flat flowering islands.
She’s brilliant, and completely in her element. She’ll be the one who goes home alive. I’ll see to it.
Katie Dunn-Rankin, D8 Female
The moonlight barely pokes through holes in the canopy as I curl up even tighter at the base of a large tree trunk, my jumpsuit still stiff with salt from the seawater in the lagoon. The island is silent. No crickets, no animal howls. Just the sound of my own breathing.
“Are you okay?”
I jerk up off the ground with a shriek as I turn to face the source of the whispered question. It’s impossible to make out who it is, but the silhouette is unmistakably female. A small, dark shadow barely popping out in the dim moonlight.
“Who are you?” I whisper, my voice sounding so unfamiliar, so fearful. “I don’t want to fight.”
“I don’t want to either,” the voice whispers back. “I’m just trying to live. I was going to just walk by without saying anything, but…but I noticed you don’t have any supplies and…well, here.
The silhouette shifts slightly, and then a red apple lands with a thump in a patch of moonlight at my feet. My stomach rumbles violently, and I snatch it off the ground after only a moment’s hesitation. I’m starving.
I glance back up at the silhouette, half-expecting this to be a ruse for an ambush. But I can see her hands are empty, and I suddenly feel an overwhelming sense of peace wash over me. I bite into the apple and immediately feel the juices quench my thirst.
“Thank you,” I whisper after a moment. “You…you could stay here if you wanted. Safety in numbers.”
The silhouette doesn’t respond. I’m opening my mouth to clarify that we should be allies by the time I realize that my throat has begun to swell and burn.
I drop the apple with a shriek as it suddenly starts burning my hand, and I gape in horror as it rolls back into the patch of moonlight, the juices inside bubbling and frothing.
“I’m sorry,”
I crash to the ground as my throat seals shut, clawing at my neck as I look up at the silhouette, who steps into the patch of moonlight to reveal that that’s all she is; a silhouette with no body.
“So sorry.”
Then she’s vanished, and I’m left alone, the jungle now completely silent as my struggles to breathe end in vain.
Joshua Miller, D8 Male
A cannon blast echoes through the night, the second I’ve heard since my alliance retreated deep into the forest of our island. My instincts that we’d find fruit in the trees have proven, well, fruitful, and we’ve managed to climb and pick enough from the lowest-hanging branches to feed us for the night.
Those of us who can climb, anyways. Carmine from 6 is far too bulky to safely climb to the thinner branches where the fruit hangs, and Grace from 10 is nursing a pretty nasty arrow wound in her arm from where the male from 7 managed to shoot her as the four of us escaped the Cornucopia (Attribute Point Lost). If Carley from 1 hadn’t managed to retaliate with her own arrow to his leg (Attribute Point Lost), the next shot might have taken her out. But we’re alive, the four of us. Alive and well-fed.
We’ll see how long that lasts.
Deceased Tributes
Savanna Crosby, D2 Female
Katie Dunn-Rankin, D8 Female
Injured Tributes
Emily Paddon, D3 Female
Bobby Durant, D4 Male
Sarena Foster, D5 Female
Jake Freitag, D7 Male
Tyler Ellsworth, D10 Male
Grace Oxford, D10 Female
Statistics
Strongest Tributes: Michal Gliszewski (D1 M), Lee Wade (D12 M)
Most Agile Tribute: Jake Freitag (D7 M)
Most Cunning Tribute: Ally Walker (D4 F)
Most Charming Tribute: Joshua Miller (D8 M)
Strongest Overall Tributes: Ally Walker (D4 F), Joshua Miller (D8 M)
Attribute scores and alliances have been altered due to today’s events. Please note the changes on the respective pages.
Wheaton Hunger Games 
