thecircus | Test Drive Meme

Welcome to Panem. You have been selected to participate in the 75th Annual Hunger Games!

Premise: This Arena is designed to be a small mock arena not all that dissimilar to the in-game arenas we run here at The Games. The party is similar to some of the gathering logs we have inside the Capitol when an Arena begins. Our hope is to give new and prospective players a place to get their feet wet, and get a feel for the fun (and bloody) mess that goes on around here.

This meme is open to anyone and everyone who would like to play. Current cast members, veteran and new, as well as anyone just wanting top drop in and have some fun!

How To Play.

Current cast members - you may tag into this arena in any way you choose, even cast members who aren't or are no longer tributes.

***An important side note, as it is within the confines of the Area in-game, all powers are lessened/nullified to bring any character down to a vincible level. (I.E. Make more magical/super-powered characters easier to actually kill for a normal person). Rule of thumb: If it's a physical difference, the Capitol will not mutilate it out (wings, etc), but other wise it's gone.

The Arena.

Tributes are raised in a circle around the Cornucopia; they are all dressed in safari outfits, including the little hats, and slathered in bug spray and sunscreen. They look amongst each other at the start of the Cornucopia. At the center of the circle is a fountain where a dancing hippo spits water into a circular pool around it. There's an engraving in embossed letters around the one-foot rim of the pool: PANEM NATIONAL ZOO.

Floating in the water of the brass fountain are supplies that the Tributes should find useful: medical kits, sleeping bags, and most importantly, weapons. Ropes, bo staffs, nunchuks, daggers and spears are all in ready supply a mere hundred yard sprint from the Tributes.

There are four paths away from the Cornucopia - into a swampy pit to the south, which, unbeknownt to Tributes, hosts alligators and crocodiles who've missed their scheduled feeding. To the west, into a dark building where boxes cut into the walls reveal that there were once tanks for creepy crawlies, but the glass has been removed. Through a gift-shop to the north, stuffed with plush animals (many of which are filled with razor blades, or other sweet little surprises). Or down an asphalt pathway to the east, winding through tall cages that may provide shelter from the other Tributes - but not necessarily the enclosure's inhabitants.

The countdown blares out in the humid air.

3...2...1...

Let the Games begin.

-/-

The Party.

Back in the Capitol, the Cornucopia is being celebrated with a lavish party. Animal couture is all the rage, and Capitol celebrities have dressed for the occasion by having their teeth elongated and their irises surgically altered to give the appearance of slit pupils. The wine is flowing freely, and the centerpiece of this particular viewing party is what appears to be a pig the size of a hippopotamus being roasted on a spit.

Screens throughout the large ballroom in which this takes place are showing the gruesome footage of the first bloodbath of what promises to be a delightfully ugly Arena. Tongueless Avoxes carry platters with little quail eggs in cups, silently offering them to all the guests. Caesar Flickerman, trademark blue hair now replaced by what appear to be feathers growing directly from his scalp, announces every gorey detail between oohing and ahhing over the dinner. Tributes die; Citizens feast.

Everyone who's anyone is invited.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Clementine smirked back at him. "You might want to dial it back a little, they're dumb but you're trying a little hard." she watched him take the wine, relegated to juice or soda herself, even the Capitol was careful not to let children drink, even if it would let them fight to the death. "So you're really a Viking?"

Hiccup just smiled at her comment that he was taking things too far.

"Hey, hey, I was perfectly believable when I was talking to them. I just threw in the moon thing so you weren't afraid I'd try to throw salt at you mid-conversation."

He sat down across from her in a nearby chair, wine glass in hand.

"And yep. I'm a Viking. Though my people are less with the torture and pillaging and more with the colonizing, trading, and exploring." He added, "And dragon-riding."

He wondered if she'd buy that one or think it was another tall tale. In fact, he wondered if other worlds even had dragons. A few he'd talked to had come from worlds that didn't.

Clementine grins, "Well they don't look kindly on tributes fighting outside the arena, so you wouldn't want to.

She looks interested. "I remember watching a show about Vikings once. They never mentioned dragons though. Do you all wear horned helmets?"

"I'm not even sure some worlds even have dragons. A few people I've mentioned it to have said they've only heard them of them as something from stories but they're very real for us. The property damage they used to cause alone was proof of that. And while I know there are mainland Vikings that supposedly dress a little differently that the ones on our islands, most Vikings do the horned helmet thing but I've never really been able to pull off the look."

He held up his fingers to make fake horns.

"My friends say it just makes me look like I'm a stick with helmet on top."

Which was understandable. He was close to six feet tall but most of that was legs - well, leg and prosthetic, really, and he was still scrawny in the arms and torso, albeit not as much as he used to be. He was a bit of a beanpole.

"What's a show, anyway?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "Is that like the moving picture thing they have on the - the not-magic-yet-seems-like-magic picture boxes? What are they called again - teevees, right?"

"Mine doesn't. We had stories about them though" Clementine informs him. She thinks of cartoons and books with princesses and knights when he talks about dragons, she can't remember any stories including dragons having much to do with Vikings though. "You never know, your stylist's might be inspired to try and make it work."

She noticed the prosthetic leg, hard not to, it's featured on his tribute profile that's broadcasted out to the Capitol. "Yeah, the proper name is television but everyone calls them teevee's. I know they weren't invented until a long time after Vikings were around. Shows are like... stories they show on them, sometimes they're made up and sometimes they're real."

"Why would they have ones about Vikings?" he asked. Archaeology was a field that hadn't quite been invented yet and most histories were oral histories or just oral histories written in books. The idea that the past was something to be excavated and explored wasn't a concept that was very common yet.

"Other than the keeping-dragons-as-pets thing, which is mostly just my tribe, we're not very interesting. Unless you're really into sheep farming."

"Because people find -- found it interesting, I guess. I can't remember it very well but it talked about how Vikings used to raid other countries and steal their stuff all the time. Made you all sound kind of scary." She might have been a little too young to have watched a documentary of that nature to be honest which seems silly in hindsight, given what she'd been through since then.

"I don't think they mentioned anything about pet dragons."

"Weird." The idea that anyone would find Vikings interesting, especially if their perception of them was that they needlessly raided other people, was strange to him. "Well, that sounds like some Vikings and yes, our people did occasionally get up to the occasional raid but it used to only be on other Vikings and they tried to leave the other guy in good enough shape to try to steal it all back. It was only fair."

He shrugged.

"I can't speak for other Viking tribes besides the ones in our little group of islands but it's not really like that anymore, though. Most of the tribes made peace with each other, even though it's a little...tentative sometimes. So we farm and fish and herd animals and trade and explore, and most of the fighting got focused on the dragons. We weren't always friends with them. That, ah, that's a bit of a very recent development, one I'm pretty much responsible for."

"Vikings might be different depending on what world they're from. It was a really, really long time ago in my world I think. " Clementine picks up a biscuit that resembles an oreo, biting into it and chewing thoughtfully. She seems uncaring for any crumbs that go down the glitzy dress they'd made her wear.

"Maybe they'd had dragons to fight they might not have wanted to raid other people." she picks up a second biscuit as soon as she finishes the first. "What did you do?"

That made sense. His people were rowdy people and had been rowdier, by all accounts, around the time Berk had first been settled.

But the dragons presented such a problem that nobody worried that much about their human neighbors - the reptilian ones were the much bigger issue.

"I learned to ride one," said Hiccup with the smallest touch of pride. "I downed a dragon with a little contraption I made that threw bolas and when I found him, I just couldn't bring myself to kill him. So I took care of him and fixed up new tail for him since I'd hurt his and now he's my best friend. Eventually, I was able to help my village see we didn't have to fght the dragons anymore, we founds ways to make peace with them and now every Viking in Berk has a pet dragon and the dragons themselves love living with us. They're free to come and go as they please but most of them have adopted a Viking of their own."

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