shenevermisses | 22nd Throw

There are some things you just can't teach. Not after a certain point.

[She doesn't sound frustrated or upset. Just... interested, in a way.]

It's weird, in a way. Trying to teach someone to be like me and finding out that's not possible. I mean, we're doing good. Great student.

[For Rue's sake more than anything, she's not going to name her over the journals, not going to divulge what they're doing.]

But there's just something different. How we were brought up. You can't teach that.

Which I guess is why they start us young. Start training us when we're five, where I'm from. Parents who think their kids have potential agree to send them off to the Academy, where they'll only see them maybe every weekend.

Usually less than that.

From there, they weed out the undesirable. The weak, the emotional, the nervous. Every year, there are fewer students your age. By the time we're sixteen or seventeen, there's only the best left.

At that point, only the girls who are stupid enough to get pregnant get sent away.

I guess I never really thought about it, but trying to teach someone else what I grew up with? You realize that some things just can't be taught. Not after a certain point.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Why do they do it? The 'Hunger Games?'

Because the Districts rebelled, and the treaty that ensured peace laid out the terms of the Hunger Games.

Powerful people keeping control.

[Laura says this mostly to herself, after a quiet moment.]

The Capitol, yes.

The people who created me did so for similar reasons, but they were more...subtle. No one knew about them.

It's hard to imagine a society that would allow something like the Hunger Games to exist.

It's what I grew up with. It's hard for me to imagine a world in which it's considered anything but normal.

Why did you accept it?

Because that's life in Panem. Or was, when I was there.

[It's easy enough to understand. 'The way things were' was true everywhere.]

...But it changed, after you left?

A bit more than a year after I died, there was a revolution. To my knowledge.

[Died. Hmm.]

Does it change what you thought of things? Knowing that things could have changed?

No. Because they wouldn't have changed in my lifetime.

[Laura suddenly seems to realize she's asking a lot of questions that are probably rather personal, and there is a delay before...]

What are you teaching the girl you are training?

How to kill if she has to. How to survive otherwise.

...Useful if she gets drafted, at least.

Precisely. Or if we get dumped with a ton of hostile people again, like some of the refugees were.

22nd Throw - [ voice ]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]

[voice]