The Hunger Games: A Short Story

With the last reaping coming to a close the screen switches to a studio with a panel, and I quickly flip it off, not bothered with what the Hunger Games "experts" think about the reapings.

I flip through my papers, making sure everything is in order, and then turn to Lei, who is resting his cheek on his fist as he stares at the wall with a bored look glazed over his face. "Do you have your notes done Lei?" I ask, snapping him back into reality.

After fumbling with his notepad for a moment he nods his head, pointing at the scribbles that randomly litter his paper. I glare at him for a moment, trying to determine whether he was really paying attention, before I just sigh and shake my head. Whatever, it's not worth it, its not like he's going

My lack of reply seems to give him enough of an answer, and he continues. "So anyways, obviously those two are not going to be the path for you, which is perfectly fine, because that leaves the last, and my personal favorite path, the District 3 path. Use your smarts to win the games, but not in the way that people usually think. Because while sometimes someone with smarts can win like Betee did, using technology, usually that isn't an option given by the Capital, because that's boring. They want to see tributes actually kill each other, not do it by proxy. Unless that is, they use another form of intelligence,

"First things first start thinking about which tributes are possible to manipulate. Stay away from ones that are smart, wary, or overly dangerous. Once you figure that out start testing the waters with how the tributes are responding to everything during training, find the ones that seem especially impacted by it, form an alliance with them, I'd suggest pairing with just one group, though you could pull off two, and from then on its all up to you really, for the most part its just going to be your judgement, what you notice when you start interacting with them in the Capital, so there's only so much I can really tell