The next few days are basically the same, with us training for a few hours in the morning, then running over interview strategy with Kolton until dinner. At the morning training sessions, they added a new station every day, as promised, starting with a climbing area, then adding extreme heat survival training, then extreme cold survival training, then an area with weight training and a few treadmills, then last but not least they opened up an entirely new room, with an inground pool in it. Our odd black jumpsuits for training doubled as swimsuits. We spent most of the five training sessions learning as much as we could and talking around to as many of the tributes as we could, including Bolt and Flash from District Three, Bran and Harvey from District Nine, Eve and Belinda from District Ten and Ivy and Rowan, and were even able to talk to Carter and Casey from Six and Penny and Lea from Eight, however briefly. We tried speaking to Coral from Four and Isaac from Five, but she ran away and he just ignored us. After the fifth day of training, we went upstairs for our last mock interview session with Kolton before the actual interview.
"How was training today?" Kolton asks as we sit down.
"Pretty good! Did you know they were going to be teaching us how to swim?" Alexia asks.
Kolton spits out a bit of his drink.
"I'm sorry, what? They're teaching you how to swim?" he asks.
"Yeah, and it's a huge pool too, like at least 30 feet deep at one point," Alexia continues.
"They don't do that. Not even for the games where there's water," Kolton says.
"We decided to just skip it though, Mother taught us how to swim years ago. There's this lake out in the woods, we would go there all the time as kids," I explain.
"First the extreme heat training, then the extreme cold training, and now they're teaching you to swim. It's like the Game-makers don't even know what the arena's going to look like this year," Kolton says, bewildered, "And they still haven't even added all of the stations yet. What else is there?"
Alexia and I both shrug, and Kolton takes another sip of his drink, while shaking his head.
"Well, we don't have to worry about that until after the interviews. This is your last session with me, so we're going to be very specific this time, not just asking random questions. We will be actually running interviews over and over. Since this is a quarter quell year and you two are doing one together, the interview will be roughly five minutes per person, so you guys actually get ten whole minutes to yourself," Kolton says.
"Ten minutes? That's so long, we don't have enough things to talk about," I say.
"That doesn't matter, Augustus Keller will be asking the questions and coming up with things to talk about. You just have to act engaged and happy, like we talked about," he replies.
I sigh and roll my eyes, before acting as if I'm regaining my composure.
"Alright then Mr. Clarke, shall we get started?" I respond, acting up my smile and Capitol accent to the point that Alexia starts laughing.
"Too much, kid, too much," Kolton says, trying to act disappointed.
We spend about two hours going over interview possibilities, talking about our hopes and our dreams and our family and our personal lives and our likes and dislikes and at certain points just come up with random things to fill the time. After what seems like days, Kolton finally seems satisfied.
"Alright, now we need to just quickly work on your entrance and exit," Kolton says, standing up, "Go into your rooms and find the tallest heels in your closets, then come back out here. I'm going to find Vita quickly, she can probably help with this."
YOU ARE READING
The 175th Hunger Games
Fanfiction"On the 175th anniversary, for the rebels to remember that the war was fought against their own brothers, the two tributes selected from each district will be siblings, both between the ages of 12 and 18 as per usual." One hundred and one years aft...
