[EVENT] The Simulation Ends

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: 6I Fountain Park & Elsewhere
WHEN: April 1
OPEN TO: ALL - Mingle
WARNINGS: N/A

---

In the snug circle of an old park, a fountain sits burbling beneath a broad, midday sky.

Once-neat paving stones have buckled and cracked from the slow nudge of wayward roots. Benches stand covered in lichen and rust. Three paths push into the underbrush like the spokes on a wheel, the encroaching forest creating lush tunnels through the dark.

But the fountain stands singular and pristine, brightly splashing in open rebellion of the deep, muffled sounds of a place long ago gone to seed. A vibration hums through the ground, there and quickly gone, and the water in the fountain trembles, lapping against the high walls of its cool, pale reservoir.

Far, far away, in a place that isn't really there, people begin to blink out of existance.

It is the first of April.

It is precisely ten o'clock in the morning.



[Please see event details and guidelines here.]

Comments

[fishermansweater]

They don't need a tracker like this, not an obvious one. Finnick and Annie (and Johanna) have had them implanted in their arms before, the hard little under-the-skin lumps injected there before their Games. Maybe they're afraid of someone working out how to get the things out, but the question then is why tracking them -- or being seen to be tracking them -- is important now when it wasn't before.

Finnick drops his hand back down, but Annie's comment about their hair makes him lift it up to his face and run it along the mess of hair on his chin.

"I've never grown a beard this long," he says. "It's got to be months' worth."

Yet the still-young peafowl haven't grown since he saw them the morning before he found himself here. If it was the same morning.

His head rolls back and he stares at the ceiling. There's still the light fixture there, though he hasn't checked if there's electricity. It makes no sense, not by the rules of the arenas he's so long ago learned to try to read, where everything is about the balance between the deaths of most of the tributes and the ability for one of them to survive.

"Keep us guessing as some sort of distraction?" he eventually offers, a sort of tentative extrapolation from Annie's suggestion.