WHO: Patsy Hops & Sephora Kohl WHAT: Another chance encounter WHEN: Night 6 WHERE: The Carousel STATUS: Complete
It had been stewing in her mind since she'd come upon the Carousel with Zepporah and Miranda. The toolbox that had meant both pain and triumph to her had been relatively useless to her and she sought to show that she could make a kill out of nothing - especially nothing. While Zepporah and Brock seemingly couldn't walk half a mile without running into tributes to fail miserably at killing, the well had been dry for Sephora. Interest would be waning and she was determined to be interesting.
Some tributes liked to give running commentary, but Sephora didn't. She let her work speak for itself - yet another of the mantras that had been drilled into her since childhood - no excuses. And the work, hopefully, said a lot. She'd unraveled some of the nylon threads that made up her rope, producing a few thin, sturdy strands, and melted the ends so it didn't unravel further. She'd used a hammer and nails, remembering that Amelia's mother was a carpenter in an absent sort of way, to install secure points low on two trees. She tied the rope around the flat-head nails and then, for good measure, added a few nails into the knot to make sure it would stay.
Standing over the trip hazard she made, she tucked her toes under it. Yes, it was a good height - low enough to be disregarded, high enough to catch the top of the foot as it strode. With a beaming smile, she went to the sports drink bottle that was a quarter filled with screws and nails. It'd been easy enough to leave the open bottle next to the Cornucopia toilet, figuring few would return there now that they had moved, but she had to hope that the exposure would be enough to maybe give blood poisoning to a scratch. Holding her breath, she stabbed the bottle with her screwdriver and used it to lift and then shake the screws some three feet out from the trip wire towards the Carousel.
The Carousel. The music was still playing with the same haunting sound and she tried to tune it out. It was difficult though. It made her homesick in a way that she hadn't felt, what with Aramis around to be that District 1 beacon.
Your head is humming and it won't go, in case you don't know, The piper's calling you to join him, Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?
She found herself humming a little as she flung the bottle off the screwdriver towards the Carousel, then took the backpack off her back just long enough to put the screwdriver back in and pull out her bottle of water. Some of it went to washing her hands, some of it went into her mouth, but the rest of it went into a puddle. The bright blue of the rope needed to be concealed, and so she bent down and mixed the dirt into mud so she could coat the rope.
Patsy was still smarting a bit from her encounter earlier in the day with Brock, but now that it was dark out, she felt like trying to walk it off a bit and hopefully in the process, find something useful like Zap had found his battery.
The music playing started off so quietly, Patsy didn’t even realize she was hearing it until she realized she was humming along to one her favorite songs from back home. Without meaning to, she walked closer and closer to the source of the music until she arrived at the creepy carousel, which she normally gave a wide berth. There were many unsettling things in the arena, but the carousel was up there in her book.
Then she realized she wasn’t alone. Sephora was on the other side of the carousel doing… something. She couldn’t quite tell. Not interested in another run and chase situation, especially with her chest still hurting some, she decided it would be better to confront the girl and gripped the knife she was holding tighter.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t my favorite career,” she said, with a hint of sarcasm.
Her head snapped up. She was some distance away, the Carousel between the two of them, but she wasn’t difficult to spot with her blonde hair and attitude. It was Patsy, playing to the cameras with a certain amount of swagger. And why shouldn’t she? She’d gotten her with a trap and now here Sephora was, laying one of her own. Could she entice her this way? The music still played, the two of them still outside the range of the silence. What would happen once the music stopped for some time?
Patsy wanted this to be dramatic. Not really Sephora’s impulse, not really her character, but needs must. She reached behind her shoulder to pull one of her daggers from where she’d jutted it through the outer pocket.
“Patsy,” she said brightly as she rose to her feet in a smooth motion. The wrist she’d sprained was feeling better, but not great enough that she could be deft with a dagger. “Have you been looking for me?” Sephora asked, tracing a slow arc from her position at the entrance to the duck pond, the music still playing.
Despite her pursed lips and narrowed eyes, Patsy hadn’t particularly intended on making things so dramatic. She definitely wasn’t doing it for the benefit of any sadistic audience. In the back of her mind, she was aware that, if she’d thought a little more about it, she might have been able to handle the situation better, but at the same time she didn’t particularly care. She was well aware of her miniscule odds of getting out of the arena alive and all she knew was that she wanted to go down swinging if she was going down at all.
Then again, maybe the oddly familiar music was giving her a confidence boost, too. There was no getting out of it now, anyway, so she slowly walked to meet the other girl. “Ha. Yes, I’ve been looking all over for you for days!”
She could make out the weapon she held - a knife. Perhaps a throwing one. She counted on the fact that even if Patsy was stupid enough to throw it, that she couldn’t throw it with any accuracy. Sephora moved still, calm and collected, until she was at the entrance towards the locker bays. With still a light smile on her face, she gestured with her un-weaponed hand, the one attached to the sore wrist. “Really?” One leg extended back to brace her in a more steady stance, her dagger forward as her eyes narrowed, turning her smile into something a little more predatory.
“You found me.”
As much as Patsy would have loved to be able to just throw her knife at Sephora and be done with her, she knew she didn’t have that ability and to risk getting lucky was just foolish. She wanted to keep this knife as long as possible. So there was only one thing left to do.
“Good!” Patsy exclaimed before running at Sephora, trying to avoid her knife and keeping the grip on hers firm.
Watching the blonde bull come at her china shop the whole way, she tried to predict how Patsy would try and sidestep a frontal attack. She zigged when Patsy zagged and Sephora had to course correct quickly, throwing herself into the taller girl and spilling them both onto the ground. With her immediate position on the ground, Sephora tried to pull herself onto Patsy, her legs snapping out to joust with Patsy and keep her scrambling. She just had to get one good jab, something that cut into her lungs.
Patsy knew her first priority should be to try and disarm the other girl, but frankly she really just wanted to draw some blood. Her fight with Brock had been entirely too one-sided (but thankfully over quickly) and although Sephora had trained for this, Patsy had spent years fighting and wrestling with her younger brothers so she was no pushover. She used her legs to kick and with her free arm, tried to pull hair, pinch, scratch or whatever she could manage all while somehow managing to avoid Sephora’s knife.
She managed to roll over onto the writhing girl but it came with a cost - her dagger skittered in away in the dirt as a flailing arm swiped it away. Sephora struggled to get her hips pinned down over the girl, her small hands darting through Patsy’s waving hands to try and knock her butcher knife out of her grasp. Hand to hand - hell, she was pretty sure even with the knife she could beat the slightly older girl to death.
But then she noticed it. Sephora went still suddenly, her weight pinning Patsy down as she perked her ears. “SHHHHH!” she shushed the blond girl as listened to the empty air. Very empty. The haunting tune had stopped. Her chest heaved as she looked, eyes wide at the carousel animals still in their place.
And then she saw the panther, the sleek black frame caught in leaping grace, blink sharply. While the first thought should have been that this was a trick of her mind, a residual from the concussion, the first thought was that they’d tripped the trap. “Patsy, did you…?” she murmured as her eyes darted again, catching an animal she couldn’t recognize but with a large horn at his head, blink.
Patsy ignored the other girl. Yeah, right, like she’d respect her wishes when Patsy didn’t trust her as far as she could throw her. Patsy continued to struggle, not noticing the music had stopped. Sephora was clearly distracted; now was her chance, she gleefully thought as she sliced her knife through the other girl’s skin.
Her left hand came off of Patsy’s shoulder as her forearm now dripped with blood. She checked quickly back at the animals and gave a solid punch into Patsy’s chest, aiming to take the wind at her, before scrambling off the girl. She could catch her breath and get torn to pieces by the onslaught. Not Sephora.
Her legs powered like pistons, running over and grabbing her dagger before jetting off, not looking back at either the tribute she hadn’t killed or the trap ready to pounce.
What the… what was going on? Patsy was confused, her chest even more sore now thanks to the punch hitting near where Brock’s mace had earlier. She looked over to the carousel, like Sephora had been and suddenly realized what had the other girl so spooked. She also spied the panther blink, it yellowish eyes momentarily obscured. Then she saw another animal’s leg muscle twitch, like it was about to start moving at any second. Those animals are actually alive, she thought. They were probably mutts, too… well she wasn’t going to waste anymore time thinking about it and instead sprang up despite the pain in her chest. Then she ran as fast as she could out of there.