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Atlas Gym [Monday evening]

Katniss was doing everything in her power to forget that she only had until Friday to prepare. Of course, she'd still train with Peeta and Haymitch when she reached Twelve, but the reaping was only a few days after that. And Fandom's resources were about to become a lost cause to her. She kept thinking of loose ends to tie up -- people she wanted to say goodbye to, strategies she needed to consider. It was more the latter that she found herself dwelling on, as the former was too painful.

And so Monday night, she went to the gym to wait for Jaina. While Katniss was stronger and faster than she'd been before the Quell had been announced, her actual one-on-one training opposite other people had been limited. She knew she couldn't rely too heavily on being able to hide this time, since not only would she be with Peeta the whole time (and she knew how good he was at hiding, sure, but it was likely that all the other victors had perfectly functional hearing), but they all would have seen her strategy the first time around. Hopefully this would help with that complacency, and give her an idea of how she might fare.

Even if she didn't think she'd probably get much opportunity to do so in the arena, when she arrived at the gym, Katniss started stretching out. It would hardly do to pull something now and have to nurse it for the weeks leading up to the Games.

[she's here for Jaina but open gym is open!]

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Jaina arrived as much on time as she could, feeling more serious than she had the rest of the day. It seemed like she saw these kinds of situations a lot with kids Katniss' age, and it was hard not to let it bother her. At least at this point it was easy to push thoughts like that to the side in order to focus on training.

"I didn't leave you here for long, did I?" she checked when she arrived.

"Nope," Katniss assured her easily, folding out of her stretch to stand and greet Jaina. "I just got here early. Too much time on my hands, lately."

"We're in a different country, back in time, and you've got too much time on your hands?" she asked with a little smile. In actuality, if Jaina had been in her situation she probably wouldn't have even noticed the setting.

Katniss shrugged. "If I'm not training, I'm stuck thinking," she said simply. "I'd rather train, and there's only so many times I can run laps or shoot my arrows. The change of scenery's helped, though. At least now I'm a little more prepared for if they throw us in a colder arena."

Jaina found it was weird to hear something like that be said by someone not her. "I can't say you don't have the right mindset," she said. "So you have no idea what the arena will be like beforehand?"

"The soonest I'll get a clue is when I see what I get to wear the morning of," she said, shaking her head. "Last year I was lucky, and it was a forest that was very similar to where I normally hunt at home. I don't think I'll be lucky twice, though. Makes for bad television."

"I have so many things to say about that but if I start ranting we won't get anything done," she frowned. "Do you have any questions before we start?"

Katniss pursed her lips in thought. "There's a good chance I'll have to dodge people with swords when I only have arrows at my disposal," she said carefully. "Do you have experience with that kind of thing? I know your grandfather uses that light sword thing, but we just have the regular metal kind where I'm from."

"I have been disarmed and not been able to get to my weapon again while someone's been swinging at me," Jaina nodded. "In that sort of situation, you really need to be fast. Get cover if you can and find something to arm yourself with, or you'd need to disarm them and try to get their weapon away. The first option's safer."

Though it sucked if you were say, glued to the floor at the time. Sigh.

Katniss nodded, frowning a little. "It happened last time, and I was lucky both times -- there was a natural resource I could use the first time, and I got some outside help the second time. But, you know. Luck doesn't really seem like something I can rely on this time, like I said. Being small and fast, though, that I can do."

"Small and fast can get you through a lot," Jaina said knowingly. "I have to stave people off a lot of the time that way. Even if you can keep them going long enough for them to start to tire out, it ups the chances of them making a mistake or you being able to get the drop on them."

"I think I'm the youngest of everyone, too," Katniss said, thinking. "Since Peeta and I only won last year, we've got that advantage over someone who's reaped who won, say, thirty years ago." She made a face, and added, "Though, some of the older victors are really vicious. There's a woman who ripped out another tribute's throat with her teeth. And after she won, she had her teeth cosmetically altered so they all end in gold points, now. Like fangs."

Apparently it was not impossible to shock Jaina with stories of humans doing things like that. "You're kidding me," she said, staring.

"I wish I was that creative," Katniss said honestly. "But no, really. Her name is Enobaria. She won a dozen years before I did."

Jaina shook her head and bit down on the urge to ask if there was any way for her to get out of this. "Well, at least you don't have to guess what her strength might be. But yes, being younger than the others should help, especially if they're out of practice." She really hoped they were out of practice.

"They should be," Katniss said, having thought about this a lot, yes. "Their pools are larger to choose from. I'm the only one who knew she was getting chosen. There's that. And a lot of the older tributes, like my mentor, are alcoholics or drug addicts. That won't help them any."

"That's pretty much the worst thing they can do," she agreed. Welcome to the reason Jaina barely even drank. "You're working with a mentor, too?"

[DAMMIT LJ WITH YOUR NON-POSTING.]

"In a manner of speaking," Katniss said a little ruefully. "Every tribute is given a victor from previous years to help them in the arena. Haymitch won the last Quell, and if I weren't doing this, I'd have a pair of tributes of my own this year to train. Though honestly, if I had to use the term 'mentor' the way I think it's intended, your grandfather's more fitting than Haymitch."

"I hadn't realized you worked with Grandfather that much," Jaina admitted.

"He's hacking the signal, so he can watch my Games," Katniss admitted, shrugging. "He's been helping with the mental preparation for the last six months or so."

"Good choice," Jaina said. She might not always agree with him counseling people, because someone had made some bad life decisions and she knew it, but for something like this, definitely a good choice. "So do you think you're ready to start or is there anything else you want to get out of the way first?"

Katniss shook her head, shaking out her arms. "You just tell me what to do, and I'll try my best."

"Okay, the first thing you need to know is stance," she said. "If someone drops in on you and you're going to have to fight hand-to-hand, the first chance you get, get in position."

She demonstrated, with her fists up, with one shoulder forward and her knees bent. "You want to give them the least amount of room to hit you. If you're like this, you have less of yourself you need to defend."

Katniss watched carefully before mimicking the stance, her shoulder dropped forward perhaps just a bit too much. "But isn't my back exposed this way?" she asked curiously. "It's where I'd keep a quiver, so there's that, I guess."

"It is, but do what you need to do to make sure whoever you're facing is in front of you," she advised, gesturing with her own shoulder as a sign to Katniss to bring it up. "If you keep your legs apart like this, it also makes it easier to pivot so that if someone comes up behind you, you can turn to face them really fast."

Katniss brought her shoulder up, biting the inside of her lip as she moved her feet a little, trying to make sure her legs were far enough apart. "Okay," she said, memorizing the way her muscles felt in this position. "And I should maintain this position if I do have to pivot?"

"Yes. It's very easy to do," Jaina said, and showed her. It was a quick move that kept her in place, just facing the other direction, and she never let her guard down. "You want to keep your hands up like this as much as you can. As soon as you drop your guard, you open yourself up to getting hit in the head or torso, and both are very bad for different reasons."

"I remember," she said, shaking her head to rid herself of the memory of that kind of dizziness, and pivoted the same way Jaina had, though her movement was a bit more clunky. "But they're often a lot bigger than me. Is this going to help if the can just knock me over?"

"That's part of the benefit of the stance. You give yourself enough ground and it'll be harder just to topple you," she assured her. "And if they do knock you down, then they have to come down to your level to get at you, which you can turn into a plus."

"Or they can pin you," Katniss said, frowning. "That was a special moment from my Games. But, okay. Sure footing like this will keep me from getting knocked down again."

"How'd you get out of if when you got pinned?" Jaina wondered, standing straight again.

"Someone saved me," she admitted. "I allied with a girl from Eleven earlier in the Games, and she was...a very unfair tribute. She was only twelve. So when she was killed, her male counterpart, Thresh, thought he owed me something as I'd looked out for her. He killed the girl who'd pinned me so that we'd be even."

Jaina could so easily go on a rant about twelve-year-olds in this kind of thing, but she held it back. "If it happens again, if you get pinned, you're going to have to fight that much harder," she said. "If you're still mobile, great, you can roll away, knock them down, whatever you need to. But there are things you can do if you get pinned."

Not that she would want that when facing she of the pointed teeth.

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Atlas Gym [Monday evening]

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