The Equestrian Hunger Games

"It's so big," said Lyra as we drew closer to Canterlot.

And it really was. You could see the spires of the Royal Castle from quite a distance, and Canterlot proper sprawled out around it. I wondered how so many ponies could bear to live so close together. The thought of being surrounded by so many ponies made me feel a bit antsy—even leaving aside the fact that they would be Canterlot ponies.

All three of us tributes were standing at the windows of the train. Gingerbread was with us, and she seemed beside herself with enthusiasm. She kept shifting from hoof to hoof, pointing out landmarks every so often, and telling us about all the things she was absolutely sure we'd just love.

"Everything gleams!" she said. "I never really realized how wonderful Canterlot was until I visited District Eight—not to say that your district isn't perfectly lovely, in a rustic sort of way, but Canterlot—it's absolutely fantastic! And I can't wait to introduce you to your stylists—I met a couple of them before setting off, they're lovely ponies, and of course they all have excellent credentials—only the best for the Hunger Games! And the quarters at the Training Center are positively gorgeous, lots of room, big crystal screens—you don't have a lot of those back home, do you?"

It got pretty easy to tune her out, after a while.

Cheerilee was nowhere in sight. I guessed she'd been to Canterlot enough times not to care about whether she saw any of it or not.

Not that I was especially thrilled to be going there, myself. The closer we got, the more difficult it became to keep my mind off the Games to come.

But darn it, I tried.

When we finally reached the city, I could see crowds of ponies through the windows, cheering. I might have gaped a little-I'd never seen anything quite like the things these ponies did to themselves. I saw ponies who'd dyed their coats with leopard spots and zebra stripes, ponies who had shaved their manes or styled them into spikes, ponies who were wearing fancy dresses or fine suits or shiny ribbons wrapped around their legs and torso—pretty much anything you could think a pony could do with their bodies and an overabundance of funds, the Canterlot ponies did. I even saw one mare with what looked like dozens of butterflies sitting all over her, covering her like a dress.

I remembered Gingerbread mentioning we were all getting stylists, and I found I was a mite nervous at the thought.

It seems kind of silly to worry about looking ridiculous on every crystal screen in Equestria when I was probably going to die on every crystal screen in Equestria shortly thereafter. But it felt kind of nice to get anxious over something petty. It sounds strange, I know, but worrying about the one made it easier not to worry about the other.

When we finally made it to the Training Hall, the three of us were swept off to a room full of mirrors and bottles full of mysterious liquids and powders.

Our prep teams were waiting for us.

"Hmm," said one, a pale, blue-green pegasus said, tilting her head and moving to look at us from various angles. "Hmm..."

"Hmm what?" Honeysuckle asked, irritated, after a few moments.

The pegasus looked up at her and blinked slowly, apparently surprised that she'd spoken up. "Well," she said after a moment, "we can work with this, I think."

A dark purple unicorn gestured me over to what I could only think of as a grooming station. Reluctantly, I followed his cue. I asked him what his name was, and he answered "Grape Sparkle." Moments later, he snatched the hat right off my head and, before I could protest, he magicked a showerhead out of the wall. Moments later, I was soaking wet and none too thrilled about it.

"What in tarnation—I took a bath before getting here, y'know!" I snapped. The unicorn ignored me, instead picking out a few bottles and brushes and setting to work.

I was brushed, combed, shampooed, conditioned, scrubbed, filed, picked, clipped, and polished within an inch of my life. Neither of my companions was faring any better, as far as I could tell. Lyra seemed to be enjoying it somewhat more than Honeysuckle, which wasn't hard, given that Honeysuckle looked like she'd have rather kicked a beehive.

When, finally, the ordeal was over, I asked for my hat back. The purple unicorn shrugged. "You'll have to ask Cardamom about that," he said. "He's the one in charge of costumes."

I didn't have high hopes.

Once the three of us were dried off, we were escorted into another room.

Three ponies greeted us-a pink unicorn, a pale blue pegasus, and a golden earth pony. The earth pony seemed to be my costume guy—Cardamom, I was guessing—since he walked right up to me, while the other two went to talk to my fellow tributes.

"Hello there," he said, smiling. He held out his hoof, which I took, albeit reluctantly. But when someone offers to shake, you can't exactly refuse, at least not without looking like a jerk.

He gestured me towards the desk that stood to one side of the room. "I've been working on these sketches ever since I saw who I'd be styling for—tell me what you think."

He looked earnest, which was kind of odd. If he meant it, then he'd probably be the first person to care about my opinion since I'd gotten reaped.

I went over and took a look at the sketches and, to my surprise, they weren't bad at all.

I'd seen the costumes used in previous years for the initial chariot ride through Canterlot, when all the city folk were able to get a good look at the ponies who'd be in the Games that year. Usually, the District Eight tributes were dressed up like, for lack of a better word, hayseeds. We were country folk out in District Eight, but not all of us wore straw hats and overalls. Not that there was anything wrong with those who did, but I'd never seen, say, Lyra wearing that sort of getup. She was a town pony, not a farm pony.

The design Cardamom had come up with was less super-rustic-farmer-pony and more blend-of-plant-and-pony.

Not all of the notes scribbled around the pictures made sense to me-I saw mention of a "pseudoflorus and illupomogen spells melded with a demiglamour enchantment," which, not being a magic-using pony, I couldn't make heads or tails of. But the gist of it was Cardamom (and the other two costume designers, presumably, since the three of us tributes would be sharing a chariot) intended to make the chariot look like a garden, and the tributes of District Eight look like part of that garden. I was going to get painted-not enough to blend in completely with the spell-plants, but enough that it might be difficult, at first glance, to tell where the plants ended and I began.

It was a bit complicated for my tastes—I'd have been happy just to wear what I'd always worn—but given that it seemed that I had to get all gussied up, it was fine. I could live with it.

I only had one question.

"Any chance I could wear my hat?" I asked.

Cardamom raised his eyebrows. "Hmm," he said. He turned and looked back at the sketches for a few moments, then picked up a pencil in his teeth and drew something, stepping back to look at it.

"Hmm," he said again. He looked back at me.

"Would you object to a different hat, in a similar style? Just so I can fit it in with my design, you see," said Cardamom.

"Well, all right," I said. "But..." I'd had a sudden thought. "I will get my old hat back eventually, right?"

Cardamom nodded. "I don't see why not. As long as there aren't any sort of concealed weapons in the hat, they should let you take it into the arena."

I grimaced.

Cardamom looked sympathetic. Strange-he was the first Canterloter to act like being a tribute was anything less than a huge privilege.

"I know." He shrugged. "It's hardly anything, compared to what we've taken away." He shook his head, and turned back to his sketches. "I can't do much for you. But I'll do my best to make sure the people of the Capitol will remember you."

I didn't know quite what to say to that.

"Well," he said, "let me call in my assistants so we can start getting you fixed up."

This involved a lot of me standing around doing nothing, which would have been pretty dull if two of Cardamom's assistants weren't spending a fair bit of time spellcasting over me.

I was surprised to discover that Cardamom had actually had something to do with designing the variant of the spells the unicorns were using, despite the fact that, being an earth pony, Cardamom didn't have any practical experience with magic.

"Oh, he's just brilliant," one of his assistants, an eye-searingly pink unicorn named Pixie Dust, told me when I said something about there being an awful lot of magic involved in my costume. "Honestly, he should have been born a unicorn—his idea of doing a semi-meld of the lower-frequency aether-field portions of the pseudofloris and minor prismshift spells was simply inspired! Such a subtle difference—but it really does wonderful things for the overall effect. And you might think that the demiglamour would be overkill, but really, it just adds an entire new layer to the viewing experience, and it's not overpowering at all. Just wait until you see it in action!"

She went on like that for a while. I tuned her out as easily as I had Gingerbread. I guessed it was nice to know I was in good hooves, but I didn't know a sudo-florist from an ill pom-pom, or whatever kind of spells Pixie was weaving over me. As long as they didn't explode in my face, I was good.

The magic left my skin feeling kind of tingly, though I couldn't see anything different about me. When I asked about it, the other unicorn—a pale blue fellow named Sugarspin—told me the spells wouldn't be activated until just after we got into the chariot.

Cardamom brought me a hat shortly before the unicorns were done. It was like my old one, only in multiple shades of green. It would do.

Soon it was time for the three of us District Eight ponies to reunite so we could all get in the pegasus-drawn chariot. I'd seen a few pegasus-powered forms of transportation overhead in Canterlot, but I'd also seen flying vehicles sans pegasi, which looked pretty strange. We didn't have many of the former back in District Eight, and none of the latter.

I was guessing we tributes got pegasus chariots because of tradition, and maybe because it would be kind of hard for us to grab control of it and fly away. The pegasi waiting at the chariot were both burlier than Honeysuckle, who wasn't exactly burly herself.

"How'd it go?" I asked Lyra and Honeysuckle, quietly.

"How do you think?" Honeysuckle replied.

"It went okay," Lyra said. "The magic itches, though."

"Same here," I said.

"All right," said Pixie Dust, "time to make the magic happen!" She lowered her horn, pointed it at me, and I saw a spark at the horn's tip. Suddenly, I was covered in greenery-vines, leaves flowers, and even some fruit. Some of the vines seemed to grow to wrap around the edges of the chariot.

When I looked back over myself, I had to admit that all of that magical frippery was awful pretty. The flowers seemed to glow, and as I watched, I realized that they were slowly changing colors-shifting from blue to purple to pink. There were some berries hanging from the vines draped over the chariot's side, so I reached out and picked one. It dissolved in my mouth, and I thought I could taste just the ghost of its flavor.

Then we were off.

It was an experience unlike any other, being paraded through the streets, surrounded by cheering ponies all arching their necks for a glimpse at the tributes. I didn't see why they bothered—I knew that all of this was being transmitted live to crystal projectors across Equestria, and in Canterlot, I figured everypony probably had a crystal projector in their own house. Why not just stay home and watch in comfort?

And they all kept screaming, too. It hurt my ears.

I tried to keep a straight face, eyes forward, keeping myself from staring too much at the crowds or the images of the other tributes that were being projected on giant floating screens.

Of course, doing that, I couldn't help but notice the chariot right in front of us. District Seven was an agricultural district, too, but they focused mainly on the sorts of plants used for magic and medicine, so their costumes had a plant-ish theme, too, with flowers woven into manes and magically-created butterflies floating all around them.

Two of the tributes from District Seven seemed around my age—the unicorn might've been a bit younger, or she might just have a slight figure—but the pegasus was a young thing, around Applebloom's age. She was waving at the crowd.

I tried to keep my eyes a little higher after that, so I could only see the tops of the older tributes' heads and the shining wings of the fake butterflies.

After what felt like hours, all eight chariots filed into the ceremonial pavilion in front of the castle.

There was an elevated podium set up. After all the chariots were set up in a half circle, facing the podium, there was a flash of light as Regent Nivea teleported in.

The crowd grew somewhat quieter as she stepped closer to the podium and began to speak.

This was my first time seeing the ruler of Equestria in person. I had to admit that she was an impressive sight. She was taller than most ponies, with a long horn to match. Her pale blue mane rippled and flowed, even though there was no wind. It was magic, of course. It was probably also magic that made me think how beautiful she looked, how regal, how graceful, how much she resembled Celestia—

I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. I'd had enough magic done on me today to know how much it could do. Right now, I wanted nothing more than to get these fake vines, fake leaves, fake berries off of me so I could go back to being Applejack instead of the prettied-up earth pony tribute from District Eight.

"Citizens of Equestria," the Regent said, her voice sounding clear even over the crowd—more magic—"we are gathered here today to honor this year's tributes."

The crowd cheered. The Regent lifted her hoof to quiet them, then continued. "This year's Hunger Games marks seventy-four years of peace and prosperity throughout Equestria. And this year, as with every year, we are united as a nation to remember the past, that we may not repeat it, and to celebrate the present that we have won through blood and toil.

Now, let me address the Tributes directly."

She looked down over us, and I felt cold, deep in the pit of my stomach.

"I congratulate you all on the great honor that has been bestowed on you," she said. "For the next week, you will be given the best of all that Canterlot can provide. Use it to prepare yourselves for the Games. All of Equestria will be watching you. Learn well, fight well, survive, and do your Districts proud."

The crowd behind us went wild, shouting and shrieking and hooting and hollering. Our chariots started to move again.

We were done.

As we made our slow way to the Training Center, still surrounded by a screaming crowd of Canterloters, all I could think was—this was real. This was really real. All magic and illusion aside, we were really here, and we were one week away from the Games.

Seven more days, and then the killing and dying would start.

Not long after the District Six unicorn enters her quarters at the Training Center, a scroll appears in a flash of smoke and green fire, thudding onto the ground at her hooves.

She levitates and unrolls it. It says:

You looked really amazing out there! I know that lots of ponies are going to want to sponsor you. You have to keep being great, so that you'll get lots and lots of help, and then you can win and come back home. I'm trying to get together enough bits to buy you something, too.

We all miss you a whole lot, but I know you can do it! Come home as soon as you can, okay?

Love,

Your favorite brother, Spike

The unicorn carefully rolls the scroll back up and stands silent for a few moments, eyes closed.

She knows that she can't send anything back home. It isn't allowed, and there's no way she could do it without getting caught.

But she thinks as hard as she can in the hope that somehow everyone she loves will hear:

I will. I'll do my best. I'll win this thing. Somehow. I promise.