#also sorry i went on a slightly irrelevant tangent i hope that doesn’t scare you off from asking questions in the future ahahahhaha

[maidstew]

Hey do you have any thoughts on the names in tbosas, especially the Capitol students? Like how they have Ancient Greek/roman names. Do you have names you like or don’t like? I just think the way Suzanne Collins names her characters is really interesting and I was wondering your thoughts on it

oh this is such a fun question!

honestly, i LOVE the way suzanne names her characters- especially the capitol’s tendency to go for roman names. i think the capitol’s roman names vs the districts industry-related names really drives home the divide between the two.

(i wish i was one of those very smart fans who could connect the use use of roman names and culture to the capitol and come up with brilliant ideas but alas. i am not.)

and honestly, i’ve seen some people hate how on the nose some of the district names are but i actually enjoy it a lot. i love the names like hy and sol and teslee and mizzen.

my only real complaint is that i would have loved to see district 12 characters have more industry inspired names! i like katniss and peeta well-enough but as someone from appalachia, i think something more on the nose for them as well could have been interesting.

or, alternatively, it would have been interesting to see historically common last names of the area being used rather than names like ‘everdeen’ or ‘mellark’. (but that’s probably just me, and tbf i guess a name like katniss smith wouldn’t sound very good for a dystopian novel.)

sorry, i know you said tbosas and especially capitol students but somehow i keep ending up back at talking about appalachia- oopsie

anyway, what are your thoughts? do you have any names that you really liked or didn’t like?

[ariadnelives]

Chapter 12 -- The Worst-Case Scenario

[Missed earlier chapters? Go catch up here! Otherwise, welcome back! Oh, and make sure to join our discord server! Chapter can also be found @ ao3”]

“Honey, we're home!” Ariadne shouted as she and Spacebreather disembarked from her shuttle. “We have information and we need some synthesis!”

Alicia, Tripwire, Lefthook, and Taryn were all waiting in the docking bay for them, looking somewhat concerned.

“Promise you won't be mad?” Tripwire offered nervously.

Of course, neither Pilar nor Ariadne would make such a promise, and it's a good thing they didn't, as Pilar had never been angrier than she was when she found out Sasha had spirited away from the station.

“Please,” Alicia said calmly as Pilar kicked a crate across the room in frustration, breaking it into three pieces, “don't blame yourself for this, there was no stopping—”

“I don't blame myself!!” Pilar shouted, picking up a rather expensive-looking vase from the crate she'd kicked apart, and smashing it against the ground. “I blame you!”

“Querida, that's—” Ariadne started reassuringly, but Pilar cut her off.

“That's what, unfair? She's the one who helped her sneak out! She's the one who disguised her as me! This is on her!”

“No, it's not,” Taryn insisted, “It was Sasha's decision.”

“It's okay, Taryn,” Alicia said flatly. “This was on me, I'm the one who helped her.”

“Well, then, it's on me too,” Taryn replied angrily. “We all thought she should be allowed to go in the field. We all saw how miserable she was in here, if she said she wanted to go, there isn't one of us here who wouldn't have helped her.”

This struck something in Pilar. She was still angry, but something about hearing how her sister felt like a prisoner snapped her back to reality and made her feel a pang of guilt.

There was silence for a moment.

“I'm willing to take full responsibility for this,” Alicia said calmly, “but I need you to remain calm when I tell you this next part.”

Pilar once again made no such promise, and almost broke her hand punching the wall of the shuttle when she found out the station had lost contact with Sasha and her rogue crew, who were now presumed captured.

When she calmed down a bit, she pointed at Tripwire. “You. I want the coordinates for Sasha's last known location programmed into my shuttle five minutes ago.”

Tripwire scrambled into the shuttle in the hopes of not making the situation worse.

Pilar pointed somewhat aggressively at Alicia. “You. We're going to need to put a pin in how furious I am with you. We have information on the life centers and we'll need all the help we can get in order to mount a rescue.”

Alicia bit her lip and nodded.

Pilar then pointed at Taryn. “And YOU. Took a lot for someone as young as you to stand up to me like that for the sake of your crewmates. Me and Ariadne will have to have a talk about your name.”

Taryn would have smiled under any other circumstances.

***

Pilar was, at the moment, too anxious to pilot the shuttle, and Alicia was poring over the information they'd retrieved from La Pesadilla, so Ariadne took the driver's seat. Of course, she was just as anxious as Pilar, but she put it aside because her hands were a little bit steadier and Spacebreather was much better at panicking.

“So, I think it's pretty obvious what the immersion pods and Cortex implants are for,” Alicia offered.

“Let's pretend it's not,” Pilar snapped, “Sorry, my brain is all over the place right now. I'm going to need you to assume nothing is obvious.”

“Okay,” Alicia replied calmly, trying to strike a balance between being accommodating and condescending in the hopes of not getting Pilar even angrier at her. “Well, it's a cult. In the old days, and I'm talking really old, they would prey on people who crave structure and ritual, they convince those people that they're better off with someone else making all the decisions for them, then convince them that any of their loved ones who've got concerns are actually the cause of all their suffering.”

“And how do the pods and implants factor into it?” Pilar asked, trying equally hard to be patient, as she did technically ask for a long-winded explanation.

“Well, see, eventually they tried to make it seem more rational and scientific. They introduced fancy-looking machines that they claimed measured mental stress, or the despair of the soul, or some other intangible quality that no court could technically prove they weren't measuring. They'd scare people into joining their practice by showing them hard data that seemed to prove they'd be better off in the cult. I think this is something similar. The pods and the implants would both allow the cult's leadership to do all sorts of things. Show them visions of their god, convince them their dead loved ones can't get into heaven unless they sign up, encode their brain with the irresistible urge to wear ugly orange robes. In fact, they wouldn't even need to go to all the trouble of exploiting a certain group of people. They could program the appropriate psychological profile, with the brainwashing already done, onto a disk and then just pop it into people's heads. Anyone who agreed to their audit would be clay in their hands as soon as the machine turned on.”

“That'd explain why nobody ever seems to come out of the Life Centers,” Pilar looked slightly confused, “but then, why both? You could do that with the just pods or just the implants, and since the implants need to be surgically installed, it doesn't seem all that practical, you know?”

“Again, I'm not sure this is what they're doing. I'm just saying, it's something they could be used for. I agree, the implants aren't practical for large-scale cult programming, but they could be used for a more direct form of mind control.”

“How do you mean?” Pilar asked.

“Well,” Alicia continued, “we've considered the possibility that maybe our impostor Ariadne might not be pulling the strings?”

“And the quantum shift generator?” Pilar asked.

“Still not sure. I'd guess it has something to do with the life centers. I mean, the impostor usually seems to be in two places at once, with the right tweaking, a quantum shift generator could make that possible. Or…” Alicia saw the look on Pilar’s face and instantly regretted beginning this sentence. “…some of the old-school cults actually had prison ships so they could detain people who wanted to leave. A quantum shift generator could be used to freeze a person in time so you don’t have to worry about supplying them with food and water.”

Pilar looked horrified. “We have to get my sister out of there…”

“We will,” Alicia started, “just—”

“Don't,” Pilar snapped. “You and I… we're not there yet.”

“That's it,” Alicia sighed, “I was really hoping I wouldn't have to do this, but…”

Alicia pulled a small circular hologram projector out of her pocket and attached earbuds to it.

“I've made a call. Hopefully they can talk some sense into you,” Alicia said, placing the projector on the table. “She's on hold, just tap the crystal.”

Alicia quietly went up to the cockpit and took the controls from a very relieved Ariadne, who walked back to be with Spacebreather.

Spacebreather had the earbuds in both her ears, listening to the woman in the hologram that Ariadne recognized immediately.

She looked a lot like Alicia, although her demeanor was slightly more relaxed. Her hair was long and twisted into colorful locs, and she had a faintly visible scar that started on her forehead, crossed her left eye and eyebrow, and landed at the top of a prominent cheekbone.

She was talking quickly, and from having spent so much time with Alicia's younger sister Ariana Baltimore, that the speech she was giving was probably sarcastic and full of borderline irrelevant tangents.

Ariadne wished she could hear what Baltimore was saying. She was something of an expert in sisterly conflict. For some incredibly complex reasons that frankly don't need to be recounted again, Alicia was forced to fake her death and disappeared for ten years, and she and Ariana had spent the last several years working to patch up the damage this had done to their relationship.

Pilar was listening intently, shaking almost imperceptibly. Her responses to Baltimore's speech were mostly nods and quiet utterances of “mhm” and “okay.” At the beginning, she seemed angry, but her expression quickly softened until she looked sad, and then horribly guilty. By the end, both Baltimore and Pilar were crying.

“Thank you,” Pilar said to her.

Baltimore said something back.

“I will,” Pilar responded, and unplugged the headphones so Ariadne could hear.

Another woman walked into the holographic display. This was Marisol Beam-Spacebreather, Baltimore's wife and Pilar's adoptive older sister. Her brown hair was longer than the last time they'd seen her.

“Hi Pilar! Hi Ariadne!” Beam cheered. “We hear you're on a dangerous mission!”

“I wasn't super listening when Alicia described it to me but as I understand it, you're trying to help the President of Mars get his confidence back?” Baltimore asked while maintaining a totally straight face.

“Not even close,” Ariadne grinned.

“And Mars doesn't have a—” Pilar started, but was cut off by Baltimore.

“I know, I'm just being a jerk. Just be safe, okay?” Baltimore said. “And remember what I told you.”

“And come back alive,” Beam quipped, “I mean, ideally. We want to bring the twins out to the station on Halloween weekend and it'd probably be better if you two weren't dead, so please try to make it an easy mission!”

“We'll do our best,” Pilar smiled, and wiped away a tear.

“What'd she say?” Ariadne asked.

“She gave me a lot to think about, and thought about a few things for me so I didn’t have to,” Pilar did not elaborate, and Ariadne did not pry further.

Ariadne and Pilar both intended to fulfill their promise to remain safe when they stepped off the ship. They gave Alicia instructions on what to do should they not make it back in time for the rendezvous, and attempted to break into the Life Center closest to Sasha's last known location.

It was almost too easy to break into. Seemingly, whoever was in charge of activating the security system had forgotten to do so, and despite the late hour, there was not a night watchman in sight.

Ariadne and Spacebreather quietly scanned for some kind of dungeon or holding cell, and after observing two barracks where rows of acolytes slept in bunk beds, a small kitchenette that seemed to be devoid of all seasonings, a recreation room that consisted of a few card tables and uncomfortably religious board games, and three separate dark rooms that had very little besides a capsule resembling a refrigerator in them, they found a large vault with the door ajar.

They silently hoped that this meant that Sasha and her rogue crew had escaped on their own. When they got inside, they found little more than dusty wooden crates, statues covered by white sheets, and shelves of books that had been there so long that, while there was no way for Ariadne to notice this, the dust mites in the pages had evolved into their own subspecies.

The only person inside was a young white man, about Ariadne's age, with dark hair and a naturally punchable face. He was shoving various trinkets, scrolls, and volumes into a large duffel bag.

He jumped back when he noticed that anyone else was in the room at all, but when he saw Pilar's tattoos a second later, he recognized her immediately.

“They let you out?!” Prescott said in a tone that was somewhere between a whisper, a gasp, and a scream.

“Uh … what?” Spacebreather replied.

“Do we know you?” Ariadne asked.

“Ugh, I guess if you want a job done right, you've got to do it yourself.” Prescott tapped the face of his watch several times and suddenly the silence split open as alarms rang through the air. Emergency lights switched on with a loud clunk and the vault door swung closed behind them. As easily as he'd deactivated the security, he'd switched the system back on, and the open vault door had triggered a full lockdown. He spoke loudly and clearly into his watch. “Babe, I've got what I need. I'm gonna need that teleport.”

“You got it,” a female voice said from the watch.

Pilar, however, moved slightly more quickly than the woman on the other end of the line. She unsheathed two of the knives strapped to her thigh and, in one move, sliced the watch from Prescott's wrist with her right hand, knocked Prescott several feet back, pinning him against the wall, and placed the knife in her left hand against his throat. Ariadne instinctively drew her blaster and trained it on his forehead.

The watch fell onto the open duffel bag, and there was a flash of white light. The watch and the duffel bag were both gone, presumably now in the possession of whatever accomplice Prescott had been talking to.

“You blew our cover and I've had a really bad day,” Pilar growled at the young man who was suppressing the impulse to wet himself. “If you want to keep all your fingers you'd better be able to get us out of here. ¿Está claro?”

Prescott began to laugh nervously.

“Something funny?” Pilar let the knife press a little harder against his throat.

“You just flushed it down the toilet!” Prescott laughed wildly. “Unless you've got a teleport of your own, the only way out of this vault just poofed away with my nest egg.”

“Wrong answer,” Pilar shouted and, with the knife that wasn't pressed to his throat, severed his right pinky and ring finger. The resulting scream was loud enough to drown out the alarms. “Clearly you've shut the security down before, so if you want this little piggy to keep eating roast beef you'd better tell us how to open that vault door.”

“That's toes,” Ariadne shouted over the alarms and Prescott's continuing sobs.

“What?” Pilar asked sharply.

“This Little Piggy, that's toes, not fingers,” Ariadne explained. “Still, I'd do what she says, you're losing a lot of blood.”

“It only opens from the outside, someone has to let us out,” Prescott whimpered.

“Try again,” Pilar hissed, and with another scream, his middle finger fell to the floor. “You've got 17 fingers and toes left to give me the right answer.”

“And probably some other things you'd rather not lose,” Ariadne added helpfully.

When the screams died down, Prescott managed to push a response through the tears. “I set up the security system,” he was gasping between every few words, “they know me. When they come check the vault, I can convince them this was a— surprise security, uh, audit, that you two are consultants, and that the system malfunctioned and trapped us here.”

Pilar considered this.

“P… please… don't hurt me again,” Prescott begged.

“Right answer,” she said, and dropped him hard to the ground. He fell to his knees and attempted to wad his T-shirt around his bleeding hand.

“You… you fucking bitch…” Prescott whimpered, which prompted a flash of rage in Ariadne that manifested in her clubbing him in the eye with the butt of her pistol.

Prescott fell to the floor, unconscious.

“Sorry,” Ariadne said immediately, “Oh god, Pilar, I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be,” Pilar said back. “You just knocked him out.”

“But now we're trapped for real,” Ariadne was trying very hard not to panic.

“Would've happened either way,” Pilar shrugged, and slumped back against a crate, waiting for their captors to come recover them.

“How do you figure?” Ariadne asked, really hoping to make sense of what she was being told.

“You were faster than me,” Pilar replied, “which is the only reason he's unconscious and not dead.”

Ariadne sat down next to Pilar and waited for someone to collect them.