On the fourth day of Chriiiiistmas

I really shouldn't leave these so late...


Its 12am. Dammit XD And now something has made all the text bold and I can't just select it and hit bold again why blogger why...

Alright. Moving on, again. 

"Go tell that long-tongue liar

Go and tell that midnight rider

Tell the rambler,

The gambler,

The back-biter;

Tell them that God's gonna cut 'em down,

Tell them that God's gonna, cut 'em down..."

The song reverberated inside my head, endlessly playing. It was the song I marched to. It wasn't the only thing in my head at that moment.

It had been a week. Seven days since my homeland had been invaded by an enemy without insignia. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. They wielded various weapons that did not identify them from a single country.

It took them seven days to gain control of the entire continent. Australia was now theirs, and they wasted no time in terrorising the citizens.

I was a Staff Sergeant of the 23rd, Australian Special Forces. We had been apart of the quick-reaction force. There were only ten of us, now. We had joined together with some of the normal army, giving us a total of about twenty-four men. Each carried a fully-loaded Steyr AUG assault rifle and our own kit.

We were lost. Our communications were useless- there was no-one on the other end to even pick up the phone.

Yet again, another story written on camp. But this was recently, when I went away with my dad and younger siblings to a National Park...area..thing... I cant remember what it's called. Anyhow. We visited this one area on a walk, and it was this beautiful place with ferns covering the ground on our left, dense enough that I imagined an Australian commando would have no trouble hiding in them, or an entire squad. So I started thinking of this story, typed a bit, and gave up XD I felt it was sounding a bit too much like Tomorrow When the War Began. Y'know, Australia gets invaded and all. Survivors are basically on their own. Eh. Didn't want to write that, in the end. I think I'll end up storing it somewhere or just deleting it. When I post this, it'll be online anyhow, so I can always go back and take it again.

The song is by Johnny Cash and plays out in the intro to a very war-ish game that I had been playing at the time. I know. Games. I do take inspiration from other stuff to. Most of my failed stories are about games... Anyway, the song is one I imagined could easily be marched to. And that was the basis for this entire story. One of the more...unoriginal ones, I know :P

  

Moving onto some of the bigger stuff, now. Oh wow, I haven't read this in ages. This is my attempt at a Hunger Games fanfiction. And I tried, twice, to make it seem kinda good. There's two different versions and they're both 800 words long, so I'm just going to read through them and choose the best to put up here.

(An hour of procrastination Ten minutes later)

Ok. This is the revised version of the story.

"We have to go," he told me. It was murder; the elephant that had been sitting in the room was now seeping it's life blood onto the carpeted floor, figuratively. I sat on the edge of the lumpy mattress and he was leaning against the door frame. My only friend.

"Where?" I ask my brother desperately. "We know they've been looking for us. Where could we go that they wouldn't follow?"

Jake shook his head. "You know who'll take us in. You know where we can go."

The unsaid taboo is on both our minds. "District 13," I whisper, afraid that somehow a Peacemaker or other Capitol resident will hear me.

"Lavina. Look at me."

I do. He's holding his pale hand out to me. He's lived his entire life here, just like me. We followed in the footsteps of our parents in some ways- they never took part in the hideous fashion designs of the Capitol that were always updating, so neither did we. Our father used to supervise the Avoxes that repaired the cars and machinery around the Capitol. He had a soft spot for them, and in his quiet moments would reflect to our mother about them. Two days ago, my parents were arrested for 'rebelling'. Jake and I moved fast to grab our things and reach some kind of safety. There was some sort of decision about our parent's fate being made by the Peacekeepers as we spoke, but we wouldn't know anything until it was too late.

Our parents had told us once that if anything ever happened to them, we would need to get out of the city as fast as we could. If we needed a temporary place to stay inside the city that was safe, she said we could go to the abandoned hotel near the outskirts. The same hotel we were sitting in now, talking about how to get further away.

There was no way out. The Capitol was surrounded by huge walls designed to keep us 'safe', while at the same time neatly keeping us from running away, too. We had thought about taking a hovercraft, but neither of us knew how to pilot it. And even if we managed to fly one, there'd be no guaranteeing that it didn't have some kind of tracking device on board. No. We couldn't risk it.

Reluctantly, I stand up and take Jake's hand. He motions to me and I follow him down the stairs and into the daylight. It blinds me at first, but my eyes readily adjust.

The Capitol shines brightly before us, as with every day. 

Jake leads me through a few side streets to avoid the Peacekeepers that line the roads. We reach a low, squat building that is out of place among the contemporary glass giants around it. Noone has lived in this house for a very long time, but I trust my brother completely.

I walk with him in silence until we're standing at the back of the house, and I'm squinting at the piles of corrugated iron when suddenly it becomes clear.

A car sits there. It's a wreck, really. Little more than a burnt out skeleton of the old cars that used to patrol the Capitol streets. Now they have electronically controlled cars that glide smoothly across the roads. All shiny curves and cushioned seats, and a speed limit that doesn't reach anymore than fifty kilometers per hour.

This car... No matter how old it looks, there's a sparkle in my brother's eye, and I can see that he can't wait to start working on it.

"Diesel engine, manual-drive 'automotive'," Jake read out to me from the dusty old book he held in his hands. I was sitting in the faded and ripped leather seat, fingers trying to clear off the grim from the dashboard. The car looked to be in good condition, despite the missing doors and roof, and only some sort of roll cage installed as protection.

"Hey, look at this," Jake says, pointing out some finer text at the back of the booklet. "It can take the same fuel as the heavy supply trucks. We might actually make this, y'know.

I swing myself out of the car and take a quick look around the squat house and the junkyard we stand in. The corners of the house are sagging unimpressively, as if in some permanent frown. I wonder who had owned it, and how old it was. We had been inside, earlier. There had only been moldy floorboards and broken lights. The only thing promising they had found was a small tool box in one of the rooms. My brother had taken it outside straight away.

I turned back to the car. "This thing's a gold mine, Jake."

He was still reading the booklet. "When we find those fuel tanks, we can leave straight away."

Ah. The fuel tanks. We would need to grab a couple from a refueling station, I guessed. They were dotted around the Capitol, in the less attractive areas of the great city. They weren't guarded incredibly well. The Capitol was perfect for it's inhabitants- who would want to go anywhere else?

That's as far as I got. I did have a plan. Eventually, they got the car up and running and stocked up on resources, and were chased out of the Capitol. Then there was this gap in my head as to what happened next (A road trip across the other eight or so districts between them and 13 was going to be a bit difficult to write) and then their car's engine was shot out by a hovercraft that had found them. So they leg it and are running through the forest outside of District 12 as Katniss spots them, just like in the book. The hovercraft moves over them and stabs Jake with the claw-hand thingo, bringing him into the hovercraft. Then it captures Lavina and bam, end story on a sad note. If anyone remembers, Lavina is the Avox that has to help Katniss while she stays at the Capitol. I wanted to fill in the backstory for how Lavina got to District 12 and who the boy was. Just lost the ability to write and put it in the Yellow section- "Stuff that I really should finish but, to be honest, will never get done."

Basically the end of the post. Yeup. Pretty sucky so far. Well, either tomorrow or the day after I'll be posting some drawings, and then the day after that I'll probably post the first Private Eye story I ever attempted, and then a coolish idea that I had that isn't just a 300 word thing :P

So don't give up on me yet.