"When I first got here, I holed up for a week in my room, looking at old tribute information, betting stats, actual arena footage, if it existed-you'd be surprised how little people give a damn about archiving this stuff, even when it used to happen just once, annually," The Victor who won would still be alive when his or her worst nightmares faded not only from public view, but from public record, lost somewhere in the endangered section of the public library's by appointment only deep records, "Used to be, just variations on wilderness, more or less. Sometimes they'd get a little creative, but always the arena would at least fake something natural. It was more subtle before the 'neverending quell'. I'd say what you've seen is more about nostalgia than anything else."

Nostalgia, and a budget. It was easier to co-opt your death traps out of existing foliage than to build them from the ground up-- and if you were building them it was cheaper to simply build them than to do that and then have to fake a version of nature on top. But Shepard had no legitimate way of knowing that budget might be a factor, so instead she shrugged, and said nothing.

"That time, though, I came in third. You ever look up the records, Sam?"