Chapter 1: Alive

Tadashi jumped over a fallen glass display and tried to avoid stepping on the shards scattered about. He raised his arm to cover his mouth and tried to see through the smoke and his tearing eyes. They were burning from both the brightness of the flames as well as the smoke contaminating them. He went into a coughing fit and looked around. He couldn't see Callaghan anywhere, not through the smog that surrounded him.

Maybe he got out already, Tadashi reasoned, deciding to turn back and head for the exit, which was not too far away. He needed to get back to Hiro. He knew that he would be heavily chastised and hit on the arm several times, but he would make it out alive. He jumped over the shattered display again and picked up his pace, weaving around fallen ceiling beams and such. He could hear his brother's voice calling for him from outside.

"TADASHI!" came the frantic shout. He had nearly reached the door, and he glimpsed a sight of his brother standing at the foot of the staircase and clutching Tadashi's lucky hat tightly, wringing it in his hands and looking like he was trying to decide whether or not to help. Tadashi smiled slightly and coughed again, making for the door.

But then, a loud hum sounded behind him. He turned around to see one of the knocked over displays pointing unknowingly at him, and it was charging up. The sound could barely be heard above the fire, but he still ran like his life depended on it, which maybe it did.

He reached for the door handle!

His hand was around it!

He started to-

BOOM!

Gone.

"TADASHI!" Hiro screamed at the building. Finally, getting up enough courage, he dropped Tadashi's hat and ran in after him.

Dang it you knucklehead! What are you thinking! You're always telling me I'm the one being too dangerous! Why don't you try listening to yourself! Hiro shouted in his mind. He thought he glimpsed a human-shaped shadow approaching the door. Suddenly, in a blinding flash, Hiro was thrown backwards. He landed hard on his back next to the hat. He knew it wasn't wise, but he ran toward the fire anyway.

"TADASHI! TADASHI! TADASHI!" he shouted as he ran up the steps. A fireman who had just arrived on the scene grabbed him by the back of his hoodie and pulled him away. Hiro struggled against the man's strong grip. He planted his feet and pulled forward, gritting his teeth and stretching his arms out, grasping for the now-flaming doors of SFIT.

"LET ME GO!" he shouted, "MY BROTHER'S IN THERE!" But the fireman picked him up from the ground and hurried back down the steps, his fellows rushing in with hoses. Hiro kept struggling, flailing his arms and trying to escape, but it was no use. He grunted when the fireman roughly set him back down.

"Listen, I know you said your brother is still inside. If I go now, there may still be a chance that he's okay. If he was standing during the shockwave, he was probably blown back toward the doors. He might be alright," the man explained, his chocolate eyes earnest and concerned. Hiro nodded weakly, briefly wondering if Aunt Cass and his friends had left for the café yet or if they were still here.

"Hiro!"

That answered his question. It was GoGo who reached him first. She didn't even look to him at first, she just stared at the flames pouring out of SFIT and the fireman's retreating form as the brave man ran into the burning building accompanied by a few others dressed appropriately for the heat. Hiro didn't look at her, just stared blankly at the flames.

"Where's Tadashi?" she whispered.

Hiro tried to say something, but his voice caught in his throat. Suddenly, he felt like the world had just crumbled out from beneath his feet and he dropped to his knees, skinning them slightly on the paved stone ground.

He heard his aunt coming up behind him, sobs racking her voice. Tears ran down Hiro's own cheeks, but in the shock of it all, his world began to spin, and his view of the school tilted into a horizontal position until finally, darkness enfolded him.

"HIRO!"

~oOo~

Tadashi's eyes snapped open. The ground felt unnaturally cool to the touch, even the spot beneath him was cool. Neither was it freezing. Jolting from his thoughts, he gasped, then coughed. He held his chest for a moment to catch his breath. When he had gotten his bearings back, he sat back on his legs and looked around. He appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. The area around him was rocky and treacherous, but at the same time, everything seemed smooth. He ran a dirty soot-covered hand through his hair. When had he gotten so dirty?

Oh, right.

He remembered running into the fire. The laser. The explosion. Was he dead? No, this all seemed too scary. Too dystopian. Too real. He got into a standing position and brushed himself off. The edges of his clothes were singed or burnt and his one pant leg was torn slightly. He looked ahead and saw bluish-white lights glowing in the distance. There was something out there.

Whether or not they were civilized was another story.

He took a step forward but suddenly noticed a ring of light surrounding his figure. Wind picked up around him, blowing dust around him. He turned and looked up, his eyes widening at the sight of what looked like some kind of airship hovering several hundred meters above him and descending. Being a good little boy, Tadashi normally would have just submitted when faced with arrest from the authorities, which these guys looked like. However, his instincts told him that this black and orange ship was very, very bad news, so he started to run.

However, a pair of guards came after him, chasing him with a pair of spears. Red-orange light illuminated lines in their dark clothing as they rushed him. One jabbed his side with the red glowing end of the staff and he yelped and fell at the shock that ran through his body. The two men gripped his wrists and hauled him up to his feet which wouldn't support him.

"This program has no disk," one said in a deep, rough, mechanical voice, "another stray." The other nodded and together they dragged him to the ship. What the heck is a program? Tadashi thought, upset that he couldn't carry his own weight. A large open corridor, lit up with fluorescent white lights had lowered to the ground, the cabin perhaps. As feeling returned to his legs, he put weight on his feet and walked in step with the two helmeted men; entering the corridor, the first thing Tadashi saw was that the wall was lined with men. No heads turned to look at him, but rather, all of their eyes stared blankly off into the distance or were glued to the floor.

Tadashi froze for half a second before receiving a rough shove from the guard behind him. Not wishing to lose power of his legs again, Tadashi started forward with an annoyed look back over his shoulder. He stepped in front of an empty slot between two men and attempted to walk past it, but the guard's hand pulled him back and pushed him into the spot. A pair of see-through clamps encased his foot like a restrictive boot to prevent him from moving, and while he was distracted, a pair of handcuffs got secured around his wrists. He mentally cursed his mental awareness factor. The cabin began to rise until it jolted, signaling that it was locked in place.

He tried to free himself, but realized it would be of no use. The already loud engine increased its volume as the ship began to rise into the air. Tadashi closed his eyes; while not being afraid of heights per say, quite frankly, he felt that he was already as high up in the dark sky as he wanted to be. Though he still didn't want to be reminded of how high up he was, he was interested in knowing where exactly it was that he was going. He blinked his eyes open, the cool air lashing at them accompanied by more than a few raindrops. He looked to his left to see a man with dead blue eyes in clothes with blue lines of lighting etched into them. Further down the line, he was met with generally the same sight as each of them stared ahead at nothing.

He turned to his left and saw a young man who looked about his age, perhaps slightly older. He wore a black jacket, the edges of which flapped around his chin and torso. His appearance seemed different than the others. Tadashi noticed that the lines in his clothes were a minty green rather than blue like the others. But he also saw his face. The rather indifferent or even resigned look that he wore masked something underneath; something akin to GoGo's bring-it-on-come-at-me-bro attitude. His hair spiked up and filed to a point at the top. He looked like a classic cartoon bad-boy from TV shows that he and Hiro had watched as kids. Tadashi smiled at the memory but it faded as soon as he began to speak to his neighbor.

"Where am I? Where are we going?" he shouted over the wind. The man turned to him; the hints of a smile turning up his lips were quickly crushed and replaced by a mask of indifference.

"Be quiet if you wanna live."

The voice was tinny and strange, if broke halfway through the sentence, making it harder to hear the last two words. However, their meaning was clear. Tadashi decided not to ask questions for the moment and instead focus on what he could learn through context, as well as the small matter of keeping himself alive. He watched where the ship was heading, to a place not far from the city it seemed. It looked like a giant glowing football stadium, floodlights shining back and forth from spots on the area surrounding the open roof. The ship landed and the cabin lowered to the smooth ground. Lights drew lines here in the ground as opposed to where the ship had found him. He swallowed when he saw one of the men down the line start to shake and start muttering a constant phrase under his breath.

"Not the games, not the games, not the games, not the games, not the games…"

Tadashi looked away from the shaking man and back towards the stoic one next to him. Further away, the guards, who had disappeared for the remainder of the trip, reappeared and were making their way down the line, accompanied by more of them from where they had landed. One of them was making his way down the line, stopping in front of every prisoner and lowering his head before raising his head as if scanning his face. The first one he told "Rectify" after he had finished scanning. It was the same for the next two, but then he reached the man standing next to him and Tadashi heard a whirring and then finally, a harsh utterance of the word "Games."

The man moved on to Tadashi, scanning his face up and down. Tadashi opened his mouth to say something, though he wasn't exactly sure what he planned to say; but the guard sharply said, "Games," and moved on. Tadashi shut his mouth after a second and then waited as a pair of the guards came and grabbed his shoulders, hauling him forward off of the landing pad and toward the stadium. They released him after a moment, but he felt something clamp around his feet again. He looked down to see the same clear binders encasing his feet once again. He looked up to see himself between the man he was standing next to previously and three others. The man was now wearing a somewhat less than indifferent and more of a semi-defiant sneer on his features. Tadashi looked the other way and saw looks of determination, resignation, or hopelessness on the faces of the other men standing next to him.

Then the world dropped away.

It took Tadashi a moment to realize that he wasn't falling. Rather, he was being lowered at high speed to someplace below ground. It made him sick to look at the walls as they flew by around him, checked by the occasional light. He pressed his lips into a thin line and waited for the nausea to pass.

After what seemed like forever, the walls around him slowed before suddenly, he was in a sizable room with the bare minimum of lights giving it just the bare minimum of illumination. He shook his head, the wavy feeling in his stomach leaving him and he gave a shuddery breath. He looked around for a moment before attempting to jerk his feet out of the binders.

A sliding sound came from behind him.

Tadashi twisted his head in time to see a tall woman in high heels that nearly matched Honey Lemon's as she strode toward him. Her stark white hair was pulled up in a very tight bun that looked like it probably hurt. He heard more footsteps and didn't have to turn to know that there were more coming toward him from other directions. He looked around at the small group of five women who had surrounded him and his eyes flicked to each of them, their appearances different and the same all at once.

Then, each of them raised their forefingers in the air and a small light that looked like white fire went on and they dragged them down his body. He swallowed and felt his ears and face burning.

"Uhm..." he stuttered. Nothing would come out in his flustered state. This was beyond weird. If this was a dream, something must have hit him on the head before he had gotten knocked out, because he had never dreamt of stuff like this happening.

Once they had him stripped to his underpants, they threw his now shredded clothes into a chute where they were sucked up and disappeared. He swallowed uncomfortably again and shifted, wondering if they were playing a joke on him. At least until a black substance started to crawl its way like a virus across his skin. He recoiled at the sight of the opaque black goo as it wound its way up his body, down his legs, and over his shoulders. It wrapped itself around his arms until it stopped and hardened. The material felt like a cross between latex and leather; tight but not restrictive. The women returned, each carrying a piece of armor, which they attached rather robotically to his person. In turn, each piece extended out and wrapped itself around whatever it attached to. He looked at his now armored arms and watched as blue lights flickered on and he flexed his fingers, three of which covered in the black material, two with the lighting running down them.

Cool, he thought, looking up to see two of the women from before. Another had walked off to a small pedestal that sat about 15 yards from the platform where he was stationed. A mechanical female voice started to speak:

"Attention Program, you will receive an identity disk. Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disk. "

The woman walked back toward him, robotic in her six inch heels, and passed the "identity disk" to one of the women next to her.

"If you lose your disk or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate derezolution."

The second woman walked behind him and pressed the disk to his back, stuck firmly between his shoulder blades on some kind of dock. Almost like a USB drive, he thought. She twisted it into place and he jolted, blue pixels shining in his eyes for a moment before he blinked them away.

The woman with white hair gave a slightly indifferent quarter-smile and said, "Mirroring complete, disc activated and synchronized. Proceed to games."

Tadashi quirked an eyebrow, he wasn't getting a good feeling about these games. "Games?" he asked, looking after the woman's departing form. They all disappeared until it was just her and him. He looked at her slightly expectantly before he asked, "What am I supposed to do?"

Her only reply was a half smile and one word.

"Survive."

Tadashi swallowed and waited a moment before noticing that the binders around his feet had unfolded and he was free to move. He took a step back before he heard the sound of the door ahead of him opening to reveal nothing but bright light. He shielded his eyes with his arm, half wondering if this was just a mindless dream on the way to heaven. He then put one foot in front of the other, one step at a time to finally reach the door.

Whatever this is, it can't be good, he thought.