All the planning and discussing had gotten deep into the possibility of no one at all wanting to be part of the reunion show, a reality Chris had known about since the very moment he had thought up the idea. But he didn't want to make it sound like that was the most likely outcome, and so every time he expressed that it might not happen, he made sure to spend the next several minutes talking about how it was going to have to happen, because he was going to put big money into this project and that meant there was little room for error. There was going to be a Total Drama reunion show, and that was that.

Having six months to get all those people to agree to it was going to be a challenge, one that needed some sort of game plan to get started. "We've got to decide who is worth the effort right now, and who we should save for later," Bridgette said, pulling out some blank paper and a couple of pens to use for this planning session. "Or maybe we could just do some research and see who lives where and all that."

"How are we going to know that kind of stuff? Do you think there's even a way we could find these people?"

She looked from her sheet of paper, which she had begun titling with the goal of the exercise, to see Geoff attempting to balance one of the pens on his nose. When it fell and he noticed her watching, she laughed. "I'm sure there's some way. I bet they get found all the time by people."

"Yeah, by people who care. Face it, Bridge, we don't care. We only care because Chris wants us to care. Do you know how hard it is to care for me right now?" He proved his point by trying to balance the pen once more, failing just as badly the second time. "See, still not caring!"

"You don't have to care about the people, I guess, but you do care about the money, don't you?" Bringing up the payment they received for whatever they did was always the way she managed to snap Geoff into caring about anything, and this time was no exception, as he put the pen down and grabbed his own piece of paper, seemingly ready to begin the brainstorming they were about to do. "There we go. Just think about the money."

He did, actually picking up the pen to use it correctly, before snorting as he attempted to hide a few chuckles. "You know who never thought about the money?" he asked, hoping Bridgette would humor him with a response. When she did, he grinned. "Zeke, the poor guy. What happened to him? He went all weird and animal, didn't he?"

"Yes, but didn't Chris say that they mostly fixed him up? He still isn't completely sane but he's better. Probably shouldn't try to contact him until we're close to done with getting everyone else on board, though." She wrote Ezekiel's name on her sheet and, next to it, in the boldest letters she could fit on the line, put to wait until later for him, due to insanity. "See, you gave us a good start. Can you think of anyone else?"

"Uh, yeah, duh! These were my friends, yo!" He put his pen to his chin in thought, before using it to scribble something down. "Lindsay! She was at the Gemmies! Pretty woman, let me tell you."

The look on Bridgette's face had been excited, until he mentioned beauty, then her smile fell and she sighed. "Yes, perfect, Lindsay. Works on a fashion reality show. Probably won't want to talk to us unless we find a way to fake an interview with her."

"Or give her a real one?" Lifting his paper to show Bridgette what he had put down on it, he revealed that he had drawn a crude sketch of the logo for their radio show, Gidgette Weekly. "I mean, we get exec decisions for what's on our show, yeah?"

"Yeah! Geoff, you're a genius!" He was two-for-two on suggestions, plus he had come up with a great cover for whenever the person they needed was still into the fame thing. After writing Lindsay down, as well as the way to get her to become part of the reunion, she looked expectantly at her boyfriend, hoping he would have something else wise to throw into the discussion. "Anyone else?"

He was too busy staring at his drawing to pay attention to what she was asking. "I still don't know if I'm totally on board with doing this. Some of those people are total drags, and besides, focusing on this means less time on what matters most. I'm gonna miss just getting to chill at the studio with you."

"I know, I'm going to miss doing that too, but we'll be having adventures trying to rope all these old faces into our plan. It's going to be nice, I'm sure." For what she said next, she went into a stern and serious mode. "Unless you want to hit on other ladies, that is."

"Would I ever do that, Bridge-y bear? You're my ride or die, babe, and you know that." He sighed. "That's what's so bad about not having the time to just chill anymore. How am I gonna remind you of how much I love you?"

"All sorts of ways, I'm sure. Now let's get back to coming up with these plans, so that maybe later we could go somewhere so you can show me that love." By that, naturally, she meant like dinner or a movie, but Geoff's mind took it elsewhere, and it energized him to be involved more than mentioning the money they'd make off of this ever could.

The problem was, aside from the once-feral one and the one he had seen at the last real event they had worked, Geoff really didn't remember anyone that they had been on the show with. It wasn't that he hadn't cared, because some of those people had been really great friends of his, but rather it was that he just hadn't had the time to keep in touch with them, and their names had been lost to the sands of time in his head. "Uh, problem. I know I said they were my friends, but…"

"You don't remember their names. I know. Sometimes I can't remember them either." It was good to hear that Bridgette was in the same boat as him, and he was about to comment on the relief he felt when she said that when she continued to speak. "But most of the time, I can remember some, especially the names of people we actually still talk to!"

"We still talk to people from the show?" There was genuine surprise in his voice when he asked that, because as far as he knew, they really didn't.

"Yes! Remember my birthday last year? Courtney was there!" Bridgette wrote a third name down on her list: Courtney, her probably closest remaining friend from the show, for some reason or another. "She took time away from her law school stuff to actually celebrate with us. So much better than anyone else I thought was my friend."

Geoff started tapping his pen to his chin again. "D'ya think she'll be up for this?"

"Of course she will be. If Chris isn't there but we are, she'll be there faster than anything." She wrote that down, before thinking about what it would mean for them. "But if she's there, then there are others we should be more careful with."

"Like who?" Geoff quickly answered his own question, although with a response Bridgette did not want at all. "Oh, right, like that dumb guy who you fell for that one time."

"Chris said we don't have to invite him to this, so we're not going to." She shuddered, not even bothering to write the name of the person they were discussing down. "Besides, he wasn't quite who I was talking about. Remember? Green hair, bad boy attitude, blew up a mansion for the sake of being bad?"

"Oh yeah, Duncan! Forgot about him. Wonder how prison's treating him." There wasn't much more to Geoff's reaction than that, which made Bridgette wonder if he wasn't thrilled with the topic. "Not like it matters, I guess. How are we gonna break a guy out of jail for a reunion show?"

She shrugged. "No one ever said he was still in jail, so maybe we could get him to come anyway. Let me put him down in the 'wait until later' category for now until we find out." That was exactly what she did, and now the list had four of twenty names written down. "This might be a lot more work than we thought it would be back when we were talking about this with Chris."

"Maybe that's why Chris wanted us to do it. We know that man won't do hard work to save his life, unless they accidentally labeled relaxing as work." Going back to his doodling, Geoff snorted again. "What a guy. Not totally down with what he keeps throwing at us, but hey, he brought us fame, we can't complain too much."

He had made a good point, but when Bridgette tried to point it out, she was shushed and told that her talking was interrupting the creative process. A few minutes later, she was shown a new drawing on the same piece of paper as before, and she figured it was a guessing game as to what it was supposed to be. "Did you really just draw Duncan?" she asked.

"Yeah, but check out who I drew next to him." He pushed the paper closer to her face so she could get a closer look at what, at first glance, had seemed to be just some random girl. "It's that old goth babe. Gwen. Man, she and I used to be friends, but then stuff happened and I think she really hates me. Bummer."

"Are you telling me that you spent the past five minutes drawing them, so you could tell me to put her on the list?" He nodded and she sighed, pushing his paper back to him so she could write Gwen's name down. "Did drawing her help you remember her name or something?"

"Or something, probs. You can't interrupt the process though, Bridge. It's not cool." He went back to his drawings and she looked at her sad excuse for a list of their one-time companions, which was so far from complete it wasn't even funny. "Do you think she'd want to do this? I don't think so. She's so got it out for me."

"I don't know, Geoff. She might want to see me again. We used to be friends, so maybe that'll get her to come." Just as she was about to write down to put effort into getting Gwen to come, something dawned on Bridgette. "No, wait, she's not going to want to come at all, and it's got nothing to do with you, Geoff."

He looked up for just a second, gave her a confused look, and then was focused once more on doodles. "Are you going to explain that?"

"Hold on." She was writing several other names down now, without the help of her admittedly mostly-useless partner. "Gwen hated like everyone on the island. In order to get her to want to come, we'll have to convince either someone else to come…or someone else not to. And based on the last thing I heard about one of those two, I think I want it to be the second one."

"Not so fast, Bridgette," a new voice said, and both her and Geoff turned to look at the open doorway, where Chris stood holding a coffee and a sandwich. "I know where you're going with that, and I'm going to have to ask you to remember that everyone must be there. Drama is a good thing!"

She turned her attention back to her paper. "Yeah, I know, but it would be so much easier if I wasn't going to be in charge of a catfight."

"Too bad, so sad. You're inviting everyone." He took a bite of the sandwich, smiled, and walked on down the hall, leaving them alone once more. She sighed, because something had told her that he was going to do that, and even though he didn't know who she was thinking of not inviting, which really would have made a difference in his decision there, she thought, he was going to force them to come up with some way to make it happen.

"I've got an idea, Bridge." Showing his drawings again, this time on their own sheet so that they had more room, Geoff proudly pointed to a mess of arrows and faces. "Just hear me out, 'kay? It's gonna work for this."

"Any idea you've got is probably going to work better than mine, so hit me with it, I guess."

He inhaled deeply, before beginning his explanation. "So we're stuck on how to get old pal Gwen to come, right? How about we say it's some sort of thing she'd dig, and just not tell her that everyone else is gonna be there! It would be like a surprise party, except not a party and a lot more work!" From there, he moved his pointer finger to a different part of the diagram. "And this one here, uh, Leshawna? That's her name, I think. But her, she's gotta be in on the whole thing. Her and Gwen used to be tight."

Bridgette gave his diagram a few glances and compared it with her paper. "Did you happen to read what I wrote while you were drawing that? Because I figured that one out myself too."

"Nah, just used the old noggin for this." Once again his finger moved, to a scribbled out portion. "Here's who we don't invite. Mostly because I don't want her bringing that guy of hers around with no permission, but also because—"

"You have to invite everyone and make sure they're all there." Back in the doorway again, Chris was down to half of a sandwich now. "I don't care if you don't get the World Tour people in on this, but you're not skipping anyone who was on the island with you."

"Dude, how do you know we're talking about that?" Geoff crumpled his paper up and threw it in Chris' direction, but it missed completely and hit the floor in front of him instead. "It's like you've got powers or something."

After taking a sip of his coffee, Chris laughed. "Yeah, I kinda do. Called being used to listening to conversations for the exploitable bits." Before he left again, he made sure to put the suggestion that kept cropping up into its permanent grave: "Everyone comes. There is no excuse I'm going to take that has anything but that. So, yeah, stop coming up with ideas that mean not inviting someone." When he was gone, but still listening from wherever it was he was spying on them, it became very clear that this was going to be even harder than it already was. What they had already planned was not going to cut it.


It took about a week of off-and-on planning to finally get a rough estimate of what was going to have to happen to get the twenty people to wherever the reunion show was going to be held (another problem they were going to have to face eventually). It wasn't a perfect plan by any means, but it was one that would satisfy Chris and his desire for everyone who had been on the island to be there for the reunion, even if some of the methods of how they were going to convince some people were a bit odd.

Some were easy to think of ways to convince. Katie and Sadie? Just tell them there would be friends and cute guys and probably other things they had liked. Owen? Remind him that these were all his buddies, and that he had won the season. It would be blasphemous for him to not be there. But others were much harder, like Duncan being in jail still—a fact they had to research—and the only way they'd be able to get him involved was if they waited an additional year for his release date. For those difficult ones, they came up with the best way they could think of and hoped for the best.

Chris took one look at the plans and scoffed. "You really think this is going to work?" he asked, getting two half-hearted nods in return. "Man, you two are bad with this logical planning thing. You're thinking like you're all sixteen still! People change, everyone's grown up, and things are not like they were back then, trust me."

"How else did you want us to go about this?" Bridgette snapped, before realizing who, exactly, she had just snapped at. "I m-mean, how would you have done it, since we're so not smart enough to do it?"

"I don't know, I figured you would know what all these people would be like nowadays! Can't exactly catch up with everyone when they've all got restraining orders against me!" He read through their plan again, making sure to comment on the things that he did like, to make everything not look like so much of a failure. "I think some of these are manageable. Pretty sure some of these people would do anything for the fame it brings. But, really? You think you'll be able to convince Noah to come through the power of persuasion?"

"It was the best idea we had!" At the end of her rope, Bridgette covered her face with her hands and sighed. "We messed up, didn't we?"

Contrary to what she was expecting, Chris said they hadn't, and she moved her hands to just stare at him. "You just ripped on our ideas though, dude," Geoff said, as he tried to make sense of what was happening. "How didn't we biff this big time if you didn't like what we came up with?"

"Because you tried, that's why. Listen, Geoff, Bridgette, I know it's not going to happen. It's just a dream, to get everyone together again so you can remember the good days of my youth and first foray into torturing teens, and it's a dream that won't come true. But you two, you've really shown me that something could come from this dream." He tapped the paper a few times, assumedly on parts he liked. "And if you two could just keep trying and make something happen, that would be about the coolest thing ever, got it?"

"You were setting us up for failure the entire time? That's not cool. Bridge was getting super into all this." Geoff put a comforting hand on his girlfriend's shoulder, hoping that it being there would make her feel a little less angry at the situation. "I knew we shouldn't have done this. You're a bad man, Chris. Real bad."

"Tell me something I haven't heard before. I just wanted to see if you guys were up for the challenge and, well," he flicked the paper again, "you were. I'll pay you each a nice amount for each of these people you actually manage to get to the reunion next summer. Least I can do for the work you've put in."

Bridgette shook her head in disbelief. "No way, we're not going to fall for that. Not until we talk through what you mean and how much money and all the details. We're not doing even more work for nothing."

"Then we can talk about that stuff eventually, sure! Right now, though, I want to know your thought processes. How do you expect to rent animals for the show? How about getting people from other countries? Oh, and of course, how do you expect to get some of these people with others present? Not inviting someone isn't an option still. Can't change that rule." Chris grinned, his smile forced and cheesy. "It would take all the fun out of this."

"No, that would make this more fun, I think. I don't want there to be a bunch of fighting because we have people that don't like each other there. I want it to be old friends catching back up with each other." Bridgette looked down, thinking about who she really wanted to see at this show. "I know you like drama, but this would be more fun for everyone if it wasn't dramatic at all."

"By everyone you mean the people who decide to do anything but watch, right? Because no drama equals no viewers, which equals low ratings and no payment. If you want your money, you'll make this as dramatic as you can."

Geoff grabbed the paper back from Chris with his free hand and looked at it for a second. "Let me guess, you want us to do the hard stuff, since they're the ones big on dramatics, yeah?"

"It's not a Total Drama party if there isn't at least one backstabbing traitor and one person who cries, so, yeah!" Taking the list into his possession once more, Chris dropped his smile but kept his same tone. "I want them all if you can. Do a jailbreak. Get the RCMP involved. Whatever you can for ratings, because they're most important here."

"Ratings are not more important than people!" As soon as she said it, it hit Bridgette that Chris never once had chosen to care about people more than the ratings his shows got. He had been responsible for many injuries and near-death experiences, after all. "Okay, maybe for you they are, but for us? No way!"

"Maybe we should think like Chris here, babe," Geoff said, trying to diffuse the situation before it got too intense and things were said or done that would be regretted. "Maybe focusing on ratings is the way to go. I mean, where would we be without high ratings on our show? Nowhere, that's where."

There was something Bridgette really wanted to say in return, something about how they achieved their ratings through being themselves and being entertaining in ways that weren't physical pain or torture for others. But she saw Chris standing there, smile back on his face and a suggestive arch to his eyebrows, and she realized that arguing about that was a lost cause against this man who simply lived to torture people. And she couldn't make the argument that if he wanted it to happen so badly he could do it, because she knew the circumstances. She knew he wasn't allowed to interact with most of the people he wanted there, and he was going to have to act through others to make his reunion dream come true. "I guess you're right," she conceded, "but just because I realize that we're going to have to make this dramatic doesn't mean I'm going to let there be fighting or any of that."

"Then you're going to make me suffer low ratings, which will make me lose all chance of ever getting another show on air. Do you want that to happen?" The voice he used was harsher than the one before, and it was clear that he was beginning to tire of this argument. Her reaction was to shake her head and say that no, she didn't want that to happen. "Good. Then you're going to let there be fights if there need to be."

"Hopefully there don't need to be any."

"Did I ask you for that comment? No? Didn't think so." He tried to perk back up to his normal self, but failed and all that was left was that fake smile. "You two better not ruin this reunion thing, got it? There's so much more I want to do on television before I'm done, and if this goes over terribly, then that's it. I'm done. The world will never get to see my beautiful face grace the screen again. And that, that would be a tragedy." Chris, always the master of dramatics, gave a forced sniffle. "So please, just do what I'm asking you to do, and do it right."

Was there really anything either of them could say against that? They had agreed to help him out with this whole thing, and now that they knew how difficult it was going to be, there was zero chance in them getting to back out of things. In fact, the only choice they had was to power forward and keep planning, keep trying to get things done so that when it was the ten year anniversary of their stint on the island, there would be a grand celebration of all the people who had been on the island in the first place.

But a week or so later, a new problem was encountered that should have been expected from the very beginning, but had never crossed either of their minds until the moment they went to call one of the numbers they had found for one of the contestants and were met with a disconnect message. "Geoff, do we have any other way to contact these people if their numbers don't work?" Bridgette asked, her voice hesitant to even approach that topic. "Or if we don't have anything, does that mean we're done with them?"

"We should have addresses, so guess that means we're sending letters or something," he replied, just minutes before he encountered the same problem she just had. "How many of these people have changed their numbers from these ones here?"

"A lot of them, I'm sure. I mean, we've changed our numbers three times since the show, so I guess we should have seen this coming." She gave a deep sigh, before dialing another number and trying someone else—someone who also had a different number than the one they had. In fact, by the time they had tried all the numbers they had, there were a grand total of five that had answered and been the correct person, plus two which had gone to a voicemail box that belonged to the person they were looking for. Seven out of twenty people was not a good start at all.

So they had to break out the fancy envelopes and mail out written information letters to everyone instead, but even then, they got several of their messages back. "Can't believe that we can't get these people to come." As he was looking through the letters that had been returned to them, Geoff couldn't help but comment on some of the ones he saw. "It's a shame that we can't talk to some of them, like this one." He lifted a letter out of the stack. "Noah. Don't even really remember the dude, except he was sarcastic and funny and Owen totally loved on him like a brother. Wish we could see that interaction again."

"Isn't the one for DJ in there too?" Bridgette, looking over Geoff's shoulder at the stack, questioned. "Because I thought I saw it in there, and if it is…what a shame."

"Yeah, him too. He's probably off with nature though, and I can't blame the guy for not wanting contact if he's out living with birdies or whatever." He shook his head sadly, before commenting on two more letters. "And then those fun girls, Sadie and Katie, they didn't get theirs either. Wonder if something happened to them. Maybe the mall ate them."

"Geoff, I'm pretty sure malls don't eat people. I bet they just moved in together and grew up, or something like that." She laughed at what he had said, but then, after he put the four letters he had commented on down and still held two more, she abruptly stopped her laughing. "You're kidding. There's no way we got both of these letters back."

He waved them both around a bit. "Looks like we did. Bit of a bummer on the one, but what can we do? Gwen really just doesn't want to be found by us."

"Yeah, but if Gwen's not there, then that's already a blow to the ratings Chris loves so much, so we can't afford to not have Heather there either. I mean, she was mean and everything, but people loved to watch her." There was a pause there, where Bridgette collected her thoughts on the matter, before she continued on with why this was such a problem. "So if neither of them are there, what are people going to watch for? Us?"

"Probably, yeah, because we're awesome and we have our own fan base. I'm only sad that Gwen won't be there, but don't really care about the other one. She wasn't very nice, and really? Her not being there means there's no chance of that guy being there, and we don't want that guy there." Geoff was right about that, and Bridgette figured that maybe it would just be for the best if that was how things were. "But yeah, sucks that Gwen's not coming."

"I'm sure we can find a way to get her to come, somehow. Maybe someone we'll be visiting will have her address or something, and maybe they'll help us out." It was wishful thinking, but if there was one person that they hadn't talked to since the show that they did want to see again, it was definitely Gwen. "As for the others who we can't reach, well, maybe something miraculous will happen. I mean it was probably a miracle that we all made it onto the show in the first place, right?"

He nodded in agreement. "Right on, babe. I totally agree."

"So maybe the same kind of miracles will happen when it comes to getting everyone involved in this. And if not, well, I guess we'll have to do this whole thing without them. That's okay, though, because I bet they're happier wherever they are now." She hugged Geoff tightly once she said that. "Hopefully they're all as happy as we are. Even if they're involved with terrible people or they've been eaten by a mall or something."

"Wait a second, I thought you said malls don't eat people…"

"They don't, Geoff. Don't worry."

This whole experience was about to get a lot more interesting, especially now that they knew who they could and couldn't find for this grand reunion.


A/N: Next chapter things will begin to get more exciting, with new characters involved and more stuff about getting this reunion in the works! I hope you're enjoying this so far, and if you are, let me know! I love seeing how everyone feels about my writing, and there's no way for me to know how you think I'm writing these characters if you don't tell me!

(If you are reading this and haven't read "love's all a game to (her, him, them)", you're fine! Although this is a companion piece, we're not quite at the part where the stories intertwine and may get confusing.)