Chopping down trees proved much more difficult than G and I originally thought. Both of us spent a precious hour of time, swinging at the local palm trees with the harvest tools provided to us, but unlike in the game, they proved to have little use in chopping them down. G had the idea to practice with the sniper rifle he had found earlier and used the trees as target practice in the hope that after enough bullets, the tree's base would eventually give out. It wasn't a perfect method but shooting at the trees proved more effective than swinging at them with a pickaxe.

"You should go find a gun for yourself Fate." G told me, "You promised you'd find one for yourself after all."

I felt uncomfortable with the idea of carrying a weapon, but since I promised G, I ended up searching the whole town. I knew every chest spawn location like the back of my hand, but it became quickly apparent to me that Edmund Chavez drastically limited the number of drops around the map. After turning Paradise Palms upside down, I only came across one chest in a bedroom in one of the three-story buildings. The chest didn't glow like in the game, but it did resemble the wooden box incredibly well.

I opened the crate cautiously, and inside, I found five rolls of gauze, bullets the size of my index finger and two black and white colored pistols. I reached passed the bullets and bandages to pick up the dual pistols immediately. As I lifted them I quickly learned they were much heavier than I imagined. Too heavy in fact. I lifted both the guns and aimed them at an adjacent wall and I had trouble steadying my hands. It looks like the many hours of sitting in my room and playing games caught up to me. I was out of shape, malnourished and weak, all of which would certainly lead me to an inevitable death if I couldn't quickly find a way off the island.

I turned back to the chest to stuff the bullets and gauze into my pockets and ran back to G to continue helping him knock down palm trees. As we worked, I constantly looked down at my phone to check the progress of the storm. I still wasn't convinced that the shrinking circle meant anything. After all, in the game, if your avatar ever walked into the storm all that would happen is that the rain would begin to fall, and your character would lose health. Even if Chavez had somehow found a way for rain drops to come out of the clouds, it wasn't like that would be enough to kill anyone outside of the circle.

I tried to explain my logic to G, but he didn't seem to want to hear any of my points. Ever since we landed, we had two opposing solutions to our situation. G wanted to play the game and I did not. As we both shot at trees, G would lie down on his stomach, he took his time to line up his shot, he'd hold his breath to steady the scope, and then he would pull his trigger and inspect the trajectory of the bullet from different distances. He was learning how to use his weapon effectively, preparing for what lay ahead of us.

I walked very close to each of the trees and unloaded a couple of clips into each tree, making sure not to waste a single bullet. I worked quickly. Any moment a boat or plane would pass the island and if the fire wasn't up and ready by that time, all my hard work would be wasted. My pistols were loud, and the kickback was so strong it jolted my arms back after each time I fired. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't stop moving. I had to call G over to help me drag the long palm trees through the sand to stack them into a pile on the most south-eastern edge of the island.

"So, you really think this is going to work?" G asked as he struck his pickaxe against a rock, successfully creating sparks.

"It has to." I said with conviction. "I am going to do everything in my power to not turn into the monster that Chavez wants me to become."

It didn't take long for the sparks to erupt into a magnificent flame, which quickly engulfed the pile of wood that G and I amassed. "You know…" G began, "If it did come to it. If you had to. Killing someone here wouldn't make you some sort of villain. We're all here because the old man wants us to be. He's the real monster here, not us."

I didn't completely believe his rationale, but I also didn't want G to think that I thought of him as a terrible person for trying to stay alive either, "Maybe you're right." I conceded.

"So, now that the fire is going, how about you and I go swimming in one of those fancy pools they got here in Paradise Palms? I don't have a pool at home after all."

"G, how can you even think about that right now? After all we've been through?"

G shook his head, "Listen, I know what you're going to say, but we should try to relax because of all that we've had to go through today. If we get stressed out we are going to start making bad choices, and that's something we can't afford right now."

"After a dozen broken keyboards, I'm glad you've learned how to avoid bad decisions." I said, laughing to myself.

"You should have seen me when I played Halo." G seemed to have a small sense of pride when he spoke about his rage, "I had to buy a new control from GameStop every two or three weeks."

The fire was burning brightly even in the daylight. The logs were piled outside of the town of Paradise Palms, laying in a small pit of sand. There wasn't any chance of it spreading and G and I couldn't add more logs with the little ammunition we had. I had no other option other than taking G up on his offer.

We both walked back to the proposed pool. I couldn't remember the last time I went to the public pool with a friend. I couldn't even remember the last time I went out with a friend at all. Ever since I first picked it up, Fortnite was all I was focused on. It was the only extra-curricular activity I was any good at. Any time I would join any sort of group, I never seemed to quite fit in the way I wanted to.

"Hey G, do you have many friends? You know, not Fortnite friends, just… You know, real life friends."

My question seemed to hang in the air as G lifted his green tank top over his head. "I had a dozen guys or so I'd go drinking with, but they could be a pain sometimes."

G and I stripped down to our underwear and waded in the water, "You went drinking? You told me you were nineteen though."

G blinked at me, "Yeah. I am." He paused. "Wait, are you telling me that you never-?"

"Nah, I'd go out drinking all the time with my friends too!" I said hurriedly, cutting G off completely, "I was just making sure is all."

G rolled his eyes, "Whatever man."

I floated on my back, allowing the light hit my pale skin of my stomach, "Why were they a pain? What did they do?"

G dunked his head under the water, as he emerged he answered, "They were just different. They'd drone on about their majors, quote stupid memes, and complain about all the things their girlfriends didn't let them do." G scoffed, "The stuff they're into gives me a headache. I tried to get them into Fortnite but when we ran squads they'd just die immediately and get bored of watching me farm mats."

I couldn't be any more different from. He spoke with real charisma and confidence, I envied how nonchalantly he spoke about his friends. For G, he didn't need to compromise between his games and friends.

Suddenly, G swam to the side of the pool and threw himself out into the dry air, "Fate, get dressed now." He instructed.

I swam over and did as he asked. "Did you hear someone? Did they see the signal fire?" I whispered.

"No. Look there."

G pointed to the sky and my eyes followed. A blue crate with an orange parachute attached to it slowly descended from the sky. I wasn't the best at math, but from my position it looked to be landing a half a mile away from us.

"In that crate, there is food, clothing and a special weapon." G said, echoing Chavez, "We have to go get it Fate."

"Everyone is going to be running after those things. We shouldn't do anything rash while we still have the signal fire burning. A boat could come along at any moment."

"You're right. The boat could come at any moment." G said flippantly, "But that air drop is coming now. We don't know when the next time we'll see another one. I'm not going to give this up."

G put on all his clothes and began to walk away from me, towards the air drop. "Wait!" I said as I ran up next to him, "Don't do this bro, if anyone else saw that thing fall out of the sky, you're going to have to fight them. You could die G."

G stopped walking and turned directly towards me. He placed his right hand on my shoulder and leaned in, "When we played together, did we ever win by sitting in bushes and hoping we didn't get found?" G asked rhetorically, "If we're afraid to take risks then as the game continues, all the other players are going to keep getting stronger and stronger and we'll stay exactly as we are now. They'll be full, we'll be hungry. They'll choose to engage us, we'll have to respond. They'll be confident, and we will be afraid."

The intensity of G's words caused my heart race. He didn't have any faith at all that we would be rescued. I looked towards the falling blue crate. If G and I were truly going to play the game, what he said was right. There were people who were seated on the battle bus who were much stronger and smarter than we were. The only chance we had to survive was to build an advantage early and use it to sustain us into the late game.

I shook my head. I didn't want to consider the violence that G was suggesting but I had to acknowledge how much he had done for me. It wasn't like he believed that we would get rescued from the signal fire, as soon as we landed, he was ready to approach this game of life and death exactly as he did in Fortnite.

If I allowed him to go after the air-drop he was going to kill anyone who got in his way. Guilt began to slowly overtake my thoughts and mind. I imagined G storming off towards the air-drop, hearing the boom of his sniper rifle and then scrambling for my phone to read the screen.

Godshot eliminated an innocent person

"Alright G, you win." I said reluctantly, "You're right, we should retrieve whatever is inside that blue crate, if we're fast, I think we can reach it before anyone else."

G looked at me if I just sprouted a second head, "Yeah. We should get going."

"I want you to stay here and tend to the fire." I asserted.

"Tend to the fire? Fate, we don't have the bullets to take down more trees if it starts to fizzle out."

"Just do it G, my pistols are more suited for this sort of thing, I don't need to carry anything around. I'll be in and out. Nothing to it."

G was confused of my sudden change of heart, but he didn't seem to be suspicious of my motives. If anything, he was glad that he and I finally got to agree on something. "Alright, hurry back though. I normally eat around this time back home."

I gave him a stern nod as I ran past him towards the falling blue crate. I felt a breeze through my hair and my heart beat with every step I took. There was something exhilarating about sprinting towards the promise of food and clothes. Running after loot was nostalgic for me. As I drew closer and closer to the descending box, I imagined someone sitting behind a computer controlling the actions I was making right now. It was amusing.