Rule 25: Never Methodize Your Mischief

Summer's approaching quickly! What better way to celebrate than to welcome you all back to your favorite vacation destination: Playa de Losers.

If you'll recall, when we left Courtney, she'd pantomimed a plan with Duncan, which caused some minor confusion leading up to their prop room break-in. And now, we learn her fate...

The prop room was much larger on the inside than Courtney had imagined, and in great need of some industrial organization. The shelves, rather than being set up in aisles, were arranged into square columns, about two meters long on each side. The multiple columns seemed to make a grid in the space, and the ground in between them consisted of paths that were barely visible through the clutter of props on the floor.

Courtney stopped walking and let Duncan venture into the dark on his own, talking about whatever criminal thing was on his mind at the moment. More curious to see just how large the space was relative to the hallway, she threw her glowstick straight up in the air as far as she could to get a better sense of the room. In the seconds before it fell back to the ground, she spotted a balcony wrapped around the full perimeter of the room, about where the second floor might be. The columns themselves extended at least as high as the balcony, so high that they disappeared in the darkness Courtney's glowstick couldn't break.

She was so mesmerized that she hardly heard Duncan's grunt of pained surprise as the glowstick came down squarely on the top of his head. Unperturbed, she stared up at the columns with both hands firmly placed at her hips. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she began to see little gleams and glimmers of shiny things on the shelves, reflecting the green spot of light. It gave her a better sense of how far up the shelves actually went. In fact, from where Courtney stood squinting at the ceiling, it looked like the room consumed all four stories of Playa. But that would be impossible, unless...

Courtney tried to place herself spatially within the resort. She mapped the turns of hallways they had taken and the trek down the employee staircases, but her projected placement of the prop room simply didn't correspond to Playa's exterior.

"Duncan, where are we?"

"The prop room," he grumbled, rubbing his head a little.

She rolled her eyes and grinned to herself. She should have expected that. "I meant on Playa. What does this look like from the outside?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. Why don't I throw the glowstick at you? Maybe that'll get the warehouse to reveal its secrets."

She ignored his suggestion and went on to herself. "I mean, unless I've made some egregious error, we're close to the north end of the island."

"If you know then why'd you ask?"

"The problem is, Duncan," she said, enunciating the syllables of his name, "that there's no warehouse on this part of the island. There's nothing on the north end of the island except a dozen more camper rooms that look out over that filthy roped off beach for the interns."

Unless...

The wing was only meant to look like more camper rooms. There would never be enough contestants to fill all those rooms, Courtney realized. They weren't expecting anyone to stay at Playa beyond the twenty ex-campers that were already there, and they were all stationed on the other side of the island entirely.

"It's a façade!" she exclaimed suddenly, giddy at her revelation.

Duncan glanced at her curiously. "Huh?"

"The outside rooms!" she clarified, turning wildly. "There aren't any camper rooms on this side of the island. It's a disguise to hide the fact that this place even exists. Probably to keep it out of the hands of mischievous contestants like you," she snickered.

Duncan tossed the glowstick at her and she fumbled to catch it, unprepared.

"You mean contestants like us," he answered cheekily, turning to continue down the dark aisle in search of the light switch. Granted, he knew exactly where the light switch was and how to get to it from his last visit, but he wasn't going to tell Courtney that. Who knew what would happen? Especially since Princess was always more fun in dark, enclosed spaces. Like prop rooms. Or fish cabins.

Wanting to confirm her theory regarding the discrepancy between the warehouse's interior and exterior, Courtney took a left down the closest aisle. "This way. If I'm right—which I am—the north wall should be half a dozens meters in this direction."

About face-ing to follow the light (and Courtney), Duncan sprinted to catch up. Going for casual, he commented, "Well, I was going to take you straight to the camera section so you could get out of here and sleep, but I appreciate the scenic route as much as the next guy."

The thought of her so-called reason for being there, and the fact that Duncan had accepted it so easily, twisted her stomach. She thought fast. "And how do you know where the camera section is?"

"I was hoping to get Heather's reaction to my master revenge scheme on film, so future generations could enjoy it with a bowl of popcorn." He shrugged. "But I had my hands full with the boombox and the chainsaw, and Geoff didn't know how to work—"

The glowstick drew an electric lightning arc in the air as Courtney wheeled around to face him. "Ha! I knew it! I knew he was in on it!"

Duncan felt his ego bruise at her vehemence. "Well, he only helped a little," he clarified. "I thought of it and did most of the work. He just helped with the heavy lifting."

In the light of the glowstick held between them, Courtney didn't look convinced. "So what you're saying is there were things that were too heavy for you," she said with a knowing grin.

Duncan tried to duck out from under her triumphant gaze and found himself bumping noisily into a shelf. Distracted, he and Courtney looked up and saw that they were standing in front of a large, square column of shelving filled with what looked like crates upon crates of fake animatronic ducks. Their beady glass eyes lit up with the reflection of the green glowstick and stared down at them like millions of tiny lightning bugs.

He smirked to cover up his mental stumble—Courtney had turned the tables on him in record time—and looked back at her, only to find her a few centimeters closer than she'd been before. The feeble glowstick she held against her chest illuminated both their faces, but Duncan gave it no credit for the electricity between them in that moment.

Brown eyes met blue, and several seconds passed in silence before Courtney was able to look away.

"I—we should...try to find the lights," she said plainly, stepping back from him and returning to the path she'd been on.

Duncan cursed under his breath and, after a second of deep breathing, turned to follow her at a slightly slower pace.

He'd waited seven weeks and five days for Courtney's proclamation of love (though at that moment, he'd be willing to accept a statement of non-disgust and mild attraction in its stead) and if Courtney's reaction just now meant anything, it meant that he hadn't been exaggerating too much in telling Geoff and DJ that she was right where he wanted her. She was almost there. He could feel it.

"What the—? Oh, you've got to be kidding. Duncan! Come see this!"

Duncan blinked at her sudden change of tone and realized he'd lost track of her in his own thoughts. Fortunately, finding the glowstick in the darkness wasn't very difficult, and he followed its glow right to Courtney.

"What up?" he asked nonchalantly, knocking down a couple of buckets in the process of jogging into her aisle.

"Look at this," Courtney hissed, holding up her glowstick to the display in front of her, gauging for Duncan's reaction.

He squinted, but his expression remained unaffected. "Princess, I can't see anything in this puny glow."

"Are you kidding me?" Courtney groaned, disappointed that he couldn't fully appreciate the array of state-of-the-art camping gear in front of her and the fact that Chris had made them sleep out in the rain instead. "This thing was fine three seconds ago!" She shook the glowstick. On top of it failing to get any brighter, a thin trail of fluorescent liquid ran down her hand.

"Uck!" She rubbed her hand on a purple plaid fedora sitting on the shelf next to her. "I think it broke when it connected with your thick skull."

"Ha ha. Give it here." Duncan snatched the stick from her and, putting it in his fists, went to work on cracking each individual centimeter. "It's probably just dying out."

"What are you doing?!" Courtney shouted, grabbing one of his arms.

He kept cracking, unaffected by her grip (and, in fact, quite enjoying it). "I'm making it brighter. Duh."

On the 'duh', Duncan cracked the glowstick in two, right down the middle, splattering them both in glowing liquid.

"Uh... Whoops," he said in non-apology as Courtney let go of him and immediately set about trying to get the liquid as far away from her eyes as quickly as possible.

"Nice going, Duncan!" she snapped, scrubbing vigorously at her face with her (sort of unstained) shoulders.

"Well, you know this only means one thing, right?"

"We're both a year closer to deat—?"

"Glow-in-the-dark paint war!" Duncan shouted, flicking a splatter of the liquid at Courtney. She squealed and jumped away.

"Duncan, no!" Courtney said, smacking the two halves of the glowstick out of his grip and onto the floor, still trying to rub the stuff out of her pores. "That solution is toxic! We shouldn't be putting it anywhere near our faces!"

"Oh," Duncan said, nonplussed. "Well, when you put it like that..." He lowered his dripping hands.

"Thank you," Courtney sighed, watching as the liquid slowly drained from the cracked glowstick halves and onto the floor.

"PSYCH!" Duncan shook out like a dog, splattering toxic substance all over Courtney, who in turn shouted, "Duncan! You sonova—!" and ran.

Not needing any more incentive, Duncan chased after her, flicking drops of phosphorescence at her back. They were madly hopping over bicycles and crates and tents and tires in what would have been an impressive display of agility to any outsider. By the time he actually got within grabbing distance of her, though, the liquid had mostly dried into their skin and clothes, and there wasn't much left to flick at all.

Courtney very maturely stuck her tongue out at him, but his gaze was on the floor.

In the now-full darkness, it looked like the Milky Way had been spilled on the ground beneath them. "Wow," she whispered, still catching her breath from their impromptu obstacle course run. "We could've made tons of money in the art world if we'd done this on purpose."

"Now she tells me," Duncan snickered, coming to stand beside her to see the floor from her angle. "I could have given up my life of crime years ago."

It took the pair a while to reorient themselves in the encompassing dark and find their way back to the sophisticated camping equipment shelves (which Duncan did agree were majorly unfair). The glow was starting to fade from their clothes, and though their now-adjusted eyes did count for something, they needed to find the lights before they were left completely blind.

Fortunately, the north wall was exactly where Courtney had predicted it would be, and a big industrial switch was mounted on it, just a few paces to the left of where her aisle ended.

"Why didn't you mention the lights were this way all along?" she snapped at Duncan as she stalked over to the switch and attempted to throw it.

"Because that wasn't the light switch I used," he answered lightly, walking over and helping her pull it down while secretly hoping it was actually a trap door to a pit of alligators, or at least something cooler than a regular light switch.

His hopes were half granted, for while the light switch did operate mere lights, the effect was not at all what either of them had envisioned.

The big industrial switch on the wall, rather than turning on giant fluorescent overhead bulbs, was hooked up to what seemed like miles and miles of holiday lights, rainbow and white, blinking and not, large and small. They snaked around the borders of the room and were hanging in thick clusters, like waterfalls of light, down the centers of the apparently hollow shelves. The light backlit the individual shelves from within, making it clearer what each contained. It took the room, in all its metal and concrete glory, and softened it substantially.

"Well... This seems counterintuitive," Courtney commented, pressing her lips together.

"Shut up, you think it's pretty."

Courtney analyzed the web of lights and wondered if they could possibly be more cost effective than industrial lighting. They were more... intimate, surely. But economical?

"For a glorified storage closet, maybe," she allowed. She left Duncan to his own devices and poked her head between two of the shelves nearest her to inspect the lighting arrangement at its center. A few seconds later, a yo-yo wobbled off its shelf and fell on the back of her neck. She started and almost whacked her head on the mesh shelf above.

"A closet with no organizational scheme to speak of," she grumbled. "There's absolutely no discernable pattern as to how things are shelved."

"Babe, heads up!"

Courtney spun around until she spotted Duncan on one of the light-ringed balconies (it turned out there were three in total) surrounding the room—one corresponding to each floor of the real resort. Duncan was on the first balcony, the second floor, leaning over the railing with a couple decks of cards in his hand.

"Make it rain!" he shouted, bouncing back and forth and dealing the cards off the edge one by one so they fell in a shower around her.

She covered her head instinctively, but she couldn't help but laugh a little after a moment as the cards floated down harmlessly. She spun around a bit in the cloud, and once the decks were out, she looked back up at him and asked, "How did you get up there so fast?"

"Ladder." He pointed several meters to his left, where a metal ladder extended up all four levels via small cutouts in each balcony floor. "Come check out the view! It's pretty sick."

Courtney sprinted over to the ladder's base and mounted it quickly. Walking over to where Duncan still stood, she peered over the edge and couldn't hide the look of awe on her face.

"I know." Duncan leaned over, resting his arms on the railing in front of them. "Cool, right?"

"Yeah..." Courtney gazed at the space in front of her. It was bigger than she had imagined, even after wandering around it for the past half hour or so. From there she could ascertain that the cascades of Christmas lights and the columns of shelves encasing them did extend all the way to the ceiling, although she still had no idea how the props were sorted onto them, or if there was any reason to it at all.

"But I don't see the logic behind anything being anywhere," she muttered aloud. "The organization, if you could even call it that, doesn't make any sense."

Duncan jerked back to look at her. "Wait, you don't see it?"

Courtney furrowed her brows. "See what?"

Duncan stared at her for a second before he started laughing, so hard that he slid down to the metal grate floor of the balcony. "Oh, this is too great," he said, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye. "You really don't see it."

"See what, Duncan?" Courtney demanded. "It's just a bunch of props on a bunch of columns!"

Duncan kept chuckling, so Courtney turned and resolutely stared out at the columns again. They weren't arranged in alphabetical order, or by utility, size, or function. A slough of canoes was lying next to an arrangement of paint guns, women's underwear, and multicolored logs of wood, for goodness sake!

"Let's keep looking for your camera," Duncan said, still chuckling as he stood up and headed for the ladder.

"Wait, Duncan, no!" she called, rushing after him. "Tell me!"

He grabbed the outer frame of the ladder and slid straight down to the floor, like he'd done it a dozen times before. Courtney tried to shake the sudden thoughts of the many Juvy-worthy, criminal escapades that ended in exactly that kind of getaway.

"It'll be more rewarding if you figure it out yourself!" Duncan called gleefully, disappearing past a shelf that started with camping gear and morphed into electrical doodads and then into animal-shaped containers.

"Fine," Courtney muttered, gripping the ladder and, in an attempt to show him up, slid down as Duncan had (with only a few minor pauses on the way down as to not pick up too much speed). She'd figure it out without him. And the sooner she did, the sooner she could get to the hair section and...

Courtney hit the ground a little less than gracefully and cursed her preoccupation under her breath. All she needed was a sprained ankle to replace the sprained wrist that was finally healing up.

"You'd better be walking in the direction of the cameras now that we can see where we're going!" she called, half-threatening as she tried to see which way he'd gone past the doodad and container column.

Courtney turned a corner and screamed.

"Princess?" Duncan hollered from somewhere across the grid. "You okay?"

She couldn't respond. She scrambled back so fast she tripped over a bowl and landed flat on her back, the wind knocked out of her.

Towering above her was Chef's massive figure.

They'd been caught! He'd found them! But how? He was away—Duncan had said so! And they'd avoided all the cameras... No one knew they were there! And yet there he was: Chef, standing above her.

Being completely silent. And... not moving at all.

Courtney choked down a panting breath and shifted a little to the side.

And in 2D.

She'd walked into the standee section by accident and had been caught entirely off guard. God, those things looked realistic, especially in the ambient lighting. And there were a ton of them! Chef was the most prominent, out in front, but as she shakily sat up she saw Chris behind him, smirking, and what looked like each and every one of the campers, famous celebrities, even people she didn't recognize, all arranged in a clump, a few tipped onto the others or lying facedown on the ground.

"Courtney!" Duncan shouted, finally skidding around to where she was and practically doing a baseball slide to the ground where she still sat. He grabbed her by the shoulders. "What's wrong?!"

"Nothing," she replied sharply, fending off his attempts to help her stand. His concern was touching, but she wasn't looking forward to explaining that it was unwarranted—that she'd been duped into confusing a standee of Chef with the real thing. And even worse, she really didn't want to explain to the seasoned criminal exactly how much fear had struck her core at the thought of being apprehended. "I'm fine, I just... I tripped over something."

Duncan narrowed his eyes at her and, giving up on helping her stand, went from looking at her to what was around her. Finally, his eyes settled on the standee collection in front of her and his look of concern shifted into one of pure mischief.

"You thought Chef's standee was real," he said. It wasn't a question.

"NO," Courtney spat back, quickly getting to her feet and searching around for a less humiliating excuse. "I... I saw the standee of you and the monstrousness of it was just too much for me to bear."

His expression didn't falter. "Bull! Admit it—the standee freaked you out!"

Courtney said nothing. Her breathing was the only answer Duncan needed.

"It's okay, darling," he went on, attempting to slide an arm across Courtney's shoulders. "It looks really real, doesn't it?"

She smacked him away and Duncan chuckled, instead going to inspect the standees behind Chef.

"It's all good, babe. We all get scared sometimes." As if on cue, Duncan jumped slightly. At arm's length, he gingerly picked up the Celine Dion standee he'd just come face to face with, turned it around, and set it up on the shelf opposite the other standees before skittering away. "You stay over there," he instructed it firmly.

"Look who's talking," Courtney retorted, crossing her arms. "Like you have the best track record with standees."

"Touche," he admitted, the playfulness quickly returning to his eyes. "But I think there's at least one standee I could get along with."

Duncan smirked and, from the masses, plucked out none other than Courtney's own standee.

Her demeanor changed to one of pure horror as she imagined what might happen next. "Duncan, put me down," she said sternly.

"Just admit that standees are some of the scariest things on the planet and I will!" he replied. He was holding standee-Courtney around the waist, but something told the real girl it wouldn't stay that way for long.

She pursed her lips. "Duncan..."

Duncan removed one of his hands from her standee waist and laid it flat against her standee stomach. Looking right at the original across the sea of cardboard, he moved his hand higher, and higher...

"Duncan, I am warning you," Courtney growled.

And higher... and higher still...

Milliseconds before her standee self was irrevocably violated, Courtney darted through the standees and, without a second thought, tackled Duncan to the ground. "You are so indecent!" she shouted, trying to wrestle her likeness out of his hands with little success.

The scuffle on the ground was starting to disturb the standees around them, and suddenly, Duncan's grip slackened.

"HA!" Courtney snatched her standee from Duncan's hands and, looking around for the source of his distraction, came face to face with Celine Dion, who had fallen right into Duncan's face.

Courtney giggled freely. "Perfect timing, Celine." And then, when she saw that Duncan had kicked off the standee, stood, and yet was not running for the hills, she turned to him with a smirk. "I'm almost impressed that you're not more terrified right now."

"You're the one that made me hug it," he said gruffly, not quite meeting her gaze. As he shoved his hands in his pockets and walked away from the pile of standees, disappearing among the columns, Courtney could have sworn she heard him say, "Nothing's ever as scary after you've hugged it."

It occurred to her that a super secret criminal escapade with Duncan was not the best place to be giggling quite so maniacally.

They split up, as per Courtney's suggestion, to "search the prop room more swiftly." She, of course, was hunting for Heather's future wig, while Duncan was on her wild-goose chase for the camera she didn't really need. (Actually, she did sort of need the camera as well... But the wig was a priority at present.) Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, Duncan actually was aware that he was on Courtney's wild-goose chase. He alone knew the camera's true whereabouts and was merely dicking around the warehouse and pretending to be useful to fill the time.

She hadn't heard from Duncan in a while though, unless you counted a suspiciously loud crash on the other side of the warehouse. It hadn't ended with screaming or cackling, so she surmised that Duncan had survived whatever it was. Besides, although the prop room was massive, they'd learned from the standee incident that if one shouted loudly enough, the other was usually pretty quick to materialize from somewhere in no time at all.

On a more disheartening note, after picking through shelf after shelf and even climbing the wrap-around ladders to get to the second and third story shelves of the columns, she was yet to find a single strand of hair, let alone an entire wig. Halfway up said library-style ladder, Courtney pulled out her PDA to check the time. It was getting later and later, though it was a comfort that midnight was still closer than the dawn, if only ever so slightly. But still the fact remained, she wasn't going to get a chance to find the wig other than the time she had now. Nervousness was starting to set in.

Courtney was about to slide back down to the floor and call for Duncan when a muffled noise sounded out.

"...Duncan?" she asked, straining her ears.

"Po...lo!"

Duncan sounded hoarse, but Courtney couldn't quite decide if she should be worried or just chalk it up to all the shouting they'd been doing over the past couple hours.

"Mar...co?" she replied hesitantly.

"Polo!"

Yeah, he was definitely hoarse. She slid back to the floor (her sliding was improving tremendously from the amount of practice she was putting in) and walked in the direction of his voice. A few Polos later, after which Courtney resolved to inform Duncan that you did not simply start a game of Marco Polo with the Polo half, she found herself in the corner of the prop room, facing a situation that she should have found more surprising than she actually did.

Duncan was, somehow, suspended against a rectangular metal wall, bug-on-a-windshield style, at least three meters in the air. A Motocross bike lay trashed below him, and something resembling a metal and cardboard ramp was set up in front of it all.

She walked around to Duncan's right, because that was the way his head was turned and it didn't look like he could move it much from that position. That explained the hoarseness.

"Do I even want to know?" Courtney asked sarcastically.

"Two words," Duncan said, looking down at her with an obscene grin on his face. "Magnet wall."

"That's a thing?"

"Apparently!"

Courtney stared up at him disapprovingly. "And you called me over here because...?"

"Okay, funny story," Duncan started. It looked like he wanted to kick his legs around or something, but they were sturdily magnetized to the wall. "So at first I was messing around on the velcro wall—" At Courtney's raised brow, he jerked his head to the left. Sure enough, an inflatable wall covered in velcro stood exactly next to the magnet one. "And that was all right, but I kept falling off."

"That's the point, Duncan."

Duncan shushed her. "So I moved to the magnet wall, and that stuck better, but I wanted to get higher! So I got a bike and made a ramp out of Celine's corpse, and jumped from the bike and stuck myself to the wall."

Courtney looked over at the ramp again. Sure enough, the cardboard on top of the metal plate was all that remained of Miss Dion's former standee.

"You're completely insane," she said matter-of-factly.

"No," Duncan said. "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I only did this once."

The surprises kept on coming. "Where did you hear that?"

"I know things, sweetheart."

"You have no idea what instrument Beethoven played but you can quote Albert Einstein's definition of insanity back to me? Be still my heart."

"I'm all about the stillness," Duncan answered dryly, indicating his inability to move his arms.

Courtney shook her head. "So if you're really going with the theory that you're not, in fact, crazy, then what seems to be the problem here?"

"Turns out I forgot that getting myself this high meant I couldn't rip myself down." He chuckled at some unknown joke—or maybe he just found his own stupidity that hilarious. "It's a kind of epic fail."

"I'll say..." Courtney looked from Duncan, to the ground, to the Velcro Wall, and back. Where the Velcro Wall had a safely padded, inflatable base, the Magnet Wall boasted nothing of the sort. Just the concrete floor. Maybe it was a prototype?

Courtney blinked up at him. He looked so assured of himself, even as he was helplessly suspended in the air. "Are you asking for my help?"

"Sure looks that way, doesn't it?" He didn't say it like an admission, though. There was still a happy glint in his eyes. "Just don't make me say please."

Courtney would have laughed if the whole thing weren't so mind-numbingly absurd. Fortunately, though most of her mental capacities were busy trying to convince the rest of her that yes, this was actually happening, her CIT instincts kicked in without further guidance.

"All right, Duncan, you stay there." The punk rolled his eyes, but Courtney was too busy planning to notice. "I'm going to find something to cushion your fall. I'll be right back."

Her first thought was to push the inflatable velcro wall under Duncan to use as an intended cushion. However, after a few failed attempts at moving the entire inflatable construct on her own (to snarky commentary from the magnetized peanut gallery), she gave up and went to search for a Plan B. She jogged up and down the aisles, around the columns, looking for anything that might work. She came across blankets, pillows, an ungodly amount of marshmallows that were undoubtedly stale, but never enough of anything to make a safe base.

Finally, though, she wandered past a column that, besides holding a tire swing and a deconstructed wooden jungle gym, was stationed near a large, circular trampoline that would work adequately, if not perfectly.

After carefully tipping it up on its side, she went about rolling it through the columns. It was no small feat—she was leaving a scene of wreckage in her wake—but it was infinitely easier than her attempts to move the velcro wall, and she eventually found her way back to Duncan and his preposterous scenario after only three wrong turns.

"Took you long enough," he teased as she set the trampoline back on its legs.

"Sorry," she replied, layering as much sarcasm onto the single word as she could manage. "Some of us haven't yet managed to map this entire place out!"

"Still haven't figured out the pattern, I see," Duncan said, much too sagely given current circumstances.

Courtney huffed. "You're safe, jerk," she said, walking around to where he could see her. "Though I would recommend shimmying at least a little down the wall so it's not such a drastic fall."

"You worry too much, Princess," he said. Then, without even double checking on what was behind him, Duncan jerked hard to part both his hands from the wall, fell back until his legs released as well, and executed a single flip to fall back onto the trampoline in a perfect X. (Courtney couldn't even imagine what kind of skill that required.)

She walked back around to where he lay reverberating and glared down at him. "I'm not saving you again."

"You didn't save me," he replied. "The trampoline did." He tried to cross his arms behind his head as he smirked but found that the magnets attached to his wrists and ankles had stuck him to the metal ring of the trampoline.

As Duncan futilely tried to pry at least one limb loose, Courtney stood to the side, pinching her brow and biting her lip to keep herself from laughing at the absolute misfortune of it all. "Yes, and I think she's experiencing some separation anxiety."

Duncan shot her his suavest look. "Don't they all?"

"It must be such a huge problem for you."

"It's the price I pay for my sparkling personality and dashing good looks."

Courtney snorted. "Keep that up and the trampoline's never letting you go."

Duncan smiled brightly at her then. It caught her a little off guard, how genuinely happy he looked to find that they had been on the same wavelength.

"I'll give her another second. But, uh...could you get me something I could use to save myself with later?"

Courtney was shaking in silent laughter by this point. "Only if you say please."

She left Duncan with a couple escape options (in the form of a fishing rod, baseball bat, and crowbar) and the instructions to "holler if Houdini needs any more assistance in saving himself." That left her to stroll around idly, flipping through the pages of a book she'd come across over on the same column as Duncan's decks of cards. But as she rounded another corner, she came to a sudden stop.

In front of her, on styrofoam heads as far up the shelves as she could see, were wigs. Every style, every color, every length. Pinks and browns and rainbows, Rapunzel length to pixie cut.

Reality came crashing back to her. She had to deliver one of those to Heather. She had to sell Duncan out, as great as their time together had been. She had to or she'd...

Or what, actually? She hadn't put anything on the line except for her reputation in Heather'seyes, which counted about as much as mud now. What did she care what Heather thought of her, or what rumors she might spread? No one would believe her if she did.

Courtney didn't have anything to lose by turning around right then and there and resuming her book and her supposed camera hunt with Duncan. All she was staring at was a wall of wigs that held the answer to the one question Duncan was never going to answer for her. That was all...

From only a few columns away, she heard Duncan calling, "Oh Priiincesss!"

Courtney steeled her nerves. She wanted this. She'd wanted it for a long time now. A few hours of goofing off in the dark of night wasn't going to get him to answer the unaskable question, no matter how much she feebly hoped it might.

She glanced quickly over the entire wall and, seeing the pair of mullet wigs Lindsay and Sadie had used for the Phobia Factor challenge within grabbing distance, rapidly snatched up both. She could hear Duncan rounding the corner and pulled something that resembled a bag out of a pile on the ground before shoving both inside.

Duncan let out a long whistle as he came up behind her, his steps tapering off into a steady walk. Courtney did her best to act natural, though her heart was drumming loudly in her ears.

"Sheesh. How many muppets did Chris have to kill to get these?" he joked, holding up a styrofoam head with a neon purple bob.

"They're probably for Chef," Courtney said, trying to hide the bag behind her. "You know, one per humiliating outfit."

Duncan grabbed a short, dark haired surfer-style mop top and flattened his Mohawk to make it sit.

"Guess who I am." Duncan cleared his throat, and in a terrible impression of a surfer's accent, said, "Welcome to Trillionaire Douchebag Island! Where you will have your butt mauled on a regular basis by wildlife, your competitors, and myself, but you might win a hundred thousand dollars, so it's worth it! What we don't tell you is that you'll have to spend it all on therapy after seeing my boyfriend in drag!"

Courtney laughed despite herself. She laughed so hard she started hiccupping, and that only made her laugh harder.

Duncan grinned proudly as he took the wig off. Getting Courtney to laugh normally was an achievement in and of itself; this was like winning the Nobel Peace Prize for Hilarity.

He pointed at the bag that was no longer hidden discretely. "Hey, what's that?"

Courtney had completely forgotten she was holding it. "Oh, um," she thought quickly, sobering herself and trying to contain her hiccups. "It's a...designer bag. Louis Vuitton! Very rare. Not worth a hundred grand, you know, but..." She hiccuped again. "Pretty close."

Duncan crossed his arms, still grinning. "Anyone ever tell you that you hiccup like a puppy?"

She leaned over, trying to control her diaphragm spasms. "Anyone ever tell you that you're a prehistoric"—hiccup—"ignoramus?"

"Only you, babe," he admitted proudly. "Only you."

Straightening up and adjusting her bag, only after she was sure her puppy hiccups had subsided, she said, "We're not going to find the camera in this arbitrary mess."

"You're right," Duncan said, grinning as he strode off. "Unless I un-arbitrize it for you."

"Will you?" Courtney couldn't help herself. She was even willing to look past the bastardization of the word arbitrary if it meant she could understand the puzzle. She already had what she'd needed to find, but not knowing had been eating at her all night.

"Yeah, come on." Duncan took off running back in the direction he had come from, beckoning to her over his shoulder. Courtney followed suit, clutching her definitely not Louis Vuitton bag close to her side.

He made his way back to the ladder and started climbing, all the way up to the fourth floor balcony, practically on the ceiling. Courtney had to stop at the third tier landing to catch her breath; climbing four stories' worth of ring ladder wasn't for the feint of heart.

When she finally reached the topmost level, she found Duncan holding an abstract painting at arm's length, angling it this way and that, probably trying to decipher it.

"All right," she said, steadying herself on the railing and trying not to let the height of the balcony get to her as she observed the sea of glowing columns.

Duncan put the painting down and came over to where she stood perched over the rail.

"Okay, so see," Duncan said, pointing to the base of one of the columns on their left. "That's dodgeball. Then the talent show..." He pointed to the column behind that one and then moved to the one behind it. "The camping episode... It goes on from there." He snaked his finger across the grid in a squiggle.

"Are you serious?" Courtney felt, to be honest, a little dense. It looked so obvious from up above. Each of the columns was an episode! The props used in each challenge, things she'd handled herself, plus the items that Chris and Chef and whoever else had access to this place must have thought were similar. All together, they formed a five by five grid in the space. She and Duncan were oriented incorrectly, but if they just walked around one wall to the right, the episodes were set up in order: left to right, top to bottom, like reading a book.

"But there'll only be twenty-two episodes in total. There are three extra columns on this grid."

"Two of them look like backup episodes," Duncan said, shifting closer to Courtney so she could follow the line of his arm to where he was pointing. "They've got stuff on them I've never seen before. Hollywood sets and flags of the world and crap." He made a gagging noise. "The other column is dedicated solely to Chef's outfits."

"Where do they keep all the filming equipment?" she asked.

"Gee, no need to beat around the bush, Princess," Duncan joked. He pointed at eye-level to the closest column. "They're on every column, the camera models and microphones and junk they used in that episode," Duncan explained. "Up here on the highest shelves."

"Seriously?" Courtney huffed. "Then where's all the footage they've been taking of Playa?"

In my duffel bag, Duncan thought, fighting to quell a strange combination of laughter and guilt. He struggled to sound serious as he said, "Beats me, Princess. I checked some of the cameras before I found the magnet wall. They were all empty."

Courtney gripped her bag subconsciously. "Great. Then this whole trip was a waste of time."

"Not a total waste," Duncan argued. "At least you got to see this place for yourself! What they keep here, its pattern. All thanks to your tour guide's expertise." He took a small bow.

"If by pattern you mean designless disarray and by expertise you mean perchance luck," she retorted. Which made it all the more astonishing that he'd found the organization so easily... "How did you figure this out anyway?" she asked. "I wouldn't have seen it in a million years."

Duncan shrugged, and the way they were leaning against the rail, Courtney felt his shoulder move against her own. "It kind of popped out at me. The idea of it, I guess. Just saw it."

Duncan's explanation wasn't overly specific, sheepish even, but she still understood what he was saying. When he looked at the columns, he saw the big picture: the episodes, everything they'd lived through. She looked at the columns and saw the details, books and wigs and standees and miscelanea that didn't mean anything to her. But now that she saw the big picture too...

It was amazing that she could look off this balcony so fondly at the things she thought she hated so much. There were the tents and maps and compasses they used in the outdoor episode. Back when she and Duncan hardly knew each other at all.

She shivered at the memory of the rain and the cold, and Duncan must have felt the tremor—out of the corner of her eye, she saw him look at her curiously. She didn't return his gaze, and he eventually looked back out at the twinkling sea of props.

Behind the camping gear were the standees and, she could see now, nearly everyone else's fears, including a now-empty pool of what had once been filled with... She shuddered again, but Duncan either didn't notice or ignored it.

She looked out at the paint guns and deer antlers, the arrow she'd worn on her head during the trust challenge and the trapeze that had, at one point, been positioned over a pool of jellyfish whose tanks lay empty nearby.

But when she finally laid eyes on all the props from her final episode—the full column in its entirety—she couldn't help but swallow. Tire swings, barbed wire, wooden walls... everything that had been on the obstacle course, broken down and stored away. It made her sad for some reason, to see it lying there.

And then there were all the memories that couldn't be represented by mere props. The army-grade gruel, the fish cabin, Chef's fridge, the sandwiches, their kiss...

Courtney was suddenly hyper-aware of Duncan's arm against her own and flinched away.

He straightened in surprise. "Something wrong?" he asked, a little too sincerely even for his own taste. Hastily, he added, "Did you spot Chef's standee again from all the way up here?"

"Shut up," she muttered.

Duncan figured it would be best to change the topic. "So, uh, why do you think this mess is up here?" he asked after a moment, turning his back to the room to examine the contents of the fourth-floor balcony, which was covered even more heavily than the other two. Specifically, he was staring into an open-fronted case of silver and golden trophies, which the painting from before was leaning against.

Glad for the change of conversation, Courtney sniffed and looked back, surveying the balcony. The bag on her shoulder suddenly felt hot. "Who knows? This is probably everything that couldn't be sorted into an episode."

"Doubt it. That stuff's in the aisles." Duncan turned to her with renewed energy. "Hey, want to see a trick, Princess?" He reached into the trophy case as Courtney glanced down at her bag, preoccupied, and waved at him in a way that could have meant yes or no.

She wasn't paying any attention, still trying to talk herself into or out of carrying out her deal with Heather, when she heard a clinking noise from somewhere behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, expecting to find that Duncan had dropped one of the trophies. Instead, she found the trophies untouched.

And Duncan nowhere to be seen.

The magical mystery prop room is waiting to take you away!...

From strayphoenix: I do love me some Beatles references. :3 But yes! Welcome to Playa! Where the architecture is made up and the props don't matter!

Finally! Courtney has her hair for Heather! Is she really going to betray Duncan after their bonding time together? Or will Duncan manage to change her mind without knowing her mind needs changing? Speaking of, uh, where did our certain punk GO anyway?

Stay tuned to the most fun in the sun you can get this summer without leaving your computer!

This chapter took some influence from an 'old' movie called Big Fat Liar and if you've ever seen it, the connection should be apparent. Wink wink.

A special Kudos to DramaRose13 and CarmillaD for guessing which scenes/lines had me on the floor laughing last chapter! There were quite a few of those moments in this chapter as well as Rina and I had a blast with the array of props at our disposal. Let us know what your favorites were!

And for the record, Rina is the best for mapping out and writing the bulk of this chapter. Rina and I have had this chapter in the works for a long time but it was as chaotic and unorganized to me as the prop room was to Courtney until Rina got her hands on it. Rina is da bomb dot com. All the other slim shadys, please sit down. ;)

From Contemperina: Aw, she flatters me! I would tell you all that stray was the one who took the mess of ideas bumping around in my head and turned them into an actual, cohesive chapter, but that's just more flattery back and forth, and that's what email's for, amiright?

Did anyone manage to figure out the prop room's arrangement before Courtney had it explained to her? And what about Courtney's panic attack after seeing Chef? Did anyone see that coming?

Apologies to you all for the wait between chapters, and many thanks to each and every reader who continues to keep up with Playa's adventures—while raining excessive thanks upon those who reached out to us over the break! We're writing for you all, and now that summer's here, we have even more time to dedicate to the shenanigans. I can't wait until you all see where Duncan's gone off to!

Thanks for reading! Please review (: