Spy movies? Closest I've seen is Spy Kids, and that's more adventure and sci-fi than anything. Oh well, it's kind of fun. Thanks for reviewing, AnonBrowser, OmniUIShaggyOverexaggerated, and lordgemini. To the guest reviewer, I have deleted your "review". If you are having trouble, try going to the school board.

We had another break before the next challenge. I spent some of it with Leshawna, but only about an hour where we just chatted happily. But I could tell how hard she was trying, so it kind of put me off hanging out, knowing it. She spent more time trying to get around Harold. Although I'd been too preoccupied to hear what she'd said about him, Beth had told me what she'd said was basically that he was deluding himself if he thought he had any chance with her, saying he was "an old school cassette tape in a world of MP3s". It was cold, but anyone with eyes could tell that even though she'd said that, she really liked him as more than just a friend. But she kept on and on friendzoning him.

I did try to spend some time with Duncan, just to prove Courtney couldn't scare me off. We actually had some fun, chatting a bit about the stuff that happened off-camera and funny stuff that happened in the trailers. The fact that Harold had to take off his glasses when he showered and mostly did when he slept as well opened the gate for a lot of pranks, and it was hilarious to find out exactly how much time Justin took over his appearance. There was also, Duncan said, this one time when Justin said he was moving to Canada "Except I'm already there."

"Where did he think he was moving from?" I giggled.

Duncan shrugged. "I think he was born in Hawaii or something. I don't know, maybe his parents still live there and his agent made him come here because there was more work for him."

I filled him in on a bit of the jokes and the girl gossip, although he pretended he didn't want to hear it. "And if you don't listen to it, I'll force you to read every book in the Twilight Saga over and over until you start thinking all girls are weird and have problems with dependency! At least with this, you know what real girls talk about, and maybe you'll pick up some tips." That was enough to get his attention.

We talked a little more about Courtney and our wrestling match, and Duncan admitted that he probably couldn't have beaten her either. "And Chris would have just loved rubbing it in that I lost to a girl. I mean, yeah, I lost to Beth, but this was wrestling. Badminton's not a guy's thing, but he'd say me losing to a girl in wrestling was especially embarrassing. There were points where I thought you were winning, but I know how strong she is. I mean, last season she pulled up a lampost and managed to wrap it around Harold, and..well, I like that, but if we were wrestling, I wouldn't. It's not like if I lost to any other girl on here. My point is, I wouldn't have voted you off for just that, especially after the way Beth played me yesterday."

"So...it would be more embarrassing if you had to wrestle me and lost?" I asked, pretending to be mad.

Duncan shrugged. "Maybe. You're strong, but not freakishly."

I was tempted to ask another question about whether Courtney's incredible roughness and strength made for a fun time, but considering I wasn't sure if they'd even reached second base yet and I knew that they certainly hadn't reached fourth, I didn't. I was even more tempted to ask if she gave good kisses and if just those were rough, but really, I would have to be stupid to even think Duncan would answer that, so I left the question unsaid and we continued talking, mostly joking around and laughing together.

But the relaxed atmosphere of the break day couldn't last. It also didn't help that I was the only one who'd committed to not shunning Leshawna for the gossip – I was going to watch and see if she redeemed herself enough to keep around, but I didn't see any point in making it harder for her. Everyone else seemed hostile in spite of the cheer, including the guys. The other girls didn't talk to her, not even Courtney, who'd just been slated as being able to have Duncan under her thumb. Harold did talk to her a little, but she still had a ways to go to get his full affection back. Duncan didn't say anything to her, and Justin blanked her. Coupled with Courtney constantly switching between glowering at me or looking suspicious, I felt very tense by lights out. I'd spent the whole day smiling sweetly at her every time she looked at me, but it was a strain, and she didn't change at all. She was hanging around most of the time when I was talking to Duncan and I could tell she thought I hadn't spotted her, but the most touching we did was shoving each other, so there really wasn't anything for her to glower about.

The next morning, we had breakfast, hung out outside for a bit, and then Lindsay started hammering on the door of the girls' trailer, apparently unable to open it. "Door, it's me, Lindsay! From this morning! You remember!"

"Door, meet doorknob." Courtney quipped.

When Lindsay finally tried the knob, suddenly, a camera came down, scanned her face, and the stairs turned into a slippery ramp. She immediately slipped off, and a pit opened right where she landed, making her fall in. One by one, other things started happening. A dart went into Duncan's neck, and Courtney was knocked out by a hat. Both followed Lindsay. Everyone else started running for the guys' cabin...except me. I was panicking that I'd be next, so I just ran for the pit and jumped in before anything could hit me. I don't think I got hurt, but there was clearly some kind of knockout gas in there, because I saw Lindsay's eyes were closed and I didn't remember anything else until I came to in a different place with all of the others around me, also all just waking up.

We were just on a set that looked like it was underground. Camera lights were everywhere, and I started to relax a bit. At least we knew this was more of the producers' doing. But what movie genre involved knocking everyone out?

A scream came from Justin who had Beth on top of him .She'd accidentally jabbed him with her elbow. "My eye! My beautiful, uninsured eye!"

"I'm so sorry!" Beth exclaimed, looking almost as upset as he did. "Are you okay?" She apparently bruised his arm in the process of just touching it and Justin gave another cry. He actually started sobbing about how he was hideous and no one would ever hire him for another photo shoot. Frankly, he was still gorgeous and his eye would heal eventually, so I felt no sympathy for him. He'd never know true pain unless I found a way to give him my hair and have him brush it every day. It got tangled no matter what was done to it.

"Where is my PDA?" Courtney demanded. It was by Beth, who jumped up and offered it to her. Courtney was, of course, not at all grateful. "Oh! Trying to steal it again, I see!"

"No, I was just trying to give it back!" Beth insisted. "Swearsies!"

Courtney just gave her the "I'm watching you" gesture. I would have spoken up for Beth at that point, but a camera suddenly appeared out of the window and projected Chris in a film set, wearing an eye patch and stroking a white cat. He began speaking in a weird accent. "Welcome to ze cloak-und-dagger world of spy moveees, man and woman." I'm not joking, he said 'ze" and "und". And emphasised the "e" in "movies' to make it sound like a double.

"Dude, what's with the bad Jamaican accent?" Duncan questioned.

I shrugged. "We know a Jamaican dude who doesn't talk like that. It'll be something European, like Portuguese."

"No, Swedish!" Courtney spoke up the second I'd finished talking.

"French!" Beth chipped in.

"Kinda sounds Italian to me." Harold added.

"Um, hellooo, it's Russian." Chris said in his normal voice. "And I should know, because I am an actor!"

"Not all criminal bosses are Russian, Chrissy." I said, grinning in spite of myself. "Haven't you ever heard that you know who the spy movie villains are from their British accents?" A movie critic I'd watched on YouTube said that once ("This is our villain. He doesn't have a name, but he has a Brtish accent, so you know he's evil"), and the villain from that Japanese movie where Mark Hamill dubbed his voice might have had a British accent put on.
Chris shushed me and then started on the three things about spy movies that a good spy needed to be skilled in – defusing a bomb, escaping from a building, and speaking in an impeccable fake accent. We apparently needed the first two skills for the challenges, so at least we knew that.

Just as we were talking in our teams, Chris suddenly added "Oh, and one last thing. Since I'm really ho-hum bored with the teams, I'm busting 'em up! From now on, it's every dude and dudette for themselves!"

We all gasped. We hadn't been expecting the merge to come when the challenge was already under way.

"Breaking us up!" Leshawna exclaimed. "After all we've been through?"

I nudged her. "This isn't the real movies, you know." I hissed. "We're not going to get a happy times montage." I mean, yes, we'd been through a lot, but it didn't mean we'd gotten along and were going to miss each other (Okay, I was wrong about the montage, but they must have photoshopped a tonne because it only happened in the episode, not on the actual show and I don't remember making an eight-pointed star by lying on the film lot with everyone else).

Justin actually found an elevator by accident, so our first task, to get back above ground, was not a hard task. All eight of us were ready to get out of the dark, all too warm area.

We ended up on a floor at the top of a water tower alike area. It was just a domed room held up by metal legs, really, but it looked pretty cool.

Another projection of Chris arrived to tell us the glass case in the middle of the room was something we had to grab, and as he spoke, lasers appeared in front of it, blocking us. We had to get through without setting off the alarms or getting cut in half from them.

Okay, we all had a look through it. Beth and Lindsay tried to go through together and ended up precariously leaning on each other, arguing that it was all the others' fault. Leshawna got stuck, too. Justin had a go, but got stuck, although he avoided the laser by deflecting one with his hand mirror. Courtney, though? Well, I was cautiously picking my way through, not making any moves until I was completely sure of them, and she was somersaulting past the lasers like they weren't even there. I even stopped long enough to notice Duncan watching her, smirk indicating he was really enjoying the show. So even though she started later than me, we got there at the same time.

"Okay, so, now what?" Courtney called to everyone else.

"Grab whatever you can and smash it open!" Duncan called. "Case probably isn't armed, since the lasers are protecting it."

"I vehemently disagree!" Harold said quickly. "The case is quite possibly booby-trapped!"

"Don't listen to His Geekiness over here." Duncan persisted. "Grab whatever you can and smash away."

I was the one to act first. In case Harold was right, I didn't actually ever touch the case. I pulled off one of my trainers, and smashed the case easily. No trap,and the lasers disappeared as soon as the case was broken. I quickly snatched up the little sack, and pulled out two things – a zipline gun and wire cutters.

I grinned. "We need to defuse bombs and escape from a building." I stated, and then I handed the wire cutters to Courtney. It was time I gave her a real reason to be suspicious of me, and I guessed she wouldn't think I'd done it out of the goodness of my heart. I was just doing it to mess with her head, I wasn't planning to befriend and betray or anything and it was more petty, but still, it worked. She looked at me suspiciously again, and I adopted an innocent look.
"What?" I shrugged. "We got here at the same time. You would've smashed the case if I hadn't. I just got first pick, so you have the bomb defusing mechanism, and I have the escaping mechanism."

At that moment, Chris came back on screen. "The room blows in ten!" he announced, putting a countdown on the screen for ten seconds.

Everyone started freaking out and hugging each other. Even I hung onto the person closest to me, which happened to be Courtney, who's already wrapped her arms around Duncan.

"I'm too knowledgable to die!" Harold cried, curled up by himself.

Chris continued the countdown. "Three, two, one...SUCKERS!" He started laughing. "You should've seen the looks on your faces!"

He put another half minute long countdown on, and left us. He said we'd need the stuff from the little sack for the next challenge. "Whether Toni, our little athletic gymnast and Courtney, our little kung fu queen chooses to share their tools with the tools is totally up to them."

I swear, when I said "What are you guys paying me for this?", I didn't expect them all to think I really wanted them to pay me. So I went on, "A few dollars if you win?"

"You gotta be kidding!" Leshawna snapped at me. "You're willing to bargain...WITH OUR LIVES?"

I laughed. "You've gotta be kidding, actually! I didn't think you'd take me seriously." I shot my zipline gun over to the flat roof of another building, and grinned. "Hang on, everyone! Let's go!"

And all eight of us zoomed to freedom, with over ten seconds to spare.

Of course, the building didn't actually blow up or anything. "As if we have the budget to blow up an entire building!" Chris said, suddenly appearing in front of us (well, he's probably been waiting for us). "I was just playing with you. Again. Because I can."

We'd escaped, though, and I'd gotten the sack first, so I'd technically won the first part of the challenge just ahead of Courtney. Even with Chris trying to put me at a disadvantage early in the competiton, he let me win fairly this time, probably because it was for reward. Courtney's lawyers couldn't do anything about that, either.

Still, Courtney didn't win the second part of the challenge, either. We had to defuse bombs, just like Chris said, while we stood in a long line with the explosives in front of us. They weren't killers – they were just basic stink bombs that would leave us all in need of a long tomato juice bath, even if just one wasn't defused. And since I gave Courtney the wire cutters, she was the only one who had the capabilities to do that. We had three minutes.

None of us knew what to do. A bunch of us had asked questions, but as usual, Chris had completely ignored them. Without any clues, we had no way of knowing which wires to cut in which order, and if any of them would cause the bomb to detonate early.

Everyone was doing something different. Justin was talking to his brain and couldn't even remember if "eeny meeny miney mo" was the right order. Courtney was tapping away on her PDA, trying to get a reply from her lawyers. Duncan and Harold were sniping at each other, and Lindsay was cooing over the colour of the wires and how they matched her eyes or hair or outfit. I just froze up again, hoping someone else would show the way forward.

Suddenly, Beth called along the line "Hey everybody, Lindsay's cutting the blue wire!"

"Great, let us know how that works out for you." Courtney replied.

"Can Lindsay borrow the wire cutters?" Beth asked.

Courtney looked down at the cutters, back at the rest of us, and down at the bomb again. She didn't say no, didn't even shake her head, but she seemed unwilling to give them up. It took Beth reminding her that just one bomb going off would affect everyone. "You make a good point." she said, and passed them along.

And when Lindsay snipped the blue wire, the timer on the bomb stopped at 1:20.

After that, we all started cutting the blue wire, in our own way. Justin used his mirror, Beth used her glasses, and half of us just pulled ours. Courtney carefully snipped hers.

Okay, let's be honest. Some of them stopped. Some. We spent a minute getting the blue wires cut. But by the time we realized not all the bombs had stopped, we didn't have enough time left to do anything more, and five of them detonated. Of course they hadn't all been wired the same.

Okay, we were allowed to sit in a tomato bath to take away the...er...fragrance...but Chef wouldn't give us anything else for dinner, so I went hungry that night. But we had a break the next day, where Lindsay and I would get our reward, since I'd won the first part and Lindsay had won the second.

Okay, it was just a trip to a cheese factory, but it would certainly be welcome after Chef's slop. We hadn't had any decent food since DJ left, and Lindsay wouldn't be terrible company. At least, I didn't think so.

Okay, so Toni won this challenge. This wasn't a hard one for her. Even non-Sues have to win sometimes.

Also, just need to put a couple disclaimers. The quote about the nameless villain with a British accent comes from Il Niege from his What We Had To Watch review of Pokemon 2000. The Japanese movie Mark Hamill played the villain in for the English dub is Laputa: Castle In The Sky, which I think was the first movie released under Studio Ghibli, although it wasn't Hayao Miyazaki's debut. If you haven't seen it, it's on Netflix. Most Studio Ghibli movies are, with the exception of Grave Of The Fireflies. Seriously, go watch it, it's considered to have all the best traits of 80s adventure movies.