Day 1 3:01 AM

It would have come as little surprise to anyone who knew her, but Frankie Almond Smith (Girl # 14 – no one was absolutely sure whether 'Almond Smith' was a double barrelled surname or if 'Almond' was simply her middle name. Either way, she never deigned to answer this question if anybody was brave enough to ask) was hopelessly lost, trundling across one of the island's many fields without a clue as to where she was. This was primarily due to the fact that during Bray Wood's 'woodland orienteering activities' (which were compulsory – otherwise she'd have skipped them and gone into town to get a manicure), Frankie had always insisted that Liz do all the map reading, whilst she just sulked and complained about the weather and thus had never really acquired the skills the course had aimed to teach.

She examined the contents of her bag. It seemed that not only were the Battle Royale administrators deeply sick, but they were also extremely stingy; having provided only 3 bread rolls and three small bottles of water to sustain the students for the three days, assuming any of them lasted that long. Frankie grimaced when she saw what her provisions consisted of, presupposing that the intention was to give the students paltry food supplies so as to provide a further incentive to kill each other in order to gain more rations.

Frankie took a few steps forward with her elegantly long legs. She was tall and slim (perhaps a little too slim; her breasts had an oddly deflated look) and she maintained her physique not by rigorous exercise - she was far too lazy for that - but by self-imposed bulimia. Only Liz knew of this affliction, having regularly accompanied Frankie to the toilets after lunch, whilst Frankie was determined to keep quiet about it, having no intention of getting counselling or therapy of any kind. She enjoyed the jealousy she incurred in the other female students; seeing the way they envied her supposed ability to eat whatever she wanted and however much she wanted, without ever gaining a pound of weight. Of course it was all an illusion, they'd never seen the way she choked and spluttered over the toilet, desperately trying to regurgitate her food as quickly - and painlessly - as possible.

Popularity wasn't a given thing at Bray Wood; once achieved it took great effort to sustain and Frankie knew that she would need to fight dirty for this to be accomplished. Her height, body shape, attractive countenance, waist length blonde hair and sharp wit made her a plausible candidate for the school's ruling queen bee, but there would always be challengers trying to commandeer her position and hence it was necessary to ferret out her oppositions' weaknesses and exploit them to bring about their downfall. Fortunately as of yet, few reputations had been tarnished by the social machinations of Frankie, partly because she was dependent upon another person to conceive of an effective smear campaign for her chosen target. That individual was none other than Liz Dunn (Girl #6), a young woman who found Frankie's constant social manoeuvring rather tiresome and usually couldn't be bothered to assist her in her scheming.

Liz was, theoretically, perhaps proof that supermodel good looks weren't vital for social power. She was rather small in stature, her body being of the voluptuous variety rather than the preferential waif-like twig – though Liz did have a set of magnificently well shaped breasts - whilst her round face, slightly sunken brown eyes and short black hair, all added further weight to other peoples' belief that her physical attributes resulted in her appearance being nothing more than plain. But at Bray wood things were not necessarily so simply beauty-fixated: if you were a member of the female species and wanted to exist at Bray Wood as opposed to being the human equivalent of wallpaper you had to either be a complete bitch or an utter slut. Liz was the epitome of the former, whilst Frankie fulfilled the latter position with gusto and a good level of discretion too. They were as thick as thieves; a knock-out combination who ruled their year with an iron fist and used the freaks, the fat and the fashion failures as their doormat with which they wiped the shit off their feet.

They'd been best friends (if that is the right expression to use; it sounds so innocent and naïve, two terms that one could definitely not apply to either Liz or Frankie) since the age of seven and were thought to be inseparably close, having seen each other through every trial and tribulation their lives had presented them with. Frankie was aware she needed to find her; Liz had always been a more enterprising and pragmatic person than she'd ever be, maybe she'd even formulated a plan to get them off the island by now?

But then she felt the hot rush of her anger and frustration towards Liz, a bubbling, frothing fury that had gradually escalated since they both arrived at Bray Wood and found their friendship becoming ever more superficial as they started to resent each other. It was technically Liz's fault that Frankie was even in the Battle Royale; for the previous two years, Frankie had been in Science set 2 and it was only when Liz doctored her coursework - at Frankie's request - to improve it that she was promoted to be a member of the year's scientific elite. Even at the time Frankie pondered why she had decided to cheat her way to the top; the work load was larger and the topics were more complex, often resulting in her struggling to comprehend the information she was given. But in all truth, Frankie already knew why she had enlisted Liz to forge her coursework; pride.

It wasn't enough that she was beautiful, that she had a coterie of close female companions and a legion of male admirers; she wanted more, but not only that, she also was determined to trump her arch-rival, Nicole Colville. Nicole may not have been tactically adept and hence was never able to successfully usurp Frankie's position as the female sovereign of Bray Wood, but she had soon found Frankie's Achilles heel: her intelligence. Frankie was far from stupid, but Nicole made a point of characterising her to others as a stereotypical blonde airhead because she was in 'inferior academic sets'. Nobody took these jibes seriously; Frankie was clearly a very able student and one who it was inadvisable to anger: she was quick with her mouth and even quicker with her hands, and most realised that Nicole was simply being malicious towards her. However these taunts struck a raw nerve with Frankie, who despite using her looks to fast-track her through life, was anxious that she not be pigeonholed as nothing more than a pretty face.

In an atypically candid moment she had once expressed her fears to Liz (the two would never confide their troubles in anybody but each other):

"I don't want to be judged for my looks, I want people to see beyond that."

"Oh, I suppose that you'd rather have Geoff screw you because he's aroused by your love of Chaucer rather than your tits?" Liz replied venomously, completely bemused as to how anybody so beautiful could have the gall to actually complain about their handsomeness. Seeing that Frankie looked truly hurt by her answer - Frankie showing her pain was an incredibly unusual occurrence - Liz put her arm around her and softly said, "I'm sorry Franks; I didn't mean that. But come on – you know what they say about good looks: they're a passport to success."

Frankie laughed humourlessly, a tear conspicuously forming in her eye, "No Liz, it's not a passport, it's a visa. And when it runs out, what are you left with if you don't have a magnetic personality or a brilliant mind?"

"Oh Frankie..."Liz gently commiserated.

Frankie had thought that by fraudulently worming her way into the upper echelons of Bray Wood's intelligentsia, she would be giving herself a better chance in life. Never had she imagined it would indirectly lead to her participating in a game that would probably end her existence!

Geoff.

His name was emblazoned on her heart; sure she was liberal in attitude when it came to sex, but of all her lovers, of which there were fewer in number than you might imagine, he was the only one she had ever formed an emotional attachment with. She berated herself for fleetingly wishing he too had been placed in the Battle with her. She knew she should be thankful that he had been spared this horror - owing to that fact that he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and thus was in a lower set to her - but despite herself, she still yearned for his company right now.

But what if he's already watching me? The thought hit her with the force of a stray bullet. The island was covered in cameras; perhaps everybody in Bray Wood was watching them now on TV – willing their friends to triumph and their enemies to perish. She shivered. The only way to win was to kill, but what would Geoff think of her then? Would he want to be with a girl who would be branded as a heartless and deranged psychopath? Talk about being in Catch 22 – her strongest reason for fighting for victory was to be with Geoff again, but by winning Battle Royale she'd almost certainly repulse and alienate him.

She walked further forward, casting her pale flashlight over the surrounding wheat crops that she casually trampled to the ground as she proceeded. She was approaching the field's edge, which lead off into the forest, when her torch beam illuminated the figure of Liz Dunn, squatting by a tree stump, scribbling some notes on a pad of notepaper. Frankie grinned, but just as she was about to step forwards, she caught sight of the silver pistol that lay by Liz's side, glistening in the whiteness of her torch's solitary ray of light. Frankie stopped, feeling inexplicably hesitant about progressing towards Liz; there was something about her manner that was oddly discomforting. Liz casually looked up from her notebook and unblinkingly met Frankie's concerned gaze.

Within three emotionally painful seconds, Frankie understood the significance of that cold stare. Here, on this island of misery, their friendship counted for nothing; they had been pitted against each other as enemies in a game where death was the only exit available and killing was the one method of point scoring. Liz was clearly intent on becoming a player in this bloodbath. The only apparent remnant of her once strong bond with Frankie, was the way her gaze explicated that she was giving Frankie her first - and last - chance to walk away, maybe to die at the hands of some other student or perhaps to survive a little longer and possibly even confront her later. It was a gesture of goodwill towards Frankie that Liz would not be repeating.

Frankie understood. She turned and began to walk away, too numb with uncertainty to cry. Without Liz's guidance, what was she to do now? Kill others? Should she be 'noble' and take her own life? Her weapon was a stun gun; hardly likely to cause any fatalities and only useable at close range, it could only really serve a purpose if used defensively. The gruesome reality of what she must do loomed ever more clearly in Frankie's mind; the ominous knowledge that it was 'kill or be killed' and that there was nobody she could turn to for assistance.

But she had one weapon that was arguably deadlier than any firearm: her body. Most of Bray Wood's male students were your archetypal horny adolescents, but whilst some had the confidence, not to mention the good looks, to act on their sexual impulses, a fair few bottled up these desires and repressed themselves in that classically British way. Frankie decided to entice her prey with a little showing of flesh (she wasn't going to actually sleep with anybody – she may have been a tart, but she still had standards to uphold), shock them into temporary paralysis with the stun gun and then purloin their weapon. She had no intention of actually slaying anyone until the last moments of the 'game', where that eventuality would be pretty much unavoidable.

Frankie skulked back across the field, compiling a list in her head of possible targets. She was agitated; though she soon had decided which boy would be the subject whom she conferred her feminine charms on, she wondered if he would be gullible enough to fall for them, given the present situation of mass paranoia.

What she really wanted right now was a nice, high quality line of coke. Unfortunately, it was always Liz who carried the narcotics. Great – she was probably going to die and she couldn't even get high just one last time.

As Frankie slowly faded into the dark cloud of night, Liz returned to her writing. She was drawing - quite literally - a social totem pole, trying to establish where her fellow classmates existed in Bray Wood's hierarchy. Popularity is, to an extent, in the eye of the beholder (not entirely unlike beauty) and hence those who are perceived popular will have greater influence over others and be adulated and possibly even feared. In Battle Royale, in Liz's not particularly humble opinion, popularity could act either for or against a person; as popular individuals might either automatically gain the trust of their fellow students or suffer their previously dormant jealousies.

She glanced at her pistol, remembering with a flush of disappointment the cheap trick the BR admin had played on her. At first sight it seemed like any regular pistol, but it was in fact nothing more than a water pistol. However what truly galled her was not only the fact that they'd had the cheek to include an instruction manual, but that they'd also dared – according to the operating manual's cover - to class this useless toy in weapons' group 3. Still, on the surface it was indistinguishable from a genuine gun, so perhaps she could use it to threaten some of her peers into surrendering their weapons to her. She needed to find some boys who were fundamentally good-natured and would be forgiving of the previous cruelties she'd perpetrated against them; the girls were out of the question, being too astute not to see through her completely. These pathetically humanitarian idiots would be the most vulnerable and the easiest ones for her to enact her schemes upon. The sun wouldn't rise for a few hours, but already Liz sensed an incandescent brightness surfacing on her horizons.

Sue Cathcart (Girl # 3) tightly squeezed the trigger of her Uzi, pellets of soil leaping into the air and doing a jittery dance as the bullets struck the ground, before the dismembered particles gracelessly fell back down to the desecrated turf. Sue released her finger from the trigger and shouted to the hidden figure in the darkness,

"You take one step forward and the next bullets will be for you, got it?"

"For fuck's sake Sue it's me – it's Jewel," Jewel (Girl # 10) shouted back with a mixture of irritation and fear, "now please let me in!"

Sue squinted at the darkness before saying, "Ok, step forward and let me see if it's really you."

Against her better judgement, Jewel moved forwards towards the window. There were traces of dirt all over her clothes and she was sweating profusely from having run up the steep hill to reach the log cabin.

"Shit, it really is you – Anne, open the door quick!" said Sue, finally lowering her Uzi and staring at Jewel in astonishment.

Anne Priestly (Girl # 11) rose from her chair, Colt 45. Pistol gripped firmly in her hand, and unlocked the cabin's heavy oak front door. Jewel, panting with exhaustion, rushed in and collapsed onto one of the cabin's cushy settees. The large entrance room of the cabin was divided into two sections by a Kitchen counter; the right hand side was furnished with three plush, cream leather sofas, a coffee table and an expensive looking widescreen TV, whilst the left side comprised of two kitchen counters, a few non-functional kitchen appliances, an agar and a circular dining table surrounded by six chairs. To the left of the TV was the room's only door, aside from the entrance, and opened off into the cabin's one corridor. Since their arrival at the cabin, thirty minutes ago, Sue and Anne had been guarding the windows with their weaponry, feeling it would be imprudent to smash up what little furniture there was to try and barricade themselves inside, considering that the region they currently were in could easily become a danger zone in a matter of hours, meaning they'd have to depart at short notice.

"So what happened to you?" asked Anne, though not really out of concern.

"Far too long a story," replied Jewel, "but I now officially want to castrate Phil Argyle."

"That bad huh?" said Sue.

"Worse than you could possibly imagine," Jewel answered, "so what have you two been up to?"

"There are four of us actually," seeing Jewel's surprise Sue elaborated, "Me, Anne, Daisy and Sylvie. We met up after leaving the HQ and headed over here, Anne said it'd be easier to defend because we're on top of a hill and as the building's small there's not much risk of anyone infiltrating it without our knowledge. Plus it's quite comfy."

"So where are Sylvie and Daisy?" Jewel queried. Anne snorted and rolled her eyes contemptuously.

"Well when we arrived here, Sylvie decided, being ever the drama queen, to lock herself in the bathroom and hasn't left since. Daisy is currently trying to coax her out but not with much success." Anne snarled, as she and Sue seated themselves on either side of the fretful Jewel.

"Well what's she doing in there?" asked the nonplussed Jewel.

"I'd bet money she's crying her eyes out." Sue said offhandedly.

"Or she's slitting her wrists, which in view of the fact she's basically dead weight, wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing." Anne sneered, lighting up a cigarette and taking one long, prolonged puff of it. She was of average height, flat chested and hatchet faced, her countenance was generally surly and her behaviour vindictive. She inhaled another jet of smoke and slowly breathed out, pushing back her short brown hair from her face as she did so. There was an awkward silence, only broken by the emergence of Daisy Donahue (Girl # 4) from the corridor.

"Oh, hello Jewel. Didn't realise you'd come in. Dear me, you look a bit of a mess, are you feeling Ok?" She asked with unfeigned empathy.

"Yeah I'm alright, though I suppose I do look a bit of a state. How's Sylvie holding up?"

"Not well unfortunately. Despite my pleas she still won't leave the bathroom." Daisy said, obviously rather exasperated and tired.

"So...when we want to umm..." and here Jewel hesitated with a little oriental modesty, "well when we want to relieve ourselves...what exactly do we do?"

"We go to the other toilet – there are two bedrooms, each with an en-suite bathroom." Sue explained, Jewel now looking a tad embarrassed.

"We should never have brought that useless bitch with us; she'll drag us all down I guarantee you." Anne complained, viciously stubbing her cigarette out in a glass ashtray on the coffee table.

"We've had this discussion already," snapped Daisy, still standing upright and leaning against the doorframe "we need strength in numbers and Sylvie's a decent person, who deserves better than this."

"We all deserve better than this!" retorted Sue, "But these are the cards we've been dealt and we're just going to have to make the best of them, so wallowing in self-pity, like the esteemed Sylvie, isn't going to make matters better. Capiche?"

"Perhaps," Jewel began, with uncharacteristic icy carnality, "we should start trying to figure some way of getting ourselves out of this situation, rather than bickering and belittling one another. Let's think of Battle Royale as a game of poker; the cards we have may be bad, but that doesn't mean we can't bluff and cheat our way to success," Jewel turned her head to face the grimacing Sue, the faintest of smugly superior smiles forming on her pouty lips. When Jewel spoke again, it was in a harsh conspiratorial whisper,

"Capiche?"

29 Students Remain.