A/N: This chapter is wordier than some of my others. Also, please, leave reviews. Every little bit helps me write a better story.
"I'm not losing again. It goes against everything I, and by extension Canada, stand for. If you're not doing it for the glory, at least do it for the spa hotel. I can't keep eating this slop."
The Wombats were sitting outside their cabin, eating what could be considered breakfast by a technicality only. James had stood up and spoke in an effort to rally the troops. The warning he'd gotten from Izzy the night before was fresh in his mind, but he didn't think it would happen soon. Whatever Izzy's abilities were, Dawn could match, and she didn't look like she was covering anything up. Other than her relationship with Lightning, but that didn't take a genius to see.
Chef poked his head out of the mess hall. His hearing was scarily acute when it came to any affronts against his work. "The fuck did you say about my food, wanna-be?"
James gave his best appease-the-press smile, which he had learned after dealing with the hostile sports media for 12 years, and said, "I'm sorry, Chef. I'm truly grateful that you're here making us food. You're doing great work."
Chef couldn't tell if it was sarcasm or not (it was), but the praise nearly brought the gruff big man to tears. "You could learn from him, maggots. That's Canada's Pride right there." With a faint sniffle, he turned back to his work.
Gwen giggled, clearly grasping the true meaning of James's effusive praise. She looked up at him with doe eyes before noticing that his smile was slightly less real. His face had frozen for a few seconds after hearing his nickname before going back to the casual smile he wore most of the time.
"The challenge today can't be that bad. The last two have been psychologically hard, and I don't think Chris would want us to go over the edge so soon", Zoey said. "Not good viewing."
Brick spoke slowly. "Maybe, if we can figure out each others' strengths and weaknesses, we can have an idea of the challenge beforehand. I'm a cadet, so my challenge was obviously a military one, despite my interest in fashion. Geoff was a relaxed guy and his challenge was to relax. What else can we think of?"
Gwen started ticking some off on her fingers. "Either James or Lightning will have a sports one, Dawn might have a nature one, Izzy might have one where we take a field trip to an asylum, mine might be death, and Heather's will obviously be who can be the bigger bitch."
Zoey, Brick, and Dawn laughed. Heather just looked over at Gwen, before uttering a simple "Bite me, goth."
James was too deep in thought. "That's not enough. Those other people, we can't predict. Alejandro's got too wide of a skill set-it could be literally anything. Plus, even if we know their challenges, we can't predict what twist Chris will put on 'em."
"No, no you can't. That's all part of the Chris McLean charm!" The host had popped out from behind a tent flap.
The Wombats jumped in terror. Gwen bellowed "Christ!"
"Close, it's Chris. Although I guess I am kind of a god figure on this show, huh? Anyways, you guys are already here, so just wait for the Muskrats to come on down."
Gwen turned to the others. "Prop bet says that this challenge is a girl's."
Brick laughed. "At the academy, we bet on everything. You're on. I'll bet dishes for the next week that this challenge is a guy's, and a guy from the Muskrats too."
Gwen turned to the others. "Dawn? Zoey? James? You guys want in?"
James snorted. "I can't be seen gambling, that's bad for my image. But, off camera, I'm with Brick here."
"I'll indulge your silly games," Dawn said with a smile. "Wombat girl. No doubt." Zoey nodded her head at that one, agreeing with Dawn.
"Ah chicas, what are we discussing on this fine morning?" Alejandro's charm caused the Wombat girls to blush almost as one. Heather looked away. It galled her that people still took him at face value, but she had too at one point.
The Muskrats were a team divided. Courtney had told the others how Harold had tried to help Geoff in the last challenge. Leshawna had obviously sided with Harold, Noah had reluctantly sided with Alejandro and Courtney, Lightning had been conspicuously silent, and Izzy… nobody could tell what Izzy thought. She was too engaged in a world of her own making to care about the game.
With the teens huddled, Chris began to lay out the day's plans. "Moving on, our next challenge comes from our 'most' athletic camper, Noah!"
Noah rolled his eyes. "Combining my love for sports and my natural love of sarcasm. Tell your writers they did a perfect job."
Chris's grin widened. The sarcastic little nerd was always fun to abuse, in part because of his weird superiority complex. "Noah would get eaten alive in any sports we'd try, so we're not doing sports. Instead, we're doing a challenge of the future using VR!" Chris swept his hand to show thirteen VR headsets behind him. Each headset was cordless, meaning that for once the Total Drama producers had sprung for the more expensive option.
"This isn't your normal VR game, though." Chris started laughing to himself.
Harold knew from three seasons that whatever followed would not end well for the campers. Chris had a sadistic sense of humor, and after the last two challenges, this should have been their easier challenge. In other years, a reward challenge, even. Something had changed this year.
"This VR game is an experimental one. The company behind it, Salve, has said that the graphics are so realistic the game testers suffered mental breakdowns when forced to leave. They played for three hours. You all will play for six. Whoever keeps their sanity the longest or whoever can find this flag first will win the challenge for their team." Chris had a projection screen rolled up to him by an intern, where he flashed a picture of a royal-blue flag with a smiling picture of Chris on it.
Confessional
Chris: We'd like to thank Salve for their very generous donation to the show. Remember, Salve is the name to trust when it comes to all forms of insanity-inducing electronics.
Harold (eyes widening): I read on Reddit about Salve. Their founder put his life's work into these headsets and when he entered one, he was so immersed he accidentally killed himself. Chris wouldn't… right?
End of confessional
The campers held the Salve headsets cautiously. Gwen said, "Where's that tech-nerd Cody when you actually need him?"
Alejandro's chivalry (or his love of mind games, who can tell) led him to step in. "Please, Gwen, I can not bear to see you so upset. I know we're on opposite teams but I will show you there's nothing to fear." He put on his headset. "I'll be there on the other side, waiting."
The goth rolled her eyes, secretly enjoying the attention. Alejandro was a jerk but he could still be impressively charming.
James looked over at the Spaniard. "Let's not keep Ale waiting, then."
Brick shrugged, glad that somebody was telling him what to do. He put on the headset expecting Minecraft-level graphics. He was wrong.
The first thing Brick noticed was how light the headset was. He had to reach up and confirm that he was, in fact, wearing one at all. The paddles he had in his hands weighed a little more but still not enough to draw massive amounts of attention. With this problem out of the way, he looked around. Boney Island was rendered perfectly.
Like, perfectly. Perfection to such a degree that Brick's eyes could barely comprehend it. He bent over to pick up a small rock, and instead of having oddly rounded corners, the rock was craggy, irregular, slightly misshapen. The rock was roughly the size of a cigar and had moss on its bottom left. There was also a splash of some purple liquid, which was probably a rotted fruit's juice, that covered the top of the rock. The rock had been translated perfectly. While he couldn't confirm, Brick thought that if went to that same spot on the real-life Boney Island, he would find a rock in that exact shape lying in the same spot.
The other campers were struggling to adjust to their new surroundings. The one thing that VR hadn't gotten right was the amount of ambient light. Whereas real-life Boney Island was perpetually overcast, this Boney Island was pleasantly sunny. Not sunny enough to show up on slightly less perfect TV cameras, but just sunny enough that the campers could tell they were somewhere else.
Dawn was looking down at her hands uneasily. One of her biggest skills was her ability to communicate with nature, and this artificial nature was screwing with her abilities. She had a dull sense of her surroundings, due to her extensive hikes of the real-life Boney Island, but her animal friends were not able to talk to her because they did not exist in this world. Instead, there were AI animals. To be fair, the AIs were programmed well, but their slight hitches in movement could be seen by a trained eye. She looked over at Zoey, who was currently trying to organize a party to find the flag. She had recruited Gwen and Brick, and had reluctantly gathered Heather, but James was nowhere to be seen. She couldn't read auras, either, and she was not going to be left with the Muskrats, so she pushed James out of her mind and went with the rest of her team.
It was Alejandro who found James. The Olympian had made it into the forest before whatever ailed him fully hit. He was sitting on the ground, trembling violently. As Alejandro got closer he saw that James was dripping sweat as well. He also heard James muttering something, over and over. Only when he was a few feet from James could he make the words out. James was repeating "this is what I wanted, I'm not going back" over and over again. Just as Alejandro was about to reach out and grab James's shoulder, James stood up and ripped off his headset, sending him back to the real world first.
Confessional
Alejandro: Curious. It seems the Olympian was having a panic attack. If I figure out what caused it, I can use it against him. Only as a last resort, of course. Burros muertos no juegan.
Chris: I bet Chef 30 bucks Brick would lose first. Where the hell did that come from?
End of confessional
Chris and Chef looked at the distraught James. He didn't even notice that he was the first camper to quit. He whipped the Salve headset into the distance before jogging into the woods. The host and his crony just shrugged. He was 18. He could handle himself.
Back in the virtual world, the perfection of the island was starting to get to the campers. Something about it made Leshawna queasy. She had long forgotten that she was wearing a VR headset; to her, this world was real. Every shadow, every blade of grass, every tree trunk was exactly as nature intended. And yet, it was better than nature. More polished. Her heart started to hammer. What was real and what wasn't?
The stream near her was babbling. Boney Island streams didn't normally babble. What the hell is this? Leshawna's thoughts exploded across her mind. She couldn't even tell if she had spoken aloud. She began to have an out-of-body experience, looking down on herself from 10 meters above. No human was made to see what she was seeing. With a concerted effort, Leshawna forced her floating self and her grounded self to rejoin. Feeling slightly less than whole, she bent down and inspected a single blade of grass. The blade was, for want of a better word, perfect. There were slight tears where she had separated it from the ground but no other blemishes whatsoever. The green was greener than anything that had ever been. She remembered from science class that objects reflect some colors, which are the colors we perceive those objects to be, and absorb others. She inherently knew, somehow, that this blade of grass was just green. There was no reflection, no absorption, nothing like that.
The blade of grass simply was. Everything here except for the campers simply was. Forever and always. This object permanence was messing with Leshawna's head. She had never been the biggest fan of the outdoors, but this was extreme. She felt unwelcome, like the campers were intruding on something they couldn't understand and weren't meant to see. Her head was pounding, spinning, and had blood rushing to it simultaneously. The feeling of vertigo was too much for Leshawna, so she ripped her headset off and sat down with a gasp. Two down.
Nearby, Heather's head was pounding too, but for a different reason. She was replaying the conversation she'd had with James from a few nights ago on an endless replay. She'd been weak. It was the lowest she'd felt since, well, the breakup. Even still, that was not a reason to talk to someone who she barely knew. She was the Queen Bee. He was, what, a half-baked athlete? Yeah, she knew how to deal with athletes. Every jock in her school had hit on her at some point, and while she toyed with some of them for a month or two, she'd turned them all down eventually.
She wanted someone to talk to, and while he had fit the bill nicely, she'd put up her wall again after that night. He wanted something from her, surely. Every guy she'd ever talked to wanted something from her. Either sex, or in the context of the show, some leg up. He surely wasn't doing that out of kindness. Once she figured out what his angle was, she'd exploit it and get him kicked off the show. That shit he told her had to be lies anyway. She laughed bitterly to herself. No way that man felt as sad as he said he did. When you look that good, have a skill that good, and can relate to people that well, he had nothing to be miserable about. Now Heather, she had something to be miserable about. That pretender? Nope. Heather was steaming with rage at this point. She completely forgot about the challenge and tore off her headset. She was going to find that white knight wannabe and make sure he knew who Heather Suoh was.
Lightning and Harold had also taken off their headsets by now, but for different reasons. Harold had taken his off because, similar to his girlfriend, his advanced brain couldn't deal with the artificially simulated world somehow being more real than the real world. Add in the graphics and reality would be unacceptable to him if he had stayed in VR for a minute longer.
Lightning just needed to pee, and he was not going to risk wetting himself out of confusion.
Back in the virtual world, Izzy had gone exploring. She was not fazed by the virtual world. Her mental state had fractured long ago, but she was experienced in putting it back together. While walking through the woods, she found a cave that was not there on the real Boney Island. Izzy lived for the thrill of discovery, so she made her way in. She was immediately assaulted by a voice reverberating in her mind.
[Who dares disturb the sleep of Cyäegha? Your death will be merciless.]
"Ooh, an elder god! Izzy's always wanted to meet one of the Great Old Ones! Now, you're the giant floating eye with tentacles, right? My Lovecraft knowledge is a bit rusty."
[Mortal, you should tremble in fear at the very thought of my presence. Your flippancy only draws your death closer.]
Izzy considered this for a moment. "Sorry, I don't really do mortal fear. That's not Izzy's style! If anything, you should fear me!"
The Great Old One, still obscured by the darkness of the cave, barely had time to reflect on this most curious of mortals before being attacked by the redhead.
[Cease this immediately, mortal. Holy shit that hurts, stop now, what are you doi-]
A mighty scream echoed throughout the rest of the virtual island. It caught up to Alejandro and Courtney, who were off in a section of the woods by themselves. The scream rattled their skulls and knocked Courtney off balance, causing her to fall into Alejandro's arms. Giving his most charming smile, the Spaniard dipped her gracefully before setting her down. "Please, chica, we must focus on the game. I think I have just the idea, too. If we leave now, we raise our chances of losing, and with a loss we can vote off Harold, who is probably the least useful teammate we have right now."
Courtney took a second to regain her composure. The plan made sense, but if it somehow went wrong, she also had an out. Alejandro's alliance with Lightning wasn't as iron-clad as it seemed and Leshawna was much more willing to listen to her than to Alejandro. She could turn this situation into a win no matter what happened.
"Deal. The nerd goes tonight."
The two shook hands before taking their headsets off gently.
Confessional
Courtney: For all of his charm and intelligence, Alejandro hasn't noticed something. I've tried to keep a lower profile this season because I've noticed that whenever I rightfully remind someone how I would be a superior leader, they tend to vote me off. That's not happening this year. It'll be a shame when I vote his beautiful, gorgeous, perfect (sighs, before snapping out of it), scheming ass off.
End of confessional
By this point, the campers had been immersed in the VR for three hours. Dawn had to quit because she was naturally more sensitive to the effect the server had. Her mental abilities made the experience quite painful, almost as if a railroad spike was being jammed between her eyes. Removing the headset made her gasp with pleasure. Looking around the area where the campers had been sitting in order to play, she noticed a very nervous Lightning hovering. Seeing her, he grinned, the worry flushing from his face, and walked over.
"What's up, creepy girl?"
She smiled a bit. He had made the insult into a pet name in a way to make fun of his old behavior.
"I saw you sha-twitching and groaning a lot, so I wanted to stay by in case you needed anything. Chris left us all sha-lone, so if something happened…" His voice trailed off, clearly demonstrating concern.
"I couldn't stand it. It was such a misrepresentation of nature. It looked great, but it had no soul. I guess it makes sense coming from Chris, that manipulative faker." Dawn rarely got mad, so this was the extent of her anger. She walked outside to revel in the beauty of actual nature.
Lightning joined her. Ever since talking to her a few days ago, he had noticed that he started to feel different. It was getting easier to avoid talking about himself in third-person and he started to care about others. Not just about how others might be in his way, but about how other people felt. He was even starting to take joy in being outside. Just being around Dawn made him feel better.
"Care to join me in the forest?" Dawn asked, giggling slightly. Being released from the virtual prison made her feel infinitely better. She was in a good mood, so why not flirt a little bit? "I promise I won't bite… unless you want me to."
Lightning's jaw dropped. He quickly joined her as the two looked for a spot away from the cameras.
They passed Zoey, who had been the last camper to drop out. She had heard a buzzing in her head that was escalating in volume, to the point where she was getting a migraine. The buzzing had started to drive a wedge between Zoey and Commando Zoey, almost separating the two into two distinct personalities. She had wondered if this was what Mike felt like, and she had no desire to go through what he went through. After remembering how Mal had mistreated everyone around him, she threw the headset off and quickly rejoined the campers in reality.
Chris looked around and confirmed the results. "Our final four, who will be moving onto the next challenge, are Gwen, Brick, Izzy, and Noah! Stay in there for a bit longer, guys, I'll be right there to explain the next challenge."
Heather had heard from Chef that James had sprinted off into the trails. She followed one that she knew he enjoyed, and lo and behold she saw him returning to the clearing where the challenge was being held.
He waved his hand in greeting. "Heather, thank god, just the person I wanted to see.."
She cut him off with a brutal backhand slap. "YOU. What are you up to, huh?"
James was stunned but managed to stammer out a response. "I was wa-wa-walking back from the t-trails. What was that for?"
With a rage that the others never saw, she started to back down the taller and more muscular guy. "You think it's fun to get girls to expose their souls? I bet you got your rocks off just watching me cry. Probably thought you could get in my pants that night, right? I bet that's all you see when you look at me. Someone for you to fuck. I mean, that's the only reason you'd be there, right? I know you don't actually give a shit about me."
She had backed him up to the wall of a nearby production trailer. Her rage only continued. "You're too smart to think you could actually be in an alliance with me, so you had to think that you could just screw me and get things over. I know the internet thinks I'm a whore, but I'm not that easy. You disgust me. Don't you dare talk to me, ever again." She accentuated this final part with a quick finger jab into his chest. With her point being made, she began to walk away.
James was not going to back down that easily. "Heather, wait. I was going to say that-"
She had turned after hearing her name and was going to unleash even more hell, but the two heard a sound that cut their conversation off immediately.
They heard a gunshot.