XI.

Myra Callaghan-Alistair, 18
Applicant #5

Nyko straps whatever sort of weird looking headgear on her head and over her face.

After that, the world sort of disappears.

It's not like anyone's gotten through the world thus far without having touched a video game of some sort, but this is something else. One second she's sitting down in her seat and the next she's standing, sort of miraculously.

Renette was right - it's not a very big area. There are no walls but she can see clearly where they would be, and where their boundaries are. The walls are shimmering almost like a force-field, but she knew if she were to touch them nothing would happen. Besides that, it's almost sort of underwhelming. There's grass. Trees. A little bit of a sound of running water, right behind her, but it's lost in the tall grass.

There's no plate. She's not standing on anything.

"Did anyone ask if there was a countdown?" she yells, looking around the circle. There's no cornucopia, either, no countdown hovering above it. Just a large, spread-out pile of supplies that slowly diminishes as it gets closer to each of them. To her right, Jahaira chuckles nervously, toeing the ground underneath her. She was sitting next to her, before. Arwen was on her other side as she stands now, looking around with her eyebrows raised high on her forehead.

"Well, is someone gonna test the theory out?" Trojan yells. "The first person to—"

Something explodes, far to her right. There's a few screams, someone lets out a shriek, and Jahaira lets out a muttered jesus christ. She keeps her feet planted firmly where they are.

The dust clears, and there's no one there. The empty spot between Sabre and Meris has no person in it, nothing to signify anyone was ever there but the large crater in the ground right in front of where they were standing.

"Who the hell was that?" she whispers, and Jahaira shakes her head, almost in awe. "Is this not a little bit fucked up?"

It is. God, it is. But it's going to make such a good story later.

"Hey!" Faye shouts. She leans down without moving and grabs a chunk of the crater rock in her fist, hefting it up. A few people look up at her, but not Sabre, who's eyes are still fixed very intently on the hole in the ground just beside him. She pitches the rock at him, and he must hear it, just before it impacts, because he turns just in time for it to catch him in the chest. He goes stumbling back; she sees him trip gracelessly out of his little ring of flattened grass. Something else explodes.

Five seconds later, there is no Sabre in there at all.

Jahaira is fucking laughing, and Arwen is snickering like it's the funniest thing she's seen in weeks and - it just might be?

Is it?

Something rings, the high little peel of a bell. Trojan gives a little two-footed hop out of his ring and onto the grass in front of him. Nothing happens.

"Uh-oh," Jahaira whispers, and she takes off.

She dives for the first thing in front of her, a machete, and scoops it up. Jahaira collides with her back, still laughing up a storm.

"Myra, Myra, protect me, please," she says, practically breathless with it, and then she squeaks. Myra turns only because of that noise - watches Topher crash into Verity as they both dive for the same knife. Verity turns it back on him. She waits, watches, whole body stiffening as she prepared for the knife to plunge into his neck.

And it does, but it doesn't. There's no spurt of blood, no ugly gouge in his skin. The knife hits him and the image that is Topher disappears. Verity herself looks wide-eyed, shocked, like it was an accident?

"This is hilarious," Jahaira decides.

There's a thud behind them. Jahaira turns her around, this time, in time to see Jupiter's body almost but not quite hit the grass as Kidava buries a sword in her back. She never gets there, no matter how much Myra waits for the impact, for the imprint of her corpse in the trampled grass. Of all the people, it was Kidava she didn't expect to give a shit about who deserved a break. At least she was right.

She starts pulling Jahaira off. No point standing around. Kidava makes her way across the circle right where they were standing and is on Verity before she can even get to her feet. Someone with one fully intact limb, and a thirteen year old. Wouldn't that look good on a resume?

She feels Jahaira let go of her, but thinks nothing of it. She sees her reach down to pick up two throwing knives, and then, oh—

There's a third in her back.

It's very odd, watching Jahaira stumble forward like she's dead or close to it. Odd in the weirdest way you could imagine. Trojan is ten feet behind her, an identical knife left in his hand. He's lifting his arm up, ready—

Oh, he's going to throw it at her.

She very wisely books it, and the knife tumbles over and over past where she had been standing. Nearly collides with Gideon as he takes down Nicator. Watches Percy stop in something that's not quite full horror but close to it, looking appropriately aghast. It's the only word she can think of to describe it.

"I did not sign up for this," he insists, and then looks at her. She points the machete at him.

His eyes widen. Emmi and Arwen appear at her side. While she's not the most friendly with them, not even close, it's not even an agreement that she'd turn the machete on one of them before Percy. There's that unspoken Group A code she was so hoping would kick in.

"You wouldn't," he mutters.

Her and Emmi lunge forward at the same time.

Percy doesn't last very long, after that.

Jupiter Valens, 14
Applicant #16

"I'm surprised you're not dead yet!" Noelani shouts at him, smiling.

If she's smiling, she must not know that Topher's already out of it. Her and Tarquin took off pretty quick, after all, because Topher seemed so inclined to go off on his own anyway. Noelani was a sibling, sort of, not a babysitter. She couldn't very well keep an eye on him twenty-four-seven.

But he's the smart one here, and takes off after the pair of them because he really doesn't have much time left, here. They're leaving tomorrow, he thinks. He's got this and dinner tonight to make a lasting impact.

If she needs some heroic saving, he'll be here.

And Tarquin, which is... rapidly becoming a problem.

He shouldn't do anything. They're friends, nothing more. They seem really similar. He'd be pretty offended himself if someone took out one of his friends just to get closer to him. But this isn't real. Noelani can't be angry at him for something that isn't real.

He only has one knife. One knife is all it will take.

He waits until Tarquin stops and turns, glancing through the trees, then buries the knife in the nape of his neck. Noelani makes a little, choked noise like it was the real thing, and then whirls on him.

"What the hell?"

He shrugs, clamming up at the look on her face. At their feet, Tarquin disappears. Noelani doesn't have it in her to be properly angry, he thinks, but she kinda looks it now, and it's terrifying. He didn't think beyond actually getting rid of him. He didn't account for any of this.

"Give me that, idiot," she insists, reaching for the knife. He backpedals a few feet, hugging it close to his chest.

"No. It's not like you're going to do anything with it."

Well, now she looks offended. Curse his mouth, no matter how true it is. He certainly can't picture Noelani killing anyone. Hell, if it was her and Tarquin in the final two they would have stood there and complimented each other until one of them fell over dead from the overwhelming force of it all. Nothing good would've come of that. Nothing at all.

She reaches for it again, and he holds an arm out. She grabs him by the wrist, trying to twist the knife free. He tries to shove her away - well, this isn't exactly the hug he expected, but he's holding onto her in the very least. If only he can make her see sense. Tarquin wasn't going to do anything, either. In this sense standing around doing nothing is synonymous with being useless.

She jerks, and he tries to pull his arm free.

The knife catches her in the chest, and Noelani literally disappears from his arms.

He stops in surprise, looking down at the knife. It's pointed outwards, but not enough...

Was it enough? Did he just kill her?

"Oh shit," he says flatly. "Oh shit, why. Why me?"

Here he stands alone, in the middle of the fake woods. He can still hear shouting. The noise is everywhere in such a small space, like there are real walls for it to bounce off of. He digs his feet further into the ridiculously fake dirt, angry when it doesn't even leave a scuff mark on his shoes.

How to blow an entire plan, and day, by Jay Valens.

He sighs, and plunges the knife into his own chest.

The first sign of coming back to life is a pair of gentle hands at his temples, trying to wiggle him free of the gear. The headset comes off his face and he squints in the light, unaware of just how bright it was before. What's brighter is Noelani and her hair, standing right in front of him. She puts the headset down. The glare on her face is spectacular, if he does say so himself.

"You are an idiot," she says flatly, and then heads off down the aisle. Topher is giggling like he didn't die almost immediately, and Tarquin is shaking his head.

God, why him?

He squints further, flattens his palms along the armrests of his chairs to ground himself. It's very odd, suddenly being back in the room. A row down Renette takes the headset off Emmi, the first one back after him. He looks up at the screen, trying to see what happened, but it's already changed onto bigger and much better things. Icarus finally runs into Soran, a dooming action from the start. Meliodas is there too, and Jay fully understands why he looks so amused. It's an amusing situation.

He can still see and hear everything like he's there. It's jarring.

"Hey, hey," Icarus says, hands up. It doesn't matter, with how close Soran is. "I don't even have a weapon, alright?"

"Okay?" Soran says. "Nice to know. You wouldn't hit me with it anyway."

Icarus huffs. "What are you gonna do, stab me? I'd like to see you—"

He does just that, slipping in-between Icarus' arms into his exposed chest and burying the sword there. Meliodas bends over in a fit of laughter, struggling to clutch onto his stomach, and doesn't move an inch when Soran turns back on him. They're both smiling, anyway, like this is gleeful.

It would've been for him too, had he not screwed it up.

Kidava and Trojan are still on their tirade. Kidava finally catches up to Isperia, who doesn't appear to be doing much other than attempting to blend into the brush when Kidava slits her throat. Trojan practically sends Faye flying, no mercy for the twelve year old to be seen here. For what she did to Sabre, he'd almost say she deserves it.

Final eight already.

Who would've thought?

Kidava Vaud, 15
Applicant #21

"Stay away from me!" she shouts at Trojan. Faye disappears from his feet and he rolls his eyes, already walking off in the opposite direction.

At least that's one problem sorted, for now.

There are swords clashing to her right. A lot of them. Meris got Emmi, that she knows - apparently even those codes break eventually, but it doesn't appear that she's going to get Gideon. He's faster than her, slips right under her arm and to her side, and hits her with a goddamn tree branch. She hits the ground and he bashes her over the head with it - once, twice, three times.

Eventually she disappears. Kidava still finds herself grimacing, but not interfering.

Caiman's there, anyway, and Arwen too. They both have swords, too. Caiman almost accidentally tackles Gideon in her quest to escape the reach of the branch, and then swings the sword towards him in a wide arc that she knows would have buried itself in his neck, had he not disappeared with a flash at the first sight of almost-impact.

Caiman stares, like even she's confused about it. Arwen gets her in the back with the sword while she stands there, unmoving.

The two of them, the only ones left standing there, look each other up and down. Arwen apparently decides her time is precious, and leaves Kidava standing there in the dust when she disappears back into the thick of the woods.

Like hell she's getting away. Not when there's so few of them left.

She gives chase through the grass, avoiding the worst of the fallen branches and brush as she races to catch up with her. The purple hair is sort of a dead giveaway in such greenery; Kidava knows she can blend in while the rest of them kill each other, if she stays hidden. Too bad she's not going to stay hidden, not the way some of the cowards in the real Games did. There's no point to hiding.

She's steadily gaining on her, anyway. Before she can get there someone comes practically tumbling out of the brush between them and she skids to a halt. Soran looks at her, bow half-raised, and she freezes. This isn't good. An arrow will kill her before she can get anywhere close enough to him to stop it's progress.

Soran decides something, she sees it in his eyes. He turns away from her and towards Arwen's retreating form, getting further and further away, letting an arrow go.

It buries itself square in-between her blades. Kidava sees it even from a distance, as her form disappears from the middle of the woods.

"Where'd you get that?" she asks, and raises the sword half-heartedly when he eyes her again.

"Took it from Mel."

"Did you kill him?"

"He let me, to be fair," Soran points out, and nocks another arrow.

The sounds of fighting close to their left dies out, and the sounds of someone tromping through the undergrowth grows louder and louder. Somehow she knows it's Trojan, despite warning him away. No one would make that must purposeful noise coming towards them, alerting them to his presence.

Sure enough Trojan shoves his way out of the bush and stumbles to a halt in front of them, waving a few lone drooping tendrils out of his way. He's got an axe, now. She doesn't remember seeing that in the pile. Probably didn't spend enough time looking, before she hurried her way to Jupiter, eager to get the first kill out of the way before she could lose her chance.

"Got Myra," he informs them. "So is it just the three of us?"

It must be. She can't hear anything except her own panting, slightly breathless from the brief run over here.

Soran's nocked arrow is pointed more towards Trojan than her, and his sword is sheathed. If they kill Trojan in such close quarters, he won't be able to turn the arrow back on her fast enough, not with such little room. The sword won't even have a chance to come out.

Trojan's still brandishing that damn axe. It's a pretty easy decision.

She tears towards him, sword pointed outward. Trojan barely dodges the arrow Soran sends at his head, tripping through the grass on his boots that are too big, too awkward. The sword glances off his arm when she finally gets close enough and then catches against the edge of the axe when he blocks her next hit. He knocks her back a few feet, shoves the two weapons back until she's forced to let him do it, backing up in order to avoid getting stabbed herself.

Soran will hit him, if she can distract him. A distraction is as good as any killing blow. It still counts as credit.

She drops the sword, and he watches it fall to the grass, eyes confused. She leaps at him and wraps her hand around the handle of the axe over his, intent on yanking it away. He's stronger than her, there was never any doubt, but it doesn't matter.

The arrow that whistles overhead barely misses the top of her scalp, and it hits Trojan square in the neck. There's no immediate gush of blood over her face at the proximity. She almost wishes there was.

He drops, disappears. She wrenches the axe out and hefts it back up in the air. It's heavy. Heavier than her sword was, though she doesn't think she'll be able to get it back now.

Just one more.

One more.

She turns. There's an arrow a foot from her face.

"Sorry," Soran says, a second before the arrow flies.

The world goes black, blacker than anything else.

She doesn't think he was all that sorry.

Nyko Ziegler, 28
Instructor: Group D

Teenagers are a wonder.

Kidava looks like a bomb about to go off, when they finally get the gear off her. She stands up on her chair and looks a row back, where Lincoln is just getting Soran out of it. Soran, who shot her in the face to win without even thinking about it.

Clearly she swallows whatever it is she wants to say, and he can imagine it feeling like glass going back down.

Renette finishes printing off the list from the back of the room and hands it to him. It's the same list now displayed on the monitor at the very front, the one that everyone slowly starts to look up at as they realize what's being laid before them.

It's not that surprising of a list, based on what he's seen in the training facility these past few days.

FINAL STANDINGS:

TWENTY-FOURTH. Damas Mancer.
TWENTY-THIRD. Sabre Hennedige.
TWENTY-SECOND. Topher Westmoreland.
TWENTY-FIRST. Jupiter Valentine.
TWENTIETH. Verity Alameda.
NINETEENTH. Jahaira Aurelion.
EIGHTEENTH. Nicator Selton.
SEVENTEENTH. Percius Marigold.
SIXTEENTH. Tarquin Vierra.
FIFTEENTH. Noelani Westmoreland.
FOURTEENTH. Jupiter Valens.
THIRTEENTH. Emmi Langlois.
TWELFTH. Icarus Devereux.
ELEVENTH. Meliodas Vergara.
TENTH. Isperia Martorell.
NINTH. Faye Ackerman.
EIGHTH. Meris Loucare.
SEVENTH. Gideon Mallory.
SIXTH. Caiman Mangle.
FIFTH. Arwen Paoul.
FOURTH. Myra Callaghan-Alistair.
THIRD. Trojan Geomantra.
SECOND. Kidava Vaud.
FIRST. Soran Faerber.

"As everyone can see, these are the final standings of our simulation. Went even better than I expected. If anyone has any comments, questions, recommendations for next year—"

"Next year?" Meliodas asks.

"Provided that all went well this year and the feedback from you, as well as from everyone stationed here, proved positive enough to have another Program next summer, the government agreed to fund it. So if anyone has something they'd like to say..."

"This is bullshit," Kidava mutters, although he's certain everyone hears it. Harper leans over the back of her chair to say something, more quietly, but Kidava only shakes her head.

"Make it bigger," Topher says, shifting in his seat. "So I have more room to run away."

Someone starts snickering. He's not sure if it's Verity or someone close by, someone who finds this more amusing than they should. That was sort of the point, though. To make the Games something easier to remember. If they could replace even a few of the bad memories with some more positive ones...

Maybe it was a pipe dream. But he was willing to gamble on it.

"Alright, well that's that," Renette says. "You're free for the rest of the day. Dinner is at six-thirty. You're welcome to return to the training facility, your rooms, or to seek us out for further conversation. Wake-up call will be at five to get you on the hovercraft back to the Capitol."

Trojan yanks his hood over his face, groaning, and then gets to his feet. Nyko can only presume back off to his bed he goes for the rest of the day - nothing more to work on, when he already got third.

He watches the rest of them file out. Renette ushers them out the door and then follows with Harper on her heels.

Someone still needs to watch them, and he doesn't suspect Ridge will have much interest anymore.

"Well, that went well," Lincoln says, nudging him in the arm. "I think bigger for next year, too."

"How long did it last for?" he asks, and Aelia flicks through a few screens.

"Twenty-three minutes, forty seconds," she answers. "Definitely shorter than any real Games, but what could you expect, in such close quarters? They were having fun."

He suspects Lincoln has something to say about the merits of fun and murdering all tied into one together, but the other man doesn't say anything, waving behind him as he heads for the door. Someone has to make sure Trojan actually makes it back to their rooms instead of going wandering off into nowhere.

"I hope they approve the funding for next year," Aelia says. "This was fun. I'd like to do it again."

Again with the fun. But he knows, for Aelia, that this was what she was meant to do. She's good at corralling them. Good at helping him out with all of this, even when he hadn't expected her to.

"Me too," he agrees. "Hopefully I'll see you then."

"Or before that," she says idly, but when he looks down all her attention is focused back on the computer, like it never wavered in the first place. He smiles, and her lips quirk up even with her eyes trained elsewhere.

Yeah, he could do this again next year.

Results of the simulation will be up on the blog soon, so you don't have to come back to this chapter every time you so much as think about it. As always my random placements and such don't have any actual effect on the Games themselves, so don't worry too much if something looks oddly out of place or unlikely. This was just for fun.

Let me know your thoughts, and if this was what you expected. Maybe, but who knows.

Until next time.