Tristan Darren was once again in the middle of the room. However, this time, there were twenty people around him. Tristan looked once again at the camera. "Greetings, players. Welcome to Circle. Today, one of you could walk out with up to $100,000, only if you all can agree entirely on who it will be. Before I continue my explanation, let us introduce our twenty."
The camera panned to the twenty players one by one as Tristan Darren introduced them, "One, Mario… Two, Link… Three, Samus Aran… Four, Fox McCloud… Five, Luigi… Six, Ness… Seven, Captain Douglas Jay Falcon… Eight, Princess Peach… Nine, Princess Daisy… Ten, Princess Zelda… Eleven, Lucina… Twelve, Pit… Thirteen, Cloud Strife… Fourteen, Lady Palutena… Fifteen, Rosalina… Sixteen, Lucas… Seventeen, Popo… Eighteen, Nana… Nineteen, Ganondorf… Twenty, Marth…"
After panning to the last person, it went back to Tristan who explained the rest of the rules, "I'll explain quickly, so listen carefully. Each round, you will have sixty seconds to talk about who to eliminate. You may vote on your monitors in front of you. Once the sixty seconds run out, your vote will be locked in. We will then reveal the votes. To eliminate someone, at least half of you, rounded up, must vote for the same person. If the votes achieve that goal, that player is eliminated and we advance to the next round. If we don't have enough, we continue the round, and you can change your vote with the round ending as soon as half of the players have the same player selected. However, as soon as we continue the round after the initial minute, the money will drain."
The graphic of white text reading "$100,000" shows up again, "Every .75 seconds, two hundred fifty dollars will be removed from the money. To simplify that, one thousand dollars will be lost every three seconds. It will take five minutes to go from one hundred thousand to zero. If we reach zero, everyone is eliminated, because at that point, there's nothing left to fight for… The red buttons to the right of you can also be used to stop the round immediately, stop the money if it's draining and move us on to the next round. However, it does come at a cost. If you press that button, you also eliminate yourself from the game, walking away from the chance at the money. Over nineteen rounds, the twenty of you will be whittled down to one… The last one standing gets whatever is left at the end, if there is anything left. Are the players ready to begin?"
The room gets filled with multiple different reactions, some clapping, others cheering, a group of people answering with "Yes.", and mixes of them. Tristan nods and looks around the room, "I wish you all the best of luck. I must now ask you, who will leave empty handed? You need at least ten votes for the same person. There are twenty players in the game… Let's play Circle…"
The white text switches from reading "$100,000" to "60". Tristan starts walking out from the middle of the room and walks away from the group. As he passes by between Zelda and Lucina, Tristan yells out, "Start the clock!" The graphic starts to count down from sixty and the room explodes into talking immediately. Everyone tries to speak over each other to get everyone else's attention, but to no avail, instead starting a yelling contest.
As the timer reaches forty seconds remaining, suddenly Falcon yells out loud enough to quiet down everyone else, "Quiet!" After everyone stopped talking, he continued, "We have to go for someone. At this point, we may as well do a random vote. We have no information to go off of, so our best bet is to simply eliminate randomly."
Everyone started to put in their vote, with some people changing theirs as the thirty second mark came in. Fox looked at Falcon as he entered his vote, "You know that we can't do this each round, right?" Falcon nodded, "We all know that. As time goes on, we learn more about each other and can decide best who should take the money in the end." Fox then added, "It's not something we're all going to be able to decide easily, Falcon. All of us want it."
A beeping noise warns everyone of the last ten seconds of the round. Votes were still being changed as Falcon pointed over to Lucina. "I say we go for number eleven." Lucina looked up in surprise from his sudden targeting on her and she changes her vote while arguing back, "We've just started and you're already trying to turn everyone on each other." As she finishes her sentence, the votes get locked in and graphics on the wall show the faces of players above each person's head. Tristan walks back into the area.
"The minute's up." He looked around to see the faces on the wall, "Above you is the picture of the player you've voted to eliminate." There were a few stray faces, a Popo and a Luigi was up on the wall, but the majority of pictures showed Lucina, Falcon, and Fox. "Circle." Tristan spoke, "Do we have our ten votes?" After a few seconds of silence, the graphic showing the clock reverts back to $100,000 and suddenly turns red. Tristan sighed, "Off to a bad start. You guys need at least ten votes for the same person. Votes will now be applied as they are changed. You guys need to get going, the money will start draining. One thousand gone every three seconds… Start the clock!"
The money on the graphic starts to decrease in intervals of $250. $99,750, $99,500, $99,250, $99,000, all in three seconds. Falcon attempts to lead the group, "We've already have a good amount of votes for her, let's just take her out." Lucina speaks up, trying to convince everyone against him, "We're in round one and you've already started antagonising people. We don't know when you'll turn on everyone else."
The money reaches $95,000 within fifteen seconds of the round restarting. The faces on the wall change as the two argue on. Eventually, the wall was only a few Fox's, and mainly populated with Lucina and Falcon. Falcon continued to argue his point, "We have a minute to talk, there's twenty of us. There's no way we can find a good reason to eliminate someone in one minute." Lucina opened her mouth to speak again, but the votes locked in and a red light shined over her. The tenth person had just tapped her picture. Lucina put her head down and sighed before gasping as she falls through the trap door that opens under her feet, ejecting her from the game.
The pictures on the wall all fade and leave behind the white text, now reading "$90,500". Tristan got back in the middle of the room and spoke, "It took you just under ninety seconds in order to eliminate someone, Lucina has been voted out of the game. You guys need to speed it up, at this pace, we wouldn't make it to round twelve. There's still ninety thousand five hundred dollars in play. Will one of you leave with it… There are nineteen players remaining… Let's play Circle… Right after this…" The camera pans away from Tristan to get shots of the remaining players before fading out to go to break, leaving the next few rounds to occur when the show returns.