Jesse watched as, over the course of several minutes- it was hard to tell exactly how much time had passed, there wasn't a clock in the room- many, MANY more people teleported in.

She was relieved when Axel popped in, tripping slightly and landing flat on Lukas, who'd teleported in seconds before, and even more relieved when Olivia showed up a few minutes later. Her relief was complete when Petra stepped into the room, practically looking like she'd just stepped through a doorway and didn't just teleport in.

However, with the exception of the Ocelots- Aiden wearing a gold wristband, Gill wearing red like Isa's, and Maya and Lukas wearing cyan wristbands- and the Order of the Stone- Soren showed up wearing the same shade of purple as Xara, the Warden, Nell, and Radar's, Magnus had a red wristband, and Ellegaard had lime green- and her friends, of course, Jesse did not see anybody else that she recognized, although from what Jesse could tell, some of the other people recognized each other.

Also, several of them recognized her for some reason.

"Do you know what's going on?"

Jesse twisted to see the tall, red-skinned (no, he literally had bright red skin), burly guy with horns standing behind her. Oh, and let's not forget he was wearing a similar outfit to Xara's, except his appeared to be a bit tight and quite ripped. His wristband was about the width of Jesse's neck, and- to Jesse's slight relief, because it made him look slightly less intimidating- it was a nice shade of pink.

(Then again, it was the same color as Porkchop's. So maybe it wasn't so much of a relief.)

"Um, no, sorry. But, uh, my name's Jesse, nice to meet you!" Jesse said cheerfully, giving a little wave and trying to hide the fact that she was kind of terrified.

The burly guy gave her a brief nod, narrowing his eyes at her. "Oxblood. Pleased ta meet you." Even though Jesse felt like he was trying to be polite, he was still absolutely terrifying. (It didn't help that he was about three times her height.)

"Please be seated. The orientation will begin momentarily."

Jesse practically jumped half a foot in the air at the sudden voice emanating from- somewhere. She wasn't the only one- Aiden had just tripped straight into Isa in surprise, Radar had let out a loud squeak and darted behind the nearest person (who happened to be Xara), and the man in the purple suit (Adrian? No, Hadrian, that was his name) that had started talking to Mevia flinched slightly and slammed his nose right into Mevia's forehead by accident.

When Jesse had sat down next to her friends on the carpet in the center of the floor (she was nervous about taking seats up), and Mevia had stopped wincing and clutching her forehead, and Aiden had apologized to the now-rather-angry man wearing some kind of uniform multiple times about accidentally bowling Isa to the floor- when, in short, everyone was seated in the room facing the screen, an eerie silence fell over the room.

Which was then broken a moment later.

"Hi, hello, and g'day, my name's Ariza Luca and welcome to... um... this thing." A short pause, and then the screen flickered to life, a young woman sighing and looking annoyed at herself as she ran a hand through her short black hair, a pink bang of hair hanging in her eyes. "I totally screwed that up, good job me..."

"Who are you?!" Gabriel shouted, jumping back to his feet with his hand tightening on his sword, eyes narrowing at 'Ariza' (what a weird name).

"... I just said. I'm Ariza."

Jesse stifled a small laugh at the matter-of-fact answer.

"Would you care to explain where we are?" the man in the purple suit drawled sarcastically at Jesse, his dark blue wristband glinting in the light the screen was now giving off. "For that matter, would you care to explain why we're here?"

"I'd love to, considering the fact that, if you read the invitation correctly and in full, I did say I'd explain the full details of the Game Tournament if you chose to attend," Ariza said cheerfully, pink eyes gleaming. "You did all mark the 'yes' on the invitation, right?"

Everyone sat still for a moment, staring at Ariza. Nobody stood up and shouted 'No, I didn't'... so Jesse could only assume that everybody in this room had marked that they wished to attend the event.

Ariza took that as the opportunity to continue.

"Fantastic! So, if anyone has any further arguments about being here, can we get them out of the way please? Because we've got two weeks to go."

"What if we don't want to participate in your stupid games?" the burly girl next to Nell asked bluntly, green eyes narrowing at Ariza.

The black-haired girl just shrugged. "Well, then you don't have to, but you're gonna have to stay for the whole two weeks because the whole 'sending you home' thing is hard to reschedule, so it'll get super boring."

Everyone waited.

Ariza waited.

"... what, you're not going to kill us if we don't participate?" Maya asked, looking a little confused at the way Ariza was patiently waiting for further complaints about the Game Tournament.

"Of course not; you all willingly signed 'yes', so I assumed you were all willing to participate. If you've changed your mind, then you'll most likely just be bored out of your brain for about two weeks, which I feel like is a suitable punishment. I brought you here to generally have fun, not to keep you trapped here for my own entertainment."

A short silence as everybody in the room processed that. Ariza appeared to be practically beaming at Hadrian, Mevia, and Otto, arms neatly folded.

"Please continue," the girl who'd introduced herself as 'Binta' earlier said softly.

"Alright, so, um, I... might've goofed up a little bit earlier with your invitations. For some reason, I forgot to include the optional 'pet' clause on the back, so, that was smart of me..."

"Um, pet clause?" The interruption slipped out of Jesse's mouth faster than she'd intended.

Ariza didn't get annoyed or anything- she just smiled politely. "Yep- basically a clause where, if you wanted to bring your pet for the Games Tournament, you could mark that yes, you had a pet, and yes, you'd like to bring them. If you'd like I can bring them in now...?"

"Yes please!"

Once again, Jesse interrupted, a little too enthusiastically. The reason she'd just blurted that was because if she was going to be stuck here for two weeks, she might as well have Reuben with her.

Ariza blinked, before smiling. "Alrighty, everyone who has a pet, please raise your hand."

Jesse raised her hand pretty quickly. To her surprise, Isa, Cassie, Stella, Oxblood, Val, and Sue (was her name Sue? Jesse was halfway certain that it was something more like a food.) also raised their hands.

"Anyone else? No? Alright, then..." Ariza's eyes focused downwards, and some vague clicking noises could be heard. "Okay, and there we..."

Reuben abruptly appeared out of thin air and plopped into Jesse's lap. He let out a relieved and excited squeal upon seeing that he'd just gotten dumped into Jesse's lap, practically jumping up on his owner with an excited squeal. Jesse let out a laugh, scooping Reuben up into a tight, comforting hug. She could feel the small knot that had formed in her stomach dissolving at the familiar pink pig nestled in her arms. "Hey buddy! Did I worry you?"

Isa, who was a few seats behind Jesse, was practically cooing over a small white chicken wearing a crown, Cassie was practically death-hugging a calico cat, Stella was gently stroking a very fluffy-looking llama with a blue-and-pink-striped-scarf, Oxblood was hugging a mooshroom and making little happy cooing noises, and Val and Soup were exuberantly rubbing a brown llama's head. (The llama didn't seem to mind.)

"Okay, now that I fixed THAT little mistake, would you all like me to start with the general rules of this place, or would you rather I focus on what the actual tournament consists of?" Ariza asked after giving all of the pet owners a few moments to reunite with their pets.

Everyone glanced around at each other, feeling slightly put off by the fact that Ariza didn't seem to really care about their participation in her game tournament.

Finally, Lukas gave an awkward little cough. "Um, whichever you think is more important to start with."

Ariza nodded at that and, after making a few more clicking sounds, pulled up a list of five rules. Jesse read them quickly- it wasn't hard, considering there were only four rules.

RULES:

1. Don't cheat.

2. Don't go into restricted areas without permission.

3. Don't actively destroy anything.

4. Don't attempt to cause harm to other people.

"You may have all noticed that you're all wearing various colored wristbands. The colors correspond to which team you're on- for example, a gold wristband means you're a member of the Gold Team. You will be basically working together with your team, more so in the second week, to do your best to win as many points as possible. Whoever has the most points at the end of the two weeks wins!"

Jesse sneaked a peek around her, noticing everyone beginning to murmur as they checked their wristband colors.

"There are a lot more functions that the wristband has besides just telling you what team they're on, but I won't get into most of those unless you want me to."

"So as you can see, the first rule is to not cheat. I will know if you are cheating, and if you do so, you essentially forfeit all of the points that your team should receive for that round, getting yourself a total of zero points regardless of what you should've gained. If you are caught cheating in the second week, you will actually also lose points rather than just gaining none."

Ariza waited for everyone to nod in comprehension before continuing. "The second rule is to not enter restricted areas without permission. You shouldn't be able to access most of the restricted areas regardless, but another restricted area for you is the dormitories of other teams. You have free access to enter your dormitory and can wander around inside that as much as you want, but you are NOT allowed to enter other teams' dormitories unless someone inside gives you express permission via the wristbands."

"Furthermore," Ariza continued, "you won't actually be able to enter anyway- without the proper permission codes, a signal is given off from that entrance that makes the wristbands produce a sort of 'force field' that will prevent you from moving forward. But, if you are caught even attempting to enter without permission, you will be penalized a certain number of points- and will probably lose more as time goes on."

"Thirdly, just don't actively destroy anything. Simple. Try to leave everything the way you found it. I don't think I have to go that far into this rule."

"Fourth, do not attempt to cause harm to other people. You won't be able to do lethal or truly damaging harm to anyone- once things reach a certain velocity, force, or begin causing a certain amount of damage to your body, the wristbands will kick in and cause a force field that will repel your attacker. If you are caught trying to actively injure, maim, sabotage, or kill someone else..."

Ariza's face grew extremely grim. "Well, I'm not trying to keep you here for my own entertainment. I would much prefer that we play through the tournament, have fun, and not even have to talk about this. But if you are caught breaking rule number four, then the punishment is a little more severe than what the penalties for the previous three rules are."

Everyone processed that for a moment, looking at Ariza's deadly serious face.

And then Ariza smiled cheerfully. "Well, now that that boring stuff is out of the way, let's talk about the actual game and talk about how the actual tournament will work."

Jesse blinked at the sudden transition as Ariza continued mildly, "So, have any of you played Mafia or Werewolf?"

Jesse glanced around herself secretly to see that everybody had equally blank faces as they blinked at Ariza.

"No? Alright," Ariza said cheerfully, "'Mafia', also known as 'Werewolf', is basically a game where we've got a small group of 'murderers'- not literally, it's just the title we give to those people-" she added when she saw several people's eyebrows go up, "who know who is a 'murderer' and who isn't within a larger majority of players known as 'innocents' who don't know who anybody is. The objective of the game for the 'murderers' is to outnumber the 'innocents', while the 'innocents' objective is to get rid of all the 'murderers'."

"We also have 'special' roles during the game, but I won't talk about those yet. They're gonna be a surprise!" Ariza said that very cheerfully, before continuing, "so, on the first week, everyone will be participating in the game, and the teams aren't quite defined in there. On the first two days, we'll also be using a 'default' theme. However, in the middle of the week, we'll start transitioning to another aspect of the game the next week that'll make it more difficult to gain the full amount of points."

"Oh, of course," Petra mumbled softly, crossing her arms in irritation.

Ariza continued, cheerfully. "Each day, we'll start having a different 'theme', and you will have to invent a character to participate in. It can be as similar to your regular personality as you want it to be, but there has to be something different and it can't give away your role within the game. Once you pick your character, you also have to stay in character the entire time to gain the full amount of points that, well, that you can gain."

"Anyway, through the first week, everybody participates in the game, but on the second week, only one- or two, depending on the number of people in your group- will participate in the game. This will make gaining points more difficult and polarized."

Ariza paused, frowning slightly as she considers what she's said, before giving a mild smile.

"Any questions?"


A/N: I'm back!

Okay, so I was out for an entire month (!) because I was working on a cool project that'll probably be released soon (possibly in a few days!); so keep an eye out for updates on that!

Also, I don't know how clear I was with explaining the game; so if you have any questions about anything discussed in this chapter, please ask! Sorry if I wasn't very clear about it. I'll probably include the question and the answer directly in the chapter, so this is your chance to discuss it if you want. You can also ask about the extra functions of the wristbands.

Also, you can have the characters ask questions that would suit their character or whatnot.

Responses to reviews!

LunarTheMooncake: Haha, yeah. / Yeeep, but that's understandable xD

ItzJaiden: Lol I'm sorry about offending you. (Good joke xD) / (chokes) uh... I'll... let the Warden know.

EllieRose27: Nope.

TheAmberShadow: Haha, don't worry about it. They CAN function as a watch. / Yeah, that makes sense. / To me, it sounds slightly more female, but yeah, it really is more neutral. / (plops a beret on Romeo's head) There we go, now he is an artiste xD / Ah, no. Xara's still before, but she's relieved to see he's not in 'Admin' form, and Romeo is... also at the beginning of Season 2, but with his powers taken away. / Pffft xD Also, what exactly are you referring to? / Hehehe xD / I love sarcasm, so no problem there. xD / Ye x3

homeworkoverload: (pats) / (shrugs)

Emily the Avenger: Thanks fam

MiekoHiroshima: Yes, they just hugged, glad to help xD

Seithr03: Which one?

Toni42: Ahh, I didn't notice that xD / Hehe, yes she is. xD / Aww, thanks bear x3

Guest: I think it's because he's Romeo and not... y'know. The Admin. So she's kinda halfway relieved.

J.M.M.: Ahhh, I see.

Metarose: Glad you like it so far!

NoItsBecky: An actually decent one xD

Ruby Ross: Here is more!

x.X. A.L. X.x