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I surfaced at some kind of...wait...I looked up. I was floating in a river, but above me was...was that the Eiffel Tower? How in the HELL did the pipes lead to Paris?

At that moment, a weird white boat thing was coming towards me, and I had to quickly swim to the side. And as I did, a very familiar hand was extended to me. Without thinking one moment, I took it.

And I smiled. "Lightning! How did you know I would be here?"

My boyfriend shrugged. "We get all the footage. After the pre-merge losers were gone, one of them had to pick up a post-merge loser. Why wouldn't I choose you? Same thing with Al. He picked up Heather." Then he grinned and whispered to me "They are actually getting really annoying. All they do is whisper to each other and kiss occasionally."

I frowned. "But...how come we're in France? Is everyone here?"

"Oh, yeah. " Lightning paused, thinking. "Yeah. Everyone got dropped off in different places. The chopper should be here soon. We're on the mainland of Muskoka. I actually ended up here, too, but got mixed up and thought it was Germany at first."

I giggled. "Yeah? Well, it doesn't matter. It's Paris, and as long as we're in the City of Love..."

But at that very second, the chopper showed up to take us home. Oh well. We made up for lost time in there instead. If we hadn't had a pilot, we would probably have gone much further than making out.

And not having more than ten minutes in Paris was made up for by seeing everyone else. Anne Maria and I finally got a proper chance to hang out, for one thing. Just as Lightning had said, Heather and Alejandro had finally got it together and become an actual couple, and they were actually pretty adorable. Justin was his old self, and so was Zoey (thank every entity, I'd missed the old her). Owen was the life and soul of the party as usual, and seemed to be getting along really well with everyone, mostly. Zoey and Lindsay in particular seemed to have built up a strong friendship with him. Scott was just the opposite, hanging around in the background with a scowl. He hadn't made any friends. Even Duncan wouldn't hang out with him, claiming he was too much of a misery. He spent most of his time with his girlfriend, or with everyone.

There were two people I was the most curious about.

Gwen was the first. I'd been glad when she was voted off, because she could finally do what she wanted – make up with Courtney. I wanted to find out how she'd done with it.

Well, she seemed in a better mood than she had been on the island. It turned out she had managed to get Courtney's contact details off Bridgette, and had been emailing her. "I said in my first email that I was sorry about how things happened, and I really wanted to make things up to her." she told me. "She's kind of a bit mad that I haven't actually broken up with Duncan, but I think as long as we skirt around that subject, things will work okay. She's actually answering in a way that's pretty friendly, so I think it's going well."

The one person I was more curious and concerned for was Mike. He showed up to greet me with everyone else, and I made an effort to ask how progress was going. He seemed happier than he had been when he left the island.

"I've talked to my psychiatrist." he told me. "She told me that it's normal to have some relapses, and as long as I work on some mind-blocking exercises, I should be able to lock him back up."

Zoey told me a little more about the personality, when it was just the two of us. "We get all the footage from the show," she explained, "So I got to see the clip of him breaking your watch. And Duncan knows him. They were in juvie together. He said back then, Mike wasn't just in juvie – he was running it. Obviously we know it was the personality. But all Duncan could tell us apart from that is that the personality called himself Mal." Zoey shuddered as she told me all this. "I'm just glad we caught it before it was too late."

I paused, thinking. "You know, the world 'mal' is actually a French word meaning 'bad'. You know how the name Mallory means unfortunate? Similar thing. Sounds like this one made up the name for himself. Maybe he really is pure evil. Did he say much in the footage?"

Zoey shook her head. "Nope. Mostly just did a lot of laughing when he was breaking stuff. But you remember how I thought Mike said something at the second campfire? That was him. But..." she smiled. "The good thing is that I haven't seen any personality except Mike since I got here!"
"And you've spent, what, twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes with him each day?" I teased, grinning. Zoey giggled, launching a pretend attack, and I dodged, laughing too. Trust me, giggle marathons may not be so good for the heart rate, but for good feelings, they really help. At least, this one did.

I watched all the footage of All-Stars that we had so far, just to check things out for myself. We had a lot of extra stuff that wouldn't make it into the final cut of the episode – extended confessionals, stuff like that. It also looked like the cameras were turned off on break days, as nothing from those days appeared, although they did keep clips of me and Lightning hanging out on challenge days, when we weren't with our teams. I also got to watch a confessional where Heather explained why she asked to form an alliance with me. Her theory was that if she befriended me, she'd make sure the rest of the cast would take Lightning out in the next week and then she'd be a shoulder to cry on, and then she'd be able to make a final two deal with me. She figured she'd take me out in the final three if the other opponent was weaker, "Although to be fair, I think I can take her." she'd said thoughtfully.

I was the only one watching those before-my-elimination episodes, mostly. Sometimes a few of the others joined me. "We all watch each episode as it gets here." Lightning explained to me. "So we saw all the episodes after we got eliminated." But he watched some of the early ones with me, although it wasn't that easy to concentrate when he was constantly pulling me closer...I missed about half the challenges because we were too busy making out. It was just lucky no one else came into the TV room at those times...or at least, they didn't make their presence known.

The day after my arrival, we received the footage for the latest episode, and, to be honest, there wasn't too much new to see. Just a few confessionals, where Sierra talked about how excited she was for the trivia challenge, and Brick saying that it was a pretty nerve-wracking challenge. Then Beth had one more confessional about the vote-off, saying how she knew it would be a tiebreaker, but she didn't know who Sierra and I would vote for. However, everyone else seemed excited to know, often pitching in with answers themselves.

"How do you mess up an answer when he mentioned ecualyptus leaves in the question?" Gwen said in exasperation when I screwed up the question about which animal she and Courtney had to feed during the tiebreaker in World Tour (baby koalas, and I'd had a moron moment when I thought it was wallabies).

I shrugged. "I've never been to Australia. I barely know what fruit bats eat, and it's there in the name!"

The day after we got the trivia challenge footage, we had another pickup. This time, it was Lindsay's turn to pick up whoever got flushed. As Lightning told me, after the merge, an ex-All-Star who was closest to the person voted out got to go to them. For me, Heather and Duncan, that meant our boyfriend or girlfriend. But if I reflected on who was and wasn't there now...well, okay. If it had been Sierra, she would have been picked up by me. She wasn't friendly with any of the Villains, and I'd definitely been her closest friend on the Heroes, even though I'd been closer to Mike and Zoey (history – we'd been through Season 4 together). And I didn't know who Brick was closest to who had been voted off. No one really disliked him, but the only person he'd really forged a close friendship with was Beth.

But since Lindsay was doing the picking up...well, that was easy. Lindsay had to go because her best friend got flushed all the way to Hawaii. With a cherry instead of a marshmallow.

No, I'm not kidding. Once they were back, Beth (as if you didn't know it was her) explained that all of them had to make and then eat sundaes by getting all the ingredients from different parts of the island. The only reason she'd come in last was because by the time she got to the finish line, the others were already eating and they'd both downed the cherry on top of each before she got the chance. And as we all knew, last place in a final three challenge usually meant instant elimination.

"Chris told us we were supposed to give the sundaes to the interns before we started." Beth sighed. "I only discovered at the end that we had to eat them. Brick asked what they'd get to eat, but Chris just shrugged. I hope they got something in the end."

"Did anyone get a brain freeze?" Owen asked. "I remember having that in the first season." (Oh yeah, ice cream brain freeze was one of the tortures in that post-merge episode).

"Everyone did." Beth answered. "It's the only reason I got close to not losing – I only had it happen once, and Brick had it happen twice. You could tell Sierra was no stranger to frozen sugar."

We didn't get a chance to watch the sundae-making trek, because tomorrow would be the finale. We'd all be going back to the island, and...well, wow. Sierra vs Brick. I never would've predicted that final two.

Be honest...how many of you thought at the start that Sierra or Brick would make the finale? I know a lot of you expected Sierra to be on the verge of elimination a lot, but...well, I think she deserved a shot at winning.