War is an Ugly Thing

[Ciel†]

"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Hermann Goering

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

John Stuart Mill




It was very obvious that Dominica Shapiro's (Girl no. 28) head was not in the greatest of places.

She knew it.

Anyone passing by and took a good look at her could see it.

Everyone who was watching probably would have noticed this too.

It wasn't much of a simple musing, but a fact. A simple fact.

She had been drugged, and thrown out of a helicopter and the first thing that came from her lips... was a soft, demonic cackle. She actually found the thought of landing on a grassy knoll in the middle of an abandoned island comical enough, but the fact that she survived the impact with only an unpleasant numbness in her head and few bruises across her arm was the real punch line. A small girl such as her surviving a fall like that... Very humorous. Added with the fact that she was in a game where the point was killing people to begin with was reason enough to laugh. She? Haha... she was lithe, and had nearly no muscles to speak of. She'd probably die from a paper cut, much less a shot to the shoulder. She was surprised that she had survived the fall from such a height with only minor body damage. Maybe her body was better built than she thought.

Or maybe luck was on her side?

Luck. Dominica snorted. There was no such thing. If luck was on her side, she would have gotten sick and had to miss the Senior Trip. Now THAT would have been luck. But no. That wasn't what happened. Dominica didn't get sick at all, although one might consider a bad nausea and a pain in the head as signs of sickness. Instead, she had pushed all of her fears that she was going to have absolutely no fun on the trip when her brother urged her to go. For the first moment in a very long time, Dominica had to listen to what her brother suggested, and look how that wound up. She really wished he had gone on the trip as well, so she could strangle every single molecule of life out of him. No matter. This was the mess that she was in, and blaming her brother for the fate she had been subjected to was not going to help her whatsoever.

Dominica lifted her whole body up as though she had just awoken from a deep slumber. In the physical sense, the fall gladly did nothing seriously bad to her body. Her neck simply cracked softly as she tilted it from one side to the other. Her hand trailed down her neck, rubbing at a sore spot under her jaw before it crossed a thin strip of metal. Her collar, no doubt. She didn't need a mirror to imagine what it looked like, and there was really no need to pull at it. No need at all. She liked her head the way it was, and the last thing she really wanted was for her neck to explode and rip off.

Oh... how she wished she could take it off. It was so thin, and yet it was beginning to choke her.

It wasn't Dominica's choosing to ever participate in such a wrongful game. Unlike many of her companions, she never had the urge to exact revenge against her tormentors, nor did she ever have a sense of blood lust that made her do violent things outside of school. She never really cared for anyone at her high school. That's all it comes down to: she has no sympathy for any of the kids who were suffering the same fate as she. There was some that Dominica felt didn't need a punishment such as this but... there those were a select few. The number of those people didn't reach into double digits. Few people actually go above the materialism that the whole population of Highland Beach practically glowed with. Its spoiled-rich attitude was what Dominica despised most about it.

What she truly hated was that she was amongst these ranks, so she would know how bad it is. Her parents were the rich tycoons that lived in the richer part of the town, drank rich wine and ate the richest grade of caviar. She hated the lifestyle. What she wouldn't give to switch lives with a normal child... What she wouldn't give not to be on this island to begin with but... Dominica had always cursed the students of Southridge for all the terrible things they did, so it was only natural that THIS was going to happen. Dominica should have seen the signs beforehand. She should have known, but she was just as surprised as the next student being dropped here.

That certainly didn't mean that she was going to exact vengeance against them. She had been able to deal with these sorts for years, so she can certainly do it now... but she had to look at the bright side. She didn't have to hold anything back now. She could be herself. The thought of that made her grin even more.

One would think she was insane when they heard that her mind had been turned to the positive side of things. Insanity? Psychosis? Dominica knew neither were the case. How did she realize this? She merely considered the idea that she had lost her complex mind the moment she had awoken. That, in and of itself, is a Catch-22. A trite and flawed excuse that seemed more of a logical fallacy than anything else, but from how she contemplated all of this in such a short time must mean that she was okay. Besides, her mind was running at miles per hour and there was no time to lose her mind. Her mind was just jumbled up. That was all. In any case, did she really have time to think of such things? She was in the middle of a godforsaken game for her own life, and the first thing on her mind was... her mind.

And that's where she was: In between worrying about the game and worrying about the state of her mind. It had been hours since she had originally woken up and Dominica thought it best to stick to the background and away from actual confrontation. She had to see who was playing and who wasn't. The most interesting part about it was the fact that she could see what the players were doing while they were killing. She had only witnessed two, but both were very different.

Eduardo Villa-Trinidad. Dominica wasn't surprised that he'd end up killing someone, but the death was more of an accident. The klutzy girl practically fell onto his sword, so he just got lucky. If she had been a lot more careful then Eduardo wouldn't have gotten a kill so early. When she thought about it, Dominica thought that there was something deeply wrong with Eduardo. He wasn't going to last long.

And then... she witnessed a huge scuffle at a lookout tower not too far away from the beautiful lagoon that she was at. She was too far away from the action to really see what was happening, but something really bad must have gone down there. Shotguns, screams of pain and other voices arguing. Quite confusing, but when some girl (Dominica had been hiding in a bush a long distance away, so she couldn't make out who it was) threw a grenade inside the house, Dominica knew that someone had died. She wish she could have went in there and looked at the victim, but three other people were heading in her direction and she had to make herself scarce.

So... there was a question that had been bothering her for the whole day: was she going to play? As it appeared, others have thought of the same idea. There also had to be other players who weren't as lucky to have had an easy kill. Should Dominica continue to lay low for another day, watching what everyone else was doing? Or should she act and make an impact on the game? Dominica had the temptation to rip her bag open and look at her weapon right now, but she wasn't going to do that. After all, that was going to ruin the surprise for her.

Dominica chuckled softly, cracking her knuckles as she rested her whole body against a tree.

She paused. Then shrugged. Then opened the bag anyway.

Dominca smirked, staring down at her assigned weapon: A polished-off wooden ocarina. The design on it was of a Japanese dragon painted with pink flowers, and her eyes studied it like a excavator would finding the bone of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the ground. It wasn't a weapon that was going to help Dominica, but something compelled her to keep it anyway. Maybe she could play it when she was all alone. Maybe. She put it right back into the back quickly, zipping it back up. There weren't many negative thoughts spinning through her head, but one stuck out above all the rest: "Mr. Danya has a warped sense of humor. I wonder what his personal life is like when his business is in killing people.

A very loud voice began to boom from a speaker a good length away.

Dominica was very surprised. The announcement? Had it been a day already? It only felt like three hours. From Mr. Danya himself. His voice literally awakened the butterflies in her stomach. She admired the man for little to no reason at all, other than his sarcastic wit and ghastly sense of humor. It made a girl like her smile, despite the unpleasant truth that she might not be alive for much longer. He was the main reason she and the rest of her peers have been brought here of all places, and she surprisingly didn't hold anything against him. The more surprising detail was not of her unexplainable respect towards the man who had orchestrated this whole thing. There had only been nine kills. Quite sad. And a few involved idiots (like Tayna) acting very... idiotically?

Dominica sighed loudly. She hated using wrongful language like "idiotically" and "stupider". It made her feel like a dunce sitting in a corner with a cone on her head.

Back on track... since few of the deaths featured on the announcement were more like accidents than murders (not to mention that Tegan girl committing suicide). So that lessened the list to only five players, six if you counted the poor bastard that got killed a few minutes after the fact. Such a small number... Were they all going to reach a full day without killing anyone else? AND... when she stopped to think about it, she had no idea who Nathaniel Harris was, so he was off the list for now... That lessoned the list to four: Melina Frost (a sexually active girl that had disgusted Dominica in the past), Bobby Jacks (a boxer whom, from the announcement, had killed someone before), Ivye Dewley (the girl who threw a grenade at the lighthouse, Dominica figured) and... There was a name that made Dominica smile: Gabriel Theobaldt. It made her laugh heartily.

"Oh, so HE'S actually playing. I'm not surprised, especially from what I saw at that bridge. There was always something deeply wrong with him, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I guess... he and I have a common goal, of sorts."

Dominica's eyes began to wander, examining every single detail of the surroundings. A camera, placed in between two long trees with no effort to camouflage it, stuck out to her like a very bad sore thumb more than anything else. The girl smirked. Before she even knew it, she had made her way over to the camera, looking into the lens with the curiosity of a child at a pet store.

At first, she didn't really say much of anything. She mouthed out something to the tune of "Is this thing on?" It was a minute after that when she said something else; "I hope you aren't seeing this..." She knew that most of the people who could recognize her would think that she was talking to her mother, her father and her brother. That she was hoping that they were watching her survive.

That was the crux of it: she wasn't directing that at her family. She imagined that they either have no clue that she was in the game, or that they were too shocked to even look. Even if her brother had the stomach to watch the show, he had been the one who convinced her to go on the Senior Trip in the first place. He knew, deep down inside, that she was not directing the comment at him. Besides, he was the only member of the girl's family that knew about her personal life. Landis had a very sharp mind on him, one that nearly matched his sister's. He could fill in the

She actually directed it to someone else that she knew. Dominica was just about to say who, but she stopped mid-sentence and flashed another smirk. What was the point in even saying a name in the first place? It was fairly easy to guess that her best friend would know who she was speaking to. And, just like any good mystery novel, Dominica wasn't exactly going to reveal that to any of the other interested people who were watching and listening intently. She was going to leave them hanging and let them draw their own conclusions until she really wanted to reveal all of her little secrets.

Dominica wanted to laugh loudly. This was the first time she was out in the open, where the camera can capture her... and she was already a fan favorite. She was surprised she could work the crowd the way she was. Wonder when the first fansite will be going up.

She stared back at the camera for a long time, unsure of what else there was to say. What else could she tell that wasn't already really obvious? Dominica knew exactly what they didn't know. Not that the thought had never passed their minds, but that they were too self-centered and too naïve to ever believe something like she was going to. Dominica brushed her black

"Hello. For those of you who don't know me from past experiences, or have been following this... game from its inception..." The lithe girl cleared her throat delicately before continuing. "My name is Dominica Shapiro, A.K.A. Girl #28 , from Southridge High School. Now... I believe that I speak for most of the children here when I say that we really don't want to be here. I suppose you already can guess as much, but in any case... since the terrorists who organized all of this aren't willing to speak to you about their horrible deeds and the reason why they commit them, I'm here to fill in for them. In a way, one may consider me the self-elected representative for the terrorists, a super-ego of sorts, if such a name is not too grandiose a title to bestow upon oneself. I know that I try always to think of the moral standards in most situations, so the title fits perfectly. But... I digress. Back to the subject at hand.

"As I presume that you are all aware of what has been happening... sitting there on your couches, watching innocent children plunder and deflower other innocents. If I were to guess, you must feel quite upset and rightfully so. After all, if I wasn't in this situation to begin with, I could imagine myself finding this sickening and wrong. That much I'll concede with you all. The idea of forcing oneself to kill anyone else is too grotesque for anyone to ever enjoy. Although this CERTAINLY doesn't explain why you're watching this in the first place.. However, I will not go so far as to say that this is certainly the terrorists fault. This is Danya's doing, I understand that much. But let's think about what we know about the people running this show. They own TV cameras, and they probably have enough profits to host many games such as this one in the future. As far as the human mind can predict, it appears as though these people..."

Dominica chortled softly in a vile, poisonous way. "Ahh! I just pointed out the obvious. How unlike me. Of course! These bastards with guns could also double as cameramen or, god-forbid, interns. Just like any normal reality show, huh? TV cameras everywhere, hidden away so the contestants have no idea that anyone's actually watching them. Hidden Microphones. Just like a normal, wholesome reality show on primetime. Doesn't that get to any of you? Any of you? How, under normal circumstances, you'd gladly watch people having emotional breakdowns on television and going through the most inane social problems and that the idea of letting people starve on a deserted island for a month doesn't raise any red flags. It's quite ironic. Really. Because the majority of you seem to have no problem with sending your child oversees to fight people that you don't and... When THIS comes along... SOMETHING like this... That's where you draw the line.

"The way I see it..." Dominica continued, her voice beginning to have a slight holier-than-thou tone. "This game, if you could even consider calling it one, is... how should I put it lightly... all your fault. Each and every one of you. In all honesty you weren't the ones who planned this whole thing. That I understand. However you must agree that it was the majority of you who took pleasure in seeing people's suffering through other traumatic experiences, and it was you who took pride that watching these same people do disgusting and indescribable things to one another for a cash prize was quite alright. I say that you are just as responsible for this so-called Tragedy as the monsters who have organized this whole thing from the very beginning. You are the ones to blame for the two-hundred plus men and women who will lose their lives trying to survive, and the fact that this has been the THIRD one in a series of these games proves my point even further. It means that even though you HATE the idea, you still watch. No matter what you try to tell me that could ever, EVER prove me wrong... The fact still remains that deep down inside of each and every one of you, you enjoy this. You could have done something different with your time, but you decided to spend it watching murder and destruction. YOU are the ones to blame.

"And don't go thinking you can change the tides of this so easily. Do whatever you like, nothing will work. This game is going to run on until we have all but one person left standing, whether you approve of it or not. The government won't have any say in any of this. They couldn't have any say. If they did, then this wouldn't be happening to begin with. So don't go blaming the innocent people of the government for all of your mistakes. Whether you like to believe it or not. This is your entire fault. And YOU can't change this."

Dominica flashed a devious grin, one that could send shivers down the spines of everyone that was watching her. "You. All of you. Each and every one of you are just one, single person. Incapable of making huge changes unless a miracle occurs and a whole unity of people just like you band together. That's always been the case. I suppose that you could just form together if that makes you feel like you're doing something of utter importance. Until then, there is nothing you could ever do to stop this. And it can't be changed. So go ahead. Sign your petitions, walk your picket lines, bring your lawsuits and personal agendas, riot in the streets, cast your votes, burn down buildings, and write those idiotic letters of complaint to whomever you please; it isn't going to change a single thing."

"And while we're on the subject.... contrary to popular belief, love and unity are capable of only small changes. It's a nice thought I agree, but Love and Unity are useless in a logical sense. Love and Unity certainly didn't work when the Holocaust happened, nor did it have any positive affect on the lethal effects of the Black Plague. Both unity and love do nothing. Just remember that. The only way to change this fate is to change yourselves and the way you live, and from what I've seen... that doesn't seem even remotely likely."

The girl waved to the camera for a second. "But... I fear as though I'm just ranting on now. I'm so sorry. I'm afraid to admit it, but I tend to ramble like this. I truly hate doing this, especially to people I oh-so love the company of. It's all true that this is all your fault, but I shouldn't get upset neither. I should just keep moving. That's all I can do at this point. It was such a pleasure talking to each and every single one of you, but I believe my train has arrived. I must bid adieu to you all. Maybe we might speak again but... I doubt it...

"Oh... and Danya... If you're watching this, then you hopefully agree with what I'm saying. If you want to mention it somewhere in the next announcement, then I don't mind. In fact, I'd be very flattered if you did. That would be the best compliment I'll ever receive during my time here, since you see us as 'duckies'. You do HAVE total control over us. You do whatever you wish."

Dominica motioned to the pack that was right over her back. "Oh! And I must say, you have an amazing sense of humor, albeit slightly strange. I won't be able to defend myself with a ocarina, but at least it makes me laugh mentally. Nice show. I truly hope you have some ammunition on this island."

And then Dominica Shapiro left the lagoon, her bag wrapped behind her right shoulder. No where in particular.

((Continued in Ten Speed))