Mao Tse Tung Said

[Kermit]

This wasn't great.

This could've also been worse.

(Valerija Bogdanovic: START)

Aleks was home. Jordan was home. Artem was home.

Gina was here. Abel was here.

Still not good.

Val looked up at a camera, idly holding the pickelhaube she'd been assigned as a weapon. She inhaled sharply and felt herself tear up a bit.

"Jordan, Aleks, Artyem... Mom," She closed her eyes. She was all her mom had left. " - Everyone at home; don't blame yourselves for this. This isn't... wasn't your fault. Don't let this define you. Keep going. Live for us.

"To everyone watching this from Chattanooga: please, for your own sake, stop. Turn off your computers. Whatever happens here, you're better off not knowing."

She turned away. Everything from here on out was for the terrorists to see.

___

People didn't just kidnap and murder hundreds of people for no reason. There had to be a motive beyond murder for the sake of murder. SOTF had too many moving parts to be the work of madmen.

The motive wasn't financial either; as far as Val knew there hadn't been any ransom demands. It had to be ideological - but not in a radical or reactionary way - this was too methodical to be the work of zealots. Too smart.

That left one possibility. The terrorists had to be trying to prove some kind of point. Whatever their point was, they hadn't done it yet - otherwise why would they still be attacking? Pulling off a kidnapping and mass murder at this scale presumably took an incredible amount of resources. The terrorists couldn't be doing this for nothing. They had to have some kind of endgame.

The first six attacks all ended the same way: they ran through to their conclusions. In the end, every previous class did what the terrorists told them to. If the goal of the terrorists was to show that humanity was evil by nature or whatever, they'd already done that by the time the first attack ended. It made no sense that they'd kill a further thousand people after reaching their goal, which brought Val back to the question of what the terrorist's goals actually were.

If the none of the six previous SOTFs had proven the terrorist's points, then that meant the point they were trying to make wasn't that humanity was evil. The previous classes had never tried not killing, and the goals of the terrorists had gone unfulfilled.

It all clicked. She'd figured it out.

Val looked back up at the camera. She smiled.

They didn't want the kids to kill each other. They wanted them to not kill each other.

She walked away, placing the pickelhaube atop her head. Every movement needed a symbol.

(Valerija Bogdanovic continued in Deep Red Bells)