More like FART EXHIBITION

[Kermit]

((Michael Froese start))

He knew. As soon as the bus pulled over, he knew.

He was sitting against a tree. It was hot out. Moist. Tropical. He'd opened one of his bags and there was a pistol inside. He took it out of the bag, holding it in his hand and staring into the middle distance.

He was OK.

[Deamon]

"Not doing great huh? I feel that."

((Aliya Kimia Nemati is making her game debut))

Aliya was a good distance away leaning against a tree. She hadn't approached too much because she didn't want to startle the guy. The main reason was for his own wellbeing, but she had to admit part of it was because she didn't know what he might have done. Her voice was surprisingly level. It hid how shaken she was. The stages of grief appeared to be on a delay for her. She expected a bit more to happen but after waking up and looking through her bags she had only let out a sigh. Her life really hadn't needed this.

The emotions would come, she could feel them below the surface, but for the moment she had been given a stay of execution.

How long that would last, who could say. It certainly wouldn't be forever though.

When that dam broke it was going to suck.

But until then, she was going to make the best of it.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Augh!" Bert gasped, waking up with a jolt. Her head hurt real bad, like she'd been sleeping on a pile of rocks. She sat up, rubbed her hair, and looked back down at the ground to see that, lo and behold, she had been sleeping on a pile of rocks for real. Great. Dazed and confused, she looked around at all the leaves and trees and things above. For some strange reason, it felt peaceful. Maybe she was already dead.

That illusion was shattered when she set her eyes on her bag, emblazoned with her name and number, and became conscious of the collar around her throat.

The last thing she remembered from her dream was the faint scent of her grandmother's homemade pancakes filling her nose.

[G026 — Liberty "Bert" Wren: Game Start]

Some time later, she was carrying her bag through the woods when she spotted some people around a tree, talking. From the side, she could tell who they were—Michael and Aliya, right?—but they weren't people she was entirely familiar with. Michael had a gun in his hand, which was probably better than whatever Bert got. She hadn't checked her bag at all yet. He was basically just some nerd, so the chance of him going postal on approach was probably pretty low, right? Wiping the salty tears from her cheeks, she walked over to them with a forced smile on her face. Fuck this, right? There was some sense of solidarity to the fact that they were all basically fucked, right?

"Yo," she said weakly, "um, where are we?"

[Aura]

(B082-Tony Acardi: Start)

Tony lugged his bulky pack on his back as he crossed through the woodlands into the art area. On the one hand, he had an entire camping set on his back, which was pretty good for when he needed to crash at night. He would probably have one of the best setups out of everyone. But on the downside, he had to lug it around everywhere, and he hadn't even tried to see what it would be like setting it up or tearing it all down yet.

Then again, having a good place to camp didn't mean a whole lot when people were going to be running around killing each other. Hell, maybe seeing a nice tent set up would make them want to come around and kill him so that they could take his stuff. So maybe he would be better off ditching it now. But then again, it was really useful, and tossing it would be a waste.

Man, this sucked.

He more or less stumbled upon a couple of people standing around. One was Michael, the skinny kid with the hoodie. The other was someone that he actually knew pretty well, Aliya. The third girl... he didn't know her so much, but he did notice how incredibly tiny she was. She looked like she might blow away with the wind for all he knew. But even with two people he didn't really know that well around, Tony smiled at his lucky break, finding one of his friends so soon. He waved to Aliya as he approached, making sure that she knew he was on the way.

"Holy shit, am I glad to see you right now."

[Kermit]

Michael's name was going to be on a memorial. He was going to die on camera. His body would be thrown into the ocean, or burned, or buried in a mass grave.

Someone else was here. A girl. Michael couldn't immediately remember her name. She was athletic, wearing trendy clothes. She said something obvious. Michael stared into her eyes. She didn't feel like a killer.

Morgan was on the island. Morgan was going to die. Clay was on the island. Clay was blind. Clay was going to die. Beryl was on the island. Beryl was Beryl. Beryl was going to die.

Another. Short girl. Michael knew her name. Bert Wren. Free Bert. Free Bird. She asked a question that everyone, her included, already knew the answer to. He looked at her. She was smiling. Killers wouldn't be smiling. Not on the first day. Not until they were broken. His eyes moved to a bright blue sad face hanging from a tree in the distance behind the short girl. He wasn't sure what to think about that. He looked back at the first girl.

Michael was never going to see his parents again. He was never going to see his dogs again. That one hurt.

Another. A boy. Heavy-looking backpack. Tony. Michael looked at him. He was waving at the first girl. Saying he was glad to see her. That was selfish. He had pretty much announced that he cared more about her life than he did Michael's or Bert's. He probably wasn't aware that he would, or at least probably didn't want to admit to himself that he would, but Michael knew that if it came down to choosing between the deaths of him and Bert or the death of the other girl, Tony would let Michael and Bert die. Then he'd lose his mind from the guilt.

Tony wouldn't survive the island. Even if he physically survived it, he wouldn't get through with his mind intact. He wouldn't make it out of here. He cared too much and this island would break him.

Michael unconsciously tightened his grip on the pistol. His gaze returned to the first girl. She had inadvertently ended up surrounded. Whatever happened next depended on what she did.

[Sh4dE]

[[Benedict Murray, Start]]

I nearly forgot the most important rule of all.

Benny leaned against a surrealist painting in the art exhibition with a cigarette in mouth. He was glad he had his aviators on so the others couldn't see his eyes being reddened by tears already flown away. Benedict had his eyes closed and prayed.

It was a long time since Benedict was this desperate. It was hard to describe this feeling. He felt dirty. His soul felt dirty. The soil on his hands felt like it was a burden to his soul.

Benedict was a happy person. He had problems, lots of problems, sure. Everyone had. But he dealt with his problems. He could live on, talk bout it, reassure himself, distract himself, deal with it. But he had no idea on how to deal with this problem. All he could do was pray.

He kept silent and prayed.

Someone has to die every day.

[Deamon]

And then two more people showed up. Alright. Aliya realised that the positioning of everyone meant that she was in the middle. Not her ideal situation. It wasn't that she didn't trust any of them. If they actually meant her harm they would have just taken their chances while she wasn't looking. It wasn't like she could have stopped them. You couldn't react to what you couldn't see coming. But for her own peace of mind, she pushed herself off the tree, making the movement seem as casual as possible.

"Hey guys." She said as she did so. It hadn't escaped her notice that the boy didn't answer any of the questions, not even hers. That wasn't ideal but she supposed he could have been in shock or something like that. She could hardly blame him if he was. Bert and Tony were good people. If there were people that were going to...take part? She didn't know the correct word for it, but it didn't matter at the end of the day. The main point was she didn't see either of them as people who were dangerous?

It struck Aliya at that point that as unnatural as it felt to think about people in that way, that was their reality now. They were going to be forced to keep thinking like that as things went on. It was a harsh, sobering thought. She felt the urge to scream and lash out building within her but she bottled it down. It wouldn't help. She needed to stay as calm as possible. To that end responding to people was a good a way as any to keep her mind off everything.

She nodded at Tony before answering Bert. "I'm not sure, an island somewhere I think." The guy had mentioned an island when they had all been tied down and...yeah.

"Where the island is," She halfheartedly shrugged. "I have no idea, sorry."

[MethodicalSlacker]

Um, not what she meant. Like, okay, her words were a little nonspecific, but shit, she thought that they'd be at least able to pick that up. Aliya took all three ways that she could understand the question—what sort of landmass, what location was the landmass, what part of the landmass—and probably chose the least informative two on purpose. Gosh, the more she thought about this, the more mad Bert got. She remembered she had read something online about micro-expressions and instead of thinking about how many she was flying through right now, she just thought of how much she missed Google Maps.

"Ahaha," Bert laughed nervously, "no, I mean, where on the island? I haven't looked through my bag yet. Do we have maps? How big is this place? Is Mikey okay? Hey, Mikey? Buddy?"

Bert looked over at Michael with concern on her face. Was everybody doing okay? More people were making their way over, and if Michael wasn't fine, then this couldn't be the party it ought to be. She wanted to shake him, snap him out of it, but that gun in his hand was freaking her out a little even if she knew that he wouldn't point it at anyone really on purpose but he might get spooked and she didn't want that to happen either.

So she waved a hand a few inches in front of his face and hoped that he'd snap out of it.

[Aura]

Okay, this was weird. Really weird. And now that Tony thought about it, he didn't really know where they were either. The best that he could come up with was that they were somewhere in the woods, surrounded by... well stuff. A few pictures here and there, an couple of statues, a a few things that just really confused him when he looked at them. Okay, he actually had no idea where they were, but he didn't think that anyone really knew in the first place, so it didn't seem like that big of a problem at the moment, at least not compared to all of their other problems.

He leaned over and paid attention to the other girl trying to get Michael's attention. He hadn't seen the kid move much since he showed up, and he didn't hear him talk either. He just kinda stood there like a statue with that gun in his hand. It kinda made Tony uncomfortable, not gonna lie. He didn't know whether he should try to talk to the dude or stay out of his way.

With that decision bouncing around his mind, Tony wound up making the call to attempt both. He took a few steps away from Michael and towards Aliya, and he verbally joined Bert in trying to snap him out of whatever he was doing. "Hey, tall drink of water! You all right?"

[MK Kilmarnock]

((Justin Greene, B064 start))

When Justin woke up, he had to brush the leaves from his face in order to discover that his body had been dumped unceremoniously in the woods. His head spun, as many other students likely did when the effects of the knockout drug had worn off and his body breathed in plentiful oxygen to wrestle him awake. Different emotions had begun to take hold. Rage, sadness, a little bit of euphoria at not having to suffer through finals, nor dealing with the stressful situation of graduation. It was little, just a spark consisting of what little solace he could find. He was still alive. That was a start.

But there were people nearby. He heard voices, and saw faces in his mind. All around him, familiar faces seeping out of the woodwork in this worn out place, desolate and forgotten. Before they were friendly; now, Justin could only think of them as danger. Danger was the key word ricocheting off of his skull. Danger, danger. Fear. Fear became the primary emotion, and he scrambled through his belongings in order to find something of use.

There was something in the bag that didn't belong to him, but it was among the rest of his things and it honestly wouldn't have looked out of place if it weren't for a tag affixed to it by a string, like a hat bought fresh out of the haberdashery. J.R. Rizzolo's tire iron. He had to read it carefully, several times, to keep the letters from blending together. Even still, the easiest parts to read were 'JR' and 'tire'. But he knew what it was, and he knew what he could do with it.

Justin ripped the tag off and discarded it; it wouldn't be necessary for using the weapon.

He had to strike first. Move first, before somebody made a move on him. A tire iron was a fine weapon but he knew others out there had better. Make the move, and beat somebody unconscious. Kill them, even because if you don't, they'll do the same to you. How much did he like any of his classmates anyway? Many of his friends were made in the special ed classes, and most of them hadn't come. Sam didn't come... did Nathan? He seemed awfully excited. At the very least, kids who missed out on the trip got the silver lining of a lifetime. Much better than the flipside: 'Hey kids, you're about to die, but at least we let you go on that awesome trip first.'

Thanks a lot. The museums were great.

Stalking through the woods, Justin came upon an area that appeared to be an exhibit of its own. Paintings, statues, all sorts of odds and ends... and people.

A lot of people.

But one person was closer, facing away from him, not paying attention and most importantly, was just far away enough from the people that maybe he could be taken out without too much of a fuss. All it took was one nice clean whack across the top of the head and he'd go down like a sack of bricks, yeah? Justin told himself that such a blow wouldn't kill anybody, only incapacitate. It's okay if you don't kill anybody. But you need to kill somebody... kill or don't kill? Just swing, swing first and think about the consequences later. You can deal with them as they come but if you get caught thinking...

He didn't think about the consequences in order to not hesitate, when Justin came up from around the tree Benedict was leaning against, swinging the tire iron with all his heave-ho.

[Kermit]

Everyone else here were still getting their bearings. Michael'd been sitting for a while now. He'd probably been one of the first few to wake up.

_

His blood sugar wasn't low, nor was it high, which would be a good thing except here he didn't have much carby food and the inevitable physical activity meant his blood sugar would drop like an anvil. He'd decided to suspend insulin delivery altogether, which meant his insulin pod would beep every hour or so. He'd seen the gun in his pack and given the manual a cursory glance before grabbing the gun out of the bag, which was when he noticed the label attached to the triggerguard.


It read: "Adam Dodd's Ballester-Molina"


If visiting the SOTF memorial felt emotionally heavy, this felt like being at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and getting crushed by the weight of an entire ocean.

It was just like... this gun was part of history. It wouldn't be out of place in a Smithsonian exhibit. It was like holding the gun Gavrilo Princip used to assassinate Franz Ferdinand.

Michael and all of his friends were going to be footnotes in a history textbook.
_

Bert was calling him 'Mikey'. Asking if he was okay. Waving her hand in his face. She seemed tense and manic. Unpredictable.

Tony was offering him water. Also asking if he was okay. Overly-friendly and full of false reassurance. Like how a soldier talked to a comrade who had just been dismembered by a landmine or like how a school secretary tried to talk down a kid with an AR-15.

Michael blinked a few times then inhaled. "I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm just - this whole thing is - it's happening."

He didn't move.

He could smell something. Something other than tropical forest-jungle. Smoke. Not just smoke but cigarette smoke. Where there was cigarette smoke there was cigarettes there was people. Nobody in front of him was smoking. He could hear rustling somewhere behind the tree he was sitting against but he wasn't sure if he was just imagining it.

"Stop. Someone's here. I can smell smoke."

He still didn't move.

[Sh4dE]

Benedict Murray was woken up to reality by a ten-year-old tire iron to the face.

As the metallic weapon collided with his head, he reflexively let a out a short and loud "Irghh!" before he let his upper body fall to the dirtied soiled ground. His hands went up to his head to cover it for more potential hits. His head felt dizzy and his whole head pained. He slowly opened his eyes to see that his aviators have been knocked off and his cigarette was also on the ground. He closed his eyes again as the pain returned and groaned to himself. He didn't even see who the culprit had been and now he only could hope for the pain to end quickly.

[Deamon]

Aliya noticed the sudden focus in the guys' eyes as he seemed to be thinking about something. Then he announced he heard and smelt something. Nearly as soon as he did there was a cry of pain from the nearby treeline. She knew it was stupid and dangerous, she didn't know what exactly had happened after all. But based on the situation they were in Aliya felt like she could do the maths and get close enough to the correct number. There was a delay as she made eye contact with the boy sitting against the tree. He didn't so much as budge, so, she set off towards the noise at a run, you know, like a moron. But hey, she'd take being a moron to letting someone die through inaction.

Standing by and letting people get picked on at school wasn't something she had done and she wasn't about to start. A myriad of thoughts of what she was going to encounter played in her mind's eye. She'd heard stories about what Survival of the Fittest was like of course and she had her own memories of events to draw from. But the human imagination was always good at making unwanted additions to things.

As she burst onto the scene she saw one boy on the ground clutching his head and another standing over him with a tire iron. Her maths had been right then. She sized the aggressor up, they looked to be roughly the same height but he was carrying more weight around the gut. There was a decent chance she could take him. As long as she didn't get bashed with the tire iron of course.

"Leave him alone."

[MethodicalSlacker]

Oh, okay. That was that, then. Bert got her hand out of Michael's personal space and let him have some air. The guy needed some time to calm down, now that he was snapped out of his weird funk. Michael knew what he needed. All good in the hood, no need to panic, just let the guy ride this strange, unique feeling out and come down when he felt like he was able to.

Except it very quickly began to look like that wouldn't be entirely possible. Mike smelled some smoke and Aliya dashed off into the woods after someone, in hiding, grunted. It sounded like there was some sort of impact, too. Bert hadn't even checked her stuff yet! How were people already doing this crap? And she still didn't know where she was! Checking all of that crap now would be pretty useless, given that shit was going down, but she still needed to know what she had as far as weapons went.

"Wait up!" Bert said, throwing her bag down. She unzipped the flap of the bag they gave her and reached inside, touching upon something that felt roughly gun shaped. It felt sort of bulky and heavy, but maybe that was normal for guns. After all, she had never even held one before, even if she had seen plenty on like, the belts of police officers and stuff like that, or in war re-enactments, or movies for that matter. With a smile—happiness at not being totally fucked, really—she pulled the weapon out and looked upon it in all its glory.

Right about now would be when Bert would charge in with the gun, tell the guy who was hitting the guy who said ow to freeze and put his hands up, and be a hero. It would be time for that, if it didn't turn out that she was mistaken about what she had.

"Oh, my dad has one of these," Bert realized aloud, holding the power drill up to the sun with her right hand.

"Fuck."

[Aura]

When Michael mentioned that he could smell something, Tony started sniffing the air to see if he could smell it too. He considered himself to have a pretty good sense of smell, but he couldn't get a whiff of anything aside from the general smell of grass and leaves. He didn't know what Michael was smelling, and he wanted to ask, but that was cut off when he heard someone screaming.

He whipped around to face where he heard the scream, and saw that Aliya was already running off in that direction. That left him with a decision to make. He could either follow her off to find the source of the scream, or stay around to see what's going on with Michael and the others. Both options were pretty flexible on a scale of weird to outright dangerous, but his only alternative to choosing one or the other was to just stand there doing nothing. He could also just leave the scene and let everyone deal with everything themselves, but he honestly couldn't keep himself away from the way things were unfolding here.

He made up his mind and ran after Aliya. He knew full well that it might have been dangerous, and he didn't have a weapon in his hands, or even the knowledge of whether or not he actually had a weapon, but his mind was already made up. If he wound up having to punch somebody, then that's just what was going to happen.

Tony caught up with her, and he saw exactly what he would be dealing with now. One guy with a tire iron, and another guy on the ground with a head wound. Didn't take a genius to see what was going on, and it was already pissing him off. He crossed his arms and glared at the attacker, who was a fairly big guy, but Tony was taller, and he bet that he was tougher too. He stood next to Aliya, feeling confident in the numbers advantage that they had over the guy.

"You doing something dumb, dumbass?" He said with a sneer.