More like FART EXHIBITION

[MK Kilmarnock]

When the iron connected with a human head rather than wood and bark, Justin was almost as surprised as Benedict was. In some sense completely devoid of logic, he'd just acted on a whim and hadn't really thought about this might play out. There was no backup if he didn't land his attack, but he did, and now he had to think of a follow-up.

He continued to think as Benedict slumped to the ground. Justin would have recognized his victim at school, but he was hardly thinking about that or looking at faces, something that might have been evident by the broad and unfocused look of his gaze. Part of him knew who this was, in truth. Part of him did not, and yet another part didn't care. Anybody who wasn't him would have to die at some point, so he told himself, using the most animal part of his brain.

He raised the tire iron again and nudged at Benedict with his foot. The guy was in pain, and able to express as such... clearly alive.

'Leave him alone,' somebody said.

Justin turned and saw Aliya. Pretty face, pretty strong. Once upon a time he took a quiet interest in her because she did things that nobody would expect a girl to do, and she did them just as good as the boys. He never could work up the confidence to talk to her, instead admiring her from afar in classes they shared... which, come to think of it, wasn't many. They might have shared one this year. Now, he had Aliya's attention, but in a way that he never wanted. He stood there, unable to say anything while she was bearing down on him. His hand lowered, but only slightly. Without a weapon, he probably couldn't take her at all. But even the biggest, baddest kids at school would buckle under a solid whack with a heavy piece of metal.

She wasn't alone, either. Justin raised his hand again when Tony addressed him in the typical style Tony was known for. 'Dumbass...' Justin was on the receiving end of that barb a lot, that and 'retard', for his placement in special education reading courses. His dyslexia had caused him to be made fun of his entire school life. And now they weren't in school, and it was still happening. A squirt of anger was added to the emotion cocktail as he continued to stand over Benedict, working his jaws in ever-growing agitation.

"Wu-hut does it look like I'm doing, huh? Maybe you're the dumbass, huh?" Justin snapped. Or rather, he wanted to snap, but in his unsteady frame of mind, perhaps 'blubbered' would have been a more appropriate description. The skin between his knuckles tightened along with his grip on the tire iron. "Whadda y'all care what I d... what I'm doing?"

[Kermit]

There was a mix between a grunt and a scream.

Michael still sat against the tree as the others rushed out to confront whoever was here. He figured if the hidden person had a gun and were up to no good, they'd shoot everyone except Michael and then Michael could shoot them. Michael also still hadn't loaded his - Adam Dodd's - pistol, which was probably an important thing to do.

He cautiously grabbed a magazine from his bag and fumbled with it. Tony and the first girl were already out of sight.

"Leave him alone."

It sounded like whoever the person was, they were doing something to someone. Not just someone. A him. Maybe Tony, maybe someone else.

Bert was still in sight. Bert had a power drill. If she had a drillbit too, it could be a lethal weapon - and if not that, good for unpleasant, painful things.

"You doing something dumb, dumbass?"

Tony wasn't the one being attacked. That meant two newcomers, at least one of who was a threat.

The magazine fit in. Michael was surprised that the gun didn't feel heavier. Safety off, hammer down. Hopefully he hadn't missed a step.

He stood up. Stepped out.

"Wu-hut does it look like I'm doing, huh? Maybe you're the dumbass, huh?"

Those were the words of someone who was already gone. Holding the pistol with both hands, Michael pointed it at the standing boy. A special-ed kid. A special-ed kid holding a tire-iron while standing over a fallen human figure.

"Whadda y'all care what I d... what I'm doing?"

Michael was pointing a loaded gun at someone who had potentially just committed murder.

This was happening.

"Why the fuck wouldn't we care? Drop the tire-iron. Make any sudden moves, I'll shoot."

This was happening.

[Sh4dE]

He heard voices after being nudged as if he was a dead animal. He didn't even need to open his eyes to see what was happening feets next to him. There was a girl stepping in and telling the culprit to stop the violence. It was Aliya if he recognised her voice correctly. She had a pretty recognisable voice, but his head still was foggy. He touched the wound. Aw, shit, was it bleeding? More people came, a boy with a sarcastic tone. He did not recognise his voice.

He did, however, recognise the voice of Justin, who had apparently attacked him. Justin out of all people, huh? He seemed like a nice kid, that couldn't be right. He opened his eyes, the sunlight inflicting more pain, but as he looked up it really was Justin, the shy, but generous Justin. It did not make any sense that he attacked him and but he couldn't keep a straight thought with the headache. Was he sweating or why does his forehead feel like it's sweating?

He squinted his eyes again. A voice threatened to shoot. Shit, shit. Still in pain, he shouted:

"Don't shoot anyone!"

[Deamon]

It was certainly an interesting morning.

Aliya had discovered one guy seemingly attempting to beat another to death and Tony had rushed to help. To say he was helping was radically overstating what he was doing. He was actually just escalating things further. So it wasn't a surprise when Justin shot back at them. Aliya was going to say something, make an attempt to talk him down. She didn't want to fight or anyone to get hurt, but she wasn't a fool. There may have been no other way to protect themselves. It wasn't cynical as much, it was just reality, as much as it sucked to think about.

But if she thought Tony had escalated things that didn't hold a candle to the other boy finally moving and appearing with the gun in hand. That was a step up. It was an uncomfortable step. Everything was a mess. Aliya could see that clear as day. Someone needed to try and calm things down. So fuck it, why not her?

"Hey man, we don't want to hurt you." She said. "And no one needs to shoot anyone. Let's just think about this."

[MethodicalSlacker]

Bert turned and looked over at the group near the tree, the really loud ones with all their weapons brandished and their edgy twelve year old sides coming out in the threats they made. Even Michael got up and went to join them, to investigate what the fuck was going on over there. His presence brought a lot more gravity to that situation, what with the gun and all. Overall, she could feel some really, really bad vibes from the group, and she still didn't know exactly where on the island she was.

The drill was pretty useless. At most, she could bonk someone over the head with it, knock them out, and then drill a really small hole in like, their skull while they were asleep? It could be useful at building things if someone else had the rest of the tools you needed to do something like that, but right now it was dead weight that she was only keeping in case someone else really wanted it. Drilling into the collar seemed like an easy way out if she ever got badly hurt or something and didn't want to suffer any more. Maybe she could kill someone else by drilling into their collar? She had no idea how the fuck that would work.

Instinctively, she stood up from the tree and walked over to where everyone else was.

Bert was at her best when she was a team player. Big groups were her strong suit, really—even though she did great on her own, there was always just some inexplicable pull that the sight of a large gathering of people had on her. Sometimes, an extra pair of hands or feet or eyes was all that a team needed to go from good to amazing, and Bert didn't know whether she was having that effect now but she might as well take the spot. The difference between Justin putting down his weapon and him rushing someone with it and getting shot could be the difference between three and four people, after all. There was strength in the collective.

"Yeah," Bert interjected, "Everyone needs to just, like, chill for a bit."

[Aura]

Tony may have been a bit rough with how he approached the situation, he knew that. It was also the only way he ever really learned how to deal with stressful situations. Back in the day he probably would have gone straight to tackling the guy, but getting a grip on his temper opened up a few more options to him. But on the other hand, a guy with a tire iron who is willing to use it is always made trying to go the diplomatic route a good bit harder. Not that Tony knew this beforehand, but he figured that he had a good knack for picking these things up on the fly.

For the time being, he thought that the best plan might be to let Aliya do the talking while he stood there to back her up as an extra number. That plan fell to pieces when Michael came in, gun in hand and freaking people out, most notably Tony himself. He practically jumped backwards once he saw Michael level the weapon at the armed boy. A shocked grimace supplanted his previous expression, and he started looking between the two with an extreme sense of nervousness.

His knees were shaking. He had seen guns and tire irons before, yeah, but not while people were trying to kill each other with them. That made them a hell of a lot scarier than when they were in a case or a tool kit.

"Holy fuck, dude. Let's just..." Tony's eyes focused on the tire iron, whose damage potential he had already seen, and the gun, which could possibly be turned on anyone at any second. With that information, he was able to surmise that things were probably about to get really bad around here unless something changed very quickly. "Let's just calm down, okay? No need to do any crazy shit."

[MK Kilmarnock]

"Shut up!" Justin squealed.

Calm down. Clam down. Clam up. So many clams. Smalls.

"You don't have to all say, you don't all have to say it!" he said, his teeth clenching together involuntarily near the end of his sentence. His jaws shut so hard that he thought his teeth were going to crack. Everybody talking made him want to hit them more. Michael he wanted to hit the most, more than even hitting his original target again just to finish them off. He thought he could just rashly act and get away with it before things got messy, but everybody in the area, which seemed to be way, way more people than he was initially accounting for, suddenly came to his aid.

And... nobody wanted to hurt him? Yeah, that was a lie, Michael had a gun pointed right at him. Well if Michael had a gun, why wasn't he shooting anybody with it? Why wasn't anybody doing... anything? They were supposed to be tearing each other apart!

"Not have to hurt anybody? That's bullshit!" Justin needed to take a step back, because there was still a gun pointed at him and he wouldn't feel safe until he got a tree between him and Michael. "We have to kill each other! They're making us! Why are you all so fucking calm about this!?"

Stay away stay away stowaway

[Kermit]

So the kid being beaten to death hadn't been beaten to death. That was good probably. What wasn't good was that he, along with pretty much everyone else, was acting like Michael was in the wrong for pulling a gun. Sure, yeah, it would be fucked up back in Chattanooga, but they weren't in Chattanooga now and they'd never be in Chattanooga again. Things were different now. The only moral choice here was offing yourself as soon as you woke up. There was no point in being some self-righteous, stuck-up quote unquote 'hero' anymore. That didn't meant there wasn't a point in looking like one. Looking like one was important, because if you didn't, people wouldn't trust you. They wouldn't feel guilty about killing you.

On this island there were very few heroes and very few villains. It was more like hypocrites, realists, and the levels in-between; hypocrites seeing themselves as being on the lighter side of the moral spectrum, and realists filling in the grey. Nobody saw themselves as the villain - that was where the hypocrisy came in. Nobody deserved to die on this island. Nobody deserved to die like this. Everyone, at least on the dawn of the first day, deserved to make it home.

But not everyone could.

Michael wasn't going to be a hypocrite and go around blindly murdering people while acting like he deserved to live any more than anyone else here. When everyone deserved to live but not everyone could, it was time to throw the whole 'deserving' thing out the window. Whoever made it in the end - and it didn't have to be Michael, they had to survive; not just physically, but mentally. They had to be able to move on from this. If they couldn't, everyone else would've died for nothing.

It was half palliative care and half artificial selection.


Pulling the gun right now was a necessary evil. Walking up to Justin unarmed would just end in everyone getting bludgeoned. The gun gave Michael leverage over Justin. That leverage meant that Justin couldn't draw everyone into a melee without getting shot. The art of conflict resolution was usually counter-intuitive.

Justin wasn't necessarily a bad person yet. He was on the brink, but the fact that he was still talking meant that some part of him still existed.

Justin was also lashing out. Yelling. Michael knew Justin was in the special-ed class. It hit him that everyone swarming and yelling was probably a giant contributing factor to Justin's conniption.

Michael put on a stern voice. Loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be yelling. "Everyone needs to just back the fuck off for a few seconds. We're all scared; if it looks like we aren't, it's because we're pretending." He made eye contact with Justin and angled the gun away slightly. "My name is Michael Froese. I'm seventeen. I wanted to be a marine biologist. I've never held a gun before. I've never... threatened anyone before. Just because they told us to kill each other doesn't mean killing isn't still a conscious choice we have to make. If your decision is to kill, then... if you walk away, we walk away. Someone has to die today, but that doesn't mean someone has to die right now."

[Sh4dE]

While the others were talking and Michael introduced himself to the group, Benedict slowly opened his eyes again, ignoring the headache. He looked at the people around him, then at his bloodied fingers. He looked at his bag, but then the dropped cigarette caught his attention as it was still burning. He picked it up from the ground and took a drag from it. It made him feel better.

He looked at his classmates and wished they could see what he saw.

"Guys, look at yourselves," he said calmly while he looked into his bag to pick up the first-aid kit. He dragged out a bandage to wrap it around his head to stop the bleeding.

"We were in school together for half a decade and now we want to hurt each other because some terrorist dickhead told us to? C'mon, we're better than this. We are the Hunter Owls."

Benny still felt the pain, but tried to have a smile that showed no sign of it, showing his teeth and the cigarette inbetween.

"We will all get out of this as long as we work together. Trust me."

[Deamon]

Aliya didn't think she had the situation under control by any measure, but she was of the opinion it had been going better before everyone started parroting what she had said. She knew they were trying to be helpful, but it wasn't working. The thing that did annoy her was when the one with the gun—Michael it turned out—repeated nearly everything she said but with a gun. It was very American and white male of him. He could solve the problem, ignore the fact he was the one who had made it worse to begin with, he'll solve it. No problem guys. It wasn't helped by him saying he'd never held a gun, but hey that didn't stop him waving it around. She was probably being harsh, he was only trying to help, but she couldn't help thinking it and shooting a glare his way. There was a good chance he wasn't even aware he was doing it. But he had, and she was annoyed by it.

Still, that didn't change the situation. They were still in a stand-off and it was no closer to being resolved, despite everyone's attempts. Things weren't helped when the victim of the beating, who she realised was Benedict, she didn't know him well, recovered and started talking. The guy must have been delirious from the blow to the head based on what he was saying, the only one who had been violent was Justin. Granted, Michael and Tony were being aggro. That much was true, but everyone was being consistent with the message.

"Yeah...we're uh working on that buddy."

Turning her attention back to Justin, Aliya considered the options they had. She knew that as much as she wanted to keep trying it may have been best to follow her own advice, but at the same time, she didn't have a great amount of faith in the ability of Michael to defuse the situation.

"It's alright man," Aliya said, keeping her voice level and soft. As she spoke she slowly took a step back, giving Justin more space. "We don't have to do anything."

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Hunter owls," Bert repeated.

"Hmm, hmm."

In any other circumstance, she'd think it was a joke. Even as a member of student government, she didn't have the most school pride in the world by any measure. It just seemed like a really, seriously trite and tone deaf thing to say at a time like this. It didn't matter that they were all from the same place. What mattered was if they had made any sort of bonds within that place. Bert was naturally drawn to groups, and things like that. She felt a strong enough bond with the idea of the "Horned Owls", yes, but she didn't expect that to be a concept that resonated with anyone else. Not at a time like this.

"Are you, um, okay?" she asked Benedict. Maybe this guy was a bit more rattled than he should be. Maybe he needed to sit off to the side. Bert knew that he obviously wasn't okay, but she wanted to just make sure of what he felt.

Something settled in her and told her that the group wasn't exactly safe. That should have been obvious earlier, right? When the guy got clocked by the pipe? Jordan was freaking out still. Bert felt like she should do something. Could she? Was that up to her? It didn't seem like the group wanted to do that. Maybe she should get Benedict away from this guy. It was really hard to move with that gun pointing in any direction it wanted. How did the others feel about all of this? What was she supposed to feel about this at all? Where were her friends?

Bert took a tentative step backwards, and stopped.

[Aura]

Tony put his hands up, trying to make himself look non-threatening. It might have been a little too late to dial things back, considering that someone had already taken a blunt object to the head, but fuck it, he was gonna give it a shot.

The bleeding guy was right. Hunter Owls and shit. They were better than all this. Some terrorist fuckers running in to tell them all to kill each other didn't mean shit. They didn't have to listen to them. It was the same reason why he wouldn't listen to someone telling him to jump off a bridge. Because it's stupid, and Tony didn't do stupid things.

... Okay, that might not have been totally accurate. The truth was that Tony didn't do stupid dangerous things, that kind that could get him or someone else in the hospital, or worse. Everything about this island? Yeah, that definitely counted as "worse". So he wasn't gonna play their game. He wasn't gonna be some loser going around killing his classmates, because that isn't what he does. However, he was getting a really strong urge to find the guys behind this and give them a few punches. Really hard punches. In places that really hurt, like the nose or the crotch.

"Yeah man, just forget all that shit. It ain't worth it." Tony looked from the big guy to Michael, and he wasn't sure which of them he was talking to more when he said that. Probably both. Definitely both.

[MK Kilmarnock]

"Stop... talking..."

The only part of Justin's body that he could feel were his hands. The hunk of metal in his palms felt red-hot, and sweat got trapped in his brow. Most of his attention was aimed at Aliya, the girl closest to him, at least until the boy with the gun started talking. Yeah, he knew his name was Michael, that wasn't new information. All the interest in fishes didn't mean anything, though, because they all should have understood that none of them were going to have a future past this island, except one of them and that was if they were lucky. They should have understood that, but apparently he was the only person who realized that, Justin thought.

Other people were babbling on about something, but he couldn't focus on the words. Even the boy that he clobbered in the head with the iron, who was probably concussed and should have been halfway to the pearly gates, was trying to tell him to calm down, that they didn't have to do this. Nobody had to do this.

Nobody had to do anything, except they all had to die.

"You're not making any sense," Justin whined. "You say somebody has to die today, but nobody has to die now... today IS now, you're contrictin' yourself." He knew he messed up the word and he didn't care to go back and correct himself. If anything, his difficulty in communicating only made him more frustrated. "Stop talking to me like I'm an idiot! I know what's happening, I listened to the rules, I was there! You were all there too!" Weight shifted from foot to foot and his voice raised. "Don't tell me that we can all just hang out and sing happy songs and and and and everything will be FINE!"

Justin lashed at his frustrations there on the trunk of the tree, a few chips of bark flying off like the tears flying off of his cheeks. The tire iron made a metallic thud when it bounced off. Now he could feel something else, and it was his forearms. The bones shook, giving off little reverberations from the strike.

"WHY DON'T ANY OF YOU GET THIS!? WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE THAT GETS THIS!?"

[Kermit]

Huh... so apparently "Everyone needs to just back the fuck off for a few seconds." meant "Everyone needs to do the opposite of just back the fuck off for a few seconds."

Like.... Jesus H. Christ everyone here except the girl who's name he didn't know and Bert were terrible at de-escalating the situation, though at least Benedict had the whole head trauma excuse. Everyone was yelling. One or two people yelling would've been preferable.

Michael caught a glimpse of the unnamed girl giving him the stink eye. It was clear she disapproved of his tactics. She was being an asshole about it but it was probably kind of hard to express her feelings any other way given the situation. It was clear she wanted a leadership role here and if she didn't get one she'd cause problems.

He held his hand out and lowered the gun. "Stop. Stop. Please. Can we... can just one person talk at a time? For Justin's sake?" He looked towards the unnamed girl and nodded his head. Michael knew monologuing after telling everyone to shut up would make him look like an asshole. The girl wanted to take charge? Wish granted. If this blew up now it would be on her.

[Sh4dE]

"I'm fine," Benny lied to Bert and the others. He could handle the head wound on his own, he did not need to act like he was a victim when he was doing fine on his own. Benedict thought about whether Michael was an ass about saying that everyone needed to be slower for Justin, because of Justin's learning disability but then decided to ignore Michael's comment.

"We will get rescued eventually, Justin. We just got to wait a bit. Every nation on the planet is on our side and we will be found. I mean j-just look at the map, it is an island again! We will be found. They cannot keep us forever. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow they will already find us."

Benny rubbed his forehead and insecurely thought about if he should say what he was thinking and then decided to continue talking.

"I-I know it is very cruel and inhumane to say this out loud, but everyone of us is worth exactly twenty-four hours. S-so that makes like 160 days - which is like four or five months or so if my math is correct. That's way longer than we need to get rescued! They probably are already on their way, maybe tomhmm-orrow they'll find us. If we were to kill, it would only subtracts the days we can wait for someone to save us. We are the Horned Owls, man, we are not murderous. We could be the first victims of SOTF who will not become the victims!"