TV2 Epilogue: Living at the Edge of the World

[MurderWeasel]

Whittree, Oklahoma

The thing that had always secretly pissed Coleen Harrigan off was that Jewel was three and a half inches taller than her. One or two she could have handled, but there was simply no way to make up a three and a half inch difference. When they went out together, Coleen could come close by wearing heels, unless Jewel wore heels too in which case there was nothing that could be done.

"You shouldn't wear heels much," Coleen once said. "They make you as tall as most of the boys, and they think that sort of thing is freaky."

And Jewel hadn't worn heels much after that, but still those three and a half inches had been inescapable. They'd been there for as long as the girls had been friends, and even as they'd grown taller together those inches had remained.

"Don't worry," Coleen's mom had said, the one time Coleen ever brought it up, when she was still in middle school, "you'll catch up sooner or later." That had been a lie.

So whenever the girls had their pictures taken together—and it happened often, to the point that Jewel was in almost as many of Coleen's family photos as actual family members—Coleen would get up on her tip toes to narrow the gap, silently seething the whole time.

---

"Coleen," her mom said, hugging her close like she hadn't in years. Her arms' thinness belied their strength; normally Coleen would've squirmed or complained, tried to wriggle free or reposition in am effort to minimize the dishevelment of her clothing. Today, she hugged back, and never mind the outfit she'd spent so long getting to look perfect. "I'm so glad you're okay."

It was cold out. It had been finals week, but finals week was now preemptively over. This embrace was taking place in front of the school; Coleen's mom had taken off work and hurried over as soon as she heard the news, according to her texts, and had been waiting outside for an hour now. Similar reunions were occurring all around, kids clinging to their parents, but mostly the underclassmen. The parents of Coleen's fellow seniors numbered far fewer.

The rumors had started flying that morning, of course: SOTF was here, in Whittree, casting for the new season. Coleen hadn't believed them initially, but then the classroom for her first test had been missing more students than could be accounted for by the usual illnesses or panic attacks that led to people missing the most important academic event of the semester, and that started her wondering.

Then the men in suits came in.

They read off some names, marched a few of Coleen's classmates out, told the remainder that they wouldn't be picked up in any later classes, and were gone. Just like that, people Coleen had sat next to for months or years, people who formed inevitable facts of her world, were gone. They were going to die in SOTF-TV.

She couldn't decide if that was more scary or exciting.

Clueless Mr. Ratcliffe had them take the fucking English final anyways, but Coleen spent most of her time staring at the page and imagining. She'd shift between thinking about the fates her classmates would face and visualizing her own possible time on the show—not a new pursuit, of course, but one given unanticipated significance by the fact that her peers were actually for-real going to be on SOTF. She couldn't wait to start breaking down the odds. Lunch could not possibly arrive soon enough. When it did, she'd show Jewel the list of people who'd been pulled from English and she'd get whoever had been taken from Jewel's first class (what final had she been bitching about again? It was something with numbers, physics maybe?) and they could start predicting how everyone would place. It was going to be a big season again, but Coleen was almost certain they'd be taking from at least two schools, just like for Sixty-Five; the team concept hadn't run its course just yet, and if they were grabbing similar amounts of people from the other classes, there just wouldn't be enough students taken from Whittree to populate a whole season. Well, unless they reached into the lower grades. That was always a possibility.

Coleen gave Mr. Ratcliffe her half-filled final at the end of the period, just in time for Headmistress Wright to come in and murmur at him and then announce that, surprise, they all actually got full points because it turns out it's sort of distracting to try to take a test after finding out a bunch of your classmates are going to die on TV. Coleen decided that meant she could definitely blow off any prep for history, and jetted towards the lunchroom, all set to bring her fantasizing to life.

Jewel wasn't there. The cafeteria actually didn't seem notably depopulated; it was thronging with confused underclassmen and was abuzz with unruly discussion. Coleen did two circuits of the whole room, then got in line and got the lukewarm square of pizza and slimy tinned peaches and soggy tater tots allotted for the day, then did another lap. She didn't text Jewel like she normally would've. She sat down, scribbled down her list in the back of her planner, next to this stylized sketch of Reverend Harold Finston Smythe puking blood Jewel had done for her. She ranked her classmates on who was probably most fucked, and a couple of her other friends came over and helped, and that took most of the break.

Then right at the end, Coleen looked up and saw Chloe Evans making her way into the cafeteria, way late and rubbing at her eyes, and that told her what she'd been trying not to hear. Chloe looked across the room and locked eyes with Coleen, and Coleen turned away and told some joke to her friends and they all laughed, and she didn't look up from the table until the bell sounded telling them to move to their next class.

"I'm glad too," Coleen said. Her mom's hands were chilly. The afternoon finals had been cancelled, though they'd still had to sit in the classrooms for a while. The grass in front of the school was mostly brown and crumbly. Coleen wanted nothing more than to go home. They'd been told they didn't need to turn up again until after vacation. Free ride through finals, courtesy of SOTF. A few were celebrating that, but the atmosphere was for the most part somber. Wright had given this whole speech over the PA about how they were family, all of them, no matter what happened, and some of the kids behind Coleen had started crying and that made her nose run a little so she bit her tongue.

She didn't see Chloe among those on the lawn.

"I can't believe they came here," Coleen's mom said. "Why Whittree?"

"Mom," Coleen said, "they took Jewel."

"I know."

---

"You think we should watch?" The question Coleen's mom asked was largely academic; they had already sat through the opening ceremony, straining to catch and name the faces they knew (even though by this point it was pretty common knowledge who'd been picked up), and now the clock in the bottom corner of the stream showed that they were only minutes away from the feed going live.

"Yeah," Coleen said. "We have to see how it goes."

It was early in the morning. They were both in their nightwear—for Coleen, this meant her flannel pajamas; her mother donned a fuzzy red robe. They each had a hot mug of tea, like usual when SOTF launched anew, but neither of them had touched the beverages. No cookies this time. No celebration of the start of the season. No excitement. No friends.

"I suppose." Her mom shifted a little on the couch, and Coleen wanted to scream at her to just sit fucking still, they just had to wait a few minutes but every movement or word made it feel that much longer. She said nothing. They stared at the clock. A car rumbled by outside. Birds chattered. The heating hummed. Coleen's toes were cold. She wished she had socks or even better her slippers, but they were upstairs in her room and while she definitely had enough time to get them she felt like everything would start the instant she turned her back on the screen.

So she waited, running the nail of her right big toe along her left shin and trying not to shiver. The minutes passed. All around the world, other fans would be watching this same clock, baited breath, and in past seasons Coleen had felt a camaraderie with them, but today there was something more. She had a connection that none of them did. She was special.

"You know," Coleen's mom said, slicing through her musings and making her want to shout again, "she might be alright."

"What?"

"She might be alright. Maybe it'll be like last year, when the collars messed up and they let everyone go."

"That won't happen again, mom," Coleen said. "That was a big mistake."

"Maybe she'll figure something out. Or just make it through. She's smart."

"Come on, mom. It's Jewel." Coleen rolled her shoulders. "She's fucked."

Any other day, the profanity would've rated at least a mild chiding. Today, there was nothing for a time, and then this soft snorting noise. Looking over, Coleen realized her mom was crying. As soon as she saw Coleen looking, she turned away.

"Are you okay?" Coleen said. The annoyance had largely drained from her now. This was unusual. She couldn't remember seeing her mom cry in years.

"I'm fine." The voice was hoarse, terse at first, but returned to normalcy following a deep breath. "It seems wrong without her here. Jewel's always been... I don't know, Coleen. Maybe when you have kids you'll understand. Don't forget this."

"Alright," she promised, not really meaning it and not understanding at all and feeling awkward about that. And then: a flash of light drew her focus. The momentary conversation had drawn her attention away, and now the feed was commencing.

It was some minutes before Jewel appeared; she was one of the earlier students to awaken, but not the first. When she did finally show up, though, Coleen at first had to choke back a tightening in her own throat. It didn't last long, however, as Jewel got up and started to move.

"What the fuck is she doing to that fish?"

---

It wasn't long after that the calls started. There were all sorts, from friends and strangers, seeking to confirm or discuss or debate, and soon the reporters were calling too. Coleen didn't know who gave them her number. She didn't care. They all wanted to talk to her, to get her reads and feelings and history, and she was more than happy to open up to the first few, but then she realized that they weren't going to call back if she told them everything she knew right off the bat.

As time passed and the violence increased, these callers were more and more curious to hear the hints Coleen could offer. They said they'd pay her. She thought about it and doubled their asking price. They agreed to meet in the middle. She was interviewed at her dining room table, and the woman from CBS said what a nice place to live this seemed, what a beautiful home. By now, all the pictures were off the walls, though.

Someone tossed a chunk of flagstone through the living room window in the middle of the night, and Coleen made sure to assure the man from ABC who later came to interview her that yes they'd been casual friends, but it had been very one-sided. People liked to exaggerate. That she knew a lot was mostly comparative because really other people just knew so little. She could give some thoughts, but they'd just be guesses. She'd barely known the girl, really.

He didn't mind. Nobody really cared about who she had been to Jewel. After all, it wasn't like they were there to talk about her. Heaven forbid anyone ask about Coleen Harrigan.

It made sense, really. They hadn't chosen her. She'd stayed in English class and written her silly little essay for the final. She'd gone to the cafeteria and made her list. She'd watched it all on the screen, just like everyone else. The only thing that made her notable was the person she happened to have ties to who was out there in some frozen Oregon hellhole doing notable things. Lots of the other Whittree people left behind like her were probably getting ignored just because their friends were boring or already dead.

Coleen was nobody. A vessel to deliver a message. And she hated it and loved it, and all throughout whenever she could be she was glued to the feeds, checking in, tracking the progress, getting more and more confused and angry.

When the quiet boy with the purple hat from the back of class swung his metal rod and bone shattered, Coleen laughed.

A short while later, as one more corpse cooled in the snow, she screamed so loudly the neighbors came to see if someone had been hurt.

[MurderWeasel]

Los Angeles, California

As was the case on most nights closely following a season's conclusion, Helen Moreau was at a bar, working her way through martinis; she was presently nearing the bottom of her third. Marcell's wasn't quite a dive, but it definitely wasn't upscale, and this combined with its location a mile and a half from headquarters meant encounters with colleagues were infrequent. From time to time, she'd bump into a cameraman or an intern, and one of them had reported with great glee to the office that the pretty young doctor took her drinks like James Bond, but by and large she could be alone here.

She wanted to be alone tonight.

Season Sixty-Six had been a bad one. No season was good exactly—her job was amazing as long as shooting wasn't live, but for the handful of days when the core content was being produced she tended to become a frazzled wreck, and the exhaustion was only a small part of that—but Season Sixty-Six had been particularly bad, or maybe it was that Season Sixty-Five had been uncharacteristically tame and she'd let her guard down.

Her job was to watch and to educate and to update. If someone got stabbed in the chest and then fell down a flight of stairs, it was her task to figure out whether it was the stabbing or the fall that proved ultimately fatal. This was a far cry from what she'd expected to do when she entered medical school, but the pay was amazing and when there wasn't a season on she was left to sit in on commentary tracks on DVDs, to provide feedback regarding weapon lethality and what objects should or should not be removed from the arena, that sort of thing. It was easy work and if she was really frugal she could call it a day in five or ten years and retire and live well, and that kept those little concerns about the Hippocratic Oath—the Hypocritical Oath, her cousin Andrew had called it when he found out what job she'd taken, but Andrew had flunked out of his second year of nursing school and now managed a waffle house so she didn't put too much stock in what he said—at bay.

And then, of course, she had to meet with the winners and help fix them up, and that was what really brought her to the bar. It was easy to watch a recording of something that had happened days or weeks or years ago and go, "compound fracture," or "severe laceration," or "partial decapitation," harder to do it in real time but real time became the past so quickly and it was beamed from so far away it might as well have been fiction, but looking someone in the eye was different. They were, so often, badly messed up. She'd been shocked at the high survival rate of winners (at least in the short term) upon first starting to work for the program. Missing digits, destroyed eyes, damage to internal organs—none of that was particularly unusual. Many came through half-crazy, and she had no idea how Dr. Schrieber was able to stomach working with them more closely. Maybe his career to this point had given him experience she lacked. Maybe he'd simply not been with the show long enough to get worn down.

Helen was worn down after her most recent meeting. The girl had arrived conscious but battered, a catalogue of injuries familiar from the screen but given life in their physical presence, and she hadn't said much at first, even when the man assigned to tend to her tried to lift her from wheelchair to table and Helen gestured for him to stop. The initial examination had been a matter of quick confirmation: several lacerations across right hand and fingers, moderate laceration on left forearm, deep stab wound to right thigh, severely fractured and dislocated right knee, various less severe cuts and bruises and burns across the body. Then it had been a matter of closer attention, re-dressing wounds while waiting for the specialists. Helen had introduced herself, tried to lighten the mood a bit, but to no avail. There had been no initial conversation, and that had been sort of weird for Helen because even Ruiz had been willing to talk and that girl wasn't exactly known for her socialization.

As she cleaned and assessed, Helen did her best to explain each injury and to offer her thoughts on how healing would go. The stab wound would probably leave a pretty big scar, as would the damage to the palm of the right hand and the slash along the left arm, caused by a chunk of flesh being torn away by a cattle gun. It was this that finally provoked a response.

"I had a mole there," the girl said, as Helen dressed the gash. She said it like she might've pointed out that it was unseasonably warm.

"I'm sorry," Helen said. The girl did not reply. She said nothing further until Helen reached the bottom three fingers on her right hand.

"The tendons were damaged," Helen said, trying to strike a neutral tone for want of a good feel for how she was being received. "You'll have pretty limited mobility for—"

"Cut them off," the girl said, in that same flat conversational way.

Helen tried to smile.

"That won't be necessary, though you definitely won't be using them for a while. It'll be a pretty minor surgery, comparatively, but we should be able to restore full mobility."

"Cut them off," the girl said again.

"Maybe you should close your eyes," Helen said. "We'll have you in surgery soon, and it'll all be better from there."

"Cut them off."

So Helen stopped replying. She tried not to think about those fingers, cut deep enough that she'd seen bone, and how a little more pressure might have left them severed. She tried not to think about the crunch of a shattering joint, the screams, tried not to listen when the girl elaborated on her mantra as Helen came to that same crushed knee and the leg below ("Cut it off. I don't need it anymore."), was still trying not to think about it now as the sounds of Marcell's swirled around her but failed to penetrate the haze of thought.

Five or ten years. Dahnke had made it six before finally becoming such a twisted shell of a man he could no longer function in his designated capacity. Or had he always been that way, and had only found himself unable to maintain pretenses otherwise due to the degree to which his perversity was rewarded?

"You okay?"

A man had materialized at Helen's right side, just one more thing she'd shut out of her awareness. He was a young man, younger than her by maybe even half a decade, and she had to search for a moment to determine that she couldn't place him. He was a stranger.

"Fine," she said, "I'm fine."

"You sure?" He looked at her closely, and Helen felt this urge to not make eye contact but held his gaze. "Did someone put something in your drink?"

"Nobody put anything in my drink," she said. "I'm just tired. It's been a long day."

He slid onto the stool next to her like it was the only place to go.

"Tell me about it," he said, then laughed and added, "Actually, you can tell me about it if you want to."

"No I can't," Helen said. "I'm under NDA."

He whistled.

"Movies, then? You're pretty far from the boulevard."

"TV," she said, and even through the haze she could see the cogs whirling as he struggled to determine whether she meant the proper noun version or not.

"Yeah," she said, "that one."

Over by the entrance, the bouncer—a man named Gustavo in his mid-forties who dressed nicer than any of their clientele and had this little moustache as the only hair on his head—raised an eyebrow at Helen, asking without asking if she wanted her privacy to be enforced. Gustavo was a charming man, and he and Helen would sometimes sit and chat about nothing when she'd finally had enough aloneness. He always told her it was rare to have a customer as willing to listen as to talk. Helen gave him a little shake of her head; for now, the stranger was an acceptable interloper, someone giving her something else to focus on, a curious little mystery to work out.

"That's cool," he said, unaware that his fate had just been weighed, "wow."

"It's work," Helen said.

He laughed, and Helen looked more closely at him. Maybe she'd misjudged his age. His face was smooth, boyish, tan, but there were the barest beginnings of crow's feet around the edges of his eyes and his laughter held little youthful mirth.

"That's how it is," he said. "Sometimes something that seems so special for everyone else is just another day for the ones who make the magic."

"There's not much magic about it, no," Helen said.

It was getting a little quieter in Marcell's now, not because patrons were leaving just yet but because many of them were well into their drinks and falling into a soft stupor. The bartender flipped channels on the television, but blessedly it just went from sports to more sports. Helen shifted a little, finding her stool suddenly uncomfortable. The man seemed not to notice.

"What about the people you deal with?" he said. "You ever meet anyone famous? Any magic about them?"

"One or two." Was that noncommittal enough? What had seemed an innocuous conversation a few seconds ago was suddenly well on its way to centering on precisely what Helen came here to avoid.

"Yeah?" This guy just wasn't taking the hint. "What's the craziest thing you've ever seen there? I thought that whole team thing was pretty damn cool. Buy you a drink?"

"I'm fine," Helen said. "I think I've had enough drinks tonight."

She wanted maybe half a dozen more.

"How long you been there?"

"A bit. What do you do for a living?"

"Do you guys get any special merchandise or mementos?"

"Not really. Do you come here often?"

"Did you meet that one chick from the Purple Team who shot all those people?"

But now Helen was finally able to catch Gustavo's eye again, with a look that expressed her regret at having turned him down before, and he took only a few seconds to appear at their side.

"Excuse me, sir, but may I have a word with you?" he said, and so Helen's problems receded again for a time, and the bartender made his way over and poured Helen another martini to help the process along.

[MurderWeasel]

Whittree, Oklahoma

"I told you that show was wrong."

This is what Sarah Evans said to Carl before she told him she was filing for divorce on grounds of mutual incompatibility. It was the first thing she'd said to him in about two days and he looked up from the newspaper he wasn't reading and opened his mouth but then decided he actually didn't have anything to offer in return. Sarah stood there, waited, and he knew she was counting on him to say something. He'd never been very good at staying quiet. But there was nothing today.

He hadn't been lost like this when her parents died. It had been a random accident, the police said, a loss of control in inclement weather and an older car that just wasn't fully equipped to protect them. Sudden, at least. Largely painless. Carl had been just as incapable of doing anything to fix that situation, but his words had seen them through it. It had been a tragedy, but a finite one. They'd talked almost constantly in the wake of that disaster. They'd cried and held each other as they sorted through old family belongings and made the decision to move into the now-vacant home.

While he hadn't grown up here, this house had become just as much his home as Sarah's over the years. He knew the parts of the floor that creaked, the light switch in the bathroom that took a little extra force, the smell of age in the garage. It was permeated—poisoned—with memories of the last eighteen years, and so he did not object to leaving when Sarah said that was what she would prefer. Again she waited and this time Carl didn't even open his mouth.

Chloe was at a friend's house. She often was, these days. Carl wasn't really sure which friend it was (maybe that Shanika girl again?), just that they hadn't heard a word from the Harrigans so it couldn't possibly be them, and thus he could relax a little bit.

Sarah said she was going out to work her shift and said that it would probably be best if Carl wasn't there when she got back, and he finally said yeah, okay, he'd be gone. She said okay, if that's what he thought was best, and he said hadn't she just said that was what she wanted? and she said she supposed she had and then she waited again but he let her wait so after a few moments she sighed and left. Carl sat and looked at the back of the paper for a while more—he had mostly been looking at the back of the paper, though he hadn't read any of the stories regardless of their placement. Finally his eyes registered the weather report. An already-cold week was supposedly going to get even colder. He'd have to pack appropriately.

He sat for a long time before finally mustering the energy to move. When he did, he kept his actions small and efficient. He made his way from the dining room through the hall that led to the bedroom he and Sarah had shared—his first time there in a few days; he'd been sleeping in a recliner in the living room—and selected a week's worth of clothing from the closet, along with his work uniforms. He stuffed this into one of their few suitcases, leaving the current contents (a silk rose and some flyers and maps from a long-ago vacation) on the floor. He tried not to pay much attention to anything else in the closet, but he couldn't help noticing its general state of disarray. Sarah's clothes were strewn about, not folded, her sock drawer open. The boxes in the back corner, so forgotten as to have become almost as much a part of the closet geography as the shelves, had been rummaged through. What was in those boxes, anyways? Old school papers, he thought, grade school art and forgotten pictures and ancient cards and that sort of thing. He tore his eyes away and retreated.

After that, he gathered up his laptop and his phone, both of which had been turned off and intentionally forgotten for some time now. He brought them back to the dining room and pulled up Google and ignored the first few suggestions that came up when he put in "Okla" and finished his search for motels in Oklahoma City. A few were promising, suitably anonymous and cheap and on the North side of the city so he wouldn't have as long a commute to Stillwater. He could've stayed in Stillwater, of course; that would've left him closer to work than he was now. But he felt that maybe a daily commute would do him some good, and besides, if he was to be gone, it wouldn't feel right for him to only go as far as Stillwater.

So then all that was left was to book, but that meant turning his phone back on. It took Carl a while longer to hype himself up for that; first he double checked that he couldn't make the reservation online, but the best-looking spot's system was down, and then he got up and went to the kitchen and searched through the refrigerator for a while, ignoring the way the door looked wrong without any art on it. He wasn't hungry, and as he sifted through condiments and ingredients he realized this was probably the last time he'd ever open this door. There was a half-empty gallon of milk, and he'd never see it finished and replaced, and he tried to remember when he'd picked it up (must've been after his shift last Monday; that was the last time he'd done any shopping of note). After that, the phone didn't seem more awful than anything else.

He'd missed dozens of calls, but the mass was so large it was in a way easier to ignore. He dialed the hotel quickly, spoke with the clerk, who sounded simultaneously bored and irritated, and was put on hold. The nothing music seemed surreal, calm and dull and inoffensive and the first music he'd heard in days. There were, he realized, an awful lots of things like that today. It was as if he'd stepped out for almost a week, and was only now returning.

He drummed his fingers against his leg in time not with the music that was playing but with some other song he could half-remember, something poppy and vapid that they played all the time at work, and as he did this he realized that he should probably call work and let them know they didn't need to keep covering his shifts. He, as Sarah had a day ago, would be returning to the Homeland grocery store in Stillwater, across Fir Street from the First Baptist Church. He might have to ask for the schedules to be changed so he and Sarah didn't overlap as much, but that shouldn't be too hard. He had the seniority to make it happen.

Maybe, he thought, that Homeland could be his home now. It was just as filled with tainted memories, but there were distractions to be had. He had responsibilities, employees to look after, angry customers to placate, tasks to do every single day, even if they meant little in the grand scheme of things. He could lose himself in the canned pop music. Carl had never much been one for music, though for a time he'd tried to understand it. He didn't know what made someone go to a song decades older than them again and again, especially a piercing caterwaul of a song, but he'd tried to at least pretend. Maybe he just been in the right place in his life. Right now, a scream would've made more sense than the tinkling of synthesized piano.

The clerk came back and told him that they could take his reservation. It wouldn't be too expensive, and besides money wasn't that important to him right now, and so he booked and then made the calls he had to for work. Kenneth asked if he was really sure he was ready to come back, and then told him they'd have backup on hand anyways in case he had to go home early, and Carl said thanks and didn't know whether to feel grateful for or offended by his manager's care and willingness to take precautions. He was fine. He would be fine.

And then, before Carl could turn his phone off, it rang. The number was one he'd never seen in his life, an area code he didn't know, identified by the Caller ID as Los Angeles, California.

He knew as he picked up that it was a bad idea.

For a long few seconds, there was nothing. Silence. Then a faint sound—static, or breathing? Then, finally: "Hello?"

Carl hung up, silencing the almost-familiar voice. He turned off his phone and then turned off his laptop and returned to his packing. Snow might be coming, and he didn't want to be on the roads too late.

[MurderWeasel]

TV Shows > SOTF-TV > Season 66 ♥ Follow/Fav The Answers to Questions
By: Lily♥Harper
I thought the resolution between Jewel and Douglas was a little disappointing, so here's how I like to imagine it happened. Constructive criticism only please!
Rated: Fiction M – English – Romance – Words: 2,331 – Reviews: 4 – Favs: 3 – Follows: 12 – Updated: 3h ago – Published: December 22, 2020 – id: 14648786

A+ A- A ☰ T| ◑

"It's been a while," Jewel said, coming into the room. It was now even more trashed than she'd left it, with her belongings torn apart and spread across the floor. Her eyes traced over the chaos, lighting momentarily on her shredded jacket before finally alighting on the one responsible for all of this: Douglas. It had been some time since she'd seen him, but he looked much as he had before, though now with dark stubble speckling his dark face.

"How've you been?" Jewel said.

Douglad did not respond, just tapped the metal bar he held against his open hand. It made a solid smacking sound, and Jewel couldn't help but notice his powerful build, muscles rippling almost unconsciously, and also that he hadn't answered her question.

"You're not very good at answering questions," Jewel said. "I think that's kind of rude."

Douglas thought about that for a second. He looked at the girl before him, his eyes tracing over her pale face, the dark shirt and pants she wore. It wasn't what she'd been wearing last time they met, he'd shreaded those clothes, trying not to think too much about the shape the skirt had taken as it hugged her hips while he savagely ripped it to ribbons. These clothes she wore now did not fit as well, but they did not mask that she walked with a little limp.

"I'm sorry I don't want to answer questions for a murderer," Douglas said, reminding himself at the same time he reminded her that she had torn the lfie from so many innocents. This girl in front of him was evil, and more than that she was tricky.

"I'm just trying to express concern for you," Jewel said. "Is that so awful? And besides, it's not like I killed anyone you care about."

He thought about that. Was it true? Could it be? Everything in his life had taught him that such things were simple, as light and dark as his face compared to hers. He strained his memory, trying to refute what she was saying, but he realized that she had only killed strangers... with one exception.

"What about Soren?" Douglas challenged.

"Did you really like Soren?" Jewel said. And Douglas realized it was true, he barely even knew Soren. Jewel had not done anything to him.

"So I think you owe me an answe," Jewel said.

"I guess I didn't like Soren," Douglas said. Jewel rolled hr eyes. "No, I mean how are you doing?"

"Oh. I guess I'm alright."

"That's good."

"How are you?"

"I'm not too good," Jewel said.

"What's wrong?" Douglas looked at her face, taking in the curves of her cheeks, the soft swell of her lips which were puckered slightly in displeasure.

"You tore up all my stuff" Jewel said "and also I got stabbed earlier."

"I'm sorry," Douglas said. "Are you allright?"

"I think so, but my leg hurts still."

"I can't fix you stuff, but maybe I can help with your leg," Douglas said. His eyes traced over Jewel's legs, but he couldn't tell where the injury was. The loose track pants made it hard to tell where cloth was meeting flesh and where it hid only air.

"I guess that would be nice." Jewel said. "Most people have just tried to kill me.

"Follow me then." DOuglas stood up and started walking deeper into the condo. He didn't want to try to do anything medical in the room he'd been waiting in, because it was filthy and trashed, and he didn't want to make things worse by getting germs into her wound. Jewel tried to follow him but she stumbled, so Douglas moved to her side and supported her. She was a tall girl, but he still towered over her, and as she clung to his side for stability her warmth seeped into him. There progress down the hall was slow, so Douglas turned them into the first clean spot her could find, a bedroom that was miraculously in pecrfect condition.

Jewel sat down on the bed and Douglas sat next to her. He put his bag and the metal bar down on the floor.

"Okay where are you hurt?"

"It's here" Jewel said, gesturing at her thigh. But Douglas still couldn't see anything.

"I can't see," he said. "I think you'll need to take off your pants."

Jewel blushed bright red. She hadn't really thought about this part, but Douglas was right. He wouldn't be able to do anything for her if he couldn't see. She tucked her fingers under the wasteband of her pants and tugged them down slightly, but cried out in pain when she accidentally touched her injury. Changing again had been a mistake. The costume had left her much more exposed and vulnerable, but that would have been to her advantage now. She'd felt embarrassed by it at first. The skirt had been maybe two thirds the length of the one she'd worn at the start of the game, long enough that she could still move around freely but short enough to be a persistent threat to hr modesty to the point that she'd left her tights on under it. The top had been worse. The low-cut crop top had left her shivering in the cold, but had offered the potential strategic advantage of a distraction. That had been mitigated abit by the bulky white lab coat she'd worn, but she'd left it open to offer a flash of cleavage and navel to those who saw her. Style was important.

Douglas moved to her and gently pushed her hands aside, then slid her pants over her hips in one fluid motion. He dropped them off the edge of the bed, to pool on the floor. He could see now that she had bandaged herself. He tried not to let the bright red swatch of cloth a few inches above the injury distract him. It was funny though, ten minutes ago he was plannign to kill Jewel and now he was looking at her panties.

He looked up and Jewel was frowning at him. He hoped she hadn't noticed his peeking. He was supposed to be helping her. Quickly, he unwrapped the wound on her leg. It was not actually very bad, though. It was a medium cut, but the bleeding had mostly stopped, so Douglas took some liquid bandage out of the medkit and sealed the wound the rest of the way and then started wrapping it up again.

"Does that feel better?" he asked? Jewel had to lift her leg so he could wrap it right with the gauze, and as he asked his fingers trailed over her inner thigh and She moaned a litle.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes I'm fine. Just finish wrapping it."

With Jewel's leg up, he had an even better view than before and though he tried not to look he kept peeking at her. She seemed to notice it too, and when he'd finished wrapped her leg he rested his hand on top of the bandage on her thigh. Her skin was soft to the touch, cool and yet warm, and when Douglas looked into Jewels eyes he saw that her face was very red but she was smiling.

"Thank you," she said.

"It was no problem," he replied. He moved to remove his hand, but the corners of her lips turned down, so he laid the hand back down on her thigh, and when she softly exhaled he let his fingers trace around to her inner thigh, then venture upwards.

"What are you doing?" jewle said.

"I can stop," Douglass said as his fingers moved from skin to cloth, then began to message gently.

"Ah no," Jewel said. "Don't stop."

He rotated his body to lay beside her on the bed and brought his lips to hers. They were smooth and soft and tasted a little coppery, like sweet blood. Her tongue came out of her mouth and into his and wrapped around his.

Douglas moved his hand away now, ignoring Jewel's grumble of protest, and lifted her shirt over her head, then undid her bra and pulled it off, never breaking the kiss as he cupped her bare breasts. They were large, probably DD cup, since they filled his massive hands and overflowed. Jewel turned bright red and tried to hide her face but couldn't because she was still kissing Doug. No boy had ever seen her like this before but now she was laid almost completely bare in front of Douglas and also millions of people watching on their TVs, only her panties preserving slight modesty. She should be ashamed and she was but she was also excited. She was probably going to die here, so why not have some fun first? She pulled at Douglas's shirt and belt, and before she knew it he was all the way naked.

Jewel ran her fingers down his chesttrailing them past his belly button to finally garsp him. She felt him stiffen and leaned over to take him briefly into her mouth. He was very large, salty and sweet at the same time, kind of like a pineapple. Douglas gasped and ran his hands over Jewel's face, then reached down to pinch her nipple, making her squirm a little. She ran her tongue along the underside of his shaft, bobbing her head back and forth, and he groaned and thrusted in time with her, making her choke and cough a little on his engorgement. A dribble of saliva dripped from the corner of her mouth. He felt himself getting close and increased the pressure on her now stiff nipple to distract him, and she moaned a little but then he put his hand on her forehead and pushed her off him. drops of spit dripped off of him and landed on her breats, glistening softly in the dim light.

"Damn," he said, "you're good."

Then he pushed her back onto the bed, enjoying how her breasts jiggled when she landed, slipped her panties off, and spread her legs. He admired her soft and secret folds for a moment, noticing that she must have shaved shortly before the game, then entered her. She was already wet and her spit lubricated his shaft so he was able to bury himself in her in one smooth motion despite his considerable girth. She let out a cry that sounded pained for a split second but then became a clear expression of pleasure, and she wrapped her legs around him, drawing him further in. He leaned forward as they began to move together, runing his tongue over her niples and then up her neck to her mouth, where they kissed again.

Jewel moaned loudly as they tangled together, Douglas being careful not to be to rough on her injured leg. They fit together perfectly, and with each movement she felt him stretching her, exploring new corners of her that she didn't know existed. His pwerful arms held her closely, guiding her in this activity she knew nothing of to maximize his own pleasure and hers. She heard the wet smacking sound that accomapnied each thrust and each stab of pleasure and groaned and kissed him harder, grinding her hips into his.

Finally Douglas could take no more. They're rythym reached it's peek and he felt her finish, and a second later her pulsations pushed him over the edge and he did too. They lay there for a time, kissing and running their hands over each other's bodies. he toyed with her breasts again, marvelling at their supple firmness. Finally, when he was fully spent, he slipped out of her.

Jewel lay there for a time, lost in the glow. She felt Douglas withdraw, and felt his warmth trickle down her thighs. Her eyes were closed. She hsould have gotten to know DOuglas long before. She could never have imagined he would be this good. She wasn't even that mad that they'd both forgotten that there were always condoms in the backpacks. It was sort of funny, relly. When she opened her eyes to tell him, though, she saw Douglas was now wearing his boxers again and was holding the metal bar.

"What are you doing?" she asked, before he brough the bar down again and again. Jewel screamed and tried to squirm away but she was too slow, and the heavy metal slammed into her skull. The pain was intense. She felt something cracking, shattering, leaking out of her, and screamed and screamed.

Douglas brought the bar down again and again. He watched the beautiful features before him contort and shatter, watched as flecks of skull mingled with the sludge of blood and grey brain pulp and loose teeth and a stray eyeball. Only when that face had been fully erased did he lowered the weapon. After finding sexual release, his mind had become clearer, and he had realized he had been right all along. Jewel had killed nine people, and that didn't happen by mistake. She was dangerous, a menace who needed to be ut down, and now she had been. Still, some part of him thought fondly of the final moments they had enjoyed together, as he ran his eyes over her now blood-splattered and headless nude form. In another life, who knows?

A/N: Wow, this has gotten very popular. owo I changed the ending a little because its going to be longer and I thought it should be a bit more dramatic. In the next chapter Jewel wakes up in Hell where she finds Zachary Johnston and gets to know him very closely. Also I may do a prologue chapter with Jewel and Sarah, because remember it's only boys seeing Jewel naked that's new to her. ;-) Any constructive criticism is welcome but if you're a troll like that guy who said in a review that I was racist and got everything wrong don't bother because I won't even read it.

Reviews for The Answers to Questions
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I thought the story was pretty good! I don't really like the Jewel/Dougie ship, but you have a knack for writing sensual scenes and I am VERY interested in your teased prologue. :-o I think you could do a lot with a more tender scene, but I do wish the ending wasn't quite so gory. I know a lot of people wish Jewel had paid but I think this goes a little too far! It sounds like maybe the first draft wasn't like that? Can I read it maybe? :-o

dougie is super sexy but i don't think he'd want to go with a tramp like jewel. it's hot to imagine though

Don't be discouraged by the meanie below! I thought your story was very good and super sexy. It's okay to change details sometimes... it's called IMAGINATION. I do think there could maybe be a little more at the end, though? They just go their own ways after such a passionate experience, and that feels like a missed opportunity. Or are you going to expand it later?

I'll try to be nice about this but the short of it is that your story has a whole lot of really really big problems. First off, if you're going to take an actual scene and then jump off from there, it's important to understand why things happened how they did and to make clear what's changing. You've changed all sorts of things without letting the reader know exactly what or why; ex. you made Jewel's stab wound really minor and totally ignored all the other injuries she had, like her torn up hand and the chunk that kid with the cattle gun took out of her arm.

You also have a lot of things here that are factually incorrect. I can let some assumptions go (I think it's sort of a stretch to frame a girl like Jewel as a shy virgin but I guess we technically don't know anything for sure since she didn't ever say anything about it during the game, but she sure didn't come off like that to me). But when you say she's a DD cup we can figure out pretty easily that's nonsense. It's not like it's that hard if you actually watched the season, she changed on camera twice and also spent almost a day running around in that costume that you spent ages describing that showed quite a bit. You clearly didn't proofread so well either, since this is full of typos and also Dougie somehow gets Jewel's shirt and bra off without ever breaking the kiss. I'd like to see you pull a t-shirt off while kissing someone the whole time.

There are also elements of this fic that are just in poor taste. You assume Dougie has a huge dick, what, because he's black? Shame on you.

[MurderWeasel]

Whittree, Oklahoma

These were the facts, as near as they could be established:

Chloe Evans was walking the mile and a half home from a friend's house alone, something that would have been unthinkable a week and a half before but had since become almost routine.

A vehicle, allegedly a black SUV, pulled abreast of her, crossing into the oncoming lane. No other vehicles were on the road.

The windows facing her rolled down. The occupants shouted something at her. The voices suggested three or more people.

It was unclear whether or not she attempted to flee.

One of the occupants threw a chunk of flagstone, which caught Chole in the temple, causing a laceration and knocking her off-balance. She fell backwards and landed on the sidewalk, fracturing her skull.

The sole witness, a seventy-four-year-old man named Donald Ragland, had been preoccupied shoveling snow in his driveway and hadn't immediately realized the import. He at first thought Evans had slipped and fallen, but when she didn't move for half a minute he crossed the street to check on her, promptly calling 911 after realizing her injuries were severe.

An ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later, during which time Evans did not regain consciousness. She was conveyed to Stillwater Medical Center, where she underwent emergency surgery to reduce swelling in her brain.

---

While Chloe Evans was still undergoing surgery, Inspector Francis Duran of the Stillwater Police Department was being briefed on and tasked with investigating the assault. He immediately realized this would be complicated. Whittree was a small, sleepy little community; a bit more than six thousand inhabitants left it just over an eighth the size of Stillwater. Duran spent a decent amount of his time around Whittree—he grew up there, was himself an alumnus of Whittree Secondary, even if he now lived a few blocks from OSU—and that gave him an access to the community that many of the other officers lacked. While Stillwater and Whittree were close neighbors, and kids from both communities attended the other's schools, the Whittree people could be a little different, a little more closed off. Duran could navigate that.

Giving a nod and a brief confirmation to Chief Rohn, Duran gathered his equipment, including a pocket recorder and a number of notepads, then made his way to his car. He was already busily concocting possibilities. Some investigators preferred to keep their minds entirely open, but Duran had always found it best to mull every potential solution he could. The end result, he suspected, was much the same: a willingness to base conclusions on the facts rather than preconceived or convenient notions.

The attack on Evans could've been a random act of violence, but that was improbable in the extreme. Whittree was too small for that, the target too high profile. No, this was a celebrity thing, and almost certainly an act of revenge.

Duran watched SOTF in his spare time. He wasn't a dedicated fan, but it was interesting and he told himself it helped him in his job. It taught him the language so many others spoke, gave him some common ground to shoot the shit with most of the folks he encountered in the course of his duties, and it also helped him understand how people reacted when under pressure. It gave him insights into the motivations that drove many to extreme reactions, and that was valuable. Without the show, he'd likely have had a much harder time telling when someone was ready to throw down and when they were only bluffing. He'd certainly have never otherwise believed just how dangerous teenagers could be.

His keys scraped at the ignition and he frowned, took a deep breath, and centered himself. He had to focus. Possibilities were fine, but they couldn't become a distraction. There was snow on the roads, and a lot of the college kids came from climates where that was rare. Most of them were home on break, but it wouldn't do at all to get rear-ended by some trust-fundee from Alabama. So he pulled out carefully, attentive to his surroundings. It was six in the evening. Rush hour was largely past, but there were still some straggling commuters on the road. A red pickup in front of him was tailgating a blue sedan. Duran gave it plenty of room. When he first started as a beat cop, he might've flashed his lights just to give them a little scare. Now, such pettiness was beneath him. He made himself focus enough to get into a groove, find the right distance to give the truck and ride it, and then he let himself return to his process.

These past few weeks had been a shock to Stillwater and Whittree. It seemed almost everyone knew someone (or at least someone who knew someone) who'd been affected. Duran himself had scoured the feed for some recognition, some familiar face he might've picked up after a party gone wrong or talked to for a little while extra on career day, but there had been nothing of the sort. For him, it was like any other season. After a while, he'd even been able to lean back and pick favorites.

Chloe's sister had not been one of his favorites. Duran wasn't exactly romantic about his job, but at the end of the day he believed in helping people, in doing what was best for the greater masses, in loyalty and friendship. That didn't gel with cheering on unrepentant murderers, even when they were playing for the home team. There'd been moments—moments near the end, mainly—where he'd questioned his understanding of her actions a little, but the killings were just too many. He'd clicked the TV off in mild disgust upon her release.

Someone else out there had done much the same thing, but instead of going and getting a rare second beer from the fridge and watching old music videos for a kick of nostalgia, this person had stewed and plotted and then had actually taken the initiative to bring their hatred to life. It wasn't total certainty, but close enough. In doing so, they had landed themselves in Duran's crosshairs, and they had in doing so given him that connection he had lacked. He was now tied to the Evans family in a way. He was glad he'd only gained that status after the season ended.

He wanted to believe his mysterious perp was someone from Albuquerque. It was maybe nine hours' drive, and the attack came on the fourth day following the Evans girl's release. Plenty of time. If it was an Albuquerque person, that meant Duran would in all likelihood never come close to solving the case—perhaps the FBI would roll in, especially if the victim ultimately died, or perhaps it would be left one more unsolved mystery—but that was something he could accept.

But the easy, palatable answer was so very often not the right one, and it was the other possibilities that had Duran ever so slightly anxious as he flipped on the windshield wipers to clear away the scant flakes of snow falling once more and accelerated to pass the red truck.

---

"I'm not totally sure nobody knew she was here, no." Shanika Stoll shifted nervously as she looked at Duran, and that made him think there was a high probability that she knew very well her visit with Chloe Evans was no secret.

"You don't remember mentioning it online? Or to any other friends?"

"I mean, I might have? Or maybe mom said something."

Shanika was a sophomore, one year older than Evans, and she and her parents, Shirley and Jason, were the ones who had seen Evans off on her way home prior to the attack. Duran had learned that Shanika and Evans were initially casual friends, but that Evans had been spending a lot of time out of the house lately and the Stolls were one of the families most welcoming to her; others (including the Harrigans, who had allegedly been quite close with her sister and had declined to speak with Duran at length) had become frosty or distant.

Shanika was an only child, her household lower-middle-class. She liked SOTF but hadn't been watching this season—said it was "too weird." She was not a popular girl at school, but she also resided in that social strata where she wasn't picked on much. She was short and thin, but her face had a certain chubbiness and she wore braces with bright red bands which combined with unfortunate pigtails to make her look about twelve. She talked a lot, even when she was trying not to say something, and while her parents had initially stymied the flow of accidental revelations, Duran had convinced them to leave him to interview her alone after promising that he wasn't presently looking at them as suspects. Jason had since left for work; Shirley was in the living room pretending to watch television but casting glances towards Duran and her daughter every few seconds. Shanika had volunteered that she'd caught some criticism from other classmates for her friendship with Evans, but that she didn't care; it was even a little exciting to be friends with someone sort of almost famous and to stand up to jerks, though she really hoped Evans would be okay because getting hurt like that was such a horrible thing.

Duran scribbled in one of his notepads. It was all for show—this conversation was being recorded—but Shanika's eyes followed the pen and she started nibbling her lower lip. The lacquered surface of the wooden table reflected the streetlight outside, with little black lines of interference signalling the branches of the tree outside the window being tossed by the wind. A glass of water sat to Duran's left, untouched on a coaster featuring Kenny Yamana making a funny face. Kenny was another SOTF person Duran hadn't been too fond of, though Kenny had redeemed himself somewhat in Duran's eyes since; it was easier to move past killings that had occurred back when Duran was still in academy when the guy responsible was also pretty badass in the movies Duran went to see from time to time when he felt too lonely to stay in.

"Oh," Shanika said, "actually I think maybe I told some people?"

Duran stopped writing and raised his eyes to Shanika's. He left his mouth a straight line and waited, and she fidgeted some more and examined her hands.

"I mean, I didn't exactly tell anyone specific. I just said on Facebook we were hanging out a lot and that she'd be over today."

"And did anyone say anything in reply?" Duran said. Then, after a second's further thought, added, "Before she got hurt, I mean."

"One or two people." Shanika said. "Maybe three or four."

She paused again, then dug into her pocket and pulled out her phone.

"I can show you if you want."

---

"I think it's a damn shame, what happened to the Evans girl. But it's not unique. Lots of people get hurt in accidents."

Glenn Fitzwater was in his late twenties, his head of curly brown hair already starting to thin up top. He wore a perpetual smirk that could have strained Duran's devotion to attempted objectivity. Fortunately, there were plenty of rational reasons to think Fitzwater an untrustworthy individual.

"I don't think there's much accidental about someone throwing a brick at her."

They were sitting on Fitzwater's porch, watching the occasional vehicle pass. Fitzwater himself didn't drive, or at least not at the moment—suspended license for one too many DUIs—but he liked to talk about cars, calling almost all of the ones that went by either "a beauty" or "a heap." He was a distant cousin of Jason Stott's, and the only person over eighteen to reply to Shanika's Facebook announcement of Chloe Evan's visit. His commentary had consisted of nothing but a winky emote, and he'd been the hardest for Duran to secure an interview with; it had taken two days of calls for the man to agree to meet, and he had declined to allow Duran into his house. The air was chilly, and they both breathed puffs of steam.

Fitzwater shrugged.

"You know how it is," he said. "Kids see cartoons, think violence like that isn't serious. Maybe someone was just trying to scare her."

"Any particular reason you think it was a kid who did this?"

Fitzwater took a pull from his can of Coors (he hadn't offered Duran so much as a glass of water) and shrugged again.

"Who else would it be? Adults know better than to pull that shit, even if they want to. Someone probably borrowed Mommy's car and got some friends together."

"You're awfully blasé about all this," Duran said. "A family's really scared for their daughter. They might lose her."

"Oh no." Fitzwater drawled the last syllable, held it for a solid second. "A family might lose their kid. That's real sad. Nobody's ever faced that before. My heart breaks for the Evans family and their unique situation, that nobody in this community can relate to."

"Even if you're mad at the older girl, it's not right to involve bystanders." Duran took a moment to center himself after almost barking these words out. He had to remember that he was on the job and was to be professional, and moreover that Fitzwater wasn't the sole face of these sentiments. He'd even heard them whispered around the station, and had to look one of the beat cops dead in the eye and tell him to shut the hell up, he wasn't Dirty Harry and justice wasn't beating up someone the person you had a grudge against cared about because you couldn't reach your real target.

Duran was building up the possibilities in his head. He didn't think Fitzwater had been the driver, and probably not the one who threw the brick. Maybe he wasn't even there. But the man knew something. His anger ran deep and disproportionate, and that got Duran's instincts engaged. Fitzwater was clever perhaps, but not intelligent. If he was involved, he'd slip up and tell someone—already had slipped up and told someone, in all likelihood—and the information would come out eventually. But a pretty plausible scenario was that he'd merely relayed the information to someone else who shared his sentiments, and that meant he'd be unlikely to go down for much.

"I'm just saying how I feel," Fitzwater said. "Whittree's had a lot of tragedy. This one's not that different, except that the family it hit is responsible for their share of pain too. I didn't have anything to do with it. Never would."

"And if you knew anything, you'd of course report it right away."

"Of course. But there's no way I'd ever hear anything about that. I don't hear much. This is a real quiet town, and I think, if you don't mind my saying, this one's probably not gonna get solved."

---

"It's okay. It's okay. Just calm down and sit still." Duran reached towards Chloe Evans, then pulled up short. The girl's eyes were wide, scared. She had awoken from her coma twelve hours before, but had soon needed rest once again; he had been at her bedside whenever possible since. Her parents had both been here already, but were out for the moment; there was a tension and anger the crackled between them that the doctors wanted to insulate Chloe from for the time being.

The girl raised her hand towards her head, as if to scratch at it, but paused when her fingers encountered the bandage. She groaned something inarticulate. Duran pressed the call button on her bed. The nurses here were on alert; he had no doubt they'd arrive presently. They were treating her well. She was, after all, their highest-profile patient. The news had been all over it, to the extent it could be around a minor with uncooperative guardians. That lack of caving to the chance at easy fame made Duran respect the Evans adults a little more.

"Where am I?" Chloe's voice was soft and slurred. Nobody was sure the extent of the damage yet, but the doctors had rumbled about a worst-case scenario involving permanent (or at least lasting) difficulties, and a best-case involving weeks or months of rehabilitation. Duran tried not to listen to such things. That would be information for the prosecutors, for the insurance agents, for Chloe and her family and those involved in her care. The financial aspect had already been handled, at least, courtesy of a small, slick man in a sharp suit who said he was from LA and who Chloe's parents wouldn't talk to but would take money from.

"You're at the hospital," Duran said. "You fell."

"I fell?" She blinked. Her hazel eyes were not focusing well on his face.

"There was a car. Do you remember the car?"

"I don't remember anything," Chloe said. She closed her eyes, and Duran thought she might be lapsing back into sleep. For a few seconds all was quiet and still.

Then: "Wait. They took her, didn't they?"

[MurderWeasel]

Albuquerque, New Mexico

It wasn't a very fucking merry Christmas for Harry Cobb when he got the call at five in the morning.

"Hey, Harry," his boss said, "remember how you said you need overtime? Get your ass over to Old Town. We've got some shit that needs cleaning. Bring a ladder. Big one. Merry Christmas."

After getting the details, Harry had rolled out of bed and showered and pulled on his long underwear and work shirt and overalls and then grabbed his biggest ladder and gone down to his truck, which made this rattling noise every time he cranked up the heat. That was part of why he needed overtime, actually; Harry did a lot of maintenance stuff at various places around the city but that didn't mean he knew the front from the ass of a car. He knew how to talk the talk to keep the mechanics from bullshitting him—yeah, sure, filter you pulled out that's never been changed, save me hundreds on gas—but he couldn't do the work himself if it was more than changing the oil or a tire, and a weird rattling sound probably meant some belt he'd never heard of that'd run him a couple hundred.

So yeah, okay, Harry would go to the goddamn mall and deal with the vandalism. He'd round his hours up and his boss wouldn't say shit about that because Harry was one of the handful of employees sticking around town and he was the only one without family nearby or kids or some romantic partner, so he was basically the only choice for Christmas Morning. And that was fine. Harry was reliable, just as long as he got paid.

He turned on the radio and Christmas music came out and he growled and flicked the dial. Last night after work he'd gone to the bar and had a few—just enough to get buzzed, somewhere between two and four if you weren't a cop and half of one if you were—and then on the way home he'd been hit by this real powerful nostalgia for when he was a kid and wanted Legos for Christmas every year and would sneak down before his parents woke up and shake the boxes listening for that unmistakable rattling and then sneak back upstairs and lie in bed checking the Lego catalogue and trying to figure out what he'd got from the sizes of the boxes. He hadn't even seen a Lego in maybe ten, fifteen years—the sets when he was a kid were all unbranded stuff, pirates and aliens and knights, and he'd heard that was a thing of the past, and his mom had probably donated all his shit to her church or something before she had her heart attack and he'd only learned way later that it was worth real money—but he turned his truck around and went to Target and bought the biggest damn Lego set he could and when the bored pimply teenager working the late Christmas Eve shift asked him if he wanted a gift receipt he said, "Nah, this's for me." And then he'd searched the channels until he found one blasting Frosty the Fucking Snowman which he'd always hated even when he was a kid, and he drove home and saw flashing lights at one point but pulled over and the cop drove right on past—real Christmas miracle right there—and then he went home and tried to put the huge-ass set together, but his eyes were kind of bleary and the pieces were bright colors and it was licensed for some cartoon he'd never heard of so five steps in he'd shrugged, gotten up to take a piss, and then gone to bed instead of back to his desk. That whole little excursion was the source of the surprise Christmas music.

Unfortunately, most channels were caught up in the Christmas bullshit. Harry kept his eyes on the road—a real kicker of a storm had rolled through a few days ago and even though the streets were mostly slush it was early enough that some of that slush had frozen into black ice. While there was mild appeal to the thought of junking his truck and starting fresh, Harry knew that in the real world insurance companies paid you as little as they had to and the shittiness of his current ride would be nothing compared to the abysmal state of whatever replacement he could scrape together. So he was groping for the radio controls without really looking at them, but he managed well enough to turn the scanner over to AM and thence to find something besides whistling hooting elves.

Harry's salvation was talk radio. It was about SOTF because election season was over and no real sports were on and what else was worth talking about? The woman speaking was going on about team dynamics and something or other about the social contract.

Harry had watched some of the last season, but not that much. He knew a guy who knew a woman who'd lost her son to it—Christine something, apparently she'd been pretty inconsolable—but that was as close as it'd come to touching Harry personally. Albuquerque was a big city, and Harry lived on the other side from that school. And it was, of course, a school that SOTF had built for them, so it wasn't like the fuckers didn't have a bit of a claim to those kids, when you really thought about it.

"I feel," the woman said, "that the presence of mentors changes the dynamics of authority greatly, providing an alternate outlet for rebellion or adulation-seeking. Personally, I found that even fairly direct advice would sometimes be received with confusion or anger."

"Thank you, Dr. Warren," said the host. "And what do you think about that claim, Mr. Bogan?"

"Well, while of course Cecelia has more direct experience in both SOTF and these fields than I do, I think it's an oversimplification to state—"

The scream of multiple horns drowned out the rest of the sentence. Harry had been cruising towards a stoplight where he had the right of way, but a van blew through the red. A split second later, there was a smash; a blue sedan going the opposite direction as Harry had slammed into the van. Harry himself slammed on the brakes, but the road was slick and for a second they failed.

So, he thought, this was how he was going to die, but then muscle memory kicked in and he pumped the brakes like he'd learned back when he was sixteen in Driver's Ed and the truck slowed, and the people behind him had some nice four-wheel-drive SUV and they probably didn't have to pump their brakes. Harry pulled up just shy of the intersection. The van and the sedan had been carried a little ways by their crash, and as Harry watched a dazed-looking bald man in an ugly red sweater pulled himself out of the sedan and started pounding on the hood of the van, shouting. The van's driver was a young-looking black girl, and she glanced back and forth, eyes wide. It had all seemed so fast, and it looked like both vehicles were well and truly fucked, but the people weren't bleeding so far as Harry could tell.

Well, Merry fucking Christmas to them too. Harry thought about stopping for a moment. They might need witnesses, or help of some sort. The fancy red SUV behind him was pulling over. But that meant someone else had it under control. It was Christmas. Harry was only up this early to do a job. If he stopped to help these people—people who'd gone and made him think he was going to die for their stupidity—then he'd be late in handling his business and later back home and his whole day would get somehow messier.

So when the light turned in his favor again, he cruised around the stopped vehicles, pretended not to see how the man's face almost matched his sweater as he pounded away on the van's hood, and carried on.

"—and I'd like to thank you once again for joining us today. Dr. Cecelia Warren has an article forthcoming next month discussing her involvement in Season Sixty-Six."

---

It was a real pain in the ass getting the damn job done.

When Harry arrived he immediately saw why his presence was required, and also why he needed the big ladder. It was more striking than how his boss had described it. There was this huge Christmas tree right by the parking lot for Old Town and someone had hung a mannequin from it. That hanging was literal—the noose was awkwardly draped over the top of the tree, and a number of ornaments had fallen and shattered, presumably while whoever was hurling the mannequin or securing the rope. It was a female mannequin, black wig and black skirt and stockings and a black shirt with some red on it but Harry couldn't quite tell what it was of because someone had stabbed the mannequin in the chest with a chef's knife to pin a piece of paper to it. That paper was also impossible to read from where Harry was; it was a bit too dark still and the letters were pretty small, which Proved (as if more evidence was required) that whoever was responsible hadn't thought this through all that well.

Harry was pretty glad he'd been warned, though. It was a ghoulish spectacle, and he might've actually thought that was a person up there if he'd been a little less informed and a little more hungover.

The first thing he did was lay out the yellow caution signs and sweep up all the shattered glass from the ornaments, because if he fucked up and fell off the ladder or tripped or something he didn't want to land in broken glass. There were a few people wandering around and some of them seemed to take his presence as permission to get curious about the tree and its unusual occupant. They came over and looked at Harry for a bit and then when he didn't acknowledge them they pointed and gawked up at the mannequin.

"What's it say?" a young woman said. The guy with her squinted and Harry felt this flash of annoyance.

"Can't tell," the guy said. Then he turned and called to Harry, "Hey, what's that say?"

"Dunno," Harry growled. He sort of liked it when his gut reactions were justified like this. "I'm just the cleaning guy."

The couple looked at it a bit longer, so Harry mumbled "Merry Christmas," to them, and apparently that satisfied them enough to make them leave. The other onlookers soon followed. Nobody wanted to waste Christmas Morning on this shit. If Harry wasn't getting holiday overtime pay, he thought, he might've told his boss to go hug a trash fire.

The sun was coming up fully by the time Harry set up the ladder. The metal rungs were cool to the touch, even through the fingerless gloves he had on. He made his way up to the mannequin and grappled with it a little, trying to undo the noose, but it was tied pretty tight and Harry wasn't trained in fucking noose-tying, so he got out his knife and sawed through the rope, bracing himself against tree and ladder so as to hopefully stabilize both. He had this horrible image of the ladder falling away, leaving him clinging to a tree thirty feet up or toppling down crashing through branches and ornaments with the mannequin landing on top of him, but that didn't happen.

He got it unsecured, and that made it easier to pull the rest of the rope loose and let it drop. Then he tucked his knife into his belt and descended the ladder, holding the mannequin awkwardly by the left arm. It bobbled stiffly along like the hunk of plastic it was. At the bottom, Harry wrestled it to the ground and finally looked at the sheet of paper pinned to the chest.

"NO FORGIVENESS FOR MURDERERS," it read.

The mannequin was wearing an SOTF shirt, he saw now, some angry-looking kid's face in bright red. In fact, the getup looked awfully familiar. It was more or less what the girl had been wearing, the one his coworkers had bitched about, the one who'd been preying on Albuquerque kids and who had made it out on their deaths. Harry had grumbled along with the others, but he hadn't really been able to muster actual outrage.

His boss had told him that this was a vandalism case, some sort of prank gone awry, but this looked like it was a shitload bigger a deal than that to Harry. This wasn't the first piece of trouble that girl had kicked up in Albuquerque's population; a bunch of underclassmen over at the school had made a huge-ass bonfire and burned her in effigy and accidentally incinerated a bush back while the game was still going. The cops had been involved, and there was talk of school suspensions, but a bunch of people had been on the kids' side and it was probably still being duked out in the letters to the editor page of the Albuquerque Journal. Harry wondered for a moment whether he should call the police about this incident. Presumably, whoever noticed and sent for his boss and thus him hadn't paid close attention in the dark and hadn't quite figured out what was going on. This would kick up that editorial hornet's nest all over again.

But talking with the cops would eat up more time, and it wasn't like that girl was going to be coming through Albuquerque anytime soon anyways, or not without some good security if she knew what was good for her, so Harry hoisted her doppelganger over his shoulders and carried it around back and tossed it in the dumpster. He thought for a second, then reached back in and grabbed the knife. It wasn't an amazing chef's knife, but he thought it'd probably been at least thirty, forty bucks, and his favorite knife at home was getting pretty dull.

He tucked his new acquisition into his tool belt, then packed away the ladder and the signs and got back into his truck and drove for home, already rounding an extra hour into his report to his boss. The talk show had ended and there was more Christmas music, but he was okay with it again. He was going home, and he had some beers in the fridge, and he had that Lego set he had to work on if he wasn't going to feel like a total idiot.

[MurderWeasel]

Los Angeles, California

"Ms. Ruiz, pardon the interruption, but you may be aware that your feat from last season—earning your release via the new ten-kill mechanic—has recently been replicated. Do you have anything to say to or about the second contestant to secure victory under the rule?"

"No."

[MurderWeasel]

Los Angeles, California

Being nostalgic for Season Sixty-One was not the only reason Patricia Schloss was going to Hell, but it was certainly a contributing factor. Of the now-ten seasons of her time with SOTF, she reflected as she stood in line at Best Buy and tried to keep her impatience from showing, it had been the calmest and most pleasant for her personally, for a number of reasons.

Patricia had been brought onboard as an intern two years ago, right out of college, for Season Fifty-Seven. Back then, her job had primarily been to run errands and take notes and stand around holding things while looking pretty in the background of occasional behind-the-scenes shots. A bunch of her classmates had been incredibly jealous; she'd scored one of the biggest possible jump starts to a half-decent career, and it sure wasn't, they whispered, off the strength of her BA in Performing Arts and her 3.1 GPA. But what did her classmates know? Those few she still heard from had by and large sunken into the sort of misery that compelled them to splash the banalities of their existences across social media. Patricia was above that. She had her precious NDA.

After Fifty-Seven, someone had liked her enough that they kept her on another season, with some increasing responsibilities, and she did well enough in Fifty-Eight to get actual for-real hired as a general assistant. For most, that might've been a stopping point for a career, or at least a pause, but for Patricia it was just the beginning. She was pretty under the radar for Fifty-Nine, but then Sixty arrived and everything changed.

Sixty was an absolute clusterfuck of a season, and while SOTF had protocols in place for dealing with unanticipated survivors, including some backup personnel, nothing on the scale of Sixty's twenty-nine released contestants had ever factored into the calculations. There had been a few team members on hand with major experience in dealing with survivors, notably Louis Janson, who had been the primary interface with winners for the past fifteen seasons, but not nearly enough. Janson gave Patricia and a bunch of other generalists the barest of crash courses when it became clear that a mass survival was likely, then each of them was assigned to a couple of the students.

Their duties included running errands for their wards, trying to keep them happy and sane, making sure they didn't slit their wrists in the tub, that sort of thing. It was really slapdash in Sixty, especially since there was very little to coax the already-rebellious kids to behave, but Patricia managed well enough. She took care of logistics, connected students with families, classmates, and therapists. She hooked her charges up with drugs, alcohol, and attractive groupies where doing so was deemed acceptable or likely to bring them around to the executives' way of thinking. She made mistakes aplenty, but she learned and she held up under the pressure.

The same could not be said of poor Janson. As the one with the most training and experience, he got assigned to George King, Jake Fenwick, and Malik Ismat—the three most difficult personalities among the survivors, and each more than enough of a challenge on his own terms. Janson, the consummate professional, waited until he had finally discharged the last of his duties, then walked straight to Mark Davison's office, slapped down his letter of resignation, and departed the building. So far as Patricia knew, nobody in any way affiliated with SOTF had heard from him since.

Janson's departure was the most dramatic, but not unique; a number of the other staffers quit, requested to be returned to their original duties, or were terminated for mishandling the situation. And so, due to all of this, Patricia found herself cast as the new Janson when Season Sixty-One rolled around. She watched nervously, aware that she now held a very personal stake in the outcome of the game, but she almost had to laugh at how it all turned out. Dannielle Austen was fucked up so badly she slipped into a coma almost immediately, a coma from which she had still not awakened even fourteen months later, and so it fell to Patricia to spend a couple weeks sitting by Dannielle's hospital bed reading things to her when the executives were watching and ushering in visitors but mostly drinking coffee and browsing the internet. For this, she was very well compensated.

Dexter and Dwight and Chelo weren't bad, of course, but catering to an emotionally-damaged teenager could just get pretty tiresome no matter how vaguely reasonable they usually were. Then, Patricia missed Season Sixty-Five for a wedding (her first vacation days since taking the job) and came back to find that Marie Brisson, her backup, had been fired for gross incompetence in certain dealings with Ruiz, the specifics of which had become minor legend.

And so Patricia had been assigned to the Evans girl, the first winner out of Sixty-Six, and they'd told her it was due to her seniority and greater experience and the absolute importance of not fucking up like had happened in Sixty-Five with the weapons and the dress and all that, and Patricia had smiled and nodded but she'd known the whole time they were giving her the difficult one on purpose. And oh had she been right.

Thus, Best Buy. Best Buy right after Christmas, when the store was picked over and swamped with returns, when the lines stretched and twisted like snakes sunning themselves, when the screaming of kids blended seamlessly with the background muzak. I want a laptop, Evans had said, bring me a laptop. Patricia had very politely pointed out that the girl still couldn't really use most of her fingers well and besides had a phone that was much easier to handle. The laptop could wait, Patricia had said, at least a day or two. Just use the fucking phone. Phone was fine for now. She'd watched the wheels turn, then had sidestepped half a second before Evans hurled her phone, which bounced off the wall to Patricia's left and hit a vase of silk flowers at the foot of the hospital bed; the phone shattered to pieces and the vase hit the floor and also flew to bits and Evans' expression melted almost instantly from rage to cheer by way of momentary surprise and she said, well, looks like I might need a new phone too, while you're getting that laptop.

That had been an unpleasant but not wholly unexpected incident. The whole gig had been nerve-wracking in ways Patricia was unaccustomed to, every encounter holding the potential to unfold into some new complication. Sometimes she was met with sullen silence, sometimes with flashes of rage or lashing out (the flowers were silk because the real ones had spilled water all over the place), sometimes with a normalcy tinged with tension pulled to the breaking point, and once—perhaps most disturbingly—with perfectly normal and cheerful conversation.

Still, the girl's usual stance had skewed more and more towards that baseline strained normalcy as the days went on and her physical therapy progressed, with the destruction of the phone the first step backwards in a couple days. Patricia had been hoping to establish a better working relationship, and she really should've just agreed to the laptop right off the bat; it was a stupid hill to die on, but she was off her game. The knee replacement deal was a massive pain in the ass, because it deprived her of a number of the carrots she could typically offer to mollify her charges; alcohol and drugs were straight out because they'd screw up the pain meds in potentially-dangerous (or even fatal) ways, and attractive members of the opposite sex were out because of the bum knee making it pretty hard to fuck and also due to the potential for bad PR because, again, heavy medication messing up stuff like consent. Connections with friends and family were for various reasons a no-go, so Patricia mostly spent her days taking as long as she could on errands within headquarters and crossing her fingers she wouldn't find a nightmare on her return. She'd tried other little surprises, made connections with the creators of one of those SOTF games and set up conversations there, handled coaching before interviews and cut them off when she saw the rumblings of brewing trouble using the excuse of fatigue or physical therapy or medicine time. She'd bitten back her distaste for the girl, by and large she thought with success, and she'd asked for few compromises, and yet here she was in Best Buy anyways.

It was a nice laptop—the nicest, in fact, in stock. The expense didn't matter; this was all going on her work card, and it was slightly cheaper and easier to get hold of than a steady and surreptitious supply of cocaine anyways. The tag describing the specs didn't mean a lot to Patricia, who owned a Mac she almost never used and mostly relied on her phone, but the bearded employee who looked like he'd just crawled in from a shipwreck had explained it had a pretty nice graphics card which was the big thing she'd been told to look for. It was just the line that made this painful, the line and the fact that it was one more task at what should have been the end of an already-busy day.

Today had been a photo shoot. There'd been a lot of pictures and film taken whenever possible, leaving this engineered promo shoot sounding totally redundant to Patricia, but the executives wanted to strike while the iron was hot. They had Patricia herd her charge to a nice big studio—and every single time they went anywhere the girl bitched about her crutches and how she knew exactly where that cane Ruiz had hung onto had come from and Patricia said yeah, well, someone got fired over that and she liked her job thank-you-very-much. At the studio, it was this whole ordeal of getting Evans changed into costume again, because it was easier to get the costume department to make up a whole new one from scratch (the original having been thoroughly shredded and messed up by blood and the like) than to find exact replicas of the clothes she'd worn in, because yeah it wasn't exactly that hard to get a fucking Zach shirt but the skirt was a bit unusual and besides, the other boy had worn his costume most of the game and the marketing people thought it'd be good if they matched.

Makeup said thank goodness Evans had kept her tights on the whole time, because that meant they didn't have to try to conceal the fuck-off scar from the knee replacement, and they could take the hinged brace off for a little and it'd be fine since they were just having the pair sit around. Some concealer would cover the remaining vestiges of bruises and scabs and burns, and some eyeliner and blush would give a bit of smolder (a word Patricia was sure only makeup and marketing people ever used), and some airbrushing in Photoshop would take care of the rest.

Patricia spent most of the prep time paying attention to the other boy, Corin, and slowly nursing and honing a loathing for whoever it was who decided she couldn't work with him. He was businesslike, passably polite, gave no impression of having recently smashed anything. When Evans talked with him, he was able to reply without losing her interest or sending her into a fit. When she started scooting a little too close and smiling a little too much and fussing with her clothes, first tugging her top up a little and then down a little bit more, he became clearly uncomfortable and confused. They had to sit close together, and Evans was giggling and getting in his space and he looked so very lost and pulled back a bit and Patricia was about to swoop in and rescue him when one of the photographers beat her to the punch, telling the girl to get into the position they wanted her in and fix her shirt and play nice so they could all get this over with. That led to some sort of debate, but Patricia had to deal with enough of that herself so she made sure to tune it out and instead turned towards the man who'd accompanied Corin, who she thought might've been another veteran of the Sixty debacle and whose name she couldn't call to mind.

"Trade?" Patricia mouthed at him, but he glanced over at the pair of winners, then pursed his lips and shook his head.

And not two hours later had been the phone incident, and now here Patricia was, finally through checkout and carrying the computer under her arm to her car. She stuck it in the trunk, tossed a blanket over it out of habit even though she didn't much care if someone stole the damn thing, and got into the driver's seat. Now all that was left was the phone. She could've bought one at Best Buy, of course, but that would've been quick and simple and she thought it was only fitting that her inconvenience be shared with the source of it. It was getting pretty late, in fact, so she might not be able to find anywhere open that would sell her the right model. She'd have to drive around a bit to find out, of course, really take her time and make sure to do a thorough job.

She had the slightest twinge of worry about what sort of trouble Evans could cause to spite her in her absence, but quashed it. It wasn't like the girl could do that much. Dr. Schrieber assured her there wasn't that high a risk of suicide, and the floor security guy looked in every few minutes anyways. Evans couldn't just walk off with her knee still badly fucked; that might be a concern in a few weeks more, but for now her mobility without assistance was still largely limited. Mostly she'd probably just call for help from the other staffers, who'd sometimes give Patricia the stink eye when she'd been out on errands an extra long time but fuck them.

She was almost off for the night, or as off as she could be while on emergency call (and not getting overtime for it—such was the pain of working on salary, though the extremely generous amount of that salary meant she couldn't feel all that sorry for herself). She had some ideas for the night ahead. She'd have a few drinks, put on something nice, and go dancing. She'd catch a movie, meet some friends, spend some of that salary that was the prime reason her old classmates were so very very jealous of her. She'd make sure she had something good to post to her social media pages, and maybe she'd hint at more brewing, tease around the edges of her NDA—not with any sort of real scoop, of course, but just enough to pique people's interests. Yeah, the evening was about to unfold. This phone thing could definitely burn the rest of scheduled shift.

In fact, she suddenly decided, she'd even make a little stop on the way to cruising for phones. It wasn't sentimental, she told herself, not fully. Just a little whim she'd indulge. A little nostalgia.

She was going to go and check in on Danielle. Just for old time's sake.

[MurderWeasel]

Los Angeles, California

One question Dane "B0atmann" Shields faced pretty much whenever he interfaced with the player community in his capacity as associate game designer for the stupendously popular SOTF Champions was this: how could the turnaround time on new characters possibly be so good without them being rush jobs? A month or two from the time a bunch of students hit the ground in whatever hellhole arena they were gonna chop each other up in this time, Dane or one of the half dozen others with the same job would proudly announce the release of some new digital doppelganger all set to do battle hundreds of thousands of times a day, bearing the likeness and voice of one of those lost students—almost invariably whoever was lucky enough to survive or crazed enough to kill a shitload of people or charming enough to make teenagers safe at home swoon over them. And sure enough, when he went on Reddit and teased that he'd landed one of the prize assignments this time, people asked that same stupid question, and Dane again told his half-truths.

It really was not that hard to piece together the actual, real, factual process of how characters for Champions were designed if you looked deep into interviews and some of the more credible rumor sites. The truth was this: whenever SOTF wasn't actually in session, Dane and the rest (plus all kinds of subordinates and interns) would come up with a bunch of abilities that could work in kits. It wasn't that difficult to do so, because SOTF was mostly a bunch of people shooting and bashing and chopping each other up and stuff, and really there were only so many ways you could depict that. Like, yeah, it got exaggerated here and there and there was that anthropomorphic collar shit Dane had been outvoted on, but the core stuff was pretty much what it was. So they'd come up with, like, half a dozen different ways a skill that was basically "shoot a dude in the face" would go, and then they'd code all that stuff up, and then it'd sit on a shelf while they waited for the murder to commence.

So okay, take some shit like Season Sixty-Two. The boss comes around and makes a face and tells Dane, okay, sorry, Dane, but the guy who won didn't do jack shit and while normally we'd ignore him, there's, you know, that thing with the footage so we're gonna have to put him in for this. And you're overdue for a total shit assignment, so you get Dexter. He's known for sitting in one spot the whole fucking game, then stabbing the guy people actually care about mostly by mistake.

And when that sort of thing happened, Dane would take a really long drag from the flask he kept in his desk and then he'd go poking in the archives to see what he could find to start fixing the mess.

It started thusly: this Dexter guy was pretty good at laying low and was mostly known for being boring as dirt, so he got stealth mechanics. Stealth mechanics were just about the best way to make sure a character would get nerfed pretty much forever and then ignored except by the most rabid niche following, but hey, they'd learned how to make it sort of okay, learned how to add some counterplay, and there was this ability in the archives that worked like so: the character would stand still for a couple seconds, then stealth. Once stealthed, they started to charge an attack for up to five seconds and could sit invisible for five to twenty-five seconds total depending on rank. Upon breaking stealth, they'd get that charged attack off.

This sort of skill basically screamed assassin, but Dane didn't think anyone would be happy seeing Dexter in all their games wrecking their shit with oneshot kills, so he tweaked it a bit. Dexter seemed, to him, more like a disruptor/setup sort, so he shifted the charged attack's effects from a nuke to a stun and let the area and duration go up with the time the charge was held. Drop it instantly, and you'd only get people right on top of you for a split second, but cook it all the way and you could lock down a decent chunk of lane width for a notable span.

Then he needed something else, so he gave Dexter this knife lunge that was a little spammable and had good base damage so he could at least farm in toplane and chase a bit. By loading the bulk of Dexter's damage into this and making the cooldown scale with level, Dane made sure that Dexter players had to either max this first or suffer greatly, which was the goal—he didn't want Dexters camping invisibly for a whole wave until the later stages of the match. This skill was sitting in the archives without any assigned damage values; it could've been on an aggressive character with lower CDs, lower bases, and better scalings, but applied to Dexter he was able to tune it to better fit the tanky role he was envisioning.

For the last basic ability, Dane gave Dexter a backpedal, where he'd back away from whoever was in his face and slow them a little while raising his own defenses by a percentage. It wasn't that exciting, but it gave Dexter an identity as a character with lots of mobility and ability to mess with his opponents' plans, without actually having much power to kill them—something mostly in keeping with his time in the game. The boost was percentage-based to avoid the situation where free stats turned anyone into an assassin; a Dexter who didn't build defensively would get minimal non-movement benefit from the backpedal as he'd have no stats to boost.

That just left his ultimate, and while ultimates were sometimes waiting in the archives, they were usually the most personalized part of a kit and often needed to be made from scratch. For Dexter, Dane was inspired by the way Jack Miller half stabbed himself by stumbling into Dexter's knife. He whipped up this thing where Dexter would enter a stance where it seemed like he was weak, forcing the nearest enemy to attack him, then reflect the damage back with interest based on his remaining health (incentivizing him to use it early rather than hold it). This paired pretty well with the rest of Dexter's stuff—he could lurk somewhere to ambush the enemy team, then further lock down their carry and kill them with their own damage, if everything went to plan. If it didn't, Dexter could still spar with and disrupt other characters, but it became much easier to shut him down and mitigate his ability to ruin a carry through proper peel.

So this was how Dane saved an assignment that was totally terrible, and even though he got some of the numbers wrong and Dexter shipped monstrously overpowered, nobody really liked him and it took a while for him to get nerfed. Everyone poked fun, but Dane got the last laugh when Dexter spent a month and a half at pick/ban tier before the balance team gutted him.

A funny little quirk about Dane, and a thing that separated him from a number of his colleagues, was that he didn't really give a shit about SOTF except in how it related to his job. He'd watch it if nothing else was on, but mostly because he knew some fanboy would drill him on trivia on Reddit or at a con and it helped to be able to get at least one or two answers right. For Season Sixty-Six, he'd caught bits and pieces, and he kept aware of some of the more notables. He'd tried not to think too far ahead, though he'd had some good ideas for a sword-based kit that he'd passed along to Bradley "MacTea" Banwen, the guy who ultimately got that assignment and would inevitably load the kit with way too much mobility and true damage and lane bullying and hyper scaling just like he always did.

And then almost as quick as a blink, they had one winner already determined and it was Dane's job to get a kit together for her. There was no way they'd make it before Christmas, but maybe shortly after the new year could be good, his bosses said. And so he'd had a bunch of energy drinks and then blazed through everything interesting she did in one sitting, and he'd come up with a pretty good concept for a bruiser ability set, he thought, based mostly on the fact that she slugged it out with a couple guys in quick succession at the end there and got banged up real good but lived through it.

So Dane was a few days into this when he got another call from the bosses and they said, Dane, turns out this girl actually plays Champions and when we were booking her for some more VO work she got pretty interested in the process and someone (it was always someone else, never the person actually delivering the bad news) said she could provide feedback and have a bit of a say during the development process.

This was very much a flask situation. Dane couldn't even wait until the conversation was over; he held his hand over the receiver, phone wedged between ear and shoulder, as he took a long drag.

Okay, Dane said, so my job just got a hell of a lot harder. Does she, you know, actually know what she's talking about?

The answer was sort of. Gold was nothing to sneeze at, but it also wasn't exactly prime bragging material. Dane himself had been high Gold when he started working for Champions but he'd not been that serious a player; at some point or other he sat down and got in gear and blazed his way to Diamond, and only a little bit by abusing characters like Drake and Parvati and Jamie who the balance team kept complaining were flagrantly overpowered.

The discussions with the girl mostly took place over email, though there were a few phone calls in there. He really wasn't sure how he felt about those at first, because she just wanted to talk Champions with him like any other fan and seemed even a little starstruck and all he could think was how he'd watched her bury an axe in a boy's skull. But tactical deployment of the flask took the edge off, and before he knew it they got down to brass tacks.

The first point of contention was that she absolutely hated the idea of being a bruiser. She wanted to be an assassin. She mained midlane and played a lot of assassins so this wasn't totally a surprise, but it was a nuisance because it meant almost everything Dane had worked on for the prior week had to go in the bin. Sure, he had veto power at the end of the day, but his bosses had impressed upon him how very nice it would be to have a winner who was really enthusiastic about the game and would talk about it a lot and would be willing to come record extra voiceovers or ads and who wouldn't get all weird about a skin showing too much, well, skin.

He asked was she really absolutely sure she was an assassin, and she pointed out that basically she was known for killing a bunch of people, and he said Karen killed a bunch of people and she was an ADC (or a jungler if you really insisted in playing her off-role even though it wasn't that good), and the girl said well, did Karen care about Champions? Okay, then. Assassin it was. Pull from the flask.

But things after that initial complete change of creative direction actually went pretty smoothly. Assassins weren't Dane's favorite thing ever to make, partially because the people who played them (and thus asked him questions about his work on them) were often assholes and partially because the people who didn't play them (and thus complained at him about them) by and large loathed them with a passion and comprised a quite sizable chunk of the player base, but he could do it. It wasn't that complicated, no matter what some Bronze experts on Reddit said. The key components of an assassin were the ability to close in quickly, the potential to wreck someone's shit really hard if they were out of position or hadn't built suitably defensively, and an annoying slipperiness that let them get away with the aforementioned nonsense.

The axe-gun was always going to be core to the kit he was designing, because it was a really versatile weapon from a thematic and gameplay perspective. So the first basic ability, and the bread and butter part of the kit, was a simple gunshot fired from the axe-gun. This let him make the overall kit melee without it being too hideously punishing in early laning phase; the shot could be used to last hit from a distance and not get totally denied by lane bullies. But to make it work really well for an assassin, it needed something else, so that was where the second skill came in: a big overhead swing with the axe part of the gun. He made it apply a slow, serve as an autoattack reset, and then for good measure set up some synergy with the bullet, where if you used the swing on the same target you'd already shot, it'd do a bunch of extra damage and stop them from dashing for a second.

This set up some good potential play patterns. The most effective way to get damage down was to shoot your enemy, then attack them, swing to reset the autoattack timer, and attack them again. If you did it this way, though, you'd delay the dash-disabling, potentially allowing your target to escape. If you wanted to be really sure they'd stick around, you'd have to drop the swing immediately, thus losing part of the burst rotation in exchange for a much smaller window of reaction for your target.

So next was mobility. For the last skill, he assigned a dash with a long cooldown that had a pretty good range and a reset component. It'd get you close to someone, and while it did no damage on its own, if you scored a kill or assist within the next few seconds, it'd activate a second dash with a longer range (though this reset could occur only once per cast). Thematically, this reflected the girl's propensity for just sort of walking into dangerous situations and treating them like they were normal; he figured they'd attach some good VO work to it, maybe a cheerful salutation. From a gameplay perspective, it gated your escape behind success; if you planned wrong, you'd be in way over your head, but if you did it right, you'd slip away again or go harder with an all-in. There'd be different lines for the departure, of course, maybe set up to contextually differentiate between getting out of Dodge and ruining days further.

And then all that was really left was the ultimate. Dane was actually able to go to the vaults in large part for this one, recycling something decently close to what he'd been planning for his bruiser concept. It was a quick series of frenzied attacks spanning two seconds or until the death of the target, during which the character would follow the target no matter where they went, dealing heavy damage though not disabling them in any way or gaining any sort of special resistances. He made this ability a short range skillshot dash that only targeted other champions, just so there was a possibility to miss it. The idea of this was it let the player double down and commit to killing a specific target, but allowed that target to try to relocate to an advantageous position and/or to fight back. Of course, properly added to the rest of the combo, the options for both were more limited.

The girl thought that was a pretty bitchin' kit, so Dane's work was pretty much done. A few celebratory sips from the flask, some fine-tuning of numbers and mechanics, and it was off to the testers and art department and all that junk, and Dane's main job became to tease the upcoming release to idiots on Reddit, exactly what he was doing when he was asked the question.

[MurderWeasel]

Auction of SOTF Winner's Artwork Raises Questions of Ownership, Merit

By JANI LOPEZ DEC. 29, 2020

The art world is ablaze with controversy over reports that a number of works created by recent SOTF-TV winner Jewel Evans will be offered for private auction to collectors. The opportunity to view and bid on roughly 30 paintings and drawings plus a large amount of sketch material has been offered to select critics, collectors and institutions, according to one of those invited, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Evans rose to prominence over the past two weeks, following her selection for SOTF-TV Season 66 as a member of the Whittree Secondary School Senior class from Whittree, Oklahoma. The first contestant of the season to score a kill, Evans earned a measure of infamy for primarily targeting students from Albuquerque's Davison Secondary School in preference to her own classmates. Throughout the game, Evans' psychological state and motivations was the subject of much debate, with SOTF analyst Katherine Wellington proclaiming it clear that Evans was "suffer(ing) from some measure of psychotic break, likely including a major hallucinatory component."

Evans ultimately eliminated ten of her fellow contestants, earning early release under a new rule established in Season 65. She is the second to earn such release, following Karen Ruiz of 65. Evans' art is of particular interest to many because it offers a rare glance into her psyche, a view potentially unvarnished and unfiltered.

"It would be fascinating," Wellington said. "It's one of the best opportunities to get insight into [Evans'] psychological state prior to its disruption by the game, to answer the question of whether she was always like this or became so [due to her selection for SOTF]."

But Evans' survival also poses a number of legal questions. Usually ownership of art, even that created within a school setting, rests with the artist. There are detailed legal provisions regarding transfer of ownership of possessions of contestants who perish in the course of SOTF, but survivors retain their rights. In this specific case, however, Evans' works were created as a minor, yet she has since been legally emancipated. This means that her parents also could potentially stake some claim to her work. According to sources close to the auction, neither Evans nor any member of her family authorized the sale of the pieces.

These various claims to ownership may become a hurdle for prospective buyers or beneficiaries of the sale, as the collection as a whole has been tentatively valued at $250,000 - $500,000, with some suggesting that the controversy over ownership is holding this valuation down, and others claiming that the opportunistic timing is drastically inflating the worth of the pieces.

While the exact source for many of the pieces is unknown, the majority are believed to have been removed from Whittree Secondary classrooms and exhibits by an employee. Art teacher and assistant librarian Robert Tarver abruptly resigned on December 18, and attempts to contact him at his listed address and number have proved fruitless. Some of the other pieces, however, have clearer and less legally dubious origins. Half a dozen paintings and a large quantity of the sketch material was acquired from Coleen Harrigan, one of Evans' classmates and a casual friend.

"Jewel would always draw all this violent, morbid stuff," Harrigan said. "She talked about death a lot, and that really comes through in what she'd paint. She gave me a bunch of paintings and doodles. I don't know why me specifically."

Harrigan declined to disclose the sum she expected to receive for Evans' works, but noted that the estimates she was provided with by the auction's organizers suggested she would be able to attend college debt-free. She said she had no reservations about selling the work, which she had always held mixed feelings about.

"I don't know why I kept it around as long as I did," she said. "It's all very disturbing. I couldn't stand even having it in the house, after what [Evans] did to all those people."

The works acquired from Harrigan may hold comparatively high value for more than just their clear provenance. Those who have viewed the collection report that the Harrigan pieces are unusual in their graphic focus on violence and death. The bulk of the material is far more conventional, comprising primarily landscapes, many modeled on the scenery surrounding Whittree. While some of this may be due to their origin within the school, other acquaintances of Evans' claim that it was somewhat uncommon for her artwork to reflect her interest in the macabre.

Art critic Juan Sanchez, who attended a showing, stated that the works were indicative of a developing but still obviously amateur talent. He opined that those seeking answers in Evans' work are likely to be disappointed.

"The pieces I saw are effectively juvenilia," Sanchez said. "They are not 'Starry Night' and they are certainly not 'Goodbye Pogo.'" He further added that he believes their value will be transitory, declining quickly unless Evans achieves some lasting cultural impact. Similar patterns have emerged with relics of past SOTF winners, with value increasing only in cases where the winner capitalized upon their renown. A recent example was the sale of the baseball bat wielded by winner-turned-actor Kenny Yamana during Season 3, which was donated to a charity auction in March and commanded nearly a quarter million dollars.

The auction is scheduled for early January. The exact date and location has yet to be revealed. As of this writing, no legal challenges to the sale have been filed, though there have been many cases of legal action being undertaken to recover stolen artworks, often years or even decades after the initial sale.

Evans and her representatives declined to comment upon the auction of her artwork. A representative of her parents requested privacy, as their other daughter, Evans' younger sister, is currently hospitalized with serious injuries as the result of an assault speculated to be retributive in nature.

[MurderWeasel]

Stillwater, Oklahoma

"You know," Jerry Eckel said to Amy Norwood, "it just occurred to me that we're probably the only Homeland in the world with a one hundred percent victory rate in SOTF."

They were both taking their tens at the same time, up in the break room with its single crumbly leather couch and its numerous too-tall-too-hard wooden stools. Someone had bought a dozen doughnuts from the day-old section and left them on the counter, which Amy had taken as an invitation for them to help themselves. She was on her second, Jerry his third. There was a rush going on downstairs, so Jerry and Amy were hoping everyone else would be too busy to notice if their tens stretched to fifteen or even twenty.

It was always busy these days. Sarah and Carl had come back for a couple days and tried to act like it was business as usual, but then there'd been that incident with their other daughter and they were out again, meaning everyone else had to put in extra time. This was especially irritating to Jerry, who had been planning on using his post-Christmas vacation time to do some serious video-gaming. Instead, his precious time free from the grasp of Stillwater High School was being absorbed with extra shifts at the job his parents forced him to work.

Amy, for her part, kept talking about the money and what she'd spend it on, clothes and food and pens. She sat two desks to the left of Jerry in math class, but he'd never paid that much attention to her before. In the past couple weeks, however, they'd taken to chatting and joking, and Jerry was trying to decide if he had a crush on her or not. Amy was short and a little pudgy, but she had a good smile and she was very funny. And it wasn't like Jerry had much of a chance with his previous crush now.

"You're right," Amy said. She beamed at Jerry and then went over to get another doughnut for herself. She wrinkled her face a little as she chewed, and it made her cheeks puff out. "You reckon we're the only one that's ever had someone in a season?"

"Dunno." Jerry watched Amy chew while trying to keep it from being super obvious that was what he was doing. "Does it matter, though? It's still pretty sweet."

"Yeah," Amy said.

It might've been even more sweet to claim not one but two winners for their school, but alas neither of them had ever so much as set foot in Whittree Secondary. Jerry had seen the kids from there shopping at the store or hanging out in Stillwater pretty often, though, and some of them had even lived here and gone to Whittree for whatever reason. It was weird to think that some of them were dead now, but not as weird as thinking about what someone he'd worked alongside for months had done.

"I can't believe she actually did it," Amy said, reflecting his thoughts a few seconds later. "I always thought Jewel was, like, sort of ironic with all that stuff. I dunno, I guess she seemed serious about Zach, but..."

"I guess so." Jerry had grown to really hate Zach Johnston in short order, and had felt sort of bad about how relieved he'd felt at the guy's death. It had been stupid even then—after all, SOTF was a million miles away from Stillwater and it wasn't like Zach would've swung through and popped into their Homeland one day even had he survived.

But then, how far away was SOTF really? Now Jewel was somewhere far away, and her mom and dad were gone too, and so were a bunch of those kids he'd seen once or twice and never even really thought about, and they were all just the same age as him. He'd could've been in their shoes if the SOTF people had stopped one town sooner for lunch or whatever. He wondered if Jewel would've sniffled when his name came up in the list of the killed like she did for Zach.

"We should have a celebration for her," Amy said, and Jerry decided that he indeed was developing a crush.

---

"Absolutely not." Bobbi Crespo had her arms crossed and was glaring at Jerry and Ami. Bobbi was a head clerk, which meant she was a step above them and a step below the assistant managers like Carl, and she was a student at Oklahoma State University in her fourth year, but was apparently not likely to graduate quite on time. Bobbi's frown deepened as her eyes passed over the banner once again.

It was made from butcher paper—about ten feet of it—and bore huge red letters, sloppy around the edges to look like blood. It read "Congratulations Jewel Evans! Our thoughts are with our employee of the month." The bloody letters had been Amy's idea. She was sort of artistic—not as artistic as Jewel had been, but also a little less serious about it, which Jerry liked. He didn't really understand what made someone want or need to sit down and create art. The end products, yeah, those were cool, but they were appreciable results. The point was to have the end object. Jewel had sometimes spent ages making things and then thrown them away or refused to show anyone, and that was something he didn't get at all.

"Come on," Amy said. "She worked here. Everyone here knew her, and now we can't even be happy for her?"

"Yeah," Jerry said. "Besides, think about how awesome it makes us look. Like, if our third-slowest checker can win SOTF, nobody's gonna even think about robbing us."

The corner of Bobbi's mouth quirked upward before settling even lower than before. Jerry thought it was pretty special how Bobbi managed to be incredibly boring while also studying chemistry and dating a guy who rode a motorcycle.

"You can be happy for whoever you want," Bobbi said. "But we're not going to put up a big bloody banner advertising that she worked here."

"Why not?" Jerry said. Amy seemed to be losing her nerve a little, and he wished she would rally. He'd enjoyed watching the way she chewed her lip as she knelt over the paper during their lunch breaks, tucking the lock of dark brown hair behind her left ear again and again even as it inevitably escaped and ended up in her face once more.

"It's inviting trouble," Bobbi said. "What if someone doesn't like what she did and firebombs the store? Not so funny then, huh?"

"Nobody would burn down the store," Jerry said, "and if they did we'd get time off and insurance would take care of it."

"Not how that works." Bobbi waved her hand. "And what about the families of the people she..."

She trailed off a bit there, and that seemed to get Amy irritated again.

"She only killed two people from around here and one of them asked her to, and the other was that weird guy," Amy said. "I have definitely never seen him come in here. I'd remember."

Jerry wasn't totally sure that was true, but he was willing to choose to believe it right now.

"No," Bobbi said. "That's not at all how it works. You think those families aren't sad anyways? And Sarah and Carl? What about them?"

As she said the names, Amy's renewed resolve visibly melted away; her shoulders slumped and she began examining her feet, and it was only the slight flush that rose to her cheeks that prevented Jerry's interest in her from being extinguished.

"You don't think they're happy?" he said. He was getting too worked up about this. He knew it, and he didn't quite know why, but the heat was rising within him. "Their daughter almost died, but she didn't. And after what happened to their other—"

"It's okay." Amy was talking loudly, and the sudden surety in her voice brought Jerry up short. "We just thought it would be fun and we didn't think about all that. I'm sorry."

Bobbi paused for a moment, likely weighing the fallout of pursuing the issue further against the post-holiday rush and the degree to which she needed all hands on deck.

"Whatever," Bobbi said. "Just get rid of that somewhere nobody will see it. And then get back to work. How long have you two been on lunch, anyways?"

"We'll get rid of it right away," Amy said, and darted off with Jerry in tow.

---

"I can't believe Bobbi wouldn't even think about it." Jerry and Amy were fifteen minutes into their last ten by now, sitting at the very back of the break room. The television was going, some sort of SOTF analysis or rebroadcast or something. Jerry was pretty sure he could recognize Hatchet in the cutout in the corner. Ramiro, the maintenance guy, was sprawled across the couch watching it. "We should see if Kenneth'll overrule her."

Kenneth was the store manager, the absolute top of the totem pole, and only rarely interacted with those lacking some sort of authority or other. Jerry suggested an appeal to him more for the fantasy of it than anything else; there was precisely zero chance of Kenneth reversing Bobbi's decision.

"I get it." Amy had been pretty quiet as they wadded up the butcher paper and stuffed it way down into the big brown trash bin out back. Jerry had stolen glances at her as she rang up customers through the rest of the night, and had decided there was something off about her—not an anger like the small one still burning within him, but a melancholy of some variety. As she spoke now, he could tell he'd surmised correctly.

"Get what?" He tried really hard to convey that he was actually curious and not seem like he was challenging her. It could be a little hard sometimes; Jerry spent a lot of time challenging people.

"I get why they wouldn't want reminders around," Amy said. She picked at the edge of the table in front of them, and Jerry thought she was going to elaborate but instead she looked at Ramiro and then at the TV which was showing a slow motion shot of a boy in a dress sailing off a tower. "Come outside for a sec?"

Jerry followed her down and through the store, ducking from aisle to aisle and keeping an eye out for Bobbi. There was only about an hour left until closing now, and neither of them was slated to stay after for cleanup. They slipped out the back maintenance door and Amy led the way over to the brown plastic garbage can. She looked like she wanted to lean on it but she was too short to do so naturally. It was quite cold out; an inch of snow coated the ground where it hadn't been disrupted, and more was falling, creating a light dusting even in those spots that had been cleared earlier. Jerry's breath came out as puffy clouds, and this led him to realize that Amy was holding hers. He counted ten before she exhaled.

"I had a little sister," Amy said. "She was named Dee, and she was four years younger than me. When I was nine, one day she got out of the backyard and ran into the street."

Tears were trickling down Amy's cheeks. Her cheeks were red and a little chubby but right now they looked very pretty to Jerry. He wanted to reach out and brush the tears away, but he wasn't sure if that would be weird. He lifted his hand and a snowflake landed on it and the cold wetness as it melted made him drop his arm back to his side.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Amy shrugged.

"It's nothing. It was a long time ago. I was nine. That's almost half my life. I didn't really know her. And my parents were okay eventually. It's just... we never talk about her. Never. There's a picture in a drawer in their bedroom, and that's it. I don't think Mom knows I know about it."

"I'm sorry," Jerry said again. Amy sniffled.

"It is what it is," she said. Then she raised her hand to her eyes and wiped them dry and Jerry had this feeling of loss, but he didn't know why.

"Hey. Hey, guys." The voice came from over by the door. Ramiro stood there, silhouetted by the light from the store, brighter than the streetlamps that cast illumination over the back parking lot. "Bobbi's looking for you. I'd make it snappy. She sounds pissed."

"Tell her we were taking out the trash," Jerry said.

Ramiro looked like he might object for just a second, but Amy smiled at him and he sighed and said, "Yeah, okay, but hurry it up."

He went back inside, and the world dimmed a bit as the door slammed. Jerry turned back to Amy, maybe to comfort her, but her smile—apparently not just for Ramiro's benefit—had grown.

"Jerry," she said, "I just realized: Jewel's at, like, what? Half a dozen no-call-no-shows? You know what that means?"

"Yeah," Jerry said, feeling his own grin spread to match hers. "Yeah, I sure do."

---

This is Jewel. I'm not here, so leave a message or text or something if you need me to see it soon. Or if you're Coleen, try the home line.

Beep.

"Hey. Hey, Jewel, this is Jerry from work. I know you probably aren't going to check this phone ever again, but there's something important I want to—hey, wait."

"Hey, Jewel, it's Amy. You remember me? You taught me how to zero the scales when they get stuck."

"Of course she remembers you. Jewel wouldn't forget us just because she's rich and famous now. Would you, Jewel?"

"Anyways, Jewel, we know there's a very good—hey, hey stop, I wanna do it. Jerry, come on. Jerry, please? Just lean in if you want to—okay, thank you. Anyways, we know there's a really good reason and all, but you still never called to tell us you wouldn't be in. We've all had to pick up the slack for you. Kenneth is pissed. And you know what the rules are: three days is three days. We gave you extra time, even. So I'm sorry to have to do this, but—okay, Jerry, on three. One. Two."

"You're fired!"

[MurderWeasel]

S66JewelEvans Videos 1 Followers 4,723 Following 0 ♥ Follow Subscribe ▼	S66JewelEvans
Continue Watching S66JewelEvans! Continue watching the most recent broadcast from S66JewelEvans. Last broadcast 3 minutes ago
JewelEpilogue.png (13.18 KiB) Viewed 162 times Out of hospital and into placements, can I get back to gold with one hand? Streaming SOTF Champions ♝ 526 ✺ 9,972     Share      :	Welcome to the chat room! Backsbe : rekt sotffronted : the camp is real xD parker4hire : lol BugInDaHood : 10/0 irl, 0/6 midlane! xD Bokih : dont feed jewel remember only noobs feed PerfAbeL : Rekt Hyenanana : How longs has stream been live? ♛PenguinThehibiki : Hatchet's gonna just keep coming mid. Buy wards? baron_s_o_t_f : !Uptime ♐ Nightbot : Stream has been live for 1 hour 37 minutes BugInDaHood : 10/0 irl, 0/6 midlane! xD eternal_gazette : here it comes Avileo : they're murdering you just like you murdered that Soren kid
	♐ Nightbot : Reminder: this is not the place to discuss Jewel's actions on SOTF. If you do so, you'll be kicked like the last guy. Game comments only. BugInDaHood : 10/0 irl, 0/6 midlane! xD Etpismon : uh oh xD jonathan_stoned : ahaa 1xubaj6 : LOL Backsbe : lul istan0m : LOL CeRTSmg : LUL baron_s_o_t_f : LUL parker4hire : lol paroldMax : lol ♛PenguinThehibiki : should've bought a wrad BugInDaHood : 10/0 irl, 0/6 midlane! xD BugInDaHood : 10/0 irl, 0/7 midlane! xD PerfAbeL : LOL Rekt growthpilot : rip promos CeRTSmg : LUL Hyenanana : why is it so dead here? Navightga : LoLoL jared_cs_payroll : xD Backsbe : I don't think she told anyone she was gonna start streaming. it's been blowing up by the minute though. cant_spell_zamora : dude stfu 2k viewers is great for a girl who's not really showing much of her tits BugInDaHood : 10/0 irl, 0/7 midlane! xD iverenath : WTF LOL Chrometrix : RQ Bokih : jewel don't oh shit L1nkeque : lol CeRTSmg : omg did she really throw it? Avileo : i think i got timed out what did i miss? baron_s_o_t_f : LUL Bokih : RIP LAPTOP XD 3ountry_B_abix : LOL RQ Backsbe : omg I think she probably just fucked that beyond fixing Avileo : what happened? parker4hire : lol BugInDaHood : 10/0 irl, 0/7 midlane! xD Chrometrix : LUL wow that was dumb growthpilot : you got your stupid ass banned for calling Jewel a murderer 65_4_evr : jewel is sing? jared_cs_payroll : I hope that wasn't an expensive computer. xD cant_spell_zamora : wtf are you talking about 65 Hyenanana : guys i know its fun to meme on jewel but do you think shes okay? that was pretty crazy even for a ragequit BugInDaHood : 10/0 irl, 0/1 laptop! xD Avileo : seriously guys what did I miss?

[MurderWeasel]

Stillwater, Oklahoma

Kathleen Melton stared through the windshield of her car at the lights shining through the windows of Stillwater's First Baptist Church. The sharp lines of the building's architecture wavered through the falling snowflakes and the trails where the snow was melting and running down her windshield. Faintly, hushed by distance and wind, she could hear a chorus of voices singing Auld Lang Syne, full of enthusiasm if not technical talent. It was New Year's Eve.

Kathleen was bundled up in a sweater and a blanket and three strategically-draped coats, and she'd just decided to make an exception to her rules and turned on the heater. To hell with it. She might as well ring in the New Year right. Something had to go right—long enough timeframe, eventually either something good would happen to her or she'd die, and either way it would be a break from the grey monotony. And breaks were what the world promised, weren't they? Sometimes they were bittersweet, but they were always there. Even the distant music was spurring her towards some optimism and hope for change. It dragged something up, some long-lost family memory from happier days. Her mom had played some schmaltzy shit all the time that had something to do with Auld Lang Syne, something about former lovers reconnecting by chance, like "Taxi" but bad. It was right there, on the tip of her mind, but she just couldn't bring the title up from the haze.

She had a cup of ramen noodles that the people at the church had given her boiling water for. The soup was still steeping, its warmth seeping though the Styrofoam cup and into her hands. The paper lid said that it had to cook for three minutes and then it was ready to go, but Kathleen knew better; way back in middle school she'd figured out that if you ate it right at three minutes it'd be a little crunchy still, with the noodles improperly saturated. Fifteen to thirty minutes was more like it, leaving the noodles time to swell up and press against the paper and the soup as a whole space to cool to a pleasant warmth. Burning your tongue on Cup Ramen wasn't like burning your tongue on any other food; it left this metallic aftertaste for days that was to be avoided studiously.

The church people had invited Kathleen inside, and they'd seemed a little disappointed when she said no. Maybe they sensed that she was pulling up roots. She'd been in Stillwater for two months now. It was the longest she'd stayed put since she left New York back in August, a million years ago. It had been good here at first, good enough that she'd thought maybe she might actually think about moving in for real. It wasn't easy living out of her car; she'd been in a sorry state the first time one of the kids at the university rec center let her sneak into the showers. She'd had a rough time in a lot of the little communities she'd passed through, with creeps and people almost as shitty as the one's she'd fled in New York hounding her at every turn, but people here had been different. There'd been a sense not just of community, but of a community maybe worth belonging to. Those she'd talked to in Stillwater knew their neighbors' names, and not just to bitch about them at HOA meetings.

It was so different from what she'd left, what she didn't even want to think about. Finding work had seemed a possibility, maybe even a realistic one. She was twenty-three. That was the same age as some of the kids at the university. She could imagine herself joining their flow on campus, heading to class and pretending she'd pay attention unlike back in high school and spending the whole time fooling around on a phone anyways. She could imagine sitting in the church on Sunday for something more than just a free meal—not some actual religious feeling, but rather for the people who held such a feeling, people she might grow to love instead of merely respect.

But Stillwater had changed.

It had taken her longer than she cared to admit to figure it out, she mused as she pulled off the paper lid of her cup of noodles and let it drop to the floor of her car (there was all sorts of garbage there already, and she wasn't about to let any of her precious heat float away by opening the door, and besides it wouldn't be a very kind repayment to throw trash into the church's parking lot after they gave her water for her soup and food on all those other nights). Being observant was important; it was how she'd managed these past four and a half months without getting arrested or having to go back to what had once been home, how she could figure out when it was okay to slip some granola bars into her purse from some nowhere gas station so she wouldn't spend the night hungry. And yet, it was only three days after the selection that she realized that the new season of SOTF everyone was mumbling about had pulled some of its cast from Whittree, and by extension from Stillwater as well.

And ever since, the city had been different. People didn't give Kathleen as much money. More than that, they didn't offer her smiles or nods, didn't stop to talk. The church still welcomed her in, but sometimes it felt like hey did so out of obligation. She was an outsider, and in the community's time of crisis, it needed to focus on its own. That's why she'd hadn't asked for anything but water tonight, why she was enjoying the salty pop of rehydrated peas and corn kernels in her car with the heater on instead of sitting inside keeping toasty for free and munching on something with substance.

She'd stolen from the Homeland across the street for the first time today, and not because she had to. She had money—not a lot, not enough to put a security deposit down on an apartment, but more than she'd had in a long time. Over her two months here, Kathleen had squirreled away four hundred dollars from gifts and odd jobs and lucky breaks, and then today she'd found a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk and converted it to a scratch ticket on a whim and won another two hundred and fifty bucks. In retrospect, that combined with the date had been the sign; the elemental shift of Stillwater had disturbed her, but it was only this New Year's lucky break that made her think she could do anything about it. All it had taken was that extra money, a little bit of providence, just enough to get her moving again, get her out of Stillwater, maybe on towards the West Coast.

So then she'd gone into the Homeland and filled up a basket with stuff that kept well—instant noodles and a bunch of juice boxes and granola bars and canned ravioli (which you could absolutely eat cold safely, even if it was pretty nasty) and a can opener (because she hadn't made it this far making sloppy mistakes) and some candy and cookies (because empty calories were still calories and she was used to trying to get the most energy bang for her buck and didn't quite remember she was stealing it until she'd already thrown a bunch of her favorites in)—and then just waited until the store seemed busy and slipped past the cash registers and into a stream of shoppers carrying their bags out and walked out with them and went to her car. She popped the whole basket in her trunk; it might be useful, and she wasn't about to risk going back to return it. This was a bigger heist than she was used to, so she'd glanced around neurotically the whole way, but the crush of last-second party shoppers had given her the cover she needed. She had probably a couple hundred dollars of provisions stored up, enough for a couple weeks of mediocre dining.

It meant she couldn't go back to the Homeland now, though. Just one more home she was banished from.

Same Old Lang Syne. That was it, the song her mom had loved so much. "Met my old lover in the grocery store/The snow was falling Christmas Eve/I stood behind her in the frozen foods/And I touched her on the sleeve." Dan Fogelberg. A soft rock nothing.

Kathleen didn't feel better for remembering. She just felt empty. Also empty was her cup of noodles; she sipped the last hint of broth and then tossed it over her shoulder into the backseat. She'd have to clean her car out here soon, just to avoid attracting attention, but she couldn't be bothered right now. The feeling of impending change rolled through her, gave her a manic burst of energy. She pushed the coats and blanket into the passenger seat.

She'd been rationing her gas and battery charge, sleeping under as many blankets as she could, and she'd thought she had another two or three days in Stillwater, to maybe say some goodbyes, but this feeling had her in thrall now. The heat, in the car and in her belly courtesy of the noodles, the way the droplets were running on the windshield, the sound of distant holiday traffic mingling with the wind, it all told her now or never. She checked the time and saw it was almost exactly the moment when the ball would be dropping back in Times Square, and she turned on the radio and there was Auld Lang Syne again, echoing the now-silent choir.

She didn't have to close her eyes to pretend she was back in New York; by simply unfocusing her eyes she called forth the lights that had dazzled her every year as long as she could remember, the flags and the signs, the music and the press of the crowd, the guest appearances—Kenny had come one year and given this hilarious speech (and come to think of it she was two seasons in the hole now and there'd been all these new rules and she was honestly sort of curious but hadn't been able to bring herself to learn any more while she was camped in Stillwater)—and she missed it. She missed it more than anything, but she couldn't go back.

The keys found their way to the ignition almost of their own accord. With a flick of her wrist, the headlights stirred to life. Her car was old and bad, no four-wheel-drive, no electric anything, she even had to crank the windows to get them to open. It would probably break before too long, and maybe then she'd have to leave it along the side of some road, an old friend fallen in the line of duty. For now, though, it was her home and her lifeline, and they were unified in their need to move on once again.

There wasn't a car in sight as she pulled onto Fir Street and turned away from the church, away from Stillwater and Whittree, flurries of snow swirling around her and Auld Lang Syne echoing in her wake.

It was 2021, and it was time for a change.