You Think You Know How the Game is Played, Until You’re in it

[The Honeless Beard]

Ivan smiled for the first time in two days; an ugly, wide, splitting smile that split his chapped lips, adding to the pain resonating from his face.

"I better get rambling, then."

Ivan looked back towards Lucille, shrugging and tapping his collar. "She was Emmy's - she was something to Emmy a while back. It'd be nice to keep tabs in case I can help."

He didn't respond to Akeno's accusation of him getting himself killed, just darted his eyes back and forth before lowering himself in a sweeping bow, grunting with pain as he did so.

"Been a pleasure, you too. Other names are Keegan, Bacchia. I didn't know-" did he? "that Vasily was involved. If you see Rhonda, she's good people."

He left it at that, his words echoing in the small room.

((Continued here))

[Cicadan]

"... Bunch of those names are a surprise. Wasn't Giselle, like, anti-SOTF? Am I even remembering the right one?"

SB05 settled a bit deeper into her repose on her chair. Legs casually yawned open, stomach slightly bloated as she slouched sans composure. She finally disentangled her hand from her friend's own, but only with the implied consent to do so, if there was no resistance when she tried to yank. She'd been watching the table like ES10 had been, all the while as their third had been busily departing to his supposed death.

"I mean by that logic did we just send him to die? I guess?"

She mumbled a sigh like it was her sleep talking. Distant, removed.

(They both liked Vasily, didn't they? Probably in different ways... Lucille had never asked, actually, what sort of folk Akeno found herself attracted to. Gender, aesthetic, so on. Or like, if Akeno had ever brought it up Lucille had forgotten- but that'd be particularly out of character- or more likely would not have been paying attention. This was unquestionably the wrong time to bring it up, to ask a question that could have been asked at many other more opportune and appropriate times)


...

(No, no, she would not do it. She herself hated pointless small talk in most seasons of TV, why would she let herself do it? Or like, keep doing it, at any rate)

"Do you think you should follow him maybe. Or we."

Tacked on suddenly, that second sentence. An afterthought, much like SB05's homework assignments.

"If Ivan's trying to take them... Numbers, right? If he has backup, maybe..."

She sounded like she didn't know. If she had the conviction, or what she wanted to do with it.

[Fenrir]

Ivan left as suddenly as he had arrived, leaving behind only a lingering doubt in Akeno’s mind and a small amount of regret.

Akeno let Lucille go when she started to pull away, untangling their fingers and moving her hand closer towards herself; the moment had been nice while it lasted but it was over now and her hand was starting to feel a little clammy regardless. She adjusted her fingerless gloves while Lucille slouched down next to her.

“Probably. I don’t think Ivan’s trying to survive though.” That was her impression anyway. She might be wrong, but it felt like Ivan had set himself on a collision course with the guys in bag masks and Akeno didn’t want to be anywhere near that when it happened. She didn’t want Lucille to be there either.

“No. No, that’s not a fight I want. Fisk is easy but if Vasily is with them he’ll just gun us down.” He probably would, though there was a small chance he might hesitate if he saw Akeno and Lucille there. She was remembering now that Lucille was close to Vasily as well, closer than Akeno was to him; there had been feelings there maybe, once upon a time, but Akeno didn’t know how deep those ran, especially with Bethan now in the picture. It had never had anything to do with her, so Akeno hadn’t felt the need to pry at the time. It seemed relevant now though.

If I had to kill Vasily, because of Jasper or because of anything else, would you hate me for it?

“I think Ivan was on my team. He mentioned Emmy; she’s my mentor... our mentor. They pulled her out of the game so she could watch us die instead.” Akeno had asked Emmy before if there was anyone she wanted her to spare, so that she could avoid killing them on her way to ten kills. The same way she wouldn’t hurt Vasily if Lucille asked her to. She hadn’t answered, but apparently that person was Alaska. Ivan knew that for some reason.

“I could go after Ivan. Fisk is the one who killed Jasper so… we could fight him together and if we win we’ll both get our revenge. Then we could team up, try to find the rest of Emmy’s team and maybe see if we can win this whole thing.”

Lightly, she began to drum her fingers on the table. The plan sounded nice. It was kind of thing that the average contestant would do, she thought; help their teammate, get revenge on the person who killed their friends, try and survive until the end with their team. So straight forward a course of action it almost felt cliché.

“I don’t think that’s the right play though.” Her fingers stopped drumming and she leaned back in her seat until her head touched the back of the chair and she was staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know what the right play is anymore. I wanted to go for ten; I thought if I acted quickly enough I could make it before anyone else could, but I haven’t had the right chances. My weapon isn’t great, so it was always too risky to go for it.”

Instead of a piece of wire Akeno could have been given a gun or a knife instead, or maybe a hook or a sword or something like that. A giant spear. She could have killed Sergio as well as Maxine; Alyssa and Verity in the hallways of the cruise ship; Rebecca and the tall girl in the maze of boxes. Fisk. Akeno would have seven kills instead of one, maybe more, if she’d gotten a different weapon. “I bet I’ve fallen too far behind now.”

Fisk had at least two kills now, which wasn’t a huge deal. Verity might have more, but the front runner was probably Seo-Yun if she had to guess. How far ahead she was, she’d have to wait until the next announcement to find out.

“If I wanted to win the normal way… it would mean letting you die.” Akeno swallowed heavily. “I’d have to let everyone not on my team die.”

Jasper was on a different team. Lucille was on a different team. What about everyone else? Was Lucia on her team? Vasily? Seo-Yun? “I don’t even know who that would be.”

[Cicadan]

"I honestly couldn't tell you if he'd gun us both down or not. But... think he would. I was always like, second ring among his friends."

SB05 breathed down a sudden excess of phlegm. Allergies to the blood and the rust perhaps.

"And yeah, I remember that from the brief. Shout outs to Emmy."

(It sounded like a good idea for the season on paper, she guessed. Turn a classmate into a mentor- she might have been interested in following along with that gimmick for a while if it'd been her watching Season 67. Seeing how the personal connections impacted the mentor interactions, so on)

The incessant tap of SB05's big toe against the gently swaying horizontal line that was the floor of the ship joined the drum of her friend's fingers.

"The more people together the more chance there is for a misunderstanding to go wrong. Always been the case in TV, right?" SB05's contemplative tone was a hue more emotive than gray goo. Ambient drone noises, leaking out of the quiet kid in classes' earphones. The kid that SB05 herself had never been. "That's why team play hasn't seemed to work out yet. I remember Ryan mentioned it in-"

(Who was Ryan? Some guy who Had! A! Podcast! A nobody probably, to anybody that hadn't made their entire life about some cool violent TV show like Lucille had)

"... Yeah," she trailed off in conclusion. "And I had a gun but, couldn't hold onto it. Maybe if you'd gotten it instead you'd be halfway out of here."

She finally chose to look at ES10, right in the eye. The third to last sentence. The idea in the second clause. It led to a brief moment of contemplation, and then a firm nod.

"If we ended up fighting it would've made for good TV... Fuck, maybe. I dunno."

She rested her mind, for a moment. Burned too hot when she was trying to use it for anything. Her lips idled in a stony pout the size of an atom.

"You could... get away with letting some of them die. As long as your team enters the final four with a numerical advantage, it's probably game over."

[Fenrir]

“That’s…” Akeno stopped drumming. “Not really was I was getting at.”

This wasn’t about her teammates. She wasn’t concerned with whether or not they lived or died, as harsh as that sounded. They were just people assigned to her by random lottery; faceless, anonymous, until proven otherwise. Ivan was the only one she could put a face to and she’d just sent him off to die at someone else’s hands.

They weren’t the people she was thinking about right now.

When Akeno had thought about how she would approach things, should she ever end up on this show, her team had never been a consideration because she’d never intended on relying on them; same way her mentor had never been a consideration until she turned out to be someone Akeno knew. In some ways it would have been preferable to be the loner. It would certainly uncomplicated some things.

The plan had always been to get the ten by herself and then leave; let the final winner be decided without her input. That was still the plan, but it was looking more and more unlikely with each announcement.

“Hey, Lucille.” No ten meant she had to start considering her other options. Surviving until the last was probably her best chance now and that had always been her fall-back, but that outcome wasn’t… ideal, for a few reasons.

“Jasper was trying to escape. The people he was with are still trying I think. Do you want to go find them?”

[Cicadan]

"It's what people who are watching are thinking, probably. Or at least the people like me," SB05 humorlessly snorted. "Wondering who ends up in endgame and how it plays out already."

(Yeah like, as an idle thoughts sort of thing, right? Lunch in the Mangrove cafeteria came with a milk carton- if you wanted to pay for the cheap shit- and wondering about things like group dynamics and how this or that kid was totally going to snap under the pressure even though they were cool as ice as of the current broadcast day)

"Who were those people?"

Her gaze had gotten a little unfocused when her friend had mentioned the late JL06. She'd been good about maintaining eye contact, up until then at any rate.

"Escapes are a crapshoot."

(Lucille had always thought they seemed rigged, outside looking in. Like any kid could be that smart that they could figure out the weaknesses in a system playtest and perfected by thousands of corporate drones who knew their marketing inside and out. She'd never cared about them, right? No season ever ended with an escape- there was always one last cool fight, one last cool bit of tactics and skullduggery and bludgeoning to be had)

(She still thought it was cool? Even while it was happening to her. Just weird to think how low she'd be ranking herself in her own contestant appraisals, the footnote's footnote she'd be in her her own 67 notebook that she would have bought at the mall on the way back from school, if she'd ended up going to classes as usual yesterday)

"It's worth a shot. Ten and endgame are about as unlikely... like, something about how the math works out. There can only ever be two at most getting out ninety-nine times out of a hundred, escape attempts are a marginal improvement on potential survival for anyone who isn't likely to be one of those lucky two. So probably, like, Seo and who the fuck knows who else."

A snort.

"Reminds me of how bad I was at math class, when I try to comprehend TV stats."

(All her book learning, she did via podcast)

SB05 started to get up, and offered ES10 a helping hand.

[Fenrir]

“There’s no way to predict this game. People surprise you, every time.” Because people, generally speaking, did not want to die. People, when faced with death, would fight for their continued survival and they would fight harder than they’d ever fought for anything before. It was an intangible, unknowable factor that every contestant possessed and it was one that defied the attempts of the experts to fit people into categories.

Akeno had seen it time and time again while watching this show; that fight. The fight. It was one of the things that had most captivated her about it, the thing that ensured she kept coming back even if she knew it was wrong. Watching people die and kill each other… it was a disturbing experience; how so many people like Lucille seemed to enjoy it as general entertainment was something she’d never fully understood. But witnessing the way people scrambled to survive, how they struggled so desperately, was just so raw and uncomfortable in how real it was that she couldn’t look away. It was like they were baring a part of themselves that shouldn’t be seen. Like it was something so personal that it felt taboo to watch, even beyond the snuff film aspect of it.

She couldn’t honestly say she’d ever enjoyed watching Survival of the Fittest, but Akeno had always been glued to the screen regardless.

Lucille rose from her seat and offered a hand for her to do the same. Akeno grabbed it and stood, using the table more than her friend to pull herself out of her slump. “I didn’t recognise any of them, but if they’re working on something we should check it out. If it doesn’t work out then we aim for endgame instead; as long as we’re alive there’s always that option.”

Akeno pushed down the anxious feeling in her stomach. As long as they were alive they had options. “Whatever the odds are we’ll beat them; we’ll surprise them.”

ES10: AKENO KUDO CONTINUED IN disappointingly a ‘luckier’ fish

[Cicadan]

"They do. Yeah. Hard to know for sure."

Repetition was sometimes socially constructive.

(Lucille hated repeating herself but she did it, like, all the time. A lot and always)

SB05's grip and spine were still technically good-to-go. The fight she'd lost evening of first day was one fluke among many for the bookkeepers. Her body appreciated her companion doing most of the work herself, leaving just a bit of tension hooking them together by the tips of their respective fingers.

"Like I said before, right?"

(Like, way back. Lucille liked to say it to all her friends, and almost as much to her kind-of-friends. These little things she'd learned with time, having glued herself to the screens of phones and tee-vees and tablets in the interest of kinda habitual consumption)

"Gotta be full of surprises to make it."

(She'd surprised herself so far, for sure. Like damn, she'd gotten in almost two full days now? She should have gotten further along than this. She also wasn't sure why she wasn't more upset about that)

((SB05 dies in disappointingly a 'luckier' fish))