The Flotilla, 5:23 PM Local Time, International Waters
The sun had passed its peak an hour or so before, and now the heat was reasonably bearable, especially in the shade of the large umbrella by the side of the pool. The umbrella was black, unlike its pastel counterparts, set up especially for the photoshoot, just like the black beach chair that would have been scalding hot if not for the black towel covering it, and also like the black bikini with dark red highlights worn by the girl occupying the chair. The socks that reached mid-thigh were also black, and the crew hadn't said anything about them yet. It was just how she liked it.
Jewel's attention was split between her phone (which had two different streams going simultaneously), a tablet (which had another half dozen, each of which could be pulled up to cover a bigger slice of screen space with a tap), a virgin pina colada (really just glorified pineapple and coconut juice), and her thoughts. She kept catching herself fantasizing—what would happen if I was in SOTF? The ponderings were old friends, but outdated ones. It was like, on the first day of high school, after spending your whole middle school years apart, running into your fifth grade crush again and discovering he'd only grown an inch and a half and still ate his own snot.
The timing on this could perhaps have been better, what with the Leviathans managing to by and large stay in the game, but she'd promised back at the start that she'd model the team merch if nobody on the team proper got to it over the first couple days, and following through was the first step to leaning on Stephanie to do so as well, and also, even if there was no chance of her actually entering the pool, it just felt nice to get outside for a little and enjoy the breeze.
The photographers buzzed around, making the periodic request or adjustment but mostly taking semi-candid shots because she'd insinuated that was all she was prepared to tolerate. She was getting more respect with the game live and nearby than she had in a while; it was interesting how proximity to the violence reminded others of her own history. Or maybe they just knew they would only have to put up with this for a few days. It didn't matter.
She wasn't wearing sunscreen. She almost never did, avoiding burning instead by staying out of direct light. The greasy slick oily feeling was unpleasant, and there was nobody she felt like enlisting to help rub it into her back, and she was going right back to her other costume when this was done. The tall boots sat beside the chair, folding over without legs to keep their shape. The rest was in a locker just inside. She'd been surprised to see how much there was to this ship. The pool area had barely gotten a moment of screen time when Sidney Rice departed from a pathway nearby. Nobody had died here, at least not because of SOTF.
Jewel's left hand idly pulled at her navel ring, tugging gently enough to avoid discomfort but firmly enough to register the feeling, as she flipped between feeds with her right, currently on the tablet, tracking her own team but also students near them, and students who seemed likely to be worth knowing about in the coming days. The metal of the ring seemed like it should've been cold, maybe, but it was instead body temperature. There was nothing too critical happening at this precise moment, which was in its way more stressful than an active catastrophe would've been.
Her headset—one similar to the ones she'd worn back in December, because you had to sneak the nods in where you could and it worked just fine for contacting the team—was currently switched off. The susurration of photographers blended with the subconscious lapping of waves into a rough facsimile of the music that never truly went away, or else of the crashing cavalcade of voices that overlapped and then screamed at her in a mounting crescendo every time she started to drift off when she wasn't supposed to; she was grateful for those, for once, because they kept her sharp, bought her another forty or so minutes of alertness before the fatigue started to creep in again. She'd allotted herself a two-hour nap every twelve, placed at the times least likely to see action and with strict orders to her three assistants—by now gleeful co-conspirators—to wake her immediately if anything seemed like it even might happen to her team.
"Excuse me," called one of the photographers, a younger man only a few years older than Jewel probably. Had he lost some bet, slowest one to touch his nose, or was he the one they thought she'd be most receptive to? His tone was gentle, on the wrong side of coddling, and her lips turned up on the edges, showing teeth behind the black lipstick.
"Yes?"
"Um," he said, taking a few steps closer, hands busy doing nothing much with his camera. "We were hoping..."
He was leaving an opening, or fishing for a prompt, and Jewel was all ready to leave him hanging except she had this sudden memory, standing there in her navy blue polo uniform shirt, some sixty-year old man with wrinkly neck skin like a turkey's not about to answer her question about whether he wanted a bag or not until he finished his phone call, thinking to herself that she had never in her life hated a human being as much as she did at that moment, had never felt so ignored and mistreated, thinking she'd rather be at home doing her fucking math homework and knowing that this seething rage wasn't actually unique at all, that this would be one of half a dozen times this week, every week, her four-hour after-school shifts not possibly worth eight dollars an hour. At least prostitutes were well compensated for the chunks of their life they sold.
"Sorry," Jewel said, "what can I do for you?"
This seemed to make him more nervous than the silence. His eyes weren't on her face, instead settled somewhere in the middle of her body.
"Uh," he said, "sorry, just, it's hard to, um, to get the pictures. When you're doing. That."
Jewel's eyes stopped their back and forth between his face and the screen, and instead followed his gaze and found her own hand, still pulling and twisting her jewelry.
"Oh." It took a conscious effort to stop; she put the tablet in her left hand. "Sorry."
A smile, apologetic, but nobody took her smiles at face value anymore.
"It's fine." He sounded unsure if he was apologizing too. "We're almost done I think, might have you stand over by the railing in a few minutes here."
"Okay," Jewel said. "Whatever you need."
Except, of course, for taking off the socks. She couldn't disappoint her Twitter followers.
The man went back to the others, but she didn't let him fade into the collective, even as she did let him slip out of her immediate vision and attention.
Her right hand, now relieved of tablet duties, brought her the drink that she was happy to let everyone else here assume was alcoholic. She barely tasted it, just enough to register that it was sweet, a little more energy to pour into this. She'd never been this sleepy in her own season. Then again, she'd only been in the game for a little under two and a half days, and she'd gotten more or less a night's worth of rest, and then there'd been all the adrenaline.
After putting the glass back down, the hand fell to rest on her right thigh, right above sock hemline, right next to the circular stab scar that stood out against her pale skin. After joking about scars and swimsuits, she'd made sure not to hide it. Not the ones on the backs of her fingers, either, or the big patch against her left arm.
The pool water shimmered brighter than the sea. Jewel wiggled her toes and watched the fabric of the socks move. Beyond her feet and the rail they'd have her standing against soon, on that bigger, distant cruise ship, somebody died in screaming agony. In a small town in Oklahoma, a girl working on a book report over spring break tore at her hair and refused to turn on the television. Thousands of pigs were herded into slaughterhouse hoppers in farms all over the country. The cameras clicked and clicked.
She smiled and turned back to the screen.
The Flotilla, 9:00 PM Local Time, International Waters
"Hello, Mangrove Garden. A very good evening to all of you. I hope you've had a happy April Twentieth. I'm sorry we couldn't partner with a dispensary to get you some samples. Maybe next year."
Ritzy Daggers sounded upbeat as ever, the pattern by now becoming almost routine.
"You know what's coming next: the battered and the broken. Starting, of course, with a few hold-overs.
"Our resident stream celebrity, Alaska Ferguson, was trying to set up a flashy play to get herself out of trouble, but instead ended up baited, outsmarted, and disabled by CC, ultimately granting her bounty to Seo-yun Lee, whose kill streak is getting awfully long.
"...Did I get all that terminology right?
"Well, either way, it was a bad day for the content creators of your class, as James Highchurch brought an early cancellation to the little show-within-a-show of Stokely Keeper. I guess you could say the outpost arc got a little abridged.
"It feels cliché to quote that old line about the butterfly and the bee, so let's just say that Rhonda Rollins got stung hard by Gregory Miller, right in the throat, and no EpiPen on earth could save her.
"It seems like just a few seconds ago that I was telling you about how James Highchurch finally scored a kill, but sometimes a few seconds is all it takes for things to get out of hand. And that's exactly what happened when Ivan Rodriguez got the drop on him and blew a hole straight through him.
"At least Sofia Kowalski won't have to get the bad news from me. I always thought those couples who mirrored each other were kind of obnoxious, but matching gaping gut wounds is taking it to a whole new level. You have to admire the dedication, if nothing else. And of course, credit to Akeno Kudo for making it happen.
"After that, Gabriela Garcia-Campos learned that no good deed goes unpunished—well, okay, 'good' might be a stretch, but just 'no deed' doesn't have any sort of ring to it—when she shot down Diana McIntyre a few seconds earlier than she probably should've.
"On the other end of the timing spectrum, we have Caleb Bloch, whose efforts to forestall or ease the inevitable failed to stop it. Junji Yamada took the shot a while ago, but it's a clear line of cause and effect, so the point is yours. Enjoy it.
"Finally, the foul and ferocious Nadine Flores, no doubt the most fearsome and vile among you, with her—"
A rustling of papers is audible from the speakers.
"—single mercy kill in service of attempted escape, was brought low at last by Anthony Golden. Keep on fighting the good fight.
"Now for the team update.
"The Crabs still have six members in play, but have managed to grow their collective kill score to seventeen. Be careful; those claws pinch hard.
"The Krakens have accounted for ten kills together, but only two of the team are left alive. I'd say it's time to start figuring out what path you're planning to follow, but at least one of you worked that out a long time ago.
"The Selkies also took more damage, and now have a mere three members in play. They're technically third place in kills, with seven, but by now you all know that two of those were, let us say, of dubious benefit to the collective.
"The Leviathans are our least-changed team, with the same stats as last time: three kills and six members. I'd tease but, well...
"Well... the Mariners... or maybe we should say, the Mariner, has a lot more to worry about. Yes, that's right, while the team officially has three kills, there's also only one member left. Congratulations, you're now as big an underdog as the Loner. Maybe even more so—after all, you know how many of those three kills were, or weren't, yours.
"The Buccaneers are still sitting at four kills, one friendly fire, but they also lost a member, bringing the crew down to four survivors. At this point, though, that still leaves them in the upper half.
"The Sirens miss that cutoff, with only three still in play at the moment. With six total kills, they haven't scored any points in a while.
"And, of course, our Loner is still one and one.
"Now then, like I warned you this morning, we're tightening the belt. The Cruise Ship and the Jetties and small boats immediately surrounding it are still in play. Everything else is not. And tomorrow that's going to shrink even more. Time to get cozy with each other. Or clear some space for privacy.
"That's that. Ritzy out."
Weather: 9:00 PM, Day Four, Tuesday, April 20, 2021
The sunset is especially scenic tonight, and a clear sky pairs with cool breezes and a lack of clouds resulting in brilliant reflections of stars, moon, and boat lights in the waves. With so much of the arena now off-limits, there's an eerie calm over most of the flotilla, punctuated by greater activity at its hub. The eighth announcement will arrive at 9:00 AM on Friday, April 21.
And, the rolls. As always, please remember all appropriate etiquette.
1. Luanne Grasset (Kermit) - Matias Juarez (Maraoone, Hero Card used)
2. Gabriela Garcia-Campos (Catche Jagger)
3. Luciano Ascensio (Skraal)
4. Bethan Gayle (Pippi) - Laura Hakštok (Pippi, Swap Card used)
Three days for cards, and a further seven for deaths. We're back to the usual three/seven split for Danger Zones. Once again, we're going to be turning post review on for the DZs after the first period elapses, so don't panic if your post does not immediately show up after that window; staff will approve it ASAP.
