Retrograde Analysis

[carduinal-cyn]

Cory had seemed pretty reasonable until that last crack about 'escape'.

Olivia was no hardcore SOTF fan, nor was she a statistician. She did not think to herself that in sixty-six seasons, successful escapes had only taken place in six of them, one in eleven, 9.09 percent. Her gut instinct, however, was another story; a pit of unease opened in her stomach no sooner than the word had left Cory's mouth. It didn't take top-of-the-class grades for her to realize the danger involved with an escape attempt; she felt an impulse, like a thousand lights switching on at once, to blurt out, "Bullshit!". Only the steady calmness in Cory's soft little nerd-voice prevented her, and even then she really did want the satisfaction of letting a big, honkin' curse word out on live television.

Instead, she dismissed the idea with a bright, girlish giggle. "C'mon, Cory!" she exclaimed. "I know we've been at this for a whole day and all, but don'tcha think that'd be way too dangerous? Like... We're all stuck with these stupid collars on, and I'm pretty sure anyone who goes too far out of bounds'll probably, like, blow up or something. You better have a real good idea for an escape plan!"

Then, in the midst of skeptically crossing her arms, her chipper grin vanished, and she began to backpedal. No way was she going to lose a potential friend-slash-ally-slash-guy-with-the-high-flutey-voice. Olivia decided to bargain. "...But, uh, if you wanna tag along with the two of us, I bet you'd make a pretty cool third member. Strength in numbers, y'know, and Lucia and I have loads of it!"

Liv quickly looked over at Lucia, whose face had frozen in what she could only assume was deep, big-sisterly thought. "Hey, what do you think? You wanna escape, or do you wanna... y'know, stick together?"

She gritted her teeth together in another big grin, this one more sheepish than the last. Hopefully, she told herself, she's gonna tell him what's right.

[ciphermitarai]

“...” Lucia sighed, after mulling it over for what they all knew was too long.

“Here’s an idea. What if we stick together until we can find a way to escape? Right now, our first priority should be getting our bearings, you know, surviving first and then thriving later.” She glanced at the both of them, weighing whatever their reactions may be. “We want to leave our options open... plus, splitting up is the easiest way to get killed.”

Movie knowledge as always put her right back in her stride. Confident that she’d found a happy medium between the two, she allowed herself a little self-congratulatory grin—until she realized what she had just said. “Eh, not that we’re going to die. I... I’m not going to let that happen. Okay? It’s just that... if we rush into any escape plans right at this moment, we might just explode, and—“ She realized she wasn’t exactly helping her case.

Lucia let out a grumble. “... You all know what I mean, yeah? Escapes are rare. We have to be in a good situation to attempt it, and right now, we need food and shelter first. We can keep it in mind, but right now, we need to play the game.”

[Dogs231]

Olivia began to speak, but not before laughing off his proposal. She said it was too dangerous as if playing the game wouldn't get her killed. She said he better have a good plan.

To create a good plan, he would need to experiment. To experiment, he would need to find a corpse, as much as the thought disgusted him. He would need to use that corpse's collar to test the mechanism. This first try would almost certainly fail. As a result, he would need to repeat this process. And he would need many corpses to do so. Olivia offered an opportunity for corpses to be created by joining as a third member of the group.

A less moral person than Cory may have decided that it was in his best interests to agree. Instead, Cory waited and listened. Olivia seemed closer and closer to a lost cause every second, just like Gregory had. He had also invited him to a group of three, and he also put on a superficial veneer of pleasantness. Gregory had tried to kill him. His trust in Olivia began to lower.

He turned to Lucia, waiting for her response. She offered a compromise. Cory would remain with them for now, and they would, in exchange, help him find a method of escape. It sounded like a good idea, and Cory was willing to agree. He believed her to be correct in her assessment. From what he had heard, escape was not a common occurrence.

However, those final six words changed his mind.

"No."

He furrowed his brow, an expression of seriousness on his face.

"I'm not going to play the game."

It was the truth, and he wouldn't bring himself so low as to end the life of his fellow man. It wasn't who he was. And he never wanted to become the kind of person who would even consider it.

[carduinal-cyn]

I'm not going to play the game, he'd said, with a face as stern as her mother's. Just hearing something so stupid sent a bolt of anger rushing through Olivia's head — It's like he was asking to die! Her grin dissipated, replaced with a surly scowl.

"...What the hell are you thinking?" Olivia snapped at him. "If you're not gonna play the game, and no one ever escapes alive... Cory, dude. You're gonna freakin' get yourself killed goin' about it like this, you know that? You're supposed to be the smart one here!" Then, she turned to Lucia, still glowering; "At least you know I'm right," she grumbled. "I don't like it either, but it's kill or be killed, and lots of people are already..."

Liv trailed off and fell silent for a few uncomfortable seconds — all it took for her to kick herself for getting bogged down in the bullshit on day two of God knows how many.

"...Fine," she pouted, her torso slowly twisting to the side. "You don't have to play the game, but we will." Her face was scrunched up in clear contempt for Cory's methods as her eyes scanned the wooden planks around her. (That stupid crossbow bolt had to be around here somewhere, after all.) She'd tried to ask him nicely, but when every move meant the difference between surviving and being pulverized into a bloody pulp, there was no use wasting precious minutes of life here. She had Lucia by her side, a coach and a loving family to make proud.

And if she wasn't the good, hardworking kid everyone said she was, she'd have put a second bolt right through Cory's dumb death-wish face.

[ciphermitarai]

"..." Lucia's eyes narrowed in confusion. "I hate to be too blunt here, but... how exactly do you intend to survive if you don't play along, at least for a little?"

Unthinking, she turned her back to Olivia for a second as she began to pace. "I understand not wanting to kill. I understand refusing to. But you have to recognize that you don't have power over this situation. If all of my years of analysis come to one thing, it's that."

She looked back down at the cleaver, practically unmarred by the standards of how she thought it would be.

"Putting yourself in that situation, well... that's just making yourself hopeless. If you can't have power over the producers, you can at least have power over the others. And I am not willing to just let that go." A more scathing remark about lagging behind passed through her mind, but she bit it back.

"... Cory. I am doing my best to help you survive. But saying that you won't fight, well, that's... practically giving people the pass." Her voice had an edge to it, unspoken words doing all of the lifting. "And I don't want to kill you, but don't think for a second that--that my friend here will be as nice. You just can't afford to be as naive as you are." Her voice was heavy as she sealed her conscious behind closed doors.

"Are you sure about this?"

[Dogs231]

Olivia asked him what he was thinking, scowling at him. He knew what he was thinking, and that was because he was a rational human being who could make decisions that didn't require the deaths of multiple people. She claimed that nobody ever escaped alive and that he was guaranteed to die trying to escape, and that the only viable options were to kill or die. All of this, in his view, was decidedly untrue. Cory didn't even watch this show, and he was still aware of that fact. Statistically, the odds of escape were likely low but not any lower than his chances of murdering his way out. She committed herself totally to the part she had decided to play - she would play the game. Cory was, at this point, unsurprised. He wished he hadn't spent so much time trying to speak reason to an unreasonable person. He sighed with exasperation before speaking. One last attempt to convince her couldn't lose him that much time.

"That's not correct. It doesn't have to be like that. Not if we try."

He turned to Lucia, responding to her doubtful questions on the viability of escape.

"It's simple. We would look for other potential escapees while testing collars that we find in the arena and amass a group over time, which would make reasonable individuals less likely to attack us."

He stopped to take a breath and to find the most convincing words to use.

"We can have power over the situation. We can defeat the game. We only need to figure out how."

A thinly-veiled threat escaped Lucia's mouth. Her voice echoed with the implications of death. He paused, considering his words, still trying to conceal the fact that he was growing frustrated.

"Olivia doesn't stand to gain anything from my death. And to be quite honest, neither do you. It's statistically unlikely either of you will reach the early release. The only thing that is naïve is believing that you stand a better chance at survival through killing than I do through escaping. I am as certain as someone can be."

He didn't have any more to say. At this point, he had given them enough of his time. Every moment spent speaking to them was more lost tempo.

[carduinal-cyn]

Holy shit, was this guy delusional? Potential escapees? Testing collars? All those highfaluting words, sounding like he's going to start experimenting on those collars like some kind of mad scientist. Olivia wasn't sure anymore whether to lose her temper at how ridiculous Cory's plan was — quite unlike his slick, nerdy, logical exterior — or burst out laughing. The indecision showed on her face, which now sported a ghastly mix of grin and grimace.

"Oh, my god." Quiet, exasperated, he's just not getting it! She pinched the bridge of her nose until the realization kicked in.

"Oh my god!" Incredulous. Shaking her head, side to side, as if it would wash the stupid away.

"Oh. My. God." The hushed, resigned whisper of a girl utterly blown away in defeat. He was serious.

"Bro, you—you've really got a death wish, huh?" she sputtered. "You're looking for someone else you think is gonna go along with this, but... You run into someone like Junji, someone angry, someone all raring to go with his head in the game, and you're gonna find out how many..."

After a brief pause, her hands morphed into a pair of sarcastic air-quotes. She said "potential escapees" with the most insultingly posh, almost fake British-sounding Cory impression she could muster. (It didn't sound a thing like him, but how much did she really give a shit?)

"...want you dead. Lucia and I aren't in it for the 10-kill release, Cory. We aren't jumping at the chance to shoot people, or... cleaver people, or whatever the hell. We're not monsters. I'm honestly kinda pissed you think we have it in us, man. Seriously! What's wrong with you! We're just tryin' to survive. This ain't a killing spree for us, it's an endurance!"

As Olivia fumed at Cory for his various assumptions — both about SOTF and about the two of them — her injured crossbow-hand gripped Little Joe with furious force. Her itchy finger grazed the trigger a few times. If her weapon was still loaded, any more frustration might have fired it off a second time. She was fortunate indeed to be out of bolts, and yet the thought of running out of ammunition had never crossed her mind.

[ciphermitarai]

“... I really wouldn’t advise trying to provoke people with weapons, Cory.” Lucia couldn’t muster anything but a flat voice. The boy just didn’t want to hurt anyone—she couldn’t fault him for that, and perhaps if it were a little earlier, she would’ve even joined him. Maybe it was a bad influence, teaming up with someone so trigger-happy, but Lucia knew it was something much more innate than that: a need to crack under the pressure. She could’ve admired his confidence if this were a few hours earlier, and the constant stalemates and guns faced down hadn’t pushed her to this state.

But still, she wasn’t about to stop Olivia... whatever she was doing over there, anyway. The grating voice? Her petty spirit, fueled to flame by his insinuations about her naivety? About a game she spent the better part of her days studying? No, by saying these things she decided he didn’t want her protection, and that to her was his first mistake.

Her gut, the better part of her, twisted in on itself as she spoke things she never thought she’d say. Sure, she never thought she’d abandon someone who needed her help, but the words that came out accidentally implied something far worse.

“Let’s just get this over with, alright?”

[Dogs231]

Olivia became agitated, mocking him and the idea of an escape, and angrily accused him of insinuating them to be killers. She said something was wrong with him. Lucia advised him not to provoke them, then made a vague statement that sounded to Cory like a threat.

The two of them had escalated the situation. Cory didn't understand what their goal was with this strategy. He held his hands up defensively before attempting to talk the two of them down.

"Listen, I'm not trying to insinuate anything or provoke anyone. Try and calm down. If you two don't want to try to escape, then fine. We can go our separate ways."

Cory's voice started to become shaky as his words began to sound more like a plea. In his mind, the situation was on the verge of spiraling of his control. He glanced about. The two people in front of him were now threats - he could see Olivia touching the trigger of her crossbow.

His mind raced - he needed to find a way out of this situation.

[carduinal-cyn]

Cory's voice was trembling now. Olivia could see the beads of sweat form on his forehead. He opened his mouth once more. It was a dishonest mouth now, one that tried to bend the truth and deny what an utter pain in the ass it had been since the minute it had uttered the word 'escape'. The kind of mouth she was seriously considering socking him in. Her hand clenched tighter still until that pesky weapon of hers stopped her from completely balling it up into a fist.

Let's just get this over with, alright?

Her fingers closed around the cold metal. Her eyes flew open. Her grimace vanished.
So that was what Lucia had meant. Internally, Olivia chuckled nervously — she hadn't expected to hear something so cold and cutthroat come from her comrade-in-arms. To keep herself grounded, she called upon the mental image of her beloved Coach...

You were gonna do it anyway. And he's nothing but bad morale for the team. Teach that kid a lesson!

The bolt stuck temptingly out of the dock's guard railing. Liv hesitated for a moment, but her hand lashed out and yanked it from its wooden prison. It was a bit battered, but largely intact; it fit neatly between the crossbow's coiled-up rubbed bands.

Blood roared in Olivia's ears. As if of its own will, Little Joe's barrel turned to Cory and

BLAM.

[ciphermitarai]

“That’s—“

Lucia’s voice cracked.

“not... what I—“

But she couldn’t even lie, couldn’t even say that it wouldn’t help them in the long run. Like she didn’t think this could’ve happened. She wasn’t even going to pretend she was too mad at Olivia, no.

All she could do was stare. Blankly.

And even as she watched, and even as she tried to convince herself that the draining life was advantageous to them—she knew she didn’t want to take credit for this.

It’s hard to chalk up blood to special effects when it’s right in front of you. But that way she stood, face contorted in frank horror, clutching just barely onto the humanity that led them there.

“... we gotta get out of here.”

[Dogs231]

Cory listened as Olivia chuckled at the vague threat Lucia had issued. He watched as Olivia pulled the bolt from the railing. It was a certainty in his mind that she was considering firing the bolt directly at him. His life was in danger, and he needed to find a way to save himself. His mind kept turning like gears in a machine, but all the solutions he could think of were inadequate. A flurry of thoughts came and went as he glanced at his surroundings for an escape from his soon-to-be-attackers.

He remembered a term he had read in a book about chess. It was a phenomenon called Kotov's Syndrome. It occurred when a chess player thought hard about a position and failed to find a solution they were satisfied with, and they, under the duress of their time constraints, instead made a move they hadn't even thought about in advance, usually a bad one. He felt that the term was accurate to the feeling he had currently. He froze in place. He couldn't decide on a move to make. And so, he stood still.

The metal bolt slammed into his abdomen, lodging inside of his body. He glanced at the wound, then back at Olivia and Lucia. His hands were shaking. For a brief moment, the injury was cold and numb. It took a few seconds for the pain to register. He crumbled backward, falling to a position where his back propped against the wooden railing of the jetty. It was hard to keep his eyes open, but he attempted to regardless.

His mind began to slow down.

[carduinal-cyn]

The now-familiar flash of pain tore through Olivia's hand a second time. She didn't even flinch.

Cory now lay in a bloody heap on the dock. Lucia mumbled something she couldn't understand. The world spun around twice and a half. Her head throbbed. Her eyes were glazed over and round as saucers. Her breath hitched.

...I shot him. Holy shit, I shot him! Is he dead? Did I kill him? I killed him, I must have, nobody could survive that...!

As her thoughts spiraled downward, the defender inhaled, exhaled, hyperventilated faster and faster. Her whole body, from the legs on up, began to tremble fearfully. Sweat dripped from her chin.

Silence.

She racked her brain, but everything was jumbled. Muddied. Wrong. She couldn't see Coach's face anymore. Her feet moved of their own accord in a zombielike gait; she turned left, right, left, right, forward and back again without another conscious thought.

It wasn't until she'd been navigating the maze for two minutes straight that she realized she was crying.

(Olivia del Rio continued in This Is Where I Died.)

[ciphermitarai]

“Liv, wait—“

But Lucia’s legs were too heavy, holding her in place, even as the desire to flee mounted with each second. Like—

She couldn’t look away.

“God, I—“

No. Sorry didn’t mean anything now.

“... god damn it.” It was all she could say. It was painfully not enough, not even close to what she felt, but she barely even knew what she was feeling. She had never felt like this before.

It would hurt too much to even think about what she had let happen. She hardly even considered putting the poor boy out of his misery.

Dumbfounded, she gave Cory’s fading face a broken stare before turning and chasing after her partner, for better or for worse.

(Lucia Cuevas Valdez continued elsewhere.)

[Dogs231]

Cory looked at his abdomen, the metal bolt embedded in it glinting in the sunlight. His mind was starting to clear again after the initial stunned shock. The pain of the injury was unrelenting, and his vision remained blurry despite the presence of his glasses.

He watched Olivia panic before she disappeared from his sight. He still couldn't quite understand why she had decided to fire at him. There was nothing to gain, no logical conclusion besides the simple idea that she was an illogical person. Lucia said things that Cory couldn't quite make out. He wondered what the words might have been. She stared at him before turning to follow Olivia.

Cory ineffectually attempted to keep his eyes from closing. He could feel himself losing consciousness. He wasn't sure if he would wake back up again.

His thoughts slowed to a crawl as his eyes shut, the sunlight displaced by darkness.

((Cory Cartwright continued in Zeitnot.))