Alice in Borderland: New York

Rising Tensions (1): Three of Clubs (1)

The flames. The smell of burned flesh. Musical chairs. Music. Guitar. Bands. Bullying. Rope. The nightmares would not stop following her, no matter what she tried to do. But it was even better to be unconscious than to have to be awake and suffer the weight of the real world. She would do everything to make the voices stop. But she did not have the strength. She did not want to risk her life in a game again. She'd just have to wait. It wouldn't take too long, normally. It had been seven days. Only a few minutes left. Before the laser comes from the sky and... As June laid down on her bed in the mall, lost in her dark thoughts, she heard a noise. It was the noise of a motor, mechanical and brutal. She tried to see what could be happening, who could be coming here this late... Someone that had played a game tonight maybe. But there was no one in the mall that had left to play earlier.

June did not have the strength nor the will to stand up and see more. If it was a dangerous person, it did not even matter if they decided to kill her. But they did something even worse. They were carrying three things. A shovel, a coffin, and a corpse. June was intrigued and decided to look at who it was. Unluckily for her, it was someone she knew. Teinejī. Silently, she started crying, mourning the loss of the one that saved her life. She had nothing to live for, but she at least wanted him to survive. She heard everything. The shovel slowly digging into the dirt near the mall, her friend being transported inside of the coffin, and the dirt being tossed onto it.

She heard the intruder leave and stood up in the middle of the mall. The giant clock installed by Peter displayed a time. 11:59. One minute. One minute left. All her life flashed before her eyes, everything. The clock stuck midnight, but nothing happened. Nothing. That's true, the visa days for lying about the rooms. Those stupid visa days. It seemed fate was not wanting to kill her yet. Disappointed, she went back to sleep, when she heard something strange. Someone was knocking. She tried to look everywhere, but she was unable to find anyone. As she looked at her surroundings, she noticed the sound was coming from below. From near the place where Teinejī was buried. A miracle. A miracle could happen. She grabbed a shovel and started digging Teinejī's coffin out of the ground. She looked inside, and this was the miracle.

"June... What happened?" Teinejī asked
Almost crying tears of joy, June explained everything she knew to Teinejī. He stood up, still in shock, and passed out from the exhaustion. But at least he was doing well. All hope wasn't lost. That was what June realized. Miracles could happen. Everything wasn't completely lost for her. The next day, she would go in a venue, clear a game, and get her visa days. She wasn't going to let them be right, she wasn't going to let her past mistakes take over.

The next morning, she left the mall alone, and wandered around the city. All those different animals, these places she would never have imagined seeing this empty... If only the games did not exist, this would have been a perfect world. She started to think about everything that happened to her, wondering if she ever could tell anyone about her past. She stopped thinking about this, and just walked around the city, seeing nature and abandoned landscapes. At night, she saw a light turn on in a nearby place, the Lincoln music center. Music, always music. It would not stop following her... There were 5 people in that center: Ikari, a brown-haired girl that just joined the borderlands, Lucas, that she saw in the mall some days ago, Asher, a guy in a suit, that she remembered seeing in movies before joining the games, and, most importantly... Teinejī. She did not even have the time to react, because the game would already start. The door closed behind them, and the voice announced the game.

"Difficulty: 3 of clubs. Game: Musical memory"