Specials

Chapter 12- The Games

When Dawn woke up, she felt like her head was stuffed with cotton. She felt like she'd been sleeping for a year, and when she opened her heavy eyelids, she was looking up at a sapphire blue sky filled with pure white fluffy clouds. Dawn noticed she was laying on something soft and a bit damp. Grass. It was a deep emerald green, and when Dawn sat up, she saw they were in a meadow dotted with wildflowers. Dawn noticed she was wearing the suit with silver, and a plasma gun resting at her hip on a holster. They had practiced how to use plasma guns in training. They shot out beams of hot white light that vaporized anything in its path, and they had battery packs that would last a month, even longer if you needed thanks to solar panels on the top. Dawn stood up and looked around. At the edges of the meadow there was a thick layer of forest surrounding them. Throughout the meadow, Dawn saw her five other teammates standing up and looking around like she was.

James was currently stamping out a small fire that he had created in the emerald grass by having his hair pressed against it. Dawn had a quick flash of wondering if he had to have a fireproof pillow in his room.

"The hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiills are aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive with the sound of muuuuuuuuuuuuusic!!!" Jaina sang. Her singing voice was really good actually, but Dawn wondered how she felt so energized while everyone was pale-faced and sleepy.

"Calm yourself, sunshine," Chameleon barked. She was a sleepy, disgruntled blue-green-purple color, and her hair was all messed up.

"Can't help it! So much nature!" Jaina chirped. Dawn realized they hadn't asked Jaina what her powers were. Jaina caught Dawn's questioning eye and winked at her.

"So what do we do now?" Sarah asked.

"Maybe there's somewhere we have to go?" Kia wondered aloud.

"I'll go climb a tree and look around," Jaina suggested, crossing the meadow and climbing one of the trees with the grace and litheness of someone who'd been climbing trees for all their life. Within moments, she was at the top, her face a dark speck nestled within the foliage. "Well." Jaina called down. "I see a whole lot of trees."

"Look in a different direction," Dawn suggested, patiently. Jaina obediently looked to the left.

"Whoa, man! That's- that's impossible! That's... That's horrible!" Jaina cried, looking suddenly distressed.

"What is it? What do you see?" Chameleon called, a rather worried green color.

"You guys won't be able to believe it. Come up here," Jaina called down. Everyone obeyed, shimmying up the tree with her, and looked to the left.

"No f***ing way," Sarah breathed. What they saw was, as Jaina said, indescribable. Imagine, for a moment, the most beautiful forest full of emerald green trees, reaching and brushing the beautiful fluffy clouds. Sapphire lakes glitter like mirrors dotted in the forest, clouds floating reflectively in them too. It's the most amazing thing you've ever seen in the entire world. And in the horizon, the sky turns gray. The clouds are apocalyptic black, soaking up ugly, polluted fog from a massive, terrible factory on the horizon.

"Well," Chameleon was an odd shade of red, "There's our objective."

"Guys," Kia gasped, "I had a random thought."

"Do tell," Jaina prodded her.

"Well, the instructions said that the simulation would be exactly like real life, with hunger and thirst and all that," Kia began. "And Sarah normally has to drink at least a little bit of blood at school, right? Just a little bit, or she goes all crazy vampire attacking people... I mean, I know we can find food in the forest, probably berries or something. But animal blood, if we even manage to catch an animal, it might be tainted or dangerous." Everyone turned and rotated to look at Sarah, realizing the drawbacks of having a vampire on their team.

"We'll cross that bridge when we get there," James said resolutely. "For now, we should focus on getting to the big creepy factory where the maniacal overlord is sure to be hiding." Everyone agreed with this suggestion, and tumbled down the tree with various amounts of grace.

"Alright then," Sarah remarked, as if the previous conversation hadn't been about her blood-sucking needs, "To the gross, stinky and very ominous factory we go."