Just a Game

Orientation [Contestant Side 1]

The room Elise Ramsey and her team of models would be staying in was everything she could ask for.

Four huge, floofy canopy beds. Dainty little lamps. Cozy wooden floorboards. Four separate sinks with a mirror each. A jacuzzi. Cushions in hot pink, presumably to match with the team's representative color. Elise wasn't especially thrilled to learn that they were Team hot pink, being more of an orange kind of person, but the room was great so who was complaining?

Elise definitely wasn't. She let out an excited yelp and made a beeline for the leftmost bed, which she had claimed as her own that very instant she laid eyes on it, and began jumping up and down on it.

"Elise, please—we're being filmed!" Fawn, Elise's soft-spoken friend, complained. Her wide eyes made her look more horrified than she actually was. Fawn may be timid, but she was surprisingly unfazed by most things.

"We don't know her," Libya told the cameraman, rolling her icy blue eyes.

Elise didn't like the cameraman much. He was hidden behind the huge camera set, not revealing anything about himself yet recording everything about them. She had heard that this was what reality TV was like—the staff knew all about you, while you knew nothing about the staff—but Elise was a people person at heart. She wanted to make friends with the world, and silent cameramen were very hard to get to know.

The pretty staff member who had led them to their room, on the other hand, Elise liked right off the bat. Her name was Diwa, she had said. Well-built, tanned and graceful, she was like a personified Siamese cat. She had on Siamese cat makeup too—deep shadows lavishly painted around the eyes. Elise liked Siamese cat makeup, but she was too much of a girl-next-door type to pull that look off.

"Glad you're enjoying your room." Diwa's voice was like slippery silk and her lips were so fascinatingly thin. "But wait till I show you the best part!" She pointed with a dramatic gesture at the blank white wall facing the beds.

"There's nothing special about that," Elise countered as she continued to bounce on her bed. In fact, the wall was especially un-special. It was underwhelming, almost, just one boring white wall in a room of snug, stylish beauty.

"And that's where you're wrong!" Diwa declared with triumph. "We're in a virtual room, after all, and what's a virtual world without some innovations?"

Elise was about to ask "what do you mean" when Diwa snapped her fingers, and the whitewashed wall immediately transformed into an expansive full-wall window. Outside the window was the most incredible view of city lights Elise had ever seen. Soaring buildings of all shapes and sizes were lit in every color of the palette, and flying vehicles weaved between them, making gentle humming city sounds.

"It's not even night now," Elise whispered in awe.

"Doesn't matter what time it is," Diwa explained, "this wall has a life of its own. It's like your average screensaver, except realer. You can shut it off by snapping your fingers when you want to sleep, of course."

"So it changes?" Natasha asked, and Elise spun around in surprise. Natasha was so quiet that Elise often forgot that she existed, despite the fact that she was the tallest of them all. Elise had assumed that she was hanging out with their manager Tristan and his team, but apparently she was right here, calmly perched on the bed beside Elise's.

Diwa nodded. "There's a remote in one of the drawers that lets you control how frequently it changes. Yeah, it's that one," she said approvingly, seeing that Natasha had already located the device.

"Hey, let's not change it yet. I want to stare at this city a bit longer—" Elise began, but Natasha had already pressed a button. The glorious lights were gone, and in its place stood a dreamy, misty maple tree forest with the reddest, saddest leaves.