The Labyrinth Trials

Chapter 1

Today was the day.

Today was the day.

And Sophia didn't know whether to be excited, like everyone else, like her classmates, like her parents, friends, family. Like the rest of the world. Or whether it was alright to be nervous. Just like she was. She lay in her bed with the duvet lazing over the top of her, as she looked up at the ceiling with her innocent crystal blue eyes, trying to imagine in her mind what she thought would happen today.

If I'm lucky, the scouts will completely ignore me, and then I wont have to worry at all. I can go about my life without needing to worry about the possibility of dying a bloody death in some weird sick trial.

Sophia was praying, praying hard, that it wasn't her. That it couldn't possibly be her.

She was praying hard that she wouldn't get picked for the Labyrinth Trials.

Those trials were by far the last thing that Sophia ever wanted to compete in.

Sophia was not a competitor. Even at school, sports was always hard for her because she could never muster up the same fierceness and determination to win like her teammates could. She couldn't even play basketball and be fierce, let alone enter a trial of doom and come out alive.

The Labyrinth Trials seemed to be the one thing that was always talked about here in New York. They were held over a duration of one week at most. Ten fifteen-year-old adolescents were selected from usually the most popular schools in New York, and then sent down far underground to conquer twenty floors of danger and death. The last four to come out, were the winners of the Trials. The Trials were so important and so famous, that they were even more highly thought of than Christmas, infact, no one really cared about Christmas. They would rather sit behind a television screen watching a bunch of kids die painfully and tragically, and laugh when the person they didn't want to win dies, or cry when the kid that they were vouching for dies. The Labyrinth Trials were all the buzz on the news, all over the web, in the newspapers, magazines, ads. You name it.

That was mainly because this year's Trials were starting In two weeks.

Sophia was nervous because today was the day that the Trial scouts would come to her school, to visit her class, to select one kid who they thought had the best chance of winning out of them all.

Sophia didn't want to die. Plain and simple she didn't want to die.

She didn't want to risk her life running through a labyrinth deep underground, and even if she did come out, the only thing she really was rewarded with was bragging rights. Other kids at school called her a wimp or a weirdo because of the fact that she was openly uninterested in the tirals. And she was alright with that. She would be the one to throw it back in their faces when their name got called up to the office at the end of the day to receive the news that they had been chosen. She could only imagine that they would be just as hesitant as she was.

The tests happened every year, infact Sophia remembered when her older brother Drew, now graduated and moved out, had undergone the test last year for the trials. He had said that they had to go through a series of activities and courses. They had to do things like throw knives and swords at targets, hand to hand combat training, solve riddles and puzzles and a series of other tests. At the end, the scouts gather up what they've seen, and choose who they think did the best at each activity.

Sophia knew that she could easily get away with this and not get chosen.

She wasn't good at throwing knives or swords (hence she's never done it), she wasn't good at running or dodging things (she wore things in the face a lot). And she sure as hell wasn't good at hand to hand combat. She knew she'd be alright. So therefore, Sophia decided that there was actually no reason to be nervous at all.