The True Essence of the Game!

Together, they pushed open the gold-trimmed double doors and stepped into a closed glass chamber of what beyond was a grand dining hall. Countless people ambled the aisles of several buffet stations, packing their plates with abundant amounts of food.

“I-Is that a buffet?!” Eligh cried, his voice bouncing back at him in the glass chamber. He was at once painfully hungry, having eaten nothing more than a few meal replacement bars somehow preserved and stored in his Gear Up! gear for the second phase. “We need to get in there!”

He rushed to push open the glass door which blocked them from the hall. But as he pushed, a violent charge of energy zinged straight through his arm and zapped the living hell out of him. He felt like a roasted duck.

Mara tsked her tongue against her teeth. “That’s what you get for assuming I’d go in there looking like this.”

A small hiss of smoke, like a representation of his very soul, left Eligh’s mouth when he tried to talk, and Mara laughed. “Let’s find a way to get this stuff off of us first,” she suggested. She moved to exit the way they came but was startled by a robotic voice telling her, “No need, Miss Ono!” She doubled back into Eligh.

What they hadn’t noticed before was a human-sized cylindrical pod attached to a wall of the glass chamber. Its frosted sliding door slid open with considerable noise and a sleek humanoid robot danced out—like literally moonwalked out of the pod and struck a pose in front of Eligh and Mara. Five more androids followed suit and soon, the pair were left standing with six robots encircling them.

Gut in his throat, Eligh pulled Mara close (not quite hiding behind her… but hiding behind her), and stammered at the six humanoid beings, “Ummm, h-h-he-hell-hello?”

In one motion, the group of androids raised their right arms at Eligh and Mara and their hands transformed swiftly into gauntlet-sized gun barrels. Each barrel, emitting a terrible noise as they powered up, produced a white light that grew brighter until it was blinding.

“Whoa!!” Eligh screamed. He thrust Mara’s arms out in front of them (because her arms were the first line of defense. He was certainly hiding behind her now) and decided to bargain.

“O-Okay, look. We can talk this out. Let’s have a conversation. Don’t want us to leave? Done. We’ll go in there and eat. Then, we’ll leave. We’ll even pay if we have to. Won’t we, Mara?”

The damned girl shook her head once and said in a sharp voice, “Not a chance in hell.”

“Mara!” Eligh squeaked and started screaming when the speaker of the robots said, “Not to worry, Mister Persil. This will be quick,” and blasted both Mara and Eligh square in the face with a rush of powerful water.

The rest of the treatment was quick and only minimally traumatizing and by the end of it, Mara was not speaking to Eligh.

Apparently, the Androids of the Glass Chamber—That would be a fire book title, Eligh thought—were cleaning bots engineered for times of quarantine. Mara and Eligh had been soaked, scrubbed, and power dried to the effectiveness of the Sahara Desert all with the intensity of an iron hand.

Eligh wondered how serious the quarantine had to be to endure that kind of cleaning.

Mara had complained that she wouldn’t have to exfoliate her skin for the next year. Eligh had at first laughed then canned it after the withering glare Mara sent his way. Anyway, his own body had also been put through the ringer, so he could sort of empathize.

“There!” The speaker of the androids said, “Clean as a whistle! Help yourself to the dining hall!”

“Thanks…” They both mumbled and with that, the chamber’s door opened, and Mara and Eligh were welcomed in with a round of cheers and applause.

Shocked, Eligh wondered, How did they know we were coming in?! And why cheer for us?! His eyes darted around everywhere, the top half of his face terror stricken and the bottom half a frozen smile. He glanced at Mara to see her reaction.

I don’t know why I even wondered. He thought. The frown on her face had melted off, replaced with a smile so pearly she could have pawned her teeth for gold. She did the princess wave she’d done at the start of the Games and Eligh huffed out a laugh, charmed once again.

“You’re enjoying this, huh?” He said to her, and she stopped with a look at him like Hell could freeze over before she’d allow him to talk to her again. Eligh grimaced, “Okay, I’m sorry!” He exclaimed, “I didn’t mean for you to get the brunt of the water blast. Honest!”

He was ignored.

People started coming up to them now, saying things like, “Congratulations for getting this far!” and “I hope you go all the way! Win this thing!”

Someone near the edge of the pack said, “Felt crazy getting sucked through that big blob of jelly, didn’t it? No way I thought we’d end up here after we disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Eligh said aloud.

“Well, yeah.” He heard, “You’re in the presence of the ones who vanished, mister!” This chipper, older-woman voice made Eligh’s head snap to attention. His eyes searched frantically until he spotted her short stature breaking off from a section of the antsy crowd.

“Jade!” He cried and surprised himself by hurrying over and throwing his arms around her. She fit in his arms like May did and suddenly, he missed home. He realized he really liked Patrice and her fellow older ladies.

“We found you!”

“You found me!”

Mara joined in on the group hug but didn’t forget to give Eligh one of her dirtiest glares before doing so. He frowned big, ‘puppy-ing’ his eyes at her and celebrated internally when her glare wilted a bit, and the corner of her mouth made the tiniest upward twitch.

The moment was then cut short by another familiar voice, this time belonging to the host of the Games. “Connnnn-gratulations!” A very skinny man with hair like a brown bowling ball said, sliding into view the way Jordan did upon their arrival to the island.

Eligh fought with the gods to not roll his eyes at this innocent man.

“Eligh Persil and Mara Ono, you two—no, your team—has successfully conquered this extreme version of Hide and Seek as champions of Phase Three! A round of applause for these brave and kind champions of world peace!!”

Renewed applause and cheers rocked the large hall and pierced Eligh’s ears. He echoed Mara when she asked, “Wait, we passed?”

The announcer came in between Mara and Eligh, hanging his arms around both their shoulders. He had to hug Mara’s head in a near headlock to continue speaking through the microphone in his left hand. He didn’t have anything in his right hand, but he squeezed the life out of Eligh’s neck, anyhow. “Of course!” He said, “It’s what Phase Three is all about! Let me tell you.

“Phase Three is the most beautiful and cherished stage of the Gear Up! Games. It’s also our best kept secret, so be sure to preserve the integrity of the Games for years to come by telling no one at all.

“Your true challenge is to build connections with others who are different from you, unknown to you. Strangers! It’s about putting someone else before yourself sometimes, worrying about how to help someone you’ve never even seen before. By the end of the game, you’re thinking more about keeping your group together than surviving on your own, whether you knew these people before the game began or not!

“First, you hide. Then, you go out of your way to seek out friendships and soon, you’re bold and determined enough to find them again in the end.”

The announcer said ‘in the end’ like it was the finale of a song, and then smiled as if he’d known the dining hall would once more explode into rowdy applause for him. Everyone showered him with ‘Wow!’s, ‘Well said!’s, and other words of praise while Eligh, though impressed, was more concerned with tapping out of the man’s chokehold and saving his throat.

“Oh, sorry about that.” The announcer said and released his hold on Mara as well.

She rolled her neck about, and she and Eligh muttered that it was fine.

“Good!” The announcer said and wasted no time ushering them over to the right side of the expansive dining hall. They rounded a bend and were awed to see a gargantuan wall-mounted monitor that was displaying a multitude of cameras on its screen. “Now, it’s time to end the games for the rest of your team!”

The bowling ball-haired man began tapping wildly on his metal wrist cuff, a blue holographic number dial hovering over his arm. His busy antics were doing something to the screen, but Eligh couldn’t make out what effect it was having.

The screen was separated into thirty square cameras in rows of six, capturing participants tackling the challenges of the third phase in various ways. It was like a sitcom—some unserious cooking or dancing in some cameras while others still had people warring it out with those crazy black birds and the quake-inducing bears.

“This is strange,” Mara said at Eligh’s right side.

Eligh made sure to stop the “Oh thank the lord, she’s talking to me!” celebration before it started and said, “What is?”

“Just… This. Seeing the Games from this side of the coin. Like—look.” She pointed. “There’s Oliver and the others.”

Eligh looked. It wasn’t easy for him to find his brother among the thirty camera screens, but he did just as a yellow frame the size of the camera squares appeared onscreen. It clicked, clicked, clicked over until it landed on the camera at the bottommost right corner of the screen. After a couple seconds, Oliver’s moving image enlarged enormously to cover the others at center screen.

He was fanning his arm toward himself as if telling someone to come here, big motions that suggested the situation was dire. A bear must have been coming. No sound played with the footage, but Eligh could almost hear Oliver yelling at whoever he needed to hurry up. Unfortunately, Oliver still ended up having to run slightly off screen and reappeared a second later dragging a body behind him.

Now… there were a lot of troubling things Eligh could say about his brother—his sweet little brother who once set fire to his elementary school trying to show off a laser pointer to a little band of his friends. However, ‘murderer’ was not in the books. He liked to think Oliver would have better things to do.

Thus, at the same time, Mara and Eligh looked at each other and said, “Jordan.”

Of course, it was Jordan and, the moment Oliver returned to his hiding spot with Jordan in tow, the camera panned over, caught the entire group in the same screen, and they all disappeared.

Twenty-eight minutes later, seven slightly terrified, mildly angry, ravenously hungry, and above all, confused champions appeared at Mara and Eligh’s side. Anton was screaming, “Th-Those robots!” Patrice, Laurie, and Fatima were asking for Jade. Jordan was wondering, “Where is this place?” while Tessa hung back, clasping her hands in a silent prayer.

Meanwhile, the announcer was shouting, “Congratulations, champions! You have passed Phase Three!”

And Oliver was making a face, wondering how this could be it. After all that running and hiding, after that suspense, the disappearing, “This?!” He cried, “This is…?!” He trailed off, deflated, and walked toward the buffet alone and in silence.

Eligh, who was standing by watching and holding the prettiest girl’s hand, laughed heartily at his brother. He knew he would eat and sleep well tonight.

Tomorrow, it was on to Phase Four and the end of the Games.