“Embrace the new, no matter how uncomfortable, and make it work for you.”

-Alex Smith, American Athlete

“So, let me get this straight. You got the golden disc from a washroom, and it gave you the ability to wield a hammer of light?” exclaimed Emily, flabbergasted. “And those other two got left behind?”

“Yah…,” Bethany murmured softly. Her knees shook as she finished telling them about the Arena.

Emily wrapped her arm around Bethany and pulled the girl into a hug.

“It’s not your fault, Bethany. They had no right to do that to you.” Emily soothed. "And they got what they deserved."

Emily leaned back on the couch carefully. She placed a hand against her ribs as a painful grunt escaped her unbidden.

“Emily, you need to take it easy,” Rocky said with concern.

“I’ve had worse than this,” dismissed Emily. “It’s only a cracked rib. I once broke my femur skiing down a double black diamond run in the Rockies. This is nothing compared to that.”

“But…”

“I will be fine, Rocky,” Emily said defiantly. “Stop your fretting. We’ve got more important things to worry about. We need to figure out what the hell is going on, and what to do next. Rocky and I were going to hole up at the refinery and wait, but is that still the best option?”

Rocky paced back and forth and pulled out his notebook out of his back pocket. He flipped through the pages and muttered to himself. “I had thought this situation was like a zombie apocalypse, but after hearing Bethany’s story, I’m not so sure. There must be something in here that is a closer match to this damn contest.”

Bethany and Emily waited patiently on the black leather couch. Bethany took the opportunity to finish the breakfast that Rocky had prepared for her, wrapping the last of three fried eggs in a slice of whole wheat toast and shoving it into her mouth.

Rocky abruptly stopped and slouched down in the matching armchair with a huff. He held up his notebook, chalk full of carefully analyzed survival scenarios.

“This situation does not match anything in here. It’s too weird. So we need to go back to the basics. Every apocalyptic scenario starts with key foundations through which every subsequent action is framed. Understand the foundation, and you understand what you must do.” Rocky started.

Bethany thought he sounded like her old high school science teacher. As if to complete the illusion, Rocky stood up and walked over to a whiteboard hung along the far wall of the president’s office. He grabbed a blue marker and started writing a list.

“I like it when he is confident. It’s not a side he shows very often,” Emily whispered to Bethany absentmindedly.

“Are you two dating?” Bethany whispered awkwardly, and instantly regretted it.

“What…no, I wouldn’t…we’re just friends,” sputtered Emily.

Bethany tried to recover. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to assume. It’s just… you seem so in sync with each other.”

Emily cheeks blushed but she did not have time to respond. Rocky had finished his mad scrawling, and revealed to them an uninterpretable web of interconnected words and phrases tied together with weaving lines of blue, black, and red.

“We do not know much,” Rocky started, tapping his marker unconsciously against the board. “But we know more than we think we do. The world around us gives us hints to the underlying foundation of what we face.”

“Keep it simple, professor,” teased Emily. Bethany got the feeling she had experience with reigning in his enthusiasm.

“Right,” responded Rocky, looking embarrassed. “Well, I will cut to the chase. This is a competition. The ‘God Contest’. So if this is a contest, then there are three fundamental questions that we need to answer.”

Rocky tapped is marker on three bubbles in the center of the whiteboard. “Who can win. How we win. How long we play. Three key questions to understand the game we are in.”

“Just…please don’t tell me that it is every woman for herself,” Emily remarked. She had a brave face, but Bethany could hear the anxiousness in her voice. “Is this a winner-takes-all competition?”

“That’s ‘who wins’,” continued Rocky. “And I don’t think so. Remember what the Builder – that giant eye in the sky – told us when the contest started. It said ‘those that succeed’. This tells us that there can be multiple winners, though we also need to assume that the number of winners will be quite small. It’s not much of a contest if everyone wins.”

“So, this is a team game,” Emily concluded, feeling relieved.

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“Yes, though the contest may try to tear teams apart,” Rocky cautioned, pointing to a red triangle on the whiteboard. “Bethany’s experience in Dolos’ Arena demonstrates that. The arena was designed to entice players into betraying each other. Bethany, you solved the arena when you used your blood to test for poison. If your two companions had been as patient and as clever as you were, all of you would have walked out of there victorious. After all, there was no poison. So the only real threat was from each other.”

Bethany had not thought about it that way, and Rocky’s words became a soothing balm on Bethany’s guilty psyche.

“So we stick together, and we trust each other,” stated Emily, definitively. “No matter what. Are you in, Bethany?”

Bethany nodded slightly, then sharply turned towards Emily as Emily’s words sunk in. “Wait, you mean stick with you? Are you sure? I mean…I’ve never been on a team before. I’ve always been alone. What if I make a mistake and you get hurt?”

Emily gave her a comforting squeeze. “Bethany, this is new to all of us. You will make mistakes. Rocky will make mistakes. And I will make mistakes.”

“I’ll make more mistakes than both of you combined,” joked Rocky with a smile.

Emily returned his smile. “But by sticking together, we protect each other from those mistakes. That’s what teams do.”

Bethany’s gazed at Rocky and Emily with tears in her eyes. “Okay, if… if you’ll have me, I’ll stay,” she answered. She had been alone for so long. It felt strange and uncomfortable to belong somewhere.

“Then we have our team,” explained Emily excitedly as she gently wiped away Bethany’s tears. “We can beat anything this contest can throw at us!”

“That’s as good a segway as any,” Rocky’s marker moved to the second bubble. “The second question is ‘how we win’. We do not know much, but there are clues. The Builder said we needed to escape this contest to win.”

“Which doesn’t mean anything,” Emily added with annoyance. “I doubt we can just pick a direction and walk until we reach the end of this world.”

“It said we needed to survive and learn,” Bethany recalled. “And that there would be rewards for those who succeeded.”

Bethany held up her ball-peen hammer. She focused, and a tendril of light began to wrap itself around the handle. She quickly dismissed it before the light hammer formed.

“Exactly,” exclaimed Rocky. “It’s a hell of a reward, and we would have been dead without it. These monsters are dangerous, and we need to expect that the danger will grow over time. We need to be prepared to fight them. I doubt it is possible to win this contest without such talents at our disposal.”

“So much for our original plan of hunkering down at the refinery until this was all over,” concluded Emily. “Good. I didn’t much like the thought of just sitting here. I’d rather take my fate into my own hands.”

Rocky slowly nodded, though Bethany could see he did not share Emily’s enthusiasm.

“Yes, I can’t see any other possibility. Those that hide, those that refuse to play this game, will not survive. We have no choice.”

“We don’t have control, but it seems like this contest has given us lots of choice,” countered Emily. “We may be skiing down a steep slope, but we get to pick the path.”

Bethany recalled the dream where she had first met Diana. She had stood in a golden field with thousands of others, yet few had chosen to play Diana’s game. Had Diana been trying to tell her something?

“Then we play,” Bethany affirmed. “And we play it smart. For as long as it takes to win.”

“Which leads us to the third question. Because it might be a long time before we can win,” Rocky announced, a quiver in his voice.

He paused to let his words sink in before he elaborated. “The beings. These ‘Gods’, if that is what they are, who created this contest invested a lot of time and energy into it. They not only created elaborate arenas and monsters inside the city, but they created four massive and distinct terrains beyond its borders. Even with nearly two hundred and fifty thousand players, it will take a very long time to explore such vast environments.

“And not all of those are going to play,” Emily added. “Or… well, survive.”

Rocky took a deep breath. “I think we need to assume that this contest will take months to finish. Actually…”

Rocky hesitated for a moment, then gave a reluctant sigh. “Actually, we should anticipate it will take years.”

“Years?” Bethany uttered. “Are you certain?”

“No,” admitted Rocky, shrugging his plump shoulders. “But it is the best theory I have. And I would rather plan for a long haul than be caught unprepared. Food, medicine, and other necessities are going to grow scarcer every day. We need to stockpile as much as we can, as early as we can. Hunger and sickness can kill us as easily as those orb monsters can.”

“We should stay at the refinery then,” Emily concluded. “But instead of holing up and waiting for a rescue, it will be our base of operations. It’s got everything we need.”

Rocky moved his marker to the top right corner of the whiteboard, its only remaining free space. He summarized everything in three short statements. “We are a team. We must explore. It will take years. Until we know more, we must consider these to be our three foundations on which we make every decision.”

Rocky plopped down on the couch beside Emily, staring at his scribbles on the whiteboard. They sat there in silence for a while, trying to wrap their heads around it. Eventually, Emily broke the silence.

“Well, it seems simple enough,” she exclaimed, her voice resolute. “Any idea how to find one of these arenas? I don’t want to fall behind the other players.”

They both looked over at Bethany. Bethany’s hands were shaking. She knew they had no choice if they wanted to survive. Yet the memories of the Arena of Dolos swam in her mind. She could still feel Becka and Daniel’s fingers wrapped around her arm, as they held her down and forced the wine down her throat. She had thought she was going to die.

Stop it, Bethany. Are you going to let yourself become a victim again? You have been the victim your whole life, yet you fought back. You broke free from your father’s grasp. So do it again!

The words of the shadowy figures from her dream repeated in her mind.

“She is damaged, sister. She is haunted by the demons of her past. They control her every movement. How can we trust such a flawed human?”

Emily was about to embrace Bethany to calm her down when Bethany abruptly stood, pushing off the couch defiantly with both hands. She had moved from frightened to angry in a heartbeat. She would not let this contest take away her freedom. Not after everything she had done to find it.

Be brave little bee.

“I can help us find arenas,” Bethany declared, unaccustomed to being assertive. “I don’t want to enter another arena. I really don’t. But I will not die in this contest. I want to finally live my real life. I want to be brave!”

In that moment, she felt like she might have fooled herself into thinking she was.

“When do we start?” asked Emily.

“Now,” Bethany answered, then gave a slightly maniacal laugh. “Before I change my mind. And I think I know where to start.”