The light of the outside world was blinding.

The sun seemed almost artificial. It radiated with an almost surreal mélange of heat and light.

“The sun is so hot!” fumed Isabelle. “Why couldn’t we at least be given some sunscreen?” She glanced over at Edward to check his reaction. It was as emotionless as could be. Did he have a stone heart too?

Edward was still in hard attempt to recall how he had ended up in this death game.

‘The voice behind the radio…’ Edward stroked his chin ‘It couldn’t have been a recording judging by the way it answered the audience’s question and it couldn’t have been recited by some computer since it seemed to understand humor and sarcasm… meaning that there is a person behind this elaborate scheme... no.. not just a person but an organization…’

“Edward. Edward. Edward, you there?” Isabelle prodded Edward from the side.

“We seem to have landed ourselves in quite the predicament, and with some very powerful people” Edward smiled coyly in response “Do you recall what the voice behind the radio said?”

“It said a lot of things, what’s your point?”

“Just this one specific line… ‘we’ve equipped each person on the island with a watch and a special power’... why use the term ‘we’ if it were just one person coordinating this grand scheme?”

Isabelle paused to think how she could’ve missed something blatantly apparent.

“I never thought of it that way—”

“Clearly there is a powerful organization at large here and we stand here in their game as their very guinea pigs”

“An organization that can even bring people back to life?” Isabelle smiled as she tapped the ‘3’ on her watch. “Well there’s not much we can really do”

Edward continued to speculate as Isabelle strutted a step forward.

“Well no point in crying over spilt milk, why don’t we first try to see where we are?”

She looked out at what lie around them. The factory was located on the top of an enormous grassy hill. Far away, near the horizon existed what seemed to be a town. Between the two lie a lush forest of Oak and Pine trees. The factory, the forest and the town seemed to all be embedded into what seemed to a be small island. Around the island lie a vast unfathomable mass of water, where the eye could see nothing other than the placid sea. From the top of the hill, you could almost get a perfect view of the city and the uninhabited timberland. Edward gave them both a quick glance. ‘Escaping this island by sea would be quite the feat even using a mechanized boat... but maybe if we had a mode of transport through the air…’

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Edward continued his thoughtful brainstorming as they both continued to the bottom of the hill, almost as if guided by an invisible hand.

Isabelle clasped her mouth in horror of what lie at the mouth of the forest. “Looks like we are late to the party” Edward frowned when he saw the bodies of dozens of people mangled and stabbed, their blue outfits blemished in red. They finally reached the advent of the forest.

Isabelle’s acid reflux kicked in quite vigorously. She forced herself to swallow and luridly stomped forward.

“We have to keep moving—”

Almost immediately Edward grabbed her back by the shoulder. In what seemed to be seconds, came two huge logs cascading through the trees. They collided with great precision near the spot Isabelle had just been standing.

“What in the world?!” She turned to be introduced by Edward’s downward gaze. She followed it to the base of the trees. There she could make out a faint disturbance in the flora along the entrance. A silver thread lie along a line that stretched across the entrance of the forest.

“Strings” answered Edward tacitly to Isabelle’s unproclaimed question.

“There have been other people here before us…we must proceed with the utmost caution” He glanced at Isabelle as she shrugged off Edward’s hand.

“But how is this possible… it’s only been five minutes… how could someone have setup such a huge and complex contraption?”

“That’s because there are people on this island who arrived before us. Do you recall the number on the ceiling inside the factory?”

Isabelle nodded “If we assume that everyone in the factory cannot die for the first 24 hours, and the fact that that number only goes down when someone… loses their three lives… then it would be safe to assume that the game has been going on even before we were introduced to it”

Edward checked the dryness and quality of the wooden logs “And players quite old at that...”

As they walked deeper into the forest, Isabelle’s eyes were met with more mutilated bodies of those who had tried to walk across the forest prior to their arrival. There were people squashed in between logs, people fallen into traps of spikes and others who were completely disfigured and removed from what you could call a human being. She clasped her mouth in expectation of a regurgitation.

“W-W-Who would do such a thing...?” She could feel the stomach acid prying at the back of her throat again.

“Uuhhlp…” There were moans of the people who had fallen into these traps, locked into the fact that they couldn’t die, now tormented by the continuous pain that was being inflicted on them. Edward drove his attention away from the path and the moans of the bodies and to her question.

“It’s simple. To gain an advantage” He crouched down and observed one of the mutilated bodies “And furthermore it’s not a question of ‘who’, but rather the question of ‘whom all’” He noticed Isabelle's confusion and sighed to an answer “Do you think a single person could have made that contraption this intricate? It requires manpower, it requires people.”

“So it's more than one? But why—” Edward slowly moved away from the bodies and responded in sorrow “When you push people into a survival, they naturally tend to band into different groups. Different groups have different beliefs, different standards, and ranging amounts of humanity. Living a society increases your chance of survival by at least sixty percent” He signaled Isabelle to begin moving “Of course to me it doesn’t make much of a difference, but to the common man it’s his best choice” He talked as he slowly bent down to pick up a stick. As he finished talking he threw the stick into an intricate motley of strings, which instantly unraveled another log trap.

“Do you do this often?” Isabelle finally said

“Do what often?”

“This thing you do? Guessing?”

Edward smiled to have been given the opportunity to explain, but quickly restricted himself to a brief answer

“I can’t seem to remember why but this ‘thing I do’, seems to be helping me stay alive”