Somewhere in the South Pacific, where the water is calm and the deep blue sea stretches seamlessly from one horizon to the other, there is a tiny, uncharted island that cannot be found on any map. Lush green forests, white sandy beaches, a ring of cascading waterfalls, and an active volcano at the very heart of the island have made it one of Polynesia's best kept secrets for centuries. Today, as the human population skyrockets past seven billion, the natural glory of Nāmaka’s Island remains untouched, frozen in the hourglass of time.

Which is precisely why Hollywood has decided to turn this paradise into its hottest new reality TV show! Yes, for the past eight months, camera crews have been feverishly installing surveillance equipment and listening devices in every tree, rock, and animal on the island, so that not one square inch is left uncovered.

The rules are simple. Twenty-five strangers have volunteered (trust us on this) to live on a remote island somewhere in the South Pacific and compete in some of the most grueling, disgusting, dangerous, and morally degrading challenges ever imagined. At the end of each day, one unlucky contestant will be voted off the island and can never, EVER return. This will continue until only one cast member remains, the ultimate champion of Nāmaka’s Island. Who will it be?

Who will be…the LAST ONE STANDING?

Team Rabid Monkeys:
Piper, Lydia, Butterfly, Angie, Claudia, Mercedes
Travis, Zero, Dizzy, Wendell, Rusty, Alejandro

Team Agitated Kangaroos:
Erica, Naomi, Misra, Penny, Bridgette, Maxine
Roger, Pip, Adam, Dante, Mean Joe, Willie, Luigi


--------------------


It was four in the morning. The time normal people are asleep. Which meant, of course, about half of the guys were wide awake. Using the dark to their advantage, the tiny Monkeys slipped out of their dollhouse windows and gathered behind the couch in the girls’ cabin. For some stupid reason, they had decided to cover their faces in black paint, except for Wendell, who had removed his shirt and smeared his whole body with the stuff.

“What are we doing, guys?” Wendell asked. He kept his voice down to a whisper, even though everybody else in the cabin was passed out.

“Something those cowards on the other team won’t even consider,” Travis said. “They want to vote off the women? Fine. Let’s make them vote off THEIR women.”

Alejandro gasped. “Do my ears deceive me? Why would we want less ladies on the island?”

“How about so we don’t get eaten by a fuckin’ volcano? That sound good to you, pretty boy?”

“Sounds good to me!” Wendell cheered, wrapping his chubby arms around Travis and Alejandro. “I’m just so excited we get to spend some time together outside of the competitions! Just us DUDES.”

“Get off me, dawg,” Travis said, pushing the behemoth away. “Look. If we’re gonna beat these girls, we need to find out more about them. Get inside their heads, ya know? There are six of them and six of us, so let’s split up, sneak into their rooms, and find out whatever we can.”

“What exactly are we searching for?” Rusty asked.

“Anything we can use against them. Allergies, medications, fears, whatever.”

“Of course! It’s so obvious. But I still have a question… Why are we doing this again?”

Travis sighed. “Maybe you should be writing this down, dawg.”

“Not a bad idea…” Rusty said, grabbing a notepad and pen from his back pocket. He began snickering to himself as he scribbled across the pages.


--------------------


Wendell: I’m glad Travis is on our team! He thinks up all sorts of fun activities to do together.

Zero: I don’t know. I like the strategy, but this just doesn’t seem very honorable…

Alejandro: This will be the SECOND time I raid a woman’s bedroom this week!

Dizzy: …
 
Rusty: [continues to scribble and laugh, looking very suspicious, but completely oblivious to the fact that the cameras are watching him]

Travis: OK, so I’m stuck with a bunch of idiots. Whatever. It just means I’ll have an easier time winning this thing once all the girls are gone.


--------------------


Naomi and Misra were sharing a room. In fact, most of the girls had to bunk with somebody else because of the show’s ridiculously low budget, which was mostly spent on Cassandra’s wardrobe and lawsuits. So, when Zero and Dizzy decided to break into their room in the middle of the night like a couple of perverted panty raiders, they weren’t too shocked to find it full of some really nerdy stuff. On Naomi’s side, the floor was scattered with comic books, insect identification guides, laboratory equipment, and a butterfly net. On Misra’s side, there was only a neat stack of books—each thicker than the guys were tall—but it was pushed up against the side of her bed to make a nice staircase. Both of the girls were sound asleep, with their blankets crumpled up by their feet and their glasses on the shared nightstand.

 “Let’s have a look around,” Zero whispered to Dizzy, who got down on all fours and began sniffing and slinking across the wooden floorboards like some kind of stupid animal. While he did that, Zero made his way to Naomi’s side of the room, climbing over and under comic books, while occasionally stopping to admire caricatures of guys in tights with hair as outlandish as his own.

Meanwhile, in another room, Alejandro had discovered Erica’s backpack. It was white and faded, as if she had owned it for many years, and yet it was the only thing she had brought with her to the island. It obviously meant a lot to her.

“Ah, what secrets lie in here, that I might use to discover the key to this señorita’s heart?” Alejandro said aloud, climbing to the top of the bag and grabbing hold of the zipper. He jumped forward, letting gravity do the work as the bag quickly became unzipped. It wouldn’t be the first time he had unzipped something that belonged to a girl in the dark, but it was probably the first time he had gotten his foot stuck in the zipper and found himself dangling upside down.

“Not good,” he cried, flailing his arms about, just inches above the floor.

Wendell was slightly more successful. Whereas nobody else would even go near Maxine’s room (she had been bunking by herself since they had arrived on the island), Wendell marched right through the open door and screamed “Woohoo!” as loudly as he could without waking any of the girls. He found Maxine sleeping in an upright position, hand on her bare belly and a steady stream of drool dribbling down her chin like some kind of magnificent waterfall of leftover lunch meat and bad body odor.

“That reminds me,” murmured Wendell. “I’m hungry. I wonder if Maxine has any food left in her pockets.”

How Wendell knew what Maxine kept in her pants was beyond anybody’s imagination, but he climbed right up on the mattress to check anyway.

“Oh, boy! CHOCOLATE!”

Moving on then…

Travis dropped to his stomach and slipped under the door into Bridgette’s room. She had been sharing a room with Cathy (Kathy?), but that was short-lived, just like Cathy. Still, like a good roommate, Bridgette had honored the memory of her friend by throwing all of Cathy’s belongings out the window and pushing their beds together so she had a little extra room for her feet.

“You are my greatest competition,” Travis said as he rose to his full size—all four-and-a-half inches—and looked at Bridgette.  She was passed out on the bed, snoring loudly, and he began scanning the area. Bridgette had only brought a single gym bag with her, but it was bigger than the guy’s cabin and was crammed full of sports equipment. Travis figured he was too short to break her kneecaps with a bat, but maybe there was something in there that would be useful.

The wannabe gangster hurried across the room to where Bridgette’s gym bag was sitting against the wall, already open, and jumped inside. He ended up with a faceful of dirty laundry. Because, you know, the producers of the show were too cheap to supply the contestants with washing machines. Or hampers. Or showers.

Hey, this is supposed to be camping, people.

“SICK, DAWG!” Travis cried as he struggled to climb out of the stink-ridden clothes. And, well, you would think Travis would be used to navigating his body through oversized articles of clothing, but he was pretty terrible at this. “Hey, who the FUCK is narrating this? Hey! Fuck you, Cass! I know you’re fuckin’ behind this!”

Yeah, so a mysterious force suddenly zipped up Bridgette’s gym bag and Travis was trapped in there for the rest of the night. Kinda sucks for him, but maybe he should have been a little nicer to the folks around him.

“When I win this game, I’m gonna use the prize money to buy this island and sink it into the ocean!”

Well, about the same time a zipper had doomed Travis, Alejandro had escaped his own careless zipper mishap. He landed on his head without misplacing a single lock of hair, stood upright, and folded down the flap of the bag to see what was inside.

“Ahhh…” he whispered. It was stocked full of health bars, vitamins, trail mix, water bottles, and a pocket calendar, open to the current month, with notes and numbers and doodles scribbled across each day. “I’ve seen one of these before. A girl who cares about her body, just as much as I care about her body!”

Alejandro decided he would respect her privacy by jumping into the bag and reading her innermost thoughts while laughing and eating her peanuts.

When he reached the first page of the calendar, his mouth dropped and so did his nuts.

Oh, and, speaking of food, Wendell was still munching away on whatever he had found in Maxine’s pockets. He stopped to belch a few times, but Maxine was such a deep sleeper that she wouldn’t have woken up if he climbed her body, dropped his trousers, and farted right in her face.

Which, of course, was the very next thing he did.

“Woohoo!” he cheered when she didn’t wake up and beat him to a bloody pulp.

He plopped down on her chest and continued stuffing his face with chocolate.

Around this time, Dizzy was making faces at himself in the reflection of Misra’s glasses and Zero had just finished the third issue of Another Loud-Mouthed Protagonist with a Really Inconveniently-Sized Sword and had done absolutely nothing to discover any of Naomi’s weaknesses. So, basically, they were about on par with the rest of their group.

“So far, all I’ve learned about Naomi is that she has good taste in light reading and has an unhealthy obsession with insects,” Zero said to Dizzy, pushing back the final page of the comic. “I don’t suppose we can use either of those against her. What have you found?”

Dizzy raced around Misra’s glasses and tackled his own reflection.

“Dizzy! Focus, man. We’re supposed to be looking for CLUES.”

Misra’s glasses fell to the floor and Dizzy went tumbling down with them. He landed without a sound, as could be expected, but the deafening roar of cheap plastic hitting hardboard caused Misra to sit upright in bed and look around. Her groggy eyes drifted to Zero on the other side of the room, but he was just a blur of skin and color—especially when he high-tailed it out of the room and left Dizzy to defend himself.

“My glasses,” Misra said, slapping helplessly at the nightstand. “Where are my glasses?” She slid her palm across the wooden plain until her thumb scraped the rim of Naomi’s glasses. She was about to grab them, thinking they were hers, but she was already stretched so far across the nightstand that she lost her balance and fell from bed. She landed on the floor with her chin inches away from Dizzy’s face, who looked up at her and did the only sensible thing he could think of. He screamed. And she screamed back. And he screamed louder. And she screamed louder still. And they continued to scream until everybody on the whole damn island was awake.

“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY ROOM, FREAK!”

Wendell went soaring through the air. He flew out of Maxine’s room and waved to the fleeing Zero before he smashed into the back room. Bridgette began beating Travis’ head in with a tennis shoe and Erica punted Alejandro out of the window. It wasn’t long before all of the girls—even the ones who weren’t victims of the late night raid—had gathered in the common area and tipped over the guys’ dollhouse. The guys went spilling out in every direction and the girls began stomping on them as if they were ants that had just ruined a picnic. If Angie hadn’t had the common sense to grab the phone and alert Cassandra of the incident immediately, the girls might have torn the guys to pieces.

Cassandra showed up three hours later.

“So, what happened here?” she asked, licking an ice cream cone.

There was a bloody mess where the guys’ dollhouse once stood and thirteen tiny, twitching bodies crying out for help. The girls were sitting calmly at the breakfast table.

“They fell down the stairs,” Claudia said. She wiped the blood from her boots on the back of Piper’s skirt when she wasn’t looking.

“Works for me,” Cassandra said. “Anyway, today’s competition is a dance-off. It was supposed to happen this morning, but I think we’ll move it to tonight so SOME OF YOU can get ready…” She put a hand over the side of her mouth and whispered to the mangled corpses on the floor. “Really, boys. At least try to look presentable on camera. This is a G-rated show.”

“Why do you think they were in our rooms anyway?” Naomi asked.

“Same reason guys always do stupid things,” Claudia said. She checked the bottom of the boot to make sure all the blood was gone. Once she was satisfied, she slipped her foot back inside. “They may be smaller now, but that doesn’t mean every part of them shrunk, eh?” She nudged Piper.

“Because their heads are the right size for their brains now!” the cheerleader snickered.

“…Totally not what I meant.”

 
--------------------


Zero: That was an epic fail.

Travis: I like to think of this as a work in progress.

Misra: Can I have my glasses back now? [stumbles into the wall]

Penny: Those creeps went perving on every gal on my team…except me. Am I not pretty enough to perv on? [leans closer to the camera] I don’t think y’all get it. They went after Maxine over me.

Pip: Why did they step on us, too!?

Penny: [steps on Pip, grabs the camera, and presses her face to the lens] MAXINE!


--------------------


After a long day of nursing their wounds, the guys and girls congregated under a large wooden pavilion on the beach. It was just after sunset and there were tables and chairs wrapped in a semi-circle around the dance floor, with enough alcohol on them to get a whale drunk. There were kegs and margaritas and tequila and even a bottle of hard lemonade for Pip. Some of them were already buzzed, but none so much as Mean Joe, who had been drinking since noon and could be heard bellowing from all the way across the beach.

Rip the Disc Jockey Zombie was setting up the turntables when the main group arrived. He waved to them, but nobody really wants to make friends with the undead, so they just stood around awkwardly and waited for Cassandra to show up instead. She was, as always and predictably, fashionably late.

“Hey…” Pip said, in an attempt to break the awkward silence. “Can you guys keep a secret?”

He was standing near Adam and Dante and they both shrugged—Dante because he was too engrossed in whatever game he was playing at the time and Adam because he just genuinely didn’t care.

“…I don’t know how to dance.”

Adam snorted. “Are you even related to Piper at all?”

“Oh, I hear Pip and Piper are reeeeeal close,” came a taunting voice from behind, followed by the sound of two lips smacking together. Pip and Adam turned their heads to see Travis strutting up to them with his hands buried deep in his pockets and Zero and Rusty on either side of him. “Pip and Piper in the bedroom with the wooden pipe—am I right, boys?”

His posse giggled at his stupid joke.

“Why don’t you losers save yourself the embarrassment and go home now before I breakdance all over your face?” Travis asked.

Always one to face adversity head-on, Pip tried to change the subject.

“You guys weren’t at the council meeting this morning,” he said. “I’m not sure you—”

“Oh, no! We weren’t at the council meeting, guys!” Travis slapped his cheeks with both hands and pretended to be in a state of shock. Zero and Rusty joined in when they thought it would make them cool. “…Get real, Pip-squeak. We’re not joining your stupid ‘council meetings’ anymore. On this island, it’s every man for himself.”

“Looks like you found a couple of other men to keep you company, though,” Adam said.

Travis stopped laughing long enough to make a scowl. “Don’t start with me, hick. You might be strong, but that won’t stop my team from wrecking you in this competition. You see that?” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to where Piper was already on the dance floor, kicking her legs high into the air and shaking her pom-poms everywhere. Her short skirt could barely keep up with her movements. “That’s what my team brings to the table. You poses don’t stand a chance.”

He turned back to the guys, but Adam’s mouth was agape and Dante’s jaw had gone through the floorboards.

“Oh, God, she’s been drinking again,” Pip said, covering his face.

Piper winked at them and shimmied her shoulders. Adam and Dante stared at Piper’s movements until their eyes were as big as the jiggling mounds in front of them.

Pip covered their faces instead. “Come on, guys! That’s my sister.”

“You are so not related…” Adam managed to utter.

“I guess we’ll see you losers after the dance,” Travis said, scoffing at their dumbfounded expressions. “And don’t forget your little plan of voting off the girls when you lose. Might I suggest the ogre? I think we’d all benefit from that being off the island.”   

“Maxine’s twice the man you’ll ever be!” Pip muttered.

His words only made Travis laugh louder. “Come on, boys. Let’s get Red some more crunk juice.”

“…This is a game over, guys,” Dante said. “We’re not going to be able to beat a cheerleader in a dance-off.”

“We have to try,” Pip said. “We just have to…”


--------------------


Travis: Do I feel sorry for them? Hellz naw! Nobody’s here to make friends. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and we just happen to have the champion pooch on our team.

Piper: I love puppies! [squeals]

Zero: Sure, Travis is a jerk, but he gets results. You can’t argue with that.

Mercedes: Why do all these competitions have to involve physical exercise? Couldn’t we just have a fashion show?

Wendell: My tummy hurts… [falls over from eating too much chocolate]

Maxine: Ogre? Yeah. I heard about that. …Do I care? Do I look like I care?

Penny: [shakes the camera] I’m prettier than Maxine, ain’t I?


--------------------


“Good evening, everyone!” Cassandra said, tapping her shot glass with a spoon. She was looking even more extraordinarily beautiful than usual, and only a few people were drunk. “Tonight’s competition is a dance-off. You will all enter the dance floor at the same time and put on your best moves. I will be joining you shortly. If I tap you on the shoulder, that means you’re out and you have to sit down. We’ll continue like that until only one team remains!”

Zero raised his hand. “Is it really safe for the guys to be on the dance floor at the same time as the girls?”

Cassandra laughed and laughed and laughed.

“…What? It was a serious question.”

“Of course it was.” Cassandra pointed to Rip the Disc Jockey Zombie, who was standing ready by the turntable. “Let’s get this party started! Everybody to the dance floor.”

There was a mad rush for the center stage and it wasn’t at all long before the music was playing and everybody was dancing. Of course, the stage wasn’t very big at all, and there were twenty-five bodies on it, so it was pretty much pure chaos, with shoulder-bumping and foot-dodging.

“Well, this will be entertaining,” Cassandra said quietly as she stood next to Rip and took another shot.

“I thought you said you didn’t know how to dance!” Dante yelled at Pip over the booming sounds coming from the speakers.

“I don’t!”

“Then what are you doing!?”

“Trying not to get stepped on!” he cried as Claudia’s boot crashed where he had been standing moments ago. He rolled to the side and nearly avoided Misra’s penny loafer, which came swinging down from the other direction. “Hey, we’re on the same team!”

“Are we supposed to be trying to step on the guys?” Butterfly asked, and Claudia just shrugged and put both feet together before jumping onto Mean Joe, ending his wicked air guitar solo. She splattered him all across the dance floor, but he was too drunk to notice anyway.

“Hey, you can’t do that,” Erica said, pushing Claudia. She stumbled back, nearly stepping on her own teammate this time. “How would you like if I did that to you?” She lifted her sneaker and brought it down on Wendell, who was spinning around and swinging a long twig like an imaginary double-sided lightsaber.

“I’m squishy!” he giggled.

Claudia shoved her back. “Bitch.” She looked around for another guy, but they had wisely rushed for the other side of the dance floor, just in time for Cassandra to get in on the fun. She didn’t murder anyone, but she did have to tap out Claudia and Erica before they broke into a cat fight, and it wasn’t long after that she tapped out Luigi because the dance he was doing next to Lydia was illegal in at least eighteen states.

“You’re such a whore,” Erica said to Claudia as they exited the stage.

They weaved their way past Maxine, who was doing the Frankenstein, and Bridgette, who was booty-shaking like a Vegas showgirl and plopped down on the line of chairs set up just offstage. Rusty was sitting on the chair between them, casually smoking a cigarette.

“Aren’t you supposed to be dancing?” Claudia asked him.

“I, uhhh….stopped to have a smoke break.”

“…Get out there now or that won’t be the only break you have.”

“Gaaah!” Rusty dropped the cigarette and plummeted back onto the stage, doing some kind of crazy spider monkey moves that got him tapped out right away. He came back, mood unreadable behind his glasses, and picked up his cigarette before scrambling back onto his spot on the chair.

“Just as well,” he panted between long, desperate drags, as though the cigarette would actually help with his breathing. “They can tell 93% of what you’re thinking based on your body language. Dancing on camera might as well be a deep-tissue brain scan.”

Claudia waited for him to sit back down before she switched seats and settled down right on top of him.

Erica stared at her.

“What? He’s not on your team.”

With less people on stage now, the contestants were able to spread out a little more, and that gave the guys a little more breathing room. Unfortunately for Pip, it also made them easier to see, and Cassandra was forced to tap him before the show’s ratings tanked. Like, really. It was embarrassing to see. But if you really want to check it out, it will probably be appearing shortly as a gif on tumblr.

Surprisingly, though, the rest of the guys were doing quite well. Alejandro had slipped into a sexy Latin salsa routine and Dante was either assisting or dodging for his life from Naomi and Misra’s flawless run on a DDR machine that had mysteriously appeared on the side of the stage. Willie and Penny were square-dancing, Zero was doing Johnny Bravo posers, and Roger was…doing some kind of rigid military dance that made him look like a nutcracker, so Cassandra tapped him out just because it was disturbing to watch. She got Adam too, who was trying his best to stay hidden, but was too big (even for a little guy) to stay unnoticed forever.

Dizzy was tearing across the stage like a Tasmanian devil, breaking out moves the world had never seen before. His body was twisting and contorting in ways that shouldn’t be physically possible and every pose he struck made Zero jealous with rage.

“Stop trying to outdo me!” Zero eventually roared, and he tackled his own teammate. They rolled across the stage and ended up right under Lydia, who was doing some kind of interpretive dance. Unfortunately for them, the only thing they were able to interpret was the bottom of her Ugg boots pressing them into the floorboards. Then she slipped, because they had turned into a gooey mess, and Cassandra had to tap them all out.

“I thought you were great!” Butterfly said to her as Lydia walked off the stage.

“Crank up the volume,” Cassandra motioned to Rip and the music became louder and faster and so did the dancing. She worked her way over to Maxine and began doing the Monster Mash with her.

“You’re quite good at this,” she said to Maxine.

“Whatever.”

As they danced, Rip came onto the stage and began doing the mash with Cassandra and Maxine. Never one to be outdone, though, Cassandra did a quick hip-thrust to send Rip soaring through the air, over the turntable, and into the snack bar.

While that was happening, Travis, who must have been at least part black from the way he could move, danced his way over to Alejandro.

“We gotta do something,” he said. “The other team is ahead.”

Alejandro gave him a wink. “I know just what to do.” With a grin so shiny that it could have been seen from space, he put his hands behind his head and began doing hip-thrusts until the shirt burst from his chest.

Almost instinctively, the girls lost their concentration. Bridgette stopped twerking to watch him and Naomi and Misra got tangled up in each other’s legs and landed on top of Dante, who wasn’t all too disappointed by this turn of events. One by one, Cassandra tapped them each out. And just like that, it was down to Penny, Maxine, and Willie for the Kangaroos, while the Monkeys still had four girls, and one of them was Piper, who had been shaking her skirt and pom-poms nonstop for hours now.

“We got this!” Travis said to Alejandro, giving him a high-five without missing a beat in his own dance routine. They crossed their arms over their chests and began boogying back to back.

Cassandra danced her way over to Angie and Mercedes, who appeared to be throwing down in a head-to-head dance-off, and then to Penny and Willie, who were doing a hoedown for the ages. Butterfly was lost in some kind of tai chi, drug-induced trance, and Piper had just downed another bottle of booze.

“I’ve got spirit, how about you!” she cheered, holding up the spirit bottle over her head as she did splits. “Wooooo!” She popped back up and, in one less-than-fluid motion, attempted a somersault, a move she had already proven more than capable of performing several times since arriving on the island. Unfortunately, she forgot to let go of her bottle and flubbed the hand-spring entirely, careening face-first across the dance floor as the bottle spun through the air.

“No!” Travis and Alejandro screamed. They held up their hands, but they didn’t stop Piper from crashing into them and then into Butterfly. Cassandra casually danced her way over to them and knocked them each out with her pointer finger. None of them seem to really care, though—Piper because she was wasted, Butterfly because she was high, and Travis and Alejandro because they were just streaks across the floor. 

“My shoes!” Mercedes cried, stepping in the remains left by the guys just as the bottle flew overhead, dousing her in fruit-flavored alcohol. “My hair, my dress! That’s it! I’ve had it with this competition. I’m sweaty and sticky and…ugh! I’m done.” She threw up her hands and stormed off the stage, leaving Angie to face off against Penny, Willie, and Maxine alone.

Luckily for Angie, she was the only contestant not completely drunk by this point. She continued to dance alongside Cassandra, matching her step by step, and waited for Maxine to start puking her guts out from all the alcohol and candy bars she had consumed. Cassandra had to tap her out after that.

Penny and Willie continued their square dance, with Willie weaving in and out from the heel of Penny’s tapping boots. They shuffled their way across the stage, each dancing with the other like they had known each other all their lives, and soon began to win over the drunken crowd. It wasn’t long at all before even the other team was cheering for them to win.

“We have our winners,” Cassandra said, grabbing Penny’s hand and lifting it for the crowd. She would’ve done the same for Willie, but his arm likely would have come detached from its socket.

Angie finally stopped dancing and frowned, turning to look at her own teammates, who were so tanked by this point that they didn’t even know what was going on.


--------------------


Angie: Disappointed? I guess you could say I’m disappointed. I mean, I thought the goal here was to win, but it seems some people are too busy having a good time to even try.

Claudia: I have nothing against Erica. She wants to play dirty? Fine by me. I just hope she knows I’ll fight back.

Penny: Yee-haw!

Piper: [is still passed out on the floor] …I like puppies…

Pip: I wasn’t that bad…was I?


--------------------


The islanders met at the Temple of Dreams at two in the morning in high spirits. Sure, one of them was going to be voted off the island and die in some horrible, grotesque way that only Cassandra would enjoy, but alcohol made everything okay. Let that be a lesson, folks.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I really enjoyed this competition,” Cassandra said, slurring her words to the point where she almost could have said anything. “I almost hate to see one of you have to go, but let’s be honest… Some of you were REALLY terrible at this.” They all laughed and pointed at the ones who stood out, who were the worst at dancing, who would likely never see another sunrise again. Were they drunk or what?

“Well, Rabid Monkeys… You lost. Again.” Cassandra got up, a bit unsteadily, and began to pass out the usual slips of paper. “I’m glad you’re not under the influence of anything that might affect your judgment this time.”

They laughed again. Mean Joe laughed so hard that he rolled down the volcano and landed in some bushes. Maybe somebody should have told the men they can’t hold their liquor.

Cassandra waited until everybody had submitted a vote and then tallied them up.

“Guys…” she said. “You can’t ALL vote Pip off. He’s not even on your team.”

Pip threw his arms up in the air. “Oh, come on!”

“Oh, wait.” Cassandra found one extra slip of paper at the bottom of the box. “…Well. It seems ONE of you was sober enough to vote somebody off on your own team. Thank you, whoever did this.”

“No problem,” Angie said, and then she turned red when she realized her vote would be the deciding factor. But no matter. The others were so inebriated that they wouldn’t remember this night anyway.

“Well…with one vote from someone who must really hate you, it’s time for you to go, …Rusty. I’m sorry, but I’m sure you saw this coming. I mean, you did sell your whole team out to Roger.”

The cigarette fell from Rusty’s lips. “W-what!? That’s not true! That’s not true at all!” He raised his arms, as if to show his innocence, and the notepad he had been keeping in his pocket spilled out onto the ground and opened up to a page with “TOP SECRET INFORMATION TO SELL TO THE OTHER TEAM” written across the top in gigantic bold letters.

“…You suck so much, dawg,” Travis said.

“I was framed! Framed, I swear!” Rusty cried out, but it was no use. Cassandra had already picked up his totem and heaved it into the mouth of the volcano. It gave a gentle burp, as if approving of the night’s selection, and then twelve pairs of legs surrounded Rusty. He looked up at the faces of the girls—not just the ones from the other team, but the ones from his team as well—that were all disgusted by his actions.

He gulped and reached for his cigarette. Pressing it to his lips, he took a long, slow, and deliberate inhale and then opened his mouth as if to speak his final words, which just happened to be…

“Pocket sand!” He launched a vicious barrage of about fourteen grains of sand that bounced harmlessly off Mercedes’ ankle and then turned to run.

“Ugh, and now I’ve got sand in my shoe!” Mercedes said. “This is like the worst day ever.”

Rusty clothes-lined himself beneath the arch of her pump as she planted it squarely in his path to block his escape, which was pretty pointless, considering he had only gotten about six paces. He landed flat on his back, unable to do anything else before the other shoes dropped. First came a boot, then another boot, then a sneaker, a loafer, a sandal, and back to a boot again. They all got their turn, all twelve girls, stomping on Rusty again and again until his name might as well have been changed to ‘Dusty’ because that was all that was left of him.

While the girls were distracted, Roger sneaked over to where Rusty had been sitting and pocketed the notepad on the ground…