MidReal Story
Battle of Identities: Survival in the Arena
Scenario: all of the lgbt community around the world participate in a battle royale
Create my version of this story
Alex Chen
supportive ally, friends with Jamie and rivals with Sam, tall with glasses, intelligent and empathetic.
Jamie Rodriguez
strategic fighter, friends with Alex and rivals with Sam, short black hair, cunning and resilient.
Sam Taylor
wildcard competitor, has complex relationships with Jamie and Alex, colorful hair, unpredictable and fierce.
I wake up to the sound of my own screaming.
It takes me a moment to realize that it’s coming from me, and another moment to realize why.
I’m on fire.
I’m burning alive.
I can feel the heat licking at my skin, and I know that I don’t have long before it consumes me completely.
I have to get out of here.
I have to put out the flames.
But no matter how hard I try, I can’t move.
My limbs are frozen in place, and all I can do is scream as the fire gets closer and closer, until—
I wake up for real this time, gasping for breath as I sit bolt upright in bed.
It takes me a moment to remember where I am, and another moment to remember why I was dreaming about being burned alive.
The voice in my head is so loud that it almost feels like someone is shouting at me from across the room.
I reach out for him, but my hand closes around nothing but air.
There’s no one in the room with me, and I’m not in bed, either.
I’m lying on the hard ground of some kind of arena, and I’m drenched in gasoline.
I can smell it on my skin, and even in the darkness I can tell that the ground is sticky with it.
My heart is pounding so hard that it feels like it might burst out of my chest, and my thoughts are racing too fast for me to catch up.
The last thing I remember was going to sleep in my own bed—how had I ended up here?
I try to sit up, but I’m so dizzy that I have to lie back down again.
The world spins around me, and I close my eyes tight against the sensation.
Even then, it takes me a moment to realize that the voice I’m hearing isn’t coming from somewhere else—it’s coming from inside my own head.
“Jamie, are you there?”
I can hear Alex saying, and—yeah, I’m here.
But how is he here, too?
I’ve known Alex for years, and he’s one of my closest friends.
He’s also a figment of my imagination.
That’s what I’d always thought, at least.
He first showed up when I was fourteen years old—short black hair and big brown eyes, tall and thin with glasses that would slide down his nose if he didn’t push them back up again.
I’d never seen him before in my life, and I’d never seen him since.
The only time he ever showed up was when things were bad—when I was sick, or hurt, or scared, or confused—so I’d always just figured that he was like an imaginary friend who had shown up late to the party.
Except now I know that’s not quite true.
“Jamie?” he says again, and this time his voice is sheathed in panic.
“Please tell me you’re there.”
I don’t know how to answer him.
I don’t even know if he can hear my thoughts right now, or if he’s just talking into the void.
If he can hear me—and if he can help me—then maybe this won’t be as bad as it seems like it’s going to be.
If he can’t…
Then I don’t even want to think about what happens next.
“Hello?” a voice calls out from somewhere above me, and the sound of it makes me flinch.
It’s so loud that it feels like it might shatter my eardrums, and it echoes off the walls of the arena like it’s coming from all directions at once.
“Hello?”
“I know you’re awake,” the voice goes on, and this time I can hear the smile in his tone.
“Everyone in the arena is awake now,” the voice continues, and I can hear the grin in his words as well as his tone.
It’s time to explain the rules of the game.”
I can hear the sound of paper rustling as he shuffles through something that’s too far away for me to see.
“Each competitor has been marked with a tracking device,” the voice goes on, and I can almost hear the smug smirk in his tone as well as his words.
“Once the game begins, you’ll be able to see the movements of the other competitors in real-time on your own personal screen.
The only way to win the game is to be the last one standing—and the only way to be the last one standing is to kill everyone else.”
The voice pauses for a moment to let his words sink in.
I lie there in silence and wait for him to continue talking—but instead of going on with his explanation like I think he will, he just stays quiet and waits for something else to happen instead.
I don’t know what that something else is going to be until I hear the countdown begin.
“Ten…”
The voice says—and this time I know that there’s a reason why he’s counting down instead of just jumping straight into the game like I thought he would.
He’s giving me a chance to run away first—something that I probably wouldn’t have realized if Alex hadn’t been here with me right now and explained it to me himself.
“Jamie,” Alex says again—the sound of his voice is quieter now that I know we’re alone—and then he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly again.
I can feel his hands trembling in my mind as he tries to keep himself calm enough to speak clearly, and when he does finally find his voice again it’s almost steady enough that I might believe that he’s not as scared as I am right now.
“You need to focus,” Alex tells me grimly.
“This isn’t a dream anymore.”
And then there’s another voice that comes over the loudspeaker—a different one this time because it’s not just some disembodied announcer who’s talking right now; it’s me.“Five…”
The voice says, and then I don’t have time to think about anything else.
I don’t even really have time to think about what it means to play the game or how I plan to do it.
All I know is that I’ve never been very good at following directions anyway—and if that means that I have to run away instead of sticking around to play the game like I’m supposed to, then so be it.
I don’t have anything to lose by trying.
I don’t have any idea what the rules are or what the best way to win the game might be—except for the fact that I already know for a fact that it’s not going to be easy.
It’s not going to be easy to kill someone else.
It might not even be easy for me to watch myself get killed.
But it won’t be hard for other people—strangers who I’ve never even met—to kill me if they get the chance.
And even though I’ve never been a particularly good fighter myself, there is one thing that I am very good at: running away.
And so I flicker in and out of existence between one space and another as the sounds of the people who are chasing me get louder and louder; until all I can think about is how much I want those footsteps to disappear without really knowing which one I’m hoping for—the ones behind me or the ones in front of me—until there’s a noise beside me that makes my heart stop all together.
The sound of a sword being drawn from its sheath is so faint at first that I almost don’t even realize what I’m hearing—and then all at once there is a blade at my throat and I am staring into the eyes of the person who finds me first.
The sight of my killer is so jarring that I almost forget to fight back at all—because it is one thing to know in theory that this is a game where everyone has been forced to fight to the death in order to win it, but it is something altogether different when you feel the cold steel of someone else’s weapon pressed up against your own skin.
The sight of the girl who has come hunting for me is like something out of a nightmare: her hair is long and wild and tangled with knots and leaves; as if she has been moving too quickly and too carelessly through the trees to care about anything as frivolous as her own appearance.
She has a round, childish face and a pair of wide, innocent eyes that are so startlingly bright and blue against her pale skin that they almost seem to glow with their own light.
She doesn’t look like a monster or a killer or a bad person.
She doesn’t look like anyone who deserves to die.
And yet, in the next moment, she is all of those things and more—because in the next moment, she draws her sword across my throat and makes me one of them too.
The first time someone dies, it’s easy for me to hold onto my sense of humanity; because even though the sight of the girl’s body crumpling up into a heap on the ground next to me terrifies me enough to make me want to vomit, at least I am not the person who was responsible for spilling her blood in the first place.
Even though it hurts me, the first time is not the hardest time for me to bear—or at least, that’s what I tell myself as I listen to the sound of my opponent’s agonized screams and struggle against my own chains without making any progress at all.
Because even though the first time is not the hardest time for me, it’s not the last time either—and as soon as the second person dies, I am forced to confront the fact that something inside of me has changed irrevocably forever.
The second person dies as quickly as the first one does; even though they struggle so much harder against their bindings than the first girl did against hers that their ropes are soaked through with blood before they are finally able to free themselves from them completely.
