Hey guys! Congrats on surviving the night, and welcome to Day 42. The vines have almost entirely disappeared, slthering back into whatever crevice they came from. The ones under the skin seem to have died off too, but they still need removed-- let's hope the doctors are ready for some business. All in all, calm day. Our seasonal How's My Driving? meme will be going up on the 23rd, along with activity check. But we have something a little more important than vine troubles!

After the poll, it seems like May's coming to you in the form of an Elimination Tournament. This will take place during Days 46 & 47, with plenty to do in the arena and just as much, if not more, to do back on the island. We have some promised pre-plotting for you to do, so here's how it's going down.


the tournament

At the tail end of Day 45, everyone on the island will be rendered unconscious if they weren't already asleep. They wake up an unspecified time later in a large and entirely foreign room with a door at one end. Above that door is an LED marquee that informs them, on a permanent loop:

• This is the final test.
  
• Your odds of survival will double with teamwork, so pick a partner you can trust implicitly. Otherwise, brave the test alone.
  
• Death is permanent. You will not go home.
  
• Anyone left in this room in 20 minutes will die. Anyone who at any point refuses the test will die.

Cheery, right?

At that point, everyone has three choices.

Choice 1: Select a partner, enter the door.
Choice 2: Do not select partner, go in alone.
Choice 3: Fuck the police, stay in the room.

Choice 1's pair will pass through the door, down a short hall, and into what amounts to a small arena. They're informed that only one of them can survive, once one's dead the other moves on, and if both are still alive in an hour, both will die. And they're reminded that death is permanent. You will not go home. Then the timer starts counting down. After that is up to the characters. If and when one dies, the body's silently carted off by some horribly deformed NPC within minutes and the door opens at the other end of the arena for the winner to pass through to containment. The clock's still ticking, though, and it's safe to assume not passing through that door will get you killed too.

Choice 2 is pretty much the same as the first, but since they didn't select a partner, they'll be paired with someone "random" (which generally means "someone KERNOS thinks will fuck with their head"). Same rules, same result.

Choice 3 is the primary opt-out option, but it's an IC one-- if your character would refuse the test before they even knew what it was and you'd personally rather not put them in the tournament, this might be for you. Everyone left in this room will black out and wake up back at the shrine, with more details on this later. Everyone from Choice 1 or Choice 2, however, will be running on the assumption that these people are legitimately dead and done for.


There are four rounds total. Each round goes by the same rules: One hour for one body or they both die. After the first one, all battles are 'Kernos-selected', ICly, but there'll be a chance to claim matches OOCly from the pool of winners.

Characters will not be healed between matches, so they'll definitely want to avoid getting a bleed-out wound in round 1.

At the end of Round 4, 5-10 people will remain. They'll have their choice of prizes-- escape tokens to return home, a guaranteed personal supply weapons/supplies for the rest of this round (ICly, they have no idea that it ends next month), or a distinct advantage waiting for them next round. (This option will be explained in full when we unveil Beta Phase's setting and such, but we promise it'll give them a head start.)



meanwhile, on the island...

Like I said, the Choice 3 folks wake up in the shrine just like any normal island!death. It's pretty obvious that Kernos was full of shit, but the people still in the tournament don't know that, and there's literally no way to get in touch with them...


What they'll notice:

• It's evening already-- who knows how long they were unconscious, or how long it took them to respawn after the timer ran out.
  
• There's a tanker on the horizon, too far out to hope to reach it and beyond the reef barrier. If anyone tries anyway, they'll find that the sea monsters are particularly feisty these couple of days, and will do everything in their power to eat you alive.
  
• The gates are open. Both the outside and inside gates, all through the night. This means the monsters of the beach and the forest both have free reign of the compound, although they're significantly lesser in number. This isn't necessarily life-threatening for most people, but it could definitely get you hurt pretty bad.
  
• As each Round is fought, more and more people are waking up at the shrine (everyone who 'dies' in the tournament, in fact).
  
• Besides the network function, the devices will now (temporarily) have the option to watch the ongoing battles, livestream-style. Watch in dismay as your buddies kill your other buddies? Hell yes.
  
• The next part of the mysterious forest cube plot is unveiled! Details on this forthcoming, but tl;dr they get to explore it and it's totally not the borg. Or the allspark. Or a rubik's cube.

how do I plot this?

Excellent question.

On this post (right over here!), we'll have an open plotting section. Here, you can lay out any ideas you may have so far and put out a call for anyone else who might be interested. We'll be doing this round by round, and all comments on this entry are for reference only. We did a hard reboot of how this event is run!

Remember, OOCly, this isn't a competition! Some of the strongest characters might very well not make it past the first round, and faced against the right opponents, some characters who might be considered 'weaker' could make it all the way. The point of this plot is delicious emotional trauma, not ~I wanna be the very best like no one ever was.

There'll be a brief FAQ in the 'mod questions' section, so stay tuned there, and happy plotting!