The cool balmy waves rose and fell into the marble blue ocean, stimulating the foamy tides onto the placating beach. Seagulls flocked from the dying breaths of the cool blue and landed on the long tan strip of the beach, staring out into the city. The peachy area stretched around the city like a belt cutting it off by two ports on both sides. It remained vacant except for the tiny chips of debris on the sand and the colony of birds that had congregated on the pier. The pier stared out into the ocean, struck down in the middle of the sandy coast.

The seagull waddled idly, discovering a body to dig its eager beak into. The body was limp, soft, but alive and it breathed with the same phlegmatic ease as the wide open beach. His eyes were prised open, legs spread apart and hands rested behind his head as if he had just finished taking a blissful ephemeral nap. The bipedal creature whistled a warm dulcet tune. The seagull stared reproachfully and glided back to the pier, crestfallen by its interrupted dalliance.

The boy rolled back in the sand. He was dressed in a loose tropical tank top, swimming shorts, and moth bitten flip-flops. His teeth bucked out and his hair lay carelessly parted back in a messy boyish style.

He had heard the booming sound assail his ears not too long ago, a faint flicker in the modicum of time. The distant shouting sounds did little to abate his confidence in security but he knew the unspoken message quite clearly, it was only a matter of time before it was sealed—

The AI's flowery metallic voice shattered the air. "The free for all event has officially been finished. Please make your way to The Office to get registered and begin your first game."

He swore he hated that woman's jarring voice. But what could he do besides stare into the sky?

His eyebrows swore an oath of height. First game, she said? Being drop shipped into the city wasn't the first incarnation of the game? The mindless carnage by random players wasn't their idea of the first game?

Another booming sound stole the air and in an instant, a resplendent gold and black holographic screen paraded itself in the sky. It showed a leaderboard of names in gilded splendor. Risen to the top bar was a boy named Casper Wolf with 340 credits. His profile was pixelated on the left side of the bar in a tiny square box and his number was on the right. Scrolling down, the next boy was Nelson Nolke championing 230 credits then the following bar displayed a Japanese girl named Hex Hirangani who had eaten through 214 credits. The next two were Zoe Fischer and Marcel Sweeney.

Zoe Fischer, the boy pondered, a German player perhaps?

Zane Vanderhugen was plastered in sixth place and seventh was Merida Aguilar. The litany of gold names scrolled down all the way to the twentieth place before the list eventually gave up and the names faded away. The boy sighed dolefully, one thing was for sure, his name wasn't on there.

Tyler Dardero got up from his reverie and looked around, face broadened. The beach was pleasantly inspiring. No one was bothering him besides those pestering birds, the sun was always shining on his face, there was a place to rest, the blue heavens weren't a horrid sight, and food was only a skip away into the city. The most attractive thing to Tyler about the silent coast was that there were no players...yet. For now, he had this area all to himself, and then...eventually...the chaos would have to settle in. It almost felt like home, except there weren't any beautiful girls and vibrant music to color up the place. As unsettling as it was to admit, Tyler missed Brazil.

Before the game he had been living in a shabby, down-at-the-heel apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his grandmother and his sister. The shelter was always cramped, swelteringly hot, and fraught with gangsters. One cold night on his birthday, he had been sleeping on the floor and he heard some raucous uninviting sounds downstairs. Tyler had thought it was just the neighbors fighting as usual, but he remembered that his sister was supposed to be coming back home with his boyfriend. But was she? Then he heard three booming cracking sounds lick the air. Tyler swept downstairs and discovered the familiar tan body of the girl he had known for twenty years, her outline slumped down in warm, sweaty blood smeared against pink and blue graffitied walls. Tyler frantically looked around, the gangsters had disappeared. They'd done their job and fled, completing their expletive journey. Tyler fought to hold down his tears as he cradled the bloody head of the hot tan body onto his weak stuttering fingers.

"Lamento muito, Marcia. Marcia, eu juro...eu juro que farei as coisas melhores para nos. Sinto muito."

Days would pass until he held on to that promise. On the other side, his grandmother had suddenly become malaise with cancer and he didn't have the financial means to take care of her. It had all seemed to be falling apart, but Tyler wasn't really the type of person to crash and burn in despair. He would keep on carrying on with his life. Although his apartment and his quality of life remained subpar, the one thing he loved about where he lived was that every day he got to walk to Ipanema Beach and meet new people. And on those cult, flavorful days he could easily find a vendor selling some Pao de queijo and Bolinhos de Bacalhau, which was one of his favorite things to eat when he was on his mindless strolls.

The best days would also take form when the mountain would shine high against the tropical haze of the sky. Those balmy tropical days never really seemed to end, as if time had stopped and God had laid His illimitable thumbprint on it. Most people usually evaded him, but Tyler loved interacting with new people and this hardly doused him with discouragement. On the days he met kids his age that wanted to talk to him, it pretty much turned out well. Then they would ask for his socials and never talk to him the next day.

But one day he laid eyes on this one girl with beach blonde hair and strange goggles on her head. It looked as if sunglasses belonged their. They reminded Tyler of the types of goggles he would see in a zombie apocalypse. It was quirky, and she had a quirky smile with tender eyes and a wide heightened forehead. Tyler could still touch the pink wispy memory of her smiling at him. She had been standing on the beach, blocking the towering tropical silhouette of Dois Irmaos as the cool summery breeze blew against her. This made her appear more enigmatically attractive and infirm of any impending flaws.

Had Tyler just gone to approach her when the time was ripe for conversation, things would've been different. But he didn't. The girl scampered away and that was the last time he ever saw her.

It was on that confusing, heart-throbbing day when Tyler relinquished the sight of the strenuous beauty that he ended up bumping into a random face. He was wearing a swimming suit with a surfboard wrung around his arms and displaying two shining black cross tattoos on his chest.

"Mantenha suas pálpebras abertas, seu idiota!"

"Desculpe."

"Ah."

But as the surfer walked past, Tyler caught a red glimpse of a silky object that flew seamlessly on the beach. Tyler quickly ran to get it and grasped it zestily into his greedy fingers. The ticket felt like velvety cloth and it read the strange enigmatic imprint of the A and on the back was the word Chaos. And somehow, most serendipitously he had been thrust into the game of his life. Tyler wouldn't let his life fail this time. He would keep his promise to his sister and make her proud. He would make both her and his grandmother proud.

Tyler stared out at the seagulls. They squawked into the hollow air as their thin spindly legs waddled quite mindlessly onto the creaking brown dirt pier. But one of the birds rose into the air and tried to propel itself forward. It soared and soared and soared and it just fell silently into the water, into a dark taciturn death. There was a thin flashing flame that grazed the air before the bird took the fateful fall, signifying the encompassing terminal end. It was as if the flashing orange flames were dying to be pushed inside but couldn't, vehemently yielded by the dome. Tyler shuddered, breath suspended into the air. Somehow, unknowingly, he had been standing on the very edge of the game. Past that pier was a fiery invisible dome that protected them from the fiery bowels of...

"Inferno," Tyler gasped. Could it be? Could it be that he was trapped in a paradise of hell?

There was something else that turned his blood cold.

The beach was calm. Quiet. But the birds somehow found it apt to not be on it. They seemed to be running away from something. Tyler's eyes perked up as he wended closer to the patched white object. It was a cracked human head. But Tyler knew better, no real humans were on this beach...yet. There was a sliver patch gleaming out on the skull. It was best revealed to be an AI. Its red eyes blinked at him while its other verdant one stood motionless. Out of instinct, Tyler grabbed a pebble sitting by his shoe and tossed it across the beach. A deafening blinding explosion devastated the air, making Tyler fall on his butt. Had he taken several more steps he would've been blown into nice chewable bacon strips.

Then he saw a faint figure approaching. The thin padding footsteps that ate the sand tickled his ear. There was a small diminutive hope that it would be a female. The figure grew closer, its silhouette becoming more and more pronounced and mature.

Tyler's eyebrows heightened and his mouth salivated with excitement. He recognized those beach blonde pigtails, the goggles, and the lazy soft eyes tucked beneath the big forehead.

"Você está bem, mano?" The girl tentatively inched further onto the pale yellow sand.

"Don't move!" Tyler shouted.

The girl froze in her tracks, staring at Tyler with disconcerted amazement. Then she looked at her feet and acknowledged the pitted holes in the sand. Her mouth gaped open in dry stifling terror for her gormless mistake. "But how?"

Tyler had the same query stapled in his mind. He studiously observed the sand and the dome and the golden leaderboard which had now disappeared. What was now shown in place was a large digital timer counting down from twenty minutes. Tick...tick...tick. It said it all.

"Right," Tyler muttered to himself with a stony nod.

"Certo o que?"

It was quite clear that the game didn't really want them to rest even though everything that the city proffered seemed to point that way. One sleepy move or a simple blunder would be your final one because whether you wanted to or not the game was always playing. The AI might've announced FFA was over but that didn't mean the city had given up on trying to kill the players. Especially to those who preferred to take shortcuts.

Tyler told the girl all of this and she just stared at him wide-eyed.

"So then, would that mean that the game thinks for itself?"

Tyler shrugged. "Something like that I guess. But one thing I know for sure is that it wants us to keep moving and to keep playing. This city was designed to cage us in and make us suffer for entertainment."

Tyler's chin pointed toward the blue sky. There was a silvery glitch and a strange blinking of red and purple lights. Somehow chips were implanted into the holographic dome. "Look, the cameras are baked into the dome. Yes, I said dome. That's not a real sky. Nothing in this game is real, at least not in the traditional sense. They want us to keep moving, they want us to keep fighting, for their show. For their entertainment. But then again," Tyler grinned scratching his head. "That's what we signed up for before we entered this game.

The blonde girl retracted her steps back on the wooden bridge, "Hmm, how are you going to get out of there?"

Tyler hummed, exhuming whatever he could find from his glassy thoughts. Then he spotted the seagulls. One thing that he was very famous for back in Rio was his uncanny impersonation of bird sounds. It had grown quite a replete crowd that would marvel at this strange faculty. Tyler cupped his hands onto his mouth and squawked out a jittering cry. Two seagulls flew over to him and landed liberally with their short spindly legs on the pale tan ground.

"O que você está fazendo?"

"Well, I'm hoping they have like a really strong scent or a strong sight or something. If I can't detect the bombs, they'll have to."

"They're seagulls, not dogs. I don't think–"

But there was a hungry tonal silence as one of the seagulls started to beeline its way out of the sand by digging its beak tastefully, yet confidently into the sand. Tyler pointed his hand at the bird with a smug smile and followed it all the way onto the wooden bridge.

The blonde girl crossed her arms but her smile couldn't be abated. "Cala a boca. You just got lucky."

The seagull chirped triumphantly and then flew on Tyler's shoulder. Tyler patted it gently on the head. "I wish I had some bread to give you. I don't really know what else seagulls eat besides that." He turned consciously at the blonde and forced a gormless grin. "You were at the beach that day."

They laughed stupidly. "Yeah, I saw you two."

There was a strange, uninvited silence that rifted in between them. This was irksome for Tyler considering not just a minute ago he was talking to her just fine. Why was he choking now? Maybe once danger abated, things become trivially average again. "So umm...what's your name? Or-or do you want to know mine first? I'm Tyler." Tyler slapped his head. The seagull blinked at him, giving him a reproving semaphore of shame. Buff the fuck up dude, its face purportedly said. The seagull flew away.

The girl giggled, shaking happily. The sun was beginning to enter its five o clock shadow, sending a burnt orange tropical glow onto the beach. Seeing the warm light on the blonde girl made Tyler feel some type of blissful way. It was just as if he was back in Rio again. "I'm Braxxie. Braxxie Farreira. We went to the same school together. At Vargas secondary school?"

Tyler shrugged, averting his eyes and scratching his head. "I-I never noticed you. Small world huh?"

Braxxie nodded, smiling.

Tyler looked at the timer. Only fifteen minutes left. What would happen if it reached zero? "Listen, we should probably get going to that office place. Don't wanna be late to our own party ya know..."

"Yeah, yeah. Liderar o caminho."