Paradigm Shift

[Solitair*]

Eiko almost looked normal today. She wore the same sort of classy clothes she loved before the island, and they almost fit her. With enough healthy eating, she'd return to her former dress size as if she never lost any weight at all. The makeup on her face was perfectly applied, the result of hours of practicing to steady her hand and fingers. Her hair was too short now to be tied in a ponytail as it used to, but it had been shampooed and styled into an attractive shape.

Sadly, her attitude couldn't match these decorations at all. Her eyes sank down to stare at the sidewalk and her feet. Her brow remained permanently furrowed, and her mouth refused to smile. She walked listlessly down the sidewalk, barely avoiding the occasional passerby. Little about the world outside seemed to warrant her attention. Sometimes she would stop and stand, looking down at the sidewalk and pausing to think. Only after a few minutes did she remember that she had somewhere to be.

It was the first time in weeks that such was the case for her. The summer had drastically different from all the others in her life, where she spent much of her free time looking to get ahead. This year, there seemed to be no point to it. When all of her life's work had been almost completely toppled like a house of cards, all because of an unpredictable, unavoidable twist of fate, why should Eiko work to build it back up again?

That had been her attitude coming home, and the jubilation her family displayed in welcoming home the daughter they though lost forever quickly faded into apprehension when they noticed how different she acted. Days would go by where she did nothing except lie in bed, staring at the ceiling and eating the meals her parents brought to her. The days of hard work and determination seemed behind her now. Out of respect for her plight, her parents allowed her that respite, her little brother being her only unwelcome visitor.

One day, as she lay submerged in bathwater, she remembered an old face completely out of the blue. She hadn't thought of Felicia Carmichael for a long time, but like a bolt from the blue, the connections between the two of them became readily apparent. Felicia was there from the very first day, making a good impression on the new student from Japan. She'd laughed good-naturedly when Eiko used embarrassingly inappropriate slang with the first black person she'd ever met up close. After that day, she and Rosa Fiametta became the first of Eiko's so-called friends. Rosa didn't make it, but Felicia did. Eiko jolted up in the tub and spilled water on the tile when the image of Felicia's happy face at the post-game McDonalds came into view.

She was there. She got out alive.

It surely came as a relief to Eiko's parents that she was making plans now. Moments after getting dressed, she called up Felicia and arranged for a meeting. Felicia was surprised, but glad to have her, even when Eiko asked to come over to her house. In the past, whenever the two of them had a private get-together, they would come to Eiko's house. Was it because she wanted to be hospitable, Eiko wondered, or because she wanted to flaunt her family's wealth? Not once had Eiko ever laid eyes on Felicia's home.

The only hesitation on Eiko's part came in deciding what to wear. All of her clothes were expensive and far beyond the means of most students her age. They reminded her of the old ways too much for comfort, and yet she still couldn't imagine wearing anything else. In the end, she settled on what she thought was the least conspicuous outfit in her wardrobe and left to meet with Felicia.

She looked down at the directions in her hand, then back up at one house on the street. It looked perfectly ordinary to her, no different from the rest of them. After taking a deep breath, she walked up the stairs and knocked.

[MK Kilmarnock]

"Boom, headshot."

It's what the little wanker got for not checking that particular door enough. It was almost like people didn't know how to snipe on a fucking video game anymore these days. As for Felicia, she wasn't sure she'd ever be able to play these games ever again. She certainly hadn't been able to touch Counterstrike at any time during the past few weeks. Even the word 'terrorist' was enough to make her lose her appetite, probably with the frequency that such a word was thrown around these days. She didn't want to think about it, she didn't want to talk about it, and she certainly didn't want to spill her guts to some therapist every Thursday at 4 PM about it... but that's exactly what her parents ended up making her do. Was it too much to ask that all she wanted to do at the current moment was blow up a bunch of ethnic stereotypes in a game that looked like a Pixar movie rip-off?

Felicia had to give props to her parents. They cared, and that was just about as much as any girl in her position could ask for. When she was finally back home there were two sets of arms waiting for her to hug the ever-loving shit out of her, and neither her mom nor her dad seemed too keen on letting her go ever again. There was a lot of things that she ended up taking for granted, but the island removed all those preconceptions about things being given away for free in life. Those arms that she got to run back into? She had to work for those. Felicia had to outlive a whole lot of other kids to get that right, and she had to suffer a great deal before experiencing any real joy. Mom and Dad had also been a couple of real troopers about keeping quiet about thing, at least at first. It was like they were attempting some cute pastiche of normalcy.

Things... broke a little one night at the supper table. A few words were uttered almost on accident, some snapping followed. Snapping was followed by scolding, scolding turned to screaming and shouting and a little bit of crying until everybody was curled up on the couch in the living room, holding on to what they all almost lost. Nothing could be taken for granted anymore.

Felicia jumped in her chair just a bit when her character screamed very loudly and fell to the floor. It seems a spy backstabbed her. Again. For the tenth chucklefucking time in a row. Fucking spies, with their fancy suits and their stupid bala... bacla... clavacle... their ski masks, and their butterfly knives that did way too much damage. She pounded her fist on the desk next to her keyboard in irritation, only to be shocked when the sound echoed itself about twice more.

Oh, right. That was the door.

...

The door?

IT'S EIKO, YOU FUCKING DOLT.

Felicia jumped out of her chair for real this time, rushing out of her room. She should've brushed her hair or something this morning, but she brushed it last night and didn't really do anything productive all day, so it should be fine, right? Her usual duds, a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, would be more than appropriate for what was simply a casual meeting. A 'meeting'... it sounded incredibly stuffy and impersonal when it was worded like that. This was an outing, more like.

"Mom, Dad, Eiko's here! I'll see you soon, okay?" Felicia yelled to the house in general, getting 'uh-huh' and 'alright, dear' in a chorus. She was sure they were just glad she was getting out more and not wasting away in her room. Everybody spent so much time doting on Felicia and worrying about her; maybe it was all rightfully so, but it got to be very bothersome after a while. If people could just let her live her life, that would be...

Living would be fantastic, actually.

Felicia straightened a stray wisp of hair by tucking it behind her ear and answered the door.

"Eikooooooo!"

[Solitair*]

When Felicia opened the door, Eiko just stared at her. How was she supposed to react to such an exuberant greeting? She could have sworn she knew at one point, but now the knowledge had slipped away. Was Felicia still remembering the abduction, the game? It didn't seem possible. Eiko couldn't remember the last time she felt this kind of joy.

But it quickly occurred to Eiko to act like a human, instead of a mannequin. "Hello... Felicia," she said. Her eyes locked onto Felicia's, and she forced a smile onto her face. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms limply around Felicia, awkwardly fitting them into the right position. After she got it right, she held onto the hug for a little bit longer than necessary. It was long enough for her to remember that she should have let go by then.

"I'm sorry," she said to Felicia. "I haven't gotten out much lately. I've had too much to think." Her eye twitched, and she sighed. "I know we had plans, but would you mind terribly if I just stayed at your house for the evening? Honestly, I really just wanted to have a talk with you most of all, and I think the less people that can listen in, the better." A corner of her mouth jerked itself up. "I can buy you dinner after, right? Please."

Though the offer no doubt came as a surprise to Felicia, she said yes anyway, and allowed Eiko into her house. It was... average. There was quite a bit of wood. And clutter. Two floors. A few rooms, living room, kitchen, stairs. Affordable.

Eiko saw Felicia's parents for the first time. They looked surprised to see her, or maybe just surprised she came in. In lieu of any better ideas, Eiko raised her hand and said "Hello" to them both. But their meeting was brief, and soon Eiko found herself in Felicia's room upstairs.

The first thing she spotted while up there was a video game that Felicia had left playing. She could barely tell anything about it from the screen, except that there was something that looked quite a bit like a gun on the bottom, and she thought she could spot a blood splatter just off to the side of the screen. Somehow she doubted that this would be a game she'd like to play, even if she did that in the first place. "So. This is what you've been doing lately?" she asked. "Looks... fun."

She sat down on the floor and sighed, looking up at Felicia with something that actually resembled unrestrained emotion for once. "Felicia, I don't know who I am anymore," she admitted.

[MK Kilmarnock]

Felicia turned to her computer when Eiko called attention to it. She had utterly forgotten that she left the game running when she went to answer the door, and from there, she didn't have any sort of opportunity to shut it off or minimize it. The decision to stay at the house rather than go anywhere right away as they initially planned caught her off guard, but she was more than happy to accomodate Eiko's wishes. By the time the miniature tour was finished (which basically comprised showing Eiko the living room and Mom, the kitchen and Dad, then taking her straight to her room), there was not enough time between seeing it on her monitor and Eiko commenting on it.

Goooood work, Felicia. Top score.

"Oh, uh, yeah! That's just Team Fortress 2, it's like a Pixar film meets Norman Rockwell paintings. Gone terribly wrong. Heh, I was playing it before you... ah, right." Felicia brushed it off about as casually as Hitler brushed off being denied from art school and set about disconnecting from the gamen and shutting it off. With the pseudo-crisis averted, the less-than-condfident host turned her back to her computer and faced her guest.

Eiko was now sitting on the floor, and had said something that struck Felicia in two different ways. Eiko seemed so stiff when she first appeared at the doorstep. This in itself was nothing new; Felicia remembered back to their interactions at Bayview, which always played out with Eiko acting like she had been starched twice over. The way their recent greeting played out was something else entirely, and she couldn't place just why until now. It was the face... Eiko's face usually held some sort of emotion even at her most awkward moments, whether they be of annoyance or simple, abject confusion. Today, it was like answering the door to see a dead girl. Now Eiko had life in her eyes.

The flipside of this, and the second way it struck a chord with Felicia was that the look in those eyes was not a happy one. It was unfair to expect anybody to be happy after going through a situation like the one they went through - in fact, it was downright stupid. It was moreso how... how lost the girl sitting on the floor looked as she said what she said and looked how she did. As if Felicia honestly expected this meetup to be a happy little dinner date or anything like that; this was her life, so of course it was going to play out like the worst soap opera ever. Right now, though, that was okay with her. It was obvious there was stuff that needed to be worked out.

She lowered herself to the floor and sat with her legs crossed, meeting Eiko on her level. "Well, last time I checked, you're Eiko Haraguchi! ... I pronounced the name right, right?" Felicia asked with a grin that totally did not come off as awkward at all, no-siree. Feeling her attempt at humor probably went a little unappreciated, she softened her tone.

"... No, I... I know how you feel, I think," Felicia said. Her hands found a resting place on her sock-covered feet, fingers flexing to crack her own toes every so often like it was some sort of tic. "That's how I felt too. But I thought you had everything lined up, why would that change now?"

[Solitair*]

Felicia decided to try and diffuse the tension with a weak joke. It's alright, Eiko told herself. Felicia was just trying to make her feel better. So Eiko restrained herself and only gave her a blank stare in response.

Thankfully, Felicia took things more seriously after that, asking the obvious question. Eiko had direction in life. She knew exactly where she was going to go after high school, and she was willing to match the considerable effort required for her to follow that path. Were it not for The Game being forced upon her, she would have continued on that path with single-minded determination, without the slightest bit of self-introspection.

She'd never thought of SOTF prior to her participation in it, but if she had, she would have definitely known what she would do, and it would definitely have been different than what actually happened. She would have taken the high road, never ever breaking, right?

"I thought so too, Felicia," she said. "But do you know what kind of mindset I had, getting everything lined up? Everything was really about results for me. It was about getting ahead. I wanted to be a bigshot. All those connections I made at Bayview? That was networking. If any of these students could help me out, I wanted to get in on it. But really, it was pretty shallow." She laughed bitterly to herself. "I honestly forgot you even existed after a few days on the island, and I didn't remember you until this morning.

"But I was doing all of this myself. Sure, I had privileges most don't, because of my father's wealth and position, but I wasn't going to just coast through life. I'd prove myself worthy of it, work harder than anyone else, be smarter than anyone else, and I'd reap the rewards. Hard work pays off, doesn't it? Hard workers get rewarded, don't they? No. No they don't. I got rewarded with two weeks of hell like everyone else in my grade.

"All of my extracurricular activities, my valedictorian contendership, my acceptance letter to Harvard, that didn't matter anymore. All I had was one of those atrocious plastic American lunchboxes. And I ended up getting out of that horrible place not through hard work and intelligence but sheer blind luck.

"If I'd gotten a weapon I could have used, I would have given up and started killing days sooner. If I hadn't met up with Peter on the first day, it's entirely possible I would have been killed easily. If the boats had arrived even a day later than they did, I would have killed someone by then, and they would have left me there. Even if I somehow outlasted everyone else and got out the other way, my life's ambition would be dead in the water. Who'd want a serial killer as their CEO? Somehow I managed to get the best possible result from this horrible situation, and I didn't do anything to earn it. I just got lucky.

"And I know I must sound like the most spoiled bitch in the world right now, complaining about another silver platter for my collection landing on my lap, but that's just it! I didn't want to be this girl living off her daddy's money! I wanted to stand on my own! I wanted to be a success story! I wanted to be someone to look up to, with a good reputation! But apparently that can't happen.

"And before you say that I didn't give in and kill anyone, I was halfway there. The day before the boats came, I tried to steal a best kill prize. Hartmann snatched it away, she humiliated me, and I made up my mind to kill. I just didn't get the chance." Her voice began to get choked up with tears. "So there."

[MK Kilmarnock]

Felicia looked away and to the floor. She could hear the cracks and breaks in Eiko's voice, and it was clear the tears would soon be visible. She had seen more than enough tears to last her a lifetime. There would be many more times where those who survived would cry and cry again, but just because it was inevitable didn't mean that she had to like it.

So, Eiko had nearly succumbed to one of the most horrible factors of the game - its ability to remove shards of yourself, your very humanity, away from you. It was what happened to Sebastian most likely. At least, that's what Felicia hoped and banked much of her sleep on these days. Maybe it was what happened to Alex too... but there would always be hatred there, and nothing but. The point was that the game could bring out the worst in just about anybody. It had managed with her, after all.

"Eiko... I killed two people," Felicia said coldly. "It doesn't matter why and it doesn't matter why, it... it just matters that two people ain't alive and it's my fault that they ain't, okay?" Somehow, she managed to look at Eiko following her confession. Maybe it was because for the time being, it wasn't so much about her own crimes as it was trying to absolve the other girl of hers. "And that's a step that you didn't have to take. Even doing all that fucked up shit I ended up doing, I want to be somebody. I'm going to go out there, get my law degree, and I'm going to help put the bastards away that were responsible for all of this!"

Her jaw quivered there for a few seconds. Got a liiiiiiiiittle bit worked up there, girl. Keep yourself together.

"Don't act like it's all over just yet. You lived for a damn reason, Eiko, so there's no point in throwing it all away just yet."

[Solitair*]

Of course Eiko's story of how she almost killed someone would go over like a lead balloon with someone who went through the same game as her. Why was she expecting anything different? Did she really think that the Felicia she knew would never kill anyone? Well, she had. Twice, in fact. Eiko didn't know what circumstances surrounded those murders, especially considering their rescuers made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with repeat offenders. But really, Eiko didn't want to know. She probably never would.

She gave Felicia a bitter chuckle. "So no reaction to the admittance that I never really thought of you as a friend?" Eiko asked. "I mean, I can see how it could get lost in the shuffle considering what happened, but I kind of expected something.

"And for your information, I wasn't throwing anything away. I just needed..." What did Eiko need, exactly, and if she wasn't throwing anything away, then what was she doing all summer? Were it not for the game, she would be sinking all of her time in preparing for college, choosing a school that would suit her best. But instead that time was squandered, and Eiko was content to let herself get unmoored. "I just needed to stop and think for a while."

And think she did. Was Felicia suffering through the same crisis she was? Hardly. Instead she managed to find a new path for herself. Maybe her situation was Eiko's opposite. Maybe instead of robbing her of an ambition, the game gave one to Felicia. And now that Eiko thought of it, it was a pretty nice ambition.

"Do you think you could use some help?" she asked Felicia. "I already know enough about law to get by, at least corporate law." She could feel her face brightening up as she talked. "It wouldn't be too hard to switch my studies over to law, now that I think about it."

[MK Kilmarnock]

There had been some bitter things said, but Felicia smiled all the same.

It was a lot to respond to, and so she picked and chose what she would respond to. She figured that Eiko and she had not always been on the closest of terms, but they were at least civil and amiable to each other. Yes, so they weren't exactly the closest of friends, but strange circumstances could do equally strange things to... well, equally strange people. So what if they hadn't been BFFs or shit like that before? That was then, and this was now, and through the struggles they shared albeit without interacting with each other on the island, they could still share the kinship of having suffered all the same.

They all needed a little bit of time to think. Felicia had already done her thinking, and was now dedicated towards acting on those whims. Although, the more she thought about them, they weren't truly whims so much as they were desires that burned her up inside. It seemed to her that her path was now fairly well set. She knew what she wanted to do and she wanted to be on the right path. Eiko seemed to be doing her thinking now, but it made Felicia wonder just what on earth Eiko had been doing all this time.

Ack... crap, that isn't exactly fair though, is it? Just because my path is linear as shit doesn't mean everybody else has been able to be dead set as quickly. So, she really should have all the time to think she needs.

So, it still came as a bit of a shock just what request had been made. Felicia wasn't too sure about what Eiko meant by needing help, but it seemed that the girl wanted to tie in business with law... somehow. Well, no, it actually made a fair bit of sense. If she was going to become a lawyer eventually, she'd need to either join or start a firm after law school.

"Are you making... a business proposition?" Felicia asked, smiling still. "I mean, th-that'd be nice and all, I'm just not a hundred percent sure what you're asking. If you wanna go for law, go for it. I always figured you as a sorta corporate business woman though, you know? I thought you still wanted to do that."