An imposter's a role I could never fulfill, if you don't believe me ask the guy I just killed

“Rose!” Mary cried, running and turning the corner. But before she could see the scene of the crime, she had already been teleported out of the hallway, and into the Meeting Room.

Three people remained.

“You see? It happened just as I said it would,” Dakota scoffed. “Kim is the saboteur. She stabbed Rose right in front of me!”

“Wait, what?” Mary gasped.

“She’s lying!” Kim exclaimed. “Dakota did it! She’s been trying to frame me this entire time! And when Rose got here before you, she had her chance! This was what she was waiting for, don’t you see, Mary? A chance to kill someone and frame me for it, right in front of you!”

“That’s what you’re trying to do,” Dakota snarled, glaring at Kim. “You can’t seriously be falling for this, can you? Just think for one second! It’s Kim! She was at the scene of practically every elimination!”

“But those were carried out by Morgana…” Kim pointed out. “I didn’t eliminate anybody! That was you! You closed the doors on me when I got back to Mary and Rose, so you could hunt down and eliminate Dawn with no witnesses! And then you were probably going to do the same with Rose and Mary, but you didn’t have to since Rose got there first!”

“Telling Mary your plans, hmm? It wasn’t me. I already said that!” Anger began to seep into Dakota’s voice. She narrowed her eyes. “Mary, you have to believe me.”

“No, you have to believe me!” Kim wailed. “I’ll even get naked again! I’ll prove that I don’t have the syringe, she does!”

“I don’t have it either,” Dakota fired back.

“I don’t know what to believe!” Mary exclaimed, holding the sides of her head. “You’re both telling me the other one did it!”

“Okay, Mary, you need to trust your instincts then,” Kim said, trying to calm her friend down. “I can explain to you as much as you like about why I’m not the saboteur and Dakota is, but I can’t prove any of it, just like I can’t prove she’s the saboteur, even though I saw her eliminate Rose with my own two eyes. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

“You’ve had by far the most suspicious behavior out of everyone here, though!” Dakota growled.

“You went off by yourself, to O2!” Kim pointed out. “You could have paired up with somebody, but you volunteered to go on your own! To me, that screams guilty!”

“I wasn’t afraid of the saboteurs. I already knew you were one of them,” Dakota replied. “And you don’t intimidate me.”

“Guys, stop, this is getting us nowhere!” Mary wailed. She just wanted to take a minute to think, but everything was going crazy here. She didn’t know who to trust.

“You’re right, Mary, this is getting us nowhere,” Kim agreed.

“Agreed,” Dakota nodded. “So I’m going to make this simple and vote for Kim, the saboteur.”

“I’m not-! Fine! I’ll vote for you then!” Kim replied.

Both votes were filed in, each aimed at the other person.

“Now you’re the deciding vote,” Dakota said, glancing back at the trembling Mary. “So? What’s it going to be, red?”

“I-I…” Mary had actually been trying to approach this challenge the way she always did in her mystery books. But being a great detective took a lot more than just tossing out quotes and analyzing the evidence an author had prepared for you.

What did you do if there wasn’t any evidence? Or if the evidence pointed to two parties at once?

Mary took a deep breath, and exhaled.

“You know it wasn’t me,” Dakota said. “You just don’t want to accept that, because Kim’s your friend and you want her to be innocent.” She was practically seething with rage.

“I am innocent,” Kim asserted. She looked right into Mary’s eyes. “Come on, Mary, you know that Dakota is lying to you and trying to frame me. You can’t let her get away with it!”

Mary was practically in tears.

“Kim, you’re really not the saboteur?” She begged. “You swear?”

“Unbelievable!” Dakota exclaimed. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?!”

“I’m not the saboteur, Mary,” Kim said, nodding encouragingly.

Mary sighed in relief. “Okay then. I’ll vote for Dakota too.”

Dakota’s curses were cut short as she was booted from the room.

DAKOTA WAS EJECTED

SABOTEURS WIN

Mary’s face fell. Her eyes widened. “What?”

She turned to Kim, who looked down, her expression clouded with guilt.

“Sorry,” the schoolgirl offered sympathetically as the two of them were transported out of the Meeting Room and back to where they’d started.

When Kim and Mary joined the others who’d been eliminated, everything exploded.

“I can’t believe you were able to do it!” Sylvia exclaimed. “It was touch and go there for a while, but I guess you’re a better liar than I gave you credit for, Kim!”

Kim’s face burned with shame. She couldn’t look Mary in the eye.

“So it was Kim and Morgana the entire time?!” Dani groaned. “Fuck, dude!”

“Sorry…” Morgana was huddled in the corner, hugging her knees to her chest. She was afraid of catching the wrong kind of attention.

“This is all your fault!” Dakota seethed. “You should have listened to me, Mary! You should have believed me! I was telling the truth, damn it!”

“Okay, that’s enough!” Rose stepped forward, holding her hands between an upset Dakota and a distraught Mary. “Come on, don’t take this out on her! This isn’t her fault, it’s yours. Didn’t you learn anything from me?”

“My fault!?” Dakota exclaimed. “How is any of this my fault!? I told the truth the whole time, and nobody believed me!”

Rose winced. “I had a hard time believing you, too,” she admitted. “It’s because of how you act all the time, Dakota. It was the same with me. I manipulated people when I came here to suit my own ends. And because of that, it took a long time for people to trust me.”

She lowered her head. “Some of them still probably don’t… but the thing is, you’re manipulative, too. And you can be a bully sometimes, and you don’t really try that hard to make friends. And Kim… yes, she was lying this whole game, but other than that, she’s been very straightforward with us. I’m sure Mary was thinking about all that stuff when she decided who she wanted to believe.”

Dakota narrowed her eyes. “And she was wrong. And it cost us the fucking challenge!”

“I-I’m sorry…” Mary was practically in tears. “I thought… I thought…”

“Mary…” Kim croaked, approaching her friend. She reached out to her, but pulled her hand back. She’d just been playing the game, and doing what she needed to do to survive. But in doing that, she’d hurt her friends and lied to them.

“It’s fine,” Mary said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “Kim, I’m not mad at you or anything, okay? I’m just… I’m pissed at myself!”

She kicked the wall in frustration. “I was supposed to be good at this! I love mysteries, and I got played! Oh… fiddlesticks!”

“…I’m sorry.” That’s all Kim could really say. “I kind of… I planned that out about halfway through. After Morgana got found out, I wanted to make sure that it was down to me, Mary, and someone who I knew Mary wouldn’t believe over me. That was you, Dakota.”

Dakota made a growling noise. She wasn’t keen on accepting Kim’s apology at the moment.

“So that leaves me as the odd one out, huh?” Rose sniffed. “You killed me for fodder.”

“You still lasted longer than half of us,” Gina pointed out with a scowl. “I got eliminated immediately! How did that figure into your plans, huh, Kim?!”

“Hey! That wasn’t me!” Kim said, raising her hands defensively. “I left all that up to Morgana, I swear!”

“Hey!” Morgana wailed, turning pale. The last thing she wanted was for Kim to be upset with her, too. That would be awful.

“…But I don’t get it!” Dawn had remained silent this entire time. She approached Kim with a frown. “Why did you kill me in the hallway? You must have had a bunch of opportunities to do it before, why did you wait until then?”

“Good question,” Sylvia nodded. “Kim, would you like to explain your thought process to the rest of us? I’m sure Nick is just dying to hear about how you eliminated the girls in his harem.”

“Hey!” Nick scowled. He’d been staying out of this the whole time, due to not wanting to pick sides. “Don’t drag me into this!”

“No, it’s fine,” Kim sighed and nodded. “I’ll tell everybody. So… look. Morgana and I, we knew from the start that we were the saboteurs. But we didn’t have any special communication powers or anything like that, Mary.”

“Oh…” Mary nodded thoughtfully.

“The only advantages we gave the saboteurs were the ability to mentally trigger a sabotage, so as not to give anything away, and syringes that they could make appear and disappear at will, just like your tablets,” Sylvia explained. “That way, they could perform their tasks as saboteurs without giving any physical indicators.”

“So the strip search was pointless in the end!” Dani groaned.

“Hey… I thought it was a really good idea,” Carly said, patting the tomboy on the shoulder. Dani shied away from her, embarrassed.

“So I went to Morgana at the beginning, when all of us were split up,” Kim explained. “I told her that she should work on getting kills, while I worked on my alibi and getting in close with everybody. Right, Morgana?”

“Right…” Morgana nodded. “We thought it would be better that way, since Kim is better at making friends and being trusted.”

Kim’s reputation as a reliable and dependable friend had done a lot of the heavy lifting there.

“So you stayed in the vents the whole time,” Marley said, nodding thoughtfully. “See? I wasn’t wrong for trying the vents, sis!”

“I didn’t say you were,” Carly replied.

“So Morgana got Gina, did she also get Carly?” Dawn asked.

“Yeah, she did,” Marley nodded, her voice bitter. “Popped right out of a vent and got her. I was screaming bloody **** about how it was Morgana, but nobody heard me.”

An embarrassed expression crossed Kim’s face. “Actually… I heard you,” she confessed. “I heard the whole thing. I just lied to the others and said I couldn’t hear a name.”

“Of fucking course,” Dani spat.

“But that still doesn’t explain why you didn’t eliminate me first,” Dawn said, frowning. “Rose was right, I’m a threat. Was it because of what I said? Morgana wanted to eliminate Carly, because she knew I’d vote for her?”

“Seriously?” Carly’s jaw dropped, and she turned to Morgana. The goth was practically in tears.

“I’m sorry!” Morgana blubbered. “I just thought… I didn’t have a choice, okay?! You said you were going to pick Dani, so… I thought… I would have to choose Dawn. I’m really sorry…”

“No, no, it’s cool! I’m not mad!” Carly assured her. “It’s just how the game is played, I get it.”

“Wait, you… you were going to pick me as your buddy again?” Dani stared at Carly in surprise. The cosplayer looked embarrassed for a second.

“Come on, you two…” Marley groaned. “Pay attention. This is why you got eliminated in the first place, Carly, because you let your personal stuff control your thinking.”

“Well, uh…” Kim’s expression turned sheepish and she glanced at Morgana, who looked down. “It wasn’t… JUST because of that, just so you guys know.”

“Hmm?” Carly raised her eyebrow.

“What do you mean?” Marley asked.

“I… kind of wasn’t thinking about Dawn’s memory during the first few rounds,” she admitted. “It wasn’t until Rose pointed out her amazing memory that I realized how much of a threat she was. That’s why I pivoted and decided to eliminate her next. I realized there was a good chance she might catch me in a lie, so…”

“So you eliminated Dawn in the hallway,” Dakota scowled. “Just like I said.”

Mary shrank a little, feeling ashamed.

“I could have just done it before O2, but if I did that, and Dani found me with Dawn’s body… yeah. Not good.” Kim looked over at Morgana. “If we could have communicated, that would have been the end right there.”

“Well, it’s how the game works,” Sylvia said, smiling. “Can’t make things TOO difficult for the workers! Even though they still lost…”

“It was great!” Chrissi cheered. “Super exciting! And lots of good orgasms, to boot! How hot!” She fanned herself, smiling cheerfully. She and Sylvia seemed to be the only people really enjoying this game.

“Now then,” Sylvia said, clearing her throat, “since we’ve figured out how everybody did everything, more or less, let’s move onto the important part of this challenge! Tallying up the scores! To start, let’s take a look at how much VP everyone went into this challenge with!”

She summoned her trusty screen, which displayed the VP scores of everyone prior to this challenge.

1st: Mary – 56 VP

2nd: Gina – 52 VP

3rd: Dawn – 46 VP

4th: Kim – 43 VP

5th: Dani – 38 VP

6th: Carly – 36 VP

7th: Morgana – 31 VP

8th: Dakota – 28 VP

9th: Rose – 16 VP

“As we can see, there’s a bit of a discrepancy,” Sylvia smirked. “Morgana’s climbed a few points since the last time, and… she’s got more to go, I’d wager. I think you’ll find there will be a few changes to the point totals… but not a lot of major ones.”

She giggled.

“After all… here’s a look at how the event itself went, and where everybody scores.”

1st: Kim (+10 VP)

1st: Morgana (+10 VP)

2nd: Mary (+0 VP)

3rd: Dakota (-1 VP)

4th: Rose (-2 VP)

5th: Dani (-3 VP)

6th: Dawn (-4 VP)

7th: Carly (-5 VP)

8th: Gina (-6 VP)

“So Dawn was eliminated before Dani was… yeah, that makes sense,” Mary said, nodding glumly over to the short girl. Dawn didn’t seem that miffed about it, though.

“It’s just one of those situations, you know how it is,” Sylvia sighed, shrugging her shoulders. “In a situation like this, well… only the winners got positive scores. You workers just should have tried harder! Pulled yourself up by your bra straps!”

That was a good way of turning the frustration about Kim’s victory towards the host. Which was probably where it deserved to go, in Nick’s opinion. He didn’t think less of Kim for doing what it took to win; in fact, he was impressed that she managed to implement such a skilled plan in the first place. It was very impressive.

“Now then,” Sylvia continued, clapping her hands. The scores on the board began to shift. “Let’s take a look and see how the scores have changed! I imagine a few people will be skyrocketing up!”

1st: Mary – 56 VP

2nd: Kim – 53 VP

3rd: Gina – 46 VP

4th: Dawn – 42 VP

5th: Morgana – 41 VP

6th: Dani – 35 VP

7th: Carly – 31 VP

8th: Dakota – 27 VP

9th: Rose – 14 VP

“Now, as we can see, Kim and Morgana have risen quite a lot, while the rest of you have slipped slightly,” Sylvia pointed out. “Quite a pity, too. This would have been a great opportunity for the workers if they managed to win, but…”

“Stop rubbing it in,” Nick pleaded.

Sylvia wisely decided to shut up and let the results speak for themselves.

Carly’s face fell. Once upon a time, she’d been in first place. At the very top. But scoring poorly multiple times in challenges had slowly eaten away at her score, and now she was practically at the bottom. She wasn’t sure what she could do to claw her way back up to the top, at this point.

“Hey… it’s going to be okay,” Marley said, taking her sister’s hand and squeezing it tightly. Carly looked back at her and smiled. She’d been concerned about her point totals, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that even if she lost… that wouldn’t be so bad.

I wanted to win because I wanted to bring my Elly back… but I made peace with that. She wouldn’t want me to suffer, Carly thought.

“Well, I didn’t fall as far as I could have,” Rose sighed. “Still in last place, though. By a lot, too...”

“Hey, come on,” Gina said, patting her on the back. “At least you’ve got immunity this round, right?”

Rose brightened up a little. Yeah, that was a good way to look at it!

Mary was a little relieved that she was still in first; and at the same time, her feelings were divided between being happy for Kim to have climbed to second place, and being a little miffed about the way she’d done so.

She hadn’t been lying before. She didn’t begrudge Kim for the method she’d used to win; after all, the game couldn’t be played without lying.

But for all Mary believed that Jesus was perfect, she knew she wasn’t. She was a fallible person, who could still feel the sting of loss, and be upset that it seemed “unfair”. She wouldn’t hold that against her friend, though.

“Now then, since we’ve determined the point totals, I believe it’s time for us to take our leave,” Sylvia said, twirling her cane. She tucked it under her arm and turned to Chrissi, grabbing both of the blonde’s hands. “Thank you again, by the way. I’m so happy you let me do this.”

“Of course!” Chrissi chirped. “And good luck with the rest of the season! I know the producers have been rumbling about it, but I know you can pull it off!”

Sylvia winced. “Y-yeah… thanks again.”

Chrissi wasn’t satisfied with holding hands. She pulled Sylvia into a big old hug.

Then she turned to Nick.

“No, no, I’m fine,” Nick said, raising his hands. The ring on his finger glistened from the sunlight outside the window. “I’m a married man, see?”

“Oh, poo.” Chrissi puffed up her cheeks and frowned.

“Sorry, Chrissi,” Sylvia giggled. “Maybe next time.”

With a flick of her cane, she sent everyone back to the island. The space station warped away, and was replaced with warm sun and sandy beaches.

And, of course, the stage, set with four roses on the table.

“Now… here we are,” Sylvia said, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “If we take a look at who placed… Kim and Morgana both won the challenge. But! Morgana is an auditionee. So she won’t be giving out any roses. That means we’ll have to go in order of who managed to last the longest. So Dawn, you’ll be choosing first. Then Rose, then Pretty Mary Sunlight, of course, and finally, our victor, Kim! Last pick again... the deciding vote. No pressure or anything! Little Miss Saboteur Traitor.”

Kim glared at her.

Sylvia was unfazed. “Go ahead, girls, think long and hard about who you would like to spend the next week with… and who will be getting kicked off the show for good.”

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