I was in a warehouse, the kind that you’d see by the harbor, although I couldn’t hear the typical sounds of the sea. The place had obviously been cleared out, recently, and in a hurry, if the scraps and pieces of junk that were scattered across the floor were to be believed, in order to make room for the twenty or so pods and their stations that lined the walls of the well-lit structure.

To match the pods, there were about twenty chicks and dudes standing around with me in a huddled formation near the door where we’d just been forced through, each of us clearly as confused as the rest as we looked around at what very well could have been some kind of super-secret gaming expo, you know, if it weren’t for the five burly guys with AK-47s behind us.

“Welcome!” a purple-suited man practically bellowed as he came toward us from the opposite end of the warehouse.

From the moment he announced his presence I knew I didn’t like him.

I didn’t like his perfectly trimmed mane of blond hair.

I didn’t like his piercing blue eyes.

I didn’t like his golden tie.

Most of all though, I didn’t like the way he smiled.

“So,” he said once he came to a stop a few feet from us, “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here.”

“Hell yeah we are!” some confident sounding dude-bro somewhere in our crowd shouted, “You have no right to keep us here!”

I half expected the man to have the loud guy on the spot, but instead he simply chuckled and waved his finger at the crowd, “Now, now, now, there will be no more outbursts.”

“Or what?” the clearly recently brain-damaged guy in the crowd shouted back.

The man didn’t respond, leaving one of the armed men behind us to do so by firing off a single shot into the ground.

“Or that.” the man said with a smile, “Alright, now that we’ve got all that out of the way, let me explain why you’re here, and what’s going to happen over the next few minutes.”

He waited a while after saying that, clearly to give us some time to see whether any one of us were going to bark at him, before nodding and continuing on when no one did, “Good, my name is Mister Purple, obviously,” he said, gesturing to his clothes, “and I’m sure you will probably recognize some of the faces around you, through mutual friends, or perhaps even from tournaments you’ve attended.”

As much as I hated the name ‘Mister Purple’, I had to agree with him.

Of the twenty people there, I knew at least half of them, half of whom I would classify as ‘friends’, and another I would classify as ‘dorm-mate’ because… well, we shared a dorm at our university.

“You will not talk to any of these people until after you’ve gone to your pod.” Mister Purple ordered, snapping my attention back to him, “In fact, it’s probably for the best that you try not to cough, sneeze, or make an otherwise abrasive sound until we’re done here.”

“And what’s to stop us from doing so? Huh?” the dude-bro shouted, apparently having forgotten the gunmen behind us, “Come on! We can take him!”

From there things were kind of confusing.

The dude-bro ran out in front of us, one of the gunmen shouted “Out of the way!” then we moved, and finally Mister Purple pulled out a pistol and emptied its mag into the dude-bro, spraying the rest of us with blood in the process.

“Anyone else thinking of making a run at me?” Mister Purple asked as he ejected his gun’s mag and slid in a new one, “No one? Good. Now, there are three simple rules. One, once you are in the game you will not tell any of the other players in your match about the nature of your… predicament. Two, you will survive for as long as you possibly can. And finally, three, winner gets the grand prize.”

Suddenly the tension in the warehouse broke, and everyone turned their attention to Mister Purple, with the exception of the corpse-focused me.

“No one’s going to ask?” Mister Purple laughed, “Alright, well, the grand prize for the winner of today’s game, which will consist of you fine pro-gamers and the 230 poor schmucks who end up in there with you, is, drumroll please… You get to live!”

I swear, I’d never heard so many people gulp so loudly before, and I have to admit that what Mister Purple had said was enough to get me to look up away from the still very much bleeding dude-bro.

“Oh, and I suppose you have that briefcase filled with cash.” Mister Purple said dismissively before snapping his fingers and then catching the briefcase that was cast his way, “I’ve got a cool half-a-million dollars in here for whoever gets in there and wins the round. But I’d get in there quickly, the game’s about to start, and I’m sure you all know what it’s like to get into KillStreak last.”

There were a few seconds of silence before, with all the subtlety of a horde of hungry orcs pillaging a small fishing village, myself and the rest of the gamers scattered.

I missed out on two pods before finally reaching one that wasn’t occupied and booting up the terminal beside it.

“Hey, Finn!” my best friend and roommate Stan called over from the pod three over from mine, “That place where we got attacked by those mutated penguins?”

It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about, but I eventually got it and nodded, “See you there!” I shouted back in response as I logged into the terminal and the pod thrummed to life, “Try not to bring back too much heat with you this time, eh?”

“Hey, you don’t tell me how to travel, I won’t tell you how to shoot.”

I’m not sure what had gotten us to the point where we were joking around with each other, I mean, we’d just seen a guy get killed.

That being said, I’m sure it was just some kind of shock response and that we weren’t actually completely desensitized to the concept of death and our own mortality, after all, I was still pretty scared.

Fear was the last thing I could have in my mind as the pod’s lid split in half and gave me room to slip into the bed of blue cushions and vents, after kicking off my shoes, of course.

I wasn’t the first to have the pod close around me, but I also sure as Hell wasn’t the last, which gave me hope that I at least had a fighting chance.

“My name is Finn Dexter, I’m in KillStreak…” I whispered to myself as I always had, locking those two ‘anchor’ memories in my brain as the pod started to whirr, “I’ve been kidnapped.”