Somewhere near Limbo----

VIP Room 02, Peak Box

"That's new."

Saki mumbled as she tried to analyze the the structure that was the center of attention in Stadium 1.

"It's all part of the theme this year" Travis said as he entered the room.

"Care to share?" Tim asked.

"No thanks, I'll let it be a surprise."

Saki remained near the window as she tried to wrestle with the structure in her mind. Having heard that this thing was Jester's brainchild, she was more than sure this thing,whatever it was, would the next source of grief for all of them. Ever since she had risen to the top of Sharp End, she had to deal with the other head-of-sections and it was then that she saw the real Jester. All she remembered before that had been a cheery older man who had all her superiors on tiptoes. She had liked him then, almost likening him to a grandfather figure. He'd been nice to her and most others lower on the totem pole. Even the code name had confused her since she thought he was named for his perpetual smile. She now lived in a state somewhere between fear of and frustration at the very same smile.

The building had been constructed exclusively for the purpose of Grey Matter's arena of war. And the team in charge of construction had been given several blueprints and a budget personally designed by Travis that went above and beyond their wild expectations.

As such, the structure was overwhelmingly eye-catching and most of the big-shots were watching it as a result.

It was a mini-office building left slightly unfinished at certain areas. It had two basement levels and 9 level above-ground. It had been filled with used furniture and office supplies and dummy-style sentry bots to simulate office workers. Every single one of the bots was armed with Tasers. They had also been given communications and advanced cooperative AI.

Cameras dotted the entire structure to give the audience a view of what was going on inside. The cameras were also linked to he bots populating the building. Each of the three jumbo screens outside had been divided into at several subsections showing the various feeds.

The objective was simple enough, to obtain a certain object and/or the information on it and extract it without triggering any alarms. Two people would be given the same objective and treat each other as the enemy after the same objective. Many of the participants were quite happy with such a format and were itching to show off their skills. Triggering the alarms would result in security bots flooding the structure. These bots were considerably more dangerous and generally meant that getting in or out would be much harder.

Tim’s usually passive face frowned as racked his brains trying to figure out Jester's agenda. He was sure that whatever it was, he wouldn't be happy with it. More importantly, he was sure Malko wouldn't like it either. He'd never been sure of Travis and suggested the same to Malko several times but it had been brushed off. He thought for sure that taking over Fulcrum would have given him the clout to become the next director but Malko was a tough old man who, like Travis had quite a few hidden trumps he hadn't used over the years. He'd taken a look at the psych and fitness reports on his boss and seen that while the old man wasn't in his prime anymore, he was nowhere close to obsolete in any way. Based on the report, he wouldn't have been surprised if the director suddenly went into the field.

"Well, it’s about to start, so let's sit back, grab some snacks and enjoy the show." Travis announced and proceeded to do exactly that.

"What about the boss?" Tim asked as he hadn't seen the director since he had pulled Travis away earlier.

"Oh he should be..., there he is. Hey, Malko, come grab a seat, this one next to me is acoustically perfect, trust me, I checked it myself. Hey, come on guys, Shell, Picky, what are you thinking about so hard?" Saki and Tim winced as he made their code-names cute.

And the director did, looking like he was in a daze and tired to the bone simultaneously.

Seeing this, Saki shrugged at Tim and took seat.

Tim stood, unsure for a moment, and then settled down into a seat as the first round began.

-----Stadium 1, Staging Area 1----

“Well this is different.”

The two participants had just been let into the arena. One had charged straight into the building but the other one just stood there for a while as he took stock of the building.

"#28 seems to be in hurry, too bad he didn't realize there isn't any time restraint."

Bink stood there wondering what the catch would be. He'd found out that this thing had been his boss' boss' plan and as such knew that it would not be the most straightforward of assignments. He had heard rumors of Jester's escapades and pranks. He looked around and saw the cameras and nodded as he took off his backpack and satchel.

He dropped both behind a fake planter at the edge of the arena right near the exit point. Looking around once more he made sure none of the cameras could see him now. He unpacked his trump card and took out his tablet and laptop from the satchel.

He paused for a moment as he thought of the folder that had been left for him awhile back and the criteria he had been assigned. Then he got to work. He pulled out a cable from the bag which had a needle at its end. With practiced ease, he plugged it into the vein on his left wrist. Taping the needle to make sure it had enough slack and wouldn't slip; he took out two other cables from the backpack and plugged them into his laptop and tablet. Having done this, he also took out a box from the backpack which was attached to the fourth and last cable the bag had.

Once the blood in the cable attached to him had reached the bag he booted up all the devices around him and then flipped a switch on the backpack. Then he watched as the dark red liquid move out from the bag into the two devices and the box he had taken out from the backpack. Two pings informed him that the tablet and laptop were ready. He unplugged them from the devices and once the cables retracted back into the backpack.

Bink had a rather unique ability, and he had long hoped to improve or change it because of its constraints. ‘Flammable blood’ was an ability which wasn’t too practical. He had tried storing some only to realize it was only good as long as it remained fresh. To his superiors and almost everyone one around him, it seemed to be an almost useless ability. But Bink had never risen up to the innumerable insults that had flown in his direction once others found out the how useless their teammate was. He was good with computers but that seemed to be about it. He could become a suicide bomber but that would understandably be a one-time thing.

The truth was that no one knew about a few particular details about his ability and Bink was in no hurry to share them. As the box pinged, he continued to wait as he watched a meter show up on one side of the box. The meter was divided into twenty sections and was filling up pretty quickly. As it reached full capacity, the backpack pump cleared both remaining cables of his blood and spooled the cables back in once he removed the needle.

As Bink started typing on the laptop, the box opened up to display a small robot that looked like a very bulky cockroach but matte black instead. It was about 7cm in length and 2cm in width. It jumped out of its box and ran with tremendous speed towards the building. Looking through the cameras it had on its body, anybody watching him at that moment would have thought he was playing one of the really old Radio control toy car racing games.

This toy of his was his best gadget. In the sanctity of his mind he called it ‘Little Immortal’. He had designed it himself and made it compatible with his ability, including the effects only he knew about. And so Little Immortal sped on through and entered the building. The little robot had no real combat ability but was second to none when it came to infiltration and surveillance.

It could even serve as a remote presence to hack electronics on its own without user guidance.

Bink watched for the screen for a while and then switched over to his least favorite plan. He had aptly named it PP for Poltergeist Peekaboo. Little Immortal would switch to stealth mode and run around while hacking the buildings infrastructure hubs following which it would start causing chaos.

As it began going through the rooms on each floor, he noticed a flash of white here and there. He recognized #28 and identified the flash as enemy combatant and changed the bots primary objective to follow #28 and set his original plan as its secondary objective.

Soon the pattern emerged in #28’s exploration of the building and the bot was able to keep up easily. As the bot mapped out the route #28 took, Bink noticed that a certain room was left untouched and that #28 was doing so deliberately. Watching him for a while longer, he found that his rival was looking for traps in area.

A minute later Bink had figured out the route in and sent the bot in. Inside he saw the target computer and the Flash drive. He manually controlled the bot to jump onto the CPU and plug itself in. Once in he analyzed the data and found that the data was rigged to trigger an alarm if the data went physically out of the room in any device. He knew he didn’t have time to disable the trigger code so he simply copied it and sent the bot to the edge of the doorway. As he used the bot’s remote features to get a view of the situation outside, he saw that #28 had found another longer route in and was almost at the doorway. Watching the flash move to the doorway, he timed it so the bot would exit just as #28 entered the room. An alarm went off inside the room and in his panic, #28 simply grabbed the flash drive and ran out again. Having the trigger code go off twice made the

sentry bots pour out a rapid speed as they flooded the building in droves.

---#28---

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” he thought as he dashed about avoiding camera sight-lines and hid in nooks and crannies.

He had examined the doorway several times and found not scanners or traps near alarms near it but it had been triggered by the door opening. But he had double-checked the door for any signals and found nothing.

He had been going along really well until then and he was sure he was going to get show off his new idea to the Grey Matter bigwigs. The scout-type intel operative was idea which had never really worked until he had dusted off the idea and put a super computer onto the scout. The hardware had to be distributed around his entire person to help with stealth and overheating.

Once he fed the data onto his computer, he threw the flash drive into the pocket of one of the dummy bots which was being shepherded into the ‘canteen’ room by sentry bots and went the other way.

As he began dashing towards the exit, a patrol of security bots rounded the corner and he was forced to get into an elevator and then go through the roof into the elevator shaft. Almost immediately, one of the security bots got onto the elevator and made the lift rise up the shaft. #28 sat there, silent as a mouse as the bot finally got off on the eighth floor and he gingerly swung down out of the elevator. As he began moving once more towards the elevator, another patrol of

bots came onto the hallway and he was forced to jump into a conference room.

As he watched the bots go past the door through the crack between the doorway and the door. He let out a sigh of relief and turned around to face the room. And instantly felt his blood run cold as twenty tasers charged up and aimed at him. In his confusion, he had run into the same room many of the dummy bots had been shepherded into.

--Bink---

Setting the poor fellow up had been easy but he never got used to the sting of placing his custom lighter on his vein. Then again he needed to do it since he would not have fulfilled the criteria for the job he had been offered unless he used all his trump cards. The assignment he had been offered had specified that he had to get second place in the tournament and that while his presence could not be caught on any camera, he also had to expose his opponent.

The unknown side effect of Bink’s ‘Inflammable blood’ was that when the blood burned, there was interference in the space time continuum around the burning. Meaning that, the world slowed down in the vicinity of the burning blood. Very handy for getting out of tight spots but very pokey as all his gadgets had to have some of his blood burn inside them to keep up with him. It also didn’t hurt that his blood burnt better than most jet fuel, but that depended on his diet.

Having thought about it, he now knew that the head of his section had some knowledge of this as the criteria had been based on prior knowledge of the tournament’s format. He downloaded the target data onto a drive of his and began packing up his gear.

As Little Immortal reached him and jumped back into the box, he heard a pitiful scream from a window that had just been opened on the eighth floor. As he made his way to the exit with the target data on a spare flash drive, he wondered what was so special about the team he would be joining.

-----------------------------

Will put up the second chapter as soon I've gone through it for mistakes. Maybe around 18 hours or so since I need to go for groceries and sleep early.

Review/comment please, even for mistakes.