Survivor: the Initiative Episode 7

Survivor: the Initiative Episode 7
Targets on Backs
Day 22
As Brendan Doyle, MAULER, thought back to the contestants they’d voted off previously (primarily Brother Nature, Number Nine, and Biohazard), he figured most of the major drama queens would be already gone. Nope. Despite getting rid of the weirdest guys, and despite having mostly men left in the game, Brendan found himself surrounded by drama queens.
“Woman, it is not your place to question my direction or my motives. I find the Initiative a confining and despicable use of government power.” In the three weeks Brendan had known Derwyddon, he’d never seen the old man lose his cool like this. Ion could really push his buttons.
Ion was floating in front of Derwyddon, her weird suit holding in all that energy that made up her body. “First of all, Derwyddon, you should address me with more respect. I am a renowned scientist, and calling me ‘woman’ is derogatory and unappreciated.” Ion waited while Derwyddon gave a humph. “And secondly, if you hold such scorn for the Initiative in the first place, then why did you choose to enroll, no less to take part in this competition?”
Derwyddon’s cheeks reddened slightly. It was like they’d both forgotten that Brendan was standing there. “I have a difficult time explaining this to those… not of my faith. Please understand. I’m centuries old. I come from a different age of man, before the cursed religion of Christianity wiped out the pagan faiths across the Earth. I little approve of institutionalization or those who choose to support it.”
Ion floated down to the ground now and stepped in close to Derwyddon. “Then why did you choose to enroll?” Brendan found himself curious about the answer as well.
“I had nothing to do with the decision. It is where my gods chose to send me.”
Ion threw up her hands. Brendan was shocked about how passionate she was sounding. She generally came across as so clinical and stoic. “So despite being centuries old and having a wealth of wisdom to draw from, you choose to rely upon some inner compass to guide your every move. Then you attribute it to messages from god, despite the fact that the very thing you are being ‘instructed’ to do goes against the very person you profess to be at your core.”
Brendan expected the old man to be angry, but Derwyddon looked into the distance, like he was remembering something old. “When I first awakened, my fury was so great that I ensorcelled a group of monsters to destroy the very world around me. I spent the next few centuries atoning for that mistake, hunting down those monsters until I felled the last just a few years ago. My path since then has been a mystery to me. I know that I am to right the injustices done. Injustices such as a government agent biting the arm off of a misled hero, our own ally the Steel Spider.”
Ion’s face mask turned toward Brendan and gave him the chills, as she always did. “My ‘path’, as you call it, is not so different. My own intense focus on science led me to being the creature I am now. I see the Initiative as the opportunity to not only redeem myself, but to find a cure for myself as well.”
Brendan walked away from the pair, letting them continue their heart to heart without him. He wondered at the contestants he was surrounded by. Derwyddon, an incredibly powerful sorcerer who was undergoing a centuries-long identity crisis. Or Ion, a sentient gas who wanted people around to believe she was sincere in everything she said and did; Brendan didn’t believe a word.
Brendan couldn’t wait until he could talk to Sandstorm about this. A few more weaknesses in their opponents they could exploit, just as soon as their plans against Battle Star and Valkyrie, their biggest threats, bore fruit.

“How did you get your powers, Angela?”
Angela Cairn, Nocturne, felt the strength radiating off of Battle Star as she nestled against him. They were alone in their shelter and he’d invited her to take a rest. She had sensed his surprise when she had lain next to him and put her head on his shoulder. He’d immediately rested his hand on her back, in between her pliable wings. She felt safe. Angela had never really thought of strength as an emotional state, but Battle Star was an incredibly self-confident man. Such a refreshing place to be, his arms, after all the uncertainty and pain of the past few years.
Her voice trilled as she spoke. “My past, it is difficult to speak of. You have heard of Baron Zemo?”
She felt Battle Star nod. “Yeah, he’s one of Captain America’s bad guys.”
“Yes. He created a machine, a terrible machine that mutates the human form. It painfully mutates you into a new being, one that reflects your various subconscious desires or thoughts of self. For me, at the time of my transformation, I was in incredible pain over the loss of my partner. I had been a police officer, eager to prove myself on a force full of men, but I had failed the person most important to me. I was transformed against my will, and changed into a creature of the night. A creature who could hide in the shadows, who could defend herself, and who could make others hurt as she did, but one constantly forced to feel the pains of others as well.”
Battle Star’s chest moved evenly below her head as he breathed in. Angela drank in his strength as he spoke. “I went through a pretty painful transformation myself, in the Power Broker’s machines, but I did it willingly. Did you ever find Baron Zemo and stop him?”
Angela fought away the fear that filled her when she thought of the Mutilation Killer. “Zemo was never my enemy. It was one of his mutates, the Mutilation Killer, who killed my partner and transformed me. I have put that part of my past to rest.”
“So what have you been doing since?”
“I’ve been helping those who feared as I did, who hurt as I did. I’ve been taking their pains upon myself to give them peace.”
Battle Star lifted Angela’s head with a hand and rolled onto his side to look at her. “But you don’t deserve all that pain. Not a beautiful creature like you.”
Angela looked away. Because she was scared. Because she was embarrassed. But mostly because she was feeling something she hadn’t experienced in a long time. Desire.
Battle Star leaned in closer, his head on his hand, his beautiful brown eyes focused on hers. “Don’t fly away.” His voice was so soft.
Then he kissed her.

Day 23
Oliver Osnick, the Steel Spider, remembered all the big words his psychiatrists had thrown around in prison at him. Histrionic. Hero worship. Attention-seeking. Antisocial. Provocative. Exaggerated expression of emotion. Personality disorder. Delusions of grandeur. Narcissistic.
Oliver understood every word. He cognitively recognized the truth in everything the doctors told him about himself. About his brain chemistry. They helped him understand how pervasive his disorders could be. They knew of his brilliant mind, which he had frequently turned to weapons design (including that of his amazing harness). Oliver was not an idiot. The doctors helped him understand himself.
Then they locked him up, doped him up on medication, and forgot about him.
Oliver had chosen to go off the medication. He’d quit it cold turkey, all in one day. That’d been a few months ago. All the withdrawal was done now, and he had a free-thinking mind was again. As Oliver dipped his hand into the lake and cupped water in it, he wondered if things weren’t getting bad again. He knew he’d been emotionally reactive in this game, that he’d been moody and irritable and that he’d even had a few delusions. But this was training to be a hero. A hero! He could do this.
As he looked back at the water, he noticed Sandstorm standing above him, and Oliver immediately tensed up. He didn’t like people sneaking up on him or getting so close. “What do you want, Trainer?”
Sandstorm smiled that bright while smile of his, offset by his dark ebony skin. “Calm down, Ollie. I just saw you down here and thought we could talk for a minute.”
“I don’t really have anything to say to you.” Oliver stood up and moved to walk away, but Sandstorm caught his shoulder.
“Listen, out of respect for an ally, even though we aren’t good friends, I wanted you to be aware, Valkyrie is gunning for you. She’s been talking with everyone privately about voting you off next. Apparently she thinks you are unstable and not a very good hero, at least that is what she told me.”
Oliver refused to respond to Sandstorm and instead took the hand off of him and walked away. Once in the trees, Oliver attached his harness, then he extended his metal legs and used the to propel him across the beach. Where was Valkyrie? He needed to confront her now, while his anger was still hot.
It took him several minutes, but Oliver found her, her feet in the water on the other side of the small lake. Valkyrie had been laying on her back, soaking in some sun, before Oliver had approached, now she was sitting up and looking at him expectantly.
Oliver settled down next to her, pulled back his mask, and looked her in the eyes. “I know what you’ve been saying about me. I know you are after me. And I won’t go down without a fight.”
Valkyrie narrowed her eyes. “Oh, my plans are exposed, are they? And who has been telling you of my game strategies?”
Oliver, pushing down his fury, stood up and extended his metal legs to move away. “I know about all your little secret alliances. You try to vote me out, I’ll expose you to everyone.” And with that boast, he rushed away.

Day 24
Immunity Challenge
Jasper welcomed the eight contestants to the new immunity challenge. He introduced this challenges guest star, the bizarre Think Tank, a fledgling hero with his eyed brain preserved in a jar atop his body, and a premier member of Montana’s Freedom Force. The contestants, except for Nocturne, seemed a bit uneasy around him and took their seats. Jasper explained that the format of this challenge would be much like the last one. Each contestant would work privately with Think Tank to determine what their greatest failure had been in the past, as opposed to their greatest fear in the previous challenge. They would then be given an electronic gun and given the chance to shoot as many targets as they could in a gallery filled with cutouts of villains; two points would be lost for every hero or civilian “shot” during the challenge, and one point gained for each target successfully acquired. The order of the contestants was determined randomly, and the contestant with the highest point total would win immunity.

As Battle Star took a seat in front of Think Tank, he steeled himself in an effort to maintain calm. The greatest fear challenge had shaken him more than he’d expected, and he intended to be prepared for this one. This experience was more intense than the last one. Instead of just seeing a form in front of him, Battle Star found him, in his own mind, transported back to the moment of his greatest failure, required to live it all over again.
As Battle Star recognized where he was, he felt a stone drop in his stomach. The militant Watchdogs, again! The same group that had hung him and left him for dead. They had targeted the elderly parents of John Walker, who was then acting as Captain America. And, before their eyes, the elderly Walkers were gunned down! Fodder for the criminals, who were trying to put the new heroes in their place. Battle Star had relived the failure, and the pain it had caused his friend, dozens of times, and the pain hurt as badly today as it ever did.
When Battle Star moved into the shooting gallery, he did his best to put his own concerns aside. He wasn’t used to offensive weaponry, and made several mistakes. At the end, he walked out with a score of 17.

MAULER prepared himself, but truly felt like he had no regrets in his life. Sure, he’d missed the birth of his son, but Daniel’s rat of a mother had never even told MAULER she was pregnant, so that was a regret, just something to be mad about. Before he could reflect further, Think Tank had pulled MAULER’s mind into events from the past.
It was just a few years ago. Brendan Doyle had been hired by Edwin Cord to steal the MAULER armor, but he’d come across his old soldier-of-fortune partner James Rhodes. After donning the armor himself, Doyle had gone to battle with Iron Man and he soon realized that he wouldn’t be able to complete his entire mission. His reputation ruined, Doyle decided to keep the armor himself and start life as a costumed criminal instead. And that was his regret; going from a mercenary to a criminal had been a terrible idea, and all of Doyle’s setbacks could be traced to that decision.
In the shooting gallery, MAULER used his armor’s reaction timing to easily take out each of the targets with pinpoint accuracy. He surprised everyone, except himself, with a score of 95.

As Think Tank entered Derwyddon’s mind, the old druid already knew what to expect, and he wasn’t surprised. He briefly noted the irony of this “vision” falling directly after his last, when he’d faced his fear of being stuck in the ocean for so long. Here he was, newly awakened, reborn in a world he no longer understood. Derwyddon experienced again the shame, the pain, the frustration, and the fury at finding the world overwhelmed by Christianity, finding his own faith null. Derwyddon had lashed out with his new magics, creating deadly monsters, cursing the Earth with a flock of demons sent to destroy all things that sang of this new faith. One act of fury that had taken Derwyddon centuries to atone for.
On the shooting gallery, freshly overcome with shame and unfamiliar with the associated technology, Derwyddon fired multiple times, missing or hitting a wrong target nearly every time. He finished with a shameful -30 points.

Nocturne’s insides went cold as this strange man with the brain on his head used a telepathic energy to read her mind. She knew what was coming. It was the same as her greatest fear. It was the turning point in her life, when she went from being a human to being a nonhuman, from working to prove herself to being a creature of the night. The death of Jackie Kessler. Jackie’s image was ingrained in Nocturne’s brain, at the forefront of her thoughts, at the edge of her every action. And yet seeing Jackie come to life before her caused Nocturne too much pain, just as it had the challenge before this. Even with the possibility of finding love and safety with Battle Star now in her life, Nocturne could not face this now. She couldn’t face it ever.
She once again opted out of the physical part of the challenge, and flew away to console herself.

Sandstorm knew this moment would come eventually. This was the point when everyone would start to learn the truth about him. He’d be questioned and the authorities would wonder why they even allowed him into the Initiative in the first place. But they were invested in him already, and they couldn’t cut him loose, not now.
As Think Tank entered his brain, Sandstorm willed the memories to come upon him. He was in Canada, during one of his assignments. The government there had a secret branch, something they called Department K, and a program that they used to turn humans into weapons, heroes into soldiers. A group called Weapon PRIME was fighting Sandstorm away, attempting to stop him from infiltrating the government facility. And they succeeded. They repelled Sandstorm’s grit armor, stopped him long enough for the government agents in the facility to get away. Sandstorm had later hunted down and killed three of the men, the ones he could find, but this, the moment of his greatest failure, had been the first time a super human presence had stopped him from meeting his goals.
With cold calculation, he entered the shooting gallery, fired on the assigned targets, and left with a score of 22.

Regret was an emotion that Valkyrie did not feel, and did not allow herself to feel. So she had suspected that when Think Tank entered her brain he would simply walk right back out, disappointed at finding no weakness there. Instead, she heard the voice.
“You can’t keep me in here forever! You have to let me out! I have a life to live! A family! Goals, wishes, dreams, pains, desires, wants, hurts! You can’t keep me stifled in here under your shell of strength! I feel! I exist!” The words sounded loudly in Valkyrie’s ears. It was the voice of her human self, Samantha Parrington, the very part of her identity that she’d kept hidden all these weeks. She couldn’t face this, anything but this, anything but her own weakness.
Valkyrie entered the shooting gallery shaky, unsure of herself, and she hated herself for feeling that way. This, plus her unfamiliarity with offensive weaponry, yielded her a score of 10.

Ion knew that this exercise would reawaken her old failure to turn herself back into human form, so she steeled herself emotionally and waited there while Think Tank entered her brain.
She was right. Her mind was taken back to the cold climates of northern Greenland. She’d moved there for a time after her transformation, using her scientific moneys to purchase a small cabin. She spent as much time as she could in the extreme colds, loving the feeling of being human again, but freezing at the same time. Within weeks, she’d taken incredibly ill and had to stay in her energy form to keep from dying. The pain of the transformation had never been greater than at that time.
Ion used her ionic field to hold the electric gun, but she lacked the mobility to use the weapon properly. Cursing that she couldn’t use her own powers in this competition, she scored a mere 8 points.

Steel Spider had a multitude of regrets on which to draw, but he had no idea which one was the greatest. He almost wondered if it would be allowing himself to remain overweight so long in his youth. But he shouldn’t have been surprised when Think Tank entered his brain.
He was taken back to the time when he sat at Jane Lane’s bedside, seeing her nearly dead because of his inability to save her from that nearly fatal gunshot wound. The beautiful girl who’d seen the best in him, who’d relied on him to be there for her. There she lay, helpless, and it was all his fault.
Steel Spider tried to put his concerns aside and focus on the challenge. He was an excellent marksman, after all. He fired shot after shot, but he was too overwhelmed and hit too many false targets. He ended with a score of 12.

Jasper declared MAULER the challenge’s winner, by a longshot, and granted him immunity in the upcoming tribal council.

TRIBAL COUNCIL
As the eight remaining contestants took a seat around the fire in the shelter, it began to rain hard outside. They watched as the sole member of their jury, Biohazard, his power dampener still secure around his neck, arrived to watch the proceedings. Jasper proceeded with the questioning.
“Battle Star, in the last tribal council, you were nearly voted out. Where do you see your position in the game now?”
“Jasper, I’m still not sure what happened. No one will fess up to voting for me in the first place. I obviously don’t know what is going on with everyone around me, but I ain’t scared of any of them. They are right to see me as their toughest competition.”
“MAULER, with immunity around your neck, you are safe tonight. Do you think this was a good night for you to have immunity?”
“Aye, fer sure, laddie. Ye can never be too sure in this game what is gannae happen, an’ I’m happy ta be havin’ assured safety, that’s fer sure.”
“Derwyddon, are the new immunity challenges causing more difficulties for you in the game, and what impact are they having on a group as a whole?”
Derwyddon was thoughtful. “These challenges are unsettling. They aren’t a test of strength, but of character. They are requiring us to look at our individual motivations and to determine where we stand as heroes. Most challenging indeed.”
Jasper then moved on to the votes.
The first vote was for Steel Spider. This was from Nocturne, who was voting along with her womens’ alliance and who wanted the most unstable party out of the game.
The second vote was for Steel Spider. This was from Ion, who was following Valkyrie’s instruction in getting rid of an unstable competitor.
The third vote was for Steel Spider. This was from Valkyrie, who wanted this bizarre competitor who had challenged her out of the game.
The fourth vote was for Battle Star. This was from Derwyddon, who was repeating his previous vote.
The fifth vote was for Battle Star. This was from Sandstorm, who wanted his toughest competitor out of the game.
The sixth vote was for Battle Star. This was from MAULER, who was voting along with Sandstorm, seeking to sow discord among the tribe.
The seventh vote was for Steel Spider. This was from Battle Star, who now saw Steel Spider as least deserving of being a hero, though he was concerned about the new revelations regarding Sandstorm.
The eighth vote was for Battle Star. This was from Steel Spider, who was clued into this vote by Sandstorm.
Jasper announced that they had their first Survivor tie. He explained that everyone would have to revote, and that if there was still a tie, then the six contestants without votes would have to draw rocks and one of them would be randomly sent home.
During the revote, everyone kept their vote the same, except for Derwyddon, who didn’t want to trust the fate of the rocks. Steel Spider was announced as the next person voted out of the game. Jasper extinguished his torch and the would-be hero slowly walked away.

Thank you to everyone who voted and who continues to stick with this little story of mine! I hope you continue to enjoy it! We are down to our final seven contestants, and are rapidly moving toward the conclusion of the game. Five men, three women, only one sole survivor among them. 
Next episode is titled Breakdowns, and everyone of our characters goes through some startling changes as they react to the revelations about themselves in the immunity challenges. Their self-discovery, and their own abilities to be heroes, will be tested like never before. Episode 9 begins the character tracks that will take them through to the end of the game. Don’t miss it!
As always, you can post votes here, Email them, or send them through on facebook. Due to random selection, Battle Star gets immunity next episode, and boy does he need it!

TEAM ROGERS
Battle Star (Lemar Hoskins) (immunity)
Derwyddon
Ion (Voletta Todd)
MAULER (Brendan Doyle)
Nocturne (Angela Cairn)
Sandstorm (Tony Trainer)
Valkyrie (Samantha Parrington)