As she looked for the seventh time at the tickets firmly gripped in her beautifully manicured hands, Mark Waldorf couldn't contain her excitement. Months of planning and anticipation had gone into this weekend, and she couldn't believe it had finally arrived. Britney Spears, she told herself. Brit. Knee. Spears. Before Mark could wander off into her own mind about fantasies of choreography and props, a knock on the taxi window from her friend brought her back to reality.

"OH. MY. GODNEY." screamed her friend, jumping up and down excitedly and tightly embracing Mark.
"Hugo! Hi! Oh my god I know!" Mark managed to utter inbetween squeezes and hyperventilation.
They rushed into the airport, leaving staff to deal with the bore that is luggage. As if I'd risk pulling a muscle 24 hours before seeing Britney, Mark thought with a wry smile.

After making a brief stop at the Starbucks on site, the pair approached the gate and with rolled eyes turned back on their fraught parents. Hugo begrudgedly hugged his mother, Jen and kissed her on the cheek, and James wished her a good time.
Mark sometimes wondered why Hugo was such a bitch to her parents. They gave her everything she wanted and often without consequence. If only her parents were the same. She faintly hugged her father, Gary, and mother, Shaun.

A brief wave of goodbyes were exchanged by the parents as the girls dashed to the departure gate. On a cellphone nearby, a young man spoke in monotone,
"They're on the flight." he hung up.

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Three hours and several martinis later, Hugo and Mark touched down in Rome. They'd heard very little about the place in the limited time they'd paid attention in geography, but what they did know is that Sabrina the Teenage Witch didn't choose her filming locations frivolously.
Iconic landmarks such as the Pantheon passed by without as much as a glance from the pair as they mindlessly checked their Blackberries and pointed out cute guys on mopeds driving past.

They soon arrived at the Rome Cavalieri, the city's leading hotel of course. Mark paused for a moment to consider how much, or little, effort will have been taken for Hugo to convince his parents to be so lavish with their spending. Being the poorer of the two friends, though still able to live comfortably, certainly had its drags. Mark was always the last one to buy the latest trends - she remembered with a shudder the time she bought the Fall Givenchy haute couture jacket only for Hugo to waltz in with Spring's latest offering.

She shook her head and took a bite of her pastry, brushing the crumbs onto Hugo's coat with a smirk. Climbing out of the taxi, Hugo waved to the concierge to escort their possessions inside, and took a key from the desk.

Walking into the extravagant en-suite, they set their bags down and Hugo immediately dashed to put on "Circus" on the home entertainment system.
Mark rushed to the bathroom and changed into some jeans and a low-cut top, and walked to the bedroom. A brief blast of Twilight Twitty's "Angel With A Dirty Face" interrupted her stride, and she immediately grabbed her Blackberry.

"How was the flight?" trawled Gary, and Mark immediately sighed.
"Fine."
"Are you at the hotel yet?"
"Yes."
"And you've checked in?"
Mark had no time to nonchalantly reply before she heard a scream in the background.

"Mark! Mark! RUN!" Hugo gasped before her head was covered by a sack. Three burly men in balaclavas quickly spread out amongst the suite and Mark barricaded herself in the bathroom.
"Dad! Dad! There's men here, they've got Hugo!" Mark stammered, her hair frightfully out of place.
"Matter of time tbh" Gary quipped, before straightening his tie and realising the urgency of the situation. "Look, honey. They're going to get you. But I need you to do this for me, provoke a reaction out of them, get them to speak, so I can hear them. SHAUN PHONE THE ****ING POLICE."
Back in London, a large woman with sizeable breasts leapt into action and scrambled for her mobile phone.
"What's happening, Mark?" Gary demanded, his face botoxed beyond the realms of plausible and discernable emotion.

"They're...they're...oh my God." Mark began, before the bathroom door flew open and she fell to the floor in terror.
"YOU. BITCH. GET OVER HERE." one of the men chanted.
"Oooh, sounds hot." Gary mumbled.
Mark remembered instantly what her father had said, and instead tore the towel heater off the wall and lunged at the man as if he were a disobedient Asian slave his mother, Shaun, was caught in bed with.

"You're messing with the wrong bitch!" she cried.
"Do what you're ****ing told or I'll shoot." replied the assailant instantly, and in a tone that was neither hysterical or angry. Without further thought, Mark decided compliance was the best option.
The two other men grabbed her and taped her arms behind her back, tearing off her charm bracelet in the process.
"YOU BASTARDS THAT WAS 24 CARA-" Mark begun but was promptly put into a sleeper hold by the man with the fiercest shoes.

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On the other side of the Channel, Gary looked at his phone with disgust and anguish. Thoughts of the worst imaginable kind were rushing through his head, and he lashed out at his hot mess of a wife.
"What's happened!?" she screamed, dropping a plate of nachos onto the tiled floor.
"Some bastards have taken Mark, that's what!" Gary yelled.
"Oh God no-", Shaun threw her hands to her face and looked fraught. She slowly crouched into a ball.

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Mark had had the weekend from Hell. As she sat down on the cold wooden bench that stood for the little furnishings she had in this Romanian cellar, she thought with a shudder at the events that she had just witnessed. Merely an hour ago a Romanian woman had been dragged from the room by a burly Red Moon and taken to the adjacent room - where her screams only conjured horrifying imaginations as to what she was enduring. Rape? Torture?
It was in the midst of such perilous thoughts that a sudden burst of light came from above and the woman was shoved down the stairs like a rag doll. She was crying, holding her arm and Mark instinctively got up to check how she was.

"I, er, don't speak your little language, but, err, are you okay?" Mark put her arm around this girl.
"NO! GO!" the woman cried and she returned to a huddle in the corner of the room, prompting cries of sympathy and fear from its other inhabitants.

"Crazy bitch," mumbled Hugo, and Mark scolded her with a stern look. Though their reunion in this squalor was a godsend, it had its pitfalls, and heartless put-downs was one of them.
"Don't. God knows what's just happened to her." Mark spat.
"I'd rather spend my time worrying about how we're going to get out of here-" Hugo begun.
"Get out? Oh honey, there's no way out."
The two girls turned to see the old voice that came from behind them. She was a familiar face, but Mark couldn't quite put her finger on it.
"Yeah. Hannah." she confirmed.

The scars on her face had momentarily disguised her - Hugo gasped. She was a shadow of her former self. When she thought of Hannah, which was seldom, she thought of the pretty, made-up girl whose Meet the Members posts were as frequent as they were beautiful.
"What are you doing here?" Mark cried, with a Paris Hilton ah/ face in the subtitles.
"The mods caught me a long time ago." Hannah said with a sense of foreboding. The light allowed for very little facial recognition, but even in such conditions she could make out Hugo and Mark were confused. She went on, "don't you know what they're doing?"
"Who?! Why has TiBB gotten so ****ing personal? I didn't even enter ****ing Elimination 4!" Mark cried, turning into more of a s0b.
"Sticks. He's up there." Hannah looked up at the ceiling with dread - Hugo swore she actually shook out of fear - "He's got Kiz and Red Moon under the thumb. I've heard a few screams from him - you can't mistake the Geordie accent once you've heard him describe the journey to Lundy."

"Why does he want us?" Hugo asked, in a convenient plot device that helped to enable hers and the readers' understanding of the story.
"To make a sacrifice." Hannah begun, before a cry from the opposite end of the room interrupted them. The Romanian woman was bleeding from her leg, though the cut didn't look too troublesome. "Poor cow," Hannah observed, "You know who that is, don't you?"
Hugo and Mark shook their heads.
"GypsyGoth. Yeah. Turns out she actually IS a gypsy, not so sure on the goth part though. She must get her posts translated or something - she only knows a little English, and certainly didn't learn anything from courtney123's posts."
"Wow..." Hugo trailed, unable to care.

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In the city, traffic poured by and tourists made idle promenades around the popular landmarks, all the while taking more photos than Conor Pendlebury with a Prt Scrn button. Drawing back the curtains, Gary couldn't imagine how life could continue for all these people so normally, whilst his had caved in on itself. He was more beautiful than them, too.
"It'll be okay," Linda was comforting Shaun on the bed with a box of the hotel's mint chocolates. "We'll find them bastards." She put on some flat shoes and looked up at Gary with a questioning look. "Ready?"
"Yeah."
They left the hotel room and Shaun to watch Glee.
"I hope she loves it." Linda said.
"OMG IKR?" Gary replied.

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Back in the basement, Hannah retold her stories.
"I was here to meet up with some, er...guy. Enough of that. Anyway, I hailed a taxi to take me to meet him, when the driver goes way off course and takes me down these alleyways and what not. So I go to him, 'Oi, this is nowhere near where I need to be, you're **** lol' and he just turns round and I see straight away it's Red Moon. You don't know what he looks like?" she asked, when Mark raised an eyebrow, "Oh, well, nothing spectacular - if you ask me, Kiz can do better. Anyway, he strikes me with his gun and I pass out. Next thing you know, I wake up here to the sound of GypsyGoth's whimpering and Christina's cries."

Hugo looked up with a shot.
"Christina's here!?" she looked around the room.
"Yeah..." she mumbled nervously, from the back corner behind some proxy account.
"Oh! No, ohay gurl I imagined you thinner in the flesh!?" Hugo wailed, with an accompanying ;O
"I...I'm just scared, that's all." Christina burst into tears. Mark put her arm around her and continued asking questions to Hannah.
"So, what's this sacrifice?" he flicked his hair and wiped Christina's tears.
"Well, I'm not entirely sure, but Sticks definitely said he needs 12. I don't know what. 12 TiBB members? And he said he has 7...but..." she looked around the room. There's only 5 TiBB members here I recognise. Us 4 and Gypsy..."
As Hugo looked around the room she had to admit Hannah was right. Hugo'd spent many nights concentrating on Meet the Members with vigour - she couldn't see CaraRawr's smile or supernoodles!' bottles of Ambre Solaire anywhere.

"But who are these nobodies then?" Hugo asked with a 2baha.
"Well...maybe, they're like, the guests who view the site." Mark offered.
"But why would Sticks want them? They aren't members. They don't have a post count of 5k or an unhealthy obsession of a modern pop artist!" Hugo responded, to which a blonde girl quickly shot up.
"I LOVE MCFLY!" she screamed.

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In an adjacent room to the basement, Dezzy and Tom were chipping away at a damp spot in the wall. They didn't know where it led to, but as the only inhabitants of the room they decided that escape was the best policy; Dezzy couldn't bear another story about Caroline Flack, and Tom's knowledge of Studio Ghibli was incredibly limited to say the least.
They had made quite a fair amount of progress. They were careful as to time their attempts so that the captors above wouldn't hear them - they knew not to dig during mealtimes or when the television was on. Most of their work was done through the night - and the determination for freedom and escape from the horrors they'd heard from next door made their attempts valiant and fairly successful.

"I've hit something." Tom whispered, as his crowbar (fnar) struck something metal.
From their careful plans since their capture, Dezzy had worked out that the wall they were digging into didn't connect to another room above. As a matter of fact, they were digging into open soil.
"Careful, it might be a wire." warned Dezzy.
As Tom wiped the dirt off it, he saw the word "Rimanet" on its underbelly. He looked at Dezzy with a shrug.
"Net sounds like it could be a connection box or something - we must be close to the surface!" he whispered excitedly.

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Arriving in the hotel lobby where Hugo and Mark had only stepped foot in 24 hours ago, Gary showed the hotel clerk a faked police badge and demanded to see the CCTV tapes, confirming an abduction the previous day. Linda remarked on how hot authority was on him.
Although her marital and personal life has no real relevance to TiBB, she often flirted with its male contingent on MSN and had seen more of Gary than most. Gary's transgression into heterosexuality had been a shock to her - just years ago they'd shared interest in Billie Joe Armstrong, now he was going to have a child. She wasn't shocked, however, by Shaun's sex change. Ever since Shaun got his hands on Twilight Twitty material and practiced dance routines an unhealthy amount, Linda knew she would be comparing breasts with him one day. They did earlier btw. Linda's were a cup bigger.
The snooty hotel assistant led Gary and Linda to a security room, where Linda slapped her for being a bitch.
"We can do without attracting attention." Gary warned, before putting a sleeper hold on the poor bitch. They began watching CCTV clips to look for as many clues as possible.

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