[Z]

Prologue

MeMyselfandI had never really been that bothered about being banned from TiBB before. He said what was on his mind and he didn't care if that meant offending people along the way. Besides, there was so much biasty on the forum that it was hard to take it seriously. Jack, to give him his real name, was a huge fan of Leona Lewis and loved listening to her music. Today was no different. Her dulcet tones on Footprints In The Sand twinkled along in the background as he clicked into the Music forum, and idly flitted between TiBB and other websites. He clicked back onto the TiBB tab and spotted a thread that immediately grabbed his attention. It was the ******** thread, and people were active in it. Excitedly, he saw an opportunity to make people listen to Leona's new album, and so clicked the link, before everything went white...

When colour and focus returned, he realised he was not sitting in front of his laptop anymore. "Leona?" he called out, half hopefully, half fearfully, but got no response. He couldn't quite comprehend where he was, he'd never seen anything like it before. He was in a plain white room with lots of bizarre imagery painted on the walls in bright colours. It was a very long room. He couldn't tell if there was a door or if he was somehow walled in. This terrified Jack slightly, so he began to run down the length of the room to try and find a way out. Panicked, he couldn't find a door, and tried to compose himself so he could think logically and figure out what had happened. Maybe it was a dream, he tried to reason with himself, but he knew this was no dream. After a while, he began to study the artwork on the walls. There were eyes, lots of different coloured eyes. His mind instantly flashed to TiBB and Big Brother, and he excitedly thought he was in the new series of Big Brother. It all made sense. This must be some kind of waiting room, or even part of the Big Brother house! He began to look up at the ceiling and along the tops of the walls and tried to spot cameras; but if they were there, they were well hidden among the graffiti. Jack was confused, so he decided to sit down and wait for something to happen. As he sat down, he became aware of something slightly sharp in his pocket jab his leg as he slid down onto the ground, so he fumbled in his pocket and pulled it out. It was a laminated piece of card, no larger than a business card, with the words "Death March" written on them. This was extremely weird, Jack had never seen it before in his life. Feeling creeped out, he flipped it over, and on the back were the words "a bolt in the blue", which he thought sounded vaguely like an idiom he'd once heard. So for a while, MeMyselfandI sat on the ground, staring at the card, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do and what it all meant. Then it occurred to him that there were lots of things painted on the walls, not just eyes, including letters from alphabets from around the world, symbols from decks of cards, basic shapes, musical notes, crosses and lightning bolts. It was the latter that interested him the most. Could the words have something to do with lightning bolts? He jumped to his feet and walked around the room once again, looking for blue lightning bolts.

There were none. The lightning bolts were all sorts of colours, but none of them were blue. This was odd and seemed calculated to Jack. Stumped, he stood back and looked at the card again. "A bolt in the blue", it said. He raised an eyebrow. What if he was meant to find the lightning bolt going into one of the other shapes which were blue? Frantically, he started pacing around the room again, and finally found a lightning bolt that fitted such a description. The end of the bolt jagged its way into the iris of a large blue eye painted on the wall, and Jack followed its path into the eye and noticed that there was indeed a piece of card; with a blue back, stuck to the wall. Excitedly, he pulled it off and flipped it over. This new card read "I know how to turn a lad insane." He was pissed off. The first card had contained a clue, but this card was utter nonsense and seemed to exist solely to confuse him. He threw it on the floor in a rage, and all of a sudden the floor dropped out beneath him and he was falling... up?! Jack screamed, and felt his body straining as he ripped through the wind and could feel himself disintegrating; yet he was still aware of what was going on, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he had stopped falling (or rising, he wasn't really sure) and was now suddenly in a virtual world. He was completely alone, but as he looked down at his feet, he could see that he was a sentient avatar rather than himself. He couldn't quite believe it. He was in ********. He was part of the game.

Meanwhile, a howling wind whistled through an open window in what appeared to be an abandoned house. All the lights were off apart from the light emanating from a harsh, bright laptop screen. A pale, vacant looking boy sat clicking periodically, fingers battering the keyboard like pistons every so often while his eyes seemed to look beyond the screen, unfocused. His eyes depicted a sadness that no story could ever fully explain. He had survived a horrific ordeal and had barely lived to tell the tale, and now... he appeared to be crazy. He was living in squalor and barely noticed. He had grown resentful over the years as his misery was forgotten by those who should never have forgotten; and his suffering was acknowledged by fewer and fewer people. He had lost everything after the incident.

The boy had once been happy, before TiBB had ruined his life. Before Mark the admin had ruined his existence. Shaun had been a happy person before he'd been sucked into that island, and over the years he had become bitter and had isolated himself. Darenn had left him and he'd taken baby MrGaryy with him, never to be seen again. He'd lost so many friends on the island and now the forum was full of new faces who hadn't lived through his personal hell. It pissed him off, the way new members would insult him, not knowing a damn thing about the time he fought his way off a killing island just to get back to real life. And now the time had come for him to teach them all a lesson. Music had been the one thing that had filled him with some form of hope for a better tomorrow. He'd waited years for a new David Bowie album and now it had finally materialised and he still felt empty. He finally snapped. He had nothing left to live for, and he had nearly ended it all, until he had gotten into a fight with some users in the Music forum on TiBB in the ratings game. Then it had occurred to him to take as many of these assholes down with him in a blaze of glory. It would be the ultimate revenge. And so began his plot to trick certain users into playing ********... but there was one thing missing from his evil plan. He needed to create the killing environment; so he invented the waiting room. It was filled with imagery and it would be up to the victim to try and figure out how to leave. If they couldn't; they would die alone in that room, and if they could; well then they'd die in the Plug arena. It was genius. It was evil genius. It was Shaun.