The Death Cage in Taruma Kivuli

We arrive at Taruma Kivuli, that tropical frontier island to the far southeast. We are far from removed from the dreamwar out here, but this is still part of it. It is still happening. You are here, and so you are a part of it, so long as you are here.

Do you understand? No, I’m asking you. Do you understand what I mean by that?

You can say or remain quiet.

Previously …

The island is teeming with plants, and you have the full danger sense of animals being around, but there are no pterodactyls in sight. The birds you see at the coastline look like herons and kingfishers. As we go further inland, the birds resemble sparrows, starlings, swallows. If you know about birds. Otherwise, they’re just, birds. There are some orioles and waterhens, too, again—if you know about birds.

It takes less than thirty minutes for us to travel the well-trod dirt path through a patch of tropical trees and up the side of a foothill to arrive at the camp.

Just beyond the camp, you can plainly see the Death Cage.

As I said before, I say to you, the Death Cage is exactly what it sounds like. Itsa cage in the center of the island—up there on the flat part of the hill. A mesa or whatever. As you can plainly see, it’s chain-link fencing, basically, and we’ve got … one, two, three machine gun turrets. They look unmanned, which means automated, like I supposed.

I lead us to the nearby tent, and there are people there.

These are the jasari, I say to you mentally.

There are several of them.

I turn to you and bat my pretty eyes. “I know you get confused about names, bae, so imma keep a list for you, m’kay?” With that, I pull out a small notebook and pen, click it.

We introduce ourselves—me as Teresa, you as whoever you are playing as or however you wish to be known to these folks.

They say … well, a lot. It’s one of those situations, where you’re meeting a lot of people all at once. You catch some of their names: Mtendere, Tamandi, Uzochi, Devon—you definitely got that one—Dominique, Quinn, and Hennie.

Before we can get any further, another person arrives—a dude with dark skin—and says, “They are running the cage!”

We all go out and look up there and see a guy and two women charging the cage.

They attempt to bob and weave and step unevenly.

The man is hamburgered immediately. Only the lower parts of his legs resemble a man.

One of the women is clipped and spins around and down. I think she’s dead, but I can’t be sure at this distance.

The other woman makes it to the cage itself. I can’t fucking tell you how, but there she is.

She struggles with the lock, and is sprayed by projectiles into chunks of meat, bone, and cloth.

You can feel the collective let down, and everyone turns back toward the main tent.

Next: “The Approach.”