Post by Amanda Kimmel on Mar 20, 2012 19:49:47 GMT -5
Episode 1: That Darn Elephant
“Amanda, I wouldn’t punch a cactus if I were you,” Parvati said calmly.
“What happened anyway?” Erik asked. “And why’s your hair blonde?”
“Where’s your hat?” DD added.
Twin cool-blue lasers emerged from Amanda’s eyes and obliterated the prickly green cactus in front of her into a soggy, lifeless pulp. Parvati, Erik, and DD all stepped back. Amanda’s bun began unraveling, but she didn’t seem to notice. She hadn’t even heard Erik mention that her hair had turned to gold. Priceless gold that wasn’t beautiful. Priceless, but worthless, and so not her thing.
“THAT. FUCKING. ELEPHANT.” Amanda shouted.
“Calm down,” DD said, patting Amanda on the back.
Amanda didn’t. Roaring at the top of her lungs, she was beyond livid. Parvati’s eyes blinked repeatedly. Erik was speechless. DD stepped back.
“So… an elephant stole your hat?” DD asked.
“What the fuck else would make me THIS livid?” Amanda replied. “The players will be getting here in an hour! I need my f**king hat for the start of the damn game!”
“Chill!” Erik replied.
“You know we could just leave the players for their own for a day. That’d be a good twist!” Parvati suggested.
Amanda pulled a pistol out of her bra. The tip was covered in the blood of her last victim – a rumor-starting bitch by the name of Kelly Czarnecki, who had turned the prior season into its disgraceful state. The stains of her cold blood did not bother Amanda in the slightest, as it was a kill she needed to make.
“You still keep that thing in there?” Parvati asked.
“Quiet, you’ll make Lividmanda shoot,” Erik quipped.
“GRRRRRR!” Amanda shouted.
“I’m going with you,” DD confirmed. “No way am I letting you get killed out there.”
Parvati whispered something to Erik, and his eyes opened wide.
“Yeah, definitely,” he agreed.
Amanda stormed off into the plains of the Kalahari Desert, with DD in trying to catch up. “Hey, wait for me!”
Nearly a mile down the nonexistent road, Amanda saw no signs of stopping.
“You know, where are we going to find the beast that took your hat? And how are you going to kill it with a pistol? It probably weighs seven tons!”
Amanda angrily turned, her eyes glowing with lasers. DD frightenedly backed down and waved frantically her hands to call her off, and Amanda started breathing hard.
“We’ve been at this for a mile. We haven’t even seen a zebra,” DD stated. “I know you love your hat, but…”
“Don’t fucking ‘but’ me, Danielle,” Amanda shot back.
DD quickly realized that Amanda meant business. She drew her cell phone out of her boobs, looked at it, and realized it didn’t get any reception away from the production lodge.
“Figures I can’t call Bobby to help,” DD cursed, referring to her husband who was in Johannesburg until the next day.
Amanda shed a couple tears, thinking about her man back home. If only Andy were here… she thought. DD interrupted her by waving in her face. “Hello?”
“Bob Dawg? What can he do that I can’t? I’ve got a gun, come on!” Amanda ushered angrily.
DD rolled her eyes and followed the storming goddess towards destination unknown.
Meanwhile, eighteen Americans arrived at the Tau Pan and had absolutely no idea what was going on.
“Where’s Amanda?” [person 1] asked.
“What are we supposed to do?” [person 2] wondered.
“Look, we gotta build a shelter together,” [person 3] suggested. “We’ll pass the time and have a place to stay here if night falls before we know what the hell we’re doing.”
“Let’s vote him out first…” [person 1] whispered to [person 2], who briefly nodded.
As she watched from behind a camera, Parvati snickered, relishing the confused castaways who had no idea what deceptions they were in for. She took a walkie-talkie from her belt. “Erik, is the shipment a go?”
“You bet,” Erik echoed from the other end.
Amanda made it to the Phukwi Pan, which she couldn’t pronounce the name of, without much of a problem – aside from DD, who was still trying to calm her down.
“I’m telling you Amanda, you still have to tell the players what’s going on! How else will they know about Deception?” DD pleaded.
“I can’t think straight without my hat,” Amanda sneered, two brief laser bullets blasting from her eyes and onto the horizon. Amanda yanked at her hair and saw its golden in her arms. “What the…?”
“I thought it looked fine,” DD shrugged.
“GRRRRRR, I'M LIVID!” Amanda blared, laser eyes shooting into the sky. DD’s priceless expression said everything. Fear, shock, nudity, blindsides, the whole nine yards polymerized into her frightened look as she turned tail and ran, only to see an elephant off in the distance. Amanda pushed DD aside and ran towards the tusked beast in all her rage, steam blowing out of her ears and a siren blaring in her head.
“You’re going down, you bastard!” Amanda shouted.
“Amanda, that's not Lex, you don't have to-” DD’s pleas were cut off by distance. “She’d better not get arrested for poaching…” DD mumbled to herself.
After rushing the length of a football field, Amanda drew her gun and pointed it at the elephant. “WHERE. IS. IT?” she yelled, as if her voice had been doctored by a sound editor.
The elephant turned its head, confused.
“WHERE. IS. MY. HAT?” Amanda was furious.
The elephant didn’t understand, but it pointed its trunk towards the other side of the pan.
Amanda scowled and impulsively went in that direction, crossing around the side of the mile-wide pan and paying no attention to DD sunbathing to pass the time.
On the other side of the pan, there was another elephant. Amanda’s green eyes glistened the moment she saw what was dangling from its tusk: Her favorite hat. The charcoal and beige hat with the rooster on front. The one she knew she looked so sexy in. The one that had made her a goddess. The one she needed. Her trademark. Her favorite sexy trademark. One of the things she couldn’t host without. And there it was, hanging from the long ivory tusk of an African elephant in the middle of nowhere, Botswana, swaying back and forth.
“Whew, looks like it’s treating the tusk like a ponytail,” Amanda breathed a sigh of relief. Then she readied her gun. “You’re going to give that thing back!”
The elephant didn’t hear. Amanda got closer.
“You have big ears. You can hear me. Give. Me. My. Hat.”
The elephant felt Amanda’s presence and stopped, its bush-ended tail swaying. Thud, clank, thud, the elephant turned around to see a goddess holding a gun. Amanda took her left hand off her gun and grabbed her extremely loose bun and ripped it out, her golden hair glistening in the sunlight, almost too unnatural, like a poodle.
“I have a problem to fix,” Amanda clarified, reading her left hand back on the pistol. “Can I have my hat back?”
The elephant was confused. Amanda aimed her gun at the tip of his tusk where her precious cap dangled.
“Christ, did you ever watch The Wild Thornberrys? Can’t you understand me?”
The elephant used the corner of its eye to see the tip of its tusk, but it couldn’t.
“That’s mine!” Amanda replied.
Confused, the elephant raised its trunk and felt the side of its tusk, being able to move just to its edge. As it did, the hat fell off, and Amanda was extremely relieved, seeing it land on top of some brush on the ground.
“Thank you,” she said politely, breathing heavily. She stuffed her gun back into her bra and ran over to grab it, and the elephant looked at her strangely. A devilish grin plastered across her face, she ripped it off the brush, grabbing the bill with her left hand and the adjustable band with her right. Smiling wildly with enough suns to extend the day, she shoved the hat over her head with a divine radiance that soon spread to her hair; the elephant’s eyes blinked repeatedly at the marvel before it, seeing the pricelessly worthless golden hair invert into a sea of chocolate brown godessness, a return to all things normal, the brightly shining ray of moonlight that parts the darkness of the alleyway. The refreshing goodness of the shiny chocolate rejuvenated the goddess, who was now ready to put players through the misery of Deception Valley and the lies it held.
From the other side of the pan, DD sat up, noticing a weird light in the distance. “The things that happen with nature,” she said with a smile.
Amanda adjusted her green track jacket and made it back over to DD after a twenty-minute stroll of tiredness.
“Hey, you found it!” DD was happy.
“I’m never talking to elephants again,” Amanda scoffed. “Come on, let’s get back to the lodge.”
“You know how to get back there?”
Silence.
Dead. Silence.
The antelope trampled the ground, half a mile away.
DD took her phone out of her boobs. “I’d call Parv, but I don’t get service out here.”
“Don’t you have a flare app or something?”
“Nope.”
Amanda checked her pockets. There was a serious absence of her Android. “Damn it, I must have left my phone back at the lodge. I have a flare app.”
“Right,” DD replied sarcastically.
“Well okay it’d probably only work at night.”
“You’ve got a gun.”
“Yeah, but how many miles have we been?”
“I don’t know, three?”
“We’re going nowhere. I have my hat, so that’s at least a start.”
“I wish I’d brought mine,” DD replied. “Oh hey, your hair is back to normal! How did that happen?”
“My hat is magic.”
“No wonder you couldn’t lose it.”
“Exactly.”
The conversation was cut off by the whirring of something in the sky. Amanda and DD looked toward the horizon to see a helicopter flying in. Amanda pulled the gun out of her bra and shot a stray bullet into the sky.
“I don’t know if they can hear that,” DD commented.
“Worth a shot,” Amanda jested, then laughed like her normal perky self.
In the helicopter, Erik tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed to where he saw his two friends. The pilot nodded and proceeded to land a few hundred feet away; Amanda and DD approached the vehicle.
“Captain Erik, at your service!” Erik said amusingly.
“All went smoothly,” Amanda replied.
“I can tell. You're as gorgeous as you’ve always been.”
“You’re married,” DD replied.
“Hey, you are too!”
Amanda giggled. DD and Erik looked strangely at her.
"What?"
"You're the only one here who isn't married..." DD replied.
Amanda looked bewildered, but Erik interrupted.
“Come on, we need to get moving. The players are confused as all hell,” Erik explained.
Construction on the shelter was going nowhere, even with the provided materials.
“The materials are here,” [person 3] said. “Why can’t we use them?”
“It’s a trick,” [person 1] replied.
“Yeah definitely a trick,” [person 2] added.
“We’re building it,” [person 4] interrupted. “We have no idea what Amanda is up to. She might come stop by tonight for all we know. Get to work, or you’ll be voted off for being lazy.”
[person 1] and [person 2] immediately obliged.
The helicopter landed back at Production Land. Amanda, DD, and Erik went into the lodge. Parvati and DD’s husband Bobby were waiting.
“Bobby!” DD exclaimed before immediately running over to hug him with a splat. “I missed you!”
“I missed you more, dawg,” Bobby replied.
“I told you not to-” DD was cut off by Bobby kissing her on the lips. Amanda and Parvati both found this amusing.
“You got your hat back,” Parvati replied.
“What a relief. I got my hair back, too,” Amanda replied.
“Well, like in case of emergency, I had Bobby bring these up from Johannesburg,” Parvati explained before pulling a box from under the table.
“More hats!” Amanda was ecstatic.
“Hey, you’re a household name. Of course your hat’s a hot seller, even in South Africa,” Erik replied.
“They might not have restorative properties, but you can host with one!” Parvati added.
DD and Bobby stopped making out to giggle at that remark.
Amanda’s beaming smile lit up the room. “This is what friends are for. GROUP HUG!”
The five of them all (((((HUGGED))))) sporadically, like a jumbled mess, but they all laughed it off.
“So… what are we doing with this season’s peeps?” Bobby changed the mood.
Amanda looked blankly at him. “I’ll get to that tomorrow. Let them be confused.”
That night, Amanda penned the first Treemail:
If you’re liked, then they will help you
If you like them, you’ll help them too
Hinder or aid – that’s the question
It’s all about first impression
“I’ll make sure they get this tomorrow. They’ll find out everything at the challenge,” Amanda grinned. “This season is going to be amazing.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
DD will be posting your first challenge at 9 PM Eastern tomorrow. Tomorrow happens to be my birthday, so I won't be here until extremely late
This challenge is non-live and shouldn't take too much time. It will last for 24 hours. For now... get to know everyone. You're all in the same camp.
