Part 1 of the next story! Wow, I'm on a roll today...

Story 2

Mariam, the dark-braided Asian girl who'd hooked up with Nanette after she failed her audition, felt restless after the exhibition.

She was one of the people who came to watch Nanette's death live, although she stood to the side so Nanette hopefully wouldn't notice her. There was no visible reaction from Nanette, so Mariam assumed she succeeded.

And Nanette really did look... happy. She was a pretty crappy actress, but that only made the point all the more convincing for Mariam. She'd looked at other exhibits during the day, too, and even the best actresses among them sometimes let slip that they were enjoying themselves a lot - and when Mariam seeked out a few of them who were obviously in most real pain and talked to them after the exhibition, they were fully satisfied with their choices.

Mariam wasn't envious of them, no - all right, she was a bit. Until recently, she hadn't even been visiting those exhibits, finding them distasteful and incomprehensible. It was only last year that she found it in herself to actually come to see one... and found it oddly compelling.

She was annoyed by that. In her pragmatic worldview, wanting to be tortured and/or killed didn't make any sense. And yet...

She signed up for the audition for the most innocent, painless, obviously fake exhibit the next year. And when it turned out to be real, she chickened out.

Nobody even learned about it. It was considered in bad taste to track and gossip about who signed up and auditioned for what, and even if someone did get curious and notice, Mariam would never learn about it.

She was one on one with herself in knowing what she refused, and she was one on one with herself in slowly starting to understand she regretted her refusal.

Like Nanette - they'd discussed it - she didn't really have any specific plans for the future. There were things she was good at, and she figured she'd make do with them, but overall, she had a fairly ambivalent attitude to growing up. She knew many of her peers feared eventually growing old and sagged and sick, but that wasn't Mariam's worry. Being a successful cool old lady was one of the few things she was settled on when she was imagining herself in the future.

Future that she might throw away on a whim, and the thought of that oddly excited her.


As the next exhibition approached, rumors started flowing around the school. Apparently this next one was to be special; no-one quite knew the occasion, but someone overheard someone else mentioning in passing that secretly maybe there were preparations for making all lethal exhibits real!

The reactions to that among student body were mixed. There were many who enjoyed watching their fellow students suffer and die but didn't want to participate themselves - those were unabashedly excited by the idea. There were those who liked to expose themselves at the exhibition, but would never really consider dying for it - those were mostly disturbed. There were those who thought that killing too many at the same time might desensitize people to it and create a slippery slope.

There were those who decided to definitely not audition that half-year.

There were those who were especially eager to.


Normally, the exhibits were not announced in advance, just posted on the board one day for the students to sign up and audition for. This time, however, there was a school-wide announcement, repeated in each class and then the next day, so nobody would miss their memo.

It wasn't just that all executions would be real. It was that every torture exhibit would end up with an execution - some of them continuing naturally from the torture (like lashing), some of them switching up entirely, although most would be thematically connected (for example, water torture would end in drowning).

The lists were posted the next day. This time each one was double - you signed up for a torture + execution pair at once.

Mariam stood at the list, pen on the ready, almost ready to write her own name in but hesitating. She looked around. As usual, quite a few girls came just to gawk and evidently had no intention of signing up to begin with. Some looked over the lists, found nothing to their tastes and forced their way through the crowd away. Some, like Mariam, stood in doubt, their pens on the ready. Unlike the regular exhibitions, where you wouldn't even know if you'd be asked to die until in private later, this sign-up felt like committing to something - at the very least, you were announcing your desire to die painfully.

A girl put her hand on Mariam's shoulder. She turned; it was Aria. They'd made quick friends after Nanette's death, bonding easily over how sexy they found her snuff film. They didn't come to fuck after all, but they were very intimate.

"Thinking about it?" Aria smiled.

Mariam hadn't confided in her her doubts about possibly wanting to be snuffed, but perhaps her clumsy avoidance of what was a pretty usual topic for students of this school to discuss was telling enough in itself.

"Did you sign up?" the girl shot the question back instead.

"Thinking about it," Aria glanced at the board. "All that I'd really want to be my last are very popular. You'd probably get chosen easily for any one you pick, but me - for one, they'll probably refuse to pick me for anything requiring lower body nudity. Respectability politics my ass!"

Mariam nodded. It wasn't common knowledge among the students that Aria was trans, and she wasn't hasty to come out to new acquaintances - she confirmed to Mariam that Nanette died not knowing - but it was in the gossip mill, and to those who demonstrated their knowledge of it she wasn't shy to confide her annoyances.

"If you sign up for a popular one, you'll still have a chance," Mariam pointed out. "They'll probably want someone with experience for this event, and you've gotten in nearly every time you tried out, havne't you?"

"Yeah..." Aria sized up the board with a glance again. "I guess I'll try, yeah. You?"

Mariam closed her eyes for a moment.

"This is going to be the stupidest thing I've done in my entire life," she informed Aria.

She would definitely be picked if she signed up, she knew. Perfectly healthy, athletic, pretty - perhaps not entirely mainstream beauty, but most girls who were interested in girls period in this school made advances to her at some point, and it was pretty common knowledge that people actually WOULD pay money for a snuff movie with Mariam in it. She also was pretty successful in drama club for a couple of years before dropping out because of interpersonal conflicts.

Yeah, not all the reason most of the school would have loved to watch her die was that she was attractive. Quite a bit of it was also due to her unanny ability to antagonize people with just a couple of sentences. Mariam didn't exactly try intentionally and revel in it, but - well, she didn't care. And unless a person came up to her with a specific complaint that Mariam would accept as not petty, she didn't apologize for offences caused.

She was the sort of person whose death people would want to masturbate to and, as mentioned, it was common knowledge. There was already buzz around her as people in the crowd started noticing her being there.

She briefly considered walking away just to spite them. This would be a stunt exactly to her taste; but then again, she most likely wouldn't get a chance like this another time, and throwing away chances out of spite was not Mariam's style.

She walked up to the board, chose one of the most popular lists - just to annoy the biggest amount of people with her choice was one of the contributing motives - and put her name down.

Aria put her name down on the one right next to it, turned to Mariam, smiled brightly, took her hand and pushed their way out of the all-increasing - a lot of people wanted to just watch the sign-ups this time, apparently - crowd.

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A little social commentary this time! And yes I'm going to tease y'all with not knowing what Mariam picked :P

There is this trope of specifically torturing and killing a defiant and strong-willed girl, to the enjoyment of people annoyed by her attitude. I do have a weakness for it, but I absolutely despise the usuall "break the haughty" twist. Nay, have it be her last 'fuck you', an entirely self-indulgent and ironically altruistic act of getting off on other people getting off on her demise. It can be sexy to think of other people masturbating to your death ;)