It started with a few commercials on MTV, a channel that used to host music videos yet somehow evolved to contain strange reality shows about pregnant teenagers and orange partiers on garbage beaches. Inbetween the heavily scripted 'real' drama, and the occasional actual scripted show that wasn't so bad (seriously, why was Teen Wolf even on this channel?), a single commercial started to catch your attention. Normally, you would roll your eyes at yet another reality game show where contestants were stuffed together and forced to compete for some prize. But this one, this one caught your eye. It seemed different. It seemed better. It seemed, dare we say it, cool.
Escape Games had already been growing fairly popular. You've probably done a few with your friends, or maybe with your family as a neat alternative to playing monopoly or yet another round of mini-golf. Maybe you're good at them. Maybe you suck at them. Maybe you're really good at them, and are just itching to try something on a larger scale. Maybe you're just bored and waiting for a new episode of Room Raiders to come on.
Whatever your deal, you see the commercial, and you're interested.
The Great Escape! A new reality game show, set in a medieval Scottish Castle, with one simple goal: Survive the curse and escape the castle. The prize? A measly $1,000,000.
Now, I know what you're thinking. In this day and age, a million dollars ain't worth sh*t. You've seen the housing market. A cool million hardly gets you a mansion. After you've paid off your student loans, you barely have enough to afford a studio apartment in Manhattan. And as everyone's favorite troubadour is proud to announce, you'll have a knapsack full of jack after taxes (+10 points if you get the reference!).
Still, adding a mil to your bank account surely couldn't hurt it.
Plus, the adverts are telling you that you get to spend ten days in a castle, for free.
Sure, MTV (in partnership with a company called Paradox Productions) has set up the castle to look cursed, and you have to solve puzzles and sh*t and compete with other people. If you get eliminated, you don't get to play in the castle anymore, but even if you only make it to the second round, that's still two days in a Scottish castle, for free.
It might be kinda cool.
Plus, if you're good at puzzles and codes and games, maybe you'll make it to the end. Maybe you'll win fame and fortune and go down in history as the coolest escape game winner ever. There may even be some hot people of your gendered interest that you could flirt with when you're not solving puzzles.
Of course, there's a chance it's all too good to be true. There was that one article on the internet that claimed Strathmore Castle to actually be cursed. Apparently someone said there were actual murders that took place there, murders that were never quite solved. Weird ass sh*t has been happening in the castle, even before MTV decided to host their rating grab show there.
But in your mind, whatever the downside, it seems worth the risk.
It won't hurt to just send an application, right? It's just an application. What are the chances you'd actually get picked to compete? What are the chances that the curse is real? What are the chances that anything bad could really come of this?
Probably as low as your chances of winning the million dollar prize.
But hey, you don't care about chances. You care about fun. And this looks fun.
So you send in an application, and you wait.
You don't admit it, but a small part of you can't wait for the response. Even if you did it as a joke, and pretended to forget about it shortly after you sent it in, there's that small part of your heart that beats a little faster on the day you pull an envelope out of the mailbox (MTV is sure old fashioned sometimes, haven't they heard of email?) and see an MTV logo on the backside.
And you can't help the feeling of excitement that alights in your chest when you read the first line of the letter:
Dear Contestant, Everyone here at Paradox Productions is delighted to accept your application....
Something that feels like fear, the kind of instinct that sends animals running before a tsunami, tickles at the back of your neck. You ignore it. It doesn't matter.
You're going to Scotland. You're going to live in a Castle. You're going to play the best Escape Game ever.
And you're going to have fun.
Or you'll die trying.
