It was interesting to see that the Chinese broadcast of the Killing Games was almost exactly like the Korean one. The MCs were obviously different but even they looked similar. The lady was extremely beautiful and wore a revealing dresses.The guy looked like a wrestler and seemed oddly familiar.
"He's one of the former contestants," Luhan explained as they all sat in the living room and watched TV. Earlier that day they had come back from a relatively frustrating job during which they had transported a bunch of extremely effeminate guys who were sold as personal slaves and who were really particularly chatty. At least until they realized where they were being shipped off to. One of them had almost managed to scratch Chanyeol's eye out, just to be close to losing his arm as Xiumin froze it and threatened to break it into pieces. Chanyeol, bleeding and disoriented, had then tried to unfreeze that fellow's arm and it was only thanks to Lay that there were no permanent injuries.
The Games and the dull entertainment they provided were exactly the right thing for a day like that.

"They use former contestants as MCs?" he asked curiously. Back home that absolutely wouldn't have happened. The Korean MCs were always normal people and anyone participating in the Games obviously already lost the right to live in their country.
"Yeah. He was really popular last year. His face was all over the media," Luhan said as he threw himself on the couch, a dumpling reaking of onions in his right hand. "He beat one of the guys we provided, so Kris really hates him. He lost quite some money betting against him during the finals."
Chanyeol snorted. No matter how cool Kris usually acted, it wasn't really hard to imagine him holding a grudge against someone.
"Do you get a bonus if your guys win?" he asked and Luhan shook his head.
"Nah, but if you keep selling them useless ones, they either won't buy anyone you provide or they won't pay well," he shrugged and made it sound as if he wasn't talking about real people but about inanimate objects. "So far we didn't sell them any winners but some of ours got quite far. There were also some popular ones. Remember the guy who could turn his body into metal?"
Chanyeol nodded. It must have been almost two years ago but that guy used to be really famous back home. There were rumours that he came from District 4 and that he had caused quite a ruckus there. Back then everyone had thought that he managed to escape and then joined the Games, but by now Chanyeol knew that he had probably been another death row candidate with no other choice. It made him feel bad in retrospective, because he used to be one of those people who believed that contestants just liked to kill.
"Anyway, so far we're still among the buyers who make decent profits," Luhan continued and was interrupted by Tao who sat on the armchair and probably wanted to join in to the conversation. They exchanged a few words during which Chanyeol thought he heard his name and Luhan pulled a face.
"What?" Chanyeol asked.
Luhan clicked his tongue and faithfully translated, "Tao says that if we ever have a fallout with the Game makers, we can just sell you or Xiumin because you'd win anyway."
Chanyeol frowned and then threw a pillow at Tao. "Tell him that I'd personally convince the makers that he'd make the better candidate because me and Xiumin combined aren't half as weird as him."
Luhan snorted and Tao sat up angrily. He threw the pillow back and Chanyeol was glad that they finally reached a level where they were still arguing but in a way that wasn't really hostile. They weren't exactly exchanging nice words but to Chanyeol it felt more like bantering with a close relative than actual fights.

The semi-finals had just started, so the majority of the show consisted of a series of Best Of montages. They had just gone through the most touching moments (two brothers had to fight and died arm in arm) and finally reached the parts that introduced today's main contestants after an endless discussion between the two MCs ("Boring," Xiumin, who stood behind the couch, translated).
The first contestant was a white guy who could move stone and whose fights largely consisted of him throwing parts of the ring at others. When Xiumin told him that the guy's hobby was to chew stones, Chanyeol thought that he meant it as a joke. Until they showed video footage of it.
The second contestant was a female who could turn stone into magma. She vaguely reminded Chanyeol of his mother and he awkwardly wondered whether that meant that he had a bit of  a mother complex. Because that female really was hot.
Tao and Kris seemed quite displeased and when Chanyeol looked at them questioningly, Xiumin explained, "They're saying that it's a waste to use girls."
"True," he agreed. Any female like that would have had dozens to choose from back in his district. People would have killed to get her, and here she was facing a guy who would try to kill her to survive. He remembered all the arguments back home during those rare times when a female contestant appeared. If women abroad were so desperate, they could easily come to their district and would be treated like queens, they would say.
"There aren't really many women where you come from, right?" Luhan asked. "So it probaby seems worse to you than to us."
"Perhaps," he shrugged.

The topic had come up a couple of times by now and he usually avoided it because it always made him feel a little awkward for being so out of place. There were many differences between the society he grew up in and the one he was living in now, but that probably was the most grave one. To them it wasn't odd that people with powers could easily marry people without. Among the others Lay was in fact the only one who he knew had a mother with powers. Lay was special in that sense, whereas children born to normal people in District 3 were a bit of a rarity. Pure probably wasn't the right word but Chanyeol figured that the reason why many of the Chinese seemed to have relatively weak powers compared to what he knew, was exactly the fact that they often just had a powerful father. Years ago he would have called them mixed breeds but now he realized that it probably was unnatural to have few females give birth to many children instead.
It was so awkward because he ultimately always was the odd one out. He always wanted a wife and a small family, just like his own one, just like the ones normal people had on television. But the reality was that the men who were actually strong enough to get themselves a wife usually had at least four children and that all those who were left behind just settled to spent their life with another guy instead. He couldn't really explain it because he was afraid that everything he could have said, would have sounded like a lame justification.

"That commentator ," Xiumin said after a while and left the room just before the male contestant sank into a puddle of molten stone.
"Why?" Chanyeol asked, obviously not understanding a thing. To him the voice in the background just sounded like rapid gibberish.
"He's biased," Luhan yawned. "He keeps saying that the girl probably would be better off cooking meals for her husband although it's obvious that she's going to win."
"What an idiot," Chanyeol said half-heartedly and unwillingly had his gaze follow the direction Xiumin walked into.

This new world confused him because the old rules he learned didn't seem to fully count any longer. He didn't want to become a cliché but the more time he spent among these people who were different from him, the more he worried that he maybe just couldn't escape.
To him a fighting woman felt wrong. Women without powers rarely left their districts and females who joined the Games never were Korean, exactly because they were almost seen as treasures where they came from. He loved his mother and he knew she was strong but to him it was always clear that she needed his father. Now he knew that his thinking maybe was a little warped but he couldn't just shake those fundamental beliefs, just like how he never really managed to get rid of the thought that it was better to end up with a guy, rather than to be alone.

It was also because of such things that he always felt something like a small gap between him and Xiumin, although they were supposed to be the same. The guys they had transported earlier that day had been relatively normal to Chanyeol. He usually avoided to mingle with that type because he hated being d but two of his cousins were exactly the same. Xiumin though was almost hostile. Not only did he almost cripple one of them, he left all the explanations to Chanyeol, something he wouldn't have done under normal circumstances.

Chanyeol sometimes suspected that Xiumin was looking down on Special Citizens in an even more extreme manner than actual foreigners. When the Chinese just honestly had no clue about some things, Xiumin seemed to have a variety of prejudices, just like the normal people usually had. Sometimes Xiumin sounded like one of those politicians on TV that talked about Special Citizens as a plague that had to be eliminated.
They never really clashed but there were those moments when it suddenly became awkward. Chanyeol tried to understand it but Xiumin never really talked much about his childhood prior to the time when he started living with Luhan. He came from Seoul but had no idea where exactly he was born. If he was born within a Special District he obviously got out before he got marked. So either his family fled and took him with them or they sold him as an infant. Another possibility was that he was the child of a normal man and normal woman whose parents were Special Citizens. It didn't happen very often but there were cases like that, so maybe they got rid of him the moment they realized that he wasn't like them. Children of normal descent probably weren't tested after they were born, so maybe they just missed it until his powers suddenly showed.
Whatever it was, it obviously couldn't have been very happy. It made sense in a way but Chanyeol hated to think that, just because he was a Special Citizen and Xiumin wasn't, they would always have that thing standing between them.