Jupiter never seemed pleased when the guards would come by his cell. They’d peek in their heads just to see the hulking many-limbed creature glaring back at them accusingly, murder slowly boiling through his eyes. Perhaps it was the cramped conditions: he’d been unable to stretch his wings since his admittance, and his room didn’t have enough space for him to do more than shuffle back and forth a couple of steps. Perhaps it was his complete boredom: he couldn’t fit through the door or the hallways, so he hadn’t been out of that room since he arrived, either. Or perhaps, as his mother may have warned him when he was younger, his face had frozen that way; yes, maybe it was possible that he was in fact the most happy of campers even though he looked like he would bite off any head that got within reach.

Regardless, his glower had largely worked out in his favor. The guards didn’t try to taunt him like they did many of the other “guests”, instead tending to just leave him alone. And he’d never had a roommate for long. Not only did he have a way of taking up the whole room and knocking over whoever would join him with one of his wings or perhaps his legs or tail, but he also had shown a complete disregard for the mental comfort of anyone they’d put in there, too. His was the physiology of the race of whom the humans had spread rumors as they settled the galaxies: Jupiter looked, no two ways about it, like a huge space dragon. And he knew that everyone else knew it. And most people really weren’t comfortable with sharing a cell with such a thing, given that it would place that glaring eye right next to the other bed and, seemingly, watch whoever was there all night. As beautiful as they may be, those glassy red eyes weren’t a fun thing to wake up to.

And so he was found as the guards hustled some poor creature into his cell yet again. Jupiter glared at them, they quickly slotted the new meat’s chains into the wall, and they quickly left. Not a word was said. And then the glare settled on the newcomer.

So this was who they had paired him with. He’d heard the talk of the upcoming event: barbaric, certainly, but economical and, if you looked at it from the humans’ political perspective, reasonable. After all, criminals didn’t make nearly as much money through their forced labor as they cost to keep alive. The obvious answer then? Why, kill them, of course. Except that that would require someone to do the killing, and that would cost more money, and… well what if they killed each other? And so it was that the event had been conceived. The commercialization came quickly upon the concept’s heels, and then you had today’s modern system.

It was rather simple, actually. All of the criminals were teleported to a waste planet in pairs, and whichever pair outlasted the other ones would be set free, regardless of their crime. Some rink matches would be orchestrated to keep things interesting and moving along for the audience: the whole thing was filmed by drone and broadcast “Live” to make the state some money and, let’s be honest, provide a glimpse at a bloody sport which simply wasn’t “ethical” to subject any other people group to; but, mostly, the dangers were in the environment and in random encounters. As pleasant as the lush forests growing from the old refuse of more living-suited planets were, they were no match for being reintegrated into society, after all. And the faster that all the other teams died, the faster that one could get to that prize.

And yes, things were done in teams: it made it more interesting to watch (one early attempt had shown the pitfalls of no teams: many stalemates were reached and, eventually, the team rule was made and those who had been fighting became allies). And it made winning that much harder: to claim victory, both members needed to survive. Otherwise there would simply be no winner, and that suited the justice system just fine.

With how important teams were, then, one would think that they wouldn’t be randomly assigned. But such was the state of affairs: assignments weren’t quite random, but they might as well have been. The participants did not pick their partners, and the committee that assigned them didn’t bother to compare their strengths and weaknesses, either. This year, things had simply been done numerically: the newest jailbirds were teamed with the oldest, in order.

So it was that Jupiter was faced with the unpleasant surprise of having a completely fresh inmate join him that day as the teams were first united to plan out how they would do things in two days’ time when they would be teleported and the games would begin. The large creature inspected him quickly, making sure that he had a translator before introducing himself. “Hello. It would seem that you and I are teamed up.” Well, not much of an introduction, but Jupiter did not have a way with words.