The year is 2027. It is Super Bowl season. The football players that have been selected for this year’s culling huddle in a sad, discontented mass in the middle of an overgrown stadium. The stink of fear mingles with the smell of fresh earth, an unholy bouquet for a terrible day.

Then they begin arriving, singly and in groups. Their claws glint in the harsh stadium lights, and there is blood matted into their fur. The football players put on their game face, but the hollowness of their eyes betrays their true hopelessness. There is no use fighting, other than to make a brave showing.

After all, everyone knows the bears always win.

Years pass. Teams deliberately lose games so they won’t be against them. Eventually, the Goverment starts a programme, to lessen prison overcrowding. Prisoners are selected at random, or so they say, to put on the jerseys and play the bears. None of them ever come back, and crime drops to almost zero. All is well, until there are no more prisoners. The goverment does not know how to choose, but they know that the Super Bowl must go on, and the bears must always win, and choose they must.

Soon, in order to keep the Bears satisfied with their sacrifice, they begin a deadly raffle, putting citizen’s names in to pull out 12 victims to send to the death-match. They start with the poor until the class divide is deeper than the Grand canyon. Until one girl is chosen to stand up for the life of her younger sister.  And everything changed when the fire nation attacked.

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