It was just a drop. Yes, utterly deadly to normal humans, but these are crazy magic blood-sport people. A good third of them should be immune to falling damage for one reason or another. Did Smile really not consider that they might fly or stick to the walls or lower their density or disperse the force or become immune to damage from a single angle or something...

*noted, mr smile is both "fair" and "reasonable"

I hope she's able to help the fox girl out of there.

In situation like this Tobi would kill for one of her grenades... if she was more evil.

So... does this mean that Levin pressed the two other buttons at the same time?

I'm getting the feeling that Mr. Smile and the corporation isn't part of the same group. Like the Smile group is using the "contestants" to figure out what Mr. Smile is and how to use him for their profit.

It really was a death trap! It wasn't just a 'delay', like they first said.

@zet: That is precisely what this means. Levin is a prick.

Two options I see here:
1) Head back and try to beat Levin to the pod. Or beat Levin unmercifully, and then get in the pod.
2) Head through Levin's door and press his button to open the way forward and just forget about his lame ass.

Of course Tobi will try to find some way to help fox girl. I totally would, she's a great ally to have as long as you're not on the receiving end of her rage.

Mr Smiles logic: "if we leave the door closed, contestant Purple will likely escape. If, however, we open the door back, contestants White and Red may cause bad things to happen to Purple, and then still fail to escape, which would just be win-win".

Hold on. Think about it: This is a non televised nor sponsored death game, within a hidden base underground, with expensive prizes and loot, and wants the strongest and smartest people in a single game, just waiting them to kill each other (Accidentally, of course).

Why they would want to do that? Maybe they want the best people, the ones that survived the game, to do... something for the company. An army, maybe? Not even the global order were aware of the presence of the Smile Company, so something is very very wrong here...

In a game all about psychological manipulation, I wonder, WAS it supposed to kill her like he says now, or was it supposed to delay her like he said before.

Maybe Levin didn't even push their buttons. Maybe the floor was always going to open up like that and she was always supposed to survive; the true challenge may be not killing Levin and instead discovering the trickery in the system.

A 'trust game' that's basically thirty minutes of poking the contestants going 'hey. hey. hey. is it easy enough for you to kill your mates for you to want to do it yet? free money. free, bloody money. hey.' is pretty lame. A trust game that PURPORTS to be that but actually is a maze of false rules that can only be navigated by willingly trusting or at least finding a benefit of the doubt to give somebody designated as 'the enemy' would be vastly more easy.

Plus, the latter seems like it would be significantly easier money in a place like Lorg.

Then again I'm probably just massively overthinking it and they're not doing experiments on distrust and authority so much as gigglingly coming up with excuses to watch human beings suffer and murder each other.

Levin's an ass, yes, but to be fair to him Foxgirl made it pretty clear she'd hurt him if she got the chance. Levin wouldn't beat foxgirl in a fight, so he's got to get his victories where he can.

Based on Tobi's comment, Fox was the one to screw her over...

She needs to be careful about that floor.

@Bisected

That's the "you can kill each other if you want" floor. Seeing as how these two don't want to kill each other, I doubt that floor will be a problem. (The long drop would be a problem for Tobi, though.)

Hm, I've noticed that Mr.Smile seems to be very humane. Maybe he isn't an AI as I thought.

Go get Levin yes. But something occurred to me while reading the theories about the reason for all this. Which is that the Smile Company seems to want people to succeed. I mean they were very particular in making sure they had Tobi's permission before throwing her into this. The only reason I can see for that (besides say, kidnapping people... maybe they would have knocked Tobi out as she left if she said no) is they want the winners to have a relatively positive view the Smile Corporation at the end.

Which suggests some sort of recruitment. If not directly into the Smile Corporation than unwittingly, with the positive view just there so the winners do not cause problems in the mean time.

Of course, although this is the most sane explanation I can think of it is still pretty crazy. The Smile Corporation just being insane would probably make more sense. But where would that lead?

Plans for Tobi aside, having someone dodge certain death and not rewarding them doesn't make good T.V. What does make good T.V is watching three people endlessly backstabbing each other before they even meet the rest of the group, i.e will Tobi help Fox who just tried to screw her over.

Now that we know that Foxy is colorblind, it changes a bit our view upon this scene.