A wise witch once said: “Things we lose have a funny way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.” That witch was Luna Lovegood, the quote comes from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and it’s the fantasy world Shirin Oskooi currently calls home. Weeks earlier, enough Survivor fans worked their magic to guarantee Shirin a seat at the table for Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance, the 31st season of the legendary reality competition series. Many of the returning players have experienced a long layoff between seasons. For Shirin, it’s been almost no time at all — and given her super-fan status, one can only imagine how much she’s losing her mind at the sight of the surreal selection of Survivors she’s about to go up against. No, really. She’s kind of losing her mind. As it turns out, the ride from the proverbial Platform 9¾ of California to Hogwarts in Cambodia is long and exhausting. When I first see Shirin at Ponderosa, she looks thoroughly drained, nursing a cup of coffee, groggily gazing out at the sun peeking out over the sea. Indeed, “groggy” is the first word she says to me when we have a chance to speak, after I ask her how she’s feeling. “Tagi is groggy,” she continues, wearily. “That’s a season one thing, right? I feel gross.” It’s been more than a week since the Second Chancers left the CBS Studios stage and began their journey toward the new season. Before that, Shirin and the 19 other Survivors (not to mention the Embittered Eleven who missed the cut) were embroiled in weeks-long public appeals for fans’ votes and private negotiations with each other, feeling one another out as potential allies and enemies in the 39-day war to come. Now, Shirin and the others face the greatest obstacle thus far: Ponderosa. “The food is disgusting,” she says. “The junk food is not even good, but there’s tons of it. All we do, all day long, is eat. We don’t get to work out or move at all.” Okay, that’s not entirely true. Shirin says she and the others have been allowed to exercise. “Twice,” she specifies, “for twenty minutes, with a yoga mat and a ten pound weight in a room like this.” I have grown quite fond of the cabana we’re inhabiting at the moment, but I can see how it might get old after a while. Shirin is certainly not alone in her assessment, either; Jeff Varner told me earlier about how he’s fed up with the pre-game, and Spencer Bledsoe, arriving at my cabana a few minutes after Shirin, seems similarly eager to move along. Still, no one is as totally over Ponderosa as Shirin, at least by my measure. There are moments of sleepiness during our conversation, followed by moments of mania. “I’m a lot more mellow these days,” she says at one point, before bursting into laughter at the ridiculousness of her own comment. But she’s finding ways to survive the pre-game. With junk food in her belly and only a couple of work-out sessions under her belt, Shirin tries to keep herself sharp by leaning on an old friend named Harry. Shirin tells me that she’s re-reading the J.K. Rowling series about magical monsters and unlikely heroes here at Ponderosa to speed things along, turning pages with the focused fury of Hermione Granger, brightest witch of her age. Finally, it sounds like the spell is working. “I just took a nap,” she says, “and when I woke up, it was the first time I realized: ‘Oh man, I’m about to play Survivor tomorrow.'” She’s showing shades of Terry Deitz with the “tomorrow” thing, a detail that I’m not allowed to confirm, but she’s right. Shirin returns to the game she loves tomorrow, and fatigue aside, she feels very good about how she’s going to do in round two. ON THE NEXT PAGE: Back to School

Another soulful sage once said: “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.” His name was Albus Dumbledore, and no, he’s not a United States Postal Service employee; he’s the greatest wizard of his time, and he may as well have been describing Shirin’s journey through Survivor: Worlds Apart. Despite experiencing her fair share of drama, to put it lightly, Shirin enjoyed her first Survivor experience thoroughly — or, at least, she feels it was a thorough experience. The list of milestones is long: Shirin came out on the right side of her season’s first Tribal Council, emerged on the wrong side of the tribe swap, aligned with the right people during a Blue-burning idol play, went zip lining and ate pizza and had a cool adventure, discovered but did not exploit the numbers loophole, went out during an insane Tribal Council described by Jeff Probst as “Survivor Russian Roulette,” and delivered a Sue Hawkian jury speech 15 years after the snakes, rats and vultures had their way with Kelly Wiglesworth. “I did almost everything awesome that there is to do last time,” she says, “except win — or even make it to Day 39.” Consider those the two things Shirin wants to cross off her Survivor bucket list heading into Second Chance, then. Shirin 2.0 will be “a little more business-oriented,” she says, but that doesn’t mean business won’t be fun — once she shakes herself free from Ponderosa, that is. “This group of people is more fun than my first group, and I think they’re also generally more strategic,” she says. “I enjoy being around smarter and more strategic people to begin with. I do better in that kind of environment as it is, so I actually think it will be more fun this time around. It will be more competitive in a different way, but I think it’ll be an easier environment for me to thrive in. I think my reputation sets me up well to go to the end.” Shirin guesses that her reputation is someone who is “loyal, harmless, fun-loving, goofy and smart.” She thinks it’s “a pretty respectable image,” but she also thinks there are other sides of her personality that weren’t so praiseworthy. “There’s also this image of: ‘Don’t take her so seriously, she’s beatable at the end.’ I think that people, based on my season alone, should think of me as someone they want to align with, and as someone they can beat at the end.” But can they beat her in the end? Shirin gives me a look that brings one of Sandra Diaz-Twine’s classic lines to mind: “I don’t know about that!” Shirin says that once she’s in the door with her fellow Second Chancers, she’ll do what she does best: “Be myself.” “When people get to know me, I tend to win them over,” she explains. “You saw that in my season. I did win over Mike. I did win over Jenn. I do have deep bonds from my season. This time around, I think people will get to know me, and I will form a lot of deep bonds — then I’ll go to the end, and those bonds will get me the votes I need to win.” Shirin likes who she sees out here in Cambodia, although she’s sad that certain people didn’t make the cut — like Sean Rector from Survivor: Marquesas (“He’s not here? Isn’t he though? That’s not what I was told! I’ve been tipped off!”) and, more seriously, Shane Powers from Survivor: Panama — Exile Island. She wishes she could play with Shane, “for fan reasons, but also I think he and I would have gotten along really well.” But she’s much less excited to see the person from Shane’s season who did make the cast: Terry Deitz, the Connecticut fighter pilot with the most impressive challenge resumé of all the Second Chancers. “Today, I saw him walking around with a leather-bound dossier that he opened up in front of me. In front of me!” she says. “It had printouts of every single one of us. I saw it open up to a Kelley Wentworth page with a photo and a whole summary. He’s flipping through it, and it has all these handwritten notes. He’s gone real military on this — except he’s not so military. Hello, Mr. Stealth Mode! I am sitting right here! I see you! I’m not blind!” Shirin does not have a big book at Ponderosa outside of Harry Potter, but she’s jotting down mental notes, and she says Terry’s actions earlier in the day signal a few critical no-no’s — and not of the Marquesan variety. “It tells me he probably hasn’t seen all the seasons,” she says, “but even if he has, he doesn’t have a good memory for them. That works to my advantage. I do have a good memory for these seasons, for better or — dot dot dot — worse. It also shows me that he lacks subtlety, which he showed in his season. That hasn’t changed. It shows me that I can’t trust him completely with secrets or things I need to keep discrete.” More to the point, Shirin says, Terry is just not her type. “The big concern I have with Terry deep down is that he’s one of the alpha males who really valued men and challenges, and his version of valuing challenges was really just valuing men,” she says. “I think that’s probably changed — I hope that that’s changed — but when somebody so blatantly opens up a dossier in front of you, it makes me wonder if he’s changed at all.” So, if Terry’s not Shirin’s type, who is? It turns out that she has two entire armies of people she’s hoping to draft to her cause. ON THE NEXT PAGE: Defense Against the Dark Arts

When I ask Shirin who she wants to play alongside this season, she pauses for what feels like an eternity. It’s not the Ponderosa blues seeping in, either. It’s the wheels, spinning and spinning. This is a big question for Shirin, so she’s chewing on it carefully. “There are two answers,” she finally says, “because there are people that I think are like me in a lot of ways, and then there are the people I want to play with — and I want to play with both, but the question is, how far.” Shirin’s answer speaks to one of her key takeaways from Worlds Apart: “My different approach this time than last time is that last time, I was so concerned with who I could see myself sitting with at the end, and this time I realize you can’t even entertain that question until you get to the merge. This time around, I have really opened up a lot in terms of I’m willing to play with almost all of these people. Even the few that I’m worried about, I’m already thinking about ways to make it work.” But she has her preferred players, of course, and she starts by talking about “Shirin’s Army,” a play on Dumbledore’s Army from — you guessed it — Harry Potter. The two key players in that speculative squad are the Harry and Ron to her Hermione: Stephen Fishbach and Spencer Bledsoe. “I see Spencer and Stephen as being very similar to me,” she says. “Nobody has an encyclopedic knowledge out of this group the way the three of us do, with that recall and detail-oriented knowledge of the history of Survivor, as well as understanding practical application. There have been other super fans that, while they know all those facts, lack the social graces to implement the strategies.” Shirin knows all about Spencer and Stephen’s social graces — or, at least, she’s heard about them from a very reliable source: “My cousin met both of them at a live event in New York, and my cousin told me that the two of them are both incredibly well-mannered and respectful and nice.” So, the scouting report from “Shirin’s cousin” is a good one. But it’s also frightening on another major level. “I think those two guys get me better than anybody, and that’s actually a little bit scary, because I think Stephen is the only person who could see me as an actual threat to win this game,” she says. “I think out of the entire group of people, he’s the only person who is maybe threatened by me. I’m going to have to make a judgment call early on. If I sense that threat at all, unfortunately, I’m going for his head. I’ll go for the jugular. But I really hope I can play with him — because I want him on the jury, because he’s also the kind of guy who would vote for me to win.” As much as Shirin talks about not wanting to entertain Day 39 on Day Zero, she’s breaking her own rule by thinking about Stephen’s place on the jury. Really, she’s thinking about a lot of these people as jurors. For example: “I don’t want Terry on the jury. If there’s a guy sitting next to me, that guy gets Terry’s vote.” But if Shirin decides to pursue her second possible pack of allies instead of Stephen and Spencer, there will be no guys for the Deitzes of the world to vote for. Enter: The Babe Brigade, a theoretical alliance of women Shirin wants to assemble, the people she really wants to work with. “I’m super excited about the Babe Brigade,” she tells me, her face aglow with enthusiasm as she runs down the roster: Babe #1 – Kelley Wentworth: “She reminds me of a more mellow version of me. She’s a super fan. She’s smart and articulate and logical. She wants to play, but she’s also loyal and she’ll know when it’s worth it to make a move.” Babe #2 – Abi-Maria Gomes: “She’s a firecracker! Give me some Latin spice. I think she has something to prove this time around. … I think Abi sees what her flaws are from last time and she wants to correct that reputation that she has, and I want to be a part of that.” Babe #3 and Babe #4 – Monica Padilla and Ciera Eastin… …but before singing their praises, Shirin stops down, and examines the possible flaws in these two Brigadiers. “My worry with Monica is that she, Ciera, Vytas and Terry have this real life love thread between them, because Monica played with Ciera’s mom and is super close with her,” she posits. “The two of them have to be close. Ciera and Vytas are close from their season. Vytas and Terry are close because Terry and [Vytas’ brother] Aras played with each other. I think the four of them must be tight. But if we can get Vytas and Terry out, then those two can join my Babe Brigade.” Shirin offers another reason why she’s not too high on Ciera: “I think people are going to be wary of her, to a point where I neither want to go out of my way to protect her, nor do I want her to steal credit from whatever moves the Babe Brigade is making.” Even Wentworth and Abi come with their share of drawbacks, says Shirin. For example: “I think Kelley is the biggest threat to win, other than me. I think if she and I get to the end, there may be a lot of bitterness — and if there is bitterness, it’ll be towards me and not her.” As for Abi? Actually, Shirin just straight up loves Abi. “I think her spiciness, which I love, takes a little bit of heat off of my quirkiness, and I don’t want to have to temper the quirkiness,” she says. “That’s what makes me me. I think it makes the whole experience more fun, when you’re so bored and you have nothing to do.” It’s interesting that Shirin does not have any designs on dialing down her quirks, as that seemed to be one of the main complaints from her Worlds Apart opponents. I wonder if that stance speaks to what just might be a Horcrux — or, for non-Potter people, a part of her soul that she should be guarding at all costs. ON THE FINAL PAGE: The Wand Cuts Both Ways