Outside! From the brightness of a professionally lit stage to the brightness of a joyful day when nothing could go wrong as long as players tapped the screen at the right time, or sometimes slid or held. If they messed up, they deserved whatever they got. Clubs, stadia, amphitheaters, and a shopping center dotted the town. As for houses and apartments, who needed them? Just commute.

“I don't think much of these C/D jokers,” Beryllia said. “Where are the fortresses, temples, sacrifices, and piles of loot? I don't mean you have to do all of those when you conquer a place, but pick one. At least. How will your victims remember you if you don't leave a few scars?”

“Um. I don't know. Our game wasn't scarred. My game. Was it?” Listeria tilted her head back and forth as she thought.

“Even worse,” Merilia told her. “Scars show that healing has taken place. All that elementercise nonsense, on the other hand, is never associated with anything good.”

“But I want to be an Eclipse!”

“Heh.” Tendradius and Beryllia exchanged some smirks, a little eyebrow-waggling, a wink or two, some seconds of flexing. He got over it and said, “Everyone does. Locals are likely scattered among the music halls. I don't care about them for now. I want Cracked Orbs, I want them fast, and I think that market area is the most probable location.”

“I'll lead the way. Champion's prerogative.” Beryllia sashayed forward. “I agree with this plan. The objection I'm about to register means anything contrary to that. 'Market area' is a weird thing to call it.”

“Is it?” His infiltration colleagues nodded. “Hm,” Tendradius said. “I am unused to commercial transactions.”

“A question! Here, Mentor Tendradius Pux! Question! Is that because you just take what you want, or are you poor since you don't bother with Vigilant Patrol?”

“I don't trust pigeons.”

As the group walked along the carless, horseless streets, Merilia explained the precautions she demanded her sellers take regarding packaging in order that no pigeons might open her bottles and get at the contents, which would cause problems for everyone involved. Hearing that, Beryllia and Listeria agreed between themselves that one of them should handle any orb buying that might come up.

“Give a signal. Then I know to shove them back with my shield. You make the purchase.”

“The signal will be when I shoot Lasva.”

“Yes. Wait. No. You might shoot her for other reasons. No ambiguity.”

“The signal will be this code word: 'bulwark.'”

“'K.”

So absorbing those parallel conversations proved, like black holes in the space opera mobile game Furious Galaxy or an Absorb Dragon in Slay Every Dragon, that even five intruders in enemy territory, their senses concentrated by pressing danger, failed to notice the truth behind occupied Vanilla Stage during their approach to the shopping center. Once there, though, they figured it out.

“There's the coffee shop. Sit Snug. And another one. And another over there. Questionable placement.” While Beryllia counted Sit Snugs, Tendradius considered the other commercial establishments.

“An electronics store specializing in implant-ready goods. Electronics store specializing in wireless hacking. Electronics, electronics, electronics, and what else? Guns, swords, and body armor. These are not Vanilla Stage goods.” He halted and analyzed the shopping center with his futuristic headgear and contemporary brain. “Convergence/Divergence built these, or rather this entire commercial area. Good. The probability of Cracked Orbs is higher than projected.”

“Beryllia! Would you like to revise your earlier statement that, and I quote, you 'don't think much of these C/D jokers?' Given that you were completely wrong about everything?”

“I should, shouldn't I? My creed is to ignore the past, and nothing here makes me want to violate it. It does make me want to go shopping.”

The infiltrators checked out the shops as part of their duty. They discovered those technologically savvy guys and gals of Convergence/Divergence had anticipated customer service problems along the same lines as what True Beryllia and Listeria Adan imagined, but instead of clumsy code words and riot suppression techniques had implemented automated checkout. The covert customers left the stores with magnificent loads of monofilament daggers, incendiary grenades, subdermal timepieces, and shirts bearing logos of corporations such as “Henderson-Kropotkin-Tamura Amalgamated Heavy/Light Shipping Transnational,” yet Cracked Orbs, glowsticks, and Jacques-style feathered hats eluded them.

“Discouraging. To force me to go to all this trouble. Well.” Beryllia tinkered with some nonsense technobabble device till it beeped to her satisfaction. “I intend, and not because it's fun, though it can be meditative, to go over every tile in those coffee shops to look for cavities. Then I'm going to cut out the secret vaults, loot them, and complain about the entire process later.”

Merilia, Lasva, and Listeria clapped, but not Mentor Tendradius Pux. He was busy searching for cavities in the closest Sit Snug with some kind of unbelievably convenient space technomechanism. The early bird gets the loot, as people unable to remember much more than half of a single sentence say.

The sign said no more than 500 repdits were ever kept on the premises, which proved the sign maker possessed the ability to write untruths. Both devices beeped in the back room, monofilament implements sawed through the wall and revealed the safe, and Merilia went to work with her careful fingers and an assurance from Beryllia that opening a lock had similarities to sawing through a rib cage to get to the important stuff within.

“Kind of low-tech compared to everything else,” Listeria said.

“Hush.”

“This combination lock is probably the only thing in here that can't be hacked by some electronic brain in a jar sitting in a van outside. Crazy stuff.”

“Hush.”

Beryllia shouldered her rifle in preparation to give Merilia something to say hush about, but lowered it after reflecting on the balance space pirate captains had to maintain between rowdiness and responsible delegation. Then she viewed the situation from the stance of someone who wanted to get into that safe right away and raised the rifle again, though pointed in a different direction, only to lower it after she calculated the probability that getting at the goods in so efficient a fashion would double-crack any Cracked Orbs inside. Did she care? As she pondered that, Merilia opened the safe.

She removed three glowsticks, a pocketful of coins of various denominations featuring your favorite Vanilla Stage talents, and two jagged-edge remains of what should have been orbs of such size that they sat in Merilia's palm, one red, one green. “You may resume not hushing,” she said.

“I didn't hush. The press will never be muzzled. I was just wondering if we're done here.” Lasva consulted her notepad. “Got some notes here on where to look for the many scandals a setup like this must be hiding. The music industry, you know? This reporter smells corruption stronger than coffee. Pay-for-play, nepotism, you name it. Problem is, we need three parties here. The locals to get up to something nasty, me to expose it, and readers to care. Right now, nobody cares. I'll bug Quircy Rau, that tyrant, to add this game to her horrible, crumbling empire, but until then, I say we scram.”

Tendradius fit the removed wall section back over the safe. “Our mission has been accomplished as far as its basic objectives. I am inclined to wait for a patrol, ambush it, and extract information. That would reveal our activity, which is undesirable for an infiltration team. I still want to do it, of course.”

“A pretty problem, except it doesn't matter so long as we don't know how long we would have to wait around for C/D to show. Oh, there they are.” Beryllia pointed through the glass that constituted most of the Sit Snug's front to forestall accusations she was trying to push a gag. Four punks wearing jackets of presumably synthetic leather and bristling with pistols and claw weapons had turned onto the street leading through the shopping center.

“How do we know they aren't from here? Oh, I see. Only two handsome men. And two handsome women. What do we do?” Listeria ducked below counter level as her sole concession to stealth.

Mentor Tendradius Pux did the same. “Four should not pose a challenge. Dull. We may however learn something, which is our purpose here.” He readied his laseresque weaponry.

“If you're so eager to use that sword to get info, I'll tell you how.”

“Do so, Lasva.”

Minutes later, the door slid open to admit four instances who jingled and jangled their way directly to the back room where they began to slice up the wall with monofilament blades. “Huh. The last bumbleclugger patrol that came through here showed its quality by not sealing up the wall. Must be the ones that left that truck down below. Pride in your work is something you search up on the personal websites of history fanatics these days.”

“You're too young to be old-fashioned and too old-fashioned to have the skills you have.”

“The skills that our luminfalutin Mr. Linnell saw on the sheet and excluded me from the Gold and Dynamite run, if you'll excuse the term, forthwith?”

“The same. They're subtle. How are you going take down a Lepanto? Precision cuts and some incisive commentary on its market value. Complaints about all the nodrives around you who can't get it down. None of it's suited to the task, Mr. Y. “Why bother?” Dieppe.”

“I really like this discussion about how useless you are a lot, but stop being useless and cram these crorbs in here.”

“'Crorbs' will never catch on.”

“I don't care what catches on. You sads waste syllables every minute without stint. I'm not sad and not a waster. Let's go.”

The instances pulled the wall away, spun the safe open with a few sure whirls, and deposited six pairs of Cracked Orbs before closing it up, replacing the section, and applying a nanomachine paste that restored the wall to the condition Convergence/Divergence guidelines demanded. They left the Sit Snug, unaware that behind them, a chunk of the store's back was being pulled away by sneaky sneaks from other games who rerobbed the safe and tugged ropes tied around their waists four times.