Some characters betook themselves to other entertainments immediately, but in every crowd there are fans of enormous animals, Skay Pact Elizonas, and learning what hunting action games are and how training for them is accomplished. Dots inside that last Venn overlap stuck around and hoped somebody immune to shame would ask, or rather were sure that such a hero of inquiry would appear. Burmin Trivvis indeed raised one plated hand. “Is that a commonly accepted genre? I'm not familiar with it. Sorry for the question.”

Since genres are a facet of advertising, if often of the word-of-mouth variety, the Convergence/Divergence instances of the Security faction stepped up to answer with the benefit of institutional knowledge acquired by their cyberpunk megacorporations over decades or centuries of profitable operation. “That's a safe label for your product when you're making a M***** H***** clone and would prefer to avoid legal trouble,” Vice-President Lane told him.

“Right. That means exaggerated swings and grunts. EEEEUGH. That sort of thing, is what I was led to believe from, uh, my research.” Alvin Renzis, Slay Every Dragon's main character, shrugged and took a few practice swings that involved lurching forward or to the side so far as to ruin his habitual warrior's balance. “I watched some videos, is what I'm saying. It might take some work. Skay Pact Elizonas usually cuts things in half without moving. I guess we have to make him slow down?”

Hearing that proposed blasphemy against the effortless coolness of SED's most popular character, most of the crowd lost interest. Some returned to the hotel, others to the links, and still others to the spaceport where transports from Furious Galaxy and Fields of Steam covered in Magical Menagerie's pigeons arrived and departed on a regular schedule laden with passengers and cargo. Travel among games had become fast, reliable, and economical because of the game-crossing arts those pigeons developed in their desperation to find XP-raising activities outside their long-buried game. Inter-ludic communication, commerce, and travel, the two Cs and one T, had become so routine that some characters spent more time outside their own games than in them. Mostly the bad ones. Mechanically bad, that is. They may have been perfectly fine people, though the odds of that, well.

“Let's go to Everyday Pin,” four or so officers proposed at once as they moseyed away from the elephant area. The entire sloppy, disgusting body of the Commandment of Hero contingent congealed around them as if the bracing coolness of their excellent taste partially hardened the passions of that hot-blooded group and made their resolve to go bowling firm before it melted again into its distinct components. And what components they were, each one crafted by a talented designer the art director knew fulfilled the highest expectations of ability, promptitude, and needing work badly enough to take what was within his budget to offer. Not only had each officer's design received the sort of attention usually reserved for a personal website about trains, but the director's vision coordinated them all into a whole that, though complete at launch, somehow became more complete with each officer released.

“I don't know who any of those people are.” While Ulrik's tone left some ambiguity whether it was the developers who implemented them or the officers themselves who ought to be punished, there was no question but that an offense had been committed. He looked upon Smidgen the hydra, fashion icon Ozric Orn Pallad, everyone's favorite Marileanna, Uryeong and Refleang of the recently added ursit race, Aurebecktoemnire and Plemodioratule of the slightly earlier skuman race, and Gary Whitecrest of the antique stumans with the eye of someone who at last understood the utility of the guillotine.

“It's gotten tough. Even content creators have to be reminded in the comments when they mess up who's who. I think it's safe to say we've reached the 'too many characters' stage, but that's inevitable for successful games. I suppose next is for players to start forgetting older officers who don't appear in events as often. That's probably at least a year out, though.”

“Right, right. Probably. Who are you? Have we met?”

The red-haired Ultra Rare Eclipse Champion, fully outfitted in bits of plate armor here and there to suggest the defensive abilities officers of his class generally possessed, pointed at himself. “Hi, Ulrik. I'm Cadmos, the protagonist of the mobile gacha game Commandment of Hero's main story as presented in chapters that combine dialogue, scenery, and challenging battles in a package designed to appeal to players on multiple levels. Maybe it's that very story, or else the events rich with fresh mechanics and game flows, or perhaps the appealing art and writing of the officers and award-winning score that have catapulted Commandment of Hero into the upper-mid tier of free-to-play live service games.”

“Hi, Cadmos. I'm Ulrik. I remember you now. How can I fix that?”

King Ostros put on his biggest, fakest frown. “I thought I told you already, table leg. To Everyday Pin! We're going that way already, which means it would take special effort not to have a good time and forget your troubles there.”

“I'm not sure that will have the claimed memory-erasing effect, Ostros, but we should absolutely do that.” Cadmos raised his voice to address the throng of officers. “Do you mind if we take the train this time? A lot of work went into the Opuwa rail network. I'm sure everyone who came together to make it possible would be happy if it saw a little more use.”

“How novel,” Darlotte Glofal remarked, and what higher praise could there be in that age of energetic scrambles to find the newest distractions and avenues for personal advancement? The array of officers sashayed across the countryside with hearts eager to try out the rail network before it became uncool. That would transpire as soon as they stepped off the train of course, but till then, the very uselessness of that mode of transportation made it enticing. When you could board a Salerno-class frigate in Automatic Adventures and get off in Lovely Interest a minute or three later, what purpose did trains serve? Nothing, which meant those who took it were beings exalted above mere purpose.

Eten, the Ultra Rare Inferno Harasser whose big arms and brawny heart carried the Construction ministry from its inception through the pan-ludic merger and into the present day as the most respected governmental organ, refused to allow that great project to be reduced to a self-indulgent art piece. He gave them some background as they walked to the Opuwa outpost near the landing pads. “Trains, buses, bikes, and a bunch of other vehicles were proposed early on before we even knew about the pigeons. We finished all the spaceports and shopping malls afterward. Suddenly we went from too busy to out of work, so why not pick up one of the old ideas? The assembly's upper chamber wanted something for the Magical Menagerie animals besides pigeons to do, and Sibyl came up and said . . . What was it she said, Skaya?”

“'A train's the classiest place to get murdered,' Master Eten.”

“That was it. Thanks, Skaya. Those are the reasons we built it.”

None of that made the train sound useful, but history has inherent value. At the outpost, Eten picked picked up two Cracked Orbs of Mastery stored there, one from Calamity Online and one from Legendary War Chronicles, and smashed them together muscularly. Skaya replicated the act maidishly, Solemn Declaration did the same horsingly, and all the officers followed down to Cadmos, who executed the operation blandly.

The glitched interaction of the two items sent them to the Option World, or Opuwa for short. Thus had the characters decided to name the vast and level plain stretching below dozens of games to house their option menus. Once it lay empty, but the industry of officers at first and units from elsewhere later on festooned it with paint, signs, traffic cones, bowling alleys, and diners, not to mention train tracks that linked magnificent stations furnished with lockers and stained-glass windows which, Eten admitted, “. . . got out of hand a little. But those Fields of Steam guys get hyped up about train stations, and I always back up people who have enthusiasm.” He folded his mighty arms and waited for the next train. Everyone else admired the surroundings and discussed whether to steal the umbrella stands for their lounges back home.

Toot toot! A machine of awe-inspiring power restrained only by the narrow but long-reaching tracks pulled in. If allowed to run free, it might have become an iron dictator or artificial god of the wastes, which would have forced intolerable schedule changes. The locomotive had all the power modernity offered for all that it was designed in the style of a 1910 South African 10B after consultation with Sibyl regarding what kind of train looked likeliest to produce a body. All it had produced to that point, however, was sneezing from Construction's Convergence/Divergence workers. To accommodate their allergic reaction to the past, a bullet train done all up in neon was also put into service.

The typical man might struggle to decide which model to take. Since officers from Commandment of Hero had no taste whatsoever, they boarded the first available, proving once again that standards are the enemy of efficiency. Anyone who did possess standards, a chef from Chaos Cuisine perhaps, would have missed out on the adroit orangutan ticket collector and conscientious penguins who served passengers in the dining car. Lobster for Ultra Rares, smaller lobster for Super Rares, and chipped beef for Rares. Hierarchy must be respected on every occasion, as the emperor penguins well understood.

Food-inhalers finished in time to watch the world outside and guess which menu buttons and sliders belonged to which game, from Ten Thousand Years to Time and Chance. And other letters, too. There, for example, one required an E for Everyday Pin, the second-happeningest location in the cluster. The balls were rolling and the pins flying when the engine pulled in, but by no means did the newcomers have trouble finding either open lanes or audiences for their news and complaints.

“They kicked you out over a stupid spinoff?” Convergence/Divergence's very own Skyapple hoisted his minigun into a more comfortable position and slung a perfect gutter ball with his sorta-free hand. “Here are your options with a spinoff. Either it's worse than the original, in which case why bother, or it's better, and then why did they make the first one? Probably because they're dumb. If the publishers get dumb people, the spinoff won't be good anyway.”

It was the other bowlers rather than the pins who fell over, unable to withstand his pitiless logic. Before they regained their erect and dignified postures, which would require developing such in the first place, a harbinger of the end times walked in. The outline of an angel! Shimmering silver and purple that replaced any identifiable features! The unbearable pressure of one's own sins that every person who saw him felt! Metatron walked in with a head-high stack of papers in his hands.

“I seem to have misunderstood the rules of bowling,” said that assembly bigwig from Holy Legend Army, a land without sport aside from endless battle.

“That's not it. We're just doing some rabble-rousing in accordance with the C/D Underground way of doing things,” Skyapple told him.

“Good. I also will proceed in the C/D way. I have these surveys. Fill one out to receive a button that says 'I filled out a survey' and a Romance of Worlds random figure set.”

Even anti-establishment types such as Skyapple and every single Rare, not to mention the rarity-deprived of other games, could see their way toward helping out The Man if they got a button out of it. A series of questions about what sorts of features they would like to see in a new game or spinoff, whether they valued quantity or quality more when it came to content, how they felt about poorly implemented minigames, and plenty more received dozens of answers.

“Is there a point to this? Or rather, what is the point to this?” King Ostros deposited his completed survey on the counter next to the nachos that were soon to become ex-nachos. “Or rather times two, did Quircy Rau tell you what the point is? In the extra comments section I wrote that elephant racing would have been better as a full mode, but I understand that we have to make do, since Magical Menagerie is no longer a real game. Will that satisfy her?”

“Nope.” Zimley Boe set hers down as well, proving that Ultra Rares outperformed SRs and Rs not only mechanically and financially but in paperwork-related matters as well. “If you said MM was far too real, maybe.”

“I'll change it then.”

“What a gentleman!”

“Miss Darlotte Glofal's giving out more praise today than I'm used to hearing,” Wruden Calx observed as he slapped down his own survey. While picking up all the sheets he had disturbed with his forceful maneuver, he offered his own opinion. “I wrote that the more minigames the better. Gives different characters a reason to exist. I don't see how anything in this survey matters unless we somehow drum up the resources to make our own game, though. I'll hope for something more attainable, like a CoH spinoff.”

“Me too!” shouted every single officer at once. Their combined dreams held enough power that the sudden expression of them scattered the papers again.