“Since that session a worry has sat in my mind, something small but persistent.”

“I understand, Count Poitnem. It has become quite boisterous outside. We may wish to increase the volume.” Hilliarde Feablas rose from his sofa, slowly, providing his fellow faction members an opportunity to object if they so desired.

Unlikely, since the plaza and the three short roads out of it no longer suffered from the quiet despair of unused infrastructure. Tourists kept up the merry spirit of the place even during dinner when the officers were at their tables. The characters manning the food stations celebrated their own holidays, not Commandment of Hero's, and therefore visitors could count on being well-fooded as they vandalized clubhouses, enjoyed the automated tours, and camped out in front of the balloon rides to be first in line when Heartful Azalea and Hot Air Hank returned to run them. That one attraction came to be known as the CoH local specialty, since most game settings skewed either too fantasy or too modern for such conveyances except Fields of Steam where unauthorized balloon-lofting was considered an act of war.

Noisy enough without the locals, the food court and surrounding region became Party Central when officers came around. From the developer-inserted to facility to the public training yard fenced off by officers, the region knew such industry and rambunctious leisure that a fellow could hardly hear himself playing his acoustic guitar for spare change. The inconspicuous men and women pretending to be repaving the roads or looking down from the marking-free blimp high above no longer bothered with headphones or any of their sophisticated auditory reception equipment. The teams all had to shout everything they planned to do anyway.

“My anxiety is of another sort, though I am far from objecting to your action,” Count Poitnem said. “Regarding the battle quotations we busied ourselves contriving, I tried them and contracted this reservation. Will not the players soon weary when I say 'Lunar THRUST' so frequently?”

“No,” Zimley Boe said. “It's good. I like it a lot.” Adigail Zem, Leslie Harthorpe, and Skaya backed her up on that.

“Whether it's good or not, you have to say something for that move. It'll be repeated a lot no matter what. So say it with fervor to make up for it!” Eten held out an imaginary lens and adopted the most Warper-like stance he could conceive, which involved shielding his face with his other hand, turning his feet away from the imaginary opponent, and trembling. “LUNAR THRUST!”

“True enough.” Count Poitnem leapt up and struck a genuine Warper pose, his body turned to face a perpendicular direction from his enemy and his head tilted down to avoid blows to the chin in a manner similar to Eten's imitation but less obvious in its physical cowardice. “Lunar THRUST!”

“LUNAR THRUST!”

A knock on the door, and who could it be? Kindo opened the door to see a cheerful Cadmos. “Did I hear some lunar thrusting going on in here? Oh, there it is,” the original Eclipse said as he squeezed into the room despite Kindo's best goalkeeping. “Lunar thrust!”

Kindo almost had the door closed before Duelist Theena pushed it inward. She flourished her blade and marched inside to practice among like-minded thrusters, though the lunar part was a bit out of her way. “Lunar. Thrust!”

Dasher Christmas trotted over, more for the lunar component than the thrusting portion, and True Beryllia and Youl Sandshaker after that, followed by Liya. So it went till almost every Eclipse and owner of a pointed implement showed up. Not that they all fit inside, but the roof had a lot of space and Eten had a ladder, which solved that problem. A tourist, Frossard by name, was already up there at a table he had set up, perusing papers held in a folder labeled Afterschool Hunters: Paranormal Sports Festival Intelligence. “What business brings you up here to the crown of the world?” he asked.

“Lunar thrust?”

“LuNaR tHrUsT.”

“Thrusting lunar!”

“Solar Thrust!”

“Nope.”

Even Gradis P. Dorenz shook off his new underlings and joined in, no matter how much they attempted to emphasize his non-sword-related capabilities. “Every fighting game character is able to throw his opponent, my lord, but only you have special wrestling moves!”

“Listen, Orrevan. Every animal is able to eat, but only humans build fortresses and palaces. Will I then stop eating? You don't have to ponder the answer to that. Lunar! Thrust.”

Zimley Boe ducked into a back room to dig some earbuds out of a cabinet. “Maybe that line gets a bit old after all,” she confided to Skaya, who had just retrieved her own.

“Lunar THRUST!”

“No, they're just mostly doing it wrong.”

An unsurprising result when so many attempted it. A rival to elementercise? Only till the roof caved in. All the guests made their excuses and took off then before anyone had a chance to suggest they help rebuild. The protocol for such incidents had been well established by the disaster of the seventh Cadmos Dome.

“Hey guys, Fomalhaut here with the usual Fomalhaut07 content. That means no spinoff talk, because it just doesn't interest me. That's just my opinion. I'm not saying fighting games aren't interesting, like, inherently, it's just . . . you know.

“But I'm here to talk about Part 3 Chapter 3. Well, not the actual chapter. It's about the two new URs coming out now that we have their skills and stuff. First up, and honestly the more interesting of the two, mechanically, is Vanna Jad Albrulin. Not that R Tanpendan is boring, I'm not saying that, but if somebody asks, 'Which of these brings more to the game?' I'm gonna say it's Vanna. So the skill effect that we're all talking about is this one that says, 'chance to attack reduced,' and like, what does that even mean? Well, it turns out there's an answer if we look at other language clients.

“What it means is that normally, that effect doesn't tell you this, but normally, actually always except with her ult, when she attacks, she has a chance to attack again with a normal attack. No delay, no cooldown, and the animation is shortened too, it's just more numbers pop up. The thing is that those follow-ups can trigger the follow-up, and so on forever. If it weren't for that effect that is, because it's telling you the chance to attack AGAIN is reduced each time she does it. Now we don't know yet what the chance is or how much it falls off, and until we do, well. 'Should I summon her and kill a Strufor in ten seconds?' We just don't know yet! So there's a mystery here. I like to give you guys good advice in these videos. Right now I just can't say anything for sure because of that. We can still go over her skills and numbers and stuff though, so let's do that now.”

All that dead time resulted in a new story chapter, presuming the developers put it together over that week, which they most certainly had not. Though sometimes players wondered. For officers, that meant some of them had to show up in it, a fact which hit Team New Blood like Boxer Andit hit Ulrik during the last Halloween pre-event. Team Generic got out of it better. Their plan to disguise themselves as extras and sneak into Chapter 3 went exactly as well with Cadmos gone as it would have with him present.

Freegate observed the usual traditions despite all the Ersatz Struggle hoopla, though they struck some of the officers as alien after all the recent innovation. “This really strikes me as alien after all the recent innovation,” Clyse said as she plopped another chair down in the Freegate courtyard.

“Agreed.” Hyune Giling stretched his arms up high to hang bunting off the plastic framework erected earlier. “Hardly an hour do I spend in our home base these days, let alone in the courtyard. How much of our time did we once lose either waiting for the Public Service assignments with dread or hiding from rampaging taskmasters, also with dread?”

“That's all true, but I had more in mind doing work at all. My UTAS is off putting a fire out. The thought has occasionally crossed my mind that Quircy Rau's distaste for UTAS proliferation isn't to our benefit.”

“Not a bit of it, if you ask me. If anything, I feel sad for those things what can't feel the slightest satisfaction at a job well done.” Ebulan Prav borrowed a ruler from Ipons Ulsrada and ran it down the front row of chairs, adjusting their positions as he went with an eye for detail and hands capable of work both heavy and fine. His stats failed to back up that “heavy” part, but there is more to life than numbers according to people with underwhelming numbers.

The teams, factions, and clubs dissolved for the day into the old divisions as the Rare crew set up accommodations for their social and mechanical superiors under the supervision of UR Taiphan Ninx. As one of the most recent additions to the cast, Taiphan made some mistakes in the execution of his duty. For one, he assisted with the manual labor, and for another, he responded to the pointless chatter of his stat-deficient underlings.

“You must be aggrieved to be taken away from Ersatz Struggle activities, not that I've seen you engage in any,” Leaznalo said to him while settling into the chair Clyse had just placed.

Taiphan Ninx tipped him out of it. “You can talk, but you have to work. The spinoff? I'm not the kind of man who lives through other people. I wish all the fighters well, but I wish far more that I were chosen.”

“You tell 'em! If you're not happy, nobody should be!” Tramda Olex hurled a clutch of umbrellas toward the front row and ran to high-five her fellow luman, but even Taiphan knew better than to allow that level of familiarity.

“Forget that. Tell us your ten favorite mystery writers.”

“First has to be Ellery Queen, but that's two people. So that's one and two. Third is Freeman Wills Crofts.”

Ulrik dragged Dennet aside. “He's actually answering. Think of something else to distract him. I already did mine.”

“No problem. I'll ask him to rate every season of P**** M**** if he likes detective stories so much.”

“Seventh is Arthur Morrison. Or Matthias McDonnell Bodkin. No, Morrison is seventh and Bodkin is eighth.”

“Better make it every episode.”

“Right.”

The silvers' efforts to distract their overseer had an overall excellent success rate. Gaelvry Beruvo had warned him not to bother with a search for Evening Best, which spoiled one promising ploy, but he did end up admitting to them what kind of tree he would like to be (“One that never bends in the fiercest winds”) and his favorite color (“indomitable gray”). They took turns so that each of them, aside from Evening Best of course, had a chance to relax and spend all his stamina, AP, oil, and every other time-gating resource.

But just as leaving a bank without robbing it only means you have to come back later, their achievement of a record low chairs-per-hour rate resulted in a longer work period, and all the more so when Taiphan Ninx informed the Rares he wanted extra seating for all the tourists likely to attend the recruitment.

“I did an estimate based on the bride and groom spotlights. I assumed the number would be somewhere between the two. Then I threw all that out. Double the seating.”

“Awwww!”

“I would suspect you're all tired, but that's impossible for officers. I have to conclude that outcry instead means you're eager to double the bandstands and confetti buckets too. I didn't think that was necessary, but I'll give in just this once.”

“Awwwwww!”

What can be more wretched than facing the inevitable consequences of your own dilly-dallying? Nothing, which was the reason they pretended Taiphan Ninx's malice caused the situation. Grumbling about your boss is a time-tested way to relieve tedium so effective that the only conceivable improvement would be to force a copy of yourself to do it in your place.

“Hey, yeah! We need to put the blame where it belongs, on Quircy Rau!”

“No, Tramda.” Hyune dropped a dainty little side table in order to push up his glasses. “Newlywed Quircy might overhear and punish us, whereas our current scapegoat is thus far content to allow us our spleen-venting. You would be wiser to yell at him some more.” That day, Taiphan Ninx learned a transformational lesson about the consequences of letting Rares get away with anything.