Suchi. Lake Hotferver. The Plains Day camping grounds for The Kingdom of South-East Asia and Oceania.

Through the crowds of loinclothed thousands, officials were squeezing their way trying to hang lanterns. It was forecast to be a dark night, with a single moon providing its light, one of its siblings being out of phase, the other concealed by paint.

"It's unfair, isn't it? They boss us around, they insist on invading our events..."

The Byzantines were being escorted by a volunteer Peopleworker to their assigned campsite. He had been complaining about a section of the grounds being commandeered by intruders from Central City; the tower with blue and white banners housed a delegation sent by The Church to keep the peace.

"...but they also ignore the customs. How many of them ran the marathon? None. They rode here in comfort on their fancy mounts and..." The Peopleworker gave an awkward glance at a figure riding at the rear of the Byzantines on top of his wagon, sketching away blissfully.

"Continue ranting if you want," Henry answered serenely. "It's the whine of a mosquito from these heights."

The camping grounds were massive, designed to host almost a hundred thousand attendees. In the journey traversing its expanse, a couple of their members splintered off at the call of companions from other Villages. Dan was included amongst the lost, his meathead pals—still shirtless, although this was now appropriate attire—being sighted spit-roasting a zebra in the middle of the street. Henry pretended not to know them.

Their campsite, when they reached it, had been prepared for them by Citizen Higgs. It'd been built in the style of a historical Byzantine fortified camp with earthen wall embankments and sizeable round-tents propped up by centre poles.

The most significant feature was a swimming-pool-sized clearing in the centre. Here, the Byzantines would stack any trophies gained throughout the Plains Day, trying to compete with other Villagers by building the most impressive pile. Lake Hotferver had been selected for the event due to its convenient placement between prime mines, hunting spots, and dungeons. Camping grounds for the other Kingdoms were spread elsewhere around Suchi, maximising resource extraction for The Empire.

On arrival, everyone was dismissed to enjoy the festival for a few hours before reconvening later.

Justinian, reminding the PVPers of a later 6v6 tournament, spoke, beneath his exhaustion, with an air of confidence - his ability to ad-lib roleplay-congruent commands had improved greatly over the past days of practice.

"Sleep! Give me sleep!" Cathy beelined it for the nearest tent.

When the rest of Team Friendship Forever were about to follow, a messenger ducked her head in through the Byzantine gates.

"Oi, you dirty $*%!, head over to Shocked Dingo Village for a wash! Our Shamans have been spamming transmutation magic for hours to make a public bath!" She paused for dramatic effect. "We have soap."

As the messengers sprinted off to the next camp, Henry's friends and the other Byzantines glanced at each other, the same thought transmitting between them all.

Soap!

In unison, everyone was rushing off, flooding the streets alongside neighbouring Villages, who also raced before this precious resource, soap, so rare in The Slums, could be depleted.

Henry decided to stay behind and get to work on their camp.

After all his years braving the great outdoors, becoming a creature of the wilds, he didn't need public baths or soap or any of these other paltry luxuries.

Shunning Citizen Higg's tents, which he didn't need either, he found an empty space to park his wagon.

Unhitching his camels, he pressed a palm to a panel on the wagon's rear. Strings of hammer-shaped Constructionist Energy and indigo-azure Arcaneworker Energy poured out of him, being absorbed into the panel and lighting up a network of runic inscriptions.

The wagon, at his command, unfurled like the petals of a flower, the sides lifting to expose the interior, sheets of fabric billowing out for walls.

From a secret compartment in the wagon's base, he unloaded a stack of Arcane Compressor chests. These then vomited out the goods. Without lifting a single finger, Henry magically distributed cooling statues, insect-repellent incenses, feed for the camels, hammocks, carpets, sofas, chilly bins loaded with ice-cold drinks, lamps, decorative paintings and carpets, a portable kitchenette, a spacious bathtub of varnished wood, an opulent spread of DOZENS of types of soap...all the basics of fully-furnished ultraluxury magical glamping!

"Hahahahahahaaaa!" he laughed maniacally.

After all his years braving the great outdoors, he didn't need paltry luxuries - he needed even more, ultraluxury. Let the children suffer their miserable weather, their bugs, and each other; Henry, the retiree, had concluded his days of hardship.

Controlling the layout of his set-up with a 3-D mental projection, he drew shut a partition to hide the feeding camels, lowered walls that enclosed his glamping site from the barbarians outside, and—directing a magical music box to play a relaxing 30s Calm Metal tune—muted their annoying buzz.

Before returning to his writing, there was one final step to create the optimal literary mood.

Henry went to his kitchen and rubbed his chin with delight while browsing an assortment of supplies for various Wankalgalese brews.

"How about The Tea of Spring Impermanence?" he asked himself pretentiously. "Yes, Henry, treat yourself. You deserve it."

"Cripple-gege, can I have some?"

Rose, stalker or fan, was still here.

"The ingredients alone cost 25k per cup."

"You're not the only one who's filthy rich."

She emphasised filthy to flaunt this real-life strength of hers, which, according to Cripple-gege's lectures, one should never be ashamed of.

Henry, however, misinterpreted this as her boasting about her dirty blood money from assassination contracts. "This one will be on me. Consider it a gift for your rapid progress on the mental climb."

"Coffee." Silver requested without lifting her gaze from the manuscript. "Milk, two sugars."

Henry, scowling at the alpha pleb's unrefined taste, set a cup to the side for his cheapest, lowest ultraluxury beans.

From a chest for The Tea of Spring Impermanence, he grabbed a palm-sized lacquer box. Inside, cushioned upon a silk lining, was a scattering of dried leaves with a peach hue and a pungent, flowery aroma similar to fresh-pressed olive oil. Picking up each leaf one by one with a pair of tweezers, he inspected them with the intensity of an antique appraiser, judging the colouration, health, and twenty-two additional dimensions. The rejects were tossed, the chosen transferred to the pot. While a kettle of spring water went onto a gentle fire to heat, he prepared seventeen more ingredients. He dispatched one after another, his hands grinding, plucking, chopping with the precise grace of a sword-blade severing a jugular.

And he made a coffee.

"Wow, that's delicious," complimented Silver.

Henry clicked his tongue in disgust. Arming himself with his teacup, he tore the pages from his notebook and used Scholar magic to make them levitate in a wall around him, rearranging the drawings into the order of his epic.

Rose took a sip, and her chest suddenly fluttered as it was possessed by the first heartbeat of spring. For a brief moment, a rainbow of colour was splashed onto Henry's monochromatic sketches, and it seemed, in that instant, as though flower seeds embedded in the pages had blossomed, only to be plucked by a chilly gust, the last word of the winter past. She turned away to wipe a tear rolling down her cheek.

Henry, having put aside these distractions, stoked the sentiments being sustained all this while by Nomad Sabre.

He had a sense of the general flow of the story's second section. For the specifics, though, he would wander the camping grounds and people-watch for inspiration. His main priority would be to track down the original trio. His story may have diverged from theirs, but, if he could, he would like to integrate another scene or two of them in order to authentically capture both the ephemeral essence of this strange camping trip and the tragedy of youth misspent on a love quadrilateral. The search for the trio should be simple since their bandanas had marked them for members of a Singaporean Village. Love polygons, these doomed, inefficient things, were a global affliction in 2050.

What a wonderful evening awaited him, he mused. Savouring an uneventful retirement, with a cup of tea and a pencil and decades of literary training, a star-studded night of staying mostly inside to transform life into art—

He took a sip of tea, and the earth beneath his feet began to shake.

This wasn't the tea.

Unsummoning his sketches and leaping away, his former position was consumed by a geyser of dirt. At once, an explosion of red dust choked the air and engulfed the surroundings.

The settling dust revealed a crater, out of which protruded the head of a Tier-9 Serpent Of The Earth. The monster's nose alone was taller than a man, and its retractable horns pressed against the top of the roof, stretching the canvas. Normally, this species, native to the Sangatingki Mountain range west of Nilke, had a midnight-black shade. This specimen, giving each of the three a mischievous flick of its tongue, was azure.

"It'ssssssss me, Karnon."

Henry held fast to the manuscript of his ultimate pleb-bait. Having swiped it from Silver at the last second, lest it be harmed, he was gripping the book with a firm resolve that not even a God could interrupt his writing.

"Not interested."

Karnon turned his head askew like a hoodlum about to scam a kid with an overpriced bag of dried basil. "Pssst, Student T., psssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst, I've got the hook up on an epic prank. Nothing but the finest, most illegal ingredients: a sleep-deprived demon, a love triangle, a cockblocked king, and, for tonight's mystery guest, a set of divine genitals. It can all be yours for the low, low price of five platinum coins."

"Not interested."

"I'll pay you five platinum coins."

"Not interested."

"HAH! You drive a hard bargain! Then, I will throw in two," Karnon flicked his tongue twice, "belly-aching laughs! Deal? Deal!"

"Not. Interested."

Karnon switched tactics. Retreating into the crater, he emerged a second later with a white wig and fake beard, an old man's cane propping up his chin, and grey bedsheets that'd been soaked wet and glued to his snake eyes.

"Professor T., is-is that you, Professor T.? My Karnon, I barely recognised you through these cataracts. But I suppose you wouldn't recognise me either. It is, in fact, me, Karnon. As you can probably tell, family life has been unkind to me. Premature ageing from chronic stress …isn't that sad? My once virile blue mane has been bleached the white of my bones, which jut out from this emaciated body as though from an ancient, weather-beaten grave, the grave of domesticity. No one warns you about the loneliness of marriage. Why, I can't even recall my last roll in the sheets with a pretty prank. Oh, how loveless is the marriage bed! How joyless! How…"

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, what's he saying?

-Henry Flower: Rambling senile monologue.

Henry stood his ground. "Not interested."

"IMPERTINENT RAT! I AM KARNON, SON OF THE FOREST, FRIEND OF DRAGONS, BANE OF BASINDI, SLAYER OF THE MOTHER, WANDERER OF THE PLANES, DESTROYER OF A MOON! TOY NOT WITH ME, HUMAN! I HAVE WITNESSED THE DAWN OF MANY MIGHTIER MEN, AND I HAVE BEEN THEIR TWILIGHT!"

"Not interested."

"By Karnon, Professor T., you sure do insist on twistin' a prankster's arm. How's this here offer sound to your apprehensive ears? Those two monster pals who've found themselves in human clothes, I'll change 'em right back to furs."

Henry wouldn't give the God a perverse incentive by rewarding him for cleaning up his own messes. "Not interested."

"HAH!" The God thrust his chin upwards petulantly, his horns stabbing holes through the roof. "Fine! Then, you DON'T get to be part of my prank! In fact, I'm never allowing you to join another merrymaking mission again. The School of Karnon? It's over, Professor T. You were this close to tenure, but after this reprehensible episode of good behaviour, the other board members and I have agreed that it's best to let you go. Farewell, Jobseeker T.! In this awful prankonomy, your belly will be empty of laughter! When you crawl back to me, don't expect a single morsel of amusement - not even a titter. You sad shrimp, you unemployed urchin, farewell!"

Karnon stayed for twenty awkward seconds of silence.

Finally, realising that his protégé wasn't going to budge, the God, snickering, retreated back into the tunnel and went to create his mischief elsewhere.

"Karnon'ssssss blesssssing!"

Henry glanced at the crater, then around his glamping set-up, everything having been caked in a nuisance layer of dust.

There was, however, one item that'd been saved from the ruin, his 25,000 gold tea. A common Wankalagese Shortsword exercise was for two tea-holding practitioners to spar until one's cup had been emptied, and, well practised in these, he'd covered his cup while leaping.

He raised it to his nostrils and gave it an investigative sniff.

It smelled normal…too normal…

Silver, who'd taken cover behind the bathtub, was dumbfounded. Since the hissing had been incomprehensible to her, it'd appeared that Henry'd defeated a monster with the power to obliterate them by telling it 'Not interested' repeatedly.

"Blue," she realised. "Should we send out a warning?"

"He'd exploit the panic." Henry, taking a test sip, grimaced at the sour tang of snake piss. "Karnon, you %$*!."

Pouring the remainder out, he got to salvaging his glamping set-up to resume his writing. He collected a handful of dirt and, using a Constructionist cleaning ability to magnetise it for similar substances, strolled about vacuuming up the debris, which formed into a globe large enough to plug the God's gaping tunnel hole.

He also contacted Princess Pateela to snitch. She informed him that she wouldn't be picking up her miscreant of a husband until a masseuse had finished squeezing out her stress-squalls.

Nerin was busy.

Henry recalled that Karnon had mentioned a love triangle. Maybe he'd snuck a peek at his pleb-bait? Or inferred the plot of his new story from his sketches, the fourth corner being too vague to deduce? Divine genitals – a grotesque vandalisation of one or both of his masterpieces? A sleep-deprived demon - Henry himself? No, back during The Arts and Crafts Competition, the God had mentioned a Doomreaver sleeping 20 miles north-east of Suchi - they were about 25 miles north-east. But what about the cockblocked king? The 'Kingdom' of South-East Asia and Oceania was headed by a woman. Then, a Tier-7 King Rooster with a shield...

Thus, in the end, Karnon did defeat him. The wave of inspiration passed by Henry, and the ocean of his heart was left too unsettled and choppy for the act of creation.

When his friends returned from bathing, he put the story aside and joined them at the evening's first major event, a 1v1 duelling tournament, to vent his frustrations by pummelling noobs.

Alas, he would have to make do with the much less thrilling martial arts climb.

Outside in the camping grounds, the festival-goers were drifting towards the tournament.

Moving with the masses, Henry watched out for any speckles of mischievous azure. Team Friendship Forever soon lost Abigail and Anderson, who separated from them at the latter's insistence to attend the demonstration of a nomadic tribesman sewing a leopard-fur outfit. Replacing them, Dan reappeared, offering everyone a share of over-cooked, spiceless zebra. Along the way, Silver spammed him with questions, having been stressed out by Karnon's presence.

The first sight of the tournament grounds, situated on the outskirts, were tall screens looming over the crowd, showing the best duels from earlier months, with loinclothed contestants wrestling and maiming each other with their baby-toothed daggers. There were hundreds of 'arenas', consisting of tiny, 4x4 metre squares whose borders had been carved into the soil with sticks.

In front of the 'arenas', a noisy construction site was concealed behind wooden barriers manned by guards. Whatever was being built would act as the stage for final rounds of contestants. Rumour had it that The Empire would be splurging to demonstrate that they could still compete with The WBAE and The New Suchi Arena. The tournament's prizes had already been increased, with a sizeable quantity of gold being offered alongside the regular Slum Point bounty, a gem-studded dagger crafted from a variant baby lion, and a custom painting of the victor's triumphant duel.

Henry glanced at the thousands wandering about, and what he saw were noobs for him to beat up, noobs to be awed by his beating up skills and recruited into his fan club.

Rose tugged his arm. "Big bro, check out this pathetic school of sardines. What secret techniques will you debut tonight to fillet them?"

"Stop that."

They joined a registration queue. From the crowd, an Australian Citydweller who'd been frequenting his arena recognised Henry and immediately jumped behind them.

"Mate, you Villagers have a strange cus—"

"%!%^ off, Corentin." Henry shoved a palm in their face. "I'm not in the mood."

Cathy almost fainted. "Apologise, now! Apologise to him, apologise to your soul!"

Henry refused. "I don't apologise to spies."

-Zhangmei33: Which guild?

-Henry Flower: Stay out of it.

-Silver Wolf: And why are there spies?

-Henry Flower: You'd need to be a Rank-6 High-Tier Patrician to understand that plotline.

"A spy?!" Cathy raged. "You there! Leave our Henry alone! What would your mother think? How can you engage in such insidious…"

The spy, dodging Brian's crab-shell, paused to reflect on what'd exposed him. It must have been his accent.

He snapped his fingers in annoyance. “Merde! Well, here's a reward for the early catch: I spotted our friend moping about like they've been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Take her soft, depressed hand and waltz, spit in his arrogant face, do whatever you want. À bientôt!"

Saluting, the French spy logged off to delete his character and plan a new persona.

Handsome Dan, on the lookout for trouble, swivelled around until he noticed a group sneaking glances at them. "Big Bro," he whispered to Henry, "are those guys spies, too?"

"Nope," Henry made an abrupt shift in topic due to an indifference to the watchers, several more of whom were stifling their laughter in the crowd. "Those are degenerate gamblers, debating whether to place their bets on me."

"Should they, Big Bro?"

"Logically speaking, yeah. Although I might be 6th on the ladder for The 'Kingdom', this tournament, in order to mimic the crude state of Suchi's founding days, forbids all abilities except attacks. This gives me the advantage. The five players above me all use Classes with more Stamina-efficient Basic Attacks, so they barely ever use , while it's a staple for most of my martial arts." He noticed a sharp-eyed child eavesdropping, a blank slate, a potential fan. "Which I have invented over these past days of combat research, my first foray into duelling. Some of those styles, bolstering my odds even better, have been never-before-seen dagger and grappling forms, each one tailor-made for this format."

The child shook their head - a cold, heartless rejection.

Henry shrugged. "So, logically, I'm a shoo-in for the top spot."

That was the logical conclusion. However, he couldn't be sure if Karnon was lurking about.

He couldn't be sure of anything.

When they reached the front of the queue, an obstinate registrar stared at Henry's attire, refusing to admit him until he complied with the official dress code.

"I could have been writing," he muttered, stripping down to a loincloth and brandishing a baby-lion-tooth dagger.