On the road, or en route as Quircy Rau preferred to say, to Paradise the Enchant with the intention of improving its anti-spaceship defenses by installing catapults on ramps, the landship received Information Gathering reports from all over by courier and pigeon. Hopeful conquerors from Falling Gate extracted themselves through their login calendar and seized Spirit Intersection, only to be subjugated by Ten Thousand Years. Dinosaur Rumble discovered some kind of glitch dinosaur omelette that allowed it to reach Afterschool Hunters, which resisted the clumsy, tiny-handed assault. Brave Cumulus defeated Project Contrails, no, Project Contrails humiliated Brave Cumulus, no, both of them teamed up to invade Alloy Saga and assert the superiority of airpower over mech power. Though details conflicted, the main message was clear that chaos ruled in that age with no certain sovereign.

“I rule though,” Quircy Rau said.

“Mayhap. Yet you are no sovereign.”

“I could be. Just call me Queen Quircy. Does anybody want to do that? Turpin?” He shook his head. “Higgins?” More head shaking. “Fine, but don't be afraid to change your minds later.” Quircy gazed over the assembly she had called outside PtE. While Construction worked up above to add alarms that would signal “whoop whoop” when a spaceship approached, below a decision on the next move had to be made. “Any other news?”

Gary Whitecrest raised his hand. “You know that UTAS seller Mrs. Dorenz found? We got a message from him, saying something along the lines of how he doesn't intend to let any future conflicts between our sudden empires affect business, and he hopes we feel the same. Figure Convergence/Divergence is on the move too.”

“Hm. Manyana, could you add C/D to that dartboard for me?”

“Aye aye, Quircy!”

“You can call me Captain Quircy.”

“Belay that, sister,” Crusher Domingo said.

“Consider it belayed.” Manyana picked up a brush and wrote in the requested letters on the giant novelty dartboard Construction had crafted to lighten the weight of decision-making which burdened the minds of the host's leadership. Quircy nodded, waved her back, and raised a dart while covering her eyes with her left hand.

“Give us a good one!” she prayed as she let the missile fly.

“Ouch!”

“Merilia, BigGuy30, please don't attempt experimental medical procedures when we're deciding the fate of empires.”

“Why not, Gaelvry?”

“We can't watch both at the same time.” While Gaelvry lectured the medical team, the rest of the horde pressed closer to get a good look at the board, and Quircy craned her neck for the same reason.

“Lovely Interest! I don't know what that is. That's fine. We'll go ask as soon as Eten finishes here. Ha. Muhahaha. OHOHOHO!”

Technological developments had engendered a boom of uppity games, but the Commandment of Hero, Holy Legend Army, Paradise the Enchant, Always Leveling Titan, and Slay Every Dragon empire possessed advantages not to be outdone in an hour or two, particularly by a cutesy match three game, if it had been trying to, which it had not. The host ran the course of conquest and came ahead at every turn, which granted it the glory of endowing Lovely Interest with a new facility decorated by so many frills, buttons, and bows that officers who viewed it caught themselves about to say “festooned” for the first time in their lives. The crusaders, for their part, proved to be veterans in the field of saying “festooned.”

As swift as the operation went, reports from Information Gathering already waited when the horde descended to Opuwa. Battle in Slaughter Pandora Mobile. Victor: Furious Galaxy. Battle in Climax Net. Victor: Furious Galaxy. Battle in Fields of Steam. Victor: Convergence/Divergence. An agreement reached inside Modern Incidence Record wherein the locals cooperated with Furious Galaxy in exchange for a chance to trouble those C/D punks. An accord between Convergence/Divergence and its old trade and correspondence buddies in Endless Disco. Most known games had aligned themselves or been aligned with one of three blocs, overwhelming in power if not necessarily in revenue. The age of chaos ended before it learned its first word, most likely “havoc,” and the age of strife began.

“Mine for gold but don't throw away copper is what I say,” Wruden Calx said. An honest start to the meeting. “Our priority is to collect intelligence on Convergence/Divergence. Number one how they're reaching Opuwa, and number two, everything else about them. Our secondary concern is a request from Construction to locate more glowsticks, posters, and vinyl albums. STHB has not enough of the first and none of the others. We can investigate both in one place. Vanilla Stage.”

“You wish to dispatch a team there, though it is held by another game? The qualifications of the agents must be three.” Nimue raised three fingers, which may have been necessary among the company she kept at home, but Information Gathering's elite knew how numbers worked. “They must not be of designs so unlike the style of Convergence/Divergence as to incur suspicion. They must possess puissance enough to overcome such contests of might as may arise. They must not be distracted from their quest by the dwellers there, who are fair in both face and manner.”

“Interesting. But why are you discussing this in the middle of a bowling alley?” Luerre Voine asked.

“The same reason I send workers into the mines. Because that's where the silver is.”

“What about the gold and copper?”

“Different mines.”

“Ah.”

“Strike!” Heartful Azalea knocked down every minister of Information Gathering as well as Smidgen from Planning and Tasket from the block to the delight of every Quake in the alley. Most of the non-Quakes, too.

“Nice one! Can someone help me up! I don't have arms!” While a team of mighty-thewed crusaders attended to the Smidgen problem, Wruden Calx managed his own rise, as expected of a self-made luman.

“The lane is more dangerous than anticipated, though I hate to lose our view of the bowlers. Any one of them could be the man we want. As for that first requirement. What genre is C/D? Follow-up question: are we saying 'C' 'D' or 'C slash D?'”

“Second one sounds cooler,” Fusberta at the next lane put down her ball to say. She picked it back up in her beak and managed a spare.

“Good enough. We won't waste time on that.”

A Rare on the other side tossed her head and loosed a bowling ball as smoothly as an arrow, if luck favored the deer and birds of Brenlond. “Just from the name you can tell it's a cyberpunk setting, right? With two factions? And when you think cyberpunk, of course you think about clean corporations that are dirty on the inside and people who get by without going along. Too stubborn, too violent, too stupid, whatever. So there must be two sets of characters you have to collect, since you can only use Security characters for some modes and Underground characters for others, though they aren't called characters, I imagine.”

“Is it the custom in Commandment of Hero to hide what games we play? Did I, all unknowing, do injury to courtesy by confessing to my own habits?”

“No, Beowulf. For instance.” Mentor Tendradius Pux, three lanes over, released his ball. “I play Everyday Pin. That's 212,” he said, his headset's lenses whirring and telescoping to capture every detail of the pins as they fell.

The alley chatter died for a moment till Inorrea Vacationer revived it without troubling herself to acquire a license from the Medic community beforehand. “Yo, cyberpunk fans. That's the kind of thing you like, right?”

Oberon, Kobold, Beelzebub, Cantrell Uwendis, FairyDragon, StarSix, and Nixa N. Dorenz all admitted the interstellar warrior's techno outfit could not be considered out of theme for at least some cyberpunk works, though they viewed it as far from a central example of the genre's aesthetics. “What about Beryllia?” Certain settings embraced fashion standards out of sync with current styles in order to immerse the audience in an alien milieu and heighten its sensitivity toward the social commentary being made, which might justify her big shoulder pads in some places, but Convergence/Divergence generally . . .

“That's two.”

“We're getting along then. Do these cyberpunks ever include vampires? Angels?” Wruden Calx considered all the crusaders who had leisure to stand around bowling alleys and help up hydras all day.

“No,” Oberon said, and never had his will been so tested as it was then. His clenched jaw and furrowed brow showed well what it cost him to refrain from adding all the qualifications he knew his denial deserved, but which the philistines of Information Gathering would interpret, for their convenience, as support for their obvious desire to grab the nearest characters and throw them at Vanilla Stage.

“Unfortunate.” Wruden shook his head.

Serdon Miloz, however, smiled. “I've been thinking about what silver Sindze said. Corporations, right? Corporate executives love functions, and when you're at a function, you have to dress the part.” He pointed in two directions, and Inorrea nodded.

“Got it. Hey, Ivar! Otsk!”

“No, not them.”

“Gaelvry! Youl!”

“Not them either.”

“Glad to hear it. I love solving puzzles.”

“Why do you hate showmanship, Inorrea? Ballroom Merilia and Society Page Lasva.”

“Thank you. Because I'm a sneaky thief.”

A sneaky thief who gets results! Inorrea avoided saying so herself, much as she evaded most attacks for the duration of her active skills, but the implication infiltrated every mind, spy-like, to the extent that in later days people would assign the credit for coming up with two members of the infiltration team to her instead of Serdon Miloz. Or rather, they would if they cared, but guess what?

“One more!” Smidgen had recovered sufficiently from its earlier ordeal to assess the situation, determine the crucial point, and explain it in a lucid but efficient style. “Listeria Adan?”

“I'll be deep in the rich, rich ground before I take advice from Planning.” Wruden Calx shook his gem-encrusted pick at Smidgen.

“Pretty!”

“I suppose it is, yes.”

Ruthven snapped his fingers. “Pretty! That is the word that, should we follow it, like the wise men did that star, leads us wither we wish to go. What mechanic is prettier than Listeria Adan? She, I nominate for this mission.”

“Great idea!” Smidgen enthused.

“Ruthven, I'll let you get away with that because we're both ministers. I do hope you'll answer this question for me, though. Are all vampires that lazy?”

“Of those vampires known to me, none believe labor to be something that never ceases even for the dead, but rather a necessity for the living alone. Nor will we praise industry in our own kind for that reason, looking upon it as a refusal to accept this truth, that our existence is altered from what it was, and that irrevocably.”

Wruden smoothed his mustache. “I understand. I won't say anything more about it.” And he was true to his word.