The council members ran out of the castle ahead of her, daring her to figure out a way to increase her speed over their shoulders while they shouted orders at nearby Cs, UCs, and Rs about rounding up the troops. They sent runners and pigeons to the likely locations where characters congregated for amusement between campaigns, such as bowling alleys, casinos, concerts, furniture showcases, and Vigilant Patrol. All those purchases put a dent in the old Wide Feather and Anchor Sliver reserves, after all.

Those scattered warriors heard the call to muster with enthusiasm, or if not, Quircy dispatched enforcers to fix their attitudes. “Come on,” BigGuy30 pleaded. “It'll be fun.” That did it in most cases. Officers, crusaders, slayers, candidates, and more swirled toward the rendezvous point near Styleful Happy!! The Battle like crud in a sink full of dirty water when the plug is pulled.

At the center of the sludge, Planning made plans with the help of Information Gathering, which uncovered Furious Galaxy's strategy down to the route the fleet would take by means of asking who knew somebody in FG willing to divulge sensitive information. Nobody did, because not a single FG crewman or crewwoman considered any information sensitive, even when told their correspondent intended to use it to start a big old fight. “Bring it on :>,” Shef Donovan signed his letter.

“Zims, what kind of person draws emotes in letters?”

“Dunno, Quirce. What kind of person still writes letters?”

“Huh.” While Quircy Rau's brain pondered that as deeply as her nonexistent INT score allowed, her keen eyes tracked the incoming flow of manpower and noted when it slowed and when it stopped. She stepped to the edge of the landship's roof, raised her voice, and addressed the host. “Hey guys! We're going to go rough up Furious Galaxy. 'But Quircy, how can you be so inspiring and confident?' I'm smart enough to not wait for anyone to ask that. I'm also smart enough to figure out there are almost two hundred of us. But. I'll tell you who's really smart. That's Gintus Pelluina, who divided you all up into Freebie, Chaff, and Moneymaker groups. That's Nimue, who researched which FG characters are free and which did big business. Most of all, that isn't our enemies, who don't even know about Opuwa elements. Let's hear it for dumb opponents! Yaaaaay!”

The heroes below joined her in that cheer, and some even tried the little hop she did so that she landed with one foot on the ground and her pointer fingers pointing, one to the sky and the other at the crowd. A few falls attended the effort, but not enough to incapacitate anyone through either injury or excessive, gut-busting laughter, leaving the horde ready to move when she said the word.

“Avaunt!”

Or when Metatron said the word. He was up there too. Same thing, really. The host jumped on motorcycles, rocketcycles, the backs of people already on rocketcycles, and all the rest while the Brave Cumulus soared overhead, thoroughly scrubbed and Quircy-free. Its majestic profile distracted everyone from the unfortunate reality that they were going to look like total goobers compared to Furious Galaxy with its rad spaceships, ones with consistent design principles that distinguished the game's factions from one another without violating the impression they could exist in the same technological milieu. Look up, not left, right, or behind, brave warriors! Look at something cool, a gigantic single-wing airborne supercarrier for example, and not the beefy dude and a maid driving an ice cream truck. Or, if necessary, look at that and not a big muscley demon riding a corn cob.

“Why not? Gives you something to work toward, like a role model,” Boxer Andit said, but Jervis Uwendis disagreed.

“That giant corn could have fed hungry families, and we've got some demon using it as transportation because he refused to board Brave Cumulus. It's not his fault he's afraid of heights, but fault isn't everything.”

“He'll eat it if he gets hungry enough. What's the big deal?”

Similar conversations spiced up the trip, although not all that similar except insofar as they were conversations. Though soon to offer battle to a foe of unknown strength that had trounced them before, those warriors trusted in their leadership, the strength of their comrades, and the total lack of consequences for failure insofar as they could just run back after they died in the most Valhalla fashion imaginable.

Their faith wavered less than their course, which zigged and zagged from game to open spot on the orders of Clint of Spinach City on the Brave Cumulus, who plotted an interception point armed with Exploring's maps and a stack of letters explaining the circuitous route Furious Galaxy had worked out in order to cross as little hostile territory as possible between the staging point at Modern Incidence Record and the target, Universe Testament. He also held an estimate from Construction about the time required to build the fake bowling alley the host would use to hide from enemy notice and also to do a little bowling during the wait.

The chosen site sat in Convergence/Divergence territory, which made it boring. No paint, no landing pads, nothing that would give a financial consultant a basis to suggest painful but necessary cuts. Only the standard Opuwa blue decorated that location till Eten and the lads plopped a bowling alley on it. For extra subterfuge, the blinking sign indicated the establishment's name to be “C/D Will Never Find This Alley,” a touch suggested by that master of misdirection, Puck's pallette-swap Brownie. Puck had turned out to be a straightforward guy, which proved those Holy Legend Army crusaders to be no liars who had insisted any resemblance between their personalities and the mythological figures who gave them their names owed itself to coincidence.

“No, wait,” Kint N. Bredle said as the greater part of the host watched the Brave Cumulus and Vinnette Melban's landship tow their vehicles out of sight. “Our Beowulf is always in Slay Every Dragon, slaying every dragon.”

Asmodeus responded while waving goodbye to his corn. “Indeed so. Whereas the mythical hero Beowulf, as you will recall, slew but one and died in the effort.” He then accepted the trophy for “#1 Debater,” which depicted a man holding a bowling ball and wearing graduation robes, from the former holder, Mentor Tendradius Pux. He had won it by carrying the argument over what fake building to construct as a ruse, a facade, a Potemkin ambush. The core of his proposal had been his contention that Furious Galaxy would be more reluctant to level a sporting area from a distance than a mead hall, as shown by their reported high-volume patronage of Let's Do It With a Racket!'s facilities, and that evidence convinced the assembly.

The host squeezed into that false traitor of a building that lacked automatic pinsetters, old arcade machines, and a guy behind the counter named Mike. It contained, instead of those conveniences, periscopes and peep holes all over to spot the expected fleet, and that expectation was realized before anyone had completed a single game.

Blocky battleships, blockier carriers, and transports both blockiest and bulbous approached amid wedges of fighters of space-looking and realistic modern varieties, the latter provided by Project Contrails. Frigates and destroyers spread out from the core of capitals like the limbs of a spider boss, and stealth ships could be seen too. Stealth in Furious Galaxy applied to radar and so forth, not vision. The artists would have revolted otherwise. All that work for nothing? Not a chance.

The sky seized all attention, especially from the periscope-users, but someone with a neck injury that prevented looking up would have been no less impressed, or only a little less at any rate. Rank after rank of uniformed crew members marched, matching one another step for step with the discipline of those who would require special training just to cut it out, maybe a three-week seminar in techniques for letting their hair down. Furious Galaxy formed the center, and its auxiliaries from games both coerced and friendly orbited it. Dinosaurs on the right flank wanted to rumble, sword-wielding heroes and elven archers from Radiant Illusion Country held the left, and the elite monster hunters of Slaughter Pandora moseyed a bit behind the main force, ready to exploit gaps in the formation of any enemy that dared test the army's patience. Modern Incidence Record had come too, but its summoners stood on the ships above in order to send out unnatural creatures that presaged the apocalypse if the occasion called for it, which it always did in their home game.

The host formed up inside the alley, informed by what the peepers saw. Groups of Moneymakers and Secondaries such as Gaelvry Bride, Titania, and Orston Cuy lined up in position to rush against Chaff, the diBiors and icthyosaurs of the foe. Commandment of Hero and Holy Legend Army set their own extensive Chaff cohorts, the Yvains, Luerre Voines, and all the Rs and under, as well as Higgins of Fort Fondue and other Priorities against the Freebies. Furious Galaxy gave its players not one, not two, but six free main characters, one for each faction and not all of them bland, either. Rein Weismuller of the Steinrich Republic, Angelina Segretti from the Fuvati League, Timur representing the Vosok Collective, Seo Yoo-joon out of Sixth Eminence, the New Caern Empire's own Wallace Blair, and Model Zero, the latest android commander created by the Stellar Continuum. None of them, or the other handout characters from their allies that had any, knew they would soon be covered in piles of Chaff.

The dire Freebie supply of the fantasy coalition worried its leaders and ministers, since collab duty still occupied the main characters of its two biggest games, and some of the other options such as Ostros and Anstralia Perandra had chosen to remain at home where they sunned themselves all day like lizards. Even so, Never Evers also beat Moneymakers. Accordingly Serena Renzis, Jervis Uwendis, Agnes of South Cabbage, and more beside prepared themselves to show Rachel Donovan and all those Iowas and Lepantos a thing or two, though preferably no more things. Nobody wanted to spend all day there. They had stuff to do, unlike those officers and crusaders who avoided excitement and held nonstop dog-walking tea parties back home or some frippery of the sort.