“Everybody give it up for our newest member game, Magical Menagerie, and its representative, um . . .” There the official spokesquircy examined the dignitary that had boarded the transport when she asked for an assembly rep. “Mr. Polar Bear. Yay!”

The gathering's attendees clapped. “Great, great, great. Now I know some of you have never heard of Magical Menagerie. Apparently neither did the players, because it's dead. That's why I decided to give some Rare I found the title of 'official game historian.' He's been preparing all the necessary information, if he wants to see another beautiful dawn anyway. Come on up, you!”

Burmin Trivvis received less applause than the bear, as might have been expected. He climbed the steps at the side of the conference platform Eten had erected for the occasion, stood where Quircy pointed, and spoke. “Hi. There sure are a lot of you. OK. Um, Magical Menagerie was one of those merge games, and it was about animals in this huge, sprawling reserve. You know the kind, right?” The crowd allowed that it did. “The animals there leveled up by doing tasks, like herding sheep, or growing their fleeces out all nice, or carrying letters, and when you had a bunch of the same kind of animal level high enough, you merged them to make a more exotic animal, like an elephant. It ceased service a while ago though. We don't know, or I don't know . . .” Surt caught his attention, a simple matter for an apocalyptic fire giant. He shook his head. “We don't know how, but the pigeons figured out their delivery skills allowed them to leave their game. That's why they move stuff between games for us. They want to level up. The other animals were stuck there with nothing to do. We think they might have developed psychic powers they used to call for help, though they only managed to influence people to make strange animal comparisons.” Burmin shrugged.

Vainamoinen stood, stroking his white beard with worried fingers. “What is this you say? In their loneliness, their isolation, these beasts have developed the power to touch men's minds, to twist them? Most unsettling this news is, and strange to hear.”

“I thought so too, but when I mentioned it to DelveR, he said remote mental conditioning is normal these days. I wasn't sure about that, but he seemed confident.” Burmin shrugged again. “I think that's everything. Are there any more questions?”

Quircy hip-checked him off the stage, and after the yells and shrieks dwindled, she resumed her presentation. “Thanks, Halberd! I knew I made the right choice. Give him a big hand too, if emotion compels you. I wouldn't be bossy about something like that. Well. We reached an agreement, maybe, possibly. Hard to tell. The pigeons give up their delivery monopoly. We include Magical Menagerie in our infrastructure plans. Nothing big, just some tennis courts, golf courses, pools and artificial lakes, race courses, an eye-catching palace . . . for me . . . And! The locals get to chase down balls, replace divots, carry our clubs, bring us towels, and so on. It's a real concession we're making here. I know it. I'm asking for a sacrifice from all of you. But in the interests of getting-alongmanship, I hope you'll all honor this deal.”

“Stand back, everyone. She may have rabies, judging by the compulsive winking.” Surgeon Merilia rushed the platform to drag Quircy away for an examination, which signaled the end of the meeting. Anyone who wished to help went with Eten, and quite a few went as well who wished otherwise but ought to have practiced their getaways more energetically.

“We're back! Everybody keeping busy? What did we miss?” A trio of officers ascended the fiberboard steps to Freegate's heart-soothing garden, or rather the area that once was a garden and became so again when they stepped far enough away. This time, however, the great doors swung shut behind them never to open till the next collab event. Ahead of them? Freegate as usual, except emptier. “Huh. Nobody? I thought at least Gaelvry would come to meet you.”

“She might claim that, yes,” Aerywe Beruvo said. “Depending on her mood. This lack of reception is surely due to some ridiculous plot or improbable disaster. We must make a search, though it is likely screams will alert us before long.”

Rhizi Nanem kicked a patch of ground that had interested her by looking different from the garden of her memory. “I'm not sure, Miss Beruvo, but I think there's been digging here. Could it be part of a ridiculous plot?” She knelt, found handles, and pulled. “Oh! They've put in a tunnel, and I don't want to call it slipshod exactly, but it's certainly not as sound as the collab connection.”

“Good find, Rhizi. Let's check it out.” Cadmos, Aerywe, and Rhizi entered the shaft one at a time, since its width could handle no more than that, and almost less. Comfort for that one person had not been neglected though, as small lights at regular intervals illuminated the cramped dirt road.

“Are those glowsticks embedded in the tunnel's ceiling? Every day I realize I know so little about the world,” Aerywe said.

The three speculated about the situation all the way through the subterranean passage, but none predicted what they saw on the other side. Coffee shops, furniture stores, bowling alleys, and sporting goods outlets faced each other across an avenue that ended in a pad where sat an Elbe-class transport, not that they knew that, atop which nestled some ducks waiting for the next flight. Shoppers walked up and down that street, and not all of them officers. Mohawked browsers, judicious Zazens, corporate comparison shoppers and cyberpunk impulse buyers, dwarves with gold in their pockets, and musketeers fingering florins looked for deals.

“We may have missed something,” Cadmos said. Aerwye and Rhizi did not disagree.

“Excuse me. Pardon me. Hello, Nimue, how are you today? Excuse me.” A wedding day vision of white, blue, and purple negotiated the eclectic crowd toward the tunnel until she saw the returning trio. “Ah! I'm late! Out of my way!” Gaelvry Bride charged across the remaining distance between her and Cadmos and Aerywe, plus Rhizi was there too.

“Do I give her a hard time, or no? To have so little time to make decisions,” Aerywe pondered as she watched her sister's advance.

Rhizi and Cadmos laughed. “Act on your feelings,” the latter advised.

“Sorry I'm late! Here's a bird,” Gaelvry said, thrusting a cage toward Aerywe that contained a pigeon preening on a little perch. “I had to fill out all these forms where I acknowledged pigeons are part of the pan-ludic coalition, identified it as a gift, and promised the owner wouldn't hesitate to put the bird to work. We had a whole debate, and we determined that the animals were fine with being pets as long as they got to do stuff. Hello, Cadmos, Rhizi. How was your trip?”

“You are aware we have no idea to what you refer, correct? As we have been gone for two weeks.” Rhizi and Cadmos waved over Aerywe's shoulders while she spoke.

Gaelvry waved back as she responded. “Aware as can be. I wanted to give you your present right away to, well . . .”

“Forestall any unpleasantness. I quite understand.”

“Right. It's sure to take some time to catch you all up, and I know a great place for that. Everybody except you three knows it, but that doesn't make it any less great. Want to come?”

The sun! The grass! The front nine, the back nine, and some more nines after that! Magical Menagerie, under the industrious hands of Construction, became the pan-ludic resort of choice. Each game had its local facilities, no longer threatened by pigeons, but the constraint of having to build exclusively outside of player vision discouraged the architects from getting too big, too fancy, or too multipurpose. None of those phrases made sense in a shut-down game. Architects and visionaries made full use of the space to realize their most lavish dreams. A colosseum there had been equipped with special seats that ejected the audience into the battle pit when the master of ceremonies pushed the button. Over there a giant tower could be climbed not by stairs, but only by jumping from platform to platform inside, which became harder when the defense systems activated. Everyone likes bandstands, but why not mount those stands on a moving belt that takes the performers past customers browsing furniture and potted plants? Only a lack of manpower, which Construction no longer suffered since every empire had folded its logistical component into a single organization that built whatever it wanted.

And visitors came to marvel, appreciate, and play. Mostly to play. Lots of space meant lots of courses for golf, not to mention the better kind of golf with windmills that knock back your ball. Tennis, polo, discus, and other sports had their fields as well. Everyone, even those lumps who had stayed home during the era of the three empires, understood Magical Menagerie was the place to be when one wanted to get away from the routine.

A thrush-covered Iowa blew Alvin Renzis's heroic hair around as it passed low over the links on its way to the airport. Unflappable as long as he had his handkerchief, he teed off with no less skill than usual.

“Wonder if they're ever going to find anything good up there,” Judge Feeley commented.

Tasket, leaning on his bag of clubs, which was taller and possibly heavier than he, said, “Are you saying a maelstrom that tears apart incautious ships and sends endless rivers of money swirling up, and up, and up to some unknown destination isn't good? Judges must make a lot of money.”

“Not at all, not at all. I'm also a mayor, you see.”

A figure blasted across the manicured fields, kicking up clods of earth and tufts of grass, only to skid to a halt beside that group. “I just got here! Which one of you is corrupt? All of you?”

“Go away, Lasva,” three of them said, though Hot Air Hank believed it was right nice of her to stop by, and in addition it would be even nicer if they all returned to the clubhouse together after the next hole, what with powerful thirst they must have on account of the energetic sun and all.

While many in Magical Menagerie took their relaxing more seriously than they ever had their farming, others, Hank-like, devoted less thought to their leisure pursuits than to devising excuses to visit the clubhouse, that palace of fountains and stained glass created in accordance with Quircy Rau's instructions except for the part where she wanted it to belong to her. Its expansive gardens included hedges and trees shaped into the beasts of every game in the block, while statues memorializing the heroic moments of the pan-ludic struggle ornamented both the impressive exterior and the interior furnished with every kind of cushion, blanket, and armrest the suppliers could imagine. The tables even had legs, not because the lower rarities whined about it, but because the intention behind the design demanded it be warm and welcoming at all hours without any dependence on flaky Rares and Commons.

There in copper was a Furious Galaxy crew member pouring experimental fuels with a nervous hand while leaning the rest of her body in the opposite direction to get a head start in the likely case of an explosion. There a steel Michael hunched over the bars of his bold swordcycle. Who could forget the opening ceremony of the first extra-territorial Sit Snug? Miss Hawkins charged those shears to the company account afterward. Across the pathway to the tennis courts, four limestone fantasy warriors faced two professionals, Im Jang-mi, and a Haetae-class destroyer.

Quircy Rau stood in the club lobby, greeting enterers and bidding farewell to leavers as if she owned the place, and any of them would have said under oath that she seemed as cheerful as ever. The officer beside her, however, thought different. “What's wrong, Quirce?”

“Zims, I try not to be realistic, because it's dull. But I can be. Sometimes I have to be. It's closing time, the cops have been called, everybody's sneaking out the back. Soon these scatterbrains are going to forget they ever accepted me as leader of anything, but they never gave me any of the titles I wanted. Or any title at all! I'm not picky all the time, I don't think.”

“Yeah, you aren't. Gotta say, you might have been too subtle about it. Still, at least you were the undisputed leader for a while. That'll be a nice memory for us.”

“They only obeyed me when they felt like it!”

“That's how it always is, right?”

“Excuse me.” A newcomer interrupted their conversation, some Radiant Illusion Country hero judging by the bold feathers of his helmet's crest and the brightly colored fiddly bits all over his design, hallmarks of that game which had long since banished tasteful restraint. “I have come to this excellent country club after hearing of it from my colleagues only recently, fool that I am. Might one of you be she they call Great Manager Rau?”

“Yes!” Quircy flung her right arm high, palm up, swept her left to invite him in, and smiled a smile brighter than green flashes in dour clouds. “Great Manager Quircy Rau! That's me! Come on in!”