The tide of tourists surged forward, and chatter among the visitors was the sound of the surf.

“Man, summer. It turns me upside-down every year.”

“I fear lest the sights to come be too lascivious.”

“I fear lest they be not.”

“First that big magnet giveaway, now an early summer. I'm spending more time in Heroland than home.” Darrell of South Cabbage of Paradise the Enchant waved his complementary magnet as if it were a big foam finger, which he also had.

“Yeah, same here. Um, I think the next thing the technicians should prioritize is a beeper? Or a pager? That way we can get alerts. I don't want to miss a single offer or stream party!” F-8 Crusader, the Brave Cumulus one and not the Project Contrails version, the proof being that she talked and also was a cute girl whose mouth stayed perennially open, held up her own free magnet and clinked it against Darrell's. The neo generation toast spread among the tourists, not just the bunch there that day, but all across the cluster for years to come. Clinking and laughing, they crossed through the flowing curtains of sun-blocking particles that shot into the bright blue sky and drifted down, softly, peacefully, non-stainingly according to the advertisement.

Inside, they joined the officers in groups or alone, standing proud or sitting on blankets and beanbags, each as caprice dictated. No phenomenon could be less remarkable than that. And yet. As Professor Carmichael wandered, curious about where people got all those magnets, and why for that matter, he noticed something about the arrangement they made among themselves by chance.

“What would I spy, with an aerial eye . . . This configuration so far as I can make it out reminds me of my brilliant theory about the possibility of distributing magnets in such a way as to cause certain types of equipment such as turbo buttons in old computers or non-standard cameras to malfunction over a wide area. What a dead end for magnetism when my least-moral theories predict you can open paths to other worlds unprepared to resist you. Ah, but then there is the prospect of practical jokes if one could find some LAN party where people rely upon such equipment and would allow you to, as you might put it to persuade them, 'show them something neat.' An unlikely combination of circumstances. When does the show begin?”

“Twenty-eight minutes, give or take,” Hot Air Hank answered. “Say, about what you was saying about old computers. Now by old, d'you mean desktops on account of us living in the portable era, or Commodore 64, or what? And those cameras you brought up. To put it different, what equipment prezactly?” Hank's voice quavered and his limbs quivered, which showed he was keeping calm despite the potential disaster. A disaster for Wruden Calx and Metatron anyway. He had already received, and spent, his funding.

“It would be tiresome to rattle off a complete list, and I'm more interested in— Watch where you're going, fool!”

Whereas Professor Carmichael acted mostly out of villainy and the collector's impulse, the character who bumped into him did so only because of the prevailing lighting conditions, not to mention the intense focus most of the crowd directed at the superscreen overhead, made that sort of thing common. Regardless of the reason for the incident, even as the bumper stumbled back and the bumpee lurched forward, struggling both to steady himself and devise a monstrous revenge, the arrangement of magnets became perfect.

Metatron's cameras and the Frame Vacuum Minis malfunctioned in a whimsical, prank-like fashion by exploding. They spewed frames and character data all around like a dataminer who slips on a banana peel on his way back from the kitchen while carrying a bowl filled with wafers as a little snack. Temporal potential levels fluctuated, which of course triggered a violent temporal equalization phenomenon.

Nobody had time to react, for time itself moved frame by frame in unaccustomed ways. It swirled around the gathered characters and out of their reach where it mixed with the strands of data ejected from broken cameras to form glorious rainbow ribbons that fled areas of excess time, encountered the region of normal temporality beyond the plaza, and spiraled back inward along channels of lowered potential toward the central point of the magnetic configuration. What would happen when the unleashed forces collided there would never be known, since by chance a character bereft of a magnet stood in the exact wrong spot for fans of apocalypses.

Instead of meeting to recreate the origin of the universe, the freed facts and frames seeped through the skin of Tiboleus the Experimenter and became sluggish, unable to pass through his own static data at the same velocity as the low-data air of the barren grassland south of Beruvia. No other officer in Commandment of Hero exceeded him in numerical stagnation, the reason being that every player fully upgraded his skills and threw the best gear possible on him as soon as he came over the wall.

The accumulated parameters of hundreds of characters from dozens of games swelled the abilities of Tiboleus while their frames granted him the time to process them. His body passed through an entire lifetime in less than a second as the external world understood it and analyzed every facet of a dozen lifetimes more in that same duration, those of the Commandment of Hero: Ersatz Struggle entrants first out of personal interest, after that every character in the plaza, and then, employing their combined analytical abilities (some cases provided a negative contribution, but never mind that), every last mobile object in the cluster. From the available evidence, he compiled a set of ineluctable conclusions which required attention.

“The spinoff's going to stink if it releases soon because we goofed off too much. Only Bel Felicitous Fasde and Waltzing Matilda are ready seeing as they managed to train in actual fighting games, and now I know how to do the same thing. If the game stinks, that lowers the chance of DLC past whatever's under development in parallel with the main game. Each additional DLC season increases my chances of getting in. Therefore, I have to grant the improved version of the plane-shift ability I just developed to every Ersatz Struggle entrant and manipulate the ambient temporal potential so that they can train under fighting masters for a thousand years in the twenty-six minutes before the stream. Better make it fifteen to allow for horseplay. There, done.”

And it was, too. Officers from Cadmos to Waltzing Matilda or else Cloton Zvolo depending on the method of alphabetization instantly understood what to do and how to do it. They visited fighting games both vital and long since dead such as B***** A**** T********, I*** & B****: W******* o* R********, and ones people like by means of advanced plane-shifting that put them in two places at once, spending centuries in one world that were anchored to mere minutes in the other. They cultivated combos with damage decay, four-frame links, continuous hitboxes, and other accouterments of a sensible fighting game that people might play for four months and forget ever existed after four years. Unlike G***** W*** E******* D***. Going nuts is a high-variance strategy though, and being played by weirdos decades hence is valueless compared to scoring an eight out of ten today.

Such did the confirmed entrants accomplish, but the less lucky officers spent a thousand years with nothing to do but reflect. “I'm never going to be picked,” Tinni Ilx concluded after about three centuries. “Any game not published by that grand strategy company will never release enough DLC for me to be implemented. My best chance is . . . what's my best chance?” More centuries passed as she concocted and reviewed schemes for increasing her popularity, infiltrating a fighter's animations as a special guest, appearing in the background, sending anonymous threats to the publisher, and more. At last she devised a millennial plan characterized by ambitious subtlety unattainable by anyone subject to the normal flow of time. “If I hunt down one of the existing fighters, kill her, gut her, and wear her character model like a holiday costume, I can sneak into the data capture place and trick it into putting me in the game! It's perfect!”

The ambient temporal potential evened out at Tiboleus the Experimenter's contrivance, informed as he was by the peerless electromagnetic understanding of Professor Carmichael. Abandoned by tumultuous time, character data settled down to the lowest level and made a carpet over the plaza a single 1 or 0 thick. The officers who, without seeming to move, went on transdimensional jaunts for training, meditation, or sightseeing reentered the typical flow of time.

“Goodness!” Darlotte Glofal exclaimed, and her fellow Ersatz Strugglers could put it no better.

“Die for me!” Tinni Ilx exclaimed, and her fellow non-Struggle officers soon revealed they had devised identical plans through certain signs such as chasing the more fortunate around with weapons out while they yelled about their intention to turn their skins into the cosmetic sort of skins.

Ulrik tackled a frothing Tramda Olex and shouted a warning to Cadmos. “Catch up on the stream later! These idiots will ruin the eccentric but memorable playstyle we cultivated for you if they get inside the data renewal facility!”

Cadmos, startled, shouted back, “Is that really their plan?”

“It has to be! I thought up the same one!”

Ben I. Sloup held his rifle out sideways to trip a quartet of Quakes, which diverted not only them but every Quake who saw it from a murderous course into giggles and guffaws. Hemt T. Elf, Saptres Muria, and Burmin Trivvis grabbed their main guy and seated him on Solemn Declaration for a quick getaway, but that bold centaur never left a battlefield without a victory behind him and another ahead. Rather than retreating, he ran circuits near and over the food service stations, pausing now and then to pull a quick turnaround for a bit of combat when no pursuers threatened his flanks.

The fury of battle disfigured the plaza as fighters and a very few of their supporters, the ones who had decided either to forgo the murder plan or else to save it for a duller day, argued the matter against officers who contemplated an unorthodox allotment of available resources. A handful of Convergence/Divergence Security types joined with the aggressed parties in an attempt to save their respected culinary franchises from ruination, which prompted some Underground instances to no particular act. The enmity between those two factions stopped when the story did. Their abstention failed however to save a single one of the food stations, which met their end even before the Novas came out.

“My wings tremble with might! Keraunos Rebirth!”

“React to this! Fusion Electric!”

“Just wait quietly for more further announcements or DLC! RAINS OF HONEYMOON!”

“That's a low-percentage chance for most of us, Quirce! Platinum Ratio!”

“Blah blah blah! Supreme Oil Spurt!”

When those started, the clubhouses nearest the plaza ended, along with all the other stuff Construction had erected aside from the supports holding up the gigantic screen overhead. The combatants watched out for those even in their battle-rage.

Much as when the ruin of a Cadmos Dome firmed up the resolve of its builders to give up and go do something fun, the devastation revealed facts that altered the intentions of some of the combatants. Technically minded officers and visitors such as Hot Air Hank, Cantrell Uwendis, and Lucco Deratti lost interest in the contest of violence to examine wires and circuitry unearthed by the explosions.

“Either there's something strange going on or there's a lot about cooking I don't know,” Cantrell Uwendis said.

“It is the second.” Dr. Golovkin's confident opinion, typical of Chaos Cuisine, failed to dissuade the curious, and soon a side tussle started as Dr. Golovkin, Wruden Calx, Frossard, and Metatron made their best effort to shoo them away.

Before the inquisitive types completed their evaluation of the discovered devices and during the contest of skin-havers and skin-wanters, the stream started. Reapers paused mid-stab and psychic energy dispersed from lenses held in the hands of suddenly still Warpers. Medics, for their part, stopped doing whatever it was they did. Other classes existed too. While nobody apologized for any of recent actions, both because the time to shut up had come and also because none of them felt bad about it, peace regained its unsteady footing, for ever did it stand on one leg only, vulnerable to a poke from any who wished to upset it. What discouraged the Commandment of Hero natives from doing so was an urgent cause that drove them all: making their guests hush up during the stream. Hands covered mouths all around the plaza just in time for viewers to enjoy some patch notes. An issue addressed with Flinch Resist not displaying correctly after the same amulet is unequipped and reequipped without closing the character gear screen? At last.