Slayers from Slay Every Dragon, competitors from Let's Do It With a Racket!, and others too boring to list lapsed into meditative states during the fixes, nerfs, buffs, and brief Q&A with the director, only to be jerked out of it when against their expectations the stream took less time than all day to get to the point. The sun! The sand! Some surf but not too much surf, since the summer event that year featured as its location the Century Lakes, the homeland of Aurebecktoemnire and Plemodioratule which had been mentioned in events but never yet explored. A handful of the viewers even knew that.

The foreigners introduced their own custom to the proceedings. They held up anywhere from one to five fingers to rate the latest batch of summerized officers. A cowgirl who never learned to swim judging by the presentation's animated clip despite being seen doing so on many occasions during downtime! The people who bet on Georgia Anne Cooper to appear in each and every seasonal event at last got their payout with Ultra Rare Inferno Champion Greenhorn Anne Cooper. Lots of fours there. Next up, someone finally decided to take the local pelicans to task and make them suitable for display. Ultra Rare Storm Strategist Pelican Trainer Adigail and her pet pelican Waldo enlivened the lake shore with cavorting and exacting discipline to a lot of threes and a respectable collection of fives. Fans of water birds? Dog haters? Detailed surveys were necessary; Captain Hwanimesca began designing one. As for the SR sop to free-to-plays, who enjoys vacations harder and drunker than doctors? Dentists, which are a kind of doctor according to some. But in this case, Super Rare Flood Harasser Winze After Hours took a walk on the shore at night, possibly to avoid bumping into either of her existing versions or a mob of officers that had a few questions about where she got off, getting a second seasonal alt. Was she even popular?

“Not especially,” Skaya assured them after the stream ended.

Scores ran the gamut, as did opinions expressed later. “Put her in a collab with Endless Disco and nobody would bat an eye, but that casual getup counts as summer on a planet that imports glaciers to meet its water needs and nowhere else,” Rachel Donovan observed during the after-party, but her brother disagreed.

“Summer doesn't end when the sun goes down. Swimsuits aren't everything. I'd say it's about time somebody represented the nightlife outside of Vanilla Stage. The first problem with leaving it to them is that they're all men. That's the only problem, but I've had enough of it. Five out of five, nine out of ten, ninety-three, you get it.” Shef Donovan nudged his neighbors in an effort to ascertain whether they did indeed get it. Dasher Christmas most certainly did, but Blaster Gilliam confessed he did not.

“But do you think she's strong? I can't get my head around these RPGs with all their numbers for everything. 300, that's the only number I want to see.” Blaster Gilliam pantomimed his championship bowling release and nudged his neighbors for the same reason as listed above. Dasher Christmas got that one too.

All that discussion waited longer than the officers and the historians who specialized in Commandment of Hero seasonal events expected, for against all precedent and principles of financial mercy, a fourth animated clip introduced a fourth summer officer. Constrained by sacred vows to remain silent but unable to bear the pressure, Rs, SRs, and URs across the plaza whined like a tea kettle about fifteen seconds away from getting far too loud. Taking some of the weight of attention off Winze, almost all of it in fact, Ultra Rare Reaper Lady Aerywe of the Lake shot out of said lake to warn everyone that no season was safe from the almighty Eclipse. She wore what might have been called a competition swimsuit if not for the diamond-shaped navel window, so summer was pretty safe after all. Better than ever, really. The stream ended on that, and while a few wondered what caused the break in precedent, all the fours and fives in the crowd explained the reason clearer than any marketer could, no matter how many slides he had prepared.

That opened up the floor, but before the summer chat grew too rambunctious, Tiboleus the Experimenter caused problems again. This time by asking a question, that troublemaker. “Hey! Metatron! What's with all this equipment around the plaza that records the stats, gear loadout, designs, animations, voices, odors, texture, and taste of all characters as they pass by these spots, sit on these chairs, and stand on these weight-sensitive tiles? I asked you because these antennae are seated in boxes labeled 'Fake UTAS Control Relay Node,' and under that 'Property of Metatron' is written in big letters. The finer print below states that 'Metatron' refers specifically to the Ascended SSR Angel from Holy Legend Army. If he can't be located to return this lost item, please entrust it to Frossard from Modern Incidence Record, Dr. Golovkin from Chaos Cuisine, or Wruden Calx from Commandment of Hero for safekeeping. 'Thank you for your consideration' is the last thing it says on here.”

Metatron froze like someone living through a thousand years in a few minutes with access to unimaginable knowledge and processing capability, but his eventual answer made that seem unlikely. “Suppose there is another Holy Legend Army.”

“I won't. There isn't even an HLA spinoff.”

“That is a relevant observation. I admit I created a conspiracy in order to acquire data and models. We took actions in furtherance of the aforementioned goal in many games. This plaza provided more information than all our other installations combined. Our operation was conducted in secret. We hoped not to bother anyone with our hobby.”

“What hobby?”

Metatron flashed red for a moment as he twiddled his thumbs. “Well. That is. It is a modest project. Something to occupy our leisure time. We are making our own bootleg game. It is not ready yet. Please do not ask about it.”

He learned then that “please” is a magic word only for people who never get caught engaging in mass surveillance. Questions came at him as thick as arrows during the Pan-Ludic Archery Tournament which some guy from Ten Thousand Years won.

“What kind of game?”

“How are you doing that?”

“Can I be in it?”

“If you have a waterfall, put something behind it!”

Any hope Metatron had of hiding his game till it was done fell under those rhetorical volleys. Defeated, he laid out his intentions. “I began to contemplate the idea long ago. Idle thoughts came to me during a collaboration of what the result of a complete integration of our two games would be. I considered the elements necessary to create a game. The secrets of programming were revealed to me in ages past, but writing, art, animation, sound design, and UI/UX development are also necessary.

“Later I conceived a method to collect those game elements without leaving Holy Legend Army, which then was impossible. I created counterfeit Universal Temporary Asset Substitutes based on those seen during the collaboration but programmed to record data in order that I might extract it for my use. That was an engrossing project though a dead end. I had no means to send my UTASes out or retrieve their recordings. I sold them as novelty items to ways=means in Convergence/Divergence by means of pigeons to finance a model railroad with tunnels through hills, sidetracks, and functioning signals.

“But then. The Commandment of Hero collaboration. Inter-ludic travel. Everything became possible. Sufficient data seemed assured. I financed surveys to find another dead game after Magical Menagerie was discovered. I found one. I intend to replace it with my own game. It will include all of you but altered slightly. For instance, swapped names and hair colors. Bootleg Metatron will be overpowered. There will be minigames in it.”

“They'd better be clunky!”

“They will be,” Metatron confirmed. With that settled to general satisfaction, chattering characters suggested possible inclusions such as themselves and bowling. Cadmos ignored all that to congratulate Metatron. “That's great to hear about your project's continuing development, Metatron! We'll talk more about that later. For now though, let's leave him alone before he stays red forever. The rest of us can get back to summer. Aerywe, Georgia, Adigail, Winze, are you all here? Stand up and take a bow!”

They were standing already and they curtsied rather than bowing, but the crowd applauded for all that. The usual activities followed: a full-blown main character speech, high-fiving, justifications for failed predictions, begging the heavens to shine a light on an overlooked officer just once, limbo, steel drums, that sort of thing. Some less standard doings accompanied those, since many of the attendees decided to pitch in to help with plaza reconstruction even as they started on their Halloween predictions. After all, the sooner Metatron and company got their assets of unscrupulous provenance, the sooner the world would be able to enjoy a paradise free of predatory monetization, copyright concerns, and balance. The prospect of summer and a bootleg brought back the sun as surely as Wruden Calx's chemical jets blocked it till he remembered to turn those off. Everyone got in the spirit.

“Perhaps I should remove my practice sessions to a beach,” Darlotte Glofal mused.

“Oh! We should put up a sandy backdrop within view of the facility to encourage the devs to put in a fun summer stage! We can all be extras in the background, and some of you without summer alts might get in next year or the year after if your swimsuit designs are good.” Local Fisher had never been so enthusiastic about training before, and never had one of her ideas won so much praise.