“The game used to be called Crisis Inclination. Now it isn't called anything. Too bad.” Shinnosuke Watanabe handled the briefing in his dual role as the representative of Afterschool Hunters in pan-ludic matters and as a guy who hunted things after school. “Unlike Magical Menagerie, nothing is left on-site except wailing spirits. We've determined they aren't really ghosts as in souls that have failed to depart this plane. They're more like a sort of living curse born from accumulations of lingering grudges felt by players who spent money on the game. A moment of silence for all of them.”

Characters drawn from across all the games in the cluster with the usual exceptions bowed their heads to pray or snicker. “That's probably enough. Now that we've identified the enemy, the plan is simple. Everybody who volunteers flies in on all the ships we have. I've been told that's a whole lot of ships. You marines guard Professor Carmichael while he sets up his transdimensional corridor like he promised to do in exchange for being given back either his magnets or ones of equivalent value. He opens up a pathway for us to reel our factualization hose through, which turns curses into something you can beat up. And then you do that.”

Thus he outlined a plan of campaign suitable for a bunch of people who run around trying to stop ghosts and fairy tale creatures from causing mischief. The tactical, strategical, and logistitastical experts of Fields of Steam scoffed, but nobody else heard them. They were boarding ships already.

That day, characters introduced after the establishment of the pan-ludic transportation network learned that the spaceports in every game had been constructed for decorative purposes only. From destroyers to carriers, from single envelopes to quadruple baggers, ships landed in the streets, in parks, and on the roofs of convenience stores within Afterschool Hunters so that the town resembled the starting location for a race around the world put on by an association of airship manufacturers to demonstrate the latest in aerial innovation. A common occurrence in Fields of Steam but less so elsewhere.

Hundreds embarked on the first vessel they reached, each ship lifting off as soon as it filled. Though proper organization and afterschool ghost hunting may sometimes have seen each other across the Sit Snug, they never struck up a conversation and found out how much they had in common. Metatron, a crusading angel more accustomed to the field of blades and ravens than were the hunters, added a touch of military best practices by informing every ship which way to go.

As a result, the skies of Opuwa just beyond Afterschool Hunters grew as thick as potato soup with wood and steel, bright as day with the glow of thrusters and flames beneath balloons, and loud as a Styleful Happy!! To the Live concert with the sound of Azusa Shinomori and her friends performing on top of the Brave Cumulus. Not even during the desperate wars of mastery among the Commandment of Hero, Convergence/Divergence, and Furious Galaxy empires had such an impressive array of aerospace craft been assembled outside of Universe Testament, whose inhabitants might judge the entire force adequate for a reconnaissance fleet. That sort of attitude was why UT never got anything done.

Certainly not anything so magnificent as transporting a thousand or so antsy fight-lovers to a game hovering above a bare spot that once was an options menu, one of the cluster's dead worlds. Though inaccessible from beneath unlike live games, Magical Menagerie's birds penetrated its borders just the same, for nothing did they care of a game's status. They never even looked at sales estimates. Guided by them, the conquerors passed into a silent world. A strip of trees bereft of fidgety squirrels bordered featureless terrain where nothing obstructed the view of battlers battling. A fine place to have a crisis, if one were so inclined.

The various vessels touched down and vomited out passengers who set about planting flags in the ground and yelling out what they wanted to call that new land. New Verdiat? District 601? The loudest yeller won, they imagined, despite the existence of the setting bible Metatron had compiled over the previous year that covered 36,000 years of history across six continents at a level of detail more commonly applied to the S**** t** H******* franchise despite the pleas of the greater internet to cut that kind of thing out.

The matter of names could be put up to a vote later, though it would not, but first, Professor Carmichael disembarked from the Brave Cumulus itself along with Eten and the tireless Construction laborers, all pushing carts consisting of magnet-laden racks on wheels. Right away they began setting up magnet dominoes where the professor's intricate diagrams described under the protection of vigilant characters who presumably would do something if they came under attack.

Which they did. First, of course, came the sighs and cries. “I could have upsized my lunch order with that money,” for example. “I did overtime just to get Ranuel! Give back my spare time!” That was another example. “At least make a singleplayer game!” The invaders heard as many examples as there were tumbleweeds in Gold and Dynamite and felt as little interest in putting up with them. The deserts there had already been replaced by pools big enough to reenact famous historical naval battles, and the pan-ludic empire possessed similar intentions for the dead world. Second, the sighers and criers appeared. Pale, floating masses of rags from which grasping fingers reached to latch onto what could never be held again approached the interlopers among swirling black winds of malevolent energy, plus they smelled bad.

The invaders responded by unleashing all their weaponry and special abilities to no effect whatsoever. “Oh, right, they're curses and stuff,” Heartful Azalea remembered. “Let's try something scientific. Hey, spirits! I've got problems too! The drop rates are lower than I'd like, for one thing!”

“Yeah! The drop rates!” Manifested curses congregated around Azalea to discuss their woes no matter how much Hot Air Hank attempted to explain how poorly the word “scientific” applied to her gambit. What did that matter, when characters all over began to flatter Heartful Azalea by complaining to ghosts about time-limited materials, stamina recovery rates, ranking events, rapid power creep, and more? So much more. Just an endless expanse of more.

That stratagem succeeded far beyond and contrary to the hopes of people who desired a thrilling scenario wherein the wicked spirits won past the defenders and reached out to touch Professor Carmichael the very moment he managed to establish the magnetically stabilized route to Afterschool Hunters. Instead of that, he finished up without ever realizing the enemy had shown up at all. The immaculately placed magnets repulsed data fragments to open a tunnel through digital reality toward the target game. Through that a gigantic hose appeared. Gigantic for a hose anyway; the hunters who came through reduced themselves to running alongside to direct it instead of riding the thing for a proper spectacle. Even ponies looked down on that hose, sizewise, to say nothing of bigger ponies. It fared well as far as its length though, and a bunch of hunters way back in their own game wheeled the thing out ell by furlong. When their associates in the vanguard felt satisfied, they tugged three times and shouted back through the hole. “Start it up!”

The factualization hose sprayed orange goop all over. It failed to affect the invaders since they were already as real as it got, but the spirits of resentment, spirentments for short, gained a glossy finish that made them look collectable before countless swings of swords and halberds split them apart, lowering their value. The extermination proceeded smoothly enough that the conquerors had leisure to ask the reason behind the gunk's orangeness.

“Blue is the color of dreams. You need a complementary color to make reality.” Mysterious Paranormal Investigator's explanation at least sounded like something he might honestly believe.

But never did the wholesale conquest of a game conclude without trouble, except for Vanilla Stage's, or Styleful Happy!! To the Live's, or its cousin The Battle's, and Divine Providence had no defenses whatsoever, and anyway, then the whale ghost showed up. Bigger than a thousand of your Earth breadboxes and floating through the sky, translucent and glimmering like a soap bubble, that agglomeration of the anguish felt by players who had spent far too much money to be satisfied with Crisis Inclination's duration of service promised to be the greatest challenge. Unlike many promises, perhaps some made by the publisher of Crisis Inclination, that one came true. The whale's uncanny movements as it drifted gave it the ability to dodge attempts to hose it down. The two Afterschool teams yelled at each other as they manipulated the hose angle, factualization material traced great arcs through the sky, and after minutes of that they managed to paint a single orange spot no bigger than a professional basketball player's hand on the thing's underside.

“Well? What about the rest? We can't do anything as it is. It's not polite to leave us unattended like this, as if we were guests invited by accident.” Darlotte Glofal fumed as she harangued the hunters.

“It's not easy, OK? If we could just pin it down for a second, but as long as we're wishing, I want to see a gacha themed around stage magic!”

Gen Suruda's evident candor impressed Darlotte so much that her little-exercised sense of noblesse oblige activated. She normally left that sort of thing to fellow Tasgan princes Hilliarde Feablas and Vinnette Melban. Not Luerre Voine, though. Disappointment may be inevitable, but it is not to be courted. “That must be a trial for you. I suppose there's nothing to be done but put my special ultimate technique to use. Wait here.”

She rushed forward, a whirlwind in Quake form, and leapt when directly underneath the phantasmal whale. Her outstretched right hand struck the painted spot with an open palm which immediately clenched shut. Grabbing the ghost whale did nothing to halt her powerful jump, and Darlotte swung the whale beneath her as she rose even higher to an apex barely visible by the onlookers below. Then both fell. The defeated spirit slammed into the ground with Darlotte sitting atop it, triumphant. “There! The Command Grab of Hero.” Her smug smile awed everyone except Formal Figro, who snapped his fingers.

“How I wish I were that whale,” Castru exclaimed. He wished that very moment not to have said that out loud, but the sounds of cheers, goop splattering all over the still foe, and the subsequent slaughter ensured only a few dozen characters heard him.

Owing to Darlotte Glofal's heroism, Crisis Inclination succumbed, again. Some games were never meant for success. That one you think is good, for instance. The one you expected to receive a sequel years ago. Not looking likely now, is it? Not likely at all.

“Now we wait for the world renewal. Aha ha ha ha!”

“That's right, Frossard. That is what we do. We wait for that MOBA to come out too, and the fighting game, and the C********* G****-type sports compilation, and the board game.” Mr. Linnell shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed at the bright sky. “Is that all we do? Wait for the next game?”

Hyl DeMereanch had the answer to that. “Yes. Why else would our live service mobile games be popular? We're always around. Put some quotation marks around that and it's positively a selling point. We're always around!”

“I don't mind going along with that half-baked slogan. We pay Marketing too much anyway. We're always around!” Mr. Linnell took up the existential declaration first, and it spread around so that every last one of the gathered characters soon chanted it. Doing so was an act of pretty poor taste considering where they were, but it was true for the people who said it.

“What's coming up in the latest TrupinL video? Not much, because I'm just putting this up to tell you guys that I'm getting the stream up now, like now now. Commandment of Hero: Ersatz Struggle. Now!”

It was time. Legal downloads here, daring, Robin Hood-like torrents there, and maybe even a physical store visit or two put the freshest fighting game in the hands of, not hundreds perhaps, but definitely tens of thousands of eager customers. What surprises awaited in the full version?

“We took a lot of the excitement out of it by following the development as closely as we did,” Dennet commented. “Everybody plays as expected so long as you believed Cadmos about not being a shoto. He even told us he would be annoying, so ten out of ten for honesty.” The fighting lounge was hopping, the officers and tourists were playing, and everything turned out about how they thought it would. ISOT Insoft had a history, after all.

His opponent, Dosellian Urapta, adopted a shrugging attitude. He refrained from the deed itself, being mid-match as he was. “It was inevitable given the circumstances. The subtleties are what we want to discover.”

“And the secrets.” Society Page Lasva leaned over the couch. “Do either of you two pretzel-motion jockeys have a comment on these rumors about an unlockable fighter? If you could work in some complaints about modern business practices and how there are fewer secrets compared to the old days, I'll mangle your quotations a little less.”

“What, really?” The answer to Dennet's question turned out to be yes, really, since his interest concerned the unlockable character and not the mangling. Such rumors existed, probably spread by the publisher. How else would anyone know? The lounge's denizens changed their focus away from losing toward perfecting every match in arcade mode, finishing every character's arcade route, inputting codes from other games and fake rumors on the main menu and fighter select screen, racking up multiplayer matches (local, lobby, and ranked), and amassing a heroic amount of time spent in game.

When the unlock happened, none knew how. So what? Some guy on the internet would tell them later. What mattered was big secrets, big rosters, and big character design. A sailor suit! A gun! What else did an officer need? Saphy sneaked onto the roster!

“I don't know who that is. Saphy? Somebody tell me who that is.” Faced with a mystery not already explained in a three-hour video, Luau Lua became agitated, whereas most of the officers contented themselves with being confused. One UR however remained unbefuddled.

“That's amazing! Congratulations on your inclusion, Eksaphite Sailor. Or should we call you Saphy now? Tell us which you prefer.” Cadmos reached into the crowd and pulled out a Common unnoticed by anyone else.

“Saphy,” she said, and so she became known.

“A Common?? A Common????? I'm running out of question marks! This is unbelievable! I'm boycotting this game!” Tinni Ilx ran out of the lounge and a good chunk of disappointed hopefuls went with her, but they came back when they found out Metatron had not finished his bootleg yet. They had a pretty good time even though Dosellian Urapta won the launch tournament playing as Saphy.

“One of those three would have taken it regardless of the character pick,” Reginald assured them loserishly if correctly.

After that, the teams suspended their operations. Some of their clubhouse decorations came to adorn Freegate's lounges while Wruden Calx consolidated the rest in a single gift shop and rest area attached to the thriving balloon ride operation which continued to attract tourists long after Ersatz Struggle's release. Officers made visits as well to look on the data renewal facility and dream of the day the display over the entrance would call for the first DLC fighter. Till it did. Hilliarde Feablas, by the way. But maybe the next one would be [YOUR NAME HERE]. It was Minsie S. Triddel. The next one! No? Back to the giraffe races, then. Teams competed in cranking their giraffes' tails to make their necks grow fastest as part of Magical Menagerie's first vertical race and its least biologically plausible race period. That killed some time at least while they waited for the next DLC wave. And Furious Galaxy: The Controversy Over Rotbart's release. And after that, there would be something for sure.