RE: The $300,000 Fight-A-Thon! [Round Two: Toyetic!]
06-12-2013, 03:43 AM
”—But my guy’s a total lameoid!” complained T.J. “I wish he’d die already. At least Fries—“
“—Thize—“ corrected Linc between sniffles.
“—At least Thighs got to be all cool and scary before he bit it.”
“Be quiet, TJ,” snapped Coach, tapping his fingers against the arms of his chair. “Be happy with the battler you have.
“There are plenty of other kids,” he added after a thought, “Who don’t have any battlers at all.” This sent Linc into a new wave of hysterics.
“All I’m saying,” says TJ, “Is that he hasn’t done anything. He just snuck around avoiding fights. Can I at least give him a glimpse of the Void next round, so he goes crazy and kills everyone?”
“You should be happy!” said the Coach, glancing uneasily at the phone. “Axys is using strategy. He’ll probably win.”
“He’ll get in second, maybe,” boasted Ron. “But once he fights Ironjaw, he’s going down.”
“Hey Ron, could you do me a favor?” asked TJ, his voice the insincere saccharine of diet cola.
“Yeah, Teej?”
“STOP HITTING YOURSELF.”
But Ron could not stop hitting himself, for he had no motor control over the third arm sprouting out of his mouth. He grappled with it helplessly as TJ laughed.
“Come on, kids,” grunted the Coach, brushing the arm off. “Friends don’t inflict body horror on friends, remember? It’s disrespectful. Settle down for a minute. I’m waiting for a very important pho—“
BRIIIIIIIIIIING!
The Coach put a hand to his chest, closed his eyes, opened them, and moved the hand over to the receiver. As he pulled the phone to his ear the gathered orphans could hear the tension in the squeak of the curly wire.
“Coach here.”
The kids couldn’t hear the voice on the other end, but the shiiiiiiing sound was distinctly audible, ringing throughout the multiverse.
“Yes, that was me,” continued Coach nervously. “I’m, um, I’m running one of those what-do-you-call-thems. A Last Man Standing?”
shiiiiiiiing
“Contestants got away from me. Honestly I’m new at this.”
shiiiiiiiiing
“No, I don’t know how valuable. But if you tell me how valuable I’ll write that down in my notebook and pay you back just as soon as this thing starts—“
shiiiiiiiiing
“Well, I don’t see how that attitude’s going to solve anything. I don’t suppose it makes any difference to you that all the proceeds are going towards a school for orphaned youth?”
shiiiiiiiiing
“Okay, okay, I understand your concern. Yes. But right now I’m cleared out just for the fines on the damage done to my own unit, so if you give me just a couple of multiversal metamonths I’ll be—“
shiiiiiiiiiing
“Alright, alright, no need to get testy. I’ll have the money in an hour. I’m not even going to tell you what I’m going to go through for your peace of mind, but I’ll have the money.”
shiiiiing
“I didn’t mean anything by that. I need to go call someone who will get me the money so I can get you the money, okay?”
shiiiiiiiiiiing
“Yes. I’m hanging up now. Bye.”
The Coach hung up and wiped his brow with a rag.
“Are you gonna be okay?” asked Flo.
The Coach smiled insincerely. “Should be. I just need to make one more phone call and then we can start the next round.”
The Coach picked up the phone again, wincing a bit, as though expecting a bread knife to leap out of the receiver in the general direction of his eye. He consulted a little black book and pressed several keys on the phone.
Several seconds passed, then he put the receiver back down again. “Funny,” he said, addressing the kids in the way he was known to do when actually talking to himself. “Three rings and a click. Well, I guess it makes sense they would change phone numbers pretty oft—“
”You don’t call us,” came a voice from behind another armchair—an armchair one far too expensive to have originally been part of the landscape of the Coach’s house. ”We call you.”
The Coach lowered his eyes. “My mistake,” he said. “I’m new at this. My cousin—“
”We know.”The chair swiveled. The man’s wrinkles all carried gravity, like a map of the roads he had traveled. His general demeanor suggested that he had a chronic illness but had tamed it and taught it some tricks. His suit was ostentatious but tasteful. ”We know many things, Coach. We know about the orphanage and the Realtor, and now your trouble with the Artiste. Not exactly reliving the glory days, no?” He didn’t speak with any sort of accent—the concept of an accent being probably meaningless in this place—but his voice resonated a differently, as though the sound was coming from a layer of mold that had gathered an inch or so below the universe.
“We’re all getting older,” said the Coach. “But you know we also have the Fight-A-Thon going, so, given a little time—“
”I’m glad to hear you’re confident. We’re confident too. We’re confident you can pay us back by, say, the end of the third round. And then make your three hundred thousand on top of that. And should you exceed that goal, well, you may find yourself in a position of great power, and we hope you’ll remember us.”
The Coach nodded. “Sure. Just like that?”
”Just like that. We aren’t so sinister as your movies would make it out to—“
“Are you a bad guy?” asked Ron.
The man glanced in Ron’s direction and offered a paternal smile. ”Yes,” he decided.
“Cool. Me too. When I grow up.”
The man chuckled. ”On that note, come to think of it, maybe I oughtn’t be so ‘good a guy’ in this case. Our confidence is not quite unlimited. So let’s discuss collateral.” The man produced a cigar, considered it, and pocketed it again. ”Not around the children. Secondhand smoke—there’s bad guy, and then there’s bad manners.” He chuckled again.
“I don’t have much,” admitted the Coach.
”That’s relative. As it so happens our organization is also running a… contest. Along the same lines as yours, more or less. We have enough characters to see us through, but we’re aware that things can happen. So we’d like to keep one of yours, just in case.”
The Coach blanched. “Yeah, um, see, the thing is… my kids picked out those contestants, and I think it’d just—“
”You might get him back later. Or we could arrange a trade. No promises, of course. A lot can happen.”
”Yeah, well, uh, the other thing is. Less contestants means less rounds, right? Which means less time to get the money. Doesn’t seem like a smart investment on your part… if you don’t mind me saying so.” The Coach scratched his head nervously.
The man smiled and raised a hand. ”I perfectly understand your concerns. But six rounds should be more than enough if you’re taking proper measures to monetize your battles.” He paused for a moment, affording the Coach an opportunity to attempt to study his face. Then he added, ”A word of advice on that front. You stand to profit off of ad revenues and broadcast subscription fees, true. But the real money is in merchandising, Coach.”
”Merchandising,” the Coach repeated emptily. All this was going a bit over his head.
”Toys. Video games. Glow-in-the-dark comforters and wall posters. Use your imagination. One spoiled rich child is worth five hundred adult viewers, if you know how to catch their interest.”
”Merchandising. Alright.” The Coach nodded a little too eagerly. “So, cards on the table: I give away one of my kids’ contestants and start, uh, merchandising, or I can’t pay back the Artiste, and—“
”—And the Artiste lacks our characteristic restraint and lenity with regards to debt.”
”Yeah.” The Coach turned to T.J. “So, T.J. You still wish Axys were dead?”
T.J. pouted. “I never said that,” he insisted.
* * * * *
The “KFAT: Axys” toy line never got off the ground.
Had it, the cardboard-and-plastic package for the basic model Axys action figure would have come with a handy sheet of Fun Facts, which would have read as follows.
Fun fact! The plural of Ax is Axes. The plural of Axis is also Axes. The plural of Axys is Axesys!*
Fun fact! The past tense of Access is Access. The past tense of Axe is Axed. The past tense of Axys is Axwuz!
Fun fact! It’s a common misconception that Axys was stolen away from his homeworld and given blade arms by scientists. This is not true. By the time the scientists found him, he already had blade arms.
Fun fact! Axys absorbs negative emotions through his “tail-hand” feature. Placing multiple Axesys around your bed will prevent nightmares, bed-wetting, and buyer’s remorse.
*Buy more Axesys to properly simulate Axys’s “Illusory Doppelganger” and “Split-Energy Duplicate” features!
Axys would never get a eulogy, but these toys made it all the way to the focus group phase.
Three versions of the Axys trading card were made for the $300,000 Fight-A-Thon Living Card Game (LCG). The first and most widely tournament-used version's ability reads “Place Axys in the dead pile. Each of your opponents must search your deck for a card called Ironjaw and place it in his dead pile.” This ability has been hotly debated by fans and widely criticized based on the implication that Axys could beat Ironjaw in a fight, which seems laughable in retrospect.
The second card has the following ability: “Multiple Axesys may be placed on the field at one time. During the Recruitment phase, Reduce Axys’ Strength by 1 to lower the cost of any Axys card by one. While there is more than one Axesys on the board, all Axesys have a Defense of zero.” This second Axys is often included in “Jawbreaker” deck builds as an exploit in order to get more copies of the first Axys on the field.
The third Axys is one of the few cards in the otherwise meticulously balanced CCCKFATLCG to occupy the “Never-Used” tier in competitive gaming parlance. The text on the card reads as follows: “If the Coach is on the field, search your deck for all Axesys, go out onto the street, and give them all to the first person you see who is smiling. If you can’t get anyone to smile, try giving them one of your Ironjaws.”
CCCKFATLCG can be bought at your local niche gaming store.
Axys had started thinking long-term. Rampant bloodlust and internal darkness aside, it would do him no good to kill Ironjaw or any of the others. Either way, he would just be a rat running a maze—and that was an undignified position for something that was less a rat and more of a monkey that was also a lion with sword arms and an arm tail. No, he would have to kill the Coach, and probably all those kids, too—there were no two ways about it.
Now, the Coach, as far as he could tell, was powerful—too powerful to contend with in terms of power, as far as that went. But he wasn’t, it seemed, very smart. Axys was very smart, comparatively speaking, which was to say, not very smart, but not not very smart by a long shot. As for the kids, they were kids, which was to say, not very smart at all, which was a notch less very smart than simply not very smart, even.
Axys spent a while crouched between two boxes munching on the negative energy radiating from the other battlers and convincing himself that he was very smart and could absolutely defeat the Coach without relying on anything so disquieting as cooperation. All he needed was a plan.
Without going into too much detail on monkey-lion-thing thought processes, which are utterly alien and beyond the average reader’s ken, the plan eventually came.
And so it was that having glutted himself on the negative energy of his peers, Axys found a nice quiet storage unit (occupied only by several kilos of narcotics maturing surreptitiously under a woolen afghan, and Axys) and made a duplicate of himself, dividing his energy in two. This left him with a fair amount of energy to spare, so he made it a trifecta (for those counting at home, yes, that’s six sword arms). All three Axesys raised their arm tails in unison and continued to gather negative energy.
All that lovely fear and doubt and pain as well as the general despair that leads one to lock all one’s things up in an austere metal room and keeps these storage parks in business. It’s all negative energy. And it was coming through quite clearly, without the interference one usually gets from positive energy cross-patterns—love and good nights’ sleep and the blissful satisfaction of buying 300KFAT merchandise.
By the time the bubble burst on Thize, so to speak, there were one hundred fifty one Axesys occupying the storage unit. Three hundred and two sword arms.
“Uh,” said the Coach, glancing over at the man with whom he’d just struck the bargain detailed above. “I’m not sure which one is yours.”
”The original one,” offered the man, his tone suggesting that he had a busy schedule to keep and no time for tomfoolery, even though time had been suspended entirely.
“The real one,” said the Coach. “Right. I, um. I’m not sure which is the original one is the thing.”
”This is why it’s often considered good form,” said the man, allowing himself a slight smile, ”To label your Axes.”
He meant Axesys.
Time stoppage aside, it took a handful of multiversal metahours to clean up the mess.
Axys’ plan had been to confuse and disorient the Coach with his army of duplicates (polyplicates?) while he killed all the children and escaped the battle. It almost worked except that it was dependent on the word “while” which generally assumes movement through time. And this is why it is never, ever fun to play games with omnipotent types.
After which the remaining contestants, utterly devoid of closure from the previous round, were teleported unceremoniously onto a city street. “Hey, friends,” called the Coach, his enthusiasm rendered a bit insincere by the bags under his eyes. “Welcome to Toyetic. I’m not much for cities, myself, but as they go, Toyetic isn’t bad. Lotta money, water on four sides, nice architecture, far as that goes. Low crime. Big.” He shrugged.
“Anyway, here’s the thing, though: Toyetic stayed out of all the wars. They aren’t on any earthquake lines or hurricane paths. All the monsters have stayed clear of them. So, city planning got a bit lazy.”
The Coach tapped his fist against the wall. A little concrete chipped off, ruining the fresh-out-the-package façade of the city. “The workmanship’s all shoddy. And the buildings fall over, not down, so they knock over more buildings. There are gas mains running under darn near everything, the sewers are full of methane, and the cars, well, let’s just say they weren’t built to go near fire. So be careful with the place.” The Coach attempted to wink and learned in that moment (as did his contestants) that he did not have a good face for winking.
“Anyway, I’ve fitted you all with these neat little satellite watches—“ the Coach paused here for a moment, as though waiting for the contestants, held paralyzed as they were, to look down at the blinking displays wrapped around their wrists. “—Yeah, these little watches that’ll lead you to six safehouses where—oh, right, yeah, six. So Axys is gone for now. He might come back later. I don’t think so, really. But anyway. I’m gonna be scattering you all over, but these safehouses are full of cool stuff for you. Weapons, vehicles, robot suits, different outfits for you to wear. All really neat moveable-parts choking-hazard plastic kinda stuff. Well, these aren’t plastic, they’re real. You can use them to kill each other or just play around.
“You’ve been doing okay so far.” If the Coach had ever been a good motivator he was not now showing it. His weakness—offset by his position of absolute power over the contestants—was palpable. “Keep at it. We’ll make it through this.” It sounded like a prayer, which was ridiculous, because who did the Coach have to pray to?
“And remember we’re doing this for the kids.” The Coach rotated out of existence into elsewhere, and the remaining contestants found themselves elsewhere as well.
“—Thize—“ corrected Linc between sniffles.
“—At least Thighs got to be all cool and scary before he bit it.”
“Be quiet, TJ,” snapped Coach, tapping his fingers against the arms of his chair. “Be happy with the battler you have.
“There are plenty of other kids,” he added after a thought, “Who don’t have any battlers at all.” This sent Linc into a new wave of hysterics.
“All I’m saying,” says TJ, “Is that he hasn’t done anything. He just snuck around avoiding fights. Can I at least give him a glimpse of the Void next round, so he goes crazy and kills everyone?”
“You should be happy!” said the Coach, glancing uneasily at the phone. “Axys is using strategy. He’ll probably win.”
“He’ll get in second, maybe,” boasted Ron. “But once he fights Ironjaw, he’s going down.”
“Hey Ron, could you do me a favor?” asked TJ, his voice the insincere saccharine of diet cola.
“Yeah, Teej?”
“STOP HITTING YOURSELF.”
But Ron could not stop hitting himself, for he had no motor control over the third arm sprouting out of his mouth. He grappled with it helplessly as TJ laughed.
“Come on, kids,” grunted the Coach, brushing the arm off. “Friends don’t inflict body horror on friends, remember? It’s disrespectful. Settle down for a minute. I’m waiting for a very important pho—“
BRIIIIIIIIIIING!
The Coach put a hand to his chest, closed his eyes, opened them, and moved the hand over to the receiver. As he pulled the phone to his ear the gathered orphans could hear the tension in the squeak of the curly wire.
“Coach here.”
The kids couldn’t hear the voice on the other end, but the shiiiiiiing sound was distinctly audible, ringing throughout the multiverse.
“Yes, that was me,” continued Coach nervously. “I’m, um, I’m running one of those what-do-you-call-thems. A Last Man Standing?”
shiiiiiiiing
“Contestants got away from me. Honestly I’m new at this.”
shiiiiiiiiing
“No, I don’t know how valuable. But if you tell me how valuable I’ll write that down in my notebook and pay you back just as soon as this thing starts—“
shiiiiiiiiing
“Well, I don’t see how that attitude’s going to solve anything. I don’t suppose it makes any difference to you that all the proceeds are going towards a school for orphaned youth?”
shiiiiiiiiing
“Okay, okay, I understand your concern. Yes. But right now I’m cleared out just for the fines on the damage done to my own unit, so if you give me just a couple of multiversal metamonths I’ll be—“
shiiiiiiiiiing
“Alright, alright, no need to get testy. I’ll have the money in an hour. I’m not even going to tell you what I’m going to go through for your peace of mind, but I’ll have the money.”
shiiiiing
“I didn’t mean anything by that. I need to go call someone who will get me the money so I can get you the money, okay?”
shiiiiiiiiiiing
“Yes. I’m hanging up now. Bye.”
The Coach hung up and wiped his brow with a rag.
“Are you gonna be okay?” asked Flo.
The Coach smiled insincerely. “Should be. I just need to make one more phone call and then we can start the next round.”
The Coach picked up the phone again, wincing a bit, as though expecting a bread knife to leap out of the receiver in the general direction of his eye. He consulted a little black book and pressed several keys on the phone.
Several seconds passed, then he put the receiver back down again. “Funny,” he said, addressing the kids in the way he was known to do when actually talking to himself. “Three rings and a click. Well, I guess it makes sense they would change phone numbers pretty oft—“
”You don’t call us,” came a voice from behind another armchair—an armchair one far too expensive to have originally been part of the landscape of the Coach’s house. ”We call you.”
The Coach lowered his eyes. “My mistake,” he said. “I’m new at this. My cousin—“
”We know.”The chair swiveled. The man’s wrinkles all carried gravity, like a map of the roads he had traveled. His general demeanor suggested that he had a chronic illness but had tamed it and taught it some tricks. His suit was ostentatious but tasteful. ”We know many things, Coach. We know about the orphanage and the Realtor, and now your trouble with the Artiste. Not exactly reliving the glory days, no?” He didn’t speak with any sort of accent—the concept of an accent being probably meaningless in this place—but his voice resonated a differently, as though the sound was coming from a layer of mold that had gathered an inch or so below the universe.
“We’re all getting older,” said the Coach. “But you know we also have the Fight-A-Thon going, so, given a little time—“
”I’m glad to hear you’re confident. We’re confident too. We’re confident you can pay us back by, say, the end of the third round. And then make your three hundred thousand on top of that. And should you exceed that goal, well, you may find yourself in a position of great power, and we hope you’ll remember us.”
The Coach nodded. “Sure. Just like that?”
”Just like that. We aren’t so sinister as your movies would make it out to—“
“Are you a bad guy?” asked Ron.
The man glanced in Ron’s direction and offered a paternal smile. ”Yes,” he decided.
“Cool. Me too. When I grow up.”
The man chuckled. ”On that note, come to think of it, maybe I oughtn’t be so ‘good a guy’ in this case. Our confidence is not quite unlimited. So let’s discuss collateral.” The man produced a cigar, considered it, and pocketed it again. ”Not around the children. Secondhand smoke—there’s bad guy, and then there’s bad manners.” He chuckled again.
“I don’t have much,” admitted the Coach.
”That’s relative. As it so happens our organization is also running a… contest. Along the same lines as yours, more or less. We have enough characters to see us through, but we’re aware that things can happen. So we’d like to keep one of yours, just in case.”
The Coach blanched. “Yeah, um, see, the thing is… my kids picked out those contestants, and I think it’d just—“
”You might get him back later. Or we could arrange a trade. No promises, of course. A lot can happen.”
”Yeah, well, uh, the other thing is. Less contestants means less rounds, right? Which means less time to get the money. Doesn’t seem like a smart investment on your part… if you don’t mind me saying so.” The Coach scratched his head nervously.
The man smiled and raised a hand. ”I perfectly understand your concerns. But six rounds should be more than enough if you’re taking proper measures to monetize your battles.” He paused for a moment, affording the Coach an opportunity to attempt to study his face. Then he added, ”A word of advice on that front. You stand to profit off of ad revenues and broadcast subscription fees, true. But the real money is in merchandising, Coach.”
”Merchandising,” the Coach repeated emptily. All this was going a bit over his head.
”Toys. Video games. Glow-in-the-dark comforters and wall posters. Use your imagination. One spoiled rich child is worth five hundred adult viewers, if you know how to catch their interest.”
”Merchandising. Alright.” The Coach nodded a little too eagerly. “So, cards on the table: I give away one of my kids’ contestants and start, uh, merchandising, or I can’t pay back the Artiste, and—“
”—And the Artiste lacks our characteristic restraint and lenity with regards to debt.”
”Yeah.” The Coach turned to T.J. “So, T.J. You still wish Axys were dead?”
T.J. pouted. “I never said that,” he insisted.
* * * * *
The “KFAT: Axys” toy line never got off the ground.
Had it, the cardboard-and-plastic package for the basic model Axys action figure would have come with a handy sheet of Fun Facts, which would have read as follows.
Fun fact! The plural of Ax is Axes. The plural of Axis is also Axes. The plural of Axys is Axesys!*
Fun fact! The past tense of Access is Access. The past tense of Axe is Axed. The past tense of Axys is Axwuz!
Fun fact! It’s a common misconception that Axys was stolen away from his homeworld and given blade arms by scientists. This is not true. By the time the scientists found him, he already had blade arms.
Fun fact! Axys absorbs negative emotions through his “tail-hand” feature. Placing multiple Axesys around your bed will prevent nightmares, bed-wetting, and buyer’s remorse.
*Buy more Axesys to properly simulate Axys’s “Illusory Doppelganger” and “Split-Energy Duplicate” features!
Axys would never get a eulogy, but these toys made it all the way to the focus group phase.
Three versions of the Axys trading card were made for the $300,000 Fight-A-Thon Living Card Game (LCG). The first and most widely tournament-used version's ability reads “Place Axys in the dead pile. Each of your opponents must search your deck for a card called Ironjaw and place it in his dead pile.” This ability has been hotly debated by fans and widely criticized based on the implication that Axys could beat Ironjaw in a fight, which seems laughable in retrospect.
The second card has the following ability: “Multiple Axesys may be placed on the field at one time. During the Recruitment phase, Reduce Axys’ Strength by 1 to lower the cost of any Axys card by one. While there is more than one Axesys on the board, all Axesys have a Defense of zero.” This second Axys is often included in “Jawbreaker” deck builds as an exploit in order to get more copies of the first Axys on the field.
The third Axys is one of the few cards in the otherwise meticulously balanced CCCKFATLCG to occupy the “Never-Used” tier in competitive gaming parlance. The text on the card reads as follows: “If the Coach is on the field, search your deck for all Axesys, go out onto the street, and give them all to the first person you see who is smiling. If you can’t get anyone to smile, try giving them one of your Ironjaws.”
CCCKFATLCG can be bought at your local niche gaming store.
Axys had started thinking long-term. Rampant bloodlust and internal darkness aside, it would do him no good to kill Ironjaw or any of the others. Either way, he would just be a rat running a maze—and that was an undignified position for something that was less a rat and more of a monkey that was also a lion with sword arms and an arm tail. No, he would have to kill the Coach, and probably all those kids, too—there were no two ways about it.
Now, the Coach, as far as he could tell, was powerful—too powerful to contend with in terms of power, as far as that went. But he wasn’t, it seemed, very smart. Axys was very smart, comparatively speaking, which was to say, not very smart, but not not very smart by a long shot. As for the kids, they were kids, which was to say, not very smart at all, which was a notch less very smart than simply not very smart, even.
Axys spent a while crouched between two boxes munching on the negative energy radiating from the other battlers and convincing himself that he was very smart and could absolutely defeat the Coach without relying on anything so disquieting as cooperation. All he needed was a plan.
Without going into too much detail on monkey-lion-thing thought processes, which are utterly alien and beyond the average reader’s ken, the plan eventually came.
And so it was that having glutted himself on the negative energy of his peers, Axys found a nice quiet storage unit (occupied only by several kilos of narcotics maturing surreptitiously under a woolen afghan, and Axys) and made a duplicate of himself, dividing his energy in two. This left him with a fair amount of energy to spare, so he made it a trifecta (for those counting at home, yes, that’s six sword arms). All three Axesys raised their arm tails in unison and continued to gather negative energy.
All that lovely fear and doubt and pain as well as the general despair that leads one to lock all one’s things up in an austere metal room and keeps these storage parks in business. It’s all negative energy. And it was coming through quite clearly, without the interference one usually gets from positive energy cross-patterns—love and good nights’ sleep and the blissful satisfaction of buying 300KFAT merchandise.
By the time the bubble burst on Thize, so to speak, there were one hundred fifty one Axesys occupying the storage unit. Three hundred and two sword arms.
“Uh,” said the Coach, glancing over at the man with whom he’d just struck the bargain detailed above. “I’m not sure which one is yours.”
”The original one,” offered the man, his tone suggesting that he had a busy schedule to keep and no time for tomfoolery, even though time had been suspended entirely.
“The real one,” said the Coach. “Right. I, um. I’m not sure which is the original one is the thing.”
”This is why it’s often considered good form,” said the man, allowing himself a slight smile, ”To label your Axes.”
He meant Axesys.
Time stoppage aside, it took a handful of multiversal metahours to clean up the mess.
Axys’ plan had been to confuse and disorient the Coach with his army of duplicates (polyplicates?) while he killed all the children and escaped the battle. It almost worked except that it was dependent on the word “while” which generally assumes movement through time. And this is why it is never, ever fun to play games with omnipotent types.
After which the remaining contestants, utterly devoid of closure from the previous round, were teleported unceremoniously onto a city street. “Hey, friends,” called the Coach, his enthusiasm rendered a bit insincere by the bags under his eyes. “Welcome to Toyetic. I’m not much for cities, myself, but as they go, Toyetic isn’t bad. Lotta money, water on four sides, nice architecture, far as that goes. Low crime. Big.” He shrugged.
“Anyway, here’s the thing, though: Toyetic stayed out of all the wars. They aren’t on any earthquake lines or hurricane paths. All the monsters have stayed clear of them. So, city planning got a bit lazy.”
The Coach tapped his fist against the wall. A little concrete chipped off, ruining the fresh-out-the-package façade of the city. “The workmanship’s all shoddy. And the buildings fall over, not down, so they knock over more buildings. There are gas mains running under darn near everything, the sewers are full of methane, and the cars, well, let’s just say they weren’t built to go near fire. So be careful with the place.” The Coach attempted to wink and learned in that moment (as did his contestants) that he did not have a good face for winking.
“Anyway, I’ve fitted you all with these neat little satellite watches—“ the Coach paused here for a moment, as though waiting for the contestants, held paralyzed as they were, to look down at the blinking displays wrapped around their wrists. “—Yeah, these little watches that’ll lead you to six safehouses where—oh, right, yeah, six. So Axys is gone for now. He might come back later. I don’t think so, really. But anyway. I’m gonna be scattering you all over, but these safehouses are full of cool stuff for you. Weapons, vehicles, robot suits, different outfits for you to wear. All really neat moveable-parts choking-hazard plastic kinda stuff. Well, these aren’t plastic, they’re real. You can use them to kill each other or just play around.
“You’ve been doing okay so far.” If the Coach had ever been a good motivator he was not now showing it. His weakness—offset by his position of absolute power over the contestants—was palpable. “Keep at it. We’ll make it through this.” It sounded like a prayer, which was ridiculous, because who did the Coach have to pray to?
“And remember we’re doing this for the kids.” The Coach rotated out of existence into elsewhere, and the remaining contestants found themselves elsewhere as well.