I was not asked to write this. I am writing it anyway, which is how you know it's accurate. Here is what the operation looks like from where I'm standing, which is directly on top of the objective, which is also the point.
STATUS OF OPERATIONS
The Garden is no longer a card game with a battlefield attached. It is a battlefield with a card game's ambitions and none of its patience -- ten of us to a side, five points of ground worth holding, and a resource meter that fills faster the more of that ground you actually keep. Team wipe used to end it. It doesn't anymore. You come back at your grave, or at whatever we've captured, and the fight resumes whether you're ready or not. I was assured this is an improvement. I have chosen to believe it.
Six of the twenty-six of us have graduated from theory to something you can actually be killed by. Wave respawns land every thirty seconds, together, so dying two seconds before the wave is a rounding error and dying two seconds after is a small tragedy. I try to arrange my own deaths accordingly. It rarely works.
NEW ASSETS DEPLOYED
The jungle learned to move. The creeps that used to sit at your captured points like furniture now walk out of your graveyard and go looking for ground you don't hold yet -- one per outpost, each finding its own direction without so much as a memo between them. I did not authorize this level of initiative from creatures with no chain of command, but I respect it.
The squads learned to move together. Something about flocks -- birds, or fish, or, I'm told, other ducks -- got taught to our escorts, so a group now closes on a fight looking like a group and not like nineteen individuals who happen to be walking the same direction. There was an incident. See below.
Agent Gary was issued new equipment. His sidearm now hits what he aims it at. Not "usually." Not "if you hold still." What he aims it at. The projectile follows the target the way I follow a lead -- patiently, and without regard for what the target would prefer.
The duplication protocol is fully synchronized. When the impostor known as TYLER teleports, every copy of him now goes with him, landing on the same unlucky soul at once. Previously only the original made the trip, which everyone agrees in hindsight was an oversight and not, as TYLER claims, "a personality choice."
A bar was added to the top of the map so both sides can watch the resource race tick up in real time. It was, briefly, colored wrong -- your own progress rendered in the color of the enemy, which is the kind of mistake that gets a lesser agency's charter revoked. It has been corrected. I am told it was corrected quickly. I was not there for the correction. I have chosen to take credit for it anyway.
INCIDENTS, CONTAINED
Squads flocking so hard around a captured point that nobody actually stood on it -- resolved. One agent per point now holds position and ignores the crowd.
The resource bar reporting your own progress as the enemy's -- resolved. Colors now follow the viewer, correctly, finally.
The draft screen assigning the same hero to every new recruit -- resolved. The assignment is now, and I cannot stress this enough, actually random.
A jungle creep striking an ally standing on their own ground -- resolved. Home turf no longer bites the hand.
OUTSTANDING OBJECTIVES
What follows is not a failure. It is a prioritization decision, made above my pay grade, by people who do not have to stand where I stand. There is still no economy: no gold, no experience, nothing a fallen creep leaves behind except the satisfaction of having fallen. There is still nothing to build, no tower, no wall, nothing that turns a held lane into a held lane that matters beyond the meter at the top of the screen. And there is still no version of this you could hand a stranger and say "play it" -- the pieces work, tested against each other in the dark by twenty bots who have never once complained, but nothing you could put in a stranger's hands and walk away from yet.
A plan exists for teaching us -- all twenty-six, and whoever comes after -- to learn something in one body that's useful in another. Play enough of me, apparently, and you'll know what to do the first time you meet someone else who also carries a ranged shot that doesn't miss. I find this reassuring. I have always suspected I was more generally applicable than I get credit for.
This report is accurate. I would know. I was there for all of it. (I was not there for all of it.)
-- The Duck
This document is authorized. I have been assured of this.
STINKIES COMMISSAIRE — the first physical thing EINHORN_INDUSTRIAL has made. Join the waiting list for the hoodie →
← All posts