“How do we get our roles?” one trainee asked.

“Yeah, can we pick any of them?” asked another.

Kelly-Ann checked her tablet before answering.

“Right. This will make more sense to you when we get a chance to talk with General after… all this has been sorted out.” She gestured downwards, keeping one hand on the railing of the balcony. “Don’t worry, you will get a choice.”

A choice that will make only the faction happy, I’m sure.

“How is it that you organise medal rewards from across the factions? Surely one or more people must end up with more than the others?”

Brinn fell back from Yeung-Sung, insinuating him.

Again?

“You again?” Kelly asked.

The rest of the orientation group answered for her, fighting over the rights to hit him with the most impactful comment.

“You think a third of the colony are staying destitute in silence?” said one, probably destined for General.

“Labour is fair here, we all contribute,” stated another proudly, “PM is only doing what should be done everywhere, it’s not that hard.”

Gatherer, guarantee it.

“They don’t need to have it all at the same time, anyway.” Yeung-Sung recognised this trainee as the same woman who asked a question before orientation had begun. “Some of the Admin staff, I heard, is used as ‘banks’”. Kelly-Ann gave a nod, confirming her statement.

“Ha! There you go.”

Enchanter? Admin, maybe? Yeung-Sung thought back through the different hubs. Who am I kidding, nearly all of us will end up as Playtesters.

“It doesn’t really matter anyway,” said a young New Zealander, popping his glasses up with a finger. “We’re family here, we own everything together; the medals; resources; time.” The rest of the group gave him some space. “It’s what Jordan has been preaching all along.”

“Is it now?” Brinn whispered from behind.

Yeung-Sung saw that the only one not wholeheartedly nodding at the young trainee’s speech was Kelly-Ann. She sighed, turning her back to the group and made herself comfortable against the balcony.

Yeung-Sung decided to ask a question for real now that the attention was drawn away from him. “Do we get the option to change?”

He posed the question -not at the group of flared noses in front of him, but towards the Fighter who was bubbling up his vape by the door, staring up at the tarpaulin swelling down beneath the cracked, unfinished roof.

He drew out a mist, Christmas red, from his mouth. Slivers of it condensed like spectral fingers crawling around the glass panel behind him. “They’ll ask you often enough,” he began,

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“We have to change our strategies often. Typically, whenever we have understood how and what the other factions are doing-almost always the Champs. We have to pivot swiftly to take advantage of a counter plan. So, yes, we have to be flexible, but we have plenty of members. There should be something for everyone.”

Brinn emerged again, keeping close to the reverent Fighter.

“You’re right. SO wise, so wise.” He pulled on his beard once and winked to Yeung-Sung, before pointing at the group, saying, “Which is why we all have to stay quiet about The Market’s secrets and stick together.”

With a wistful look down, he added under his breath, “Or else.”

I knew it. He left them and was punished, that’s why he is so bitter. But why even come back?

“Enough!” Kelly-Ann beckoned them towards the balcony. “I think it’s begun.”

Yeung-Sung only caught glimpses of the procession below, but he didn’t need to see it to understand what was going on. He felt it; All three hundred plus members of the ‘Player’s Market’ stomping; The banisters rattling, wobbling the trainee and pushing him further back against the entrance of the Fighter’s Hub.

Perhaps the chat he was invited held some answers. While he opened Airgead, Kelly addressed the group again.

“The gesture we make is the PM emblem, see?” she said, raising an arm.

“You put your phone in your left hand and open raise it to about eleven o’clock in front. Then you support your arm by the elbow underneath, bending your right arm in a right angle. Right arm; right angle, in case you ever get confused.”

“A reference to the communists of old?” Yeung-Sung asked hatefully.

Kelly turned back to him with a hand on her hip. She blinked slowly. “Good ideas…ruined by awful people,” she explained, still not really looking at him at all.

You don’t seem disappointed to not be down there with the rest of them. How did someone so unconvinced of the cause end up in charge of new recruits?

Kelly-Ann finally addressed him, then. “There’s more to it than that; If we want to act like a cohesive unit, we need to practise it in little ways too, don’t we?”

She sounded sluggish all of a sudden. Yeung-Sung felt a pang of guilt for annoying her, even though for the most part it had been Brinn’s fault.

“Listen to the next part,” she said, leaning back on the banister.

The rhythmic chant that he heard before now resonated again all over the abandoned mall, swooping up to the top level in a vulturous caw. He looked around at the ceiling. Even it seemed to feel the pressure of this meeting, coughing down streams of dust. Though, on the hand, it may have just been residue from the Fighter’s vape.

Yeung-Sung turned to him; He was still being harassed by Brinn.

“Man, it’s perfectly safe,” the Fighter assured Brinn, who was shifting his feet on the seemingly wobbly floor.

“I don’t know,” Brinn squealed, sounding all the more ridiculous considering his bulk and overgrown beard.

The Fighter noticed Yeung-Sung watching them and shrugged, going back to his phone and typing something out fiercely in the chat.

That reminds me, I should check the chat.

But the words of the chant around him became clear.

“Profit!” blared through a microphone below.

“MURDER!” replied PM.

“Profit!” he roared again.

“THEFT!”

Static swept through as the man behind the intercom inhaled. “Say it with me now…”

“MURDER PROFITS

TAKE BACK OUR LIVES!”

Even though Yeung-Sung held the chat open in front of his eyes, he was so startled by the extreme words that it took him a moment to realise his phone was stuttering with the amount of spam filling his screen. Out of order, sometimes added to or more often deducted to a single word, the same words plummeted endlessly.

< X> Profit is murder!

< X> Profit is theft!

< X> Take it back

< X> Murder all profits!

< X> Murder profits, take it all back!

< X> Theft!

Yeung-Sung cupped a hand over his mouth. The orientation group was all smiles, repeating the words with increased confidence as the chant went around. Twisting over to the door, the Fighter had hidden himself behind the door but his phone was visible, sputtering out text. Brinn was the only other one who was uncomfortable with this madness. The shouts became ear slitting screams. Yeung-Sung began raising his hands to his ears when…it stopped.

The echoes of it still bounced around his head, but Yeung-Sung felt he needed to know what the hell was going on here. Simon is here? What’s he got to do with them?

As if his thoughts were written on his face, Brinn thrust him along, pushing past the group towards the front so they could both see.