+ + +

"Can we talk about those ass fucks who keep breaking stuff?" A voice called out from the audience.

"Yeah! Someone smashed up all the watermelons in my garden!"

A clamor rose up from the crowd.

"Oh my god, you too?!"

"I fucking hate those people."

"I saw a group of players chasing giant mammoths with clubs and sticks."

"Ban them already! Why are they still even here?!"

@Synbius coughed a few times atop his podium, but the momentum of the conversation had already been stolen from him. The throng did not pay the slightest amount of attention to the grizzly-haired administrator.

Even @Flan interjected herself into the fray.

"Actually, I kicked a few people from the server, but it's barely made a difference," she explained with a frown. "I feel like I'm stumbling across at least one major incident every day, and I'm constantly reviewing moderation reports."

"Then ban more people!"

"Permaban them too!"

"I fucking hate those guys!"

The blond-haired administrator seemed to shrink smaller in the face of such a heated reaction from the staff.

"I..." She faltered.

"Just give all the moderators ban privileges. We'll hunt them down."

"You should've done this a long time ago!!!"

"Why aren't we scouring the user access logs already? Someone vandalized the main 「City」 gates, and if we checked the logs, it'd be easy to figure out who did it. We can get rid of them easily."

"Ban them!"

"Actually—" A user with thick-rimmed glasses spoke up. "I don't think it's as simple as just banning them all. As far as I can tell, we're getting trolls faster than we can deal with them. The server population quadrupled in size in the past month, and we haven't expanded the moderation team to the same degree."

"We can still ban them faster!"

"Well... we probably need more staff."

"Um, I think I know why we're having a troll problem."

"Zero tolerance for trolls! Ban the trolls! Death to the trolls!"

"Dude, are you even serious? We aren't meme-ing here."

"It's not a meme, it's a campaign slogan!"

"Ugh."

"I agree! I don't really care how we get rid of them, but I hate how things are right now!"

"Right! Give us ban privileges! We want them gone!"

"Ban them!"

"Please! Everyone quiet down! And @Blaire, do you think you could repeat what you said?"

A freckled cat girl with fluffy black ears looked startled to have her name called. Apparently, she had already resigned herself to being ignored and forgotten about. After all, she was a relatively new staff member, and probably didn't have anything really constructive to add to the debate.

"M-Me?" She stammered.

The room briefly quieted down as suddenly everyone's attention focused on the feline. She stared blankly back at the audience with her large slitted emerald eyes.

"Well you see—" Blaire started hesitantly.

The girl fiddled with her ears slightly before continuing to speak.

"—I was clicking around the Internet a few days ago, and a friend sent me a couple of public links to 「Q's Server」 posted on a handful of different websites. I saw posts on 4chan, 69.net, and Rule34... although I'm sure there must be more places too. The server is being advertised as a hyper-realistic sandbox where you can do whatever the heck you want... and it's entirely free to play. Supposedly, it's a pretty big hit and lots of people are recommending it..."

The entire room instantly went silent.

Moments later, the crowd burst into an angry clamor.

+ + +

Kuro tugged lightly on Kiu's hand, and the black-haired girl looked up into her friend's deep purple eyes. 

"You doing okay?" He whispered.

Kiu wordlessly stared at the crowd of staff members shouting at each other. She didn't quite know exactly what to say or feel.

She felt numb.

All she could see was people arguing.

It was a lot of information to absorb, and a lot had transpired in a single day. Stumbling across the dead stag had dealt quite a lot to her, and the shock had taken its own toll. Everything almost felt surreal, as if she were dreaming. To a certain extent, it was almost frightening, much in a nightmarish sense. But it wasn't scary like spooky movies or zombies were. Rather, it was the kind of intellectual nightmare where a bunch of coincidental disasters lined up perfectly and caused a person's worst anxieties to surface.

The meeting was crumbling to chaos. 

Kiu had always been the kind of person who mentally reassured herself that 'Everything was going to be okay'. It was also her laissez-faire philosophy to life. She trusted @Synbius and @Flan with doing whatever they thought was best, and she held a lot faith that things would sort itself out. She used to believe that the server was capable of taking care of itself.

All of this was just supposed to be a hobby.

A place to go to in her free time to relax and maybe read a few books.

It wasn't a job nor a company, and pretty much all of the staff were volunteers. Even the moderators could be a little wild sometimes, but Kiu had spent enough time on the Internet to know that one shouldn't have too high expectations. 

It wasn't supposed to be a thing that people stressed about.

There literally wasn't anything complex or sophisticated to it. The server was just a bunch of people who met online and did a bunch of random things in the same place.

At first, it had only been herself and a few friends. Later on, it had grown much bigger.

Who could have imagined putting a bunch of people together could get so...

...complicated.

+ + +

"If I had known it was going to be this bad, I wouldn't have asked you to come," Kuro whispered.

The high school girl shook her head in response. The black witch's hat that she wore swayed in the air.

"...It's fine..." She whispered in response.

Meanwhile, a blue-haired young man with a long cape climbed on top of a chair. He flourished his cloak with a dramatized wave and then addressed the audience, projecting his voice over the steady commotion:

"Friends!" His sharp voice boomed to all corners of the room. "I think it is clear that our leaders have failed us! Many of us have insisted on having stricter rules from the beginning, but @Synbius and @Flan refused to listen to our concerns for months! Now look what is happening to this server? Whose fault is it that the trolls are everywhere? I say it is our own!"

"@Cloud! Get down from there!"

"Let him speak!"

"Hear him out, please."

"I know all of us love @Synbius and @Flan dearly, but the truth is that they're unqualified to deal with this situation. They were excellent leaders back when the server was small, but this isn't the reality we're dealing with today. Your everyday 'dad' and 'college student' don't have the experience to operate a server of this size. In contrast, we have an immensely talented body of staff members. A few of us work in information technology for our day jobs, and we even have the Vice President of the the 「Historica 1900」 server in our ranks."

Kurotora blinked at the reference to him. No one had mentioned this to him at all.

"Why aren't we taking advantage of our assets? Why are we handicapping ourselves? Are @Synbius and @Flan really the right individuals to be leading us? Is there any reason why they're in charge other than the fact they were here first? Why do they hold so many more server privileges than the rest of us?"

Murmurs rippled through the crowd.

"So I say — let us have elections!" The blue-haired man spoke emphatically. "We need a leadership that can lead us through these hard times! Because whatever we're doing right now is not working!"

+ + +

"Cloud!" @Flan struggled to push her way to the front of the crowd.

The sea of people who stood in her way reluctantly parted to give her space.

"Y-You're misunderstanding things! Syn and I agree with you! We're on the same page about stricter rules! It's... It's just that with 「Q」... it's hard... we're trying our best to work together—"

The blue-haired man sighed and brought his hand to his forehead.

"—Flan." He interrupted her, shaking his head. "This is where you're just terribly misguided. Both of you obsess over 「Q」 too much. You're always trying to get permission from the kid, and you'll let things stall if you don't get a response. But let's be real. How old is that girl? Are you really going to let a sixteen year old dictate how you're going to run a server? She's a high school student for crying sake! She doesn't even come to the staff meetings. As far as I can tell, she doesn't even care whatever the fuck happens to the server."

"But—"

"I mean sure, it's fine if she's the mascot and stuff. But seriously, leave the real work to the adults."

"Cloud..."

The blue-haired man turned to face the crowd.

"Elections! We've held votes to decide issues in this assembly before. Why not use those votes to decide our leader?"

"Sounds reasonable."

"I don't like the idea of it..."

"All in favor say aye!"

+ + +

"That's enough." Synbius's deep voice suddenly echoed from the podium.

It was the first thing that he had said in a long while.

For some reason, the older man sounded so tired. 

"Syn! You have to hear us out! We just want—"

"Yeah, I heard." Synbius's voice was frigid. "But let me talk."

"Just—"

"There's something important that I need to share with all of you." He pressed forward, cutting off Cloud's protest.

Synbius lifted a clicker in his hands and pointed it at an empty section of the wall. There was a push of a button, and then a white projector light illuminated the plaster. It took a few seconds, but the blurry image soon resolved into a formal document on the display.

It was some kind of letterhead. 

The paper header bore the seal of the federal government.

"We received this notice from the federal government in our inbox," he spoke.

The audience was totally silent.

"It is an IDPS Audit Notice. Apparently there was a whistleblower who claimed that our server was in violation of international privacy law. Specifically, the allegation was improper handling of user personal data. For instance, retrospectively accessing the database to read private messages between users is a clear violation."

"Fuck..."

"So that time from October...? With the whispering...?"

"Those assholes..."

Synbius remained perfectly neutral and level-headed as he continued to speak.

"There will be an audit conducted by the federal government. As the primary individual involved in the October incident, I will be resigning as staff... permanently... and furthermore be banned from the server for 30 days... to demonstrate that disciplinary action was taken against rogue staff members."

A few isolated gasps in the audience penetrated through the silence.

"This server does not condone user privacy violations according to international law, and accessing the database for user information is strictly forbidden." 

Synbius looked around and made eye contact with a few select members.

"This means, @Alaster91, nobody is allowed to check user access logs or user activity logs without a police warrant. There will not be a witch hunt for 'trolls', as many of you have so kindly put it. All forms of user data are strictly off-limits, and please do not get creative with different ideas of how to hack the system. The audit is not something to joke about."

The oldest staff member in the room sighed.

"I have many fond memories working with you all. Thank you. It's a shame that it has to end this way."

He hesitated one last time.

"Goodbye."

 

∎