Do All That Is Human, Then Await Heaven
The image I had built as Märchen was, on any ordinary day, a natural-born clown. Not a tasteful one, either. A clown with the screws genuinely loose.
Of course, when I actually locked in on a game, I could look more serious and more striking than anyone. Those moments were simply rare enough that they never quite scraped the clown off the brand. The precise definition, if anyone wanted it, was this: a clown by nature, who very occasionally remembered how to be cool.
So when I announced that I would give my thoughts on receiving a Silver Button in place of the principal's address, the viewers expected exactly what they always got. Not a scrap of sincerity. Pure nonsense. And why wouldn't they? The segment had started out of nowhere. An online bootleg Silver Button award ceremony was already a faintly unhinged idea, and they had just watched me blow a hundred and fifty dollars in the name of putting an outfit together, followed by certificate copy that was self-praise in a nicer font. Right up until that moment, I had been performing the clown at full volume.
I betrayed every one of those expectations, cleanly. All the way to the last second, I simply said what I had to say, plain and unadorned.
Had I ever held a mood like that for so long? I had, once, at the very end of the vlog I filmed for the hundred-thousand-subscriber celebration. But that, too, had been a blink. Less than a minute, and the moment sank without a trace beneath the clown I had spent so long building. It was too short to stick in anyone's head, which was why a Märchen who murmured out a fairly long speech in a calm, level voice could only feel profoundly strange.
Some people, confronted with an unfamiliar Märchen, simply panicked and yelled to give them back the little brat they knew. Some found that unfamiliar Märchen charming, which is to say they felt the gap moe I never shut up about. And some watched the unfamiliar Märchen and still refused to let their guard down.
Then there were the ones who had been with me a long while. They simply listened to the speech, and they were moved. The sincerity arrived whole. Just as I had hoped.
What none of them knew was that I had never planned to give a speech at all.
"All right! The last order of morning assembly is the school anthem, isn't it?"
They didn't know that the item scheduled after the bootleg Silver Button ceremony was not remarks of any kind, but the singing of the school song. And unfortunately for everyone involved, my memory was not bad enough to forget that a school anthem existed while I was busy talking.
"If the Märchen broadcast has a school anthem, it can only be this! Pig-Dog LIFE!"
And of all the songs in the world, the one I had picked for the anthem happened to be my own original.
"Everyone together! One, two, three, four!"
And so the ending, inevitably, was Märchen being Märchen.
Once the assembly had wrapped without incident, I flung the donations wide open again, and the viewers, as if they had been waiting for exactly that, started spending money to lodge their reviews.
Our viewers, it seemed, were not especially fond of the school-anthem portion. But even so....
"Okay, but the last part of morning assembly being the school anthem is basically the law. ...And closing the whole thing on my own original was pretty romantic, wasn't it?"
The mood of the track was a little unfortunate, granted, but that couldn't be helped. Officially, my only original was still Pig-Dog LIFE.
...They were not with me on this.
"Anyway, the assembly content ends here!"
With this much footage, one respectable YouTube video was more or less guaranteed.
"Raider's maintenance window is... Oh, good. They didn't extend it again!"
...They wouldn't slap another extension on it five minutes before it ended, right?
Thankfully, the nightmare of a maintenance extension five minutes out never arrived. And so I, Märchen, guardian of humanity, was linked once more to the world of Raider after our brief separation.
"I can't believe six hours could feel this long...."
I said it while drawing in battlefield air I hadn't breathed for six hours, and it felt right. I had a bootleg Silver Button. I had received a congratulations with a distinctly metaverse flavor. And the extended maintenance had lasted only an hour. This was a day when things were going to work.
"All right, then. Let's go meet a new comrade!"
A day like this was the single best day to pull.
Was there any idiom in the world that captured gacha more perfectly than this one?
In the end, whether a banner prospers or collapses is not in human hands. It rests with heaven. Or rather, with a clump of code. Even so, gacha was also a thing where a clever plan could claw back a little extra value, bad luck notwithstanding.
Take an example. There is a person who, dead set on maxing Tequiel, slammed six hundred pulls into the character banner while the weapon banner got a tasting menu of exactly ten, leaving the weapon roster in a state of famine beside the character roster. On the current banner, this person intends to walk away with three featured characters and one featured weapon. What, then, is the most efficient way to pull? They need more featured characters, so should they pull the character banner?
Everyone will have their own answer. The answer according to Teacher Märchen, gacha genius, is this: spin the weapon banner until the featured weapon appears, and the instant it does, move to the featured character banner. Done that way, even a miss still restocks the weapon roster to some degree, and you come out ahead.
Wringing the maximum efficiency out of a limited currency. If the part of that idiom about doing all that a human being ought to do had a summit, an absolute outer limit, wasn't this it?
"Right. The plan was flawless. I'm sure of it...."
Three hundred pulls on the weapon banner. One hundred on the character banner. Four hundred pulls in all, and this is what came of them.
◈ Off-Banner Weapon
◈ Off-Banner Weapon
◈ Featured Weapon
◈ Featured Character
And both off-banner weapons were duplicates. Both of them were bows. Which is to say that Yurie's weapon had just reached two dupes.
Wow! Three more and it'd be a perfect Yurie!
"Haa...."
I lifted my eyes to the ceiling and quietly looked reality in the face.
"I'm screwed...."
I had drawn up a clever gacha plan, and heaven had abandoned me again. There was no arguing with that. Had the five-stars come out well? They had not. The expected value across four hundred pulls was eight five-stars, and I had gotten half of that. I had pulled like filth. Then had I at least landed the things that actually mattered? No. Not that either.
The only comfort was that it still beat the previous catastrophe: three hundred and ten pulls, zero featured, seven off-banners, five duplicates. Not that ranking two piles of acorns by height meant anything.
...What was this? Was real life going well, with the gacha griefing me as the price? Or did Raider and I simply not fit? My batting average was awful. I felt sick about it. This particular sickness, the one that showed up every time a banner ruined me, never got familiar no matter how many times I caught it.
I had thought today was a day when things would work.
I want to Bitik...! I want to see three featured units burst out of a single ten-pull...!!
"How did Märchen, gacha genius, fall this far...?"
I let out a long, deep sigh.
"...I'll just exchange it at pity. If I keep pulling on a day like this to save the pity, I really will crash and burn."
If I wanted to be ready for the Afaneru banner that would arrive someday, I needed to hoard pity mileage as hard as I could.... No. Positive thoughts. Think positive.
"Still, it's getting a little better, bit by bit! If it keeps improving like this, then someday even I'll have a day when I Bitik in Raider, right?"
Easy. Hold, you mustache of the purge-genius I keep inside me.... A purge has to be done with care...!