Sofia, a young representative of the Vitric’s augmented reality development team, hosts a gaming fair at ERA. Skyber, in her human girl Clementine disguise, comes by and is impressed by the technology. She challenges Nathaniel (ex-bandit from the Frontier) to an in-game brawl and obviously wins, though admires Nathaniel’s tenacity.
Skyber, reflecting on the uselessness of the guards and the inability of students to retaliate to threats at the Rockathon, forms a tournament of strength and skill amongst her trusted patrons and employees. Brown, Kay, Leaf, Fraise, Carrie, Saki, Lucas, Riolfie, Kai, Cassie, Tori, Pearl, Ernst, Jesse, Nathaniel, Sybil, and an unknown 16th contestant sign up for the grand championship prize: Whatever They Want™.
To do this, Skyber commandeer’s Sofia’s AR machine, and reconfigures it with Nova, imbuing it with additional powers to handle anomalous energy. This allows her to set up the Machine such that it projects realistic simulations without the need for headsets, changes the physical landscape of the area within its simulation and resets everything back to normal after it concludes, and even programs in user-generated items known as Wildcards, which grant the user(s) extra special abilities considered normally impossible to attain or wield in real life.
Days before the tournament begins, however, Ernst becomes distrustful of Skyber’s true intentions, and spies on multiple participants, including Brown, Kai, Fraise, and even Skyber herself. They destroy his spy drones, though hostility grows between the players and their host. Brown is especially concerned, as Ernst deducing Skyber’s selfish disregard for human moralities seeds doubt into his head.
Kay goes around inviting loads of people into the Tournament, as both spectators and participants.
The tournament commences, with Round 1 divided up into 8 separate 1v1 matchups, all with different goals and objectives. Also, players are allowed to choose 1 out of 3 Wildcards before the match begins to help them in their fight:
- Match 1 - Brown vs. Leaf: Pin the opponent in one place for ten seconds. Brown picks a card giving him a rusty pipe, and Leaf picks an increased freezing speed card. Brown rushes the win condition, pinning Leaf down. Leaf freezes Brown’s arm and bites the other to try to get free, but is headbutted unconscious. Brown wins.
- Match 2 - Pearl vs. Kay Knockout: first to knock their opponent over the waterfall wins. Pearl picks an agility card. Knockout picks a card allowing her to extend her attack range using psychokinesis. The cards are randomly switched for this round. Knockout is able to adapt way more easily, and uses her voltage to overwhelm and manhandle Pearl off the cliff. Knockout wins.
- Match 3 - Carrie vs. Nathaniel: defeat your opponent using the power of Imagination (limited to one item/combatant at a time.) Carrie picks an Eye Bat card that can see opponents through walls. Nathaniel picks a gymnastics card. Carrie manifests a black cat that transforms into a Lovecraftian monster. Carrie wins. Nathaniel develops a fear of black cats. During Intermission, Ernst finds Skyber and Nova playtesting the machine, and is invited to spar with the two. He wins, and after their fun, Ernst begins to question why Vitric came to bring this technology to ERA, distrusting the place because of his troubled past with them. Despite Skyber using the machine for her own entertainment, Ernst urges her to cancel the Tournament, and leaves on that note.
- Match 4 - Tori vs. Lucas: convince The Judge why you should win this fight. Lucas picks a frying pan. Tori picks a hacksaw. Cases may only be presented when the player holds the designated microphone, and the opponent is timed out for 15 seconds before being allowed to fight for the microphone. The judge finds Tori “unoriginal”, with “ashy knees and no rizz”, but finds Lucas Guilty of “being homeless, getting his J’s dirty, showing up drunk to the courtroom, and being White.” Tori wins. Nathaniel sneaks into the arena between matches upon Ernst’s request, tampering with the machine by placing some device into the wires. Kai watches him from afar.
- Match 5 - Kai vs Riolfie: rescue the “Princess” (Nova) from the opponent. Holding the princess nullifies all abilities and cards. Kai chooses to make shapes from glass to any material he last touched. Riolfie chooses to disguise as any inanimate object. Kai unleashes the rizz on Nova, and much to Cassie’s envy, Kai wins.
- Match 6 - Ernst vs. Cassie: find the needle (Pearl dressed up as a rabbit) in the haystack (Amazonian rainforest), then return it to the starting platform. Ernst picks a small drone to fulfill any one task at a time. Cassie chooses a berserker’s rage, only applicable for unarmed attacks. Ernst gets the upper hand a few times, but Cassie, being way too stubborn to lose, literally throws the finish platform on top of Pearl in her Berserker’s Rage. Cassie wins.
- Match 7 - Sybil vs. Jesse: first to pop each of the opponent’s 3 balloons wins. Sybil chooses to swim in the air, Jesse gets to pickpocket another wildcard. Jesse acts too impulsively, and Sybil is too agile for her to reach. Sybil ends up turning off her card, falling on top of Jesse and crushing the rest of her balloons. Sybil wins.
- Match 8 - Fraise Big Green Bastard vs. ???: Electi Roulette. The 16th contestant finally reveals herself as none other than Gyssabel. She chooses a card allowing her to backstab with her wand, but Fraise counterpicks with wooden body armor. The AR machine glitches halfway through the fight (possibly due to Nathaniel’s tampering), throwing in Electi abilities from unregistered spectators like Lily, Artemis, and Lemonlord. The machine then randomly sets Skyber’s amplification ability to Fraise, overwhelming Gys with a certain defeat. The witch runs away. Nobody likes this outcome.
Round 1 ends abruptly and frustratingly. Hostility grows amongst participants and spectators alike. While Skyber spends the break troubleshooting what went wrong. Nova is unable to maintain optimism seeing the students and their friends repeat history, by taking all the fun out of what was supposed to be a game and using it for violence and drama, leaving Skyber’s side for the first time.
Nova visits Hugo, who is still secluded in his dorm after the events of the recent Piano Mishap. They console him, assuring that his intentions were pure, but simply got caught on the wrong side of the law, at the wrong place and time. They mention that Skyber has “always put the pressure of perfection on people” for as long as they knew her, causing many to be ostracized, overwhelmed, or scarred. They advise that despite his mistake, he should stop beating himself up, reminding him of his bravery in the face of adversity.
Brown and Kay, Skyber’s most trusted employees, storm her office (which she had burned to the ground (along with her shirt) out of frustration) and demand her to shut the Machine down, warning the problems plaguing the Tournament are becoming too rampant to control. Skyber refuses, claiming those two were precisely the ones she made this whole tournament for, and leads to a rather unproductive screaming match between the three. Brown quiet-quits after the confrontation, only participating to fulfill his obligation. Kay settles for an agreeable compromise to halt the Tournament until absolutely certain nothing is wrong.
Nathaniel, thoroughly emasculated, humiliated, and neglected at this point, takes his frustrations out on Kay, who is working at the local coffee shop. In his misogynist, racist toxic hyper-masculine tantrum, he picks a fight for real, and manages to crack Kay’s gem, putting her out of commission from fighting in the Tournament anymore. However, he promptly gets curb-stomped after this, and immediately arrested.
Sofia and Fraise talk about the Tournament and the Machine, believing Skyber’s influence is what’s causing such harmful effects on the Arena. However, Sofia finds the equipment used to tamper with the Machine and removes it, letting Fraise return to continue his Vice President duties while she sets off to investigate.
With the Machine debugged (literally), the glitches stop for now, Kay’s gem heals, and the Tournament is able to continue. However, Sofia is never seen after Fraise’s last exchange…
Round 2 commences, letting players stack their first cards with new ones, more powerful than the last selection. This time, the goals are even more wild, and contestants are paired in 2v2 matches:
- Match 9 - Brown and Knockout vs. Big Green Bastard and Carrie: Wacky Races. First team to drive their truck through a set of obstacles or to prevent the other team’s vehicle from finishing wins. BGB carries an early lead until Brown and Knockout figure out how to drive, but Carrie summons a leviathan in hopes of taking everyone out and winning for herself, though she ends up destroying her truck. Brown and Knockout win by default. Carrie mysteriously falls into a deep coma afterwards.
- Match 10 - Kai and Cassie vs. Sybil and Tori: Capture the Flag, but the Floor is Lava! First team to capture the opponents’ flag and return it to their base wins. However, each base is surrounded by an ocean of lava, and each teammate is bound together by a virtual rubber band. After a long and arduous slog with little to no progress gained by either party, Kai and Cassie decide none of this is worth it in a melodramatic fashion, prompting Sybil to join them in a joined suicide and all jump into the lava, except Tori. Skyber disqualifies everyone except Tori, meaning she advances by default.
Nathaniel is eventually let out of the holding cells, though is now forced to work community service for the foreseeable future.
Sean is also let out around this time, and suffers the same fate as Nathaniel. After their match, Kai and Cassie suddenly disappear from the public eye. It had been noticed by many that since their romantic relationship had been made official, they’d become more aloof, disengaged, and/or downright hostile towards their so-called friends. However, the Tournament had apparently been the final straw, as the morning after, it was rumored they had managed to escape the ERA grounds, never to look back again.
Round 3 is the Loser Brackets, with participants from Round 1 making a return to the fighting ring.
- Match 11 - Pearl vs. Nathaniel: Final Destination (with items). A Magic Wish Button appears in the middle of the stage, promising to grant any wish for the players to help aid in their battle within reason. However, Pearl is too crazy and Nathaniel is too shortsighted to think of anything rational to wish for, making the button consistently punish them for their stupidity instead, before despawning entirely. Pearl and Nathaniel tire themselves out and collapse off the shrinking stage, though Nathaniel just happens to fall off first. Pearl wins (by default, for the third round in a row…)
- Match 12 - Ernst vs. Gyssabel: Item Swap. Both players’ loadouts are swapped with each other, leading to a battle of wits–street smarts vs. book smarts. Ernst proves to outsmart the witch, and defeats her with her own magic. Again, nobody likes this outcome, and Skyber is left even more hated.
Nathaniel is left even more humiliated than before, though Kay takes pity on him and invites him to talk about his feelings. His toxic masculinity doesn’t let him, but the booze definitely does. Deep down, he wants to help people, but his bandit lifestyle set him in his ways, and feels only violence is the answer. Kay tells him to knock it off.
- Match 13 - Leaf vs. Lucas: Electi Roulette. Knock your opponent off the giant roulette wheel. Lucas and Leaf complain about their completely situational and unfair matchups, leaving both begrudgingly spamming and depending on RNG to cheese a win. Lucas, unfortunately, cheeses harder, leaving a very, very bitter Leaf to stew in his defeat.
The Tournament had been brought to Merla’s attention, who immediately told their uncle Korbin. Brown, who had told Merla in confidence to begin with, kept this a secret from Skyber, out of one last good grace to a former friend. Off screen, Merla takes Leaf on her sabbatical back to their hometown, Feather’s Peak, and were never heard from since.
Abigail and Jesse also go missing after this Tournament. It is unclear whether Jesse told her mother about the event, or if they had more personal matters to attend to elsewhere.
Soon after, Saki mysteriously disappears and Tori has been arrested for various crimes throughout her history at ERA, and relocated to an Electi penitentiary. Brown’s roommate, Ray, had also graduated, leaving his dorm empty except for him. This, with the mental effects of the Tournament, his perceived image of Skyber, all of his friends betraying and leaving him, and the past story arc still haunting him, all send Brown on a deep, downward mental spiral of self-loathing and depression, lasting months.
Carrie still doesn’t wake from her coma, which prompts her family lawyer, Jason Whitman, to visit her in the medical ward and serve Skyber a lawsuit after thoroughly investigating the students and staff. Skyber narrowly avoids her legal trouble through sheer intimidation.
Sometime during these days, Nova returns with Skyber, having on-and-off talks about the situation, realizing they really only have each other. With everything slowing down, they begin to make amends.
Public outcry reaches its peak in the worst possible time. With melodramatic relationship feuds, letting a child fight and get traumatized, missing contestants, the Guard Force close to discovering the Underground, and now the Machine glitching more than ever, Skyber has no choice but to shut everything down, and lock up the Wildcard Arena, putting an indefinite hiatus on the Tournament, though not before causing irreparable damage to her reputation, her self-esteem, and the hearts and minds of ERA’s participants, especially her most valued associates. The Machine is stored deep in her wine cellar, in hopes of letting itself die out.