Eschaton: SOVWAR's Air Marshal — the parley, her one line, and Ingersoll's headshot

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU (Interdependence Day)

• When: Interdependence Day YDAU (Sunday, 8 Nov), afternoon, on the East Courts
• What: In the annual Eschaton global-thermonuclear game, Kittenplan plays SOVWAR's designated launcher — styled "Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan" — though she lands "nothing worse than an indirect hit all afternoon" while AMNAT's launchman, the lob prodigy Todd Possalthwaite, does the day's precision shooting. When game-master Lord dons the white beanie signalling a cessation of hostilities, she and Premier Peterson carry SOVWAR's white janitorial stockpile-bucket between them across Europe and the Atlantic to parley in Sierra Leone, and she cracks her knuckles while the heads of state confer. Her sole spoken line comes from the scrum around Lord's cart, shrieked at a raging Pemulis: "For Christ's sake leave us alone!"; prorector Thode, halting her scooter behind the pavilion, yells across for Kittenplan to put a hat on if she's going to play in the snow in a crew-cut. Then Evan Ingersoll — reasoning that IRLIBSYR profits if the superpowers never come to terms — fires a ball that "flies straight as if shot from a rifle and strikes Ann Kittenplan right in the back of the head with a loud thock": the first time any Eschaton Combatant has ever intentionally struck another Combatant's physical person. She whirls, locks on Damascus, "her face a stony Toltec death-mask", and stands transfixed while Ingersoll blandly claims her as a vaporized target and Lord, to general horror, exchanges the white beanie for the red one that signifies Utter Global Crisis.