KvK prep had barely been announced when Bob decided the kingdom needed something more important than upgrades, more vital than True Gold, more essential than defense: allies. Not military allies. Soul allies. People who understood him on a level nobody in APX had ever really managed to.
He set off with a hand-drawn recruitment flyer (crayon, mostly accurate) reading: WANTED: FELLOW AGENTS OF CHAOS. MUST LOVE GOATS. EXPERIENCE HELPFUL BUT NOT AS HELPFUL AS ENTHUSIASM.
He did not expect to find five of them already fully operational, one per alliance, hiding in plain sight the entire time.
Bob returned home first, mostly to recruit Funky Lion, and found the APX supply tent already collapsed, three crates of TG scattered across the courtyard, and a man he had never seen before standing triumphantly on top of the wreckage holding a clipboard upside-down.
"Who," Bob asked, "are you."
"Billy Joe," said Billy Joe. "APX. I've been here since March."
Bob blinked. "How have I never met you."
"You're usually causing the other disaster," Billy Joe said. "I'm causing this one. We've genuinely never been in the same building."
Drew emerged from the war hall, took one look at both of them standing in the wreckage together, and just stood there for a long moment, silent, doing what could only be described later — in his own incident report, because no one else could bring themselves to write it — as "processing." "Bob," he finally managed, "there have been two of you this whole time?"
"I contain my chaos to Tuesdays," Billy Joe offered helpfully.
Bob's eyes filled with something Drew had genuinely never seen on him before: recognition. "Billy Joe," he breathed, "I think I've been looking for you my whole life." Billy Joe considered this. "Cool. Wanna help me finish knocking over the rest of the TG?" Bob was already moving.
Within four minutes they had upended the second crate, buffed a wheelbarrow instead of a wall, and convinced two APX recruits that "synchronized collapsing" was a real training drill. Drew did not intervene. Drew had accepted his fate.
TTK's construction floor was, as always, a marvel of terrifying efficiency — until Bob found Bill.
Bill did not look chaotic. Bill looked like someone's uncle who does taxes for fun. Bill was standing in front of an enormous whiteboard that read TTK RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION INITIATIVE v7, and every single item on it was, upon inspection, completely insane.
"You want to move the entire TG vault," Splink said, reading over Bill's shoulder, "to the roof."
"Better sun exposure," Bill said, without a trace of doubt.
"True Gold doesn't need sun."
"We don't know that."
Bob had found his second soulmate. Where Bob broke things through sheer chaotic enthusiasm, Bill broke things through confident, well-formatted memos. Together they drafted TTK Resource Optimization Initiative v8, which proposed relabeling every building alphabetically, "for morale," and re-timed all of TTK's rallies to launch on the hour "for aesthetic symmetry."
DarkZero read it once, said nothing, and quietly locked the vault a second time — a redundancy no one had thought necessary until today. Splink attempted to build a trap specifically to catch both of them at once and it caught Hunter instead. Hunter did not find this funny. Bill apologized in memo form. The memo made it worse.
By the time Bob left, TTK's construction queue had been reorganized alphabetically, chronologically, and by "vibes," three contradictory systems now layered on top of each other, and nobody — including Bill — could locate the actual queue anymore.
"TTK is now fully optimized," Bob announced. Bill nodded, satisfied. Behind them, TwinTaco quietly began drafting Bill's transfer paperwork to literally anywhere else, then remembered transfers require the target alliance's consent, and put the paperwork down.
ONE's garrison was newer, calmer, and considerably more disciplined than the LGD days — right up until Bob found Billy Bob standing at rigid attention in front of an empty flagpole, saluting nothing.
"What's the salute for," Bob asked.
"Loyalty test," Billy Bob said. "Guruya said if I salute long enough, they'll notice my dedication."
"Did they say that?"
"They said 'go away.' I'm choosing to hear it as a test."
This, Bob understood immediately, was a kindred spirit — someone who had taken a clear "no" and, through sheer force of hopeful misinterpretation, converted it into a "maybe, eventually, if I'm persistent enough." Bob saluted the flagpole too, out of solidarity. Then, because two people saluting an empty flagpole seemed to require an audience, they recruited six nearby ONE members into "the Loyalty Formation," a made-up ceremonial unit that existed for the sole purpose of saluting things.
By the time CaptAndy noticed, the Loyalty Formation had saluted the flagpole, a supply cart, a very confused chicken, and — briefly, mistakenly — Guruya themself, who had simply walked past at the wrong moment and gotten seven salutes for it.
"Walls do not have health bars," Guruya said, on reflex, before realizing that particular line didn't actually apply here and there was no correct sentence for this situation. They settled for pointing at the exit. Bob and Billy Bob saluted the exit too, on their way out.
"No Bob," Aladdin said, the instant Bob appeared at the gate. "No exceptions."
"I'm not Bob," said the man standing next to Bob. "I'm Joe Bob."
Aladdin considered the rule as written. It was, technically, airtight. "...Proceed," he said, already regretting every word of it.
Joe Bob turned out to be SOV's disciplinary paradox made flesh — he followed procedure to the absolute letter, cited the correct regulation for every single action, and every one of his by-the-book solutions was, upon reaching the final clause, completely unhinged. His proposal for "efficient wall inspection" was airtight bureaucratically and involved seventeen SOV members running into the wall in sequence, "per protocol." Esmeralda actually checked the regulation. It was real. Somebody had genuinely written it, years ago, as either a joke or a warning, and no one had ever repealed it.
Bob and Joe Bob ran the wall-inspection protocol together, twice, "for a control group." RearAdmiral watched both bounces with the flat expression of a man doing complicated math about how many more years he had left in this job. Rynnik, dutifully, took notes on both impacts, because someone had to, and it might as well be accurate.
"SOV is now fully optimized," Bob reported. "Per protocol," Joe Bob added. Aladdin closed the gate mid-sentence, the same as always — but this time there were two sentences to cut off, and he only managed to catch one of them.
FAR was calm, which by now Bob understood as a threat, not a comfort. He found Jim Bob crouched behind a supply crate, eyes wide, already mid-panic over something that had not yet happened.
"What's wrong," Bob asked.
"Nothing yet," Jim Bob whispered. "But I've called in three rallies just in case."
"In case of what?"
"I don't know. That's what makes it efficient."
Bob had never met someone who could match his own energy at full volume and somehow front-load it with dread. It was, to Bob, deeply moving. Together they escalated a single scouting report — one lone enemy scout, spotted at the treeline — into a full defensive posture: three rallies recalled from useful positions, a siege engine repositioned for an attack that wasn't coming, and Snapback screaming into the sky on general principle, which by this point in the day was less a reaction and more a professional habit.
Rambo growled at both of them. Jonnycolumbia gently tried to stand down the rallies and discovered Jim Bob had already locked the recall timers "for safety." It took FAR eleven minutes to talk one scouting report back down from a war footing.
"FAR is now fully optimized," Bob said. Jim Bob nodded gravely. "We were ready," he said. "That's what matters." Somewhere, a bush that had definitely not been on fire earlier in the day was now, in fact, on fire.
That evening, all six of them gathered on the ridge overlooking the castle — Bob, Billy Joe, Bill, Billy Bob, Joe Bob, and Jim Bob — surveying a kingdom that had, in a single afternoon, been alphabetized, saluted, inspected into structural failure, put on a war footing over one scout, and quietly relieved of an entire TG vault's worth of dignity.
"We should have a name," Billy Joe said.
"The Council of Bobs," Bob said immediately, like he'd been holding onto it his entire life, which, arguably, he had.
Nobody objected. Nobody had the energy left to object. Somewhere below them, five separate alliance leaderships were independently drafting five separate incident reports, each one convinced their disaster had been an isolated event — none of them yet realizing it was the same afternoon, the same tour, and the same six people, twice as chaotic at every single stop.
Bob looked around at the five faces beside him — none of them named Bob, all of them somehow exactly like him — and felt, for the first time since a single min-effort troop had bounced off a shield in April, something he didn't quite have a word for.
He settled on "optimized."